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Perfectae Caritatis
Perfectæ caritatis, subtitled as the Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life, is the document issued by the Second Vatican Council which deals specifically with institutes of consecrated life in the Roman Catholic Church. One of the shorter documents of the council, the decree was approved by a vote of 2,321 to 4 of the assembled bishops, and promulgated by Pope Paul VI on 28 October 1965. As is customary for Roman Catholic ecclesiastical documents, the title is taken from the first words (incipit) of the decree: "of Perfect Charity" in Latin.
The Second Vatican Council had already given an exposition of the nature of religious life in chapter 6 of the constitution "Lumen gentium". This chapter described the essential form of religious life as a life "consecrated by the profession of the evangelical counsels". The decree "Perfectae caritatis" was published in order to, "treat of the life and discipline of those institutes whose members make profession of chastity, poverty and obedience and to provide for their needs in our time". "Perfectae Caritatis" clarifies some of "Lumen gentium"'s content and becomes an important way to integrate it. Both documents reorient religious life from primarily a way of individual sanctification to a means for the sanctification of the church. An essentially ecclesial focus permeates the entire document. According to Archbishop Franc Rodé, Prefect for the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, "the good of the Church is the raison d'être of the Document."
"Perfectae caritatis" is subtitled "Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life". Adaptation refers to adjusting to the "changed conditions of the times”"; renewal refers to "a continuous return to the sources of all Christian life and to the original inspiration behind a given community.” Religious communities were urged to return to their roots, adapt to the needs of the contemporary world in light of Scripture and the early intent their founders. For many religious communities, this involved revisiting the historical events relative to their foundation. The decree directed that each institute review its governing documents and re-evaluate its constitutions, books of prayers, and ceremonies and that obsolete rules be dispensed with.
The decree established general principles to guide the renewal of these institutes without prejudice to the special characteristics of the individual religious orders. Rodé, explained, "Thus the renewal of the consecrated life, as the Council described it, should be lived through a return to the sources that are represented primarily by Sacred Scripture, hence by the very person of Jesus Christ, and subsequently by the authentic charism of founders." The Decree has a strong Christological emphasis. The priority commitment of every consecrated person is the "sequela Christi" (following of Christ).
Because of the broad variety of religious communities with their different histories, characteristics, customs, and missions, the Vatican council did not give specific indications, and left to each individual community the authority to determine what needed to be changed in accord with the spirit of their founders, the needs of modern life, and the situations where they lived and worked.
In regards to contemplative communities:Communities which are entirely dedicated to contemplation, so that their members in solitude and silence, with constant prayer and penance willingly undertaken, occupy themselves with God alone, retain at all times, no matter how pressing the needs of the active apostolate may be, an honorable place in the Mystical Body of Christ, whose "members do not all have the same function" (Rom. 12:4). For these offer to God a sacrifice of praise which is outstanding. Moreover the manifold results of their holiness lends luster to the people of God which is inspired by their example and which gains new members by their apostolate which is as effective as it is hidden. Thus they are revealed to be a glory of the Church and a well-spring of heavenly graces. Nevertheless, their manner of living should be revised according to the principles and criteria of adaptation and renewal mentioned above. However their withdrawal from the world and the exercises proper to the contemplative life should be preserved with the utmost care.
"Papal cloister should be maintained in the case of nuns engaged exclusively in the contemplative life. However, it must be adjusted to conditions of time and place and obsolete practices suppressed." So to monks who "offer a service to the divine majesty at once humble and noble within the walls of the monastery, ...should revive their ancient traditions of service and so adapt them to the needs of today that monasteries will become institutions dedicated to the edification of the Christian people."
The decree also emphasized the importance of education and ongoing formation that integrates religious, apostolic, doctrinal and technical training. Religious need to understand and live an integrated life to be effective not only in their own community lives but especially in their apostolic assignments.
The document recognized that at some point there may be communities and monasteries that are no longer viable. "Others who have practically identical constitutions and rules and a common spirit should unite, particularly when they have too few members."
The aim of the evangelical counsels is to remove whatever might hinder the development of charity.
"Religious, therefore, who are striving faithfully to observe the chastity they have professed must have faith in the words of the Lord, and trusting in God's help not overestimate their own strength but practice mortification and custody of the senses. ...Since the observance of perfect continence touches intimately the deepest instincts of human nature, candidates should neither present themselves for nor be admitted to the vow of chastity, unless they have been previously tested sufficiently and have been shown to possess the required psychological and emotional maturity. ...they should be so instructed as to be able to undertake the celibacy which binds them to God in a way which will benefit their entire personality."
Evangelical poverty is based on discipleship. It is a means to an end, a more intimate participation in the life of Christ. "The several provinces and houses of each community should share their temporal goods with one another, so that those who have more help the others who are in need. ...Religious communities have the right to possess whatever is required for their temporal life and work, unless this is forbidden by their rules and constitutions. ...Nevertheless, they should avoid every appearance of luxury, excessive wealth and the accumulation of goods."
"Religious should use both the forces of their intellect and will and the gifts of nature and grace to execute the commands and fulfill the duties entrusted to them. ...Superiors should exercise their authority ...out of a spirit of service to the brethren. ...They should govern these as sons of God, respecting their human dignity. In this way religious obedience, far from lessening the dignity of the human person ...leads it to maturity."
The period that followed the promulgation of "Perfectae caritatis" was marked by a huge amount of experimentation in religious life. "Perfectae caritatis" directed that "the religious habit, an outward mark of consecration to God, should be simple and modest, poor and at the same becoming. In addition it must meet the requirements of health and be suited to the circumstances of time and place and to the needs of the ministry involved. The habits of both men and women religious which do not conform to these norms must be changed." Many institutes replaced their traditional habits with more modern attire, experimented with different forms of prayer and community life, and adapted obedience to a superior to a form of consultation and discussion. Some communities of women religious modified their headgear since it obscured peripheral vision while driving. The enormous upheavals present within society and the church at that time led some institutes to make rather drastic changes to the stable form of living religious life.
The decree also recommended federations, conferences and councils of major superiors be established, allowing for greater communication and connection with the Apostolic See and the local church. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40413 |
Optatam Totius
Optatam totius, the Decree on Priestly Training, is a document which was produced by the Second Vatican Council. Approved by a vote of 2,318 to 3 of the bishops assembled at the council, the decree was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on 28 October 1965. The Latin title means "desired renewal of the whole [church]".
"The numbers given correspond to the section numbers within the text."
"Optatam totius" influenced the German Roman Catholic theologian Karl Rahner to write his work "The Foundation of Christian Faith".
The period that followed the promulgation "Optatam totius" was marked by a severe drop in the number of priestly vocations in the Western World. Church leaders had argued that age-old secularization was to blame and that it was not directly related to the documents of the council. Historians have also pointed to the damage caused by the sexual revolution in 1968 and the strong backlash over "Humanae vitae". Yet other authors have asserted that the drop in vocations was at least partly deliberate and was part of an attempt to de-clericalize the church and allow for a more pluralistic clergy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40414 |
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (also spelled "Point de Sable", "Point au Sable", "Point Sable", "Pointe DuSable"; before 1750 – August 28, 1818) is regarded as the first permanent non-Indigenous settler of what would later become Chicago, Illinois, and is recognized as the "Founder of Chicago". A school, museum, harbor, park, and bridge have been named in his honor. The site where he settled near the mouth of the Chicago River around the 1780s is identified as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court.
Point du Sable was of African descent, but little else is known of his life prior to the 1770s. During his career, the areas where he settled and traded around the Great Lakes and in the Illinois Country changed hands several times among France, Britain, Spain and the new United States. Described as handsome and well educated, Point duSable married a Native American woman, "Kitiwaha," and they had two children. In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, he was arrested by the British military on suspicion of being an American rebel sympathizer. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now the city of St. Clair, Michigan north of Detroit.
Point du Sable is first recorded as living at the mouth of the Chicago River in a trader's journal of early 1790. By then he had established an extensive and prosperous trading settlement in what later became the City of Chicago. He sold his Chicago River property in 1800 and moved to the port of St. Charles, where he was licensed to run a Missouri River ferry. Point duSable's successful role in developing the Chicago River settlement was little recognized until the mid-20th century.
There are no records of Point du Sable's life prior to the 1770s. Though it is known from sources during his life that he was of African descent, his birth year, place of birth, and parents are unknown. Juliette Kinzie, another early pioneer of Chicago, never met Point duSable but stated in her 1856 memoir that he was "a native of St.Domingo" (the island of Hispaniola). This became generally accepted as his place of birth. Historian Milo Milton Quaife regarded Kinzie's account of Point duSable as "largely fictitious and wholly unauthenticated", later putting forward a theory that he was of African and French-Canadian origin. A historical novel published in 1953 helped to popularize the claim that Point du Sable was born in 1745 in Saint-Marc in Saint-Domingue (later known as Haiti). If he was born outside continental North America, there are further competing accounts that he entered as a trader from the north through French Canada, or from the south through French Louisiana.
Point du Sable married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa (Christianized to Catherine) on October27, 1788, in a Catholic ceremony in Cahokia, a longtime French Illinois Country colonial settlement on east side of the Mississippi River. It is likely that this couple was married earlier in the 1770s in a Native American tradition. They had a son named Jean and a daughter named Susanne. Point duSable supported his family as a frontier trader and settler during a period when Great Britain, and later the newly formed United States, were seeking to assert control in the former southern dependencies of French Canada and in the Illinois Country.
In a footnote to a poem titled "Speech to the Western Indians", Arent DePeyster, British commandant from 1774 to 1779 at Fort Michilimackinac (a former French fort in what was then the British Quebec territory), noted that "Baptist Point deSaible" was "a handsome negro", "well educated", and "settled in Eschecagou". When he published this poem in 1813, DePeyster presented it as a speech that he had made at the village of Arbrecroche (now Harbor Springs, Michigan) on July4, 1779. This footnote has led many scholars to assume that Point duSable had settled in Chicago by 1779. But letters written by other traders in the late 1770s suggest that Point duSable was at this time settled at the mouth of Trail Creek ("Rivière duChemin") at what is now Michigan City, Indiana.
In August 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, Point duSable was arrested as a suspected patriot partisan at Trail Creek by British troops and imprisoned briefly at Fort Michilimackinac. An officer's report following his arrest noted that Point du Sable had many friends who vouched for his good character. The following year, Point du Sable was ordered transported to the Pinery on the St. Clair River north of Detroit. From the summer of 1780 until May 1784, Point duSable managed the Pinery, a tract of woodlands claimed by British officer Lt.Patrick Sinclair, on the St. Clair River in eastern Michigan. This may have been associated with his confinement by the British, or at least the best choice Point du Sable was given by his captors. Point duSable with his family lived in a cabin at the mouth of the Pine River in what is now the city of St. Clair.
At some time in the 1780s, after the US achieved independence, Point du Sable settled on the north bank of the Chicago River close to its mouth. The earliest known record of Point duSable living in Chicago is an entry that Hugh Heward made in his journal on May10, 1790, during a journey from Detroit across Michigan and through Illinois. Heward's party stopped at Point duSable's house enroute to the Chicago portage; they swapped their canoe for a pirogue that belonged to Point duSable, and they bought bread, flour, and pork from him. Perrish Grignon, who visited Chicago in about 1794, described Point duSable as a large man and wealthy trader. Point du Sable's granddaughter, Eulalie Pelletier, was born at his Chicago River settlement in 1796.
In 1800 Point duSable sold his farm to John Kinzie's frontman, Jean La Lime, for 6,000 livres. The bill of sale, which was rediscovered in 1913 in an archive in Detroit, detailed all of the property Point duSable owned, as well as many of his personal effects. This included a house, two barns, a horse drawn mill, a bakehouse, a poultry house, a dairy, and a smokehouse. The house was a log cabin filled with fine furniture and paintings.
After Point du Sable sold his property in Chicago, he moved to St. Charles, now in Missouri but at that time in Spanish Louisiana. He was commissioned by the colonial governor to operate a ferry across the Missouri River. In St.Charles, he may have lived for a time with his son, and later with his granddaughter's family. Late in life, he may have sought public or charitable assistance. He died on August 28, 1818, and was buried in an unmarked grave in St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery. His entry in the parish burial register does not mention his origins, parents, or relatives; it simply describes him as "nègre" (French for "negro").
The St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery was moved twice in the 19thcentury. Oral tradition and records of the Archdiocese of St. Louis suggested that Point duSable's remains were also moved. On October12, 1968, the Illinois Sesquicentennial Commission erected a granite marker at the site believed to be Point duSable's grave in the third St.Charles Borromeo Cemetery. In 2002 an archaeological investigation of the grave site was initiated by the African Scientific Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Researchers using a combination of ground-penetrating radar, surveys, and excavation of a area did not find any evidence of any burials at the supposed grave site, leading the archaeologists to conclude that Point duSable's remains may not have been reinterred from one of the two previous cemeteries.
Though there is little historical evidence regarding Point duSable's life before the 1770s, there are several theories and legends that give accounts of his early life. Writing in 1933, Quaife identified a French immigrant to Canada, Pierre Dandonneau, who acquired the title "Sieur deSable" and whose descendants were known by both the names "Dandonneau" and "DuSable". Quaife was unable to find a direct link to Point duSable, but he identified descendants of Pierre Dandonneau as living around the Great Lakes region in Detroit, Mackinac, and St.Joseph. He speculated that Point duSable's father may have been a member of this family, while his mother was likely an enslaved woman.
In 1951 Joseph Jeremie, a native of Haiti, published a pamphlet in which he said he was the great grandson of Point duSable. Based on family recollections and tombstone inscriptions, he claimed that Point duSable was born in Saint-Marc in Haiti, studied in France, and returned to Haiti to deal in coffee before traveling to French Louisiana. Historian and Point duSable biographer John F. Swenson has called these claims "elaborate, undocumented assertions... in a fanciful biography".
In 1953 Shirley Graham drew from the work of Quaife and Jeremie in a historical novel about Point duSable. She described it as "not accurate history nor pure fiction", but rather "an imaginative interpretation of all the known facts". This book presented Point duSable as the son of the mate on a pirate ship, the "Black Sea Gull", and a freedwoman called Suzanne. Despite lack of evidence and the continued debate about Point duSable's early life, parentage, and birthplace, this popular story has been repeated and widely presented as being definitive.
In 1815 a land claim that had been submitted by Nicholas Jarrot to the land commissioners at Kaskaskia, Illinois Territory, was approved. In the claim Jarrot asserted that a "Jean Baptiste Poinstable" had been "head of a family at Peoria in the year 1783, and before and after that year", and that he "had a house built and cultivated land between the Old Fort and the new settlement in the year 1780". This document has been taken by Quaife and other historians as evidence that Point duSable lived at Peoria on the Illinois River prior to going upriver to Chicago. Other records demonstrate that Point duSable was living and working under the British at the Pinery in Michigan in the early 1780s. The Kaskaskia land commissioners identified many fraudulent land claims, including two previously submitted in the name of Point duSable. Nicholas Jarrot, the claimant, was involved in many false claims, and Swenson suggests that this one was also fraudulent, made without the knowledge of Point duSable. Although perhaps in conflict with some of the above information, some historical records suggest that Point duSable bought land in Peoria from J.B. Maillet on March13, 1773, and sold it to Isaac Darneille in 1783 before he became the first "permanent" resident of Chicago.
Point du Sable left Chicago in 1800. He sold his property to Jean La Lime, a trader from Quebec, and moved to the Missouri River valley, at that time part of Spanish Louisiana. The reason for his departure is unknown. By 1804, John Kinzie, who also settled in Chicago, had bought the former du Sable house. In her 1852 memoir, Juliette Kinzie, Kinzie's daughter-in-law, suggested that "perhaps he was disgusted at not being elected to a similar dignity [great chief] by the Pottowattamies". In 1874 Nehemiah Matson elaborated on this story, claiming that Point duSable was a slave from Virginia who had moved with his master to Lexington, Kentucky, in 1790. According to Matson, Point duSable became a zealous Catholic to convince a Jesuit missionary to declare him chief of the local Native Americans, and left Chicago when the natives refused to accept him as their chief. Quaife dismisses both of these stories as being fictional.
In her 1953 novel Graham suggests that Point du Sable left Chicago because he was angered with the United States government, which wanted him to buy the land on which he had lived and called his own for the previous two decades. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville, which ended the Northwest Indian War, and the subsequent westward migration of Native Americans away from the Chicago area might also have influenced his decision.
The French came to the North American mid-continent region in the 17thcentury. Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, during their 1673 Mississippi Valley expedition, though probably not the first Europeans to visit the area, are the first in the written record to have crossed the Chicago Portage and traveled along the Chicago River. Over the following years visits continued, and occasional intermittent posts were established, including those by René LaSalle, Henri Tonti, Pierre Liette and the four-year Mission of the Guardian Angel. Point duSable 1780s establishment is recognized as the first settlement that continued on and ultimately grew to become the city of Chicago. He is therefore widely regarded as the first permanent resident of Chicago and has been given the appellation "Founder of Chicago".
By the 1850s, historians of Chicago recognized Point duSable as the city's earliest non-native permanent settler. For a long time the city did not honor him in the same manner as other pioneers. Point du Sable was generally forgotten in the 19thcentury and instead the Scots-Irish trader John Kinzie, who had bought his property, was often credited for the settlement. A plaque was erected by the city in 1913 at the corner of Kinzie and Pine Streets to commemorate the Kinzie homestead. In the planning stages of the 1933–1934 Century of Progress International Exposition, several African-American groups campaigned for Point duSable to be honored at the fair. At the time, few Chicagoans had even heard of Point duSable, and the fair's organizers presented the 1803 construction of Fort Dearborn as the city's historical beginning. The campaign was successful, and a replica of Point duSable's cabin was presented as part of the "background of the history of Chicago".
In 1965 a plaza called Pioneer Court was built on the site of Point duSable's homestead as part of the construction of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of America building. The Jean Baptiste Point Du Sable Homesite was designated as a National Historic Landmark on May11, 1976, as a site deemed to have "exceptional value to the nation". Pioneer Court is located at what is now 401N.Michigan Avenue in the Michigan–Wacker Historic District. At this site in 2009 the City of Chicago and a private donor erected a large bronze bust of Point duSable by Chicago-born sculptor Erik Blome. In October 2010 the Michigan Avenue Bridge was renamed "DuSable Bridge" in honor of Point duSable. Previously, a small street named "DeSaible Street" had been named after him.
Several Chicago institutions have been named in honor of Point duSable. DuSable High School opened in Bronzeville in 1934. The DuSable campus today houses the Daniel Hale Williams Prep School of Medicine, and the Bronzeville Scholastic Institute. Dr.Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, a prominent African-American artist and writer, taught at the school for twenty-three years. She and her husband co-founded the DuSable Museum of African American History, located on Chicago's South Side, which was renamed in honor of Point duSable in 1968. DuSable Harbor is located in the heart of downtown Chicago at the foot of Randolph Street, and DuSable Park is a urban park in Chicago currently awaiting redevelopment. The project was originally announced in 1987 by Mayor Harold Washington. The US Postal Service has also honored Point duSable with the issue of a Black Heritage Series 22-cent postage stamp on February20, 1987. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40415 |
Battle of Fort Dearborn
The Battle of Fort Dearborn (sometimes called the Fort Dearborn Massacre) was an engagement between United States troops and Potawatomi Native Americans that occurred on August 15, 1812, near Fort Dearborn in what is now Chicago, Illinois (at that time, wilderness in the Illinois Territory). The battle, which occurred during the War of 1812, followed the evacuation of the fort as ordered by the commander of the United States Army of the Northwest, William Hull. The battle lasted about 15 minutes and resulted in a complete victory for the Native Americans. After the battle, Fort Dearborn was burned down. Some of the soldiers and settlers who had been taken captive were later ransomed.
Following the battle, the federal government became convinced that all Indians had to be removed from the territory and the vicinity of any settlements, as settlers continued to migrate to the area. The fort was rebuilt in 1816.
Fort Dearborn was constructed by United States troops under the command of Captain John Whistler in 1803. It was located on the south bank of the main stem of the Chicago River in what is now the Loop community area of downtown Chicago. At the time, the area was seen as wilderness; in the view of later commander, Heald, "so remote from the civilized part of the world." The fort was named in honor of Henry Dearborn, then United States Secretary of War. It had been commissioned following the Northwest Indian War of 1785–1795, and the signing of the Treaty of Greenville at Fort Greenville (now Greenville, Ohio), on August 3, 1795. As part of the terms of this treaty, a coalition of Native Americans and frontiersmen, known as the Western Confederacy, turned over to the United States large parts of modern-day Ohio, and various other parcels of land including centered at the mouth of the Chicago River.
The British Empire had ceded the Northwest Territory—comprising the modern day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin—to the United States in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The area had been the subject of dispute between the Native American nations and the United States, however, since the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. The Indian Nations followed Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet and the brother of Tecumseh. Tenskwatawa had a vision of purifying his society by expelling the "children of the Evil Spirit", the American settlers. Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh formed a confederation of numerous tribes to block American expansion. The British saw the Native American nations as valuable allies and a buffer to its Canadian colonies and provided them arms. Attacks on American settlers in the Northwest further aggravated tensions between Britain and the United States. The Confederation's raids hindered American access to potentially valuable farmlands, mineral deposits and fur trade areas.
In 1810, as a result of a long running feud, Captain Whistler and other senior officers at Fort Dearborn were removed. Whistler was replaced by Captain Nathan Heald, who had been stationed at Fort Wayne, Indiana. Heald was dissatisfied with his new posting and immediately applied for and received a leave of absence to spend the winter in Massachusetts. On his return journey to Fort Dearborn, he visited Kentucky, where he married Rebekah Wells, the daughter of Samuel Wells, and they traveled together to the fort in June 1811.
As the United States and Britain moved towards war, antipathy between the settlers and Native Americans in the Fort Dearborn area increased. In the summer of 1811, British emissaries tried to enlist the support of Native Americans in the region, telling them that the British would help them to resist the encroaching American settlement. On April 6, 1812, a band of Winnebago Indians murdered Liberty White, an American, and John B. Cardin, a French Canadian, at a farm called Hardscrabble that was located on the south branch of the Chicago River, in the area now called Bridgeport. News of the murder was carried to Fort Dearborn by a soldier of the garrison named John Kelso and a small boy who had managed to escape from the farm. Following the murder, some nearby settlers moved into the fort while the rest fortified themselves in a house that had belonged to Charles Jouett, a Native American agent. Fifteen men from the civilian population were organized into a militia by Captain Heald, and armed with guns and ammunition from the fort.
On June 18, 1812, the United States declared war on the British Empire, and on July 17, British forces captured Fort Mackinac. On July 29, General William Hull received news of the fall of Fort Mackinac and immediately sent orders to Heald to evacuate Fort Dearborn, fearing that it could no longer be adequately supplied with provisions. In his letter to Heald, which arrived at Fort Dearborn on August 9, Hull ordered Heald to destroy all the arms and ammunition and give the remaining goods to friendly Indians in the hope of attaining an escort to Fort Wayne. Hull also sent a copy of these orders to Fort Wayne with additional instructions to provide Heald with all the information, advice and assistance within their power. In the following days, the sub-Native American agent at Fort Wayne, Captain William Wells, who was the uncle of Heald's wife, Rebekah, assembled a group of about 30 Miami Native Americans. Wells, Corporal Walter K. Jordan, and the Miamis traveled to Fort Dearborn to provide an escort for the evacuees.
Wells arrived at Fort Dearborn on August 12 or 13 (sources differ), and on August 14, Heald held a council with the Potawatomi leaders to inform them of his intention to evacuate the fort. The Native Americans believed that Heald told them that he would distribute the firearms, ammunition, provisions and whiskey among them, and that, if they would send a band of Potawatomis to escort them safely to Fort Wayne, he would pay them a large sum of money. However, Heald ordered all the surplus arms, ammunition and liquor destroyed "fearing that [the Native Americans] would make bad use of it if put in their possession." On August 14, a Potawatomi chief called Black Partridge warned Heald that the young men of the tribe intended to attack, and that he could no longer restrain them.
At 9:00 am on August 15, the garrison—comprising, according to Heald's report, 54 U.S. regulars, 12 militia, nine women and 18 children—left Fort Dearborn with the intention of marching to Fort Wayne. Wells led the group with some of the Miami escorts, while the rest of the Miamis were positioned at the rear. About south of Fort Dearborn, a band of Potawatomi warriors ambushed the garrison. Heald reported that, upon discovering that the Indians were preparing to ambush from behind a dune, the company marched to the top of the dune, fired off a round and charged at the Native Americans.
This maneuver separated the cavalry from the wagons, allowing the overwhelming Native American force to charge into the gap, divide, and surround both groups. During the ensuing battle, some of the Native Americans charged at the wagon train that contained the women and children and the provisions. The wagons were defended by the militia, as well as Ensign Ronan and the fort physician Van Voorhis. The officers and militia were killed, along with two of the women and most of the children. Wells disengaged from the main battle and attempted to ride to the aid of those at the wagons. In doing so, he was brought down; according to eyewitness accounts he fought off many Native Americans before being killed, and a group of Indians immediately cut out his heart and ate it to absorb his courage. The battle lasted about 15 minutes, after which Heald and the surviving soldiers withdrew to an area of elevated ground on the prairie. They surrendered to the Native Americans who took them as prisoners to their camp near Fort Dearborn. In his report, Heald detailed the American loss at 26 regulars, all 12 of the militia, two women and twelve children killed, with the other 28 regulars, seven women, and six children taken prisoner. Survivors of the massacre filed different accounts regarding the Miami warriors. Some said they fought for the Americans, while others said they did not fight at all.
The recollections of a number of the survivors of the battle have been published. Heald's story was recorded on September 22, 1812, by Charles Askin in his diary, Heald also wrote brief accounts of events in his journal and in an official report of the battle. Walter Jordan recorded his version of events in a letter to his wife dated October 12, 1812. Helm wrote a detailed narrative of events; but, because of his fear of being court martialed due to his criticism of Heald, delayed publication until 1814. John Kinzie's recollections of the battle were recorded by Henry Schoolcraft in August 1820.
These accounts of details of the conflict are discrepant, particularly in their attribution of blame for the battle. Juliette Magill Kinzie's "Wau-Bun: The Early Day in the Northwest", which was first published in 1856, provides the traditional account of the conflict. However it is based on family stories and is regarded as historically inaccurate. Nonetheless, its popular acceptance was surprisingly strong.
The Battle of Fort Dearborn has also been referred to as "The Fort Dearborn Massacre" by the defending Americans. The battle has been claimed a massacre due to the large number of Americans killed including women and children, as opposed to the relatively smaller Potawatami losses incurred. The conflict has also been argued to have been a measure of self-defense on the part of the Potawatami.
Following the battle, the Native Americans took their prisoners to their camp near Fort Dearborn and the fort was burned to the ground. The region remained empty of U.S. citizens until after the war ended. Some of the prisoners died in captivity, while others were later ransomed. The fort, however, was rebuilt in 1816.
General William Henry Harrison, who was not present at the battle, later claimed the Miami had fought against the Americans, and used the Battle of Fort Dearborn as a pretext to attack Miami villages. Miami Chief, Pacanne, and his nephew, Jean Baptiste Richardville, accordingly ended their neutrality in the War of 1812, and allied with the British.
Seen from the perspective of the War of 1812, and the larger conflict between Britain and France which precipitated it, this was a very small and brief battle, but it ultimately had larger consequences in the territory. Arguably, for the Native Americans, it was an example of "winning the battle but losing the war": the U.S. later pursued a policy of removing the tribes from the region, resulting in the Treaty of Chicago, which was marked at its culmination in 1835 by the last great Native American war dance in the then nascent city. Thereafter, the Potowatomie and other tribes were moved further west.
Eye-witness accounts place the battle on the lake shore somewhere between south of Fort Dearborn. Heald's official report said the battle occurred south of the fort, placing the battle at what is now the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Michigan Avenue. Juliette Kinzie, shortly before her death in 1870, stated that the battle had started by a large cottonwood tree, which at that time still stood on 18th Street between Prairie Avenue and the lake. The tree was supposed to have been the last remaining of a grove of trees that had been saplings at the time of the battle.
The tree was blown down in a storm on May 16, 1894 and a portion of its trunk was preserved at the Chicago Historical Society. Historian Harry A. Musham points out that the testimony relating to this tree is all second hand and came from people who settled in Chicago more than 20 years after the battle. Moreover, based on the diameter of the preserved section of trunk (about ) he estimated the age of the tree at the time that it was blown over at no more than 80 years, and therefore asserts that it could not have been growing at the time of the battle. Nevertheless, the site at 18th Street and Prairie Avenue has become the location traditionally associated with the battle, and on the battle's 197th anniversary in 2009, the Chicago Park District, the Prairie District Neighborhood Alliance and other community partners dedicated "Battle of Fort Dearborn Park" near the site at 18th Street and Calumet Avenue.
In 1893, George Pullman had a sculpture he had commissioned from Carl Rohl-Smith erected near his house. It portrays the rescue of Margaret Helm, the stepdaughter of Chicago resident John Kinzie and wife of Lt. Linai Taliaferro Helm, by Potawatomi chief Black Partridge, who led her and some others to Lake Michigan and helped her escape by boat. The monument was moved to the lobby of the Chicago Historical Society in 1931. In the 1970s, however, Native American groups protested the display of the monument, and it was removed. In the 1990s, the statue was reinstalled near 18th Street and Prairie Avenue, close to its original site, at the time of the revival of the Prairie Avenue Historic District. It was later removed for conservation reasons by the Office of Public Art of the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. There are some efforts to reinstall the monument, but it is meeting resistance from the Chicago American Indian Center.
The battle is also memorialized with a sculpture by Henry Hering called "Defense" that is located on the south western tender's house of the Michigan Avenue Bridge (which partially covers the site of Fort Dearborn). There are also memorials in Chicago to individuals who fought in the battle. William Wells is commemorated in the naming of Wells Street, a north-south street and part of the original 1830 58-block plat of Chicago, while Nathan Heald is commemorated in the naming of Heald Square. Ronan Park on the city's Far North Side honors Ensign George Ronan, who was the first West Point graduate to die in battle. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40416 |
Fort Dearborn
Fort Dearborn was a United States fort built in 1803 beside the Chicago River, in what is now Chicago, Illinois. It was constructed by troops under Captain John Whistler and named in honor of Henry Dearborn, then United States Secretary of War. The original fort was destroyed following the Battle of Fort Dearborn during the War of 1812, and a second fort was reconstructed on the same site in 1816. By 1837, the fort had been de-commissioned. Parts of the fort were lost to both the widening of the Chicago River in 1855, and a fire in 1857. The last vestiges of Fort Dearborn were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The site of the fort is now a Chicago Landmark, located in the Michigan–Wacker Historic District.
The history of human activity in the Chicago area prior to the arrival of European explorers is mostly unknown. In 1673, an expedition headed by Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette was the first recorded to have crossed the Chicago Portage and traveled along the Chicago River. Marquette returned in 1674, and camped for a few days near the mouth of the river; then moved on to the portage, where he camped through the winter of 1674–75. Joliet and Marquette did not report any Native Americans living near the Chicago River area at that time, although archaeologists have discovered numerous Indian village sites dating to that time elsewhere in the Chicago region. Two of de La Salle's men built a stockade at the portage in the winter of 1682/1683.
In 1682, René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle had claimed a large territory (including the Chicago area), for France. In 1763, following the French and Indian War, the French ceded this area to Great Britain, and it became a region of the Province of Quebec. Great Britain later ceded the area to the United States (at the end of the American Revolutionary War), although the Northwest Territory remained under "de facto" British control until about 1796. Following the Northwest Indian War of 1785–1795, the Treaty of Greenville was signed at Fort Greenville (now Greenville, Ohio), on August 3, 1795. As part of the terms of this treaty, a coalition of Native Americans and Frontiers men, known as the Western Confederacy, turned over to the United States large parts of modern-day Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Illinois. This included "six square miles" centered from the mouth of the Chicago River.
A French-Jesuit mission, the Mission of the Guardian Angel, was founded somewhere in the vicinity in 1696, but was abandoned around 1700. The Fox Wars effectively closed the area to Europeans in the first part of the 18th century. The first non-native to re-settle in the area may have been a trader named Guillory, who might have had a trading-post near Wolf Point on the Chicago River around 1778. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable built a farm and trading post near the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1780s, and he is widely regarded as the founder of Chicago. Antoine Ouilmette is the next recorded resident of Chicago; he claimed to have settled at the mouth of the Chicago River in July 1790.
On March 9, 1803, Henry Dearborn, the Secretary of War, wrote to Colonel Jean Hamtramck, the commandant of Detroit, instructing him to have an officer and six men survey the route from Detroit to Chicago, and to make a preliminary investigation of the situation at Chicago. Captain John Whistler was selected as commandant of the new post, and set out with six men to complete the survey. The survey completed, on July 14, 1803, a company of troops set out to make the overland journey from Detroit to Chicago. Whistler and his family made their way to Chicago on a schooner called the "Tracy". The troops reached their destination on August 17. The "Tracy" was anchored about half a mile offshore, unable to enter the Chicago River due to a sandbar at its mouth. Julia Whistler, the wife of Captain Whistler's son, Lieutenant William Whistler, later related that 2000 Indians gathered to see the "Tracy". The troops had completed the construction of the fort by the summer of 1804; it was a log-built fort enclosed in a double stockade, with two blockhouses (see diagram above). The fort was named "Fort Dearborn", after U.S. Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, who had commissioned its construction.
A fur trader, John Kinzie, who bought the old Baptiste property, arrived in Chicago in 1804, and rapidly became the civilian leader of the small settlement that grew around the fort. In 1810 Kinzie and Whistler became embroiled in a dispute over Kinzie supplying alcohol to the Indians. In April, Whistler and other senior officers at the fort were removed; Whistler was replaced as commandant of the fort by Captain Nathan Heald.
During the War of 1812, General William Hull ordered the evacuation of Fort Dearborn in August 1812. Capt. Heald oversaw the evacuation, but on August 15 the evacuees were ambushed along the trail by about 500 Potawatomi Indians in the Battle of Fort Dearborn. The Potawatomi captured Heald and his wife, Rebekah, and ransomed them to the British. Of the 148 soldiers, women, and children who evacuated the fort, 86 were killed in the ambush. The Potawatomi burned the fort to the ground the next day.
Following the war, a second Fort Dearborn was built (1816). This fort consisted of a double wall of wooden palisades, officer and enlisted barracks, a garden, and other buildings. The American forces garrisoned the fort until 1823, when peace with the Indians led the garrison to be deemed redundant. This temporary abandonment lasted until 1828, when it was re-garrisoned following the outbreak of war with the Winnebago Indians. In her 1856 memoir "Wau Bun", Juliette Kinzie described the fort as it appeared on her arrival in Chicago in 1831:
The fort was closed briefly before the Black Hawk War of 1832 and by 1837, the fort was being used by the Superintendent of Harbor Works. In 1837, the fort and its reserve, including part of the land that became Grant Park, was deeded to the city by the Federal Government. In 1855 part of the fort was demolished so that the south bank of the Chicago River could be dredged, straightening the bend in the river and widening it at this point by about ; and in 1857, a fire destroyed nearly all the remaining buildings in the fort. The remaining blockhouse and few surviving outbuildings were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
The southern perimeter of Fort Dearborn was located at what is now the intersection of Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue in the Loop community area of Chicago along the Magnificent Mile. Part of the fort outline is marked by plaques, and a line embedded in the sidewalk and road near the Michigan Avenue Bridge and Wacker Drive. A few boards from the old fort were retained and are now in the Chicago History Museum in Lincoln Park.
On March 5, 1899, the "Chicago Tribune" publicized a Chicago Historical Society replica of the original fort.
In 1933, at the Century of Progress Exhibition, a detailed replica of Fort Dearborn was erected as a fair exhibit. As part of the celebration, both a United States one-cent postage stamp and a souvenir sheet (containing 25 of the stamps) were issued, showing the fort. The individual stamp and sheet were reprinted when Postmaster General James A. Farley gave imperforated examples of these, and other stamps, to his friends. Because of the ensuing public outcry, millions of copies of "Farley's Follies" were printed and sold.
In 1939, the Chicago City Council added a fourth star to the city flag to represent Fort Dearborn. This star is depicted as the left-most, or first, star of the flag.
The site of the fort was designated a Chicago Landmark on September 15, 1971. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40417 |
Carl Sandburg
Carl August Sandburg (January 6, 1878 – July 22, 1967) was an American poet, biographer, journalist, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes: two for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln. During his lifetime, Sandburg was widely regarded as "a major figure in contemporary literature", especially for volumes of his collected verse, including "Chicago Poems" (1916), "Cornhuskers" (1918), and "Smoke and Steel" (1920). He enjoyed "unrivaled appeal as a poet in his day, perhaps because the breadth of his experiences connected him with so many strands of American life", and at his death in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson observed that "Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America, more than the poet of its strength and genius. He was America."
Carl Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage at 313 East Third Street in Galesburg, Illinois, to Clara Mathilda (née Anderson) and August Sandberg, both of Swedish ancestry. He adopted the nickname "Charles" or "Charlie" in elementary school at about the same time he and his two oldest siblings changed the spelling of their last name to "Sandburg".
At the age of thirteen he left school and began driving a milk wagon. From the age of about fourteen until he was seventeen or eighteen, he worked as a porter at the Union Hotel barbershop in Galesburg. After that he was on the milk route again for 18 months. He then became a bricklayer and a farm laborer on the wheat plains of Kansas. After an interval spent at Lombard College in Galesburg, he became a hotel servant in Denver, then a coal-heaver in Omaha. He began his writing career as a journalist for the "Chicago Daily News". Later he wrote poetry, history, biographies, novels, children's literature, and film reviews. Sandburg also collected and edited books of ballads and folklore. He spent most of his life in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan before moving to North Carolina.
Sandburg volunteered to go to the military during the Spanish–American War and was stationed in Puerto Rico with the 6th Illinois Infantry, disembarking at Guánica, Puerto Rico on July 25, 1898. Sandburg was never actually called to battle. He attended West Point for just two weeks before failing a mathematics and grammar exam. Sandburg returned to Galesburg and entered Lombard College but left without a degree in 1903. He then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to work for a newspaper, and also joined the Wisconsin Social Democratic Party, the name by which the Socialist Party of America was known in the state. Sandburg served as a secretary to Emil Seidel, socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912. Carl Sanburg later remarked that Milwaukee was where he got his bearings and that the rest of his life had been "the unrolling of a scene that started up in Wisconsin".
Sandburg met Lilian Steichen (1883-1977) at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office in 1907, and they married the next year in Milwaukee. Lilian's brother was the famous photographer Edward Steichen. Sandburg with his wife, whom he called Paula, raised three daughters. Their first daughter, Margaret, was born in 1911. The Sandburgs moved to Harbert, Michigan, and then to suburban Chicago, Illinois in 1912 after he was offered a job by a Chicago newspaper.
They lived in Evanston, Illinois before settling at 331 South York Street in Elmhurst, Illinois, from 1919 to 1930. During the time, Sandburg wrote "Chicago Poems" (1916), "Cornhuskers" (1918), and "Smoke and Steel" (1920). In 1919 Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize "made possible by a special grant from The Poetry Society" for his collection "Cornhuskers". Sandburg also wrote three children's books in Elmhurst: "Rootabaga Stories", in 1922, followed by "Rootabaga Pigeons" (1923), and "Potato Face" (1930). Sandburg also wrote "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years", a two-volume biography, in 1926, "The American Songbag" (1927), and a book of poems called "Good Morning, America" (1928) in Elmhurst. The Sandburg house at 331 South York Street in Elmhurst was demolished and the site is now a parking lot. The family moved to Michigan in 1930.
Sandburg won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for the four-volume "The War Years", the sequel to his "Abraham Lincoln", and a second Poetry Pulitzer in 1951 for "Complete Poems".
In 1945 he moved to Connemara, a rural estate in Flat Rock, North Carolina. Here he produced a little over a third of his total published work and lived with his wife, daughters, and two grandchildren.
On February 12, 1959, in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, Congress met in joint session to hear actor Fredric March give a dramatic reading of the Gettysburg Address, followed by an address by Sandburg.
Sandburg supported the Civil Rights Movement and was the first white man to be honored by the NAACP with their Silver Plaque Award as a "major prophet of civil rights in our time."
Sandburg died of natural causes in 1967 and his body was cremated. The ashes were interred under "Remembrance Rock", a granite boulder located behind his birth house in Galesburg.
Much of Carl Sandburg's poetry, such as "Chicago", focused on Chicago, Illinois, where he spent time as a reporter for the "Chicago Daily News" and the "Day Book". His most famous description of the city is as "Hog Butcher for the World/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat/Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler,/Stormy, Husky, Brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."
Sandburg earned Pulitzer Prizes for his collection "The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg", "Corn Huskers", and for his biography of Abraham Lincoln ("Abraham Lincoln: The War Years"). Sandburg is also remembered by generations of children for his "Rootabaga Stories" and "Rootabaga Pigeons", a series of whimsical, sometimes melancholy stories he originally created for his own daughters. "The Rootabaga Stories" were born of Sandburg's desire for "American fairy tales" to match American childhood. He felt that the European stories involving royalty and knights were inappropriate, and so populated his stories with skyscrapers, trains, corn fairies and the "Five Marvelous Pretzels".
In 1919, Sandburg was assigned by his editor at the "Daily News" to do a series of reports on the working classes and tensions among whites and African Americans. The impetus for these reports were race riots that had broken out in other American cities. Ultimately, major riots broke out in Chicago too, but much of Sandburg's writing on the issues before the riots caused him to be seen as having a prophetic voice. A visiting philanthropist, Joel Spingarn, who was also an official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, read Sandburg's columns with interest and asked to publish them, as "The Chicago Race Riots, July, 1919".
Sandburg's popular multivolume biography "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years", 2 vols. (1926) and "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years", 4 vols. (1939) are collectively "the best-selling, most widely read, and most influential book[s] about Lincoln." The books have been through many editions, including a one-volume edition in 1954 prepared by Sandburg.
Sandburg's Lincoln scholarship had an enormous impact on the popular view of Lincoln. The books were adapted by Robert E. Sherwood for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" (1938) and David Wolper's six-part dramatization for television, "Sandburg's Lincoln" (1974). He recorded excerpts from the biography and some of Lincoln's speeches for Caedmon Records in New York City in May 1957. He was awarded a Grammy Award in 1959 for Best Performance – Documentary Or Spoken Word (Other Than Comedy) for his recording of Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait" with the New York Philharmonic. Some historians suggest more Americans learned about Lincoln from Sandburg than from any other source.
The books garnered critical praise and attention for Sandburg, including the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History for the four-volume "The War Years". But Sandburg's works on Lincoln also brought substantial criticism. William E. Barton, who had published a Lincoln biography in 1925, wrote that Sandburg's book "is not history, is not even biography" because of its lack of original research and uncritical use of evidence, but Barton nevertheless thought it was "real literature and a delightful and important contribution to the ever-lengthening shelf of really good books about Lincoln." Others criticized Sandburg's failure to document sources and factual errors. Others complain "The Prairie Years" and "The War Years" contain too much material that is neither biography nor history and is instead "sentimental poeticizing" by Sandburg. Sandburg may have viewed his book as an American epic more than as a mere biography, a view mirrored by other reviewers as well.
Sandburg's 1927 anthology, the "American Songbag", enjoyed enormous popularity, going through many editions; and Sandburg himself was perhaps the first American urban folk singer, accompanying himself on solo guitar at lectures and poetry recitals, and in recordings, long before the first or the second folk revival movements (of the 1940s and 1960s, respectively). According to the musicologist Judith Tick:
As a populist poet, Sandburg bestowed a powerful dignity on what the '20s called the "American scene" in a book he called a "ragbag of stripes and streaks of color from nearly all ends of the earth ... rich with the diversity of the United States." Reviewed widely in journals ranging from the "New Masses" to "Modern Music", the "American Songbag" influenced a number of musicians. Pete Seeger, who calls it a "landmark", saw it "almost as soon as it came out." The composer Elie Siegmeister took it to Paris with him in 1927, and he and his wife Hannah "were always singing these songs. That was home. That was where we belonged."
Carl Sandburg's boyhood home in Galesburg is now operated by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency as the Carl Sandburg State Historic Site. The site contains the cottage Sandburg was born in, a modern visitor's center, and small garden with a large stone called Remembrance Rock, under which his and his wife's ashes are buried. Sandburg's home of 22 years in Flat Rock, Henderson County, North Carolina, is preserved by the National Park Service as the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site. Carl Sandburg College is located in Sandburg's birthplace of Galesburg, Illinois.
On January 6, 1978, the 100th anniversary of his birth, the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Sandburg. The spare design consists of a profile originally drawn by his friend William A. Smith in 1952, along with Sandburg's own distinctive autograph.
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) (RBML) houses the Carl Sandburg Papers. The bulk of the collection was purchased directly from Carl Sandburg and his family. In total, the RBML owns over 600 cubic feet of Sandburg's papers, including photographs, correspondence, and manuscripts.
In 2011, Sandburg was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
Carl Sandburg Village was a 1960s urban renewal project in the Near North Side, Chicago. Financed by the city, it is located between Clark and LaSalle St. between Division Street and North Ave. Solomon & Cordwell, architects. In 1979, Carl Sandburg Village was converted to condominium ownership.
Numerous schools are named for Sandburg throughout the United States, and he was present at some of these schools' dedications. (Some years after attending the 1954 dedication of Carl Sandburg High School in Orland Park, Illinois, Sandburg returned for an unannounced visit; the school's principal at first mistook him for a hobo.) Sandburg Halls, a student residence hall at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, carries a plaque commemorating Sandburg's roles as an organizer for the Social Democratic Party and as personal secretary to Emil Seidel, Milwaukee's first Socialist mayor.
Carl Sandburg Library opened in Livonia, Michigan in 1961. The name was recommended by the Library Commission as an example of an American author representing the best of literature of the Midwest. Carl Sandburg had taught at the University of Michigan for a time.
Galesburg opened Sandburg Mall in 1975, named in honor of Sandburg. The Chicago Public Library installed the Carl Sandburg Award, annually awarded for contributions to literature.
Amtrak added the "Carl Sandburg" train in 2006 to supplement the "Illinois Zephyr" on the Chicago–Quincy route. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40418 |
Dover
Dover () is a town and major ferry port in Kent, South East England. It faces France across the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel, and lies south-east of Canterbury and east of Maidstone. The town is the administrative centre of the Dover District and home of the Port of Dover. The surrounding chalk cliffs are known as the White Cliffs of Dover.
Archaeological finds have revealed that the area has always been a focus for peoples entering and leaving Britain. The name derives from the River Dour that flows through it.
The Port of Dover provides much of the town's employment, as does tourism.
First recorded in its Latinised form of "Portus Dubris", the name derives from the Brythonic word for water ("dwfr" in Middle Welsh, dŵr in modern Modern Welsh). The same element is present in the town's French name "Douvres" and the name of the river, "Dour", which is also evident in other English towns such as Wendover. However, the modern Modern Welsh name "Dofr" is an adaptation of the English name Dover.
The current name was in use at least by the time of Shakespeare's "King Lear" (between 1603 and 1606), in which the town and its cliffs play a prominent role.
Archaeological finds have shown that there were Stone Age people in the area, and that some Iron Age finds also exist. During the Roman period, the area became part of the Roman communications network. It was connected by road to Canterbury and Watling Street and it became "Portus Dubris", a fortified port. Dover has a partly preserved Roman lighthouse (the tallest surviving Roman structure in Britain) and the remains of a villa with preserved Roman wall paintings. Dover later figured in the "Domesday Book".
Forts were built above the port and lighthouses were constructed to guide passing ships. It is one of the Cinque Ports. and has served as a bastion against various attackers: notably the French during the Napoleonic Wars and Germany during the Second World War.
Dover is in the south-east corner of Britain. From South Foreland, the nearest point to the European mainland, Cap Gris Nez is away across the Strait of Dover.
The site of its original settlement lies in the valley of the River Dour, sheltering from the prevailing south-westerly winds. This has led to the silting up of the river mouth by the action of longshore drift. The town has been forced into making artificial breakwaters to keep the port in being. These breakwaters have been extended and adapted so that the port lies almost entirely on reclaimed land.
The higher land on either side of the valley – the Western Heights and the eastern high point on which Dover Castle stands – has been adapted to perform the function of protection against invaders. The town has gradually extended up the river valley, encompassing several villages in doing so. Little growth is possible along the coast, since the cliffs are on the sea's edge. The railway, being tunnelled and embanked, skirts the foot of the cliffs.
Dover has an oceanic climate (Koppen classification "Cfb") similar to the rest of the United Kingdom with mild temperatures year-round and a light amount of rainfall each month. The warmest recorded temperature was , recorded on 25 July 2019. The temperature is usually between and . There is evidence that the sea is coldest in February; the warmest recorded temperature for February was only , compared with in January.
In 1800, the year before Britain's first national census, Edward Hasted (1732–1812) reported that the town had a population of almost 10,000 people.
At the 2001 census, the town of Dover had 28,156 inhabitants, while the population of the whole urban area of Dover, as calculated by the Office for National Statistics, was 39,078 inhabitants.
With the expansion of Dover, many of the outlying ancient villages have been incorporated into the town. Originally the parishes of Dover St. Mary's and Dover St. James, since 1836 Buckland and Charlton have become part Dover, and Maxton (a hamlet to the west), River, Kearsney, Temple Ewell, and Whitfield, all to the north of the town centre, are within its conurbation.
The Dover Harbour Board is the responsible authority for the running of the Port of Dover. The English Channel, here at its narrowest point in the Straits of Dover, is the busiest shipping lane in the world. Ferries crossing between here and the Continent have to negotiate their way through the constant stream of shipping crossing their path. The "Dover Strait Traffic Separation Scheme" allots ships separate lanes when passing through the Strait. The Scheme is controlled by the Channel Navigation Information Service based at Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre Dover. MRCC Dover is also charged with co-ordination of civil maritime search and rescue within these waters.
The Port of Dover is also used by cruise ships. The old Dover Marine railway station building houses one passenger terminal, together with a car park. A second, purpose-built, terminal is located further out along the pier.
The ferry lines using the port are (number of daily sailings in parentheses):
These services have been cut in recent years:
Dover Harbour, from the cliffs above.
Dover's main communications artery, the A2 road replicates two former routes, connecting the town with Canterbury. The Roman road was followed for centuries until, in the late 18th century, it became a toll road. Stagecoaches were operating: one description stated that the journey took all day to reach London, from 4am to being "in time for supper".
The other main roads, travelling west and east, are the A20 to Folkestone and thence the M20 to London, and the A258 through Deal to Sandwich.
The railway reached Dover from two directions: the South Eastern Railway's main line connected with Folkestone in 1844, and the London, Chatham and Dover Railway opened its line from Canterbury in 1861. Southeastern trains run from Dover Priory to London Charing Cross, London Victoria or London St Pancras International stations in London, and Ramsgate or Sandwich in Kent.
The Chatham Main Line into Priory was electrified under British Railways in 1959 as part of Stage 1 of Kent Coast Electrification, under the BR 1955 Modernisation Plan. The line up to Ramsgate, via Deal, was subsequently electrified under stage two of Kent Coast electrification in January 1961. The line from Folkestone into Priory was electrified in June 1961.
A tram system operated in the town from 1897 to 1936.
Dover has two long distance footpaths: the Saxon Shore Way and the North Downs Way. Two National Cycle Network routes begin their journey at the town.
The Port of Dover is a 20-minute walk from Dover Priory railway station.
The Dover to Dunkirk ferry route was originally operated by ferry operator Norfolkline. This company was later acquired by the pan European operator DFDS Seaways in July 2010. The crossing time is approximately two hours. Due to this route not being as well known as Dover to Calais, prices are often cheaper. The location of Dunkirk is also more convenient for those travelling by road transport on to countries in Northern Europe including Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and further afield.
Stagecoach in East Kent provide local bus services. Dover is on the Stagecoach Diamond network providing links to Canterbury and Deal. The Western Docks at the port of Dover are served from the town centre as well as Canterbury and Deal. Dover is the start of The Wave network to New Romney via Folkestone, Hythe and Dymchurch. There are services to Lydd via Lydd Airport, with one continuing from Lydd on to Hastings via Camber and Rye. There is a link to Sandwich and Ramsgate. Buses run from Dover to Canterbury via Aylesham.
National Express runs coaches from Dover to other towns in Kent including Canterbury, Folkestone, Ashford, Kent, Maidstone, Gillingham at Hempsted Valley shopping centre and Greenhithe at Bluewater Shopping Centre for Dartford to London including Bexleyheath, Eltham, Walworth, Canary Wharf, Elephant & Castle, The City (The City of London) and to Victoria Coach Station
The town's main shopping streets are the High Street, Biggin Street, Market Square, Cannon Street, Pencester Road and Castle Street. The Castleton Retail Park is to the north-west of the town centre. The new St James' Retail and Leisure Park opened in 2018 and is a southern extension of the town centre and consists of shops, restaurants, a Travelodge Hotel and a Cineworld Cinema.
The Dover lifeboat is a Severn class lifeboat based in the Western Docks.
Dover Lifeboat station is based at crosswall quay in Dover Harbour. There is a Severn-class lifeboat, which is the biggest in the fleet. It belongs to the RNLI which covers all of Great Britain. The lifeboat number is 17-09 and has a lot of emergencies in the Channel. The Severn class is designed to lay afloat. Built from fibre reinforced composite (FRC) the boat is lightweight yet very strong and is designed to right itself in the event of a capsize.
There are seven secondary level schools serving Dover.
Public schools
Dover College is a mixed public school founded in 1871 by a group of local business men.
Selective secondary schools
There are 2 single-sex grammar schools and a mixed military school.
Both grammar schools require the Dover Test or the Kent Test for admission to Year 7.
Duke of York's Royal Military School is a selective secondary school with academy status and England's only military boarding school for children of service personnel (co-education ages 11–18), located next to the former site of Connaught Barracks.
Non-selective secondary schools
There are 3 ex-secondary modern mixed schools, all with academy status.
Astor College federated with St Radigunds Primary School (then renamed White Cliffs Primary College for the Arts) to form the Dover Federation for the Arts (DFA). Subsequently, Barton Junior School and Shatterlocks Nursery and Infant School joined the DFA. In 2014 the DFA was warned by the Department for Education about "unacceptably low standards of performance of pupils ".
St Edmund's Catholic School federated with St Richards Catholic Primary School to form the Dover Federation of Catholic Schools.
Dover Christ Church Academy is located in Whitfield, 4 miles north of Dover.
Technical College
Dover Technical College is part of the East Kent College (EKC) group.
In addition, 16 primary schools and 2 special schools add to the educational offering.
Dover has one hospital, Buckland Hospital. Earlier hospitals included the Royal Victoria Hospital, the Isolation Hospital and the Eye Hospital.
Dover was the home to television studios and production offices of Southern Television Ltd, the company which operated the ITV franchise for South and South East England from 1958–1981. The studios were located on Russell Street and were home to programmes like 'Scene South East', 'Scene Midweek', 'Southern News', 'Farm Progress' and the nightly epilogue, 'Guideline'. The studios were operated by TVS in 1982 and home to 'Coast to Coast', however they closed a year later when the company moved their operations to the newly complete Television Centre in Maidstone.
Dover has two paid for newspapers, the "Dover Express" (published by Kent Regional News and Media) and the "Dover Mercury" (published by the KM Group). Free newspapers for the town previously included the "Dover and Deal Extra", part of the KM Group; and "yourdover", part of KOS Media.
Dover has one local commercial radio station, KMFM Shepway and White Cliffs Country, broadcasting to Dover on 106.8FM. The station was founded in Dover as Neptune Radio in September 1997 but moved to Folkestone in 2003 and was consequently rebranded after a takeover by the KM Group. Dover is also served by the county-wide stations Heart, Gold and BBC Radio Kent.
The Gateway Hospital Broadcasting Service, in Buckland Hospital radio, closed at the end of 2006. It was the oldest hospital radio station in East Kent being founded in 1968.
Dover Community Radio (DCR) currently offer internet programming and podcasts (since 2010) on local events and organisations on their website. The online station of the same name launched on 30 July 2011 offering local programmes, music and news for Dover and district. Dover Community Radio is expected to launch on FM soon as it was awarded a community radio licence by OFCOM on 12 May 2020
There are three museums: the main Dover Museum, the Dover Transport Museum and the Roman Painted House. The town has two cinemas, the Silver Screen Cinema located at the Dover Museum and the Cineworld Cinema opened in 2018 as part of the St James' Retail and Leisure complex. The Discovery Centre located off the Market Square houses Dover's library, Dover Museum, Silver Screen Cinema, the Roundhouse Community Theatre as well as adult education facilities. The Charlton Shopping Centre off the High Street has retail units, the Dover Local community hub, leisure facilities and the studios of Dover Community Radio. The White Cliffs Theatre opened in 2001 is based at Astor College. There is also a community theatre based at St Edmund's Catholic School
Dover District Leisure Centre operated by Places Leisure located in Whitfield opened in March 2019 replacing the previous facility on Townwall Street, which was operated by Your Leisure, a not for profit charitable trust, which caters for sports and includes a swimming pool.
There are sports clubs, amongst them Dover Athletic F.C., who play in the National League; rugby; swimming; water polo and netball (Dover and District Netball League).
Dover Rowing Club is the oldest coastal rowing club in Britain and has a rich history, at one time becoming the best club on the south coast. More information can be found on the history page of the club's website.
One event which gets media attention is that of swimming the English Channel.
Sea fishing, from the beach, pier or out at sea, is carried out here. The so-called Dover sole ("solea solea") is found all over European waters.
Dover is now the host of a variety of watersports; such as paddle-boarding and kayaking.
M.R. James used the Dover landmark, the Lord Warden Hotel, as a location in his short ghost story "Casting the Runes", first published in More Ghost Stories in 1911.
Matthew Arnold used the setting of Dover in his famous 19th-century poem, "Dover Beach."
Dover appears several times in "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40419 |
John Hancock Center
875 North Michigan Avenue, formerly the John Hancock Center, is a 100-story, 1,128-foot supertall skyscraper located in Chicago, Illinois. Located in the Magnificent Mile district, its name was changed to 875 North Michigan Avenue on February 12, 2018. However, despite this, the building is still colloquially called the John Hancock Center.
It was constructed under the supervision of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, with Peruvian-American chief designer Bruce Graham and Bangladeshi structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan. When the building topped out on May 6, 1968, it was the second-tallest building in the world and the tallest outside New York City. It is currently the fourth-tallest building in Chicago and the ninth-tallest in the United States, after One World Trade Center, the Willis Tower, 432 Park Avenue, the Trump Tower Chicago, the Empire State Building, the Bank of America Tower, 30 Hudson Yards and the Aon Center. When measured to the top of its antenna masts, it stands at . The building is home to several offices and restaurants, as well as about 700 condominiums. It also contains the third-highest residence in the world, after the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and the Trump Tower in Chicago. The building was named for John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, a developer and original tenant of the building. In 2018, John Hancock Insurance requested that its name be removed and the owner is seeking another naming rights deal.
From the 95th floor restaurant, diners can look out at Chicago and Lake Michigan. The observatory (360 Chicago), which competes with the Willis Tower's Skydeck, has a 360° view of the city, up to four states, and a distance of over . 360 Chicago is home to TILT, a moving platform that leans visitors over the edge of the skyscraper to a 30-degree angle, a full bar with local selections, Chicago's only open-air SkyWalk, and also features free interactive high definition touch screens in six languages. The 44th-floor sky lobby features America's highest indoor swimming pool.
The project, which would become the world's second tallest building at opening, was conceived and owned by Jerry Wolman in late 1964. The project was financed by John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company. Construction of the tower was interrupted in 1967 due to a flaw in an innovative engineering method used to pour concrete in stages, that was discovered when the building was 20 stories high. The engineers were getting the same soil settlements for the 20 stories that had been built as what they had expected for the "entire" 99 stories. This forced the owner to stop development until the engineering problem could be resolved, resulting in a credit crunch. The situation is similar to the one faced during the construction of 111 West Wacker, then known as the Waterview Tower. Wolman's bankruptcy resulted in John Hancock taking over the project, which retained the original design, architect, engineer, and main contractor.
The building's first resident was Ray Heckla, the original building engineer, responsible for the residential floors from 44 to 92. Heckla moved his family in April 1969, before the building was completed.
On November 11, 1981, Veterans Day, high-rise firefighting and rescue advocate Dan Goodwin, for the purpose of calling attention to the inability to rescue people trapped in the upper floors of skyscrapers, successfully climbed the building's exterior wall. Wearing a wetsuit and using a climbing device that enabled him to ascend the I-beams on the building's side, Goodwin battled repeated attempts by the Chicago Fire Department to knock him off. Fire Commissioner William Blair ordered Chicago firemen to stop Goodwin by directing a fully engaged fire hose at him and by blasting fire axes through nearby glass from the inside. Fearing for Goodwin's life, Mayor Jane Byrne intervened and allowed him to continue to the top.
The John Hancock Center is featured in the 1988 film "Poltergeist III".
On December 18, 1997, comedian Chris Farley was found dead in his apartment on the 60th floor of the building.
On March 9, 2002, part of a scaffold fell 43 stories after being torn loose by wind gusts around crushing several cars, killing three people in two of them. The remaining part of the stage swung back-and-forth in the gusts repeatedly slamming against the building, damaging cladding panels, breaking windows, and sending pieces onto the street below.
On December 10, 2006, the non-residential portion of the building was sold by San Francisco based Shorenstein Properties for $385 million and was purchased by a joint venture of Chicago-based Golub & Company and the Whitehall Street Real Estate Funds. Shorenstein Properties had bought the building in 1998 for $220 million.
Golub defaulted on its debt and the building was acquired in 2012 by Deutsche Bank who subsequently carved up the building. The venture of Deutsche Bank and New York-based NorthStar Realty Finance paid an estimated $325 million for debt on 875 North Michigan Avenue in 2012 after Shorenstein Properties defaulted on $400 million in loans. The observation deck was sold to Paris-based Montparnasse 56 Group for between $35 million and $45 million in July 2012. That same month, Prudential Real Estate Investors acquired the retail and restaurant space for almost $142 million. In November 2012, Boston-based American Tower Corp affiliate paid $70 million for the antennas. In June 2013, a venture of Chicago-based real estate investment firm Hearn Co., New York-based investment firm Mount Kellett Capital Management L.P. and San Antonio-based developer Lynd Co. closed on the expected acquisition of 875 North Michigan Avenue's 856,000 square feet of office space and 710-car parking deck. The Chicago firm did not disclose a price, but sources said it was about $145 million. This was the last step in that piecemeal sale process. In May 2016, Hearn Co. announced that they were seeking buyers for the naming rights with possible signage rights for the building.
Hustle up the Hancock is an annual stair climb race up the 94 floors from the Michigan Avenue level to the observation deck. It is held on the last Sunday of February. The climb benefits Respiratory Health Association. The record time as of 2007 is 9 minutes 30 seconds.
The building is home to the transmitter of Univision's WGBO-DT (channel 66), while all other full-power television stations in Chicago broadcast from Willis Tower. The City Colleges of Chicago's WYCC (channel 20) transmitted from the building until November 2017, when it departed the air as part of the 2016 FCC spectrum auction, and will eventually return as a part of WTTW's spectrum from Willis Tower.
On November 21, 2015, a fire broke out in an apartment on the 50th floor of the building. The Chicago Fire Department was able to extinguish the fire after an hour and a half; five people suffered minor injuries.
On February 11, 2018, a fire in a car on the seventh floor required approximately 150 firefighters to extinguish.
On February 12, 2018, John Hancock Insurance requested that its name and logos throughout the building's interior be removed immediately; John Hancock had not had a naming-rights deal with the skyscraper's owners since 2013. The building's name was subsequently changed to its street address as 875 North Michigan Avenue.
On November 16, 2018, an express elevator cable broke. Initial reports stated that an elevator with six passengers plunged 84 stories from the 95th to 11th floor. Since express elevators are not accessible from floors within the express zone, a team of firefighters had to break through a brick wall from the parking garage to extricate the passengers, none of whom suffered injuries. Elevators to the 95th/96th floor were closed thereafter pending investigation. Subsequent investigation documented only a controlled descent from the 20th floor to the 11th floor.
One of the most famous buildings of the structural expressionist style, the skyscraper's distinctive X-braced exterior shows that the structure's skin is part of its "tubular system". This is one of the engineering techniques which the designers used to achieve a record height; the tubular system is the structure that keeps the building upright during wind and earthquake loads. This X-bracing allows for both higher performance from tall structures and the ability to open up the inside floorplan. Such original features have allowed 875 North Michigan Avenue to become an architectural icon. It was pioneered by Bangladeshi-American structural civil engineer Fazlur Khan and chief architect Bruce Graham.
The interior was remodeled in 1995, adding to the lobby travertine, black granite, and textured limestone surfaces. The elliptical-shaped plaza outside the building serves as a public oasis with seasonal plantings and a 12-foot (3.7 m) waterfall. A band of white lights at the top of the building is visible all over Chicago at night, and changes colors for different events. For example, at Christmas time the colors are green and red. When a Chicago-area sports team goes far in the playoffs, the colors are changed to match that team's colors.
The building is a member of the World Federation of Great Towers. It has won various awards for its distinctive style, including the Distinguished Architects Twenty-five Year Award from the American Institute of Architects in May 1999. In celebration of the 2018 Illinois Bicentennial, the John Hancock Center was selected as one of the Illinois 200 Great Places by the American Institute of Architects Illinois component (AIA Illinois) and was recognized by USA Today Travel magazine, as one of AIA Illinois' selections for Illinois 25 Must See Places.
The building is only partially protected by a fire sprinkler system, as the residential floors do not have sprinklers.
Including its antennae, the building has a height of , making it the thirty-third tallest building in the world when measured to pinnacle height.
The Observatory elevators of 875 North Michigan Avenue, manufactured by Otis, travel 96 floors at a top speed of . It has been said the elevators to the observation deck are the fastest in North America, reaching from ground floor to the 95th floor at a top speed of 38 seconds. The fact about the speed record is also mentioned in the voice announcement recording which is played every time the elevator is going up from ground floor to observation deck.
Located on the 94th floor, 360 Chicago Observation Deck is 875 North Michigan Avenue's observatory. The floor of the observatory is off of street-level below. The entrance can be found on the concourse level of 875 North Michigan Avenue and is mainly accessible from the Michigan Avenue side of the building. The observatory, previously called the John Hancock Observatory, has been independently owned and operated since 2014 by the Montparnasse 56 Group out of Paris, France. The elevators are credited to be the fastest in the Western Hemisphere, at a top speed of 1,800 ft/min (20.5 mph). The observatory boasts larger floor space than its direct competitor, Skydeck at the Willis Tower. In addition, 360 Chicago has a full bar called BAR 94 which stocks local beer and spirits from Revolution Brewing and KOVAL Distillery. In the summer of 2014, 360 Chicago added its TILT attraction. TILT is an additional fee, and is a series of floor to ceiling windows that slowly tilt outside the building to 30°. The platform is on the observatory level, and faces south over the city. This observatory sees less attendance than the Skydeck at the Willis Tower, leading to a quieter and quicker experience.
Separate from its observatory, 875 North Michigan Avenue has a restaurant on its 95th floor named the Signature Room, with an accompanying bar on the 96th floor called the Signature Lounge.
The Cloudbase Chronicles, Life at the Top - An engineers Tale by Harry W. Budge III | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40420 |
Waltzing Matilda
"Waltzing Matilda" is Australia's best-known bush ballad, and has been described as the country's "unofficial national anthem".
The title was Australian slang for travelling on foot (waltzing) with one's belongings in a "matilda" (swag) slung over one's back. The song narrates the story of an itinerant worker, or "swagman", making a drink of billy tea at a bush camp and capturing a stray jumbuck (sheep) to eat. When the jumbuck's owner, a squatter (landowner), and three troopers (mounted policemen) pursue the swagman for theft, he declares "You'll never catch me alive!" and commits suicide by drowning himself in a nearby billabong (watering hole), after which his ghost haunts the site.
The original lyrics were written in 1895 by Australian poet Banjo Paterson, and were first published as sheet music in 1903. Extensive folklore surrounds the song and the process of its creation, to the extent that it has its own museum, the Waltzing Matilda Centre in Winton, in the Queensland outback, where Paterson wrote the lyrics. In 2012, to remind Australians of the song's significance, Winton organised the inaugural Waltzing Matilda Day to be held on 6 April, the anniversary of its first performance.
The song was first recorded in 1926 as performed by John Collinson and Russell Callow. In 2008, this recording of "Waltzing Matilda" was added to the Sounds of Australia registry in the National Film and Sound Archive, which says that there are more recordings of "Waltzing Matilda" than any other Australian song.
The Australian poet Banjo Paterson wrote the words to "Waltzing Matilda" in August 1895 while staying at Dagworth Station, a sheep and cattle station near Winton in Central West Queensland owned by the Macpherson family. The words were written to a tune played on a zither or autoharp by 31‑year‑old Christina Macpherson (1864–1936), one of the family members at the station.
Macpherson had heard the tune "The Craigielee March" played by a military band while attending the Warrnambool steeplechase horse racing in Victoria in April 1894, and played it back by ear at Dagworth. Paterson decided that the music would be a good piece to set lyrics to, and produced the original version during the rest of his stay at the station and in Winton.
The march was based on the music the Scottish composer James Barr composed in 1818 for Robert Tannahill's 1806 poem "Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielee". In the early 1890s it was arranged as "The Craigielee" march music for brass band by Australian composer Thomas Bulch.
It has been widely accepted that "Waltzing Matilda" is probably based on the following story:
In Queensland in 1891 the Great Shearers' Strike brought the colony close to civil war and was broken only after the Premier of Queensland, Samuel Griffith, called in the military. In September 1894, some shearers at Dagworth Station were again on strike. The situation turned violent with the striking shearers firing their rifles and pistols in the air and setting fire to the woolshed at Dagworth, killing dozens of sheep. The owner of Dagworth Station and three policemen gave chase to a man named Samuel Hoffmeister, an immigrant said to have been born in Batavia also known as "Frenchy". Rather than be captured, Hoffmeister shot and killed himself at the 4 Mile Creek south of Kynuna at 12.30pm on 2 September, 1894.
Bob Macpherson (the brother of Christina) and Paterson are said to have taken rides together at Dagworth. Here they would probably have passed the Combo Waterhole, where Macpherson is purported to have told this story to Paterson. Although not remaining in close contact, Paterson and Christina Macpherson had different recollections of where the song was first composed- Christina said it was composed "in Winton" while Paterson said it was at "Dick's Creek" on the road to Winton. Amongst Macpherson's belongings, found after her death in 1936, was an unopened letter to a music researcher that read "... one day I played (from ear) a tune, which I had heard played by a band at the Races in Warrnambool ... he [Paterson] then said he thought he could write some words to it. He then and there wrote the first verse. We tried it and thought it went well, so he then wrote the other verses." Similarly, in the early 1930s on ABC radio Paterson said: "The shearers staged a strike and Macpherson's woolshed at Dagworth was burnt down and a man was picked up dead ... Miss Macpherson used to play a little Scottish tune on a zither and I put words to it and called it "Waltzing Matilda"."
The song itself was first performed on 6 April 1895 by Sir Herbert Ramsay, 5th Bart., at the North Gregory Hotel in Winton, Queensland. The occasion was a banquet for the Premier of Queensland.
In February 2010, ABC News reported an investigation by barrister Trevor Monti that the death of Hoffmeister was more akin to a gangland assassination than to suicide. The same report asserts, "Writer Matthew Richardson says the song was most likely written as a carefully worded political allegory to record and comment on the events of the shearers' strike."
Several alternative theories for the origins or meaning of "Waltzing Matilda" have been proposed since the time it was written. Still, most experts now essentially agree on the details outlined above. Some oral stories collected during the twentieth century claimed that Paterson had merely modified a pre-existing bush song, but there is no evidence for this. In 1905, Paterson himself published a book of bush ballads he had collected from around Australia entitled "Old Bush Songs", with nothing resembling "Waltzing Matilda" in it. Nor do any other publications or recordings of bush ballads include anything to suggest it preceded Paterson. Meanwhile, manuscripts from the time the song originated indicate the song's origins with Paterson and Christina Macpherson, as do their own recollections and other pieces of evidence.
There has been speculation about the relationship "Waltzing Matilda" bears to an English song, "The Bold Fusilier" (also known as "Marching through Rochester", referring to Rochester in Kent and the Duke of Marlborough), a song sung to the same tune and dated by some back to the 18th century but first printed in 1900. There is, however, no documentary proof that "The Bold Fusilier" existed before 1900, and evidence suggests that this song was in fact written as a parody of "Waltzing Matilda" by English soldiers during the Boer War where Australian soldiers are known to have sung "Waltzing Matilda" as a theme. The first verse of "The Bold Fusilier" is:
A bold fusilier came marching back through Rochester
Off from the wars in the north country,
And he sang as he marched
Through the crowded streets of Rochester,
Who'll be a soldier for Marlboro and me?
In 2008 Australian amateur historian Peter Forrest claimed that the widespread belief that Paterson had penned the ballad as a socialist anthem, inspired by the Great Shearers' Strike, was false and a "misappropriation" by political groups. Forrest asserted that Paterson had in fact written the self-described "ditty" as part of his flirtation with Macpherson, despite his engagement to someone else. This theory was not shared by other historians like Ross Fitzgerald, emeritus professor in history and politics at Griffith University, who argued that the defeat of the strike in the area that Paterson was visiting only several months before the song's creation would have been in his mind, most likely consciously but at least "unconsciously", and thus was likely to have been an inspiration for the song. Fitzgerald stated, "the two things aren't mutually exclusive"a view shared by others who, while not denying the significance of Paterson's relationship with Macpherson, nonetheless recognise the underlying story of the shearers' strike and Hoffmeister's death in the lyrics of the song.
Paterson sold the rights to "Waltzing Matilda" and "some other pieces" to Angus & Robertson for five Australian pounds.
In 1903 Marie Cowan was hired by tea trader James Inglis to alter the song lyrics for use as an advertising jingle for Billy Tea, making it nationally famous. Cowan, who was married to Inglis's accountant, adapted the lyrics and set them to music in 1903.
A third variation on the song, with a slightly different chorus, was published in 1907.
Although no copyright applied to the song in Australia and many other countries, the Australian Olympic organisers had to pay royalties to an American publisher, Carl Fischer Music, following the song being played at the 1996 Summer Olympics held in Atlanta. According to some reports, the song was copyrighted by Carl Fischer Music in 1941 as an original composition. However, "The Sydney Morning Herald" said that Carl Fischer Music had collected the royalties on behalf of Messrs Allan & Co, an Australian publisher that claimed to have bought the original copyright, though Allan's claim "remains unclear". Arrangements such as those claimed by Richard D. Magoffin remain in copyright in America.
There are no "official" lyrics to "Waltzing Matilda" and slight variations can be found in different sources. This version incorporates the famous "You'll never catch me alive said he" variation introduced by the Billy Tea company. Paterson's original lyrics referred to "drowning himself 'neath the Coolibah Tree". The following lyrics are the Cowan version.
Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolibah tree,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his "Billy" boiled,
"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."
"Chorus:"
Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda,
You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me,
And he sang as he watched and waited till his "Billy" boiled,
"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."
Down came a jumbuck to drink at that billabong,
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee,
And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker bag,
"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."
"(Chorus)"
Up rode the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred.
Down came the troopers, one, two, and three.
"Whose is that jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?
You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."
"(Chorus)"
Up jumped the swagman and sprang into the billabong.
"You'll never catch me alive!" said he
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong:
"You'll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."
"(Chorus)"
The lyrics contain many distinctively Australian English words, some now rarely used outside the song. These include:
The lyrics of "Waltzing Matilda" have been changed since it was written.
In a facsimile of the first part of the original manuscript, included in "Singer of the Bush", a collection of Paterson's works published by Lansdowne Press in 1983, the first two verses appear as follows:
Oh there once was a swagman camped in the billabong,
Under the shade of a Coolibah tree,
And he sang as he looked at the old billy boiling,
Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?
"Chorus:"
Who'll come a waltzin' Matilda my darling,
Who'll come a waltzin' Matilda with me?
Waltzing Matilda and leading a water bag,
Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?
Down came a jumbuck to drink at the water hole,
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him in glee,
And he sang as he put him away in the tucker bag,
You'll come a waltzin' Matilda with me.
"Chorus":
You'll come a waltzing Matilda my darling,
You'll come a waltzing Matilda with me.
Waltzing Matilda and leading a water bag,
You'll come a waltzing Matilda with me.
Some corrections in the manuscript are evident; the verses originally read (differences in italics):
Oh there once was a swagman camped in the billabong,
Under the shade of a Coolibah tree,
And he sang as he looked at the old billy boiling,
Who'll come a "roving Australia" with me?
"Chorus:"
Who'll come a "rovin" (rest missing)
Who'll come a waltzin' Matilda with me?
Waltzing Matilda and leading a "tucker" bag.
Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?
It has been suggested that these changes were from an even earlier version and that Paterson was talked out of using this text, but the manuscript does not bear this out. In particular, the first line of the chorus was corrected before it had been finished, so the original version is incomplete.
The first published version, in 1903, differs slightly from this text:
Oh there once was a swagman camped in the billabongs,
Under the shade of a Coolibah tree,
And he sang as he looked at the old billy boiling,
"Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?"
"Chorus:"
Who'll come a waltzing Matilda, my darling,
Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?
Waltzing Matilda and leading a water-bag,
Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?
Down came a jumbuck to drink at the waterhole,
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him in glee,
And he sang as he put him away in the tucker-bag,
You'll come a waltzing Matilda with me.
Up came the squatter a-riding his thoroughbred,
Up rose the troopers—one, two, a and three.
"Whose the jolly jumbuck you've got in the tucker-bag?
You'll come a waltzing Matilda with we."
Up sprang the swagman and jumped in the waterhole,
Drowning himself by the Coolibah tree.
And his voice can be heard as it sings in the billabongs,
Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me.
("Chorus")
By contrast with the original, and also with subsequent versions, the chorus of all the verses was the same in this version. This is also apparently the only version that uses "billabongs" instead of "billabong".
Current variations of the third line of the first verse are "And he sang as he sat and waited by the billabong" or "And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled". Another variation is that the third line of each chorus is kept unchanged from the first chorus, or is changed to the third line of the preceding verse.
There is also the very popular so-called Queensland version that has a different chorus, one very similar to that used by Paterson:
Oh there once was a swagman camped in a billabong
Under the shade of the coolibah tree
And he sang as he looked at his old billy boiling
Who'll come a waltzing Matilda with me?
"Chorus:"
Who'll come a'waltzing Matilda my darling?
Who'll come a'waltzing Matilda with me?
Waltzing Matilda and leading a water bag
Who'll come a'waltzing Matilda with me?
Down came a jumbuck to drink at the water hole
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee
And he sang as he stowed him away in his tucker bag
You'll come a'waltzing Matilda with me
Down came the squatter a'riding his thoroughbred
Down came policemen one two three
Whose is the jumbuck you've got in your tucker bag?
You'll come a'waltzing Matilda with me
But the swagman he up and he jumped in the water hole
Drowning himself by the coolibah tree
And his ghost may be heard as it sings in the billabong
Who'll come a'waltzing Matilda with me?
("Chorus")
In May 1988 the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) Chief Executive, John Sturman, presented five platinum awards, "which recognised writers who had created enduring works which have become a major part of the Australian culture", at the annual APRA Awards ceremony as part of their celebrations for the Australian Bicentenary. One of the platinum awards was for Paterson and Cowan's version of "Waltzing Matilda".
The song has never been the officially recognised national anthem in Australia. Unofficially, however, it is often used in similar circumstances. The song was one of four included in a national plebiscite to choose Australia's national song held on 21 May 1977 by the Fraser Government to determine which song was preferred as Australia's national anthem. "Waltzing Matilda" received 28% of the vote compared with 43% for "Advance Australia Fair", 19% for "God Save the Queen" and 10% for "Song of Australia".
Australian passports issued from 2003 have had the lyrics of "Waltzing Matilda" hidden microscopically in the background pattern of most of the pages for visas and arrival/departure stamps.
"Waltzing Matilda" was used at the 1974 FIFA World Cup and at the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976 and, as a response to the New Zealand All Blacks haka, it has gained popularity as a sporting anthem for the Australia national rugby union team. It is also performed, along with "Advance Australia Fair", at the annual AFL Grand Final.
Matilda the Kangaroo was the mascot at the 1982 Commonwealth Games held in Brisbane, Queensland. Matilda was a cartoon kangaroo, who appeared as a high mechanical kangaroo at the opening ceremony, accompanied by Rolf Harris singing "Waltzing Matilda".
The Australian women's national soccer team is nicknamed the Matildas after this song.
It is used as the quick march of the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment and as the official song of the US 1st Marine Division, commemorating the time the unit spent in Australia during the Second World War. Partly also used in the British Royal Tank Regiment's slow march of "Royal Tank Regiment", because an early British tank model was called "Matilda".
In 1995, it was reported that at least 500 artists in Australia and overseas had released recordings of "Waltzing Matilda", and according to Peter Burgis of the National Film and Sound Archive, it is "one of the most recorded songs in the world". Among the artists and bands who have covered the song include Frank Ifield, Rod Stewart, Chubby Checker, Liberace, Harry Belafonte, Bill Haley and the Comets, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Helmut Lotti, Wilf Carter (Montana Slim), the Irish Rovers, and Burl Ives, The Swingle Singers and the Red Army Choir. Jimmie Rodgers had a US#41 pop hit with the song in 1959.
On 14 April 1981, on Space Shuttle "Columbia"'s first mission, country singer Slim Dusty's rendition was broadcast to Earth.
In the Kidsongs 1986 recording "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" where Mr. World and the Kidsongs Kids visit the Australians, the final two verses were replaced with the repeat of the first verse to make it more kid-friendly. Only this time, new words such as "Traveller" took the original ones' places such as "Swagman".
Versions of the song have been featured in a number of mainly Australian films and television programs.
"Waltzing Matilda" is a 1933 Australian film directed by and starring Pat Hanna. It features a young Coral Browne.
Using the first line of the song, "Once a Jolly Swagman" is a 1949 British film starring Dirk Bogarde.
There was an animated short made in 1958 for Australian television.
Ernest Gold used the song and variations of it extensively in the 1959 film "On the Beach".
The 2017 short film "Waltzing Tilda" features various versions of the song and it is also sung by the main character.
The 2019 HBO American film "" featured characters Al Swearengen and Jewel singing a version of the song at the end of the film. The movie is set in 1889 so pre-dates the creation of the song.
It is the theme song for Australia in the video games "Civilization VI".
"Waltzing Matilda" is a fixture at many Australian sporting events. Jessica Mauboy and Stan Walker recorded a version of "Waltzing Matilda" to promote the 2012 Summer Olympics in Australia. It was released as a single on 3 August 2012.
On the occasion of Queensland's 150-year celebrations in 2009, Opera Queensland produced the revue "Waltzing Our Matilda", staged at the Conservatorium Theatre and subsequently touring twelve regional centres in Queensland. The show was created by Jason and Leisa Barry-Smith and Narelle French. The story line used the fictional process of Banjo Paterson writing the poem when he visited Queensland in 1895 to present episodes of four famous Australians: bass-baritone Peter Dawson (1882–1961), soprano Dame Nellie Melba (1861–1931), Bundaberg-born tenor Donald Smith (1922–1998), and soprano Gladys Moncrieff, also from Bundaberg. The performers were Jason Barry-Smith as Banjo Paterson, Guy Booth as Dawson, David Kidd as Smith, Emily Burke as Melba, Zoe Traylor as Moncrieff, and Donna Balson (piano, voice). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40429 |
Molde
Molde () is a municipality in Møre og Romsdal county, Norway. It is located in the traditional district of Romsdal. The municipality is located on the Romsdal Peninsula, surrounding the Fannefjord and Moldefjord.
The administrative centre of the municipality is the city of Molde which is also the administrative centre of Møre og Romsdal county, the commercial hub of the Romsdal region, and the seat of the Diocese of Møre. Other main population centres in the municipality include the villages of Hjelset, Kleive, Nesjestranda, Midsund, Nord-Heggdal, Eidsvåg, Rausand, Boggestranda, Myklebostad, Eresfjord, and Eikesdalen.
Molde has a maritime, temperate climate, with cool-to-warm summers, and relatively mild winters. The city is nicknamed "The Town of Roses".
It is an old settlement which emerged as a trading post in the late Middle Ages. Formal trading rights were introduced in 1614, and the town was incorporated through a royal charter in 1742. Molde was established as a municipality on 1 January 1838 (see formannskapsdistrikt)
The town continued to grow throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, becoming a centre for Norwegian textile and garment industry, as well as the administrative centre for the region, and a major tourist destination. After World War II, Molde experienced accelerated growth, merging with Bolsøy Municipality and parts of Veøy Municipality on 1 January 1964, and has become a centre for not only administrative and public services, but also academic resources and industrial output.
The municipality is the 56th largest by area out of the 356 municipalities in Norway. Molde is the 31st most populous municipality in Norway with a population of 31,967. The municipality's population density is and its population has increased by 7.2% over the previous 10-year period.
The city's current location dates from the late mediaeval period, but is preceded by the early mediaeval township on Veøya, an island to the south of present-day Molde. The settlement at Veøya probably dates from the Migration Period, but is first mentioned in the sagas by Snorri Sturluson as the location of the "Battle of Sekken" in 1162, where king Håkon the Broad-shouldered was killed fighting the aristocrat Erling Skakke, during the Norwegian civil wars.
However, settlement in the area can be traced much further back in time—evidence given by two rock slabs carved with petroglyphs found at Bjørset, west of the city centre.
At the eve of the 15th century, the influence of Veøya waned, and the island was eventually deserted. However, commercial life in the region was not dead, and originating from the two settlements at Reknes and Molde (later "Moldegård"), a minor port called "Molde Fjære" ("Molde Landing") emerged, based on trade with timber and herring to foreign merchants.
The town gained formal trading rights in 1614 as a ladested under the supervision of the city of Trondheim. During the Swedish occupation of Middle Norway, 1658–1660, after Denmark-Norway's devastating defeat in the Northern Wars, the town became a hub of resistance to the Swedes. After the rebellion and liberation in 1660, Molde became the administrative centre of Romsdalen Amt and was incorporated as a kjøpstad through a royal charter in 1742. Molde continued to grow throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, becoming a centre for Norwegian textile and garment industry. Tourism later became a major industry, and Molde saw notabilities such as the German emperor Wilhelm II of Germany and the Prince of Wales as regular summer visitors. Molde consisted of luxurious hotels surrounding an idyllic township with quaint, wooden houses, lush gardens and parks, esplanades and pavilions, earning it the nickname "the Town of Roses". This was interrupted when one third of the city was destroyed in a fire on 21 January 1916. However, Molde recovered and continued to grow in the economically difficult interbellum period.
A second fire, or series of fires, struck from the German air-raids in April and May 1940, which destroyed about two thirds of the town. Molde was in effect the capital of Norway for a week after King Haakon, Crown Prince Olav, and members of the government and parliament arrived at Molde on April 23, after a dramatic flight from Oslo. They were put up at Glomstua, then at the western outskirts of the town, and experienced the bombing raids personally. The Norwegian gold reserve was also conveyed to Molde, and was hidden in a clothing factory.
However, German intelligence was well aware of this, and on April 25 the Luftwaffe initiated a series of air-raids. For a week the air-raid siren on the chimney of the dairy building announced the repeated attacks. April 29 turned out to be the worst day in the history of Molde, as the city was transformed into a sea of flames by incendiary bombs. Until then the church had escaped undamaged, but in the final sortie a firebomb became stuck high up in the tower, and the beautiful wooden church was obliterated by fire.
After World War II, Molde experienced tremendous growth. As the modernisation of the Norwegian society accelerated in the post-reconstruction years, Molde became a centre for not only administrative and public services, but also academic resources and industrial output. After the consolidation of the town itself and its adjacent communities in 1964, Molde became a modern city, encompassing most branches of employment, from farming and fisheries, to industrial production, banking, higher education, tourism, commerce, health care, and civil administration.
The town of Molde was established as an urban municipality on 1 January 1838 (see formannskapsdistrikt law). It was surrounded by the rural municipality of Bolsøy. On 1 July 1915, a part of Bolsøy (population: 183) was transferred to the city of Molde. On 1 January 1952, another part of Bolsøy (population: 1,913) was transferred to Molde.
During the 1960s, there were many municipal mergers across Norway due to the work of the Schei Committee. On 1 January 1964, the town of Molde (population: 8,289) merged with the Sekken, Veøya, and Nesjestranda parts of municipality of Veøy (population: 756), all of the municipality of Bolsøy (population: 7,996), and the Mordal area of Nord-Aukra municipality (population: 77) to form the present day municipality of Molde.
On 1 January 2020, the neighbouring municipalities of Midsund and Nesset merged with Molde to form a much larger municipality called Molde.
The city is named after the original settlement on the farmstead of Molde (). The name is the plural form of either "mold" which means "fertile soil" or "" which means "skull" or "mold" (thus in reference to the rounded peaks in Moldemarka).
Pronunciation varies between the standard "Molde" and the rural "Molle". A person from Molde will refer to him/herself as a "Moldenser".
The coat of arms was granted on 29 June 1742. It shows a whale chasing herring into a barrel, based on an old myth that cetaceans guided by the Providence chased, rather than followed, the schools into the fjords at certain times. It also portrays the city's founding industries of herring fisheries and timber exports. Molde was never a whaling port, but the unusually bountiful fisheries in the early 1740s alleviated the city's suffering during a major famine. The sighting of whales, usually pods of orca, was commonly held to be the start of the spring herring fisheries.
Moldesangen ("The Song of Molde") is the semi-official anthem. It was written by Palle Godtfred Olaus Dørum (1818–1886) and composed by Karl Groos (1789–1861), supposedly in 1818.(Moldesangen)
Molde municipality includes part of the Romsdal peninsula as well as many islands. The town of Molde consists of a long and wide strip of urban land running east–west along the north shore of the Moldefjord, an arm of the Romsdalsfjord, on the Romsdal peninsula. The city is sheltered by Bolsøya and the Molde archipelago, a chain of low-lying islands and islets, to the south, and the wood-clad hills of Moldemarka to the north. The city centre is located just west of the river Moldeelva, which runs into the city from the north, originating in the Moldevatnet lake, through the valley Moldedalen. Despite the river being minor and seasonal, it supported several sawmills in the 16th and 17th centuries. This gave rise to the original town itself through a combination of a good harbour, proximity to the sea routes, vast timber resources, and a river capable of supporting mills. In 1909, the river housed the first hydro electric power plant capable of providing sufficient electricity for the city, and the upper reaches of the river still provide drinking water for most of the city.
Its panoramic view of some 222 partly snow-clad peaks, usually referred to as the Molde panorama, is one of Molde's main attractions, and has drawn tourists to the city since the 19th century. Molde is nicknamed the "Town of Roses", a name which originated during Molde's era as a tourist destination of international fame in the late 19th century.
Neighbouring municipalities are Aukra, Gjemnes, and Hustadvika (to the north); Ålesund (to the west); Vestnes and Rauma (to the south); and Tingvoll and Sunndal (to the east).
Salmon, sea trout and sea char are found in the rivers throughout the area, especially the Rauma, Driva, and Eira, already legendary among the British gentry in the mid-19th century. Trout is abundant in most lakes. Cod, pollock, saithe, mackerel and other species of saltwater fish are commonly caught in the Romsdalsfjord, both from land and from boat. Skiing is a popular activity among the inhabitants of Molde in the winter, on groomed tracks, in resorts or by own trail. There are several popular rock climbing, ice climbing, bouldering, glacier and basejumping areas in the immediate vicinity of Molde.
The "Atlantic road" was voted the Norwegian Construction of the Century in 2005. It is built on bridges and landfills across small islands and skerries, and spans from the small communities of Vikan and Vevang to Averøy, an island with several historic landmarks, such as the Bremsnes cave with Mesolithic findings from the Fosna culture, the mediaeval Kvernes stave church, and Langøysund, now a remote fishing community, but once a bustling port along the main coastal route. Langøysund was the site of the compromise between King Magnus I and the farmers along the coast in 1040. The compromise is regarded as Norway's Magna Carta, and is commemorated though the "Pilespisser" () monument.
"Trollkirka" (English: lit. "Troll Church") is a marble grotto leading up to an underground waterfall. The grotto is situated 30 minutes outside Molde, followed by a 1-hour hike up a steep trail. "Trollveggen" is Europe's tallest vertical, overhanging mountain face, with several very difficult climbing routes. "Trollstigen" is the most visited tourist road in Norway. The road twists and turns its way up an almost vertical mountainside through 11 hairpin bends to an altitude of . "Mardalsfossen" is the highest waterfall in Northern Europe and the fourth highest waterfall in the world, cascading 297 metres down into the valley. The total height of the waterfall is .
Bud is a fishing village on the very tip of the Romsdal peninsula. It gained importance during the Middle Ages as a trading post, and hosted the last free Privy Council of Norway in 1533, a desperate attempt to save the country's independence and stave off the Protestant Reformation, led by Olav Engelbrektsson, archbishop of Nidaros (today "Trondheim"). The massive Ergan coastal defences, a restored German coastal fort from World War II, and a part of the Atlantic Wall, is situated in Bud. The fishing communities of Ona, Bjørnsund and Håholmen are located on remote islands off the coast, only accessible by boat or ferry.
Moldemarka, the hilly woodland area north of the city, is public land. The area has an extensive network of paths, walking trails and skiing tracks. Forest roads enter the area from several directions. Bulletin boards and maps provide information regarding local plants and wildlife, as well as signposts along the trails. Marked trails lead to a number of peaks, sites and fishing lakes and rivers. A national fishing licence is required to fish in the lakes and streams.
Varden, above sea level is a viewpoint directly above Molde, with a good view of the city, the fjord with the Molde archipelago and the Molde panorama.
Molde has a maritime, temperate climate, with cool-to-warm summers, and relatively mild winters. The annual precipitation is medium high, with an average of per year. The warmest season is late summer. Molde holds the national high for the month of October, with (on 11 October 2005). The driest season is May–June. Due to its geographic location, Molde experiences frequent snowfalls in winter, but this snow is usually wet as the winters tend to be mild. Due to the effects of the Gulf Stream, the city rarely experiences lasting cold spells, and the average temperature is well above the average for its latitude.
A natural phenomenon occurring in Molde and the adjacent district, are frequent winter days with temperatures above , sometimes even above . This is due to the foehn wind from south and south-east. Combined with a steady influx of warm, moist south-westerly winds from the Atlantic Ocean, warmed by the North Atlantic Current, it gives Molde a climate much warmer than its latitude would indicate. The sheltered location of the city, facing south with hills to the north, mountains to the east and mountainous islands to the west, contributes to Molde's climate and unusually rich plant life, especially among species naturally growing on far lower latitudes, like maple, chestnut, oak, tilia ("lime" or "linden"), beech, yew, and others.
All municipalities in Norway, including Molde, are responsible for primary education (through 10th grade), outpatient health services, senior citizen services, unemployment and other social services, zoning, economic development, and municipal roads. The municipality is governed by a municipal council of elected representatives, which in turn elect a mayor. The municipality falls under the Romsdal District Court and the Frostating Court of Appeal.
The municipal council () of Molde is made up of 59 representatives who are elected to four-year terms. The party breakdown of the council is as follows:
The mayors of Molde (incomplete list):
Three of the "four great" Norwegian authors are connected to Molde. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson spent his childhood years at Nesset outside Molde, and attended school in the city. Henrik Ibsen frequently spent his vacations at the mansion "Moldegård" visiting the family Møller; and Alexander Kielland resided in the city as the governor of Romsdals amt. Ibsen's play "Rosmersholm" is generally thought to be inspired by life at the mansion Moldegård, and "The Lady from the Sea" is also believed to be set in the city of Molde, although never actually mentioned. Other authors from or with ties to Molde include Edvard Hoem, Jo Nesbø, Knut Ødegård, and Nini Roll Anker, a friend of Sigrid Undset.
The Romsdal Museum, one of Norway's largest folk museums, was established in 1912. Buildings originating from all over the region have been moved here to form a typical cluster of farm buildings including "open hearth" houses, sheds, outhouses, smokehouses and a small chapel. The "town street" with Mali's Café shows typical Molde town houses from the pre-World War I period. The Museum of the Fisheries is an open-air museum located on the island of Hjertøya, 10 minutes from the centre of Molde. A small fishing village with authentic buildings, boats and fishing equipment, the museum shows local coastal culture from 1850 onwards.
The local newspaper is Romsdals Budstikke.
The Church of Norway has ten parishes () within the municipality of Molde. It is part of the Molde domprosti (arch-deanery) in the Diocese of Møre.
The Moldejazz jazz festival is held in Molde every July. Moldejazz is one of the largest and oldest jazz festivals in Europe, and one of the most important. An estimated 40,000 tickets are sold for the more than a hundred events during the festival. Between 80,000 and 100,000 visitors visit the city during the one-week-long festival.
Every August, Molde and Nesset are hosts to the Bjørnson Festival, an international literature festival. Established by the poet Knut Ødegård in connection with the 250-year anniversary of Molde, the festival is named in honour of the Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910). It is the oldest and the most internationally acclaimed literature festival in Norway.
In addition to the two major events, a number of minor festivals are held annually. Byfest, the city's celebration of incorporation, is an arrangement by local artists, coinciding with the anniversary of the royal charter of 29 June 1742.
Molde University College offers a wide range of academic opportunities, from nursing and health-related studies, to economics and administrative courses. The school is Norway's leading college in logistics, and well established as a centre for research and academic programmes in information technology, with degrees up to and including PhD.
Molde University College is also one of the country's leading institutions in international student exchange and programmes conducted in English.
Hurtigruta calls on Molde every day, on its journey between Bergen and Kirkenes. The nearest railway station is Åndalsnes, the terminus for the Rauma Line.
The local airport is Molde Airport which has several daily flights to Oslo, Bergen, and Trondheim, as well as weekly flights to other domestic and international destinations.
The European route E39 and Norwegian County Road 64 both pass through the municipality. The city of Molde is connected to Fræna Municipality (to the north) by the Tussen Tunnel. The city is connected to the Røvika and Nesjestranda part of the municipality by the Fannefjord Tunnel and Bolsøy Bridge, significantly shortening the drive by avoiding driving all the way around the Fannefjorden. The proposed Langfjord Tunnel would connect Molde Municipality to Rauma Municipality via a tunnel under the Langfjorden.
Molde hosts a variety of sports teams, most notably the football team, Molde FK, which plays in the Eliteserien, the top division in the Norwegian football league system. Their home matches are played at Aker stadion, inaugurated in 1998, which holds a record attendance of 13,308. The team is four-time league champions (2011, 2012, 2014 and 2019), four-time Norwegian Cup winners (1994, 2005, 2013 and 2014), and has made numerous appearances in European tournaments, including the UEFA Champions League. The club was founded in 1911, during Molde's period of great British and Continental influx, and was first named "International", since it predominantly played teams made up from crews of foreign vessels visiting the city.
In addition to a number of international players, the city has also produced several ski jumpers, cross-country skiers and alpine skiers of international merit.
Other sports include the accomplished team handball clubs (Molde HK, SK Træff, SK Rival), athletics teams (IL Molde-Olymp), skiing clubs, basketball and volleyball teams.
Molde has three sister cities. They are: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40433 |
History of Barbados
Barbados was inhabited by its indigenous peoples—Arawaks and Caribs—prior to the European colonization of the Americas in the 16th century. Barbados was briefly claimed by the Portuguese from 1532 to 1620. The island was English and later a British colony from 1625 until 1966. Since 1966, it has been a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy, modelled on the Westminster system, with Elizabeth II, Queen of Barbados, as head of state.
Some evidence suggests that Barbados may have been settled in the second millennium BC, but this is limited to fragments of conch lip adzes found in association with shells that have been radiocarbon-dated to about 1630 BC. Fully documented Amerindian settlement dates to between about 350 and 650 AD. The arrivals were a group known as the Saladoid-Barrancoid from the mainland of South America. A second wave of settlers appeared around the year 800 (the Spanish referred to these as "Arawaks") and a third in the mid-13th century (called "Caribs" by the Spanish). This last group was politically more organised and came to rule over the others.
The Portuguese were the first Europeans to discover the island. Portuguese navigator Pedro A. Campos named it "Os Barbados" (meaning "bearded ones").
Frequent slave-raiding missions by the Spanish Empire in the early 16th century led to a massive decline in the Amerindian population, so that by 1541 a Spanish writer claimed they were uninhabited. The Amerindians were either captured for use as slaves by the Spanish or fled to other, more easily defensible mountainous islands nearby.
From about 1600 the English, French, and Dutch began to found colonies in the North American mainland and the smaller islands of the West Indies. Although Spanish and Portuguese sailors had visited Barbados, the first English ship touched the island on 14 May 1625, and England was the first European nation to establish a lasting settlement there from 1627. England is commonly said to have made its initial claim to Barbados in 1625, although reportedly an earlier claim may have been made in 1620. Nonetheless, Barbados was claimed from 1625 in the name of King James I of England. There were earlier English settlements in The Americas (1607: Jamestown, 1609: Bermuda, and 1620: Plymouth Colony), and several islands in the Leeward Islands were claimed by the English at about the same time as Barbados (1623: St Kitts, 1628: Nevis, 1632: Montserrat, 1632: Antigua). Nevertheless, Barbados quickly grew to become the third major English settlement in the Americas due to its prime eastern location.
The settlement was established as a proprietary colony and funded by Sir William Courten, a City of London merchant who acquired the title to Barbados and several other islands. So the first colonists were actually tenants and much of the profits of their labor returned to Courten and his company.
The first English ship, which had arrived on 14 May 1625, was captained by John Powell. The first settlement began on 17 February 1627, near what is now Holetown (formerly Jamestown), by a group led by John Powell's younger brother, Henry, consisting of 80 settlers and 10 English laborers. The latter were young indentured laborers who according to some sources had been abducted, effectively making them slaves.
Courten's title was transferred to James Hay, 1st Earl of Carlisle, in what was called the "Great Barbados Robbery." Carlisle then chose as governor Henry Hawley, who established the House of Assembly in 1639, in an effort to appease the planters, who might otherwise have opposed his controversial appointment.
In the period 1640–60, the West Indies attracted over two-thirds of the total number of English emigrants to the Americas. By 1650, there were 44,000 settlers in the West Indies, as compared to 12,000 on the Chesapeake and 23,000 in New England. Most English arrivals were indentured. After five years of labor, they were given "freedom dues" of about £10, usually in goods. (Before the mid-1630s, they also received 5 to 10 acres of land, but after that time the island filled and there was no more free land.) Around the time of Cromwell a number of rebels and criminals were also transported there. Timothy Meads of Warwickshire was one of the rebels sent to Barbados at that time, before he received compensation for servitude of 1000 acres of land in North Carolina in 1666. Parish registers from the 1650s show, for the white population, four times as many deaths as marriages. The death rate was very high.
Before this, the mainstay of the infant colony's economy was the growing export of tobacco, but tobacco prices eventually fell in the 1630s, as Chesapeake production expanded.
Around the same time, fighting during the War of the Three Kingdoms and the Interregnum spilled over into Barbados and Barbadian territorial waters. The island was not involved in the war until after the execution of Charles I, when the island's government fell under the control of Royalists (ironically the Governor, Philip Bell, remained loyal to Parliament while the Barbadian House of Assembly, under the influence of Humphrey Walrond, supported Charles II). To try to bring the recalcitrant colony to heel, the Commonwealth Parliament passed an act on 3 October 1650 prohibiting trade between England and Barbados, and because the island also traded with the Netherlands, further navigation acts were passed prohibiting any but English vessels trading with Dutch colonies. These acts were a precursor to the First Anglo-Dutch War. The Commonwealth of England sent an invasion force under the command of Sir George Ayscue, which arrived in October 1651. After some skirmishing, the Royalists in the House of Assembly led by Lord Willoughby surrendered. The conditions of the surrender were incorporated into the Charter of Barbados (Treaty of Oistins), which was signed at the Mermaid's Inn, Oistins, on 17 January 1652.
Sugar cane cultivation in Barbados began in the 1640s, after its introduction in 1637 by Pieter Blower. Initially, rum was produced but by 1642, sugar was the focus of the industry. As it developed into the main commercial enterprise, Barbados was divided into large plantation estates which replaced the small holdings of the early English settlers as the wealthy planters pushed out the poorer. Some of the displaced farmers relocated to the English colonies in North America, most notably South Carolina. To work the plantations, black Africans – primarily from West Africa – were imported as slaves in such numbers that there were three for every one planter. Increasingly after 1750 the plantations were owned by absentee landlords living in Britain and operated by hired managers. The slave trade ceased in 1807 and slaves were emancipated in 1834. Persecuted Catholics from Ireland also worked the plantations. Life expectancy of slaves was short and replacements were purchased annually.
The introduction of sugar cane from Dutch Brazil in 1640 completely transformed society and the economy. Barbados eventually had one of the world's biggest sugar industries. One group instrumental in ensuring the early success of the industry were the Sephardic Jews, who had originally been expelled from the Iberian peninsula, to end up in Dutch Brazil. As the effects of the new crop increased, so did the shift in the ethnic composition of Barbados and surrounding islands. The workable sugar plantation required a large investment and a great deal of heavy labour. At first, Dutch traders supplied the equipment, financing, and African slaves, in addition to transporting most of the sugar to Europe. In 1644, the population of Barbados was estimated at 30,000, of which about 800 were of African descent, with the remainder mainly of English descent. These English smallholders were eventually bought out and the island filled up with large African slave-worked sugar plantations. By 1660, there was near parity with 27,000 blacks and 26,000 whites. By 1666, at least 12,000 white smallholders had been bought out, died, or left the island. Many of the remaining whites were increasingly poor. By 1680, there were 17 slaves for every indentured servant. By 1700, there were 15,000 whites and 50,000 enslaved blacks.
Due to the increased implementation of slave codes, which emphasized differential treatment between Africans, and the white workers and ruling planter class, the island became increasingly unattractive to poor whites. Black or slave codes were implemented in 1661, 1676, 1682, and 1688. In response to these codes, several slave rebellions were attempted or planned during this time, but none succeeded. Nevertheless, poor whites who had or acquired the means to emigrate often did so. Planters expanded their importation of African slaves to cultivate sugar cane. One early advocate of slave rights in Barbados was the visiting Quaker preacher Alice Curwen in 1677: " "For I am persuaded, that if they whom thou call'st thy Slaves, be Upright-hearted to God, the Lord God Almighty will set them Free in a way that thou knowest not; for there is none set free but in Christ Jesus, for all other Freedom will prove but a Bondage."
By 1660, Barbados generated more trade than all the other English colonies combined. This remained so until it was eventually surpassed by geographically larger islands like Jamaica in 1713. But even so, the estimated value of the colony of Barbados in 1730–31 was as much as £5,500,000. Bridgetown, the capital, was one of the three largest cities in English America (the other two being Boston, Massachusetts and Port Royal, Jamaica.) By 1700, the English West Indies produced 25,000 tons of sugar, compared to 20,000 for Brazil, 10,000 for the French islands and 4,000 for the Dutch islands. This quickly replaced tobacco, which had been the island's main export.
As the sugar industry developed into its main commercial enterprise, Barbados was divided into large plantation estates that replaced the smallholdings of the early English settlers. In 1680, over half the arable land was held by 175 large enslavers/planters, each of whom enslaved at least 60 persons. The great enslavers/planters had connections with the English aristocracy and great influence on Parliament. (In 1668, the West Indian sugar crop sold for £180,000 after customs of £18,000. Chesapeake tobacco earned £50,000 after customs of £75,000). So much land was devoted to sugar that most foods had to be imported from New England. The poorer whites who were moved off the island went to the English Leeward Islands, or especially to Jamaica. In 1670, the Province of South Carolina was founded, when some of the surplus population again left Barbados. Other nations benefiting from large numbers of Barbadians included British Guiana and Panama.
Roberts (2006) shows that enslaved persons did not spend the majority of time in restricted roles cultivating, harvesting, and processing sugarcane, the island's most important cash crop. Rather, the enslaved were involved in various activities and in multiple roles: raising livestock, fertilizing soil, growing provisional crops, maintaining plantation infrastructure, caregiving, and other tasks. One notable soil management technique was intercropping, planting subsistence crops between the rows of cash crops, which demanded of the enslaved skilled and experienced observations of growing conditions for efficient land use.
"Slaveholders often counted as 'married' only the enslaved with mates on the estate. For example, the manager of Newton estate ... recorded 20 women with co-resident husbands and 35 with mates elsewhere. Members of the latter group were labeled single, members of extended units, or mother-child units."
The British abolished the slave trade in 1807, but not the institution itself. In 1816, enslaved persons rose up in what was the first of three rebellions in the British West Indies to occur in the interval between the end of the slave trade and emancipation, and the largest slave uprising in the island's history. Around 20,000 enslaved persons from over 70 plantations are thought to have been involved. The rebellion was partly fueled by information about the growing abolitionist movement in England, and the opposition against such by local whites. It largely surprised planters, who felt that their slaves were content because they were allowed weekly dances, participated in social and economic activity across the island and were generally fed and looked after.
However, they had refused to reform the Barbados Slave Code since its inception, a code that denied slaves human rights and prescribed inhumane torture, mutilation or death as a means of control. This contributed to what was later termed "Bussa's Rebellion", named for the slave ranger, Bussa, and the result of a growing sentiment that the treatment of slaves in Barbados was "intolerable", and who believed the political climate in Britain made the time ripe to peacefully negotiate with planters for freedom.
Bussa became the most famous of the rebellion's organizers, many of whom were either enslaved persons of some higher position or literate freedmen. One woman, Nanny Grigg, is also named as a principal organizer.
Bussa's Rebellion failed. The uprising was triggered prematurely, but the slaves were already greatly outmatched. Barbados’ flat terrain gave the horses of the better-armed militia the clear advantage over the rebels, with no mountains or forest for concealment. Slaves had also thought they would be supported by freed men of colour, but these instead joined efforts to quell the rebellion. Although they drove whites off the plantations, widespread killings did not take place. By the end, one hundred and twenty slaves died in combat or were immediately executed, and another 144 were brought to trial and executed. The remaining rebels were shipped off the island.
In 1826, the Barbados legislature passed the Consolidated Slave Law, which simultaneously granted concessions to the slaves while providing reassurances to the slave owners.
Slavery was finally abolished in the British Empire 8 years later, in 1834. In Barbados and the rest of the British West Indian colonies, full emancipation from slavery was preceded by a contentious apprenticeship period that lasted four years.
In 1884, the Barbados Agricultural Society sent a letter to Sir Francis Hincks requesting his private and public views on whether the Dominion of Canada would favourably entertain having the then colony of Barbados admitted as a member of the Canadian Confederation. Asked from Canada were the terms of the Canadian side to initiate discussions, and whether or not the island of Barbados could depend on the full influence of Canada in getting the change agreed to by the British Parliament at Westminster.
In 1952, the "Barbados Advocate" newspaper polled several prominent Barbadian politicians, lawyers, businessmen, the Speaker of the Barbados House of Assembly and later as first President of the Senate, Sir Theodore Branker, Q.C. and found them to be in favour of immediate federation of Barbados along with the rest of the British Caribbean with complete Dominion Status within five years from the date of inauguration of the West Indies Federation with Canada.
However, plantation owners and merchants of British descent still dominated local politics, owing to the high income qualification required for voting. More than 70 percent of the population, many of them disenfranchised women, were excluded from the democratic process. It was not until the 1930s that the descendants of emancipated slaves began a movement for political rights. One of the leaders of this, Sir Grantley Adams, founded the Barbados Progressive League in 1938, which later became known as the Barbados Labour Party (BLP).
Adams and his party demanded more rights for the poor and for the people, and staunchly supported the monarchy. Progress toward a more democratic government in Barbados was made in 1942, when the exclusive income qualification was lowered and women were given the right to vote. By 1949, governmental control was wrested from the planters, and in 1958 Adams became Premier of Barbados.
From 1958 to 1962, Barbados was one of the ten members of the West Indies Federation, a federalist organisation doomed by nationalist attitudes and the fact that its members, as British colonies, held limited legislative power. Grantley Adams served as its first and only "Premier", but his leadership failed in attempts to form similar unions, and his continued defence of the monarchy was used by his opponents as evidence that he was no longer in touch with the needs of his country. Errol Walton Barrow, a fervent reformer, became the people's new advocate. Barrow had left the BLP and formed the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) as a liberal alternative to Adams' conservative government. Barrow instituted many progressive social programmes, such as free education for all Barbadians and a school meals system. By 1961, Barrow had replaced Adams as Premier and the DLP controlled the government.
With the Federation dissolved, Barbados reverted to its former status, that of a self-governing colony. The island negotiated its own independence at a constitutional conference with Britain in June 1966. After years of peaceful and democratic progress, Barbados finally became an independent state on 30 November 1966, with Errol Barrow its first Prime Minister, although Queen Elizabeth II remained the monarch. Upon independence Barbados maintained historical linkages with Britain by becoming a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. A year later, Barbados' international linkages were expanded by obtaining membership of both the United Nations and the Organization of American States.
Carrington (1982) examines politics during the American Revolution, revealing that Barbadian political leaders shared many of the grievances and goals of the American revolutionaries, but that they were unwilling to go to war over them. Nevertheless, the repeated conflicts between the island assembly and the royal governors brought important constitutional reforms which confirmed the legislature's control over most local matters and its power over the executive.
From 1800 until 1885, Barbados then served as the main seat of Government for the former British colonies of the Windward Islands. During the period of around 85 years the resident Governor of Barbados also served as the Colonial head of the Windward Islands. After the Government of Barbados officially exited from the Windward Island union in 1885, the seat was moved from Bridgetown to St. George's on the neighbouring island of Grenada, where it remained until the territory of the Windward Islands was dissolved.
Soon after Barbados' withdrawal from the Windward Islands, Barbados became aware that Tobago was going to be amalgamated with another territory as part of a single state. In response, Barbados made an official bid to the British Government to have neighbouring Island Tobago joined with Barbados as a political union. The British government however decided that Trinidad would be a better fit and Tobago instead was made a Ward of Trinidad.
African slaves worked on plantations owned by merchants of English and Scottish descent. It was these merchants who continued to dominate Barbados politics, even after emancipation, due to a high income restriction on voting. Only the upper 30 per cent had any voice in the democratic process. It was not until the 1930s that a movement for political rights was begun by the descendants of emancipated slaves, who started trade unions. Charles Duncan O’Neal, Clennell Wickham and the members of the Democratic League were some of the leaders of this movement. This was initially opposed by Sir Grantley Adams, who played an instrumental role in the bankruptcy and shutdown of The Herald newspapers, one of the movement's foremost voices. Adams would later found the Barbados Progressive League (now the Barbados Labour Party) in 1938, during the Great Depression. The Depression caused mass unemployment and strikes, and the standard of living on the island fell drastically. With the death of O’Neal and the demise of the League, Adams cemented his power, but he used this to advocate for causes that had once been his rivals, including more help for the people especially the poor.
Finally, in 1942, the income qualification was lowered. This was followed by the introduction of universal adult suffrage in 1951, and Adams was elected as Premier of Barbados in 1958. For his action and leadership, Adams would later become a National Hero.
From 1958 to 1962, Barbados was one of the ten members of the West Indies Federation, an organisation doomed to failure by a number of factors, including what were often petty nationalistic prejudices and limited legislative power. Indeed, Adams's position as "Prime Minister" was a misnomer, as all of the Federation members were still colonies of Britain. Adams, once a political visionary and now a man whose policies seemed to some blind to the needs of his country, not only held fast to his notion of defending the monarchy but also made additional attempts to form other Federation-like entities after that union's demise. When the Federation was terminated, Barbados reverted to its former status as a self-governing colony, but efforts were made by Adams to form another federation composed of Barbados and the Leeward and Windward Islands.
Errol Walton Barrow was to replace Grantley Adams as the advocate of populism, and it was he who would eventually lead the island into Independence in 1966. Barrow, a fervent reformer and once a member of the Barbados Labour Party, had left the party to form his own Democratic Labour Party, as the liberal alternative to the conservative BLP government under Adams. He remains a National Hero for his work in social reformation, including the institution of free education for all Barbadians. In 1961, Barrow supplanted Adams as Premier as the DLP took control of the government.
Due to several years of growing autonomy, Barbados, with Barrow at the helm, was able successfully to negotiate its independence at a constitutional conference with the United Kingdom in June 1966. After years of peaceful and democratic progress, Barbados finally became an independent state and formally joined the Commonwealth of Nations on 30 November 1966, Errol Barrow serving as its first Prime Minister.
A number of proposals have been mooted in the past to have Barbados integrated with either neighboring countries or even the Canadian Confederation. To date all have failed, and one proposal even led to deadly riots in 1876 when Governor John Pope Hennessy tried to pressure Barbados' politicians to integrate more firmly into the Windward Islands. Governor Hennessy was quickly transferred from Barbados by the British Crown. In 1884, attempts were then made by the influential Barbados Agricultural Society to have Barbados form a political association with the Canadian Confederation. From 1958 to 1962 Barbados became one of the ten states of the West Indies Federation. Lastly in the 1990s, a plan was devised by the leaders of Guyana, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago to form a political association between those three governments. Again this deal was never completed, following the loss of Sir Lloyd Erskine Sandiford in the Barbadian general elections. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40435 |
Conrad III of Germany
Conrad III (; ; 1093 or 1094 – 15 February 1152) of the Hohenstaufen dynasty was from 1116 to 1120 Duke of Franconia, from 1127 to 1135 anti-king of his predecessor King Lothair III and from 1138 until his death in 1152 King in the Holy Roman Empire. He was the son of Duke Frederick I of Swabia and Agnes, a daughter of the Salian Emperor Henry IV.
The origin of the House of Hohenstaufen in the Duchy of Swabia has not been conclusively established. As the name came from the Hohenstaufen Castle (built in 1105) Conrad's great-grandfather Frederick of Staufen was count in the Riesgau and in 1053 became Swabian Count palatine. His son Frederick of Buren probably resided near present-day Wäschenbeuren and about 1050 married Countess Hildegard of Egisheim-Dagsburg from Alsace.
Conrad's father took advantage of the conflict between King Henry IV of Germany and the Swabian duke Rudolf of Rheinfelden during the Investiture Controversy. When Rudolf had himself elected German anti-king at Forchheim in 1077, Frederick of Hohenstaufen remained loyal to the royal crown and in 1079 was vested with the Duchy of Swabia by Henry IV, including an engagement with the king's minor daughter Agnes. He died in 1105, leaving two sons, Conrad and his elder brother Frederick II, who inherited the Swabian ducal title. Their mother entered into a second marriage with Babenberg margrave Leopold III of Austria.
In 1105 Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor since 1084, was overthrown by his son Henry V, Conrad's uncle. Emperor since 1111, Henry V preparing for his second campaign to Italy upon the death of Margravine Matilda of Tuscany, in 1116 appointed Conrad a Duke of Franconia. Conrad was marked out to act as regent for Germany, together with his elder brother, Duke Frederick II of Swabia. At the death of Henry V in 1125, Conrad unsuccessfully supported Frederick II for the kingship of Germany. Frederick was placed under a ban and Conrad was deprived of Franconia and the Kingdom of Burgundy, of which he was rector. With the support of the imperial cities, Swabia, and the Duchy of Austria, Conrad was elected anti-king at Nuremberg in December 1127.
Conrad quickly crossed the Alps to be crowned King of Italy by Anselmo della Pusterla, Archbishop of Milan, in the village of Monza. Over the next two years, he failed to achieve anything in Italy, however, and returned to Germany in 1130, after Nuremberg and Speyer, two strong cities that supported him, fell to Lothair in 1129. Conrad continued in Lothair's opposition, but he and Frederick were forced to acknowledge Lothair as emperor in 1135, during which time Conrad relinquished his title as King of Italy. After this they were pardoned and could take again possession of their lands.
After Lothair's death (December 1137), Conrad was elected king at Coblenz on 7 March 1138, in the presence of the papal legate Theodwin. Conrad was crowned at Aachen six days later (13 March) and was acknowledged in Bamberg by several princes of southern Germany. As Henry the Proud, son-in-law and heir of Lothair and the most powerful prince in Germany, who had been passed over in the election, refused to do the same, Conrad deprived him of all his territories, giving the Duchy of Saxony to Albert the Bear and that of Bavaria to Leopold IV, Margrave of Austria. Henry, however, retained the loyalty of his subjects. The civil war that broke out is considered the first act of the struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, which later extended southwards to Italy. After Henry's death (October 1139), the war was continued by his son Henry the Lion, supported by the Saxons, and by his brother Welf VI. Conrad, after a long siege, defeated the latter at Weinsberg in December 1140, and in May 1142 a peace agreement was reached in Frankfurt.
In the same year, Conrad entered Bohemia to reinstate his brother-in-law Vladislav II as prince. The attempt to do the same with another brother-in-law, the Polish prince Ladislaus the Exile, failed. Bavaria, Saxony, and the other regions of Germany were in revolt.
In 1146, Conrad heard Bernard of Clairvaux preach the Second Crusade at Speyer, and he agreed to join Louis VII in a great expedition to the Holy Land. At the imperial diet in Frankfurt in March 1147 Conrad and the assembled princes entrusted Bernard of Clairvaux with the recruitment for the Wendish crusade.
Before leaving, he had the nobles elect and crown his son Henry Berengar king. The succession secured in the event of his death, Conrad set out. His army of 20,000 men went overland, via Hungary, causing disruptions in the Byzantine territories through which they passed. They arrived at Constantinople by September 1147, ahead of the French army.
Rather than taking the coastal road around Anatolia through Christian-held territory, by which he sent most of his noncombatants, Conrad took his army across Anatolia. On 25 October 1147, they were defeated by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Dorylaeum. Conrad and most of the knights escaped, but most of the foot soldiers were killed or captured. The remaining 2,000 men of the German army limped on to Nicaea, where many of the survivors deserted and tried to return home. Conrad and his adherents had to be escorted to Lopadium by the French, where they joined the main French army under Louis. Conrad fell seriously ill at Ephesus and was sent to recuperate in Constantinople, where his host the Emperor Manuel I acted as his personal physician. After recovering, Conrad sailed to Acre, and from there reached Jerusalem. He participated in the ill-fated Siege of Damascus and after that failure, grew disaffected with his allies. Another attempt to attack Ascalon failed when Conrad's allies did not appear as promised, and Conrad returned to Germany.
In 1150, Conrad and Henry Berengar defeated Welf VI and his son Welf VII at the Battle of Flochberg. Henry Berengar died later that year and the succession was thrown open. The Welfs and Hohenstaufen made peace in 1152 and the peaceful succession of one of Conrad's family was secured.
Conrad was never crowned emperor and continued to style himself "King of the Romans" until his death. On his deathbed, in the presence of only two witnesses, his nephew Frederick Barbarossa and the Bishop of Bamberg, he allegedly designated Frederick his successor, rather than his own surviving six-year-old son Frederick. Frederick Barbarossa, who had accompanied his uncle on the unfortunate crusade, forcefully pursued his advantage and was duly elected king in Cologne a few weeks later. The young son of the late king was given the Duchy of Swabia.
Conrad left no male heirs by his first wife, Gertrude von Komburg. In 1136, he married Gertrude of Sulzbach, who was a daughter of Berengar II of Sulzbach, and whose sister Bertha was married to Emperor Manuel. Gertrude was the mother of Conrad's children and the link which cemented his alliance with Byzantium. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40440 |
Josip Plemelj
Josip Plemelj (December 11, 1873 – May 22, 1967) was a Slovene mathematician, whose main contributions were to the theory of analytic functions and the application of integral equations to potential theory. He was the first chancellor of the University of Ljubljana.
Plemelj was born in the village of Bled near Bled Castle in Austria-Hungary (now Slovenia); he died in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). His father, Urban, a carpenter and crofter, died when Josip was only a year old. His mother Marija, née , found bringing up the family alone very hard, but she was able to send her son to school in Ljubljana where Plemelj studied from 1886 to 1894. Due to a bench thrown into Tivoli Pond by him or his friends, he could not attend the school after he finished the fourth class and had to pass the final exam privately. After leaving and obtaining the necessary examination results he went to the University of Vienna in 1894 where he had applied to Faculty of Arts to study mathematics, physics and astronomy. His professors in Vienna were von Escherich for mathematical analysis, Gegenbauer and Mertens for arithmetic and algebra, Weiss for astronomy, Stefan's student Boltzmann for physics.
In May 1898, Plemelj presented his doctoral thesis under Escherich's tutelage entitled "Über lineare homogene Differentialgleichungen mit eindeutigen periodischen Koeffizienten" (Linear Homogeneous Differential Equations with Uniform Periodical Coefficients). He continued with his study in Berlin (1899/1900) under the German mathematicians Frobenius and Fuchs and in Göttingen (1900/1901) under Klein and Hilbert.
In April 1902 he became a private senior lecturer at the University of Vienna. In 1906 he was appointed assistant at the Technical University of Vienna. In 1907 he became associate professor and in 1908 full professor of mathematics at the University of Chernivtsi (Ukrainian: Чернівці, Russian: Черновцы), Ukraine. From 1912 to 1913 he was dean of this faculty. In 1917 his political views led him to be forcibly ejected by the government and resettled in Moravia. After the First World War he became a member of the University Commission under the Slovene Provincial Government and helped establish the first Slovene university at Ljubljana, and was elected its first chancellor. In the same year he was appointed professor of mathematics at the Faculty of Arts. After the Second World War he joined the Faculty of Natural Science and Technology (FNT). He retired in 1957 after having lectured in mathematics for 40 years.
Plemelj had shown his great gift for mathematics early in elementary school. He mastered the whole of the high school syllabus by the beginning of the fourth year and began to tutor students for their graduation examinations. At that time he discovered alone series for sin "x" and cos "x". Actually he found a series for cyclometric function arccos "x" and after that he just inverted this series and then guessed a principle for coefficients. Yet he did not have a proof for that.
Plemelj had great joy for a difficult constructional tasks from geometry. From his high school days originates an elementary problem — his later construction of regular sevenfold polygon inscribed in a circle otherwise exactly and not approximately with simple solution as an angle trisection which was yet not known in those days and which necessarily leads to the old Indian or Babylonian approximate construction. He started to occupy himself with mathematics in fourth and fifth class of high school. Beside in mathematics he was interested also in natural science and especially astronomy. He studied celestial mechanics already at high school. He liked observing the stars. His eyesight was so sharp he could see the planet Venus even in the daytime.
Plemelj's main research interests were the theory of linear differential equations, integral equations, potential theory, the theory of analytic functions, and functional analysis. Plemelj encountered integral equations while still a student at Göttingen, when the Swedish professor Erik Holmgren gave a lecture on the work of his fellow countryman Fredholm on linear integral equations of the 1st and 2nd kind. Spurred on by Hilbert, Göttingen mathematicians attacked this new area of research and Plemelj was one of the first to publish original results on the question, applying the theory of integral equations to the study of harmonic functions in potential theory.
His most important work in potential theory is summarised in his 1911 book "Potentialtheoretische Untersuchungen" (Studies in Potential Theory), which received the Jablonowski Society award in Leipzig (1500 marks), and the Richard Lieben award from the University of Vienna (2000 crowns) for the most outstanding work in the field of pure and applied mathematics written by any kind of 'Austrian' mathematician in the previous three years.
His most original contribution is the elementary solution he provided for the Riemann–Hilbert problem "f"+ = "g" "f"− about the existence of a differential equation with given monodromy group. The solution, published in his 1908 article "Riemannian classes of functions with given monodromy group", rests on three formulas that now carry his name, which connect the values taken by a holomorphic function at the boundary of an arc Γ:
These formulas are variously called the Plemelj formulae, the Sokhotsky-Plemelj formulae, or sometimes (mainly in German literature) the Plemelj-Sokhotsky Formulae, after the Russian mathematician Yulian Vasilievich Sokhotski (Юлиан Карл Васильевич Сохоцкий) (1842–1927).
From his methods on solving the Riemann problem had developed the theory of singular integral equations (MSC (2000) 45-Exx) which was entertained above all by the Russian school at the head of Nikoloz Muskhelishvili (Николай Иванович Мусхелишвили) (1891–1976).
Also important are Plemelj's contributions to the theory of analytic functions in solving the problem of uniformization of algebraic functions, contributions on formulation of the theorem of analytic extension of designs and treatises in algebra and in number theory.
In 1912, Plemelj published a very simple proof of the special case of Fermat's last theorem where the exponent, "n", is 5. More difficult proofs of this case were first given by Dirichlet in 1828 and Legendre in 1830.
His arrival in Ljubljana in 1919 was very important for development of mathematics in Slovenia. As a good teacher he had raised several generations of mathematicians and engineers. His most famous student is Ivan Vidav. After the Second World War Slovenska akademija znanosti in umetnosti (Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts) (SAZU) had published his three-year course of lectures for students of mathematics: "Teorija analitičnih funkcij" (The Theory of Analytic Functions),
(SAZU, Ljubljana 1953, pp XVI+516), "Diferencialne in integralske enačbe. Teorija in uporaba" (Differential and Integral Equations. Theory and Application).
Plemelj found a formula for a sum of normal derivatives of one-layered potential in the internal or external region. He was pleased also with algebra and number theory, but he had published only few contributions from these fields – for example a book entitled "Algebra in teorija števil" (Algebra and Number Theory; SAZU, Ljubljana 1962, pp. xiv + 278) which was published abroad as his last work "Problemi v smislu Riemanna in Kleina" (Problems in the Sense of Riemann and Klein; edition and translation by J. R. M. Radok, "Interscience Tract in Pure and Applied Mathematics", No. 16, Interscience Publishers: John Wiley & Sons, New York, London, Sydney 1964, pp VII+175). This work deals with questions which were of his most interests and examinations. His bibliography includes 33 units, from which 30 are scientific treatises and had been published among the others in a magazines such as: "Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik", "Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften"; in Vienna, "Jahresbericht der deutschen Mathematikervereinigung", "Gesellschaft deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte" in Verhandlungen, "Bulletin des Sciences Mathematiques", "Obzornik za matematiko in fiziko" and "Publications mathematiques de l'Universite de Belgrade". When French mathematician Charles Émile Picard denoted Plemelj's works as "deux excellents memoires", Plemelj became known in the mathematical world.
Plemelj was a regular member of the SAZU since its foundation in 1938, corresponding member of the JAZU (Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts) in Zagreb, Croatia since 1923, corresponding member of the SANU (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts) in Belgrade since 1930 (1931). In 1954 he received the highest award for research in Slovenia, the Prešeren award. The same year he was elected for corresponding member of Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich.
In 1963, for his 90th anniversary, University of Ljubljana granted him title of the honorary doctor. Plemelj was first teacher of mathematics at Slovene university and 1949 became first honorary member of ZDMFAJ, (Yugoslav Union of societies of mathematicians, physicists and astronomers). He left his villa in Bled to the DMFA where today is his memorial room.
Plemelj did not do extra preparation for lectures; he didn't have any notes. He used to say that he thought over the lecture subject on the way from his home in Gradišče to the University. Students are said to have got the impression that he was creating teaching material on the spot and that they were witnessing the formation of something new. He was writing formulae on the table beautifully although they were composited from Greek, Latin or Gothic letters. He requested the same from students. They had to write distinctly.
Plemelj is said to have had a very refined ear for languages and created a solid base for the development of Slovene mathematical terminology. He had accustomed students for a clear and logical phraseology. For example, he would become angry if they used the word "rabiti" 'to use' instead of the word "potrebovati" 'to need'. For this reason he said: "The engineer who does not know mathematics never "needs" it. But if he knows it, he "uses" it frequently." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40441 |
Pilgrims (Plymouth Colony)
The Pilgrims were the English settlers who came to North America on the "Mayflower" and established the Plymouth Colony in what is today Plymouth, Massachusetts. Their leadership came from the religious congregations of Brownists, or Separatist Puritans, who had fled religious persecution in England for the tolerance of 17th-century Holland in the Netherlands.
They held Puritan Calvinist religious beliefs but, unlike most other Puritans, they maintained that their congregations should separate from the English state church. They eventually determined to establish a new settlement in the New World and arranged with investors to fund them. They established Plymouth Colony in 1620, which became the second successful English settlement in America, following the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. The Pilgrims' story became a central theme in the history and culture of the United States.
The core of the group called "the Pilgrims" were brought together around 1605 when they quit the church of England to form Separatist congregations in the north of England, led by John Robinson, Richard Clyfton, and John Smyth. Their congregations held Brownist beliefs—that true churches were voluntary, democratic communities, not whole Christian nations—as taught by Robert Browne, John Greenwood, and Henry Barrow. As separatists, they held that their differences with the Church of England were irreconcilable and that their worship should be independent of the trappings, traditions, and organization of a central church.
The Separatist movement was controversial. Under the Act of Uniformity 1559, it was illegal not to attend official Church of England services, with a fine of one shilling (£0.05; about £ today) for each missed Sunday and holy day. The penalties included imprisonment and larger fines for conducting unofficial services. The Seditious Sectaries Act of 1593 was specifically aimed at outlawing the Brownists. Under this policy, the London Underground Church from 1566, and then Robert Browne and his followers in Norfolk during the 1580s, were repeatedly imprisoned. Henry Barrow, John Greenwood, and John Penry were executed for sedition in 1593. Browne had taken his followers into exile in Middelburg, and Penry urged the London Separatists to emigrate in order to escape persecution, so after his death they went to Amsterdam.
During much of Brewster's tenure (1595–1606), the Archbishop was Matthew Hutton. He displayed some sympathy to the Puritan cause, writing to Robert Cecil, Secretary of State to James I in 1604:
The Puritans though they differ in Ceremonies and accidentes, yet they agree with us in substance of religion, and I thinke all or the moste parte of them love his Majestie, and the presente state, and I hope will yield to conformitie. But the Papistes are opposite and contrarie in very many substantiall pointes of religion, and cannot but wishe the Popes authoritie and popish religion to be established.
Many Puritans had hoped that a reconciliation would be possible when James came to power which would allow them independence, but the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 denied nearly all of the concessions which they had requested—except for an updated English translation of the Bible. The same year, Richard Bancroft became Archbishop of Canterbury and launched a campaign against Puritanism. He suspended 300 ministers and fired 80, which led some of them to found Separatist churches. Robinson, Clifton, and their followers founded a Brownist church, making a covenant with God "to walk in all his ways made known, or to be made known, unto them, according to their best endeavours, whatsoever it should cost them, the Lord assisting them".
Archbishop Hutton died in 1606 and Tobias Matthew was appointed as his replacement. He was one of James's chief supporters at the 1604 conference, and he promptly began a campaign to purge the archdiocese of non-conforming influences, both Puritans and those wishing to return to the Catholic faith. Disobedient clergy were replaced, and prominent Separatists were confronted, fined, and imprisoned. He is credited with driving people out of the country who refused to attend Anglican services.
William Brewster was a former diplomatic assistant to the Netherlands. He was living in the Scrooby manor house while serving as postmaster for the village and bailiff to the Archbishop of York. He had been impressed by Clyfton's services and had begun participating in services led by John Smyth in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. After a time, he arranged for a congregation to meet privately at the Scrooby manor house. Services were held beginning in 1606 with Clyfton as pastor, John Robinson as teacher, and Brewster as the presiding elder. Shortly after, Smyth and members of the Gainsborough group moved on to Amsterdam. Brewster was fined £20 (about £ today) "in absentia" for his non-compliance with the church. This followed his September 1607 resignation from the postmaster position, about the time that the congregation had decided to follow the Smyth party to Amsterdam.
Scrooby member William Bradford of Austerfield kept a journal of the congregation's events which was eventually published as "Of Plymouth Plantation". He wrote concerning this time period:
But after these things they could not long continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted & persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these which now came upon them. For some were taken & clapt up in prison, others had their houses besett & watcht night and day, & hardly escaped their hands; and the most were faine to flie & leave their howses & habitations, and the means of their livelehood.
The Pilgrims moved to the Netherlands around 1607/08. They lived in Leiden, Holland, a city of 30,000 inhabitants, residing in small houses behind the "Kloksteeg" opposite the Pieterskerk.
The success of the congregation in Leiden was mixed. Leiden was a thriving industrial center,
and many members were able to support themselves working at Leiden University or in the textile, printing, and brewing trades. Others were less able to bring in sufficient income, hampered by their rural backgrounds and the language barrier; for those, accommodations were made on an estate bought by Robinson and three partners. Bradford wrote of their years in Leiden:
For these & other reasons they removed to Leyden, a fair & bewtifull citie, and of a sweete situation, but made more famous by ye universitie wherwith it is adorned, in which of late had been so many learned man. But wanting that traffike by sea which Amerstdam injoyes, it was not so beneficiall for their outward means of living & estats. But being now hear pitchet they fell to such trads & imployments as they best could; valewing peace & their spirituall comforte above any other riches whatsoever. And at length they came to raise a competente & comforteable living, but with hard and continuall labor.
William Brewster had been teaching English at the university, and Robinson enrolled in 1615 to pursue his doctorate. There he participated in a series of debates, particularly regarding the contentious issue of Calvinism versus Arminianism (siding with the Calvinists against the Remonstrants).
Brewster acquired typesetting equipment about 1616 in a venture financed by Thomas Brewer, and began publishing the debates through a local press.
The Netherlands, however, was a land whose culture and language were strange and difficult for the English congregation to understand or learn. They found the Dutch morals much too libertine, and their children were becoming more and more Dutch as the years passed. The congregation came to believe that they faced eventual extinction if they remained there.
By 1617, the congregation was stable and relatively secure, but there were ongoing issues which needed to be resolved. Bradford noted that many members of the congregation were showing signs of early aging, compounding the difficulties which some had in supporting themselves. A few had spent their savings and so gave up and returned to England, and the leaders feared that more would follow and that the congregation would become unsustainable. The employment issues made it unattractive for others to come to Leiden, and younger members had begun leaving to find employment and adventure elsewhere. Also compelling was the possibility of missionary work in some distant land, an opportunity that rarely arose in a Protestant stronghold.
Bradford lists some of the reasons which the Puritans had to leave, including the discouragements that they faced in the Netherlands and the hope of attracting others by finding "a better, and easier place of living", the children of the group being "drawn away by evil examples into extravagance and dangerous courses", and the "great hope, for the propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world." Edward Winslow's list was similar. In addition to the economic worries and missionary possibilities, he stressed that it was important for the people to retain their English identity, culture, and language. They also believed that the English Church in Leiden could do little to benefit the larger community there.
At the same time, there were many uncertainties about moving to such a place as America, as stories had come back about failed colonies. There were fears that the native people would be violent, that there would be no source of food or water, that they might be exposed to unknown diseases, and that travel by sea was always hazardous. Balancing all this was a local political situation which was in danger of becoming unstable. The truce was faltering in the Eighty Years' War, and there was fear over what the attitudes of Spain might be toward them.
Possible destinations included Guiana on the northeast coast of South America where the Dutch had established Essequibo colony, or another site near the Virginia settlements. Virginia was an attractive destination because the presence of the older colony might offer better security and trade opportunities; however, they also felt that they should not settle too near, since that might inadvertently duplicate the political environment back in England. The London Company administered a territory of considerable size in the region, and the intended settlement location was at the mouth of the Hudson River (which instead became the Dutch colony of New Netherland). This plan allayed their concerns of social, political, and religious conflicts, but still promised the military and economic benefits of being close to an established colony.
Robert Cushman and John Carver were sent to England to solicit a land patent. Their negotiations were delayed because of conflicts internal to the London Company, but ultimately a patent was secured in the name of John Wincob on June 9 (Old Style)/June 19 (New Style), 1619.
The charter was granted with the king's condition that the Leiden group's religion would not receive official recognition.
Preparations then stalled because of the continued problems within the London Company, and competing Dutch companies approached the congregation with the possibility of settling in the Hudson River area. David Baeckelandt suggests that the Leiden group was approached by Englishman Matthew Slade, son-in-law of Petrus Placius, a cartographer for the Dutch East India Company. Slade was also a spy for the English Ambassador, and the Puritans' plans were therefore known both at court and among influential investors in the Virginia Company's colony at Jamestown. Negotiations were broken off with the Dutch, however, at the encouragement of English merchant Thomas Weston, who assured them that he could resolve the London Company delays. The London Company intended to claim the area explored by Hudson before the Dutch could become fully established, and the first Dutch settlers did not arrive in the area until 1624.
Weston did come with a substantial change, telling the Leiden group that parties in England had obtained a land grant north of the existing Virginia territory to be called New England. This was only partially true; the new grant did come to pass, but not until late in 1620 when the Plymouth Council for New England received its charter. It was expected that this area could be fished profitably, and it was not under the control of the existing Virginia government.
A second change was known only to parties in England who did not inform the larger group. New investors had been brought into the venture who wanted the terms altered so that, at the end of the seven-year contract, half of the settled land and property would revert to the investors. Also, there had been a provision which allowed each settler to have two days per week to work on personal business, but this provision had been dropped from the agreement without the knowledge of the Puritans.
Amid these negotiations, William Brewster found himself involved with religious unrest emerging in Scotland. In 1618, King James had promulgated the Five Articles of Perth which were seen in Scotland as an attempt to encroach on their Presbyterian tradition. Brewster published several pamphlets that were critical of this law, and they were smuggled into Scotland by April 1619. These pamphlets were traced back to Leiden, and the English authorities unsuccessfully attempted to arrest Brewster. English ambassador Dudley Carleton became aware of the situation and began pressuring the Dutch government to extradite Brewster, and the Dutch responded by arresting Thomas Brewer the financier in September. Brewster's whereabouts remain unknown between then and the colonists' departure, but the Dutch authorities did seize the typesetting materials which he had used to print his pamphlets. Meanwhile, Brewer was sent to England for questioning, where he stonewalled government officials until well into 1620. He was ultimately convicted in England for his continued religious publication activities and sentenced in 1626 to a 14-year prison term.
Not all of the congregation were able to depart on the first trip. Many members were not able to settle their affairs within the time constraints, and the budget was limited for travel and supplies, and the group decided that the initial settlement should be undertaken primarily by younger and stronger members. The remainder agreed to follow if and when they could. Robinson would remain in Leiden with the larger portion of the congregation, and Brewster was to lead the American congregation. The church in America would be run independently, but it was agreed that membership would automatically be granted in either congregation to members who moved between the continents.
With personal and business matters agreed upon, the Puritans procured supplies and a small ship. "Speedwell" was to bring some passengers from the Netherlands to England, then on to America where it would be kept for the fishing business, with a crew hired for support services during the first year. The larger ship "Mayflower" was leased for transport and exploration services.
The "Speedwell" was originally named "Swiftsure". It was built in 1577 at 60 tons and was part of the English fleet that defeated the Spanish Armada. It departed Delfshaven in July 1620 with the Leiden colonists, after a canal ride from Leyden of about seven hours. It reached Southampton, Hampshire, and met with the "Mayflower" and the additional colonists hired by the investors. With final arrangements made, the two vessels set out on August 5 (Old Style)/August 15 (New Style).
Soon after, the "Speedwell" crew reported that their ship was taking on water, so both were diverted to Dartmouth, Devon. The crew inspected "Speedwell" for leaks and sealed them, but their second attempt to depart got them only as far as Plymouth, Devon. The crew decided that "Speedwell" was untrustworthy, and her owners sold her; the ship's master and some of the crew transferred to the "Mayflower" for the trip. William Bradford observed that the "Speedwell" seemed "overmasted", thus putting a strain on the hull; and he attributed her leaking to crew members who had deliberately caused it, allowing them to abandon their year-long commitments. Passenger Robert Cushman wrote that the leaking was caused by a loose board.
Of the 120 combined passengers, 102 were chosen to travel on the "Mayflower" with the supplies consolidated. Of these, about half had come by way of Leiden, and about 28 of the adults were members of the congregation.
The reduced party finally sailed successfully on September 6 (Old Style)/September 16 (New Style), 1620.
Initially the trip went smoothly, but under way they were met with strong winds and storms. One of these caused a main beam to crack, and the possibility was considered of turning back, even though they were more than halfway to their destination. However, they repaired the ship sufficiently to continue using a "great iron screw" brought along by the colonists (probably a jack to be used for either house construction or a cider press). Passenger John Howland was washed overboard in the storm but caught a top-sail halyard trailing in the water and was pulled back on board.
One crew member and one passenger died before they reached land. A child was born at sea and named Oceanus.
The "Mayflower" passengers sighted land on November 9, 1620 after enduring miserable conditions for about 65 days, and William Brewster led them in reading Psalm 100 as a prayer of thanksgiving. They confirmed that the area was Cape Cod within the New England territory recommended by Weston. They attempted to sail the ship around the cape towards the Hudson River, also within the New England grant area, but they encountered shoals and difficult currents around Cape Malabar (the old French name for Monomoy Island). They decided to turn around, and the ship was anchored in Provincetown Harbor by November 11/12.
The charter was incomplete for the Plymouth Council for New England when the colonists departed England (it was granted while they were in transit on November 3/13). They arrived without a patent; the older Wincob patent was from their abandoned dealings with the London Company. Some of the passengers, aware of the situation, suggested that they were free to do as they chose upon landing, without a patent in place, and to ignore the contract with the investors.
A brief contract was drafted to address this issue, later known as the Mayflower Compact, promising cooperation among the settlers "for the general good of the Colony unto which we promise all due submission and obedience." It organized them into what was called a "civill body politick," in which issues would be decided by voting, the key ingredient of democracy. It was ratified by majority rule, with 41 adult male Pilgrims signing for the 102 passengers (73 males and 29 females). Included in the company were 19 male servants and three female servants, along with some sailors and craftsmen hired for short-term service to the colony. At this time, John Carver was chosen as the colony's first governor. It was Carver who had chartered the "Mayflower" and his is the first signature on the Mayflower Compact, being the most respected and affluent member of the group. The Mayflower Compact is considered to be one of the seeds of American democracy and one source has called it the world's first written constitution.
Thorough exploration of the area was delayed for more than two weeks because the shallop or pinnace (a smaller sailing vessel) which they brought had been partially dismantled to fit aboard the "Mayflower" and was further damaged in transit. Small parties, however, waded to the beach to fetch firewood and attend to long-deferred personal hygiene.
Exploratory parties were undertaken while awaiting the shallop, led by Myles Standish (an English soldier whom the colonists had met while in Leiden) and Christopher Jones. They encountered an old European-built house and iron kettle, left behind by some ship's crew, and a few recently cultivated fields, showing corn stubble.
They came upon an artificial mound near the dunes which they partially uncovered and found to be an Indian grave. Farther along, a similar mound was found, more recently made, and they discovered that some of the burial mounds also contained corn. The colonists took some of the corn, intending to use it as seed for planting, while they reburied the rest. William Bradford later recorded in his book "Of Plymouth Plantation" that, after the shallop had been repaired,
They also found two of the Indian's houses covered with mats, and some of their implements in them; but the people had run away and could not be seen. Without permission they took more corn, and beans of various colours. These they brought away, intending to give them full satisfaction (payment) when they should meet with any of them, – as about six months afterwards they did.
And it is to be noted as a special providence of God, and a great mercy to this poor people, that they thus got seed to plant corn the next year, or they might have starved; for they had none, nor any likelihood of getting any, till too late for the planting season.
By December, most of the passengers and crew had become ill, coughing violently. Many were also suffering from the effects of scurvy. There had already been ice and snowfall, hampering exploration efforts; half of them died during the first winter.
Explorations resumed on December 6/16. The shallop party headed south along the cape, consisting of seven colonists from Leiden, three from London, and seven crew; they chose to land at the area inhabited by the Nauset people (the area around Brewster, Chatham, Eastham, Harwich, and Orleans) where they saw some people on the shore who fled when they approached. Inland they found more mounds, one containing acorns which they exhumed, and more graves, which they decided not to dig. They remained ashore overnight and heard cries near the encampment. The following morning, they were attacked by Indians who shot at them with arrows. The colonists retrieved their firearms and shot back, then chased them into the woods but did not find them. There was no more contact with Indians for several months.
The local Indians were already familiar with the English, who had intermittently visited the area for fishing and trade before "Mayflower" arrived. In the Cape Cod area, relations were poor following a visit several years earlier by Thomas Hunt. Hunt kidnapped 20 people from Patuxet (the site of Plymouth Colony) and another seven from Nausett, and he attempted to sell them as slaves in Europe. One of the Patuxet abductees was Squanto, who became an ally of the Plymouth Colony.
The Pokanokets also lived nearby and had developed a particular dislike for the English after one group came in, captured numerous people, and shot them aboard their ship. By this time, there had already been reciprocal killings at Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod. But during one of the captures by the English, Squanto escaped to England and there became a Christian. When he came back, he found that most of his tribe had died from plague.
Continuing westward, the shallop's mast and rudder were broken by storms and the sail was lost. They rowed for safety, encountering the harbor formed by Duxbury and Plymouth barrier beaches and stumbling on land in the darkness. They remained at this spot for two days to recuperate and repair equipment. They named it Clark's Island for a "Mayflower" mate who first set foot on it.
They resumed exploration on Monday, December 11/21 when the party crossed over to the mainland and surveyed the area that ultimately became the settlement. The anniversary of this survey is observed in Massachusetts as Forefathers' Day and is traditionally associated with the Plymouth Rock landing tradition. This land was especially suited to winter building because it had already been cleared, and the tall hills provided a good defensive position.
The cleared village was known as Patuxet to the Wampanoag people and was abandoned about three years earlier following a plague that killed all of its residents. The "Indian fever" involved hemorrhaging and is assumed to have been fulminating smallpox. The outbreak had been severe enough that the colonists discovered unburied skeletons in the dwellings.
The exploratory party returned to the "Mayflower", anchored away, having been brought to the harbor on December 16/26. Only nearby sites were evaluated, with a hill in Plymouth (so named on earlier charts)
chosen on December 19/29.
Construction commenced immediately, with the first common house nearly completed by January 9/19, 20 feet square and built for general use. At this point, each single man was ordered to join himself to one of the 19 families in order to eliminate the need to build any more houses than absolutely necessary. Each extended family was assigned a plot one-half rod wide and three rods long for each household member, then each family built its own dwelling. Supplies were brought ashore, and the settlement was mostly complete by early February.
When the first house was finished, it immediately became a hospital for the ill Pilgrims. Thirty-one of the company were dead by the end of February, with deaths still rising. Coles Hill became the first cemetery, on a prominence above the beach, and the graves were allowed to overgrow with grass for fear that the Indians would discover how weakened the settlement had actually become.
Between the landing and March, only 47 colonists had survived the diseases that they contracted on the ship. During the worst of the sickness, only six or seven of the group were able to feed and care for the rest. In this time, half the "Mayflower" crew also died.
William Bradford became governor in 1621 upon the death of John Carver. On March 22, 1621, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony signed a peace treaty with Massasoit of the Wampanoags. The patent of Plymouth Colony was surrendered by Bradford to the freemen in 1640, minus a small reserve of three tracts of land. Bradford served for 11 consecutive years, and was elected to various other terms until his death in 1657.
The colony contained Bristol County, Plymouth County, and Barnstable County, Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was reorganized and issued a new charter as the Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1691, and Plymouth ended its history as a separate colony.
The first use of the word "pilgrims" for the "Mayflower" passengers appeared in William Bradford's "Of Plymouth Plantation". As he finished recounting his group's July 1620 departure from Leiden, he used the imagery of Hebrews 11:13–16 about Old Testament "strangers and pilgrims" who had the opportunity to return to their old country but instead longed for a better, heavenly country.
So they lefte [that] goodly & pleasante citie, which had been ther resting place, nere 12 years; but they knew they were pilgrimes, & looked not much on these things; but lift up their eyes to ye heavens, their dearest cuntrie, and quieted their spirits.
There is no record of the term "Pilgrims" being used to describe Plymouth's founders for 150 years after Bradford wrote this passage, except when quoting him. The "Mayflower's" story was retold by historians Nathaniel Morton (in 1669) and Cotton Mather (in 1702), and both paraphrased Bradford's passage and used his word "pilgrims". At Plymouth's Forefathers' Day observance in 1793, Rev. Chandler Robbins recited this passage.
The name "Pilgrims" was probably not in popular use before about 1798, even though Plymouth celebrated Forefathers' Day several times between 1769 and 1798 and used a variety of terms to honor Plymouth's founders. The term "Pilgrims" was not mentioned, other than in Robbins' 1793 recitation.
The first documented use of the term that was not simply quoting Bradford was at a December 22, 1798 celebration of Forefathers' Day in Boston. A song composed for the occasion used the word "Pilgrims", and the participants drank a toast to "The Pilgrims of Leyden".
The term was used prominently during Plymouth's next Forefather's Day celebration in 1800, and was used in Forefathers' Day observances thereafter.
By the 1820s, the term "Pilgrims" was becoming more common. Daniel Webster repeatedly referred to "the Pilgrims" in his December 22, 1820 address for Plymouth's bicentennial which was widely read. Harriet Vaughan Cheney used it in her 1824 novel "A Peep at the Pilgrims in Sixteen Thirty-Six", and the term also gained popularity with the 1825 publication of Felicia Hemans's classic poem "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40442 |
Ivan Vidav
Ivan Vidav (January 17, 1918 – October 6, 2015) was a Slovenian mathematician.
Ivan Vidav was born in Opčine near Trieste (Slovenian "Trst"), Italy. He was Josip Plemelj's student. Vidav got his Ph.D. under Plemelj's advisory in 1941 at the University of Ljubljana with a dissertation "Kleinovi teoremi v teoriji linearnih diferencialnih enačb" ("Klein's theorems in the theory of linear differential equations").
Vidav's main research interest were differential equations, functional analysis and algebra. He was a regular member of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was awarded the Prešeren Award.
From 1988 he was an honourable member of the Society of Mathematicians, Physicists and Astronomers of Slovenia (DMFA). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40443 |
Monterey, California
Monterey (; Ohlone: "") is a city located in Monterey County on the southern edge of Monterey Bay on California's Central Coast. Founded on June 3, 1770, it was the capital of Alta California under both Spain and Mexico. During this period, Monterey hosted California's first theater, public building, public library, publicly funded school, printing press, and newspaper. It was originally the only port of entry for all taxable goods in California. In 1846 during the Mexican–American War, the United States flag was raised over the Customs House. After California was ceded to the U.S. after the war, Monterey hosted California's first constitutional convention in 1849.
The city occupies a land area of and the city hall is at above sea level. The 2010 census recorded a population of 27,810.
Monterey and surrounding area have attracted artists since the late 19th century and many celebrated painters and writers have lived there. Until the 1950s, there was an abundant fishery. Among Monterey's present-day attractions are the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Cannery Row, Fisherman's Wharf, California Roots Music and Arts Festival, and the annual Monterey Jazz Festival.
Long before the arrival of Spanish explorers, the Rumsen Ohlone tribe, one of seven linguistically distinct Ohlone groups in California, inhabited the area now known as Monterey. They subsisted by hunting, fishing and gathering food on and around the biologically rich Monterey Peninsula. Researchers have found a number of shell middens in the area and, based on the archaeological evidence, concluded the Ohlone's primary marine food consisted at various times of mussels and abalone. A number of midden sites have been located along about of rocky coast on the Monterey Peninsula from the current site of Fishermans' Wharf in Monterey to Carmel.
The city is named after Monterey Bay. The current bay's name was first documented by Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1602. He anchored in what is now the Monterey harbor on December 16, and named it "Puerto de Monterrey", in honor of the Conde de Monterrey, who was then the viceroy of New Spain. Monterrey is an alternate spelling of Monterrei, a municipality in the Galicia region of Spain from which the viceroy and his father (the Fourth Count of Monterrei) originated. Some variants of the city's name are recorded as Monte Rey and Monterey.
In 1769, the first European land exploration of Alta California, the Spanish Portolá expedition, traveled north from San Diego, seeking Vizcaíno's "Port of Monterey" from 167 years earlier. For some reason, the explorers failed to recognize the place when they came to it on October 1, 1769. The party continued north as far as San Francisco Bay before turning back. On the return journey, they camped near one of Monterey's lagoons on November 27, still not convinced they had found the place Vizcaíno had described. Franciscan missionary Juan Crespí noted in his diary, "We halted in sight of the Point of Pines (recognized, as was said, in the beginning of October) and camped near a small lagoon which has rather muddy water, but abounds in pasture and firewood."
Portolá returned by land to Monterey the next year, having concluded that he must have been at Vizcaíno's Port of Monterey after all. The land party was met at Monterey by Junípero Serra who traveled by sea. Portolá erected the Presidio of Monterey to defend the port and, on June 3, 1770, Serra founded the Cathedral of San Carlos Borromeo inside the presidio enclosure. Portolá returned to Mexico, replaced in Monterey by Captain Pedro Fages, who had been third in command on the exploratory expeditions. Fages became the second governor of Alta California, serving from 1770 to 1774. San Diego is the only city in California older than Monterey.
Serra's missionary aims soon came into conflict with Fages and the soldiers, and he moved the mission to Carmel the following year to gain greater independence from Fages. The existing wood and adobe building became the chapel for the Presidio.
Monterey became the capital of the "Province of Both Californias" in 1777, and the chapel was renamed the Royal Presidio Chapel. The original church was destroyed by fire in 1789 and replaced by the present sandstone structure. It was completed in 1794 by Indian labor. In 1840, the chapel was rededicated to the patronage of Saint Charles Borromeo. The cathedral is the oldest continuously operating parish and the oldest stone building in California. It is also the oldest (and smallest) serving cathedral along with St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, Louisiana. It is the only existing presidio chapel in California and the only surviving building from the original Monterey Presidio.
The city was originally the only port of entry for all taxable goods in California. All shipments into California by sea were required to go through the Custom House, the oldest governmental building in the state and California's Historic Landmark Number One. Built in three phases, the Spanish began construction of the Custom House in 1814, the Mexican government completed the center section in 1827, and the United States government finished the lower end in 1846.
On November 24, 1818, Argentine corsair Hippolyte Bouchard landed away from the Presidio of Monterey in a hidden creek. The fort's resistance proved ineffective, and after an hour of combat the Argentine flag flew over it. The Argentines took the city for six days, during which time they stole the cattle and burned the fort, the artillery headquarters, the governor's residence and the Spanish houses. The town's residents were unharmed.
Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, but the civil and religious institutions of Alta California remained much the same until the 1830s, when the secularization of the missions converted most of the mission pasture lands into private land grant ranchos.
Monterey was the site of the Battle of Monterey on July 7, 1846, during the Mexican–American War. It was on this date that John D. Sloat, Commodore in the United States Navy, raised the U.S. flag over the Monterey Custom House and claimed California for the United States.
In addition, many historic "firsts" occurred in Monterey. These include California's first theater, brick house, publicly funded school, public building, public library, and printing press, which printed "The Californian", California's first newspaper. Larkin House, one of Monterey State Historic Park's National Historic Landmarks, built in the Mexican period by Thomas Oliver Larkin, is an early example of Monterey Colonial architecture. The old Custom House, the historic district and the Royal Presidio Chapel are also National Historic Landmarks. The Cooper-Molera Adobe is a National Trust Historic Site.
Colton Hall, built in 1849 by Walter Colton, originally served as both a public school and a government meeting place.
Monterey hosted California's first constitutional convention in 1849, which composed the documents necessary to apply to the United States for statehood. Today it houses a small museum, while adjacent buildings serve as the seat of local government, and the Monterey post office (opened in 1849). Monterey was incorporated in 1890.
Monterey had long been famous for the abundant fishery in Monterey Bay. That changed in the 1950s when the local fishery business collapsed due to overfishing. A few of the old fishermen's cabins from the early 20th century have been preserved as they originally stood along Cannery Row.
The city has a noteworthy history as a center for California painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such painters as Arthur Frank Mathews, Armin Hansen, Xavier Martinez, Rowena Meeks Abdy and Percy Gray lived or visited to pursue painting in the style of either En plein air or Tonalism.
In addition to painters, many noted authors have also lived in and around the Monterey area, including Robert Louis Stevenson, John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, Robinson Jeffers, Robert A. Heinlein, and Henry Miller.
More recently, Monterey has been recognized for its significant involvement in post-secondary learning of languages other than English and its major role in delivering translation and interpretation services around the world.
In November 1995, California Governor Pete Wilson proclaimed Monterey as "the Language Capital of the World".
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and (28.05%) is water. Sand deposits in the northern coastal area comprise the sole known mineral resources.
Local soil is Quaternary Alluvium. Common soil series include the Baywood fine sand on the east side, Narlon loamy sand on the west side, Sheridan coarse sandy loam on hilly terrain, and the pale Tangair sand on hills supporting closed-cone pine habitat. The city is in a moderate to high seismic risk zone, the principal threat being the active San Andreas Fault approximately 26 miles (42 km) to the east. The Monterey Bay fault, which tracks three miles (4.8 km) to the north, is also active, as is the Palo Colorado fault seven miles (11.3 km) to the south. Also nearby, minor but potentially active, are the Berwick Canyon, Seaside, Tularcitos and Chupines faults.
Monterey Bay's maximum credible tsunami for a 100-year interval has been calculated as a wave nine feet (2.7 m) high. The considerable undeveloped area in the northwest part of the city has a high potential for landslides and erosion.
The city is adjacent to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a federally protected ocean area extending along the coast. Sometimes this sanctuary is confused with the local bay which is also termed Monterey Bay.
Soquel Canyon State Marine Conservation Area, Portuguese Ledge State Marine Conservation Area, Pacific Grove Marine Gardens State Marine Conservation Area, Lovers Point State Marine Reserve, Edward F. Ricketts State Marine Conservation Area and Asilomar State Marine Reserve are marine protected areas established by the state of California in Monterey Bay. Like underwater parks, these marine protected areas help conserve ocean wildlife and marine ecosystems.
The California sea otter, a threatened subspecies, inhabits the local Monterey Bay marine environment, and a field station of The Marine Mammal Center is located in Monterey to support sea rescue operations in this section of the California coast. The rare San Joaquin kit fox is found in Monterey's oak-forest and chaparral habitats. The chaparral, found mainly on the city's drier eastern slopes, hosts such plants as manzanita, chamise and ceanothus. Additional species of interest (that is, potential candidates for endangered species status) are the Salinas kangaroo rat and the silver-sided legless lizard.
There is a variety of natural habitat in Monterey: littoral zone and sand dunes; closed-cone pine forest; and Monterey Cypress. There are no dairy farms in the city of Monterey; the semi-hard cheese known as Monterey Jack originated in nearby Carmel Valley, California, and is named after businessman and land speculator David Jack.
The closed-cone pine habitat is dominated by Monterey pine, Knobcone pine and Bishop pine, and contains the rare Monterey manzanita. In the early 20th century the botanist Willis Linn Jepson characterized Monterey Peninsula's forests as the "most important silva ever", and encouraged Samuel F.B. Morse (a century younger than the inventor Samuel F. B. Morse) of the Del Monte Properties Company to explore the possibilities of preserving the unique forest communities. The dune area is no less important, as it hosts endangered species such as the vascular plants Seaside birds beak, Hickman's potentilla and Eastwood's Ericameria. Rare plants also inhabit the chaparral: Hickman's onion, Yadon's piperia ("Piperia yadonii") and Sandmat manzanita. Other rare plants in Monterey include Hutchinson's delphinium, Tidestrom lupine, Gardner's yampah and Knotweed, the latter perhaps already extinct.
Monterey's noise pollution has been mapped to define the principal sources of noise and to ascertain the areas of the population exposed to significant levels. Principal sources are the Monterey Regional Airport, State Route 1 and major arterial streets such as Munras Avenue, Fremont Street, Del Monte Boulevard, and Camino Aguajito. While most of Monterey is a quiet residential city, a moderate number of people in the northern part of the city are exposed to aircraft noise at levels in excess of 60 dB on the Community Noise Equivalent Level (CNEL) scale. The most intense source is State Route 1: all residents exposed to levels greater than 65 CNEL—about 1600 people—live near State Route 1 or one of the principal arterial streets.
The climate of Monterey is regulated by its proximity to the Pacific Ocean resulting in a cool-summer Mediterranean climate (Köppen climate classification: Csb). Monterey's average high temperatures range from around in winter to during the summer months. Average annual precipitation is around , with most rainfall occurring between October and April, with little to no precipitation falling during the summer months. There is an average of 70 days with measurable precipitation annually. Summers in Monterey are often cool and foggy. The cold surface waters cause even summer nights to be unusually cool for the latitude, opposite to on the U.S. east coast where coastal summer days and nights are much warmer. The extreme moderation is further underlined by the fact that Monterey is on a similar latitude in California as Death Valley – one of the hottest areas in the world.
During winter, snow occasionally falls in the higher elevations of the Santa Lucia Mountains and Gabilan Mountains that overlook Monterey, but snow in Monterey itself is extremely rare. A few unusual events in January 1962, February 1976, and December 1997 brought a light coating of snow to Monterey. In March 2006, a total of fell in Monterey, including on March 10, 2006. The snowfall on January 21, 1962, of , is remembered for delaying the Bing Crosby golf tournament in nearby Pebble Beach.
The record lowest temperature was on December 22, 1990. Annually, there are an average of 2.9 days with + highs, and an average of 2 days with lows reaching the freezing mark or lower.
The wettest year on record was 1998 with of precipitation. The driest year was 1953 with . The most precipitation in one month was in February 1998. The record maximum 24-hour precipitation was on December 23, 1995.
Monterey is well known for the abundance and diversity of its marine life, which includes sea lions, sea otters, harbor seals, bat rays, kelp forests, pelicans and dolphins and several species of whales. Only a few miles offshore is the Monterey Canyon, the largest and deepest (3.2 km) underwater canyon off the Pacific coast of North America, which grants scientists access to the deep sea within hours. The cornucopia of marine life makes Monterey a popular destination for scuba divers of all abilities ranging from novice to expert. Scuba classes are held at San Carlos State Beach, which has been a favorite with divers since the 1960s. The Monterey Bay Aquarium on Cannery Row is one of the largest aquariums in North America, and several marine science laboratories, including Hopkins Marine Station are located in the area.
Monterey's historic Fisherman's Wharf was constructed in 1845, reconstructed in 1870 and is now a commercial shopping and restaurant district with several whale watching entities operating at the end of its pier.
Monterey is home to several museums and more than thirty carefully preserved historic buildings. Most of these buildings are adobes built in the mid-1800s. Some are museums and open to the public, including the Cooper Molera Adobe, Robert Louis Stevenson House, Casa Serrano, The Perry House, The Customs House, Colton Hall, Mayo Hayes O'Donnell Library and The First Brick House. Many others are only open during Monterey's annual adobe tour. The Monterey Museum of Art specializes in Early California Impressionist painting, photography, and contemporary art. Other youth-oriented art attractions include MY Museum, a children's museum, and YAC, an arts organization for teens.
What may be the only whalebone sidewalk still in existence in the United States lies in front of the Old Whaling Station.
Cannery Row is an historic industrial district west of downtown Monterey. Several companies operated large sardine canneries and packing houses from the 1920s until the 1950s when the sardines were overfished and the industry collapsed. The neighborhood was largely empty from the 1950s until the late 1980s when the Monterey Bay Aquarium bought the former Hovden Cannery and built their cannery around it. The Aquarium revitalized the neighborhood and it is now the number one tourist destination on the Monterey Peninsula. Several of the canneries burnt down in the 1970s and some of their empty foundations are still visible along the oceanfront. A free shuttle transports visitors between downtown Monterey and the Aquarium.
Once called Ocean View Boulevard, Cannery Row street was renamed in 1953 in honor of writer John Steinbeck, who had written a well-known novel of the same name. It has now become a tourist attraction with numerous establishments located in former cannery buildings, including Cannery Row Antique Mall which is located in the most historically intact cannery building open to the public. Other historical buildings in this district include Wing Chong Market, The American Tin Cannery which is a shopping mall, Doc Rickett's lab, next door to the aquarium and only open to the public a few times a year, and some of the water tanks written about by Steinbeck. A few privately owned and operated fishing companies still exist on Cannery Row, housed on piers located a short distance from the historic district frequented by tourists. Cannery Row is now considered the historic cannery district from Foam St. to the ocean.
Lake El Estero is a popular Monterey park. Recreation opportunities include paddle boats, the Dennis the Menace Park (named after the comics character Dennis the Menace), and a skate park designed by local skaters. Birders are especially fond of this park due to its easy accessibility and the diversity of bird life it attracts.
Other attractions within easy reach of Monterey include:
Monterey is the home of the Monterey Museum of Art, its annex museum La Mirada and the Salvador Dali Museum. There are several commercial galleries located in the historic district of Cannery Row, New Monterey and Customs House Plaza.
Monterey is also the site of numerous waterfront arts and crafts festivals held in the Custom House Plaza at the top of Fisherman's Wharf.
Artists who have made the area their home have included John Steinbeck, who grew up in Salinas and lived many years in nearby Pacific Grove, as well as very briefly in the city of Monterey. Steinbeck immortalized Monterey in his novels "Cannery Row", "Tortilla Flat", "Sweet Thursday", and "East of Eden".
Steinbeck's friends included some of the city's more colorful characters, including Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist, and Bruce Ariss, artist and theater enthusiast who designed and built the Wharf Theater.
After Ricketts' death, the new owner of his lab and a group of friends assembled each Wednesday at the lab for drinks and jazz music. While visiting with the group, San Francisco disc jockey Jimmy Lyons suggested holding a jazz celebration in Monterey, which eventually became the Monterey Jazz Festival.
In 1879 Robert Louis Stevenson spent a short time in Monterey at the French Hotel while writing "The Amateur Emigrant", "The Old Pacific Capital," and "Vendetta of the West." The former hotel, now known as the "Stevenson House", stands at 530 Houston Street and features items that belonged to the writer.
The Monterey Jazz Festival began in 1958, presenting such artists as Louie Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Billie Holiday, and now claims to be "the longest running jazz festival in the world" (since the Newport Jazz Festival moved locations).
In June 1967 the city was the venue of the Monterey Pop Festival. Formally known as the Monterey International Pop Music Festival the three-day concert event was held June 16 to 18, 1967, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds. It was the first widely promoted and heavily attended rock festival, attracting an estimated 200,000 total attendees with 55,000 to 90,000 people present at the event's peak at midnight on Sunday. It was notable as hosting the first major American appearances by Jimi Hendrix and The Who, as well as the first major public performances of Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.
The Monterey Pop Festival embodied the themes of San Francisco as a focal point for the counterculture and is generally regarded as one of the beginnings of the "Summer of Love" in 1967. It also became the template for future music festivals, notably the Woodstock Festival two years later.
In 1986, the Monterey Blues Festival was created and ran continuously for over two decades. It filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and was resurrected in 2017 as the Monterey International Blues Festival.
The building in which the first paid public dramatic entertainment in California occurred is located in Monterey and is called, appropriately, "California's First Theater". In 1847, a sailor named Jack Swan began construction on an adobe building at the corner of Pacific St. and Scott Ave, near the Pacific House and Fisherman's Wharf. Between 1847 and 1848 several detachments of soldiers were stationed in Monterey and some of the sailors approached Swan with a proposition to lease a section of his building for use as a theater and money-making venture—a proposal that Swan accepted. The enterprise collected $500 on its first performance, a considerable sum at that time. The primary mediums presented were melodramas and Olios (a form of musical revue and audience sing-along). In the spring of 1848, the play "Putnam, the Iron Son of '76", was presented. After the California Gold Rush of 1849, much of the population, including Swan, traveled to northern California in search of riches. As a result, by the end that year, the company disbanded. In 1896, Swan died and the building was abandoned until 1906 when it was purchased by the California Historic Landmarks League, who deeded it to the State of California.
In 1937, the building was leased to Denny-Watrous Management, who revived the tradition of melodrama at the now historic building. A resident company was created and named the Troupers of the Gold Coast, who maintained the tradition for over 50 years, closing for renovation in 1999. It is now permanently closed.
The Wharf Theater opened on Fisherman's Wharf on May 18, 1950, with a production of "Happy Birthday", featuring a set designed by Bruce Ariss. The theater also produced one of Bruce Ariss' original plays and was successful enough to draw the attention of MGM who brought the artist to Hollywood to work for several years. The theater was destroyed by fire on December 31, 1959. The company re-opened in 1960 in a new location on Alvarado Street (formerly "The Monterey Theater") which in 1963 was renamed "The Old Monterey Opera House". It continued until the mid-1960s when it fell to urban renewal. In the early 1970s, discussions began about rebuilding back on the wharf itself, and theater plans began to take shape. Bruce Ariss and Angelo Di Girolamo, whose brother had the original idea for a theater on the wharf, began construction on The New Wharf Theater in 1975. Designed by Ariss, the New Wharf Theater opened its doors on December 3, 1976, with a community theater production of "Guys and Dolls", directed by Monterey Peninsula College Drama Department chairman, Morgan Stock. Located at the northwest end of old Fisherman's Wharf, the theater is now known as the Bruce Ariss Wharf Theater. Girolamo died in September 2014.
In 2005, the Golden State Theatre, a former movie palace located on Alvarado Street was refurbished to produce live theatrical events. The Forest Theater Guild produced several plays at the Golden State including: "Aida", "Grease", "Zoot Suit", and "Fiddler on the Roof". The theater's new owners, Eric and Lori Lochtefeld, have produced several musicals in the theater in conjunction with Broadway By the Bay.
The headquarters of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Monterey in California is in Monterey, and one of the relatively few Oratorian communities in the United States is located in the city. The city is adjacent to the historic Catholic Carmel Mission.
According to the City's 2015 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top private sector employers in the city are (in alphabetical order):
The top public sector employers are (in alphabetical order):
Other private sector employers based in Monterey include Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, and Mapleton Communications. Additional military facilities in Monterey include the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center, and the United States Naval Research Laboratory - Monterey.
Local radio stations include KPIG-FM 107.5, KAZU-FM - 90.3 KDON-FM - 102.5, KCDU-FM – 101.7, KWAV-FM – 96.9, KDFG-FM – 103.9, KIDD-AM – 630, KNRY-AM – 1240, KRML 94.7 FM jazz, and 1610-AM the city information station. Television service for the community comes from the Monterey-Salinas-Santa Cruz designated market area (DMA). Local newspapers include the "Monterey County Herald" and the "Monterey County Weekly".
The city is serviced by California State Route 1, also known as the Cabrillo Highway, as it runs along the coastline of the rest of Monterey Bay to the north and Big Sur to the south. California State Route 68, also known as the Monterey-Salinas Highway, connects the city to U.S. Route 101 at Salinas and to Pacific Grove.
Monterey Regional Airport connects the city to the large metropolitan areas in California, Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada.
Monterey train station was served until 1971, when Amtrak took over intercity train service and the "Del Monte" was discontinued.
There are several institutions of higher education in the area: the Defense Language Institute, located on the Presidio of Monterey, California; the Naval Postgraduate School, on the site of a former resort hotel; the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (a graduate school of Middlebury College); and Monterey Peninsula College, part of the California Community Colleges system. The federal institutions (the Defense Language Institute (DLI) and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS)) are important employers in and strongly associated with the city.
California State University, Monterey Bay and the Monterey College of Law are located at the site of the former Fort Ord in neighboring Seaside. CSU Monterey Bay has developed several programs in marine and watershed sciences.
The Monterey Peninsula Unified School District operates a high school, a middle school and three elementary schools. Private schools include Santa Catalina School (girls, co-ed elementary and middle school) and Trinity Christian High School (co-ed).
The Monterey Amberjacks are a professional baseball team that competes in the independent Pecos League which is not affiliated with Major League Baseball or Minor League Baseball. They play their home games at Sollecito Ballpark.
The Monterey Bay Derby Dames (MBDD) is a non-profit, amateur flat track roller derby league created by skaters for skaters in Monterey County, California. They are a member of the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA).
The 2010 United States Census reported that Monterey had a population of 27,810. The population density was 2,364.0 people per square mile (912.7/km2). The racial makeup of Monterey was 21,788 (78.3%) White, 777 (2.8%) African American, 149 (0.5%) Native American, 2,204 (7.9%) Asian, 91 (0.3%) Pacific Islander, 1,382 (5.0%) from other races, and 1,419 (5.1%) from two or more races. There were 3,817 people (13.7%) of Hispanic or Latino origin, of any race.
The Census reported that 25,307 people (91.0% of the population) lived in households, 2,210 (7.9%) lived in non-institutionalized group quarters, and 293 (1.1%) were institutionalized.
There were 12,184 households, out of which 2,475 (20.3%) had children under the age of 18 living in them, 4,690 (38.5%) were opposite-sex married couples living together, 902 (7.4%) had a female householder with no husband present, 371 (3.0%) had a male householder with no wife present. 4,778 households (39.2%) were made up of individuals, and 1,432 (11.8%) had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.08. There were 5,963 families (48.9% of all households); the average family size was 2.81.
The population was spread out, with 4,266 people (15.3%) under the age of 18, 3,841 people (13.8%) aged 18 to 24, 8,474 people (30.5%) aged 25 to 44, 6,932 people (24.9%) aged 45 to 64, and 4,297 people (15.5%) who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 36.9 years. For every 100 females, there were 101.2 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 100.6 males.
There were 13,584 housing units at an average density of 1,154.7 per square mile (445.8/km2), of which 4,360 (35.8%) were owner-occupied, and 7,824 (64.2%) were occupied by renters. The homeowner vacancy rate was 2.0%; the rental vacancy rate was 6.5%. 9,458 people (34.0% of the population) lived in owner-occupied housing units and 15,849 people (57.0%) lived in rental housing units.
As of the census of 2000, there were 29,674 people, 12,600 households, and 6,476 families residing in the city. The population density was 3,516.9 people per square mile (1,357.5/km2). There were 13,382 housing units at an average density of 1,586.0 per square mile (612.2/km2). The racial makeup of the city was 80.8% White, 10.9% Hispanic, 7.4% Asian, 2.5% African American, 0.6% Native American, 0.3% Pacific Islander, 3.9% from other races, and 4.5% from two or more races.
There were 12,600 households, out of which 21.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 39.5% were married couples living together, 8.4% had a female householder with no husband present, and 48.6% were non-families. 37.0% of all households consisted of individuals, and 11.0% had a lone dweller who is over 64. The average household size was 2.13 and the average family size was 2.82.
The age distribution is as follows: 16.6% under the age of 18, 13.1% from 18 to 24, 33.8% from 25 to 44, 21.7% from 45 to 64, and 14.9% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 36 years. For every 100 females, there were 96.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 96.1 males.
The median income for a household in the city was $49,109, and the median income for a family was $58,757. Males had a median income of $40,410 versus $31,258 for females. The per capita income for the city was $27,133. About 4.4% of families and 7.8% of the population were below the poverty line, including 6.5% of those under age 18 and 4.8% of those age 65 or over.
The city is served by Monterey Regional Airport, and local bus Service is provided by Monterey-Salinas Transit. The city government's Recreation and Community Services department runs the Monterey Sports Center.
Monterey is governed by a mayor and 4 city council members, all elected by the public.
As of December 2019, the mayor is Clyde Roberson and the city council members are Dan Albert, Jr., Alan Haffa, Ed Smith, and Tyller Williamson.
The City of Monterey provides base maintenance support services for the Presidio of Monterey and the Naval Postgraduate School, including streets, parks, and building maintenance. Additional support services include traffic engineering, inspections, construction engineering and project management. This innovative partnership has become known as the "Monterey Model" and is now being adopted by communities across the country. This service reduces maintenance costs by millions of dollars and supports a continued military presence in Monterey.
Monterey is represented on the Monterey County Board of Supervisors by Supervisor Mary Adams.
In the California State Legislature, Monterey is in , and .
In the United States House of Representatives, Monterey is part of .
Monterey is twinned with: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40444 |
1788–89 United States presidential election
The 1788–89 United States presidential election was the first quadrennial presidential election. It was held from Monday, December 15, 1788 to Saturday, January 10, 1789, under the new Constitution ratified in 1788. George Washington was unanimously elected for the first of his two terms as president, and John Adams became the first vice president. This was the only U.S. presidential election that spanned two calendar years (1788 and 1789).
Under the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781, the United States had no head of state. Separation of the executive function of government from the legislative was incomplete, as in countries that use a parliamentary system. Federal power, strictly limited, was reserved to the Congress of the Confederation, whose "President of the United States in Congress Assembled" was also chair of the Committee of the States, which aimed to fulfill a function similar to that of the modern Cabinet.
The Constitution created the offices of President and Vice President, fully separating these offices from Congress. The Constitution established an Electoral College, based on each state's Congressional representation, in which each elector would cast two votes for two different candidates, a procedure modified in 1804 by ratification of the Twelfth Amendment. Different states had varying methods for choosing presidential electors. In 5 states, the state legislature chose electors. The other 6 chose electors through some form involving a popular vote, though in only two states did the choice depend directly on a statewide vote in a way even roughly resembling the modern method in all states.
The enormously popular Washington was distinguished as the former Commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. After he agreed to come out of retirement, it was known that he would be elected by virtual acclaim; Washington did not select a running mate, as that concept was not yet developed.
No formal political parties existed, though an informally organized consistent difference of opinion had already manifested between Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Thus, the contest for the Vice-Presidency was open. Thomas Jefferson predicted that a popular Northern leader such as Governor John Hancock of Massachusetts or John Adams, a former minister to Great Britain who had represented Massachusetts in Congress, would be elected vice president. Anti-Federalist leaders such as Patrick Henry, who did not run, and George Clinton, who had opposed ratification of the Constitution, also represented potential choices.
All 69 electors cast one vote for Washington, making his election unanimous. Adams won 34 electoral votes and the vice presidency. The remaining 35 electoral votes were split among 10 different candidates, including John Jay, who finished second with nine electoral votes. Washington was inaugurated in New York City on April 30, 1789, 57 days after the First Congress convened.
Though no organized political parties yet existed, political opinion loosely divided between those who had more stridently and enthusiastically endorsed ratification of the Constitution, called Federalists or Cosmopolitans, and Anti-Federalists or Localists who had only more reluctantly, skeptically, or conditionally supported, or who had outright opposed, ratification. Both factions supported Washington for President. Limited, primitive political campaigning occurred in states and localities where swaying public opinion might matter. For example, in Maryland, a state with a statewide popular vote, unofficial parties campaigned locally, advertising platforms even in German to appeal and drive turnout by a German-speaking rural population. Organizers elsewhere lobbied through public forums, parades, and banquets.
No nomination process existed. The framers of the Constitution presumed that Washington would be elected unopposed. For example, Alexander Hamilton spoke for national opinion when in a letter to Washington attempting to persuade him to leave retirement on his farm in Mount Vernon to serve as the first President, he wrote that "...the point of light in which you stand at home and abroad will make an infinite difference in the respectability in which the government will begin its operations in the alternative of your being or not being the head of state."
Uncertain was the choice for the vice presidency, which contained no definite job description beyond being the President's designated successor while presiding over the Senate. The Constitution stipulated that the position would be awarded to the runner-up in the Presidential election. Because Washington was from Virginia, then the largest state, many assumed that electors would choose a vice president from a northern state. In an August 1788 letter, U.S. Minister to France Thomas Jefferson wrote that he considered John Adams and John Hancock, both from Massachusetts, to be the top contenders. Jefferson suggested John Jay, John Rutledge, and Virginian James Madison as other possible candidates. Adams received 34 electoral votes, one short of a majority - because the Constitution did not require an outright majority in the Electoral College prior to ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to elect a runner-up as vice president, Adams was elected to that post.
Voter turnout comprised a low single-digit percentage of the adult population. Though all states allowed some rudimentary form of popular vote, only 6 ratifying states allowed any form of popular vote specifically for Presidential electors. In most states only white men, and in many only those who owned property, could vote. Free black men could vote in four Northern states, and women could vote in New Jersey until 1807. In some states, there was a nominal religious test for voting. For example, in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Congregational Church was established, supported by taxes.
Voting was hampered by poor communications and infrastructure and the labor demands imposed by farming. Two months passed after the election before the votes were counted and Washington was notified that he had been elected President. Washington spent one week traveling from Virginia to New York for inauguration. Similarly, Congress took weeks to assemble.
As the electors were selected, politics intruded, and the process was not free of rumors and intrigue. For example, Hamilton aimed to ensure that Adams did not inadvertently tie Washington in the electoral vote. Also, Federalists spread rumors that Anti-Federalists plotted to elect Richard Henry Lee or Patrick Henry President, with George Clinton as vice president. However, Clinton received only three electoral votes.
Source: U.S. President National Vote. "Our Campaigns". (February 11, 2006).
Source:
Source (Popular Vote): A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787–1825"
Source: Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections
The Constitution, in Article II, Section 1, provided that the state legislatures should decide the manner in which their Electors were chosen. Different state legislatures chose different methods: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40449 |
1792 United States presidential election
The 1792 United States presidential election was the second quadrennial presidential election. It was held from Friday, November 2, to Wednesday, December 5, 1792. Incumbent President George Washington was elected to a second term by a unanimous vote in the electoral college, while John Adams was re-elected as vice president. Washington was essentially unopposed, but Adams faced a competitive re-election against Governor George Clinton of New York.
Washington was widely popular, and no one made a serious attempt to oppose his re-election. Electoral rules of the time required each presidential elector to cast two votes without distinguishing which was for president and which for vice president. The recipient of the most votes would then become president, and the runner-up vice president. The Democratic-Republican Party, which had organized in opposition to the policies of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, supported Clinton for the position of vice president. Adams, meanwhile, was backed by the Federalist Party in his bid for another term. Neither party had fully organized, and partisan divisions had not yet solidified.
Washington received 132 electoral votes, one from each elector. Adams won 77 electoral votes, enough to win re-election. Clinton finished in third place with 50 electoral votes, taking his home state of New York as well as three Southern states. Two other candidates won the five remaining electoral votes. This election was the first in which each of the original 13 states appointed electors, as did the newly added states of Kentucky and Vermont.
While it was also the only presidential election that was not held exactly four years after the previous election, most of the previous election was held four years prior.
In 1792, presidential elections were still conducted according to the original method established under the U.S. Constitution. Under this system, each elector cast two votes: the candidate who received the greatest number of votes (so long as they won a majority) became president, while the runner-up became vice president. The Twelfth Amendment would eventually replace this system, requiring electors to cast one vote for president and one vote for vice president, but this change did not take effect until 1804. Because of this, it is difficult to use modern-day terminology to describe the relationship among the candidates in this election.
Washington is generally held by historians to have run unopposed. Indeed, the incumbent president enjoyed bipartisan support and received one vote from every elector. The choice for vice president was more divisive. The Federalist Party threw its support behind the incumbent vice president, John Adams of Massachusetts, while the Democratic-Republican Party backed the candidacy of New York Governor George Clinton. Because few doubted that Washington would receive the greatest number of votes, Adams and Clinton were effectively competing for the vice presidency; under the letter of the law, however, they were technically candidates for president competing against Washington.
Born out of the Anti-Federalist faction that had opposed the Constitution in 1788, the Democratic-Republican Party was the main opposition to the agenda of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. They had no chance of unseating Washington, but hoped to win the vice presidency by defeating the incumbent, Adams. Many Democratic-Republicans would have preferred to nominate Thomas Jefferson, their ideological leader and Washington's Secretary of State. However, this would have cost them the state of Virginia, as electors were not permitted to vote for two candidates from their home state and Washington was also a Virginian. Clinton, the Governor of New York and a former anti-Federalist leader, became the party's nominee after he won the backing of Jefferson and James Madison. Clinton was from an electorally-important swing state, and he convinced party leaders that he would be a stronger candidate than another New Yorker, Senator Aaron Burr. A group of Democratic-Republican leaders met in Philadelphia in October 1792 and selected Clinton as the party's vice presidential candidate.
By 1792, a party division had emerged between Federalists led by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who desired a stronger federal government with a leading role in the economy, and the Democratic-Republicans led by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Representative James Madison of Virginia, who favored states' rights and opposed Hamilton's economic program. Madison was at first a Federalist until he opposed the establishment of Hamilton's First Bank of the United States in 1791. He formed the Democratic-Republican Party along with Anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson in 1792.
The elections of 1792 were the first ones in the United States to be contested on anything resembling a partisan basis. In most states, the congressional elections were recognized in some sense as a "struggle between the Treasury department and the republican interest," to use the words of Jefferson strategist John Beckley. In New York, the race for governor was fought along these lines. The candidates were Chief Justice John Jay, a Hamiltonian, and incumbent George Clinton, the party's vice presidential nominee.
Although Washington had been considering retiring, both sides encouraged him to remain in office to bridge factional differences. Washington was supported by practically all sides throughout his presidency and gained more popularity with the passage of the Bill of Rights. However, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists contested the vice-presidency, with incumbent John Adams as the Federalist nominee and George Clinton as the Democratic-Republican nominee. Federalists attacked Clinton for his past association with the anti-Federalists. With some Democratic-Republican electors voting against their nominee George Clinton – voting instead for Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr – Adams easily secured re-election.
At the time, there were 15 states in the United States: the 13 original states and the two recently admitted states of Vermont (March 1791) and Kentucky (June 1792). The Electoral College consisted of 132 electors, with each elector having two votes.
The Electoral College chose Washington unanimously. John Adams was again elected vice-president as the runner-up, this time getting the vote of a majority of electors. George Clinton won the votes of only Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, his native New York, and a single elector in Pennsylvania. Thomas Jefferson won the votes of Kentucky, newly separated from Jefferson's home state of Virginia. A single South Carolina elector voted for Aaron Burr. All five of these candidates would eventually win election to the offices of president or vice president.
Source: U.S. President National Vote. "Our Campaigns". (February 11, 2006).
Source (Popular Vote): "A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825"
(a) "Only 6 of the 15 states chose electors by any form of popular vote."
(b) "Pre-Twelfth Amendment electoral vote rules obscure the intentions of the voters"
(c) "Those states that did choose electors by popular vote had widely varying restrictions on suffrage via property requirements."
Source:
(a) "Only 6 of the 15 states chose electors by any form of popular vote, while pre-Twelfth Amendment electoral vote rules obscure the intentions of the voters, and those states that did choose electors by popular vote restricted the vote via property requirements."
(b) "Two electors from Maryland and one elector from Vermont did not cast votes."
Source: Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections
The Constitution, in Article II, Section 1, provided that the state legislatures should decide the manner in which their Electors were chosen. Different state legislatures chose different methods: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40451 |
1800 United States presidential election
The 1800 United States presidential election was the fourth presidential election. It was held from October 31 to December 3, 1800. In what is sometimes referred to as the "Revolution of 1800", Vice President Thomas Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party defeated incumbent President John Adams of the Federalist Party. The election was a realigning election that ushered in a generation of Democratic-Republican rule.
Adams had narrowly defeated Jefferson in the 1796 election. Under the rules of the electoral system that were in place prior to the 1804 ratification of the 12th Amendment, each member of the Electoral College cast two votes, with no distinction made between electoral votes for president and electoral votes for vice president. As Jefferson received the second-most votes in 1796, he was elected vice president. In 1800, unlike in 1796, both parties formally nominated tickets. The Democratic-Republicans nominated a ticket consisting of Jefferson and Aaron Burr, while the Federalists nominated a ticket consisting of Adams and Charles C. Pinckney. Each party formed a plan in which one of their respective electors would vote for a third candidate or abstain so that their preferred presidential candidate (Adams for the Federalists and Jefferson for the Democratic-Republicans) would win one more vote than the party's other nominee.
The chief political issues revolved around the fallout from the French Revolution and the Quasi-War. The Federalists favored a strong central government and close relations with Great Britain. The Democratic-Republicans favored decentralization to the state governments, and the party attacked the taxes imposed by the Federalists. The Democratic-Republicans also denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts, which the Federalists had passed to make it harder for immigrants to become citizens and to restrict statements critical of the federal government. While the Democratic-Republicans were well organized at the state and local levels, the Federalists were disorganized and suffered a bitter split between their two major leaders, President Adams and Alexander Hamilton. According to historian John Ferling, the jockeying for electoral votes, regional divisions, and the propaganda smear campaigns created by both parties made the election recognizably modern.
At the end of a long and bitter campaign, Jefferson and Burr each won 73 electoral votes, Adams won 65 electoral votes, and Pinckney won 64 electoral votes. The Federalists swept New England, the Democratic-Republicans dominated the South, and the parties split the Mid-Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The Democratic-Republicans' failure to execute their plan to award Jefferson one more vote than Burr resulted in a tie, which necessitated a contingent election in the House of Representatives. Under the terms laid out in the Constitution, the outgoing House of Representatives chose between Jefferson and Burr. Each state delegation cast one vote, and a victory in the contingent election required one candidate to win a majority of the state delegations. Neither Burr nor Jefferson was able to win on the first 35 ballots of the contingent election, as most Federalist Congressmen backed Burr and all Democratic-Republican Congressmen backed Jefferson. Hamilton personally favored Jefferson over Burr, and he convinced several Federalists to switch their support to Jefferson, giving Jefferson a victory on the 36th ballot of the contingent election.
Both parties used congressional nominating caucuses to formally nominate tickets for the first time. The Federalists nominated a ticket consisting of incumbent President John Adams of Massachusetts and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina. Pinckney had fought in the American Revolutionary War and later served as the minister to France. The Democratic-Republicans nominated a ticket consisting of Vice President Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and former Senator Aaron Burr of New York. Jefferson had been the runner-up in the previous election and had co-founded the party with James Madison and others, while Burr was popular in the electorally important state of New York.
While the 1800 election was a re-match of the 1796 election, it ushered in a new type of American politics, a two-party republic and acrimonious campaigning behind the scenes and through the press. On top of this, the election pitted the "larger than life" Adams and Jefferson, who were formerly close allies turned political enemies.
The campaign was bitter and characterized by slander and personal attacks on both sides. Federalists spread rumors that the Democratic-Republicans were radicals who would ruin the country (based on the Democratic-Republican support for the French Revolution). In 1798, George Washington had complained "that you could as soon scrub the blackamoor white, as to change the principles of a professed Democrat; and that he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the Government of this Country". Meanwhile, the Democratic-Republicans accused Federalists of subverting republican principles with the Alien and Sedition Acts, some of which were later declared unconstitutional after their expiration by the Supreme Court, and relying for their support on foreign immigrants; they also accused Federalists of favoring Britain and the other coalition countries in their war with France in order to promote aristocratic, anti-democratic values.
Adams was attacked by both the opposition Democratic-Republicans and a group of so-called "High Federalists" aligned with Alexander Hamilton. The Democratic-Republicans felt that the Adams foreign policy was too favorable toward Britain; feared that the new army called up for the Quasi-War would oppress the people; opposed new taxes to pay for war; and attacked the Alien and Sedition Acts as violations of states' rights and the Constitution. "High Federalists" considered Adams too moderate and would have preferred the leadership of Alexander Hamilton instead.
Hamilton had apparently grown impatient with Adams and wanted a new president who was more receptive to his goals. During Washington's presidency, Hamilton had been able to influence the federal response to the Whiskey Rebellion (which threatened the government's power to tax citizens). When Washington announced that he would not seek a third term, Adams was widely recognized by the Federalists as next-in-line.
Hamilton appears to have hoped in 1796 that his influence within an Adams administration would be as great as or greater than in Washington's. By 1800, Hamilton had come to realize that Adams was too independent and thought the Federalist vice presidential candidate, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, more suited to serving Hamilton's interests. In his third sabotage attempt toward Adams, Hamilton quietly schemed to elect Pinckney to the presidency. Given Pinckney's lack of political experience, he would have been expected to be open to Hamilton's influence. However, Hamilton's plan backfired and hurt the Federalist party, particularly after one of his letters, a scathing criticism of Adams that was fifty-four pages long, fell into the hands of a Democratic-Republican and soon after became public. It embarrassed Adams and damaged Hamilton's efforts on behalf of Pinckney, not to mention speeding Hamilton's own political decline.
The contemporarily unorthodox public campaigning methods employed in 1800 were first employed by Jefferson's running mate and campaign manager, Aaron Burr, who is credited by some historians with inventing the modern electioneering process.
Partisans on both sides sought any advantage they could find. In several states, this included changing the process of selecting electors to ensure the desired result. In Georgia, Democratic-Republican legislators replaced the popular vote with selection by the state legislature. Federalist legislators did the same in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. This may have had some unintended consequences in Massachusetts, where the makeup of the delegation to the House of Representatives changed from 12 Federalists and 2 Democratic-Republicans to 8 Federalists and 6 Democratic-Republicans, perhaps the result of backlash on the part of the electorate. Pennsylvania also switched to legislative choice, but this resulted in an almost evenly split set of electors. Virginia switched from electoral districts to winner-take-all, a move that probably switched one or two votes out of the Federalist column.
Because each state could choose its own election day in 1800, voting lasted from April to October. In April, Burr's successful mobilization of the vote in New York City succeeded in reversing the Federalist majority in the state legislature to provide decisive support for the Democratic-Republican ticket. With the two parties tied 63–63 in the Electoral College in the autumn of 1800, the last state to vote, South Carolina, chose eight Democratic-Republicans to award the election to Jefferson and Burr.
Under the United States Constitution as it then stood, each elector cast two votes, and the candidate with a majority of the votes was elected president, with the vice presidency going to the runner-up. The Federalists therefore arranged for one of their electors to vote for John Jay rather than for Pinckney. The Democratic-Republicans had a similar plan to have one of their electors cast a vote for another candidate instead of Burr but failed to execute it, thus all of the Democratic-Republican electors cast their votes for both Jefferson and Burr, 73 in all for each of them. According to a provision of the United States Constitution, a tie in a case of this type had to be resolved by the House of Representatives, with each state casting one vote. Although the congressional election of 1800 turned over majority control of the House of Representatives to the Democratic-Republicans by 68 seats to 38, the presidential election had to be decided by the outgoing House that had been elected in the congressional election of 1798 (at that time, the new presidential and congressional terms all started on March 4 of the year after a national election). In the outgoing House, the Federalists retained a majority of 60 seats to 46.
When the electoral ballots were opened and counted on February 11, 1801, it turned out that the certificate of election from Georgia was defective: while it was clear that the electors had cast their votes for Jefferson and Burr, the certificate did not take the constitutionally mandated form of a "List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each". Vice President Jefferson, who was counting the votes in his role as President of the Senate, immediately counted the votes from Georgia as votes for Jefferson and Burr, and no objections were raised.
If the disputed Georgia ballots were rejected on these technicalities, Jefferson and Burr would have been left with 69 votes each, or one short of the 70 votes required for a majority, meaning a contingent election would have been required between the top five finishers (Jefferson, Burr, incumbent president John Adams, Charles C. Pickney and John Jay) in the House of Representatives. With these votes, the total number of votes for Jefferson and Burr was 73, which gave them a majority of the total, but they were tied.
Jefferson—and Burr—won all or a majority of the voters in each state that he had won in 1796, and additionally won majorities in New York and Maryland. Adams picked up votes in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, but these votes were not enough to offset the Democratic-Republican gains elsewhere. Of the 155 counties and independent cities making returns, Jefferson and Burr won in 115 (74.19%), whereas the Adams ticket carried 40 (25.81%). This was the last time that Vermont voted for the Federalists.
Source (Popular Vote): U.S. President National Vote. "Our Campaigns". Retrieved February 10, 2006.
Source (Popular Vote): A New Nation Votes: American Election Returns 1787-1825"
Source (Electoral Vote):
(a) "Votes for Federalist electors have been assigned to John Adams and votes for Democratic-Republican electors have been assigned to Thomas Jefferson."
(b) "Only 6 of the 16 states chose electors by any form of popular vote."
(c) "Those states that did choose electors by popular vote had widely varying restrictions on suffrage via property requirements."
Source:
In February 1801, the members of the House of Representatives balloted as states to determine whether Jefferson or Burr would become president. There were sixteen states, each with one vote; an absolute majority of nine was required for victory. It was the outgoing House of Representatives, controlled by the Federalist Party, that was charged with electing the new president. Jefferson was the great enemy of the Federalists, and a faction of Federalist representatives tried to block him and elect Burr. Most Federalists voted for Burr, giving Burr six of the eight states controlled by Federalists. The seven delegations controlled by Republicans all voted for Jefferson, and Georgia's sole Federalist representative also voted for him, giving him eight states. The Vermont delegation was evenly split and cast a blank ballot. The remaining state, Maryland, had five Federalist representatives to three Republicans; one of its Federalist representatives voted for Jefferson, forcing that state delegation also to cast a blank ballot.
Publicly, Burr remained quiet between mid-December 1800 and mid-February 1801, when the electoral votes were counted. Behind the scenes, he faced mounting pressure from within the party to step aside if he and Jefferson should tie in electoral votes. However, there was confusion as to whether or not Burr could simply concede the presidency to Jefferson and become vice-president, or whether he would have been forced to withdraw entirely and allow one of the Federalist candidates to become vice-president, as the Constitution was unclear on the matter. Regardless, he refused to disavow the presidency, writing in December 1800 to Representative Samuel Smith that he would not "engage to resign" if chosen president, adding that the question was "unnecessary, unreasonable and impertinent." Rumors circulated that Representative James A. Bayard, a Federalist, had—purportedly in Burr's name—approached Smith, and Edward Livingston with offers of political appointments if they voted for Burr.
True or not, House Republicans, who from the start of the 1800 campaign viewed Jefferson as their candidate for president and Burr for vice president, faced two abhorrent possible outcomes when they met to vote: the Federalists manage to engineer a victory for Burr, or, the Federalists refuse to break the deadlock leaving a Federalist—Secretary of State John Marshall—as Acting President. Neither came to pass however, chiefly due to the energetic opposition to Burr by Hamilton. Over the course of seven days, from February 11 to 17, the House cast a total of 35 ballots, with Jefferson receiving the votes of eight state delegations each time, falling just one short of the necessary majority of nine each time. Hamilton recommended to Federalists that they support Jefferson because he was "by far not so dangerous a man" as Burr; in short, he would much rather have someone with wrong principles than someone devoid of any. Hamilton embarked on a frenzied letter-writing campaign to get delegates to switch votes.
On February 17, on the 36th ballot, Jefferson was elected. Federalist James A. Bayard of Delaware and his allies in Maryland and Vermont all cast blank ballots. This resulted in the Maryland and Vermont votes changing from no selection to Jefferson, giving him the votes of 10 states and the presidency. Bayard, as the sole representative from Delaware, changed his vote from Burr to no selection. The four representatives present from South Carolina, all Federalists, also changed their 3–1 selection of Burr to four abstentions.
(a) The votes of the representatives is typical and may have fluctuated from ballot to ballot, but the result for each state did not change.
(b) Even though Georgia had two representatives apportioned, one seat was vacant due to the death of James Jones.
(c) Even though South Carolina had six representatives apportioned, Thomas Sumter was absent due to illness, and Abraham Nott departed for South Carolina between the first and final ballots.
The Constitution, in Article II, Section 1, provided that the state legislatures should decide the manner in which their electors were chosen. Different state legislatures chose different methods:
The election's story and the eventual reconciliation between Jefferson and Adams was also retold in a second-season episode of Comedy Central's "Drunk History", with Jerry O'Connell portraying Jefferson and Joe Lo Truglio as Adams.
The election's story is also told, briefly, in "Hamilton", in the song "The Election Of 1800". The song focuses on Alexander Hamilton's effect on the outcome of the election for the most part. Hamilton chose Jefferson, as he rivaled both presidential candidates but believed Jefferson was the better choice, which led to the election of President Jefferson.
The story of the congressional runoff between Burr and Jefferson is told in Gore Vidal's 1973 novel "Burr". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40454 |
Monterrey
Monterrey (; ) is the capital and largest city of the northeastern state of Nuevo León, Mexico. The city is anchor to the Monterrey metropolitan area, the second most productive in Mexico with a GDP (PPP) of US$123 billion, and the third largest with an estimated population of 4,689,601 people as of 2015. Monterrey is typically considered one of the most livable cities in Mexico, and a 2018 study found that suburb San Pedro Garza García is the city with the best quality of life in Mexico. It serves as a commercial center of northern Mexico and is the base of many significant international corporations. Its purchasing power parity-adjusted GDP per capita is considerably higher than the rest of Mexico's at around US$35,500, compared to the country's US$18,800. It is considered a Beta World City, cosmopolitan and competitive. Rich in history and culture, it is one of the most developed cities in Mexico. It is also considered to be the most “Americanized” city in the country.
As an important industrial and business center, the city is also home to many Mexican companies, including Grupo Avante, Lanix Electronics, Ocresa, CEMEX, Vitro, OXXO, FEMSA, DINA S.A., Gamesa, Cuauhtémoc Moctezuma Brewery, and Grupo ALFA. Monterrey is also home to international companies such as Cognizant, Siemens, Accenture, MSCI, Ternium, Sony, Toshiba, Carrier, Whirlpool, Samsung, Toyota, Babcock & Wilcox, Daewoo, British American Tobacco, Nokia, Dell, Boeing, HTC, General Electric, Johnson Controls, LG, SAS Institute, Grundfos, Danfoss, Qualfon and Teleperformance, among others.
Monterrey is in northeastern Mexico, at the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The uninterrupted settlement of Monterrey was founded by Diego de Montemayor in 1596. In the years after the Mexican War of Independence, Monterrey became an important business center. With the establishment of "Fundidora Monterrey", the city has experienced great industrial growth.
Before the European foundation of the city, there was no established nation-state, and the population consisted of some indigenous semi-nomadic groups. Carved stone and cave painting in surrounding mountains and caves have allowed historians to identify four major groups in present-day Monterrey: "Azalapas", "Huachichiles", "Coahuiltecos" and "Borrados".
In the 16th century, the valley in which Monterrey sits was known as the Extremadura Valley, an area largely unexplored by the Spanish colonizers. The first expeditions and colonization attempts were led by conquistador Alberto del Canto, who named the city Santa Lucia, but they were unsuccessful because the Spanish were attacked by the natives and fled. The Spanish expeditionary Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva negotiated with King Philip II of Spain to establish a territory in northern New Spain that would be called Nuevo León, the "New Kingdom of León". In 1580 he arrived in the newly granted lands but it was not until 1582 that he established a settlement called San Luis Rey de Francia (named for Saint Louis IX of France) within present-day Monterrey. The New Kingdom of León extended westward from the port of Tampico to the limits of Nueva Vizcaya ("New Biscay", now State of Chihuahua), and around 1,000 kilometers northward. For eight years Nuevo León was abandoned and uninhabited, until a third expedition of 13 families led by conquistador Diego de Montemayor founded "Ciudad Metropolitana de Nuestra Señora de Monterrey" ("Metropolitan City of Our Lady of Monterrey") on September 20, 1596, next to a water spring called "Ojos de Agua de Santa Lucia", where the Museum of Mexican History and Santa Lucía riverwalk are now. The new city's name was chosen to honor the wife of Gaspar de Zúñiga, 5th Count of Monterrey, ninth Viceroy of New Spain.
Monterrey's Coat of Arms shows an Indian throwing an arrow to the sun in front of Cerro de la Silla mountain. This represents a native ceremony performed at sunrise.
During the years of Spanish rule, Monterrey remained a small city, and its population varied from a few hundred to only dozens. The city facilitated trade between San Antonio (now in Texas), Tampico and from Saltillo to the center of the country. Tampico's port brought many products from Europe, while Saltillo concentrated the Northern Territories' trade with the capital, Mexico City. San Antonio was the key trade point with the northern foreign colonies (British and French).
In the 19th century, after the Mexican Independence War, Monterrey rose as a key economic center for the newly formed nation, especially due to its balanced ties between Europe (with its connections to Tampico), the United States (with its connections to San Antonio), and the capital (through Saltillo). In 1824, the "New Kingdom of León" became the State of Nuevo León, and Monterrey was selected as its capital. But the political instability that followed the first 50 years of the new country allowed two American invasions and an internal secession war, during which the governor of the state annexed Coahuila and Tamaulipas states, designating Monterrey as the capital of the Republic of the Sierra Madre as it did before in 1840 for the Republic of the Rio Grande.
In 1846, the earliest large-scale engagement of the Mexican–American War took place in the city, known as the Battle of Monterrey. Mexican forces were forced to surrender but only after successfully repelling U.S. forces' first few advances on the city. The battle inflicted high casualties on both sides, much of them resulting from hand-to-hand combat within the walls of the city center.
Many of the generals in the Mexican War against France were natives of the city, including Mariano Escobedo, Juan Zuazua (b. Lampazos de Naranjo, NL) and Jerónimo Treviño.
During the last decade of the 19th century, Monterrey was linked by railroad, which benefitted industry. It was during this period that José Eleuterio González founded the University Hospital, now one of northeast Mexico's best public hospitals, affiliated with the School of Medicine of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León (UANL). Antonio Basagoiti and other citizens founded the "Fundidora de Fierro y Acero de Monterrey". The brewery Cervecería Cuauthemoc, one of the milestone local enterprises, was founded in 1890. A steel-producing company that accelerated the already fast industrialization of the city was founded in 1900 and became one of the world's biggest. In 1986, Monterrey hosted several games of the 1986 FIFA World Cup.
In 1988, Hurricane Gilbert caused great damage to the city; the Santa Catarina River overflowed, causing about 100 deaths and economic damage.
The city has hosted international events such as the 2002 United Nations Conference on Financing for Development with the participation of more than 50 heads of state and government, as well as other ministers and senior delegates from over 150 countries. The conference resulted in the adoption of the Monterrey Consensus, which has become a reference point for international development and cooperation. In 2004, the OAS Special Summit of the Americas was attended by almost all the presidents of the Americas.
In 2007, Monterrey held the Universal Forum of Cultures, with four million visitors. In 2008, Monterrey held the FINA World Junior Championships.
In 2010, Monterrey was hit by another damaging storm, Hurricane Alex. Alex was considered worse than Hurricane Gilbert, with record-breaking rain bringing floods and causing severe economic damage. Damage estimates totaled US$1.885 billion and $16.9 billion MXN. Reconstruction and urban renewal ensued. Recently, the Nuevo León Development Plan 2030 was presented, along with some other metropolitan projects.
In August 2011 the city was the scene of a terror attack on a casino, in which more than 50 people were killed.
Monterrey and its metropolitan area are municipalities governed by a democratically elected "Presidente Municipal" (Municipal President), or mayor, for a period of three years. The political environment is one of civility and in the last decade political parties have been alternating office. The current mayor of Monterrey is Adrian De la Garza Santos.
The City Council of Monterrey ("Cabildo de Monterrey") is an organ integrated by the mayor, the "Regidores" and the "Síndicos". The mayor is the executor of the determinations of the City Council and the person directly in charge of public municipal administration. The "Regidores" represent the community and collectively define city policies. The "Síndicos" are in charge of watching and legally defending city interests, as well as of monitoring the treasury and the municipal patrimony.
The political parties with representation in the city are the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI, the National Action Party or PAN, the Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD, the Labor Party or PT, the Green Party, Citizens´ Movement, Socialdemocratic Party and Nueva Alianza.
In 2005, Monterrey was ranked one of the safest cities in Mexico, and one of the two safest in 2006. But since 2008 it has experienced violence related to turf battles between warring drug cartels. The year 2011 was the most violent in history. Drug dealers are a major concern, although military offensives and police captures of important drug-cartel chiefs have weakened cartels trying to settle in the city. The city is safe to travel by day and night, but common-sense precautions should be taken in certain districts at night.
There are two police departments in the city, the Police of the City of Monterrey (locally known as the "Policía Regia"), dependent on the municipal government, and the State Public Safety. The "Policía Regia" protects the city's downtown and main areas, while the State Public Safety is in charge of remoter areas. Since the 2011 attack on the Casino Royale, security has been reinforced by military and federal police.
The city of Monterrey is above sea level in the northeastern state of Nuevo León. Monterrey translated from Spanish to English is "King Mount" or "King mountain", which refers to the city's topography and the large mountains that surround it. The Santa Catarina River—dry most of the year on the surface but with flowing underground water—bisects Monterrey from east to west, separating the city into north and south halves, and drains the city to the San Juan River and Rio Grande.
Monterrey is adjacent to San Nicolás de los Garza, García and General Escobedo to the north; Guadalupe, Juárez and Cadereyta Jiménez to the east; Santiago to the south; and San Pedro Garza García and Santa Catarina to the west. Their combined metropolitan population is over 4,080,329 people.
Monterrey lies north of the foothills of the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range. A small hill, the Cerro del Topo, and the smaller Topo Chico are in the suburbs of San Nicolás de los Garza and Escobedo. West of the city rises the Cerro de las Mitras (Mountain of the Mitres), which resemble the profile of several bishops with their mitres.
Cerro de la Silla (Saddle Mountain) dominates the view at the east of the city and is considered a major symbol of the city. Cerro de la Loma Larga—South of the Santa Catarina river—separates Monterrey from the suburb of San Pedro Garza García. At the summit of the Cerro del Obispado, north of the river, is the historic Bishopric Palace, site of one of the most important battles of the Mexican–American War.
The mountains surrounding Monterrey contain many canyons, trails and roads that cross deserts and forests. Suitable trails are available to the general public. The Sierra Madre Oriental mountains south of the city are included in the "Parque Nacional Cumbres de Monterrey" (National Park), which was added to UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Program of Biosphere Reserves in 2006.
Cumbres de Monterrey includes:
Monterrey has a semi-arid climate (Köppen climate classification "BSh"). It is one of the warmest major cities in Mexico. Summers are generally hot, spring and fall temperate, and winters mild, with temperatures rarely below freezing. The average high in August is and the average low is . The average January high is and the average low in January is . Rainfall is scarce in winter, but more frequent during May through September.
Monterrey frequently experiences extreme weather changes; for example, it sometimes reaches in January and February, the coldest months. The most extreme weather changes in summer occur with rainfall, which can reduce temperatures significantly, and the temporary absence of the "northern winds" in winter, which can lead to abnormally high temperatures. Seasons are not well defined; the warm season may start in February and may last until September. In April and May 2011 temperatures reached or higher, causing fires and extreme heat. Snow is a very rare event, although an accumulation of in 8 hours occurred in January 1967. The most recent snowfall was in December 2004, on Christmas Eve. Sleet and ice events occurred in January 2007, December 2009, January and February 2010 and February 2011, caused by temperatures around .
From June 30 to July 2, 2010, Monterrey was hit by the worst natural disaster in the city's history when Hurricane Alex delivered more than of rain in 72 hours, with areas reaching up to of rain during that same period, destroying homes, avenues, highways and infrastructure, and leaving up to 200,000 families without water for a week or more. The amount of water that fell was equivalent to the average precipitation for a year. This was about 3–4 times as much rain as Hurricane Gilbert produced in the city on September 15, 1988. The death toll of Hurricane Alex was estimated to be around 20.
Monterrey has several neighborhoods. The most populous include:
The commercial areas include:
According to the national INEGI population census of 2010, of the total population of the state of Nuevo León, 87.3% lived in the Monterrey metropolitan area.
The Monterrey metropolitan area is the third most populous in Mexico with more than 4 million. It comprises the municipalities of Monterrey, Apodaca, Escobedo, García, Guadalupe, Santiago, Juárez, San Nicolás de los Garza, San Pedro Garza García, Santa Catarina and Salinas Victoria.
Monterrey is connected with the United States–Mexico border, the sea and inland Mexico through different roads, including the Carretera Nacional (also known as the Panamerican Highway) that runs from Nuevo Laredo to Mexico City and south, and the Carretera Interoceánica connecting Matamoros with the port of Mazatlán on the Pacific; it is also crossed by highways 40, 45, 57. The divided highway Monterrey-Saltillo-Matehuala-Mexico City is the main land corridor to interior Mexico.
There are several between-cities bus lines at the bus station downtown. There are arrivals and departures into deeper Mexico, to the U.S. border and into the United States.
Monterrey is also connected by at least three important railroad freight lines: Nuevo Laredo-Mexico City, Monterrey-Tampico, and Monterrey-Pacific (Mazatlán).
The city has a rapid transit system called Metrorrey, which currently has 2 lines. and a BRT called Ecovia.
The city is served by two international airports: General Mariano Escobedo International Airport (served by major international carriers and moving more than 6.5 million passengers in 2007) and Del Norte International Airport, a primarily private airport.
Monterrey is linked through frequent non-stop flights to many Mexican cities and to key United States hubs (Atlanta, Chicago-O'Hare, Dallas/Fort Worth, Detroit, Houston-Intercontinental, JFK/New York, and Las Vegas). Monterrey is the second most important city for the operating routes of Aeroméxico.
Five airlines have their operational bases and headquarters in Monterrey, Volaris, Aeroméxico Connect, VivaAerobus and Magnicharters. There is no public transportation from Monterrey International Airport to the city. However, the Miguel Aleman highway interchange where public transportation is readily available is approximately 3 kilometers from the airport and can easily be reached on foot. A cartel of taxi services link the airport with the city and charge around US$20 for a one-way ride to the city. From this airport, there is a bus shuttle to nearby Saltillo. Inter-city bus services run daily into the interior, as well as north to the US border and points beyond.
Monterrey generally has a very highly ranked medical infrastructure with some internationally acclaimed hospitals, | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40455 |
Presbyterorum Ordinis
Presbyterorum ordinis, subtitled the "Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests", is one of the documents produced by the Second Vatican Council. On 7 December 1965, the document was promulgated by Pope Paul VI, after an approval vote of 2,390 to 4 among the assembled bishops. The title means "Order of Priests" in Latin. As is customary for such documents in the Catholic Church, it is taken from the first line of the decree (its incipit).
Agitation among the Council Fathers for a separate and distinct conciliar decree on the priesthood began in the second session of the council (1963), in the course of the discussions about the drafts concerning the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church ("Lumen gentium"). "Presbyterorum ordinis" has come to be one of the defining documents on the role and duties of the priesthood in the modern era.
The ministry of the priest derives from what is completely unique to priests, that is, the "sacred power of orders to offer sacrifice and to forgive sins." The document was intended to emphasize the special sacramental consecration of priests. Chapter two, on the "Ministry of Priests", recognized the benefit of some type of communal contact among priests. ...in order that priests may find mutual assistance in the development of their spiritual and intellectual life, that they may be able to cooperate more effectively in their ministry and be saved from the dangers of loneliness which may arise, it is necessary that some kind of common life or some sharing of common life be encouraged among priests. This, however, may take many forms, according to different personal or pastoral needs, such as living together where this is possible, or having a common table, or at least by frequent and periodic meetings."
Chapter three addresses practical considerations such as fair compensation, vacation time and health care.
The period that followed the promulgation of "Presbyterorum ordinis" was marked by a severe drop in the number of priestly vocations in the Western World. Church leaders argued age-old secularization was to blame and that it was not directly related to the documents of the council. Historians also pointed to the damage caused in 1968, by the sexual revolution, and the strong backlash over "Humanae vitae". Yet, other authors asserted the drop in vocations was at least partly deliberate as part of an attempt to de-clericalize the Church and allow for a more pluralistic clergy. In 1995, according to the Congregation for the Clergy, in recent years, "despite various persistent difficulties, there is a positive quantitative and qualitative recovery which makes one hope for a priestly second spring."
There was a related exodus from the priesthood, which began under Paul VI and continued during the papacy of John Paul II. In 2007, "La Civilta Cattolica" reported 69,063 priests left the ministry between 1964 and 2004; 11,213 later returned.
In November 2015 Pope Francis addressed a conference sponsored by the Congregation for the Clergy marking the fiftieth anniversary of the proclamation of the Vatican II decree "Presbyterorum ordinis". He told delegates attending the conference, "The good that priests can do comes primarily from their proximity to – and a tender love for – their people. They are not philanthropists or functionaries, but fathers and brothers. ...Even priests have a biography, and are not 'mushrooms' which sprout up suddenly at the Cathedral on their day of ordination." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40460 |
Buckingham Fountain
Buckingham Fountain is a Chicago Landmark in the center of Grant Park, and between Queen's Landing and Congress Parkway. Dedicated in 1927, it is one of the largest fountains in the world. Built in a rococo wedding cake style and inspired by the Latona Fountain at the Palace of Versailles, it is designed to allegorically represent nearby Lake Michigan. It operates from April to October, with regular water shows and evening color-light shows. During the winter, the fountain is decorated with festival lights.
The fountain area is considered Chicago's front door, since it is located in the center of Grant Park, the city's front yard near the intersection of Columbus Drive and Ida B. Wells Drive. The fountain itself represents Lake Michigan, with four sets of sea horses (two per set) symbolizing the four states—Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana—that border the lake. The fountain was designed by beaux arts architect Edward H. Bennett. The statues were created by the French sculptor Marcel F. Loyau. The design of the fountain was inspired by the "Bassin de Latone" and modeled after Latona Fountain at Versailles.
The fountain was donated to the city by Kate Sturges Buckingham in memory of her brother, Clarence Buckingham, and was constructed at a cost of $750,000. The fountain's official name is the "Clarence Buckingham Memorial Fountain". Kate Buckingham also established the Buckingham Fountain Endowment Fund with an initial investment of $300,000 to pay for maintenance. Buckingham Fountain was dedicated on August 26, 1927.
In August 2016, in a partnership with the City of Chicago, the Chicago Parks District and Everywhere Wireless, the Buckingham Fountain viewing area joined many Chicago beaches and the Museum Campus in providing free Wi-Fi to visitors.
Many tourists and Chicagoans visit the fountain each year. The fountain operates daily 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. from mid-April through mid-October, unless below freezing weather conditions dictate otherwise. Water shows occur every hour on-the-hour and last 20 minutes. During shows, the center jet shoots up vertically to , and after dusk shows are choreographed with lights and music. The last show begins at 10:00 p.m. nightly.
The fountain is constructed of Georgia pink marble and contains of water. During a display, more than are pushed through its 193 jets. The bottom pool of the fountain is in diameter, the lower basin is , the middle basin is and the upper basin is . The lip of the upper basin is above the water in the lower basin.
The fountain's pumps are controlled by a Honeywell computer which was previously located in Atlanta, Georgia, until the 1994 renovation when it was moved to the pump house of the fountain. The fountain's security system is monitored from Arlington Heights (a Chicago suburb).
In 1994, the fountain received a $2.8 million restoration to its three smallest basins which developed leaks due to Chicago's harsh winters.
The latest renovation project on Buckingham Fountain began in September 2008. This three-phase project will modernize aging internal systems in the fountain and restore deteriorated features. Funding is a combination from the Buckingham endowment, city and park district funds and a grant from the Lollapalooza music festival which is held annually near the fountain.
Phase I was dedicated April 3, 2009. This phase included permeable pavers to surround the fountain. This replaced the crushed stone that was used since the fountain was constructed. The pavers make a safer and smoother surface and complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Phase II began in the winter of 2009. This phase included the demolition of the fountain table, installation of extensive underdrainage system, new landscaping, site lighting, signs, site furnishings, sewer system, selective demolition within or adjacent to the fountain's outer basin, repairs of some existing cast-in-place concrete elements and installation of new cast-in-place elements. Work was not completed due to lack of funds and the Chicago Park District has not announced when it expects to finish this phase.
Phase III updates have not been scheduled until Phase II projects are completed. This phase will include the restoration of Buckingham Fountain and fountain table, the construction of a new equipment room with selective demolition, structural construction and repair, masonry restoration and repair, mechanical and electrical work, bronze restoration and repair and installation of site improvements and amenities.
Buckingham Fountain was featured in the title sequences of TV shows "Married... with Children" and "Crime Story". The fountain was the starting point for the television show "The Amazing Race 6" in 2004 and was featured in a task 13 years later on "The Amazing Race 29".
The fountain can be seen for a handful of seconds about nine minutes into the 1983 film "National Lampoon's Vacation" as the Griswolds are pulling out of Chicago.
It is also seen when the French criminals arrive in Chicago to do the job for their boss in the 2003 comedy "Crime Spree".
It is also shown in the TV show "Shameless".
Buckingham Fountain is often mistaken for the eastern terminus of U.S. Route 66, but in fact it is not. The original eastern terminus was at the intersection of Jackson Boulevard and Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. In a later alignment, the terminus was moved east two blocks to the intersection of Jackson Drive and Lake Shore Drive after the latter was designated as U.S. Route 41. It remained there until the eastern terminus of Interstate 55 was completed at Lake Shore Drive, and then that also became the eastern terminus of Route 66 until I-55 completely replaced the route in Illinois and Route 66 was decommissioned. Nevertheless, many people still associate Buckingham Fountain with the start of Route 66, even though it had not been built yet when the route opened on November 11, 1926 — whereas the Fountain of the Great Lakes in the South Garden of the Art Institute of Chicago, which has been at that intersection since 1913, actually preceded Route 66 by 13 years and Buckingham Fountain by 14 years. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40461 |
Daniel Burnham
Daniel Hudson Burnham, (September 4, 1846 – June 1, 1912) was an American architect and urban designer. A proponent of the "Beaux-Arts" movement, he may have been, "the most successful power broker the American architectural profession has ever produced."
A successful Chicago architect, he was selected as Director of Works for the 1892–93 World's Columbian Exposition, colloquially referred to as "The White City". He had prominent roles in the creation of master plans for the development of a number of cities, including the Plan of Chicago, and plans for Manila, Baguio and downtown Washington, D.C.. He also designed several famous buildings, including a number of notable skyscrapers in Chicago, the Flatiron Building of triangular shape in New York City, Union Station in Washington D.C., London's Selfridges department store, and San Francisco's Merchants Exchange.
Although best known for his skyscrapers, city planning, and for the White City, almost one third of Burnham's total output – 14.7 million square feet (1.37 million square meters) – consisted of buildings for shopping.
Burnham was born in Henderson, New York and raised in the teachings of the Swedenborgian called The New Church, which ingrained in him the strong belief that man should strive to be of service to others. At the age of eight Burnham moved to Chicago, Illinois, and his father established there a wholesale drug business, which became a success.
Burnham was not a good student, but he was good at drawing. He went east at the age of 18 to be taught by private tutors in order to pass the admissions examinations for Harvard and Yale, failing both apparently because of a bad case of test anxiety. In 1867, when he was 21, he returned to Chicago and took an apprenticeship as a draftsman under William LeBaron Jenney of the architectural firm Loring & Jenney. Architecture seemed to be the calling he was looking for, and he told his parents that he wanted to become "the greatest architect in the city or country".
Nevertheless, the young Burnham still had a streak of wanderlust in him, and in 1869 he left his apprenticeship to go to Nevada with friends to try mining gold, at which he failed. He then ran for the Nevada state legislature and failed to be elected. Broke, he returned again to Chicago and took a position with the architect L. G. Laurean. When the Great Chicago Fire hit the city in October 1871, it seemed as if there would be endless work for architects, but Burnham chose to strike out again, becoming first a salesman of plate glass windows, then a druggist. He failed at the first and quit the second. He later remarked on "a family tendency to get tired of doing the same thing for very long".
At age 26, Burnham moved on to the Chicago offices of Carter, Drake and Wight, where he met future business partner John Wellborn Root, who was 21, four years younger than Burnham. The two became friends and then opened an architectural office together in 1873. Unlike his previous ventures, Burnham stuck to this one. Burnham and Root went on to become a very successful firm. Their first major commission came from John B. Sherman, the superintendent of the massive Union Stock Yards in Chicago, which provided the liveliehood – directly or indirectly – for one-fifth of the city's population. Sherman hired the firm to build for him a mansion on Prairie Avenue at Twenty-first Street among the mansions of Chicago's other merchant barons. Root made the initial design. Burnham refined it and supervised the construction. It was on the construction site that he met Sherman's daughter, Margaret, whom Burnham would marry in 1876 after a short courtship. Sherman would commission other projects from Burnham and Root, including the Stone Gate, an entry portal to the stockyards, which became a Chicago landmark.
In 1881, the firm was commissioned to build the Montauk Building, which would be the tallest building in Chicago at the time. To solve the problem of the city's water-saturated sandy soil and bedrock below the surface, Root came up with a plan to dig down to a "hardpan" layer of clay on which was laid a thick pad of concrete overlaid with steel rails placed at right-angles to form a lattice "grill", which was then filled with Portland cement. This "floating foundation" was, in effect, artificially-created bedrock on which the building could be constructed. The completed building was so tall compared to existing buildings that it defied easy description, and the name "skyscraper" was coined to describe it. Thomas Talmadge, an architect and architectural critic, said of the building, "What Chartres was to the Gothic cathedral, the Montauk Block was to the high commercial building."
Burnham and Root went on to build more of the first American skyscrapers, such as the Masonic Temple Building in Chicago. Measuring 21 stories and 302 feet, the temple held claims as the tallest building of its time, but was torn down in 1939.
The talents of the two partners were complementary. Both men were artists and gifted architects, but Root had a knack for conceiving elegant designs and was able to see almost at once the totality of the necessary structure. Burnham, on the other hand, excelled at bringing in clients and supervising the building of Root's designs. They each appreciated the value of the other to the firm. Burnham also took steps to ensure their employees were happy: he installed a gym in the office, gave fencing lessons and let employees play handball at lunch time. Root, a pianist and organist, gave piano recitals in the office on a rented piano. Paul Starrett, who joined the office in 1888, said "The office was full of a rush of work, but the spirit of the place was delightfully free and easy and human in comparison to other offices I had worked in."
Although the firm was extremely successful, there were several notable setbacks. One of their designs, the Grannis Block, in which their office was located, burned down in 1885, necessitating a move to the top floor of The Rookery, another of their designs. Then, in 1888, a Kansas City, Missouri, hotel they had designed collapsed during construction, killing one man and injuring several others. At the coroner's inquest, the building's design came in for criticism. The negative publicity shook and depressed Burnham. Then in a further setback, Burnham and Root also failed to win the commission for design of the giant Auditorium Building, which went instead to their rivals, Adler & Sullivan.
On January 15, 1891, while the firm was deep in meetings for the design of
the World's Columbian Exposition, Root died after a three-day course of pneumonia. As Root had been only 41 years old, his death stunned both Burnham and Chicago society. After Root's death, the firm of Burnham and Root, which had had tremendous success producing modern buildings as part of the Chicago School of architecture, was renamed D.H. Burnham & Company. After that the firm continued it successes and Burnham extended his reach into city design.
Burnham and Root had accepted responsibility to oversee the design and construction of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago's then-desolate Jackson Park on the south lakefront. The largest world's fair to that date (1893), it celebrated the 400-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus's famous voyage. After Root's sudden and unexpected death, a team of distinguished American architects and landscape architects, including Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Richard M. Hunt, George B. Post, Henry Van Brunt, and Louis Sullivan, radically changed Root's modern and colorful style to a Classical Revival style. To ensure the project's success, Burnham moved his personal residence into a wooden headquarters, called "the shanty," on the burgeoning fairgrounds to improve his ability to oversee construction. The construction of the fair faced huge financial and logistical hurdles, including a worldwide financial panic and an extremely tight timeframe, to open on time.
Considered the first example of a comprehensive planning document in the nation, the fairground featured grand boulevards, classical building facades, and lush gardens. Often called the "White City," it popularized neoclassical architecture in a monumental, yet rational Beaux-Arts style. As a result of the fair's popularity, architects across the U.S. were said to be inundated with requests by clients to incorporate similar elements into their designs.
The control of the fair's design and construction was a matter of dispute between various entities, particularly the National Commission, which was headed by George R. Davis, who served as Director-General of the fair, the Exposition Company, which consisted of the city's leading merchants, led by Lyman Gage, which had raised the money need to build the fair, and Burnham as Director of Works. In addition the large number of committees made it difficult for constructed to move forward at the pace needed to meet the opening day deadline. After a major accident which destroyed one of the fair's premiere buildings, Burnham moved to take tighter control of construction, distributing a memo to all the fair's department heads which read "I have assumed personal control of the active work within the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition... Henceforward, and until further notice, you will report to and receive orders from me exclusively."
After the fair opened, Olmsted, who designed the fairgrounds, said of Burnham that "too high an estimate cannot be placed on the industry, skill and tact with which this result was secured by the master of us all." Burnham himself rejected the suggestion that Root had been largely responsible for the fair's design, writing afterwards:
What was done up to the time of his death was the faintest suggestion of a plan... The impression concerning his part has been gradually built up by a few people, close friends of his and mostly women, who naturally after the Fair proved beautiful desired to more broadly identify his memory with it.
Nevertheless, Burnham's reputation was considerably enhanced by the success and beauty of the fair. Harvard and Yale both presented him honorary master's degrees, ameliorating his having failed their entrance exams in his youth. The common perception while Root was alive was that he was the architectural artist and Burnham had run the business side of the firm; Root's death, while devastating to Burnham personally, allowed him to develop as an architect in a way it might not have, had Root lived on.
In 1901, Burnham designed the Flatiron Building in New York City, a trailblazing structure that utilized an internal steel skeleton to provide structural integrity; the exterior masonry walls were not load-bearing. This allowed the building to rise to 22 stories. The design was that of a vertical Renaissance palazzo with Beaux-Arts styling, divided like a classical column, into base, shaft and capital.
Other Burnham post-fair designs included the Land Title Building (1897) in Philadelphia, the first major building in that city not designed by local architects, and known as "the finest example of early skyscraper design" there, John Wanamaker's Department Store (1902-11) in Philadelphia, now Macy's, which is built around a central court, Wanamaker's Annex (1904, addition: 1907-10), in New York City, a 19-story full-block building which contains as much floorspace as the Empire State Building, the neo-classical Gimbels Department Store (1908-12) also in New York, now the Manhattan Mall, with a completely new facade, the stunningly Art Deco Mount Wilson Observatory in the hills above Pasadena, California, and Filene's Department Store (1912) in Boston, Burnham's last major building.
Initiated in 1906 and published in 1909, Burnham and his co-author Edward H. Bennett prepared a "Plan of Chicago", which laid out plans for the future of the city. It was the first comprehensive plan for the controlled growth of an American city and an outgrowth of the City Beautiful movement. The plan included ambitious proposals for the lakefront and river. It also asserted that every citizen should be within walking distance of a park. Sponsored by the Commercial Club of Chicago, Burnham donated his services in hopes of furthering his own cause.
Building off plans and conceptual designs from the World's Fair for the south lakefront, Burnham envisioned Chicago as a "Paris on the Prairie". French-inspired public works constructions, fountains and boulevards radiating from a central, domed municipal palace became Chicago's new backdrop. Though only parts of the plan were actually implemented, it set the standard for urban design, anticipating the future need to control urban growth and continuing to influence the development of Chicago long after Burnham's death.
Burnham's city planning projects did not stop at Chicago though. Burnham had previously contributed to plans for cities such as Cleveland (the 1903 Group Plan), San Francisco (1905), and Manila (1905) and Baguio in the Philippines, details of which appear in the 1909 "Plan of Chicago" publication. His plans for the redesign of San Francisco were delivered to the Board of Supervisors in September 1905, but in the haste to rebuild the city after the 1906 earthquake and fires, Burnham's plans were ultimately ignored. In the Philippines, Burnham's Plan for Manila never materialized due to the outbreak of World War II and the relocation of the capital to another city after the war. Some components of the plan, however, did come into fruition including the shore road, which became Dewey Boulevard (now known as Roxas Boulevard) and the various neoclassical government buildings around Luneta Park, which very much resemble a miniature version of Washington, D.C., in their arrangement.
In Washington, D.C., Burnham did much to shape the 1901 McMillan Plan, which led to the completion of the overall design of the National Mall. The Senate Park Commission, or McMillan Commission, established by Michigan Senator James McMillan, brought together Burnham and three of his colleagues from the World's Columbian Exposition: architect Charles Follen McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Going well beyond Pierre L'Enfant's original vision for the city, the plan provided for the extension of the Mall beyond the Washington Monument to a new Lincoln Memorial and a "pantheon" that eventually materialized as the Jefferson Memorial. This plan involved significant reclamation of land from swamp and the Potomac River and the relocation of an existing railroad station, which was replaced by Burnham's design for Union Station. As a result of his service on the McMillan Commission, in 1910 Burnham was appointed a member and first chairman of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, helping to ensure implementation of the McMillan Plan's vision. Burnham served on the commission until his death in 1912.
In his career after the fair, Burnham became one of the country's most prominent advocates for the Beaux-Arts movement, as well as the revival of Neo-classical architecture which the fair set off. Much of Burhham's work was based on the classical style of Greece and Rome. In his 1924 autobiography, Louis Sullivan, one of the leading architects of the Chicago School, but one who had a difficult relationship with Burnham over an extended period of time, criticized Burnham for what Sullivan viewed as his lack of original expression and dependence on classicism. Sullivan went on to claim that "the damage wrought by the World's Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer" – a sentiment edged with bitterness, as corporate America of the early 20th century had demonstrated a strong preference for Burnham's architectural style over Sullivan's.
Burnham is famously quoted as saying, "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized." This slogan has been taken to capture the essence of Burnham's spirit.
A man of influence, Burnham was considered the pre-eminent architect in America at the start of the 20th century. He held many positions during his lifetime, including the presidency of the American Institute of Architects. Other notable architects began their careers under his aegis, such as Joseph W. McCarthy. Several of his descendants have worked as influential architects and planners in the United States, including his son, Daniel Burnham Jr., and grandchildren Burnham Kelly and Margaret Burnham Geddes.
Burnham married Margaret Sherman, the daughter of his first major client, John B. Sherman, on January 20, 1876. They first met on the construction site of her father's house. Her father had a house built for the couple to live in. During their courtship, there was a scandal in which Burnham's older brother was accused of having forged checks. Burnham immediately went to John Sherman and offered to break the engagement as a matter of honor, but Sherman rejected the offer, saying "There is a black sheep in every family." However, Sherman remained wary of his son-in-law, who, he thought, drank too much.
Burnham and Margaret remained married for the rest of his life. They had five children, two daughters and three sons, including Daniel Burnham Jr., born in February 1886, who became an architect and urban planner like his father. He worked in his father's firm until 1917, and served as the Director of Public Works for the 1933-34 Chicago World's Fair, known as the "Century of Progress".
The Burnham family lived in Chicago until 1886, when he purchased a 16-room farmhouse and estate on Lake Michigan in the suburb of Evanston, Illinois. Burnham had become wary of Chicago, which he felt was becoming dirtier and more dangerous as its population increased. Burnham explained to his mother, whom he did not tell of the move in advance, "I did it, because I can no longer bear to have my children on the streets of Chicago..." When Burnham moved into "the shanty" in Jackson Park to better supervise construction of the fair, his wife, Margaret, and their children remained in Evanston.
Burnham was an early environmentalist, writing: "Up to our time, strict economy in the use of natural resources has not been practiced, but it must be henceforth unless we are immoral enough to impair conditions in which our children are to live," although he also believed the automobile would be a positive environmental factor, with the end of horse-based transportation bringing "a real step in civilization... With no smoke, no gases, no litter of horses, your air and streets will be clean and pure. This means, does it not, that the health and spirits of men will be better?" Like many men of his time, he also showed an interest in the supernatural, saying "If I were able to take the time, I believe that I could prove the continuation of life beyond the grave, reasoning from the necessity, philosophically speaking, of a belief in an absolute and universal power."
When Burnham was in his fifties, his health began to decline. He developed colitis and in 1909 was diagnosed with diabetes, which affected his circulatory system and led to an infection in his foot which was to continue for the remainder of his life.
On April 14, 1912, Burnham and his wife were aboard the S.S." Olympic" of the White Star Line, traveling to Europe to tour Heidelberg, Germany. When he attempted to send a telegram to his friend Frank Millet, who was traveling the opposite direction, from Europe to the United States, on the S.S." Titanic", he learned that the ship had sunk in an accident and Millet was not a survivor. Burnham died just 47 days later from colitis complicated by his diabetes and food poisoning from a meal eaten in Heidelberg.
At the time of his death, D.H. Burnham and Co. was the world's largest architectural firm. Even legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright, although strongly critical of Burnham's Beaux Arts European influences, still admired him as a man and eulogized him, saying: "[Burnham] made masterful use of the methods and men of his time...[As] an enthusiastic promoter of great construction enterprises...his powerful personality was supreme." The successor firm to Burnham's practice was Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, which continued in some form until 2006. Burnham was interred at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.
Tributes to Burnham include Burnham Park and Daniel Burnham Court in Chicago, Burnham Park in Baguio City in the Philippines, Daniel Burnham Court in San Francisco (formerly Hemlock Street between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street), the annual "Daniel Burnham Award for a Comprehensive Plan" (run by the American Planning Association), and the "Burnham Memorial Competition" held in 2009 to create a memorial to Burnham and his Plan of Chicago. Collections of Burnham's personal and professional papers, photographs, and other archival materials are held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In addition, the Reliance Building in Chicago, which was designed by Burnham and Root, is now the Hotel Burnham, although Root was the primary architect before his death in 1891.
Informational notes
Citations
Bibliography | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40462 |
Halophyte
A halophyte is a salt-tolerant plant that grows in soil or waters of high salinity, coming into contact with saline water through its roots or by salt spray, such as in saline semi-deserts, mangrove swamps, marshes and sloughs and seashores. The word derives from Ancient Greek ἅλας (halas) 'salt' and φυτόν (phyton) 'plant'. An example of a halophyte is the salt marsh grass "Spartina alterniflora" (smooth cordgrass). Relatively few plant species are halophytes—perhaps only 2% of all plant species.
The large majority of plant species are glycophytes, which are not salt-tolerant and are damaged fairly easily by high salinity.
Halophytes can be classified in many ways. According to Stocker (1933), it is mainly of 3 kinds, viz.
1. Aqua-halines
2. Terrestro-halines
3. Aero-halines
Again, according to Iversen (1936), these plants are classified with respect to the salinity of the soil on which they grow.
1. Oligo-halophytes (amount of NaCl in the soil is 0.01 to 0.1%)
2. Meso-halophytes (amount of NaCl in the soil is 0.1 to 1%)
3. Euhalophytes (amount of NaCl in the soil is >1%)
Major habitats where halophytes flourish include mangrove swamps, sand and cliff shorelines in the tropics, salt deserts and semi-deserts, the Sargasso Sea, mudflats and salt marshes, kelp forests and beds, salt lakes and salt steppes of the Pannonian region, wash fringes, isolated inland saline grasslands, and in places where people have brought about salination.
One quantitative measure of salt tolerance (halotolerance) is the total dissolved solids in irrigation water that a plant can tolerate. Seawater typically contains 40 grams per litre (g/l) of dissolved salts (mostly sodium chloride). Beans and rice can tolerate about 1–3 g/l, and are considered glycophytes (as are most crop plants). At the other extreme, "Salicornia bigelovii" (dwarf glasswort) grows well at 70 g/l of dissolved solids, and is a promising halophyte for use as a crop.
Plants such as barley ("Hordeum vulgare") and the date palm ("Phoenix dactylifera") can tolerate about 5 g/l, and can be considered as marginal halophytes.
Adaptation to saline environments by halophytes may take the form of salt tolerance or salt avoidance. Plants that avoid the effects of high salt even though they live in a saline environment may be referred to as facultative halophytes rather than 'true', or obligatory, halophytes.
For example, a short-lived plant species that completes its reproductive life cycle during periods (such as a rainy season) when the salt concentration is low would be avoiding salt rather than tolerating it. Or a plant species may maintain a 'normal' internal salt concentration by excreting excess salts through its leaves, by way of a hydathode, or by concentrating salts in leaves that later die and drop off.
In an effort to improve agricultural production in regions where crops are exposed to salinity, research is focused on improving understanding of the various mechanisms whereby plants respond to salinity stress, so that more robust crop halophytes may be developed. Adaptive responses to salinity stress have been identified at molecular, cellular, metabolic, and physiological levels.
Some halophytes are:
Some halophytes are being studied for use as "3rd-generation" biofuel precursors. Halophytes such as "Salicornia bigelovii" can be grown in harsh environments and typically do not compete with food crops for resources, making them promising sources of biodiesel or bioalcohol. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40465 |
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Saint Paul (abbreviated St. Paul) is the capital and second-most populous city of the U.S. state of Minnesota. As of 2019, the city's estimated population was 308,096. Saint Paul is the county seat of Ramsey County, the smallest and most densely populated county in Minnesota. The city lies mostly on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the area surrounding its point of confluence with the Minnesota River, and adjoins Minneapolis, the state's largest city. Known as the "Twin Cities", the two form the core of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, the 16th-largest metropolitan area in the United States, with about 3.6 million residents.
Founded near historic Native American settlements as a trading and transportation center, the city rose to prominence when it was named the capital of the Minnesota Territory in 1849. The Dakota name for Saint Paul is "Imnizaska". Regionally, the city is known for the Xcel Energy Center, home of the Minnesota Wild, and for the Science Museum of Minnesota. As a business hub of the Upper Midwest, it is the headquarters of companies such as Ecolab. Saint Paul, along with its twin city, Minneapolis, is known for its high literacy rate.
The settlement originally began at present-day Lambert's Landing, but was known as Pig's Eye after Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant established a popular tavern there. When Lucien Galtier, the first Catholic pastor of the region, established the Log Chapel of Saint Paul (shortly thereafter to become the first location of the Cathedral of Saint Paul), he made it known that the settlement was now to be called by that name, as "Saint Paul as applied to a town or city was well appropriated, this monosyllable is short, sounds good, it is understood by all Christian denominations".
Burial mounds in present-day Indian Mounds Park suggest that the area was originally inhabited by the Hopewell Native Americans about two thousand years ago. From the early 17th century until 1837, the Mdewakanton Dakota, a tribe of the Sioux, lived near the mounds after fleeing their ancestral home of Mille Lacs Lake from advancing Ojibwe. They called the area "I-mni-za ska dan" ("little white rock") for its exposed white sandstone cliffs. In the Menominee language it is called "Sāēnepān-Menīkān", which means "ribbon, silk or satin village", suggesting its role in trade throughout the region after the introduction of European goods.
Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, US Army officer Zebulon Pike negotiated approximately of land from the local Dakota tribes in 1805 to establish a fort. The negotiated territory was located on both banks of the Mississippi River, starting from Saint Anthony Falls in present-day Minneapolis, to its confluence with the Saint Croix River. Fort Snelling was built on the territory in 1819 at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, which formed a natural barrier to both Native American nations. The 1837 Treaty with the Sioux ceded all local tribal land east of the Mississippi to the U.S. Government. Taoyateduta (Chief Little Crow V) moved his band at Kaposia across the river to the south. Fur traders, explorers, and missionaries came to the area for the fort's protection. Many of the settlers were French-Canadians who lived nearby. However, as a whiskey trade flourished, military officers banned settlers from the fort-controlled lands. Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant, a retired fur trader-turned-bootlegger who particularly irritated officials, set up his tavern, the Pig's Eye, near present-day Lambert's Landing. By the early 1840s, the community had become important as a trading center and a destination for settlers heading west. Locals called the area "Pig's Eye" (French: "L'Œil du Cochon") or "Pig's Eye Landing" after Parrant's popular tavern.
In 1841, Father Lucien Galtier was sent to minister to the Catholic French Canadians and established a chapel, named for his favorite saint, Paul the Apostle, on the bluffs above Lambert's Landing. Galtier intended for the settlement to adopt the name Saint Paul in honor of the new chapel. In 1847, a New York educator named Harriet Bishop moved to the area and opened the city's first school. The Minnesota Territory was formalized in 1849 and Saint Paul named as its capital. In 1857, the territorial legislature voted to move the capital to Saint Peter. However, Joe Rolette, a territorial legislator, stole the physical text of the approved bill and went into hiding, thus preventing the move. On May 11, 1858, Minnesota was admitted to the union as the thirty-second state, with Saint Paul as the capital.
That year, more than 1,000 steamboats were in service at Saint Paul, making the city a gateway for settlers to the Minnesota frontier or Dakota Territory. Natural geography was a primary reason that the city became a landing. The area was the last accessible point to unload boats coming upriver due to the Mississippi River Valley's stone bluffs. During this period, Saint Paul was called "The Last City of the East." Industrialist James J. Hill constructed and expanded his network of railways into the Great Northern Railway and Northern Pacific Railway, which were headquartered in Saint Paul. Today they are collectively part of the BNSF Railway.
On August 20, 1904, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes damaged hundreds of downtown buildings, causing USD $1.78 million ($ million present-day) in damages to the city and ripping spans from the High Bridge. In the 1960s, during urban renewal, Saint Paul razed western neighborhoods close to downtown. The city also contended with the creation of the interstate freeway system in a fully built landscape. From 1959 to 1961, the western Rondo Neighborhood was demolished by the construction of Interstate 94, which brought attention to racial segregation and unequal housing in northern cities. The annual Rondo Days celebration commemorates the African American community.
Downtown had short skyscraper-building booms beginning in the 1970s. The tallest buildings, such as Galtier Plaza (Jackson and Sibley Towers), The Pointe of Saint Paul condominiums, and the city's tallest building, Wells Fargo Place (formerly Minnesota World Trade Center), were constructed in the late 1980s. In the 1990s and 2000s, the tradition of bringing new immigrant groups to the city continued. As of 2004, nearly 10% of the city's population were recent Hmong immigrants from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar. Saint Paul is the location of the Hmong Archives.
Saint Paul's history and growth as a landing port are tied to water. The city's defining physical characteristic, the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, was carved into the region during the last ice age, as were the steep river bluffs and dramatic palisades on which the city is built. Receding glaciers and Lake Agassiz forced torrents of water from a glacial river that undercut the river valleys. The city is situated in east-central Minnesota.
The Mississippi River forms a municipal boundary on part of the city's west, southwest, and southeast sides. Minneapolis, the state's largest city, lies to the west. Falcon Heights, Lauderdale, Roseville, and Maplewood are north, with Maplewood lying to the east. The cities of West Saint Paul and South Saint Paul are to the south, as are Lilydale, Mendota, and Mendota Heights, although across the river from the city. The city's largest lakes are Pig's Eye Lake, which is part of the Mississippi, Lake Phalen, and Lake Como. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and is water.
The Parks and Recreation department is responsible for 160 parks and 41 recreation centers. The city ranked #2 in park access and quality, after only Minneapolis, in the 2018 ParkScore ranking of the top 100 park systems across the United States according to the nonprofit Trust for Public Land.
Saint Paul's Department of Planning and Economic Development divides Saint Paul into seventeen Planning Districts, created in 1979 to allow neighborhoods to participate in governance and use Community Development Block Grants. With a funding agreement directly from the city, the councils share a pool of funds. The councils have significant land-use control, a voice in guiding development, and they organize residents. The boundaries are adjusted depending on population changes; as such, they sometimes overlap established neighborhoods. Though these neighborhoods changed over time, preservationists have saved many of their historically significant structures.
The city's seventeen Planning Districts are:
Saint Paul has a continental climate typical of the Upper Midwestern United States. Winters are frigid and snowy, while summers are warm to hot and humid. On the Köppen climate classification, Saint Paul falls in the hot summer humid continental climate zone ("Dfa"). The city experiences a full range of precipitation and related weather events, including snow, sleet, ice, rain, thunderstorms, tornadoes, and fog.
Due to its northerly location in the United States and lack of large bodies of water to moderate the air, Saint Paul is sometimes subjected to cold Arctic air masses, especially during late December, January, and February. The average annual temperature of gives the Minneapolis−Saint Paul metropolitan area the coldest annual mean temperature of any major metropolitan area in the continental U.S.
The earliest known inhabitants from about 400 A.D. were members of the Hopewell tradition who buried their dead in mounds (now Indian Mounds Park) on the bluffs above the river. The next known inhabitants were the Mdewakanton Dakota in the 17th century who fled their ancestral home of Mille Lacs Lake in central Minnesota in response to westward expansion of the Ojibwe nation. The Ojibwe would later occupy the north (east) bank of the Mississippi River.
By 1800, French-Canadian explorers came through the region and attracted fur traders to the area. Fort Snelling and nearby Pig's Eye Tavern also brought the first Yankees from New England and English, Irish, and Scottish immigrants who had enlisted in the army and settled nearby after discharge. These early settlers and entrepreneurs built houses on the heights north of the river. The first wave of immigration came with the Irish who settled at Connemara Patch along the Mississippi, named for their home in Connemara Ireland. The Irish would become prolific in politics, city governance, and public safety, much to the chagrin of the Germans and French who had grown into the majority. In 1850, the first of many groups of Swedish immigrants passed through Saint Paul on their way to farming communities in northern and western regions of the territory. A large group settled in Swede Hollow, which would later become home to Poles, Italians, and Mexicans. The last Swedish presence had moved up Saint Paul's East Side along Payne Avenue in the 1950s.
In terms of people who specified European ancestry in the 2005–2007 American Community Survey, the city was 26.4% German, 13.8% Irish, 8.4% Norwegian, 7.0% Swedish, and 6.2% English. There is also a visible community of people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, representing 4.2% of Saint Paul's population. By the 1980s, the Thomas Dale area, once an Austro-Hungarian enclave known as Frogtown (German: "Froschburg"), became home to Vietnamese people who had left their war-torn country. A settlement program for the Hmong diaspora came soon after, and by 2000, the Saint Paul Hmong were the largest urban contingent in the United States. Mexican immigrants have settled in Saint Paul's West Side since the 1930s, and have grown enough that Mexico opened a foreign consulate in 2005.
The majority of residents claiming religious affiliation are Christian, split between the Roman Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations. The Roman Catholic presence comes from Irish, German, Scottish, and French Canadian settlers who, in time, would be bolstered by Hispanic immigrants. There are Jewish synagogues such as Mount Zion Temple and relatively small populations of Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. The city has been dubbed "paganistan" due to its large Wiccan population.
As of the 2005–2007 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, White Americans made up 66.5% of Saint Paul's population, of whom 62.1% were non-Hispanic whites, down from 93.6% in 1970. Blacks or African Americans made up 13.9% of Saint Paul's population, of whom 13.5% were non-Hispanic blacks. American Indians made up 0.8% of Saint Paul's population, of whom 0.6% were non-Hispanic. Asian Americans made up 12.3% of Saint Paul's population, of whom 12.2% were non-Hispanic. Pacific Islander Americans made up less than 0.1% of Saint Paul's population. Individuals of other races made up 3.4% of Saint Paul's population, of whom 0.2% were non-Hispanic. Individuals from two or more races made up 3.1% of Saint Paul's population, of whom 2.6% were non-Hispanic. In addition, Hispanics and Latinos made up 8.7% of Saint Paul's population.
As of the 2000 U.S. Census, there were 287,151 people, 112,109 households, and 60,999 families residing in the city. The racial makeup of the city was 67.0% White, 11.7% African American, 1.1% Native American, 12.4% Asian (mostly Hmong), 0.1% Pacific Islander, 3.8% from other races, and 3.9% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino people of any race were 7.9% of the population.
As of the census of 2010, there were 285,068 people, 111,001 households, and 59,689 families residing in the city. The population density was . There were 120,795 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the city was 60.1% white, 15.7% African American, 1.1% Native American, 15.0% Asian, 0.1% Pacific Islander, 3.9% from other races, and 4.2% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino people of any race were 9.6% of the population.
There were 111,001 households of which 30.4% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 34.1% were married couples living together, 14.8% had a female householder with no husband present, 4.9% had a male householder with no wife present, and 46.2% were non-families. 35.8% of all households were made up of individuals and 8.5% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.47 and the average family size was 3.33.
The median age in the city was 30.9 years. 25.1% of residents were under the age of 18; 13.9% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 29.6% were from 25 to 44; 22.6% were from 45 to 64; and 9% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the city was 48.9% male and 51.1% female.
The Minneapolis–Saint Paul–Bloomington area employs 1,570,700 people in the private sector as of July 2008, 82.43 percent of which work in private service providing-related jobs.
Major corporations headquartered in Saint Paul include Ecolab, a chemical and cleaning product company which was named in 2008 by the "Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal" as the eighth best place to work in the Twin Cites for companies with 1,000 full-time Minnesota employees, and Securian Financial Group Inc.
The 3M Company is often cited as one of Saint Paul's companies, though it is located in adjacent Maplewood. 3M employs 16,000 people throughout Minnesota. St. Jude Medical, a manufacturer of medical devices, is directly across the northern border of Saint Paul in Little Canada, though the company's address is listed in Saint Paul.
The city was home to the Ford Motor Company's Twin Cities Assembly Plant, which opened in 1924 and closed at the end of 2011. The plant was in Highland Park on the Mississippi River, adjacent to Lock and Dam No. 1, Mississippi River, which generates hydroelectric power. The site is now being cleared of all buildings and tested for contamination to prepare for redevelopment. As the lead developer, the Ryan Company has released a proposed set of zoning changes that will shape how the land will be used.
The city of Saint Paul has financed city development by use of tax increment financing (TIF). In 2018, the city had 55 TIF districts. Some projects that have benefited from TIF funding include the St. Paul Saints stadium, and the affordable housing along the Twin Cities Metro Green Line.
In winter months, Saint Paul hosts the Saint Paul Winter Carnival, a tradition that began in 1886 when a New York reporter called Saint Paul "another Siberia." Attended by 350,000 visitors annually, the event showcases ice sculpting, an annual treasure hunt, winter food, activities, and an ice palace. The Como Zoo and Conservatory and adjoining Japanese Garden are popular year-round. The historic Landmark Center in downtown Saint Paul hosts cultural and arts organizations. The city's notable recreation locations include Indian Mounds Park, Battle Creek Regional Park, Harriet Island Regional Park, Highland Park, the Wabasha Street Caves, Lake Como, Lake Phalen, and Rice Park, as well as several areas abutting the Mississippi River. The Irish Fair of Minnesota is also held annually at the Harriet Island Pavilion area. And the country's largest Hmong American sports festival, the Freedom Festival, is held the first weekend of July at McMurray Field near Como Park.
The city is associated with the Minnesota State Fair in nearby Falcon Heights just west of Saint Paul's Como Park neighborhood and southeast of the University of Minnesota Saint Paul Campus. Though Fort Snelling is on the Minneapolis side of the Mississippi River bluff, the area including Fort Snelling State Park and Pike Island is managed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources headquartered in the city.
Saint Paul is the birthplace of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz ("Peanuts"), who lived in Merriam Park from infancy until 1960. Schulz's Snoopy cartoon inspired giant, decorated "Peanuts" sculptures around the city, a Chamber of Commerce promotion in the late 1990s. Other notable residents include writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, playwright August Wilson, who premiered many of the ten plays in his Pittsburgh Cycle at the local Penumbra Theater.
The Ordway Center for the Performing Arts hosts theater productions and the Minnesota Opera is a founding tenant. RiverCentre, attached to Xcel Energy Center, serves as the city's convention center. The city has contributed to the music of Minnesota and the Twin Cities music scene through various venues. Great jazz musicians have passed through the influential Artists' Quarter, first established in the 1970s in Whittier, Minneapolis, and moved to downtown Saint Paul in 1994. Artists' Quarter also hosts the Soapboxing Poetry Slam, home of the 2009 National Poetry Slam Champions. At The Black Dog, in Lowertown, many French or European jazz musicians (Evan Parker, Tony Hymas, Benoît Delbecq, François Corneloup) have met Twin Cities musicians and started new groups touring in Europe. Groups and performers such as Fantastic Merlins, Dean Magraw/Davu Seru, Merciless Ghosts, and Willie Murphy are regulars. The Turf Club in Midway has been a music scene landmark since the 1940s. Saint Paul is also the home base of the internationally acclaimed Rose Ensemble. As an Irish stronghold, the city boasts popular Irish pubs with live music, such as Shamrocks, The Dubliner, and O'Gara's. The internationally acclaimed Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is the nation's only full-time professional chamber orchestra. The Minnesota Centennial Showboat on the Mississippi River began in 1958 with Minnesota's first centennial celebration.
Saint Paul hosts a number of museums, including the University of Minnesota's Goldstein Museum of Design, the Minnesota Children's Museum, the Schubert Club Museum of Musical Instruments, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Traces Center for History and Culture, the Minnesota History Center, the Alexander Ramsey House, the James J. Hill House, the Minnesota Transportation Museum, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the Twin City Model Railroad Museum.
The Saint Paul division of Parks and Recreation runs over 1,500 organized sports teams.
Saint Paul hosts a number of professional, semi-professional, and amateur sports teams. The Minnesota Wild play their home games in downtown Saint Paul's Xcel Energy Center, which opened in 2000. The Wild brought the NHL back to Minnesota for the first time since 1993, when the Minnesota North Stars left the state for Dallas, Texas. (The World Hockey Association's Minnesota Fighting Saints played in Saint Paul from 1972 to 1977.) Citing the history of hockey in the Twin Cities and teams at all levels, "Sports Illustrated" called Saint Paul the new Hockeytown U.S.A. in 2007.
The Xcel Energy Center, a multipurpose entertainment and sports venue, can host concerts and accommodate nearly all sporting events. It occupies the site of the demolished Saint Paul Civic Center. The Xcel Energy Center hosts the Minnesota high school boys hockey tournament, the Minnesota high school girls' volleyball tournament, and concerts throughout the year. In 2004, it was named the best overall sports venue in the US by ESPN.
The St. Paul Saints is the city's independent league baseball team. There have been several different teams called the Saints over the years. Founded in 1884, they were shut down in 1961 after the Minnesota Twins moved to Bloomington. The St. Paul Saints were brought back in 1993 as an independent baseball team in the Northern League, moving to the American Association in 2006. Their home games are played at the open-air CHS Field in downtown's Lowertown Historic District. Four noted Major League All-Star baseball players are natives of Saint Paul: Hall of Fame outfielder Dave Winfield, Hall of Fame infielder Paul Molitor, Hall of Fame pitcher Jack Morris, and first baseman Joe Mauer. The all-black St. Paul Colored Gophers played four seasons in Saint Paul from 1907 to 1911.
The St. Paul Twin Stars of the National Premier Soccer League play their home games at Macalester Stadium. The first curling club in Saint Paul was founded in 1888. The current club, the St. Paul Curling Club, was founded in 1912 and is the largest curling club in the United States. The Minnesota RollerGirls are a flat-track roller derby league based in the Roy Wilkins Auditorium. Minnesota's oldest athletic organization, the Minnesota Boat Club, resides in the Mississippi River on Raspberry Island. Saint Paul is also home to Circus Juventas, the largest circus arts school in North America.
On March 25, 2015, Major League Soccer announced that it had awarded its 23rd MLS franchise to Minnesota United FC, a team from the lower-level North American Soccer League. Bill McGuire and his ownership group, which includes Jim Pohlad of the Minnesota Twins, Glen Taylor of the Minnesota Timberwolves, former Minnesota Wild investor Glen Nelson, and his daughter Wendy Carlson Nelson of the Carlson hospitality company, had intended to build a privately financed soccer-specific stadium in Downtown Minneapolis near the Minneapolis Farmer's Market. But their plan was met with heavy opposition from former Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, who said her city was suffering from "stadium fatigue" after building three stadiums, for the Minnesota Twins, Minnesota Vikings and the Minnesota Golden Gophers, within a six-year span. On July 1, 2015, after failing to reach an agreement with the city of Minneapolis, McGuire and his partners turned their focus to Saint Paul.
On October 23, 2015, Bill McGuire of Minnesota United FC and former Saint Paul Mayor Chris Coleman announced that a privately financed soccer-specific stadium would be built on the vacant Metro Transit bus barn site in Saint Paul's Midway neighborhood near the intersection of Snelling Avenue and University Avenue. It is midway between downtown Saint Paul and downtown Minneapolis. The stadium, Allianz Field, opened in April 2019 and seats 19,400. The team began playing in the MLS in 2017.
On May 15, 2018, the Minnesota Whitecaps joined the National Women's Hockey League as their fifth franchise. Founded in 2004, the team originally played in the Western Women's Hockey League before going independent in 2010 when that league folded. The Whitecaps play their home games at TRIA Rink, a 1,200-seat hockey arena and practice facility in downtown Saint Paul. The team began playing in the NWHL in 2018.
The Timberwolves, Twins, Vikings, and Lynx all play in Minneapolis.
Saint Paul has a variation of the strong mayor–council form of government. The mayor is the chief executive and chief administrative officer for the city and the seven-member city council is the legislative body. The mayor is elected by the entire city, while members of the city council are elected from seven different geographic wards of approximately equal population. Both the mayor and council members serve four-year terms. The current mayor is Melvin Carter (DFL), Saint Paul's first African-American mayor. Aside from Norm Coleman, who became a Republican during his second term, Saint Paul has not elected a Republican mayor since 1952.
The city is also the county seat of Ramsey County, named for Alexander Ramsey, the state's first governor. The county once spanned much of the present-day metropolitan area and was originally to be named Saint Paul County after the city. Today it is geographically the smallest county and the most densely populated. Ramsey is the only home rule county in Minnesota; the seven-member Board of Commissioners appoints a county manager whose office is in the combination city hall/county courthouse along with the Minnesota Second Judicial Courts. The nearby Law Enforcement Center houses the Ramsey County Sheriff's office.
Saint Paul is the capital of the state of Minnesota. The city hosts the capitol building, designed by Saint Paul resident Cass Gilbert, and the House and Senate office buildings. The Minnesota Governor's Residence, which is used for some state functions, is on Summit Avenue. The Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (affiliated with the Democratic Party) is headquartered in Saint Paul. Numerous state departments and services are also headquartered in Saint Paul, such as the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.
The city is split into four Minnesota Senate districts (64, 65, 66 and 67) and eight Minnesota House of Representatives districts (64A, 64B, 65A, 65B, 66A, 66B, 67A and 67B), all of which are held by Democrats.
Saint Paul is the heart of Minnesota's 4th congressional district, represented by Democrat Betty McCollum. The district has been in DFL hands without interruption since 1949. Minnesota is represented in the US Senate by Democrat Amy Klobuchar, a former Hennepin County Attorney, and Democrat Tina Smith, former Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota.
*District also includes Falcon Heights, Lauderdale and Roseville.
Saint Paul is second in the United States in the number of higher education institutions per capita. Higher education institutions that call Saint Paul home include three public and eight private colleges and universities and five post-secondary institutions. Well-known colleges and universities include the Saint Catherine University, Concordia University, Hamline University, Macalester College, and the University of St. Thomas. Metropolitan State University and Saint Paul College, which focus on non-traditional students, are based in Saint Paul, as well as a law school, Mitchell Hamline School of Law.
The Saint Paul Public Schools district is the state's largest school district and serves approximately 39,000 students. The district is extremely diverse with students from families speaking 90 different languages, although only five languages are used for most school communication: English, Spanish, Hmong, Karen, and Somali. The district runs 82 different schools, including 52 elementary schools, twelve middle schools, seven high schools, ten alternative schools, and one special education school, employing over 6,500 teachers and staff. The school district also oversees community education programs for pre-K and adult learners, including Early Childhood Family Education, GED Diploma, language programs, and various learning opportunities for community members of all ages. In 2006, Saint Paul Public Schools celebrated its 150th anniversary. Some students attend public schools in other school districts chosen by their families under Minnesota's open enrollment statute.
A variety of K-12 private, parochial, and public charter schools are also represented in the city. In 1992, Saint Paul became the first city in the US to sponsor and open a charter school, now found in most states across the nation. Saint Paul is currently home to 21 charter schools as well as 38 private schools. The Saint Paul Public Library system includes a central library and twelve branch locations.
Residents of Saint Paul can receive 10 broadcast television stations, five of which broadcast from within Saint Paul. One daily newspaper, the "St. Paul Pioneer Press", two weekly neighborhood newspapers, the "East Side Review" and "City Pages" (owned by The Star Tribune Company), and several monthly or semimonthly neighborhood papers serve the city. It was the only city in the United States with a population of 250,000 or more to see an increase in circulation of Sunday newspapers in 2007. Several media outlets based in neighboring Minneapolis also serve the Saint Paul community, including the "Star Tribune". Saint Paul is home to Minnesota Public Radio, a three-format system that broadcasts on nearly 40 stations around the Midwest. MPR locally delivers news and information, classical, and The Current (which plays a wide variety of music). The station has 110,000 regional members and more than 800,000 listeners each week throughout the Upper Midwest, the largest audience of any regional public radio network. Also operating as part of American Public Media, MPR's programming reaches five million listeners, most notably through "Live from Here", hosted by Chris Thile (previously known as "A Prairie Home Companion", hosted by Garrison Keillor, who also lives in the city). The Fitzgerald Theater, renamed in 1994 for Saint Paul native and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, is home to the show.
Interstate Highways
US Highways
Minnesota Highways
Residents use Interstate 35E running north–south and Interstate 94 running east–west. Trunk highways include U.S. Highway 52, Minnesota State Highway 280, and Minnesota State Highway 5. Saint Paul has several unique roads such as Ayd Mill Road, Phalen Boulevard and Shepard Road/Warner Road, which diagonally follow particular geographic features in the city. Biking is also gaining popularity, due to the creation of more paved bike lanes that connect to other bike routes throughout the metropolitan area and the creation of Nice Ride Minnesota, a seasonally operated nonprofit bicycle sharing and rental system that has over 1,550 bicycles and 170 stations in both Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Downtown Saint Paul has a five-mile (8 km) enclosed skyway system over twenty-five city blocks. The Avenue of the Saints connects Saint Paul with Saint Louis, Missouri.
The layout of city streets and roads has often drawn complaints. While he was Governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura appeared on the "Late Show with David Letterman", and remarked that the streets were designed by "drunken Irishmen". He later apologized, though people had been complaining about the fractured grid system for more than a century by that point. Some of the city's road design is the result of the curve of the Mississippi River, hilly topography, conflicts between developers of different neighborhoods in the early city, and grand plans only half-realized. Outside of downtown, the roads are less confusing, but most roads are named, rather than numbered, increasing the difficulty for non-natives to navigate.
Metro Transit provides bus service and light rail in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area. The METRO Green Line is an light rail line that connects downtown Saint Paul to downtown Minneapolis with 14 stations in Saint Paul. The Green Line runs west along University Avenue, through the University of Minnesota campus, until it links up and then shares stations with the METRO Blue Line in downtown Minneapolis. Construction began in November 2010 and the line began service on June 14, 2014. Roughly 45,000 people rode on the first day; an average 28,000 riders are expected per day.
Metro Transit opened the METRO A Line, Minneapolis–Saint Paul's first arterial bus rapid transit line, along Snelling Avenue and Ford Parkway. The A Line connects the METRO Blue Line at 46th Street station to Rosedale Center with a connection at the Green Line Snelling Avenue station. The A Line is the first in a series of planned arterial bus rapid transit lines and is set to open in early 2016.
Amtrak's "Empire Builder" between Chicago and Seattle stops twice daily in each direction at the newly renovated Saint Paul Union Depot. Ridership on the train increased about 6% from 2005 to over 505,000 in fiscal year 2007. A Minnesota Department of Transportation study found that increased daily service to Chicago should be economically viable, especially if it originates in Saint Paul and does not experience delays from the rest of the western route of the Empire Builder. Saint Paul is the site of the Pig's Eye Yard, a major freight classification yard for Canadian Pacific Railway. As of 2003, the yard handled over 1,000 freight cars per day. Both Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe run trains through the yard, though they are not classified at Pig's Eye. Burlington Northern Santa Fe operates the large Northtown Yard in Minneapolis, which handles about 600 cars per day. There are several other small yards located around the city.
Saint Paul is served by the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport (MSP), which sits on southwest of the city on the west side of the Mississippi River between Minnesota State Highway 5, Interstate 494, Minnesota State Highway 77, and Minnesota State Highway 62. The airport serves three international, twelve domestic, seven charter, and four regional carriers and is a hub and home base for Delta Air Lines, Mesaba Airlines and Sun Country Airlines. Saint Paul is also served by the St. Paul Downtown Airport located just south of downtown, across the Mississippi River. The airport, also known as Holman Field, is a reliever airport run by the Metropolitan Airports Commission. The airport houses Minnesota's Air National Guard and is tailored to local corporate aviation. There are three runways that serve about 100 resident aircraft and a flight training school. The Holman Field Administration Building and Riverside Hangar are on the National Register of Historic Places. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40469 |
Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki (; , ), also known as Thessalonica (), Saloniki or Salonica (; , , ), is the second-largest city in Greece, with over 1 million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, and the capital of the geographic region of Macedonia, the administrative region of Central Macedonia and the Decentralized Administration of Macedonia and Thrace. It is also known in Greek as (), literally "the co-capital", a reference to its historical status as the () or "co-reigning" city of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, alongside Constantinople.
Thessaloniki is located on the Thermaic Gulf, at the northwest corner of the Aegean Sea. It is bounded on the west by the delta of the Axios. The municipality of Thessaloniki, the historical center, had a population of 325,182 in 2011, while the Thessaloniki Urban Area had a population of 824,676 and the Thessaloniki metropolitan area had 1,030,338 inhabitants in 2011. It is Greece's second major economic, industrial, commercial and political centre; it is a major transportation hub for Greece and southeastern Europe, notably through the Port of Thessaloniki. The city is renowned for its festivals, events and vibrant cultural life in general, and is considered to be Greece's cultural capital. Events such as the Thessaloniki International Fair and the Thessaloniki International Film Festival are held annually, while the city also hosts the largest bi-annual meeting of the Greek diaspora. Thessaloniki was the 2014 European Youth Capital.
The city of Thessaloniki was founded in 315 BC by Cassander of Macedon. An important metropolis by the Roman period, Thessaloniki was the second largest and wealthiest city of the Byzantine Empire. It was conquered by the Ottomans in 1430, and remained an important seaport and multi-ethnic metropolis during the nearly five centuries of Turkish rule. It passed from the Ottoman Empire to Greece on 8 November 1912. It is home to numerous notable Byzantine monuments, including the Paleochristian and Byzantine monuments of Thessaloniki, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as several Roman, Ottoman and Sephardic Jewish structures. The city's main university, Aristotle University, is the largest in Greece and the Balkans.
Thessaloniki is a popular tourist destination in Greece. In 2013, "National Geographic Magazine" included Thessaloniki in its top tourist destinations worldwide, while in 2014 "Financial Times" FDI magazine (Foreign Direct Investments) declared Thessaloniki as the best mid-sized European city of the future for human capital and lifestyle. Among street photographers, the center of Thessaloniki is also considered the most popular destination for street photography in Greece.
The original name of the city was . It was named after the princess Thessalonike of Macedon, the half sister of Alexander the Great, whose name means "Thessalian victory", from Thessalos, and 'victory' (Nike), honoring the Macedonian victory at the Battle of Crocus Field (353/352 BC).
Minor variants are also found, including , , , and .
The name is first attested in Greek in the Chronicle of the Morea (14th century), and is common in folk songs, but it must have originated earlier, as al-Idrisi called it "Salunik" already in the 12th century. It is the basis for the city's name in other languages: ("Solun") in Old Church Slavonic, () in Ladino, ("Selânik") in Ottoman Turkish and in modern Turkish, in Italian, "Solun" or in the local and neighboring South Slavic languages, ("Saloníki") in Russian, and "Sãrunã" in Aromanian.
In English, the city can be called Thessaloniki, Salonika, Thessalonica, Salonica, Thessalonika, Saloniki, Thessalonike, or Thessalonice. In printed texts, the most common name and spelling until the early 20th century was Thessalonica; through most of rest of the 20th century, it was Salonika. By about 1985, the most common single name became Thessaloniki. The forms with the Latin ending "-a" taken together remain more common than those with the phonetic Greek ending "-i" and much more common than the ancient transliteration "-e".
Thessaloniki was revived as the city's official name in 1912, when it joined the Kingdom of Greece during the Balkan Wars. In local speech, the city's name is typically pronounced with a dark and deep "L" characteristic of Modern Macedonian accent. The name is often abbreviated as .
The city was founded around 315 BC by the King Cassander of Macedon, on or near the site of the ancient town of Therma and 26 other local villages. He named it after his wife Thessalonike, a half-sister of Alexander the Great and princess of Macedonia as daughter of Philip II. Under the kingdom of Macedonia the city retained its own autonomy and parliament and evolved to become the most important city in Macedonia.
After the fall of the Kingdom of Macedonia in 168 BC, in 148 BC Thessalonica was made the capital of the Roman province of Macedonia. Thessalonica became a free city of the Roman Republic under Mark Antony in 41 BC. It grew to be an important trade hub located on the "Via Egnatia", the road connecting Dyrrhachium with Byzantium, which facilitated trade between Thessaloniki and great centers of commerce such as Rome and Byzantium. Thessaloniki also lay at the southern end of the main north–south route through the Balkans along the valleys of the Morava and Axios river valleys, thereby linking the Balkans with the rest of Greece. The city became the capital of one of the four Roman districts of Macedonia; later it became the capital of all the Greek provinces of the Roman Empire because of its importance in the Balkan peninsula.
At the time of the Roman Empire, about 50 A.D., Thessaloniki was also one of the early centers of Christianity; while on his second missionary journey, Paul the Apostle visited this city's chief synagogue on three Sabbaths and sowed the seeds for Thessaloniki's first Christian church. Later, Paul wrote two letters to the new church at Thessaloniki, preserved in the Biblical canon as First and Second Thessalonians. Some scholars hold that the First Epistle to the Thessalonians is the first written book of the New Testament.
In 306 AD, Thessaloniki acquired a patron saint, St. Demetrius, a Christian whom Galerius is said to have put to death. Most scholars agree with Hippolyte Delehaye's theory that Demetrius was not a Thessaloniki native, but his veneration was transferred to Thessaloniki when it replaced Sirmium as the main military base in the Balkans. A basilical church dedicated to St. Demetrius, Hagios Demetrios, was first built in the 5th century AD and is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
When the Roman Empire was divided into the tetrarchy, Thessaloniki became the administrative capital of one of the four portions of the Empire under Galerius Maximianus Caesar, where Galerius commissioned an imperial palace, a new hippodrome, a triumphal arch and a mausoleum among others.
In 379, when the Roman Prefecture of Illyricum was divided between the East and West Roman Empires, Thessaloniki became the capital of the new Prefecture of Illyricum. The following year, the Edict of Thessalonica made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. In 390, Gothic troops under the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, led a massacre against the inhabitants of Thessalonica, who had risen in revolt against the Gothic soldiers. By the time of the Fall of Rome in 476, Thessaloniki was the second-largest city of the Eastern Roman Empire.
From the first years of the Byzantine Empire, Thessaloniki was considered the second city in the Empire after Constantinople, both in terms of wealth and size. with a population of 150,000 in the mid-12th century. The city held this status until its transfer to Venetian control in 1423. In the 14th century, the city's population exceeded 100,000 to 150,000, making it larger than London at the time.
During the 6th and 7th centuries, the area around Thessaloniki was invaded by Avars and Slavs, who unsuccessfully laid siege to the city several times, as narrated in the "Miracles of Saint Demetrius". Traditional historiography stipulates that many Slavs settled in the hinterland of Thessaloniki; however, modern scholars consider this migration to have been on a much smaller scale than previously thought. In the 9th century, the Byzantine Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius, both natives of the city, created the first literary language of the Slavs, the Old Church Slavonic, most likely based on the Slavic dialect used in the hinterland of their hometown.
An Arab naval attack in 904 resulted in the sack of the city.
The economic expansion of the city continued through the 12th century as the rule of the Komnenoi emperors expanded Byzantine control to the north. Thessaloniki passed out of Byzantine hands in 1204, when Constantinople was captured by the forces of the Fourth Crusade and incorporated the city and its surrounding territories in the Kingdom of Thessalonica — which then became the largest vassal of the Latin Empire. In 1224, the Kingdom of Thessalonica was overrun by the Despotate of Epirus, a remnant of the former Byzantine Empire, under Theodore Komnenos Doukas who crowned himself Emperor, and the city became the capital of the short-lived Empire of Thessalonica. Following his defeat at Klokotnitsa however in 1230, the Empire of Thessalonica became a vassal state of the Second Bulgarian Empire until it was recovered again in 1246, this time by the Nicaean Empire.
In 1342, the city saw the rise of the Commune of the Zealots, an anti-aristocratic party formed of sailors and the poor, which is nowadays described as social-revolutionary. The city was practically independent of the rest of the Empire, as it had its own government, a form of republic. The zealot movement was overthrown in 1350 and the city was reunited with the rest of the Empire.
The capture of Gallipoli by the Ottomans in 1354 kicked off a rapid Turkish expansion in the southern Balkans, conducted both by the Ottomans themselves and by semi-independent Turkish ghazi warrior-bands. By 1369, the Ottomans were able to conquer Adrianople (modern Edirne), which became their new capital until 1453. Thessalonica, ruled by Manuel II Palaiologos (r. 1391–1425) itself surrendered after a lengthy siege in 1383–1387, along with most of eastern and central Macedonia, to the forces of Sultan Murad I. Initially, the surrendered cities were allowed complete autonomy in exchange for payment of the "kharaj" poll-tax. Following the death of Emperor John V Palaiologos in 1391, however, Manuel II escaped Ottoman custody and went to Constantinople, where he was crowned emperor, succeeding his father. This angered Sultan Bayezid I, who laid waste to the remaining Byzantine territories, and then turned on Chrysopolis, which was captured by storm and largely destroyed. Thessalonica too submitted again to Ottoman rule at this time, possibly after brief resistance, but was treated more leniently: although the city was brought under full Ottoman control, the Christian population and the Church retained most of their possessions, and the city retained its institutions.
Thessalonica remained in Ottoman hands until 1403, when Emperor Manuel II sided with Bayezid's eldest son Süleyman in the Ottoman succession struggle that broke out following the crushing defeat and capture of Bayezid at the Battle of Ankara against Tamerlane in 1402. In exchange for his support, in the Treaty of Gallipoli the Byzantine emperor secured the return of Thessalonica, part of its hinterland, the Chalcidice peninsula, and the coastal region between the rivers Strymon and Pineios. Thessalonica and the surrounding region were given as an autonomous appanage to John VII Palaiologos. After his death in 1408, he was succeeded by Manuel's third son, the Despot Andronikos Palaiologos, who was supervised by Demetrios Leontares until 1415. Thessalonica enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity after 1403, as the Turks were preoccupied with their own civil war, but was attacked by the rival Ottoman pretenders in 1412 (by Musa Çelebi) and 1416 (during the uprising of Mustafa Çelebi against Mehmed I). Once the Ottoman civil war ended, the Turkish pressure on the city began to increase again. Just as during the 1383–1387 siege, this led to a sharp division of opinion within the city between factions supporting resistance, if necessary with Western help, or submission to the Ottomans.
In 1423, Despot Andronikos Palaiologos ceded it to the Republic of Venice with the hope that it could be protected from the Ottomans who were besieging the city. The Venetians held Thessaloniki until it was captured by the Ottoman Sultan Murad II on 29 March 1430.
When Sultan Murad II captured Thessaloniki and sacked it in 1430, contemporary reports estimated that about one-fifth of the city's population was enslaved. Ottoman artillery was used to secure the city's capture and bypass its double walls. Upon the conquest of Thessaloniki, some of its inhabitants escaped, including intellectuals such as Theodorus Gaza "Thessalonicensis" and Andronicus Callistus. However, the change of sovereignty from the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman one did not affect the city's prestige as a major imperial city and trading hub. Thessaloniki and Smyrna, although smaller in size than Constantinople, were the Ottoman Empire's most important trading hubs. Thessaloniki's importance was mostly in the field of shipping, but also in manufacturing, while most of the city's trade was controlled by ethnic Greeks.
During the Ottoman period, the city's population of Ottoman Muslims (including those of Turkish origin, as well as Albanian Muslim, Bulgarian Muslim and Greek Muslim of convert origin) grew substantially. According to the 1478 census Selânik (), as the city came to be known in Ottoman Turkish, had 6,094 Greek Orthodox households, 4,320 Muslim ones, and some Catholic. No Jews were recorded in the census suggesting that the subsequent influx of Jewish population was not linked to the already existing Romaniots community. Soon after the turn of the 15th to 16th century, however, nearly 20,000 Sephardic Jews immigrated to Greece from the Iberian Peninsula following their expulsion from Spain by the 1492 Alhambra Decree. By c. 1500, the number of households had grown to 7,986 Greek ones, 8,575 Muslim ones, and 3,770 Jewish. By 1519, Sephardic Jewish households numbered 15,715, 54% of the city's population. Some historians consider the Ottoman regime's invitation to Jewish settlement was a strategy to prevent the ethnic Greek population from dominating the city.
Thessaloniki was the capital of the Sanjak of Selanik within the wider Rumeli Eyalet (Balkans) until 1826, and subsequently the capital of Selanik Eyalet (after 1867, the Selanik Vilayet). This consisted of the sanjaks of Selanik, Serres and Drama between 1826 and 1912.
With the break out of the Greek War of Independence in the spring of 1821, the governor Yusuf Bey imprisoned in his headquarters more than 400 hostages. On 18 May, when Yusuf learned of the insurrection to the villages of Chalkidiki, he ordered half of his hostages to be slaughtered before his eyes. The mulla of Thessaloniki, Hayrıülah, gives the following description of Yusuf's retaliations: ""Every day and every night you hear nothing in the streets of Thessaloniki but shouting and moaning. It seems that Yusuf Bey, the Yeniceri Agasi, the Subaşı, the hocas and the ulemas have all gone raving mad."" It would take until the end of the century for the city's Greek community to recover.
Thessaloniki was also a Janissary stronghold where novice Janissaries were trained. In June 1826, regular Ottoman soldiers attacked and destroyed the Janissary base in Thessaloniki while also killing over 10,000 Janissaries, an event known as The Auspicious Incident in Ottoman history. In 1870–1917, driven by economic growth, the city's population expanded by 70%, reaching 135,000 in 1917.
The last few decades of Ottoman control over the city were an era of revival, particularly in terms of the city's infrastructure. It was at that time that the Ottoman administration of the city acquired an "official" face with the creation of the Government House while a number of new public buildings were built in the eclectic style in order to project the European face both of Thessaloniki and the Ottoman Empire. The city walls were torn down between 1869 and 1889, efforts for a planned expansion of the city are evident as early as 1879, the first tram service started in 1888 and the city streets were illuminated with electric lamp posts in 1908. In 1888 the Oriental Railway connected Thessaloniki to Central Europe via rail through Belgrade and to Monastir in 1893, while the Thessaloniki-Istanbul Junction Railway connected it to Constantinople in 1896.
In the early 20th century, Thessaloniki was in the center of radical activities by various groups; the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, founded in 1897, and the Greek Macedonian Committee, founded in 1903. In 1903 an anarchist group known as the Boatmen of Thessaloniki planted bombs in several buildings in Thessaloniki, including the Ottoman Bank, with some assistance from the IMRO. The Greek consulate in Ottoman Thessaloniki (now the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle) served as the center of operations for the Greek guerillas.
During this period, and since the 14th century, Thessaloniki's Jewish element was the most dominant; it was the only city in Europe where the Jews were a majority of the total population. The city was ethnically diverse and cosmopolitan. In 1890 its population had risen to 118,000, 47% of which were Jews, followed by Turks (22%), Greeks (14%), Bulgars (8%), Roma (2%), and others (7%). By 1913, the ethnic composition of the city had changed so that the population stood at 157,889, with Jews at 39%, followed again by Turks (29%), Greeks (25%), Bulgars (4%), Roma (2%), and others at 1%. Many varied religions were practiced and many languages spoken, including Ladino, a dialect of Spanish spoken by the city's Jews.
Thessaloniki was also the center of activities of the Young Turks, a political reform movement, which goal was to replace the Ottoman Empire's absolute monarchy with a constitutional government. The Young Turks started out as an underground movement, until finally in 1908, they started the Young Turk Revolution from the city of Thessaloniki, by which their revolutionaries gained control over the Ottoman Empire. Eleftherias (Liberty) Square, where the Young Turks gathered at the outbreak of the revolution, is named after the event.
As the First Balkan War broke out, Greece declared war on the Ottoman Empire and expanded its borders. When Eleftherios Venizelos, Prime Minister at the time, was asked if the Greek army should move towards Thessaloniki or Monastir (now Bitola, Republic of North Macedonia), Venizelos replied "" ("Thessaloniki, at all costs!"). As both Greece and Bulgaria wanted Thessaloniki, the Ottoman garrison of the city entered negotiations with both armies. On 8 November 1912 (26 October Old Style), the feast day of the city's patron saint, Saint Demetrius, the Greek Army accepted the surrender of the Ottoman garrison at Thessaloniki. The Bulgarian army arrived one day after the surrender of the city to Greece and Tahsin Pasha, ruler of the city, told the Bulgarian officials that "I have only one Thessaloniki, which I have surrendered". After the Second Balkan War, Thessaloniki and the rest of the Greek portion of Macedonia were officially annexed to Greece by the Treaty of Bucharest in 1913. On 18 March 1913 George I of Greece was assassinated in the city by Alexandros Schinas.
In 1915, during World War I, a large Allied expeditionary force established a base at Thessaloniki for operations against pro-German Bulgaria. This culminated in the establishment of the Macedonian Front, also known as the Salonika Front. In 1916, pro-Venizelist Greek army officers and civilians, with the support of the Allies, launched an uprising, creating a pro-Allied temporary government by the name of the "Provisional Government of National Defence" that controlled the "New Lands" (lands that were gained by Greece in the Balkan Wars, most of Northern Greece including Greek Macedonia, the North Aegean as well as the island of Crete); the official government of the King in Athens, the "State of Athens", controlled "Old Greece" which were traditionally monarchist. The State of Thessaloniki was disestablished with the unification of the two opposing Greek governments under Venizelos, following the abdication of King Constantine in 1917.
On 30 December 1915 an Austrian air raid on Thessaloniki alarmed many town civilians and killed at least one person, and in response the Allied troops based there arrested the German and Austrian and Bulgarian and Turkish vice-consuls and their families and dependents and put them on a battleship, and billeted troops in their consulate buildings in Thessaloniki.
Most of the old center of the city was destroyed by the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917, which was started accidentally by an unattended kitchen fire on 18 August 1917. The fire swept through the centre of the city, leaving 72,000 people homeless; according to the Pallis Report, most of them were Jewish (50,000). Many businesses were destroyed, as a result, 70% of the population were unemployed. Two churches and many synagogues and mosques were lost. Nearly one-quarter of the total population of approximately 271,157 became homeless. Following the fire the government prohibited quick rebuilding, so it could implement the new redesign of the city according to the European-style urban plan prepared by a group of architects, including the Briton Thomas Mawson, and headed by French architect Ernest Hébrard. Property values fell from 6.5 million Greek drachmas to 750,000.
After the defeat of Greece in the Greco-Turkish War and during the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, a population exchange took place between Greece and Turkey. Over 160,000 ethnic Greeks deported from the former Ottoman Empire – particularly Greeks from Asia Minor and East Thrace were resettled in the city, changing its demographics. Additionally many of the city's Muslims, including Ottoman Greek Muslims, were deported to Turkey, ranging at about 20,000 people. This made the Greek element dominant, while the Jewish population was reduced to a minority for the first time since the 14th century.
During World War II Thessaloniki was heavily bombarded by Fascist Italy (with 232 people dead, 871 wounded and over 800 buildings damaged or destroyed in November 1940 alone), and, the Italians having failed in their invasion of Greece, it fell to the forces of Nazi Germany on 8 April 1941 and went under German occupation. The Nazis soon forced the Jewish residents into a ghetto near the railroads and on 15 March 1943 began the deportation of the city's Jews to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Most were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Of the 45,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz, only 4% survived.
During a speech in Reichstag, Hitler claimed that the intention of his Balkan campaign, was to prevent the Allies from establishing "a new Macedonian front", like they did during WWI. The importance of Thessaloniki to Nazi Germany can be demonstrated by the fact that, initially, Hitler had planned to incorporate it directly in the Third Reich (that is, make it part of Germany) and not have it controlled by a puppet state such as the Hellenic State or an ally of Germany (Thessaloniki had been promised to Yugoslavia as a reward for joining the Axis on 25 March 1941). As it was the first major city in Greece to fall to the occupying forces, the first Greek resistance group formed in Thessaloniki (under the name , , "Freedom") as well as the first anti-Nazi newspaper in an occupied territory anywhere in Europe, also by the name "Eleftheria". Thessaloniki was also home to a military camp-converted-concentration camp, known in German as "Konzentrationslager Pavlo Mela" (Pavlos Melas Concentration Camp), where members of the resistance and other anti-fascists were held either to be killed or sent to other concentration camps. On 30 October 1944, after battles with the retreating German army and the Security Battalions of Poulos, forces of ELAS entered Thessaloniki as liberators headed by Markos Vafiadis (who didn't obey to orders from ELAS leadership in Athens to not enter the city). Pro-EAM celebrations and demonstrations followed in the city. In the 1946 monarchy referendum, the majority of the locals voted in favor of a republic, contrary to the rest of Greece.
After the war, Thessaloniki was rebuilt with large-scale development of new infrastructure and industry throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Many of its architectural treasures still remain, adding value to the city as a tourist destination, while several early Christian and Byzantine monuments of Thessaloniki were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1988. In 1997, Thessaloniki was celebrated as the European Capital of Culture, sponsoring events across the city and the region. Agency established to oversee the cultural activities of that year 1997 was still in existence by 2010. In 2004 the city hosted a number of the football events as part of the 2004 Summer Olympics.
Today, Thessaloniki has become one of the most important trade and business hubs in Southeastern Europe, with its port, the Port of Thessaloniki being one of the largest in the Aegean and facilitating trade throughout the Balkan hinterland. On 26 October 2012 the city celebrated its centennial since its incorporation into Greece. The city also forms one of the largest student centers in Southeastern Europe, is host to the largest student population in Greece and was the European Youth Capital in 2014.
Thessaloniki lies on the northern fringe of the Thermaic Gulf on its eastern coast and is bound by Mount Chortiatis on its southeast. Its proximity to imposing mountain ranges, hills and fault lines, especially towards its southeast have historically made the city prone to geological changes.
Since medieval times, Thessaloniki was hit by strong earthquakes, notably in 1759, 1902, 1978 and 1995. On 19–20 June 1978, the city suffered a series of powerful earthquakes, registering 5.5 and 6.5 on the Richter scale. The tremors caused considerable damage to a number of buildings and ancient monuments, but the city withstood the catastrophe without any major problems. One apartment building in central Thessaloniki collapsed during the second earthquake, killing many, raising the final death toll to 51.
Thessaloniki's climate is directly affected by the sea it is situated on. The city lies in a transitional climatic zone, so its climate displays characteristics of several climates. According to the Köppen climate classification, it has a humid subtropical climate ("Cfa") that borders on a Mediterranean climate ("Csa"), as well as a semi-arid climate ("BSk"), observed on the periphery of the region. Its average annual precipitation of is due to the Pindus rain shadow drying the westerly winds. However, the city has a summer precipitation between , which prevents it from qualifying as a Mediterranean climate ("Csa"), and increases gradually towards the north and west, turning humid subtropical.
Winters are relatively dry, with common morning frost. Snowfalls occur sporadically more or less every winter, but the snow cover does not last for more than a few days. Fog is common, with an average of 193 foggy days in a year. During the coldest winters, temperatures can drop to . The record minimum temperature in Thessaloniki was . On average, Thessaloniki experiences frost (sub-zero temperature) 32 days a year. The coldest month of the year in the city is January, with an average 24-hour temperature of . Wind is also usual in the winter months, with December and January having an average wind speed of .
Thessaloniki's summers are hot and quite dry. Maximum temperatures usually rise above , but they rarely approach or go over ; the average number of days the temperature is above is 32. The maximum recorded temperature in the city was . Rain seldom falls in summer, mainly during thunderstorms. In the summer months Thessaloniki also experiences strong heat waves. The hottest month of the year in the city is July, with an average 24-hour temperature of . The average wind speed for June and July in Thessaloniki is .
According to the Kallikratis reform, as of 1 January 2011 the Thessaloniki Urban Area () which makes up the "City of Thessaloniki", is made up of six self-governing municipalities () and one municipal unit (). The municipalities that are included in the Thessaloniki Urban Area are those of Thessaloniki (the city center and largest in population size), Kalamaria, Neapoli-Sykies, Pavlos Melas, Kordelio-Evosmos, Ampelokipoi-Menemeni, and the municipal units of Pylaia and Panorama, part of the municipality of Pylaia-Chortiatis. Prior to the Kallikratis reform, the Thessaloniki Urban Area was made up of twice as many municipalities, considerably smaller in size, which created bureaucratic problems.
The municipality of Thessaloniki () is the second most populous in Greece, after Athens, with a resident population of 325,182 (in 2011) and an area of . The municipality forms the core of the Thessaloniki Urban Area, with its central district (the city center), referred to as the "Kentro", meaning 'center' or 'downtown'.
The city's first mayor, Osman Sait Bey, was appointed when the institution of mayor was inaugurated under the Ottoman Empire in 1912. The incumbent mayor is . In 2011, the municipality of Thessaloniki had a budget of €464.33 million while the budget of 2012 stands at €409.00 million.
Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece. It is an influential city for the northern parts of the country and is the capital of the region of Central Macedonia and the Thessaloniki regional unit. The Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace is also based in Thessaloniki, being that the city is the "de facto" capital of the Greek region of Macedonia.
It is customary every year for the Prime Minister of Greece to announce his administration's policies on a number of issues, such as the economy, at the opening night of the Thessaloniki International Fair. In 2010, during the first months of the 2010 Greek debt crisis, the entire cabinet of Greece met in Thessaloniki to discuss the country's future.
In the Hellenic Parliament, the Thessaloniki urban area constitutes a 16-seat constituency. As of the 2019 Greek legislative election the largest party in Thessaloniki is the New Democracy with 35.55% of the vote, followed by the Coalition of the Radical Left (31.29%) and the Movement for Change (6.05%). The table below summarizes the results of the latest elections.
Architecture in Thessaloniki is the direct result of the city's position at the centre of all historical developments in the Balkans. Aside from its commercial importance, Thessaloniki was also for many centuries the military and administrative hub of the region, and beyond this the transportation link between Europe and the Levant.
Merchants, traders and refugees from all over Europe settled in the city. The need for commercial and public buildings in this new era of prosperity led to the construction of large edifices in the city center. During this time, the city saw the building of banks, large hotels, theatres, warehouses, and factories. Architects who designed some of the most notable buildings of the city, in the late 19th and early 20th century, include Vitaliano Poselli, Pietro Arrigoni, Xenophon Paionidis, Salvatore Poselli, Leonardo Gennari, Eli Modiano, Moshé Jacques, , Frederic Charnot, Ernst Ziller, Roubens Max, Levi Ernst, Angelos Siagas, Alexandros Tzonis using mainly the styles of Eclecticism, Art Nouveau and Neobaroque.
The city layout changed after 1870, when the seaside fortifications gave way to extensive piers, and many of the oldest walls of the city were demolished, including those surrounding the White Tower, which today stands as the main landmark of the city. As parts of the early Byzantine walls were demolished, this allowed the city to expand east and west along the coast.
The expansion of Eleftherias Square towards the sea completed the new commercial hub of the city and at the time was considered one of the most vibrant squares of the city. As the city grew, workers moved to the western districts, because of their proximity to factories and industrial activities; while the middle and upper classes gradually moved from the city-center to the eastern suburbs, leaving mainly businesses. In 1917, a devastating fire swept through the city and burned uncontrollably for 32 hours. It destroyed the city's historic center and a large part of its architectural heritage, but paved the way for modern development featuring wider diagonal avenues and monumental squares.
After the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917, a team of architects and urban planners including Thomas Mawson and Ernest Hebrard, a French architect, chose the Byzantine era as the basis of their (re)building designs for Thessaloniki's city centre. The new city plan included axes, diagonal streets and monumental squares, with a street grid that would channel traffic smoothly. The plan of 1917 included provisions for future population expansions and a street and road network that would be, and still is sufficient today. It contained sites for public buildings and provided for the restoration of Byzantine churches and Ottoman mosques.
Also called the "historic centre", it is divided into several districts, including Dimokratias Square (Democracy Sq. known also as "Vardaris") "Ladadika" (where many entertainment venues and tavernas are located), "Kapani" (were the city's central Modiano market is located), "Diagonios, Navarinou, Rotonda, Agia Sofia" and "Hippodromio", which are all located around Thessaloniki's most central point, Aristotelous Square.
Various commercial stoas around Aristotelous are named from the city's past and historic personalities of the city, like stoa Hirsch, stoa Carasso/Ermou, Pelosov, Colombou, Modiano, Morpurgo, Mordoch, Simcha, Malakopi, Olympios, Emboron, Rogoti, Vyzantio, Tatti, Agiou Mina, Karipi etc.
The western portion of the city centre is home to Thessaloniki's law courts, its central international railway station and the port, while its eastern side hosts the city's two universities, the Thessaloniki International Exhibition Centre, the city's main stadium, its archaeological and Byzantine museums, the new city hall and its central parks and gardens, namely those of the "ΧΑΝΘ" and "Pedion tou Areos".
Ano Poli (also called "Old Town" and literally the "Upper Town") is the heritage listed district north of Thessaloniki's city center that was not engulfed by the great fire of 1917 and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site by ministerial actions of Melina Merkouri, during the 1980s. It consists of Thessaloniki's most traditional part of the city, still featuring small stone paved streets, old squares and homes featuring old Greek and Ottoman architecture. It is the favorite area of Thessaloniki's poets, intellectuals and bohemians.
Ano Poli also, is the highest point in Thessaloniki and as such, is the location of the city's "acropolis", its Byzantine fort, the Heptapyrgion, a large portion of the city's remaining walls, and with many of its additional Ottoman and Byzantine structures still standing. The area provides access to the "Seich Sou" Forest National Park and features panoramic views of the whole city and the Thermaic Gulf. On clear days Mount Olympus, at about away across the gulf, can also be seen towering the horizon.
Northwestern Thessaloniki is home to "Moni Lazariston", located in Stavroupoli, which today forms one of the most important cultural centers for the city, including MOMus–Museum of Modern Art–Costakis Collection and two theatres of the National Theatre of Northern Greece. Construction on the Holocaust Museum of Greece began in the city in 2018 in the area of the Old Railway Station.
In this area are located the Railway Museum of Thessaloniki and the Water Supply Museum.
In northwestern Thessaloniki exist many cultural premises such as the open-air Theater "Manos Katrakis" in Sykies, the Museum of Refugee Hellenism in Neapolis, the municipal theater and the open-air theater in Neapoli and the New Cultural Center of Menemeni (Ellis Alexiou Street). The Stavroupolis Botanical Garden on Perikleous Street includes 1,000 species of plants and is an oasis of 5 acres of greenery. The Environmental Education Center in Kordelio was designed in 1997 and is one of a few public buildings of bioclimatic design in Thessaloniki.
Northwest Thessaloniki forms the main entry point into the city of Thessaloniki with the avenues of Monastiriou, Lagkada and 26is Octovriou passing through it, as well as the extension of the A1 motorway, feeding into Thessaloniki's city center. The area is home to the Macedonia InterCity Bus Terminal (KTEL), the New Thessaloniki Railway Station, the Zeitenlik Allied memorial military cemetery and to large entertainment venues of the city, such as "Milos", "Fix", "Vilka" (which are housed in converted old factories).
Monuments have also been erected in honor of the fighters of the Greek Resistance, as in these areas the Resistance was very active: the monument of Greek National Resistance in Sykies, the monument of Greek National Resistance in Stavroupolis, the Statue of the struggling Mother in Eptalofos Sq. and the monument of the young Greeks that were executed on May 11, 1944, by the Nazis in Xirokrini. In Eptalofos, on May 15, 1941, one month after the occupation of the country, was founded the first resistance organization in Greece, "Eleftheria", with its newspaper and the first illegal printing house in the city of Thessaloniki.
The area along the today Vasileos Georgiou and Vasilissis Olgas avenues, was up until the 1920s home to the city's most affluent residents and formed the outermost suburbs of the city at the time, with the area close to the Thermaic Gulf coast called "Exochès" (des Campagnes), from the 19th century holiday villas which defined the area. Some of them include "Villa Allatini", "Villa Bianca", "Villa Mehmet Kapanci", "Villa Modiano", "Villa Mordoch" and others.
Today southeastern Thessaloniki has in some way become a natural extension of the city center, with the avenues of Megalou Alexandrou, Georgiou Papandreou (Antheon), Vasileos Georgiou, Vasilissis Olgas, Delfon, Konstantinou Karamanli (Nea Egnatia) and Papanastasiou passing through it, enclosing an area traditionally called ("," lit. Dépôt), from the name of the old tram station, owned by a French company.
The municipality of Kalamaria is also located in southeastern Thessaloniki and was firstly inhabited mainly by Greek refugees from Asia Minor and East Thrace after 1922.
Southeastern Thessaloniki is also home to three of the city's football stadiums, the Thessaloniki Concert Hall, the "Poseidonio" aquatic and athletic complex, the Northern Greece Naval Command and the old royal palace (called Palataki), located on the most westerly point of Karabournaki cape.
Other extended and densely built-up residential areas are Charilaou and Toumba, which is divided in "Ano Toumpa" and "Kato Toumpa". Toumba was named after the homonymous hill of Toumba, situated in the northwest of the area. It was created by refugees after the 1922 Asia Minor disaster and the population exchange (1923–24). Toumba is famous mainly due to the football stadium of the local team PAOK FC and its important archaeological site on the hill of Toumba, where extensive archaeological research takes place.
Because of Thessaloniki's importance during the early Christian and Byzantine periods, the city is host to several paleochristian monuments that have significantly contributed to the development of Byzantine art and architecture throughout the Byzantine Empire as well as Serbia. The evolution of Imperial Byzantine architecture and the prosperity of Thessaloniki go hand in hand, especially during the first years of the Empire, when the city continued to flourish. It was at that time that the Complex of Roman emperor Galerius was built, as well as the first church of Hagios Demetrios.
By the 8th century, the city had become an important administrative center of the Byzantine Empire, and handled much of the Empire's Balkan affairs. During that time, the city saw the creation of more notable Christian churches that are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites, such as Hagia Sophia of Thessaloniki, the Church of the Acheiropoietos, the Church of Panagia Chalkeon. When the Ottoman Empire took control of Thessaloniki in 1430, most of the city's churches were converted into mosques, but have survived to this day. Travelers such as Paul Lucas and Abdulmejid I document the city's wealth in Christian monuments during the years of the Ottoman control of the city.
The church of Hagios Demetrios was burnt down during the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917, as did many other of the city's monuments, but it was rebuilt. During World War II, the city was extensively bombed and as such many of Thessaloniki's paleochristian and Byzantine monuments were heavily damaged. Some of the sites were not restored until the 1980s. Thessaloniki has more UNESCO World Heritage Sites listed than any other city in Greece, a total of 15 monuments. They have been listed since 1988.
There are around 150 statues or busts in the city. Probably the most famous one is the equestrian statue of Alexander the Great on the promenade, placed in 1973 and created by sculptor Evangelos Moustakas. An equestrian statue of Constantine I, by sculptor , is located in Demokratias Square. Other notable statues include that of Eleftherios Venizelos by sculptor , Pavlos Melas by Natalia Mela, the statue of Emmanouel Pappas by Memos Makris, Chrysostomos of Smyrna by Athanasios Apartis, such as various creations by George Zongolopoulos.
With the 100th anniversary of the 1912 incorporation of Thessaloniki into Greece, the government announced a large-scale redevelopment program for the city of Thessaloniki, which aims in addressing the current environmental and spatial problems that the city faces. More specifically, the program will drastically change the physiognomy of the city by relocating the Thessaloniki International Exhibition Center and grounds of the Thessaloniki International Fair outside the city centre and turning the current location into a large metropolitan park, redeveloping the coastal front of the city, relocating the city's numerous military camps and using the grounds and facilities to create large parklands and cultural centers; and the complete redevelopment of the harbor and the "Lachanokipoi" and "Dendropotamos" districts (behind and near the Port of Thessaloniki) into a commercial business district, with possible highrise developments.
The plan also envisions the creation of new wide avenues in the outskirts of the city and the creation of pedestrian-only zones in the city centre. Furthermore, the program includes plans to expand the jurisdiction of "Seich Sou" Forest National Park and the improvement of accessibility to and from the Old Town. The ministry has said that the project will take an estimated 15 years to be completed, in 2025.
Part of the plan has been implemented with extensive pedestrianization's within the city center by the municipality of Thessaloniki and the revitalization the eastern urban waterfront/promenade, (, lit. new promenade), with a modern and vibrant design. Its first section opened in 2008, having been awarded as the best public project in Greece of the last five years by the Hellenic Institute of Architecture.
The municipality of Thessaloniki's budget for the reconstruction of important areas of the city and the completion of the waterfront, opened in January 2014, was estimated at around million ( million) for the year 2011 alone.
Thessaloniki rose to economic prominence as a major economic hub in the Balkans during the years of the Roman Empire. The Pax Romana and the city's strategic position allowed for the facilitation of trade between Rome and Byzantium (later Constantinople and now Istanbul) through Thessaloniki by means of the Via Egnatia. The Via Egnatia also functioned as an important line of communication between the Roman Empire and the nations of Asia, particularly in relation to the Silk Road. With the partition of the Roman Emp. into East (Byzantine) and West, Thessaloniki became the second-largest city of the Eastern Roman Empire after New Rome (Constantinople) in terms of economic might. Under the Empire, Thessaloniki was the largest port in the Balkans. As the city passed from Byzantium to the Republic of Venice in 1423, it was subsequently conquered by the Ottoman Empire. Under Ottoman rule the city retained its position as the most important trading hub in the Balkans. Manufacturing, shipping and trade were the most important components of the city's economy during the Ottoman period, and the majority of the city's trade at the time was controlled by ethnic Greeks. Plus, the Jewish community was also an important factor in the trade sector.
Historically important industries for the economy of Thessaloniki included tobacco (in 1946 35% of all tobacco companies in Greece were headquartered in the city, and 44% in 1979) and banking (in Ottoman years Thessaloniki was a major center for investment from western Europe, with the Bank of Thessaloniki () having a capital of 20 million French francs in 1909).
The service sector accounts for nearly two thirds of the total labour force of Thessaloniki. Of those working in services, 20% were employed in trade, 13% in education and healthcare, 7.1% in real estate, 6.3% in transport, communications & storing, 6.1% in the finance industry & service-providing organizations, 5.7% in public administration & insurance services and 5.4% in hotels & restaurants.
The city's port, the Port of Thessaloniki, is one of the largest ports in the Aegean and as a free port, it functions as a major gateway to the Balkan hinterland. In 2010, more than 15.8 million tons of products went through the city's port, making it the second-largest port in Greece after Aghioi Theodoroi, surpassing Piraeus. At 273,282 TEUs, it is also Greece's second-largest container port after Piraeus. As a result, the city is a major transportation hub for the whole of south-eastern Europe, carrying, among other things, trade to and from the neighbouring countries.
In recent years Thessaloniki has begun to turn into a major port for cruising in the eastern Mediterranean. The Greek ministry of tourism considers Thessaloniki to be Greece's second most important commercial port, and companies such as Royal Caribbean International have expressed interest in adding the Port of Thessaloniki to their destinations. A total of 30 cruise ships are expected to arrive at Thessaloniki in 2011.
After WWII and the Greek civil war, heavy industrialization of the city's suburbs began in the middle 1950s.
During the 1980s a spate of factory shut downs occurred, mostly of automobile manufacters, such as Agricola (vehicles), AutoDiana, EBIAM, Motoemil, Pantelemidis-TITAN and C.AR (automobiles). Since the 1990s, companies took advantage of cheaper labour markets and more lax regulations in other countries, and among the largest companies to shut down factories were Goodyear, AVEZ pasta industry (one of the first industrial factories in northern Greece, built in 1926), Philkeram Johnson, AGNO dairy and VIAMIL.
However, Thessaloniki still remains a major business hub in the Balkans and Greece, with a number of important Greek companies headquartered in the city, such as the Hellenic Vehicle Industry (ELVO), Namco (automobiles), Astra Airlines, Ellinair, Pyramis and MLS Multimedia, which introduced the first Greek-built smartphone in 2012.
In early 1960s, with the collaboration of Standard Oil and ESSO-Pappas, a large industrial zone was created, containing refineries, oil refinery and steel production (owned by Hellenic Steel Co.). The zone attracted also a series of different factories during the next decades.
Titan Cement has also facilities outside the city, on the road to Serres, such as the AGET Heracles, a member of the Lafarge group, and Alumil SA.
Multinational companies such as Air Liquide, Cyanamid, Nestlé, Pfizer, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company and Vivartia have also industrial facilities in the suburbs of the city.
Foodstuff or drink companies headquartered in the city include the Macedonian Milk Industry (Mevgal), Allatini, Barbastathis, Hellenic Sugar Industry, Haitoglou Bros, Mythos Brewery, Malamatina, while the Goody's chain started from the city.
The American Farm School also has important contribution in food production.
In 2011, the regional unit of Thessaloniki had a Gross Domestic Product of €18.293 billion (ranked 2nd amongst the country's regional units), comparable to Bahrain or Cyprus, and a per capita of €15,900 (ranked 16th). In Purchasing Power Parity, the same indicators are €19,851 billion (2nd) and €17,200 (15th) respectively. In terms of comparison with the European Union average, Thessaloniki's GDP per capita indicator stands at 63% the EU average and 69% in PPP – this is comparable to the German state of Brandenburg. Overall, Thessaloniki accounts for 8.9% of the total economy of Greece. Between 1995 and 2008 Thessaloniki's GDP saw an average growth rate of 4.1% per annum (ranging from +14.5% in 1996 to −11.1% in 2005) while in 2011 the economy contracted by −7.8%.
The tables below show the ethnic statistics of Thessaloniki during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
The municipality of Thessaloniki is the most populous in the Thessaloniki Urban Area. Its population has increased in the latest census and the metropolitan area's population rose to over one million. The city forms the base of the Thessaloniki metropolitan area, with latest census in 2011 giving it a population of 1,030,338.
The Jewish population in Greece is the oldest in mainland Europe (see Romaniotes). When Paul the Apostle came in Thessaloniki he taught in the area of what today is called "Upper City". Later, during the Ottoman period, with the coming of Sephardic Jews from Spain, the community of Thessaloniki became mostly Sephardic. Thessaloniki became the largest center in Europe of the Sephardic Jews, who nicknamed the city "la madre de Israel" (Israel's mother) and "Jerusalem of the Balkans". It also included the historically significant and ancient Greek-speaking Romaniote community. During the Ottoman era, Thessaloniki's Sephardic community of was half the population according to the Ottoman Census of 1902 and almost 40% the city's population of 157,000 about 1913; Jewish merchants were prominent in commerce until the ethnic Greek population increased after Thessaloniki was incorporated into the Kingdom of Greece in 1913. By the 1680s, about 300 families of Sephardic Jews, followers of Sabbatai Zevi, had converted to Islam, becoming a sect known as the "Dönmeh" (convert), and migrated to Salonika, whose population was majority Jewish. They established an active community that thrived for about 250 years. Many of their descendants later became prominent in trade. Many Jewish inhabitants of Thessaloniki spoke Ladino, the Romance language of the Sephardic Jews.
From the second half of the 19th century with the Ottoman reforms, the Jewish community had a new revival. Many French and especially Italian Jews (from Livorno and other cities), influential in introducing new methods of education and developing new schools and intellectual environment for the Jewish population, were established in Thessaloniki. Such modernists introduced also new techniques and ideas from the industrialized Western Europe and from the 1880s the city began to industrialize. The Italian Jews Allatini brothers led Jewish entrepreneurship, establishing milling and other food industries, brickmaking and processing plants for tobacco. Several traders supported the introduction of a large textile-production industry, superseding the weaving of cloth in a system of artisanal production. Notable names of the era include among others the Italo-Jewish Modiano family and the Allatini. Benrubis founded also in 1880 one of the first retail companies in the Balkans.
After the Balkan Wars, Thessaloniki was incorporated into the Kingdom of Greece in 1913. At first the community feared that the annexation would lead to difficulties and during the first years its political stance was, in general, anti-Venizelist and pro-royalist/conservative. The Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 during World War I burned much of the center of the city and left 50,000 Jews homeless of the total of 72,000 residents who were burned out. Having lost homes and their businesses, many Jews emigrated: to the United States, Palestine, and Paris. They could not wait for the government to create a new urban plan for rebuilding, which was eventually done.
After the Greco-Turkish War in 1922 and the bilateral population exchange between Greece and Turkey, many refugees came to Greece. Nearly 100,000 ethnic Greeks resettled in Thessaloniki, reducing the proportion of Jews in the total community. After this, Jews made up about 20% of the city's population. During the interwar period, Greece granted Jewish citizens the same civil rights as other Greek citizens. In March 1926, Greece re-emphasized that all citizens of Greece enjoyed equal rights, and a considerable proportion of the city's Jews decided to stay. During the Metaxas regime, the stance towards Jews became even better.
World War II brought a disaster for the Jewish Greeks, since in 1941 the Germans occupied Greece and began actions against the Jewish population. Greeks of the Resistance helped save some of the Jewish residents. By the 1940s, the great majority of the Jewish Greek community firmly identified as both Greek and Jewish. According to Misha Glenny, such Greek Jews had largely not encountered "anti-Semitism as in its North European form."
In 1943, the Nazis began brutal actions against the historic Jewish population in Thessaloniki, forcing them into a ghetto near the railroad lines and beginning deportation to concentration and labor camps. They deported and exterminated approximately 96% of Thessaloniki's Jews of all ages during the Holocaust. The Thessaloniki Holocaust memorial in Eleftherias ("Freedom") Square was built in 1997 in memory of all the Jewish people from Thessaloniki, who died in the Holocaust. The site was chosen because it was the place where Jewish residents were rounded up before embarking to trains for concentration camps. Today, a community of around 1200 remains in the city. Communities of descendants of Thessaloniki Jews – both Sephardic and Romaniote – live in other areas, mainly the United States and Israel. Israeli singer Yehuda Poliker recorded a song about the Jewish people of Thessaloniki, called "Wait for me, Thessaloniki".
Since the late 19th century, many merchants from Western Europe (mainly from France and Italy) were established in the city. They had an important role in the social and economic life of the city and introduced new industrial techniques. Their main district was what is known today as the "Frankish district" (near Ladadika), where the Catholic church designed by Vitaliano Poselli is also situated. Many of them left after the incorporation of the city into the Greek kingdom, others, who were of Jewish faith, were exterminated by the Nazis.
The Bulgarian community of the city increased during the late 19th century. The community had a Men's High School, a Girl's High School, a trade union and a gymnastics society. A large part of them were Catholics, as a result of actions by the Lazarists society, which had its base in the city.
Another group is the Armenian community which dates back to the Byzantine and Ottoman periods. During the 20th century, after the Armenian Genocide and the defeat of the Greek army in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22), many fled to Greece including Thessaloniki. There is also an Armenian cemetery and an Armenian church at the center of the city.
Thessaloniki is not only regarded as the cultural and entertainment capital of northern Greece but also the cultural capital of the country. The city's main theaters, run by the National Theatre of Northern Greece () which was established in 1961, include the "Theater of the Society of Macedonian Studies", where the National Theater is based, the "Royal Theater" ()-the first base of the National Theater-, "Moni Lazariston", and the "Earth Theater" and "Forest Theater", both amphitheatrical open-air theatres overlooking the city.
The title of the European Capital of Culture in 1997 saw the birth of the city's first opera and today forms an independent section of the National Theatre of Northern Greece. The opera is based at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall, one of the largest concert halls in Greece. Recently a second building was also constructed and designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki. Thessaloniki is also the seat of two symphony orchestras, the "Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra" and the "Symphony Orchestra of the Municipality of Thessaloniki".
"Olympion Theater", the site of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and the "Plateia Assos Odeon multiplex" are the two major cinemas in downtown Thessaloniki. The city also has a number of multiplex cinemas in major shopping malls in the suburbs, most notably in Mediterranean Cosmos, the largest retail and entertainment development in the Balkans.
Thessaloniki is renowned for its major shopping streets and lively laneways. Tsimiski Street and Proxenou Koromila avenue are the city's most famous shopping streets and are among Greece's most expensive and exclusive high streets. The city is also home to one of Greece's most famous and prestigious hotels, Makedonia Palace hotel, the Hyatt Regency Casino and hotel (the biggest casino in Greece and one of the biggest in Europe) and Waterland, the largest water park in southeastern Europe.
The city has long been known in Greece for its vibrant city culture, including having the most cafes and bars per capita of any city in Europe; and as having some of the best nightlife and entertainment in the country, thanks to its large young population and multicultural feel. Lonely Planet listed Thessaloniki among the world's "ultimate party cities".
Although Thessaloniki is not renowned for its parks and greenery throughout its urban area, where green spaces are few, it has several large open spaces around its waterfront, namely the central city gardens of "Palios Zoologikos Kipos" (which is recently being redeveloped to also include rock climbing facilities, a new skatepark and paintball range), the park of "Pedion tou Areos", which also holds the city's annual floral expo; and the parks of the "Nea Paralia" (waterfront) that span for along the coast, from the White Tower to the concert hall.
The "Nea Paralia" parks are used throughout the year for a variety of events, while they open up to the Thessaloniki waterfront, which is lined up with several cafés and bars; and during summer is full of Thessalonians enjoying their long evening walks (referred to as ""the volta"" and is embedded into the culture of the city). Having undergone an extensive revitalization, the city's waterfront today features a total of 12 thematic gardens/parks.
Thessaloniki's proximity to places such as the national parks of Pieria and beaches of Chalkidiki often allow its residents to easily have access to some of the best outdoor recreation in Europe; however, the city is also right next to the "Seich Sou" forest national park, just away from Thessaloniki's city center; and offers residents and visitors alike, quiet viewpoints towards the city, mountain bike trails and landscaped hiking paths. The city's zoo, which is operated by the municipality of Thessaloniki, is also located nearby the national park.
Other recreation spaces throughout the Thessaloniki metropolitan area include the "Fragma Thermis", a landscaped parkland near Thermi and the Delta wetlands west of the city center; while urban beaches that have continuously been awarded the blue flags, are located along the coastline of Thessaloniki's southeastern suburbs of Thermaikos, about away from the city center.
Because of the city's rich and diverse history, Thessaloniki houses many museums dealing with many different eras in history. Two of the city's most famous museums include the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki and the Museum of Byzantine Culture.
The Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki was established in 1962 and houses some of the most important ancient Macedonian artifacts, including an extensive collection of golden artwork from the royal palaces of Aigai and Pella. It also houses exhibits from Macedon's prehistoric past, dating from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. The Prehistoric Antiquities Museum of Thessaloniki has exhibits from those periods as well.
The Museum of Byzantine Culture is one of the city's most famous museums, showcasing the city's glorious Byzantine past. The museum was also awarded Council of Europe's museum prize in 2005. The museum of the White Tower of Thessaloniki houses a series of galleries relating to the city's past, from the creation of the White Tower until recent years.
One of the most modern museums in the city is the Thessaloniki Science Center and Technology Museum and is one of the most high-tech museums in Greece and southeastern Europe. It features the largest planetarium in Greece, a cosmotheater with the country's largest flat screen, an amphitheater, a motion simulator with 3D projection and 6-axis movement and exhibition spaces. Other industrial and technological museums in the city include the Railway Museum of Thessaloniki, which houses an original Orient Express train, the War Museum of Thessaloniki and others. The city also has a number of educational and sports museums, including the Thessaloniki Olympic Museum.
The Atatürk Museum in Thessaloniki is the historic house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern-day Turkey, was born. The house is now part of the Turkish consulate complex, but admission to the museum is free. The museum contains historic information about Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his life, especially while he was in Thessaloniki.
Other ethnological museums of the sort include the Historical Museum of the Balkan Wars, the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle, containing information about the freedom fighters in Macedonia and their struggle to liberate the region from the Ottoman yoke. Construction on the Holocaust Museum of Greece began in the city in 2018.
The city also has a number of important art galleries. Such include the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, housing exhibitions from a number of well-known Greek and foreign artists. The Teloglion Foundation of Art is part of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and includes an extensive collection of works by important artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, including works by prominent Greeks and native Thessalonians. The Thessaloniki Museum of Photography also houses a number of important exhibitions, and is located within the old port of Thessaloniki.
Thessaloniki is home to a number of prominent archaeological sites. Apart from its recognized UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Thessaloniki features a large two-terraced Roman forum featuring two-storey stoas, dug up by accident in the 1960s. The forum complex also boasts two Roman baths, one of which has been excavated while the other is buried underneath the city. The forum also features a small theater, which was also used for gladiatorial games. Although the initial complex was not built in Roman times, it was largely refurbished in the 2nd century. It is believed that the forum and the theater continued to be used until at least the 6th century.
Another important archaeological site is the imperial palace complex which Roman emperor Galerius, located at Navarinou Square, commissioned when he made Thessaloniki the capital of his portion of the Roman Empire. The large octagonal portion of the complex, most of which survives to this day, is believed to have been an imperial throne room. Various mosaics from the palatial complex have also survived. Some historians believe that the complex must have been in use as an imperial residence until the 11th century.
Not far from the palace itself is the Arch of Galerius, known colloquially as the "Kamara". The arch was built to commemorate the emperor's campaigns against the Persians. The original structure featured three arches; however, only two full arches and part of the third survive to this day. Many of the arches' marble parts survive as well, although it is mostly the brick interior that can be seen today.
Other monuments of the city's past, such as the "Incantadas", a Caryatid portico from the ancient forum, have been removed or destroyed over the years. The Incantadas in particular are on display at the Louvre. Thanks to a private donation of €180,000, it was announced on 6 December 2011 that a replica of the Incantadas would be commissioned and later put on display in Thessaloniki.
The construction of the Thessaloniki Metro inadvertently started the largest archaeological dig not only of the city, but of Northern Greece; the dig spans and has unearthed 300,000 individual artefacts from as early as the Roman Empire and as late as the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917. Ancient Thessaloniki's Decumanus Maximus was also found and of the marble-paved and column-lined road were unearthed along with shops, other buildings, and plumbing, prompting one scholar to describe the discovery as "the Byzantine Pompeii". Some of the artefacts will be put on display inside the metro stations, while will feature the world's first open archaeological site located within a metro station.
Thessaloniki is home of a number of festivals and events. The Thessaloniki International Fair is the most important event to be hosted in the city annually, by means of economic development. It was first established in 1926 and takes place every year at the "Thessaloniki International Exhibition Center". The event attracts major political attention and it is customary for the Prime Minister of Greece to outline his administration's policies for the next year, during event. Over 250,000 visitors attended the exposition in 2010. The new Art Thessaloniki, is starting first time 29.10. – 1 November 2015 as an international contemporary art fair.
The Thessaloniki International Film Festival is established as one of the most important film festivals in Southern Europe, with a number of notable film makers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Faye Dunaway, Catherine Deneuve, Irene Papas and Fatih Akın taking part, and was established in 1960. The Documentary Festival, founded in 1999, has focused on documentaries that explore global social and cultural developments, with many of the films presented being candidates for FIPRESCI and Audience Awards.
The Dimitria festival, founded in 1966 and named after the city's patron saint of St. Demetrius, has focused on a wide range of events including music, theatre, dance, local happenings, and exhibitions. The "DMC DJ Championship" has been hosted at the International Trade Fair of Thessaloniki, has become a worldwide event for aspiring DJs and turntablists. The "International Festival of Photography" has taken place every February to mid-April. Exhibitions for the event are sited in museums, heritage landmarks, galleries, bookshops and cafés. Thessaloniki also holds an annual International Book Fair.
Between 1962–1997 and 2005–2008 the city also hosted the Thessaloniki Song Festival, Greece's most important music festival, at Alexandreio Melathron.
In 2012 the city hosted its first pride parade, "Thessaloniki Pride", which took place between 22 and 23 June. It has been held every year ever since, however in 2013 transgender people participating in the parade became victims of police brutality. The issue was soon settled by the government. The city's Greek Orthodox Church leadership has consistently rallied against the event, but mayor Boutaris sided with "Thessaloniki Pride", saying also that Thessaloniki would seek to host EuroPride 2020. The event was given to Thessaloniki in September 2017, beating Bergen, Brussels, and Hamburg.
The main stadium of the city is the Kaftanzoglio Stadium (also home ground of Iraklis F.C.), while other main stadiums of the city include the football Kleanthis Vikelidis Stadium and Toumba Stadium home grounds of Aris F.C. and PAOK FC, respectively, all of whom are founding members of the Greek league.
Being the largest "multi-sport" stadium in the city, Kaftanzoglio Stadium regularly plays host to athletics events; such as the European Athletics Association event "Olympic Meeting Thessaloniki" every year; it has hosted the Greek national championships in 2009 and has been used for athletics at the Mediterranean Games and for the European Cup in athletics. In 2004 the stadium served as an official Athens 2004 venue, while in 2009 the city and the stadium hosted the 2009 IAAF World Athletics Final.
Thessaloniki's major indoor arenas include the state-owned Alexandreio Melathron, P.A.O.K. Sports Arena and the YMCA indoor hall. Other sporting clubs in the city include Apollon FC based in Kalamaria, Agrotikos Asteras F.C. based in Evosmos and YMCA. Thessaloniki has a rich sporting history with its teams winning the first ever panhellenic football (Aris FC), basketball (Iraklis BC), and water polo (AC Aris) tournaments.
During recent years, PAOK FC has emerged as the strongest football club of the city, winning also the Greek championship without a defeat (2018–19 season).
The city played a major role in the development of basketball in Greece. The local YMCA was the first to introduce the sport to the country, while Iraklis B.C. won the first ever Greek championship. From 1982 to 1993 Aris B.C. dominated the league, regularly finishing in first place. In that period Aris won a total of 9 championships, 7 cups and one European Cup Winners' Cup. The city also hosted the 2003 FIBA Under-19 World Championship in which Greece came third. In volleyball, Iraklis has emerged since 2000 as one of the most successful teams in Greece and Europe – see 2005–06 CEV Champions League. In October 2007, Thessaloniki also played host to the first Southeastern European Games.
The city is also the finish point of the annual Alexander The Great Marathon, which starts at Pella, in recognition of its Ancient Macedonian heritage.
Thessaloniki is home to the ERT3 TV-channel and Radio Macedonia, both services of Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) operating in the city and are broadcast all over Greece.
The municipality of Thessaloniki also operates three radio stations, namely FM100, FM101 and FM100.6; and TV100, a television network which was also the first non-state-owned TV station in Greece and opened in 1988. Several private TV-networks also broadcast out from Thessaloniki, with Makedonia TV being the most popular.
The city's main newspapers and some of the most circulated in Greece, include "Makedonia", which was also the first newspaper published in Thessaloniki in 1911 and "Aggelioforos". A large number of radio stations also broadcast from Thessaloniki as the city is known for its music contributions.
Throughout its history, Thessaloniki has been home to a number of well-known figures. It was also the birthplace or base of various Saints and other religious figures, such as Demetrius of Thessaloniki, Cyril and Methodius (creators of the first Slavic alphabet), Saint Mitre (Saint Demetrius, not to be confused with the previous), Gregorios Palamas, Eustathius of Thessalonica and Patriarch Philotheus I of Constantinople. Other Byzantine-era notables included jurist Constantine Armenopoulos, the anti-Palamian theologians Prochoros and Demetrios Kydones, such as scholars Theodorus Gaza ("Thessalonicensis") and Matthaios Kamariotis.
Many of the country's best-known musicians and movie personalities are from Thessaloniki, such as Zoe Laskari, Costas Hajihristos, , Giannis Dalianidis, Maria Plyta, Harry Klynn, Antonis Remos, Paschalis Terzis, Nikos Papazoglou, Nikolas Asimos, Giorgos Hatzinasios, , Stavros Kouyioumtzis, Giannis Kalatzis, Natassa Theodoridou, Katia Zygouli, Kostas Voutsas, Takis Kanellopoulos, Titos Vandis, Manolis Chiotis, Dionysis Savvopoulos, Marinella, Yvonne Sanson and the classical composer Emilios Riadis. Additionally, there have been a number of politicians born in the city: Ioannis Skandalidis, Alexandros Zannas, Evangelos Venizelos, Christos Sartzetakis, fourth President of Greece, Niki Kerameus and Yiannis Boutaris. Sports personalities from the city include Georgios Roubanis, Giannis Ioannidis, Faidon Matthaiou, Alketas Panagoulias, Panagiotis Fasoulas, Eleni Daniilidou, Traianos Dellas, Giorgos Koudas, Kleanthis Vikelidis, Christos Kostis, Dimitris Salpingidis and Nikos Zisis. Benefactor Ioannis Papafis, architect Lysandros Kaftanzoglou and writers, such as Grigorios Zalykis, Manolis Anagnostakis, Kleitos Kyrou, , Giorgos Ioannou, Elias Petropoulos, , Rena Molho and Dinos Christianopoulos are also from Thessaloniki.
The city is also the birthplace or base of a number of international personalities, which include Bulgarians (Atanas Dalchev), Jews (Moshe Levy, Maurice Abravanel, Isaak Benrubi, Isaac and Daniel Carasso, Raphaël Salem, Baruch Uziel, Shlomo Halevi Alkabetz, Salamo Arouch), Slav Macedonians (Dimo Todorovski), Italians (, Giacomo Poselli, ), French (Louis Dumont), Spanish (Juana Mordó), Turks (Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nâzım Hikmet, Afet İnan, Cahit Arf, Mehmet Cavit Bey, Sabiha Sertel, Abdul Kerim Pasha, Hasan Tahsin Uzer, Hasan Tahsin) and Armenians (Jean Tatlian).
Because Thessaloniki remained under Ottoman rule for about 100 years more than southern Greece, it has retained a lot of its Eastern character, including its culinary tastes. Spices in particular play an important role in the cuisine of Thessaloniki, something which is not true to the same degree about Greece's southern regions. Thessaloniki's Ladadika borough is a particularly busy area in regards to Thessalonian cuisine, with most tavernas serving traditional meze and other such culinary delights.
Bougatsa, a breakfast pastry, which can be either sweet or savory, is very popular throughout the city and has spread around other parts of Greece and the Balkans as well. Another popular snack is "koulouri".
Notable sweets of the city are "Trigona", "Roxákia" and "Armenovíl". A stereotypical Thessalonian coffee drink is Frappé coffee. Frappé was invented in the Thessaloniki International Fair in 1957 and has since spread throughout Greece and Cyprus to become a hallmark of the Greek coffee culture.
A touristic boom took place in the 2010s, during the years of mayor Boutaris, especially from the neighboring countries, Austria, Israel and Turkey. In 2010 the sleepovers of foreign tourists in the city were around 250,000. In 2018 the sleepovers of foreign tourists was estimated to reach 3,000,000 people.
The city is viewed as a romantic one in Greece, and as such Thessaloniki is commonly featured in Greek songs. There are a number of famous songs that go by the name 'Thessaloniki' (rebetiko, laïko etc.) or include the name in their title.
During the 1930s and 40s the city became a center of the Rebetiko music, partly because of the Metaxas censorship, which was stricter in Athens. Vassilis Tsitsanis wrote some of his best songs in Thessaloniki.
The city is the birthplace of significant composers in the Greek music scene, such as Manolis Chiotis, Stavros Kouyioumtzis and Dionysis Savvopoulos. It is also notable for its rock music scene and its many rock groups; some became famous such as Xylina Spathia, Trypes or the pop rock Onirama.
Between 1962–1997 and 2005–2008 the city also hosted the Thessaloniki Song Festival. In the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 Greece was represented by Koza Mostra and Agathonas Iakovidis, both from Thessaloniki.
Thessaloniki is a major center of education for Greece. Three of the country's largest universities are located in central Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Macedonia and the International Hellenic University. Aristotle University was founded in 1926 and is currently the largest university in Greece by number of students, which number at more than 80,000 in 2010, and is a member of the Utrecht Network. For the academic year 2009–2010, Aristotle University was ranked as one of the 150 best universities in the world for arts and humanities and among the 250 best universities in the world overall by the Times QS World University Rankings, making it one of the top 2% of best universities worldwide. Leiden ranks Aristotle University as one of the top 100 European universities and the best university in Greece, at number 97. Since 2010, Thessaloniki is also home to the Open University of Thessaloniki, which is funded by Aristotle University, the University of Macedonia and the municipality of Thessaloniki.
Additionally, a TEI (Technological Educational Institute), namely the Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, is located in the western suburb of Sindos; home also to the industrial zone of the city. Numerous public and private vocational institutes () provide professional training to young students, while a large number of private colleges offer American and UK academic curriculum, via cooperation with foreign universities. In addition to Greek students, the city hence attracts many foreign students either via the Erasmus programme for public universities, or for a complete degree in public universities or in the city's private colleges. the city's total student population was estimated around 200,000.
Tram was the main, oldest and most popular public urban mean of Thessalonians in the past. It functioned from 1893 to 1957, when it was disestablished by the government of Konstantinos Karamanlis. The French "Compagnie de Tramways et d' Éclairage Électrique de Salonique" operated it from 1912 until 1940, when the company was purchased by the Hellenic State. The operating base and tram station was in the district of Dépôt.
Before the economic crisis of 2009, there were various proposals for new tram lines.
Thessaloniki Urban Transport Organization ("OASTH") operates buses as the only form of public transport in Thessaloniki. It was founded in 1957 and operates a fleet of 604 vehicles on 75 routes throughout the Thessaloniki metropolitan area. International and regional bus links are provided by KTEL at its Macedonia InterCity Bus Terminal, located to the west of the city centre.
The creation of a metro system for Thessaloniki goes back as far as 1918, when Thomas Hayton Mawson and Ernest Hébrard proposed the creation of a Thessaloniki Metropolitan Railway. In 1968 a circular metro line was proposed, and in 1987 the first serious proposal was presented and construction briefly started in 1988, before stalling and finally being abandoned due to lack of funding. Both the 1918 and 1988 proposals ran almost the identical route to the current Line 1.
Construction on Thessaloniki's current metro began in 2006 and is classified as a megaproject: it has a budget of €1.57 billion ($ billion). Line 1 and Line 2 are currently under construction and will enter service, in phases, between 2020 and 2021. Line 1 is long and stops at 13 stations, while Line 2 is long and stops at a further 5 stations, while also calling at 11 of the Line 1 stations. Important archaeological discoveries have been made during construction, and some of the system's stations will house archaeological exhibitions. One stop, , will house the only open archaeological site within a metro station anywhere in the world.
Line 2 is to be expanded further, with a loop extension to the western suburbs of the city, towards Evosmos and Stavroupoli, and one overground extension towards the Airport. The western extension is more high-priority than the airport one, as the airport will be served by a 10-minute shuttle bus to the terminus of Line 2, .
Once opened in 2020, it is expected that 320,000 people will use the metro every day, or 116 million people every year.
Commuter rail services have recently been established between Thessaloniki and the city of Larissa (the service is known in Greek as the "Proastiakos", meaning "Suburban Railway"). The service is operated using Siemens Desiro EMU trains on a modernised electrified double track and stops at 11 refurbished stations, covering the journey in 1 hour and 33 minutes. Furthermore, an additional line has also been established, although with the use of regional trains, between Thessaloniki and the city of Edessa.
International and domestic air traffic to and from the city is served by Thessaloniki Airport "Makedonia". The short length of the airport's two runways means that it does not currently support intercontinental flights, although a major extension – lengthening one of its runways into the Thermaic Gulf – is under construction, despite considerable opposition from local environmental groups. Following the completion of the runway works, the airport will be able to serve intercontinental flights and cater for larger aircraft in the future. Construction of a second terminal began in September 2018, due to be completed in 2021.
Because of the Greek economic crisis, all international train links from the city were suspended in February 2011. Until then, the city was a major railway hub for the Balkans, with direct connections to Sofia, Skopje, Belgrade, Moscow, Vienna, Budapest, Bucharest and Istanbul, alongside Athens and other destinations in Greece. Daily through trains to Sofia and Belgrade were restarted in May 2014. Thessaloniki remains one of Greece's most important railway hubs and has the biggest marshalling yard in the country.
Regional train services within Greece (operated by TrainOSE, the Hellenic Railways Organization's train operating company), link the city with other parts of the country, from its central railway passenger station, called the "New railway station" located at the western end of Thessaloniki's city center.
The Port of Thessaloniki connects the city with seasonal ferries to the Sporades and other north Aegean islands, with its passenger terminal, being one of the largest in the Aegean Sea basin; having handled around 162,731 passengers in 2007. Meanwhile, ongoing actions have been going on for more connections and the port is recently being upgraded, as Thessaloniki is also slowly turning into a major tourist port for cruising in the eastern Mediterranean.
Thessaloniki lies on the crossroads of the A1/E75, A2/E90 and A25 motorways; which connect the city with other parts of the country, as well as the Republic of North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Turkey.
The city itself is bypassed by the C-shaped Thessaloniki Inner Ring Road ("Esoteriki Peripheriaki Odos", ), which all of the above motorways connect onto it. The western end of the route begins at the junction with the A1/A2 motorways in "Lachanagora" District. Clockwise it heads northeast around the city, passing through the northwestern suburbs, the forest of "Seich Sou" and through to the southeast suburb/borough of Kalamaria. The ring road ends at a large junction with the A25 motorway, which then continues south to Chalkidiki, passing through Thessaloniki's outer southeast suburbs.
The speed limit on this motorway is , it currently has three traffic lanes for each direction and forms the city's most vital road link; handling more than 120,000 vehicles daily, instead of 30,000 as it was meant to handle when designed in 1975.
An outer ring road known as Eksoteriki Peripheriaki Odos (, "outer ring road") carries all traffic that completely bypasses the city. It is Part of Motorway 2.
Despite the large effort that was made in 2004 to improve the motorway features of the Thessaloniki ring road, the motorway is still insufficient to tackle Thessaloniki's increasing traffic and metropolitan population. To tackle this problem, the government has introduced large scale redevelopment plans throughout 2011 with tenders expected to be announced within early 2012; that include the total restructuring of the A16 in the western side of the city, with new junctions and new emergency lanes throughout the whole length of the motorway. In the eastern side an even larger scale project has been announced, for the construction of a new elevated motorway section above the existing, which would allow faster travel for drivers heading through to the airport and Chalkidiki that do not wish to exit into the city, and will decongest the existing motorway for city commuters. The plans also include adding one more lane in each direction on the existing A16 ring road and on the A25 passing through Thessaloniki's southeast suburbs, from its junction with the A16 in Kalamaria, up to the airport exit (ΕΟ67); which will make it an 8 lane highway.
Additional long term plans further include the extension of the planned outer ring road known as Eksoteriki Peripheriaki Odos (, "outer ring road") to circle around the entire Thessaloniki metropolitan area, crossing over the Thermaic Gulf from the east, to join with the A1/E75 motorway. Preliminary plans have been announced which include a bridge over the gulf, as part of the southern bypass of the city; to cater for the large number of travellers from Macedonia and the rest of Greece heading to the airport, and to the increasingly popular tourist region of Chalkidiki.
Consulates
Thessaloniki is twinned with:
Modern Greece." Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture
Series. Stanford Stanford University Press, 2016. 400 pp. . | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40471 |
Baker v. Vermont
Baker v. Vermont, 744 A.2d 864 (Vt. 1999), was a lawsuit decided by Vermont Supreme Court on December 20, 1999. It was one of the first judicial affirmations of the right of same-sex couples to treatment equivalent to that afforded different-sex couples. The decision held that the state's prohibition on same-sex marriage denied rights granted by the Vermont Constitution. The court ordered the Vermont legislature to either allow same-sex marriages or implement an alternative legal mechanism according similar rights to same-sex couples.
Following their initial success in Hawaii in 1996 that was later undone by a popular referendum in 1998, advocates for same-sex marriage selected Vermont for their lawsuit on the basis of the state's record of establishing rights for gays and lesbians as well as the difficulty of amending its constitution.
Vermont enacted hate crimes legislation in 1990, one of the first states to do so. From the time the legislation that became the Hate Crimes Act was introduced in 1989, it included sexual orientation. Most of the testimony and statistics that supported the legislation related to the gay and lesbian community and one incident of anti-gay violence helped secure its passage. It added "sexual orientation" to its anti-discrimination statute, the Human Rights Law, in 1992. In 1993, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the case "In re B.L.V.B." that a woman could adopt her lesbian partner's natural children. The statute provided that an adoption terminates the rights of natural parents, unless the person adopting is the "spouse" of the child's natural parent. The Court decided that the statute did not intend to restrict adoption to legal spouses only, that safeguarding the child was its "general intent and spirit", and that adoption by a second woman was therefore permissible. In 1995, in the course of reforming the state's adoption statute, a Senate committee first removed language allowing unmarried couples, whatever their sex, to adopt, but after months of work the legislature passed a version that made same-sex couples eligible to adopt.
On July 22, 1997, three same-sex couples, who had been denied marriage licenses in the towns of Milton and Shelburne and the city of South Burlington, sued those jurisdictions and the state. They were Stan Baker and Peter Harrigan, Holly Puterbaugh and Lois Farnham, and Nina Beck and Stacy Jolles. Two of the couples had raised children together. The couples sued their respective localities and the state of Vermont, requesting a declaratory judgment that the denial of licenses violated Vermont's marriage statutes and the state Constitution. The plaintiffs were represented by Mary Bonauto, an attorney with Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, and two Vermont attorneys, Susan Murray and Beth Robinson.
The defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that no relief could be legally granted for the plaintiffs' grievances. On December 19 at the trial court in Chittenden County, Superior Court Judge Linda Levitt granted the defendants' motion, ruling that the marriage statutes could not be construed to allow same-sex marriages and that the statutes were constitutional because they served the public interest by promoting "the link between procreation and child rearing". She disagreed with the defendants' contention that "history and tradition" justify the state's interest in preserving marriage. The plaintiffs appealed the decision to the Vermont Supreme Court.
On November 3, 1998, voters in Alaska and Hawaii approved referendums in opposition to same-sex marriage.Two weeks later, on the eve of oral arguments in "Baker" before the Vermont Supreme Court, Tracey Conaty of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force said "Right now Vermont, in many ways, is our biggest hope". Discussing the interplay between the courts and public opinion, Greg Johnson, a professor at Vermont Law School, said: "The reason we have some hope here in Vermont is not just because the jurisprudence is good but the body politic is markedly different than in Alaska and Hawaii".
The Vermont Supreme Court received amicus briefs from the Vermont Human Rights Commission, Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Vermont Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights, Parents and Friends of Lesbian and Gay Men, Vermont Organization for Weddings of the Same-Gender, Vermont NOW, Vermont Psychiatric Association, Take It To the People, New Journey, the American Center for Law and Justice, Specialty Research Associates, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, Agudath Israel of America, the Christian Legal Society, and a number of U.S. states, groups of professors of law, and individuals. It heard oral arguments on November 18, 1998.
Attorney Beth Robinson represented the plaintiffs at the State Supreme Court. She argued that the statutes could be read to provide same-sex couples the right to marry. They also argued that in the absence of such an interpretation of the statutes, the Vermont Constitution's Common Benefits Clause (Chapter I, Article 7), which guarantees all citizens equal benefit and protection of the law, guarantees same-sex couples' right to the substantial benefits and protections of marriage. They questioned the lower court's justification for limiting marital status to male-female couples—linking marital status to procreation and child rearing, noting that Vermont law recognized same-sex couples' right to adopt children and to parent children conceived by natural and artificial means. They questioned how the state could explicitly allow same-sex partners to parent, but deny them and their adopted children the benefits and security of marriage. The justices questioned whether the state's position constituted gender discrimination and whether modern science was undermining the idea that only male-female couples could procreate. The state nevertheless maintained that this was a question of social policy within the purview of the legislature in "furthering the link between procreation and child rearing.". When a justice asked if the state saw marriage as a fundamental right, the attorney for the state answered "Yes, but it's a fundamental right between a man and a woman."
On December 20, 1999, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled in three different opinions that the denial of marriage benefits was a violation of the state constitution. The three judge majority written by Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy wrote that the state must guarantee the same protections and benefits to same-sex couples that it does to male-female spouses, and said that the legislature should, in a "reasonable period of time", find a way to provide same-sex couples with those benefits. Justices John Dooley and Denise R. Johnson each wrote separate opinions concurring that the exclusion of same-sex couples to the state's marriage rights was unconstitutional, but with different rationales.
The majority decision was authored by Chief Justice Jeffrey Amestoy joined by justices James Morse and Marilyn Skoglund dismissed the plaintiff's contention that the denial of same-sex unions violated of the Vermont marriage statutes. The court held that while the statutes did not explicitly limit marriage to male-female pairs, both the common dictionary definition of marriage and the legislative intent when the relevant statutes were enacted in 1945 favored the interpretation of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The court also interpreted the terms "bride" and "groom" as being gender-specific.
With respect to the State Constitution's Common Benefit Clause, the court noted that it was an original component of the 1777 Vermont Constitution, predating the Equal Protection Clause of the Federal Constitution's 14th Amendment by several decades, that Vermont is free to provide rights to its citizens not granted by the federal constitution, and that the application of the Common Benefit Clause has historically been significantly different from the federal courts' application of the Equal Protection Clause. While the federal Equal Protection Clause is typically invoked only under very limited circumstances, the Common Benefit Clause has been read to require that "statutory exclusions from publicly conferred benefits and protections must be 'premised on an appropriate and overriding public interest.'"
It found that the state's policy did not serve such an "overriding public interest", rejecting the argument that same-sex marriages would do harm by weakening the link between marriage and child rearing and finding no administrative or pragmatic difficulty with extending the rights of marriage to same-sex couples. The court also noted the state's endorsement of parenting by gays and lesbians in a series of actions, including 1996 legislation promoting same-sex adoption. It also dismissed the argument that legal recognition of same-sex marriage would not conform to the practices of other states, pointing out that Vermont already allowed for certain marriage contracts not recognized by other states, including first-cousin marriages, and that such concerns had not prevented the passage of similarly distinctive laws allowing same-sex couples to adopt. The court dismissed the remaining arguments, such as those concerning the "stability" of same-sex couples, as too nebulous or speculative to justify a policy with respect to all same-sex couples and equally applicable to some male-female partnerships.
The majority opinion declined to grant the plaintiffs' request for a marriage license, though it allowed that "some future case may attempt to establish that notwithstanding equal benefits and protections under Vermont law—the denial of a marriage license operates per se to deny constitutionally protected rights". Instead it directed requiring the State to implement a system to grant same-sex couples statutory rights and privileges equivalent to those enjoyed by male-female couples. This system could be implemented by modifying the marriage statutes to allow for same-sex marriages or creating a parallel status under another name such as a "domestic partnership system".
Justice John Dooley wrote a concurrence in which he agreed with the majority opinion in that the denial of marriage benefits to same-sex couples violated the State's Common Benefits Clause, he did not agree with the majority's reliance on federal precedent, which does not hold binding on the Vermont state courts. He accused the majority on relying on the Supreme Court case "Bowers v. Hardwick", which held that sodomy laws can be constitutionally criminalized, and not applying a suspect classification to sexual orientation in accordance to Vermont court jurisprudence developments.
Justice Denise R. Johnson concurred with the majority's holding that the marriage statutes defining marriage between opposite couples violated the state constitution, but dissented from the remedy. Johnson wrote that she believed that the state was required to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, not just offer the same benefits by a different name. She argued the marriage statutes were a violation of sex classification. She wrote, "I would grant the requested relief and enjoin defendants from denying plaintiffs a marriage license based solely on the sex of the applicants."
In 2000, the Legislature responded to the "Baker" decision by instituting civil unions for same-sex couples after an acrimonious and deeply polarizing debate. The legislation, which took effect on July 1, also defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman, an explicit statement previously not found in Vermont's marriage licensing statute. In response to the court's decision in "Baker" and the legislature's enactment of civil unions, opponents of the legal recognition of same-sex unions formed an opposition organization called Take Back Vermont.
In the elections that fall, six incumbent legislators who supported civil unions lost in the September primaries, five Republicans and one Democrat. In November another 11 civil union supporters lost their seats in the legislature. Exit polls showed voters were evenly split on the question of civil unions.
When GLAD filed a lawsuit seeking same-sex marriage rights in Massachusetts, Bonauto tried to avoid winning a decision like "Baker" by emphasizing the status of marriage rather than its particular legal benefits and obligations. She said: "We spent more time in Massachusetts talking about how marriage is a basic civil and human right. It cannot be splintered into state and federal protections. We talked about what marriage is in our culture."
New Jersey's highest court ruled unanimously in "Lewis v. Harris" on October 25, 2006, that excluding same-sex couples from marriage violated the state constitution's guarantee of equal protection. When the justices determined 4 to 3 that the appropriate remedy should be left to the legislature because "such change must come from the crucible of the democratic process", the "New York Times" said New Jersey "could be considered the new Vermont".
Vermont legalized same-sex marriage effective September 1, 2009. Civil unions entered into prior to September 1 continued to be recognized as civil unions unless the couple marries. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40472 |
Berea College
Berea College is a private liberal arts work college in Berea, Kentucky. Founded in 1855, Berea College is distinctive among post-secondary institutions for providing free education to students and for having been the first college in the Southern United States to be coeducational and racially integrated. Berea College charges no tuition; every admitted student is provided the equivalent of a four-year scholarship.
Berea offers bachelor's degrees in 32 majors. It has a full-participation work-study program in which students are required to work at least 10 hours per week in campus and service jobs in any of over 130 departments. Berea's primary service region is Southern Appalachia, but students come from 46 states in the United States and 58 other countries, with approximately one in three students an ethnic minority or from outside the U.S.
Founded in 1855 by the abolitionist John Gregg Fee (1816–1901), Berea College admitted both black and white students in a fully integrated curriculum, making it the first non-segregated, coeducational college in the South and one of a handful of institutions of higher learning to admit both male and female students in the mid-19th century. The college began as a one-room schoolhouse that also served as a church on Sundays on land that was granted to Fee by politician and abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay. Fee named the new community after the biblical Berea. Although the school's first articles of incorporation were adopted in 1859, founder John Gregg Fee and the teachers were forced out of the area by pro-slavery supporters in that same year.
Fee spent the Civil War years raising funds for the school, trying to provide for his family in Cincinnati, Ohio, and working at Camp Nelson. He returned afterward to continue his work at Berea. He spent nearly 18 months working mostly at Camp Nelson, where he helped provide facilities for the freedmen and their families, as well as teaching and preaching. He helped get funds for barracks, a hospital, school and church.
In 1866, Berea's first full year after the war, it had 187 students, 96 African American and 91 white. It began with preparatory classes to ready students for advanced study at the college level. In 1869, the first college students were admitted, and the first bachelor's degrees were awarded in 1873. Almost all the private and state colleges in the South were racially segregated. Berea was the main exception until a new state law in 1904 forced its segregation.
The college challenged the law in state court and further appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in "Berea College v. Kentucky". When the challenge failed, the college had to become a segregated school, but it set aside funds to help establish the Lincoln Institute near Louisville to educate black students. In 1950, when the law was amended to allow integration of schools at the college level, Berea promptly resumed its integrated policies.
In 1925 famed advertiser Bruce Barton, a future congressman, sent a letter to 24 wealthy men in America to raise funds for the college. Every single letter was returned with a minimum of $1,000 in donation. During World War II, Berea was one of 131 colleges nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a navy commission.
Up until the 1960s, Berea provided pre-college education in addition to college level curriculum. In 1968, the elementary and secondary schools (Foundation School) were discontinued in favor of focusing on undergraduate college education.
The college provides significant funding to assist students in studying abroad. Berea students are also eligible to win the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which provides funding for a year of study abroad following graduation. Like many private colleges, Berea does not enroll students based upon semester hours. Berea College uses a course credit system, which has the following equivalencies:
All students are required to attend the college on a full-time basis, which is 3.00 course credits of enrollment, or 12 semester hours. Students must be enrolled in at least 4.00 course credits to be considered for the Dean's list. Enrollment in 4.75 or more course credits requires the approval of the Academic Adviser, and a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.30. There are also optional Summer opportunities to engage in study. Students may take between 1 and 2.25 credits during Summer. One Berea course credit is equivalent to four semester hours (6 quarter hours). Part-time enrollment is not permitted except during Summer term. A cumulative GPA of 2.0 is required in all majors in order to graduate with a bachelor's degree.
In 2019, "Washington Monthly" ranked Berea College 4th in the U.S. among liberal arts colleges based on its contribution to the public good, as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service. The 2020 annual ranking of "U.S. News & World Report" categorizes Berea as 'more selective' and rates it tied for 46th overall, 2nd for "Most Innovative Schools", 4th for "Best Undergraduate Teaching" and tied for 14th in "Top Performers in Social Mobility" among liberal arts colleges in the U.S. "Kiplinger's Personal Finance" places Berea 35th in its 2019 ranking of 149 best value liberal arts colleges in the United States.
Berea College provides all students with full-tuition scholarships and many receive support for room and board as well. Berea College charges no tuition; every admitted student is provided the equivalent of a four-year, full-tuition scholarship (currently worth over $150,000; $39,400 per year for 2018-2019). Admission to the college is granted only to students who need financial assistance (as determined by the FAFSA); in general, applications are accepted only from those whose family income falls within the bottom 40% of U.S. households. About 75% of the college's incoming class is drawn from the Appalachian region of the South and some adjoining areas, and about 8% are international students. Generally, no more than one student is admitted from a given country in a single year (with the exception of countries in distress such as Liberia). This policy ensures that 70 or more nationalities are usually represented in the student body of Berea College. All international students are admitted on full scholarships with the same regard for financial need as U.S. students.
In order to support its extensive scholarship program, Berea College has one of the largest financial reserves of any American college when measured on a per-student basis. The endowment was $1.192 billion as of June 30, 2018. The base of Berea College's finances is dependent on substantial contributions from individuals, foundations, corporations that support the mission of the college and donations from alumni. A solid investment strategy increased the endowment from $150 million in 1985 to its current amount.
As a work college, Berea has a student work program in which all students work 10 or more hours per week on campus. Berea is one of only eight colleges in the United States and one of two in Kentucky (Alice Lloyd College being the other) to have mandatory work study programs. Employment opportunities range from busing tables at the Boone Tavern Hotel, a historic business owned by the college, to editing, writing, publishing, and managing the College's Independent Students' Newspaper "The Pinnacle" or managing the hanging and focusing of lights for the productions at the Theatre Lab. Other job duties include janitorial labor, building management, resident assistance, teaching assistance, food service, gardening and groundskeeping, information technology, woodworking, weaving, and secretarial work. Some of the work-study has helped to extend and support practice of traditional crafts from the Appalachian region, such as weaving. Berea College has helped make the town a center for quality arts and crafts.
Students are currently paid an hourly wage from $4.10 to $6.55 by the college, based on the WLS ("Work, Learning, and Service") level attached to individual labor positions. The college regularly increases student pay on a yearly basis, but it has never been equivalent to the federal minimum wage in the school's history. Because of the scheduling demands of both an academic requirement and a labor requirement, students are not allowed to work at off-campus jobs.
Berea was founded by Protestant Christians. It maintains a Christian identity separate from any particular denomination. The college's motto, "God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth", is taken from Acts . One General Studies course is focused on Christian faith, as every student is required to take an Understandings of Christianity course. In an effort to be sensitive to the diverse preferences and experiences of students and faculty, these courses are designed to be taught with respect for the unique spiritual journey of each individual, regardless of religious identification.
The Hutchins Library maintains an extensive collection of books, archives, and music pertaining to the history and culture of the Southern Appalachian region. The Southern Appalachian Archives contain organizational records, personal papers, oral histories, and photographs. Included are the papers of the Council of the Southern Mountains (1912–1989) and the Appalachian Volunteers (1963–1970).
Technology is an important part of life at Berea College. Since 2002, all students at Berea receive laptops that they take with them when they graduate. Students are not required to pay for the computers, though they do provide a small fee to support the technological infrastructure.
Students are also not allowed to have cars on campus without a special permit, and student permits for cars are rarely granted to first- or second-year students. The college provides students with supplemental transport through a shuttle bus system.
Berea College teams are nicknamed as the Mountaineers. The college is a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, competing in Division III. Men's sports include baseball, basketball, cross country, golf, soccer, tennis and track & field; while women's sports include basketball, cross country, soccer, softball, tennis, track & field, and volleyball.
On February 20, 2012, the NCAA announced it had granted Berea permission to begin a one-year period exploring membership in its Division III, non-scholarship athletic program.
On May 4, 2016, the USA South Athletic Conference announced that Berea would join the league effective in the 2017–18 school year. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40473 |
Minardi
Minardi was an Italian automobile racing team and constructor founded in Faenza in 1979 by Giancarlo Minardi. It competed in the Formula One World Championship from 1985 until 2005 with little success, nevertheless acquiring a loyal following of fans. In 2001, to save the team from folding, Minardi sold it to Australian businessman Paul Stoddart, who ran the team for five years before selling it on to Red Bull GmbH in 2005 who renamed it Scuderia Toro Rosso. From 2001, all of Minardi chassis were called "PS" then a number, the PS being the initials of team owner, Paul Stoddart.
During its time in F1, the team scored a total of 38 championship points; 16 of these were earned by the team's first driver, Pierluigi Martini. Martini also recorded the team's only front row start, qualifying 2nd at the 1990 United States Grand Prix, and he led a lap during the 1989 Portuguese Grand Prix, the only time a Minardi led a lap. The team never achieved a podium finish, only managing three 4th-place finishes: Martini twice in 1991 and Christian Fittipaldi in 1993.
In the 21 seasons, Minardi entered 37 drivers. Thirteen had Italian nationality, the others came with 13 different nationalities (discounting Doornbos racing under a Monaco license in 2005). Martini started in 103 Grands Prix for the team, while Morbidelli and Gené started 33 times.
Before Minardi's demise, the team was a particularly well-liked team within Formula One circles for its friendliness, accessibility, and lack of corporate culture. On the track, their cars were regarded by many as well-designed for their tiny budget, their low position recognised as a result of a lack of funds (and engine power) rather than a poor car. They also resisted employing pay-drivers more than most other financially strapped teams. Former Minardi drivers include double World Champion Fernando Alonso, Grands Prix winners Alessandro Nannini, Giancarlo Fisichella, Jarno Trulli and Mark Webber; CART IndyCar World Series double champion Alessandro Zanardi and race winners Justin Wilson and Christian Fittipaldi; and 24 Hours of Le Mans overall winners Michele Alboreto and Marc Gené.
The Minardi family has a longstanding involvement in motorsport. Giancarlo Minardi's grandfather had a Fiat dealership in Faenza since 1927, while his father, Giovanni Minardi, competed in his own cars in the late 1940s. The first Minardi’s car ever was the GM75 built by Giovanni Minardi: it had a 6 cylinder engine designed by Oberdan Golfieri and built by Antonio Lotti. Rino Ferniani drove it at the Circuito del Garda, retiring when he was leading the race. After his father’s death, Giancarlo took over the racing part of the family business. He took the reins of the Scuderia del Passatore in the early ‘70s. He decided to start from Formula Italia rather than Formula 3, like it was decided before. The team raced with a Brabham BT28 chassis and an Alfa Romeo engine. In 1972 it finished runner-up with Giancarlo Martini, but he won in the following season. In 1974 Lamberto Leoni lost the championship due to a controversial black flag. In 1975 the team was renamed “Scuderia Everest” for sponsorship reasons. The promising Elio De Angelis raced for the team in 1977 and 1978 and also Clay Regazzoni raced in 1978 and 1979. He ran with March cars and BMW engines in Formula Two from 1975 to 1979 and in 1976 briefly ran a customer Formula One Ferrari 312T with Giancarlo Martini, uncle of Pierluigi Martini. Martini Sr. qualified 15th for the Race of Champions at Brands Hatch but failed to start the race after an accident during the opening lap. The team then competed at the BRDC International Trophy in Silverstone where Martini finished 10th. In 1979 Minardi received financial backing from well known Italian motor racing patron Piero Mancini and set up the Minardi racing team as a Formula Two constructor.
The team first competed under the Minardi name in the 1980 European Formula Two championship. Rather than using a customer chassis, the team commissioned a BMW powered design from Giacomo Caliri's FLY studios — previously responsible for the Fittipaldi Automotive team's F5A Formula One car. The first Minardi’s driver was Miguel Ángel Guerra, who achieved the 9th place in the standings with 10 points. In 1981 Caliri and Marmiroli designed the Minardi M281 driven by Michele Alboreto, Johnny Cecotto, Miguel Ángel Guerra, Roberto Farneti and Enzo Coloni: Alboreto won the Misano race and finished 8th with 13 points, Cecotto gained 3 points and moved to March in summer. A Ferrari Dino 206 engine was used for the new Minardi M282. The drivers were Alessandro Nannini and Paolo Barilla. Barilla didn’t score any point, Nannini got the 10th place with 8 points. The 1983 season saw several drivers racing with the Minardi M283: Alessandro Nannini (11 points), Pierluigi Martini (6 points), Paolo Barilla (0 points), Enzo Coloni (1 race), Emilio De Villota (2 races), Oscar Larrauri (1 race) and Aldo Bertuzzi (1 race). The last season in Formula 2 was in 1984. Nannini (finished 10th with 9 points) was the first driver, the others were Roberto Del Castello (14th, 1 point), Pierre Chauvet (1 race) and Lamberto Leoni (3 races). The team's most notable result remains the 1981 win at the Misano round by Michele Alboreto. Minardi left the lower division at the end of 1984, although in 1986 a modified version of their final Formula Two car, the 283, was entered without success in two rounds of the Formula 3000 championship which had replaced Formula Two in 1985.
During 1984, Minardi took the decision to enter Formula One the following year. Caliri designed the M184, the team's prototype Formula One car (intended as a dual purpose design for the new Formula 3000) around Alfa Romeo's V8 turbocharged engine but when engineer Carlo Chiti left Alfa Romeo to found Motori Moderni, Minardi became the only customer for his new V6 engine design. The engine was not ready for the start of the season, so the team converted their M185 chassis to accept a Cosworth DFV engine for the first two races. The single car team was unsuccessful in its first year, scoring no points. The new engine was underpowered and driver Pierluigi Martini finished only two races, although he was also classified 11th at the German Grand Prix despite stopping with engine problems. Martini's best position was 8th in the 1985 Australian Grand Prix, behind Huub Rothengatter in an Osella.
Nonetheless, the team expanded to two cars for the season. In 1988 Minardi switched to Cosworth engines, and in 1989 it became top entrant for Pirelli's return to Formula One. The team was moderately successful in the midfield through the late 1980s and early 1990s, giving a succession of Italian drivers their first chance at the top level, including Alessandro Nannini, Pierluigi Martini and Gianni Morbidelli. Martini in particular was synonymous with Minardi, eventually having three spells with the team. He drove for them on their debut in 1985, scored their first point in the 1988 United States Grand Prix, although he had been running 5th for quite a long time during the race until being passed by Tyrrell's Jonathan Palmer, took their only front-row start at 1990 USA Grand Prix (aided by special Pirelli tyres; several of their other drivers had surprise qualifying results that day), their only lap leading a race in the 1989 Portuguese Grand Prix, where he finished 5th, and scored their joint-best F1 result up to that point (the other being at the British Grand Prix the same year).
In 1991 Minardi became the first team in modern times to make use of customer engines from Ferrari and in 1992 they used Lamborghini V12s. In 1993 Minardi enjoyed a good campaign, collecting seven points thanks to Christian Fittipaldi's fourth place in the 1993 South African Grand Prix and fifth place in the 1993 Monaco Grand Prix and Fabrizio Barbazza sixth places in the 1993 European Grand Prix and 1993 San Marino Grand Prix.
As the number of small teams shrank, Minardi slipped from the mid-field towards the back of the grid. Money woes hit and in 1994 Minardi joined his team with BMS Scuderia Italia in an effort to survive. Giancarlo Minardi retained 14.5% with the remaining 85.5% distributed between the Scuderia Italia investors (Emilio Gnutti, Giuseppe Lucchini and Vittorio Palazzani) and Defendente Marniga. In 1994 Martini finished 5th at both the 1994 Spanish Grand Prix and 1994 French Grand Prix, while Michele Alboreto scored his last point in Formula 1 with a 6th place in the 1994 Monaco Grand Prix. Acknowledging that the team was struggling, Bernie Ecclestone spoke to Flavio Briatore, who agreed to buy a share in the team in 1995. In 1996 Italian businessman Gabriele Rumi, former owner of the Fondmetal team switched his sponsorship support from Tyrrell to Minardi. He gradually increased his interest in the Faenza outfit, becoming co-owner and chairman. In 1997 Minardi teamed up with engine manufacturer Brian Hart. For the season the team were forced to use 1998-spec Ford Zetec-R V10 engines, which were rebadged as Fondmetal engines in deference to his financial input. However, Rumi's poor health forced him to withdraw his backing at the end of the season.
Points were rare during this time; Pedro Lamy scored his one and only point in Formula 1 with a 6th place in the 1995 Australian Grand Prix; this result was followed by a long barren spell until Marc Gené finished 6th in the 1999 European Grand Prix. That same race, Luca Badoer had been running fourth until his gearbox failed with 13 laps to go, at which point the Italian burst into tears next to his stricken car. Other Minardi drivers also came close to scoring points, including Shinji Nakano who finished 7th at the 1998 Canadian Grand Prix and Esteban Tuero, who finished 8th at the 1998 San Marino Grand Prix.
Minardi was known for not using pay drivers, but for the 2000 season, the team signed Argentinian Gastón Mazzacane, who only acquired the seat thanks to backing from the short-lived pay television channel Pan-American Sports Network.
The team, now near collapse, was purchased by Australian businessman Paul Stoddart in early 2001, merging it with his European Racing Formula 3000 team. That season saw Fernando Alonso make his F1 debut for the team at the age of 19; though he (and the team) failed to score any points that year, his performance was impressive enough that the reborn Renault F1 team signed him for 2002. He was replaced by Mark Webber, another future race winner, and heavy attrition at his debut race in Melbourne saw him finish in the points in 5th, with teammate Alex Yoong just outside the points in 7th.
Another memorable episode happened during the 2003 Brazilian Grand Prix. The race was stopped just after 75% distance, after treacherous weather and a sequence of accidents, including a spin into the grass for lead Minardi driver Jos Verstappen. Stoddart later claimed that Verstappen had enough fuel on board to last until just after the time the red flag was eventually waved, due to the large number of safety car laps. Assuming Stoddart was being truthful, Verstappen may well have won this race had he not spun.
During its final years, the Minardi team was almost as famous for its politics as for its racing. Stoddart was described as the Formula One teams' unofficial shop steward. During his time as team principal, Stoddart campaigned for reduced costs in the sport. He appealed to the competing car manufacturers for an agreement where the independent (and, on the whole, financially weaker) teams in Formula One would get cheaper engine deals than at present. In return, the team principals who would benefit from this would support the works teams when it came to opposing new rule changes enforced by the FIA, such as the proposed ban on traction control. Before the start of the 2004 season, however, Stoddart threatened to withdraw his support against the ban on traction control, but later changed his mind. Midway through the 2004 season, the other teams voted to change the unpopular single lap qualifying system back to the old 1 hour format, but Stoddart voted against because it would also mean the 107% rule being reintroduced; this meant the change never occurred, as a unanimous vote was required to change something so significant in the middle of a season. Before the 2005 Australian Grand Prix, Stoddart initially threatened to withdraw his cars if they were made to comply with the revised regulations for 2005, claiming Minardi could not afford to do so. Once again Stoddart ended up withdrawing his threat. Stoddart also repeatedly called for the resignation of the FIA's President, Max Mosley, particularly in the aftermath of the 2005 United States Grand Prix where the majority of teams withdrew from the race due to safety concerns about their Michelin tyres. While Minardi had run Bridgestone tyres, Stoddart had offered to compromise with the Michelin teams but Mosley had rejected it.
In 2004 Minardi was represented by two rookies, Italian Gianmaria "Gimmi" Bruni and Hungarian Zsolt Baumgartner. During the year, they celebrated their 20th season in F1. Baumgartner scored Minardi's first point in more than 2 years at the United States Grand Prix, finishing 8th (albeit last). Baumgartner was also the first Hungarian to score a point in a World Championship F1 race.
In 2005, Minardi's drivers were Christijan Albers and Patrick Friesacher. They amassed a total of seven points following the debacle of the 2005 United States Grand Prix, in which they finished fifth and sixth (of six runners) respectively. After losing financial backing from his sponsors before the 2005 German Grand Prix, Friesacher was replaced by Dutch Jordan test driver Robert Doornbos, creating the first all-Dutch driver line-up in Formula one since Carel Godin de Beaufort and Ben Pon drove together for the Ecurie Maarsbergen team at the 1962 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort.
In 2005, Paul Stoddart stated that he would sell Minardi if he could find the right buyer. Stoddart claimed that he had 41 approaches. His criterion for a sale was the ability of a buyer to move the team forward and leave the team based in Faenza. The drinks manufacturer Red Bull GmbH, which already owned another Formula One team, Red Bull Racing, decided to set up a second team to promote American drivers that had risen through its young driver programme, Red Bull Driver Search.
Ending several weeks of speculation on 10 September 2005 Red Bull announced it would take control of Minardi in November and run it as their "rookie team" from 2006.
Minardi fans worldwide immediately started an online petition to save the Minardi team name and the team's 20-year heritage in F1 after the news broke. The petition was not successful and the team was renamed Scuderia Toro Rosso for the 2006 season. The greatly increased funding from Red Bull, including the use of the Red Bull chassis and Ferrari engines, gradually led to improved results, culminating in Toro Rosso's only win at the 2008 Italian Grand Prix.
Giancarlo Minardi and Paul Stoddart have both made use of the Minardi name in new motorsport ventures.
On 1 January 2006, Giancarlo Minardi re-acquired certain rights to use the Minardi name in racing. He also announced that he was licensing the Minardi name to established team GP Racing in the junior Euro Formula 3000 series, to be entitled 'Minardi Team by GP Racing'. The team raced with moderate success, scoring a podium in each leg of the Spa round in June 2006. For 2007, Minardi Team by GP Racing combined forces with GP2 team Piquet Sports, to form Minardi Piquet Sports. For 2008 the team was known simply as Piquet Sports.
In 2006, Paul Stoddart declared his intention to enter a new team called 'European Minardi F1 Team Ltd' into Formula One beginning in . His application was unsuccessful, with the 12th place on the grid being awarded to Prodrive. Instead, Stoddart turned his attentions to the U.S.-based Champ Car series. On 18 December 2006, it was confirmed that he had purchased a controlling interest in the CTE Racing-HVM Champ Car team and that the team would be renamed Minardi Team USA. In 2007, the team had reasonable success. Robert Doornbos took two wins and several podium places on his way to third in the series, winning Rookie of the Year honours. When the series folded before its planned 2008 season, Stoddart's involvement ceased, with the team entering the IndyCar Series under the HVM name.
Stoddart retains the right to use the Minardi name for a British-registered company. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40479 |
Benetton Group
Benetton Group S.r.l. is a global fashion brand based in Ponzano Veneto, Italy founded in 1965. Benetton Group has a network of about 5,000 stores worldwide. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Benetton family's holding company Edizione.
In 1965, the Benettons opened their first store in Belluno and three years after in Paris. The company's core business consists of clothing brands United Colors of Benetton and Sisley.
Benetton was an iconic brand in the 1980s and 1990s but has since struggled to regain this position. In 2000, it ranked 75th in Interbrand's ranking of best global brands, however, by 2002, it had dropped out of the list.
In 2012, Benetton Group was delisted from the stock exchange and is now a fully owned subsidiary of the Benetton family company Edizione holding.
In 2017, the group posted a loss of €180 million. Prompted by the heavy losses, Luciano Benetton, who was then 83 years old, returned from retirement as Executive Chairman for the brand.
Revival efforts also included appointing Jean-Charles de Castelbajac as artistic director and re-appointing photographer Oliviero Toscani. As of 2020, United Colors of Benetton has 1,500 employees and uses 25,000 workers through subcontractors.
Benetton is known for its sports sponsorships, and for its "United Colors" advertising campaign. In 1982, Benetton hired Oliviero Toscani as creative director, which led to a change in advertising focus towards raising awareness for various issues worldwide. In 1984, Toscani photographed the first multiracial ad for the brand.
In 1989, Toscani refocused Benetton's advertising strategy under the "United Colors of Benetton" campaign. The campaign's graphic, billboard-sized ads depicted a variety of shocking subjects, including the deathbed scene of a man (AIDS activist David Kirby) dying from AIDS. Another ad featured a bloodied, unwashed newborn baby with umbilical cord still attached. The newborn ad prompted roughly 650 complaints to the British Advertising Standards Authority, which noted in its 1991 annual report that the Benetton baby ad "attracted more complaints than we have ever previously known." A third ad included a black stallion copulating with a white mare, while an fourth advert showed a light-skinned girl with blond hair hugging a dark-skinned boy whose hair was shaped into devil horns.
In 2000, Benetton was included in the reference publication "Guinness World Records" for the "Most Controversial Campaign."
In November 2011, Benetton created the UNHATE Foundation, launching a worldwide communication campaign described as an invitation to leaders and citizens of the world to combat the "culture of hatred." Benetton claimed the campaign was created to serve as its corporate social responsibility strategy. The UNHATE poster series uses altered images of political and religious leaders, such as then-President of the United States Barack Obama and Hugo Chávez, then President of Venezuela, kissing each other. Following Vatican protests, Benetton removed an ad purportedly showing Pope Benedict XVI kissing Ahmed Mohamed el Tayeb, the imam of Egypt's Al Azhar mosque.
Benetton won the Press Grand Prix at the 2012 Cannes Ad festival for its Unhate campaign.
In November 2017, Benetton launched a campaign in collaboration with Devbhumi, a company owned by rural women from India's remote Uttarakhand region. The initiative claims to empower more than 6,000 rural women artisans in India.
In 2019, Benetton Group announced it will be hosting one of the four days of talks and presentations which makes up the 88th annual International Wool Textile Organisation (IWTO) congress.
Benetton Group entered Formula One as a sponsor of Tyrrell in , then Alfa Romeo in ; this arrangement was extended to both Alfa and Toleman in . Benetton Formula Ltd. was formed at the end of 1985 when the Toleman and Spirit teams were sold to the Benetton family. The team saw its greatest success under Flavio Briatore, who managed the team from to . Michael Schumacher won his first Drivers' Championships with the team in and , and the team won their only Constructors' title in 1995. From , the team raced under an Italian licence although it continued to be based, like Toleman, in Oxfordshire in England. The team was bought by Renault for US$120 million in and was rebranded Renault F1 in 2002.
In 1979, Benetton first sponsored their (then amateur) local rugby team, A.S. Rugby Treviso. Benetton Rugby has since become a major force in Italian rugby, with 11 league titles and supplying many players to the national team. Benetton Group has also sponsored Treviso Basket (1982–2012) and Sisley Volley (1987–2012).
In 1991, Edizone Holding International, a Benetton subsidiary, bought Compañía de Tierras del Sud Argentino S. A. and became the largest private landowner in Argentina after taking over the land the company had inherited from the 19th century Conquest of the Desert. Benetton has faced criticism, particularly from Mapuche organizations, over its ownership and management of traditional Mapuche lands in Patagonia. In 1997, Benetton invested in a museum in Leleque which presented the Mapuche as migrants from Chile, which was interpreted as an attempt to diminish the Mapuche's traditional claims. The Curiñanco-Nahuelquir family was evicted from their land in 2002 following Benetton's claim to it, but the land was restored in 2007. The company published a position statement regarding the Mapuche in Patagonia in 2012. Protests and occupations began again in 2015. Activist Santiago Maldonado was last seen being evicted by the Argentine National Gendarmerie from the disputed area in August 2017. His body was found two months later.
Benetton aroused suspicion when they considered using RFID tracking chips on clothes to monitor inventory. A boycott site alleges the tracking chips "can be read from a distance and used to monitor the people wearing them." Issues of consumer privacy were raised and the plan was shelved. Benetton's position on RFID technology is also available on their website.
PETA launched a boycott campaign against Benetton for buying wool from farmers who practiced mulesing. Benetton has since agreed to buy nonmulesed wool and has further urged the wool industry to adopt the PETA and Australian Wool Growers Association agreement to end mulesing. Benetton's position statement on the mulesing controversy is available on their website.
On 24 April 2013, the eight-storey "Rana Plaza" commercial building collapsed outside Dhaka that housed one of the factories where Benetton makes its clothing. At least 1,130 people died. Benetton first denied reports linking production of their clothing at the factory, but clothes and documents linked to Benetton were discovered at the disaster site. Of the 29 brands identified as having sourced products from the Rana Plaza factories, only nine attended meetings held in November 2013 to agree a proposal on compensation to the victims. Several companies refused to sign including Walmart, Carrefour, Bonmarché, Mango, Auchan and Kik. The agreement was signed by Primark, Loblaw, Bonmarche and El Corte Ingles. A year after the collapse, Benetton faced international protests after failing to pay any compensation to the Rana Plaza Donors Trust Fund. Protests included shutting down Benetton's flagship Oxford Street store in London.
In April 2015, Benetton Group announced that it has doubled compensation for Rana Plaza victims recommended by independent assessors (PWC AND WRAP) and applied the principles of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety to global suppliers. Benetton's engagement for Bangladesh is available on their website. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=40480 |
Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick Barbarossa (, ; 1122 – 10 June 1190), also known as Frederick I, was the Holy Roman Emperor from 2 January 1155 until his death 35 years later. He was elected King of Germany at Frankfurt on 4 March 1152 and crowned in Aachen on 9 March 1152. He was crowned King of Italy on 24 April 1155 in Pavia and emperor by Pope Adrian IV on 18 June 1155 in Rome. Two years later, the term ' ("holy") first appeared in a document in connection with his empire. He was later formally crowned King of Burgundy, at Arles on 30 June 1178. He was named ' by the northern Italian cities which he attempted to rule: Barbarossa means "red beard" in Italian; in German, he was known as ", which has the same meaning. The fact of the Italian version of the nickname becoming prevalent, even in later German usage, reflects the centrality of the Italian campaigns to his career.
Before his imperial election, Frederick was by inheritance Duke of Swabia (1147–1152, as Frederick III). He was the son of Duke Frederick II of the Hohenstaufen dynasty and Judith, daughter of Henry IX, Duke of Bavaria, from the rival House of Welf. Frederick, therefore, descended from the two leading families in Germany, making him an acceptable choice for the Empire's prince-electors.
Historians consider him among the Holy Roman Empire's greatest medieval emperors. He combined qualities that made him appear almost superhuman to his contemporaries: his longevity, his ambition, his extraordinary skills at organization, his battlefield acumen and his political perspicacity. His contributions to Central European society and culture include the reestablishment of the ", or the Roman rule of law, which counterbalanced the papal power that dominated the German states since the conclusion of the Investiture Controversy.
Frederick died in 1190 in Asia Minor while leading an army in the Third Crusade.
Frederick was born in mid-December 1122 in Haguenau, to Frederick II, Duke of Swabia and Judith of Bavaria. He learned to ride, hunt and use weapons, but could neither read nor write, and was also unable to speak the Latin language. Later on, he took part in the "Hoftage" during the reign of his uncle, King Conrad III, in 1141 in Strasbourg, 1142 in Konstanz, 1143 in Ulm, 1144 in Würzburg and 1145 in Worms.
In early 1147, Frederick joined the Second Crusade. His uncle, King Conrad III, had taken the crusader vow in public on 28 December 1146. Frederick's father strongly objected to his son's crusade. According to Otto of Freising, the duke berated his brother, Conrad III, for permitting his son to go. The elder Frederick, who was dying, expected his son to look after his widow and young half-brother.
Perhaps in preparation for his crusade, Frederick married Adelaide of Vohburg sometime before March 1147. His father died on 4 or 6 April and Frederick succeeded to the Duchy of Swabia. The German crusader army departed from Regensburg seven weeks later.
In August 1147, while crossing the Byzantine Empire, an ill crusader stopped in a monastery outside Adrianople to recuperate. There he was robbed and killed. Conrad ordered Frederick to avenge him. The duke of Swabia razed the monastery, captured and executed the robbers and demanded a return of the stolen money. The intervention of the Byzantine general Prosuch prevented a further escalation.
A few weeks later, on 8 September, Frederick and Welf VI were among the few German crusaders spared when flash flooding destroyed the main camp. They had encamped on a hill away from the main army. The army reached Constantinople the following day.
Conrad III attempted to lead the army overland across Anatolia. Finding this too difficult in the face of constant Turkish attacks near Dorylaeum, he turned back. The rearguard was subsequently annihilated. Conrad sent Frederick ahead to inform King Louis VII of France of the disaster and ask for help. The two armies, French and German, then advanced together. When Conrad fell ill at Christmas in Ephesus, he returned to Constantinople by ship with his main followers, including Frederick.
With Byzantine ships and money, the German army left Constantinople on 7 March 1148 and arrived in Acre on 11 April. After Easter, Conrad and Frederick visited Jerusalem, where Frederick was impressed by the charitable works of the Knights Hospitaller. He took part in the council that was held at Palmarea on 24 June, where it was decided to attack Damascus.
The Siege of Damascus (24–28 July) lasted a mere five days and ended in ignominious defeat. Gilbert of Mons, writing fifty years later, recorded that Frederick "prevailed in arms before all others in front of Damascus". On 8 September, the German army sailed out of Acre.
On the route home, Conrad III and Frederick stopped in Thessaloniki where they swore oaths to uphold the treaty that Conrad had agreed with Emperor Manuel I Komnenos the previous winter. This treaty obligated the Germans to attack King Roger II of Sicily in cooperation with the Byzantines. After confirming the treaty, Frederick was sent ahead to Germany. He passed through Bulgaria and Hungary and arrived in Germany in April 1149.
When Conrad died in February 1152, only Frederick and the prince-bishop of Bamberg were at his deathbed. Both asserted afterwards that Conrad had, in full possession of his mental powers, handed the royal insignia to Frederick and indicated that Frederick, rather than Conrad's own six-year-old son, the future Frederick IV, Duke of Swabia, succeed him as king. Frederick energetically pursued the crown and at Frankfurt on 4 March 1152 the kingdom's princely electors designated him as the next German king.
He was crowned King of the Romans at Aachen several days later, on 9 March 1152. Frederick's father was from the Hohenstaufen family, and his mother was from the Welf family, the two most powerful families in Germany. The Hohenstaufens were often called Ghibellines, which derives from the Italianized name for Waiblingen castle, the family seat in Swabia; the Welfs, in a similar Italianization, were called Guelfs.
The reigns of Henry IV and Henry V left the status of the German empire in disarray, its power waning under the weight of the Investiture controversy. For a quarter of a century following the death of Henry V in 1125, the German monarchy was largely a nominal title with no real power. The king was chosen by the princes, was given no resources outside those of his own duchy, and he was prevented from exercising any real authority or leadership in the realm. The royal title was furthermore passed from one family to another to preclude the development of any dynastic interest in the German crown. When Frederick I of Hohenstaufen was chosen as king in 1152, royal power had been in effective abeyance for over twenty-five years, and to a considerable degree for more than eighty years. The only real claim to wealth lay in the rich cities of northern Italy, which were still within the nominal control of the German king. The Salian line had died out with the death of Henry V in 1125. The German princes refused to give the crown to his nephew, the duke of Swabia, for fear he would try to regain the imperial power held by Henry V. Instead, they chose Lothair III (1125–1137), who found himself embroiled in a long-running dispute with the Hohenstaufens, and who married into the Welfs. One of the Hohenstaufens gained the throne as Conrad III of Germany (1137–1152). When Frederick Barbarossa succeeded his uncle in 1152, there seemed to be excellent prospects for ending the feud, since he was a Welf on his mother's side. The Welf duke of Saxony, Henry the Lion, would not be appeased, however, remaining an implacable enemy of the Hohenstaufen monarchy. Barbarossa had the duchies of Swabia and Franconia, the force of his own personality, and very little else to construct an empire.
The Germany that Frederick tried to unite was a patchwork of more than 1600 individual states, each with its own prince. A few of these, such as Bavaria and Saxony, were large. Many were too small to pinpoint on a map. The titles afforded to the German king were "Caesar", "Augustus", and "Emperor of the Romans". By the time Frederick would assume these, they were little more than propaganda slogans with little other meaning. Frederick was a pragmatist who dealt with the princes by finding a mutual self-interest. Unlike Henry II of England, Frederick did not attempt to end medieval feudalism, but rather tried to restore it, though this was beyond his ability. The great players in the German civil war had been the Pope, Emperor, Ghibellines, and the Guelfs, but none of these had emerged as the winner.
Eager to restore the Empire to the position it had occupied under Charlemagne and Otto I the Great, the new king saw clearly that the restoration of order in Germany was a necessary preliminary to the enforcement of the imperial rights in Italy. Issuing a general order for peace, he made lavish concessions to the nobles. Abroad, Frederick intervened in the Danish civil war between Svend III and Valdemar I of Denmark and began negotiations with the Eastern Roman Emperor, Manuel I Comnenus. It was probably about this time that the king obtained papal assent for the annulment of his childless marriage with Adelheid of Vohburg, on the grounds of consanguinity (his great-great-grandfather was a brother of Adela's great-great-great-grandmother, making them fourth cousins, once removed). He then made a vain attempt to obtain a bride from the court of Constantinople. On his accession, Frederick had communicated the news of his election to Pope Eugene III, but had neglected to ask for papal confirmation. In March 1153, Frederick concluded the Treaty of Constance with the Pope, wherein he promised, in return for his coronation, to defend the papacy, to make no peace with king Roger II of Sicily or other enemies of the Church without the consent of Eugene, and to help Eugene regain control of the city of Rome.
Frederick undertook six expeditions into Italy. In the first, beginning in October 1154, his plan was to launch a campaign against the Normans under King William I of Sicily. He marched down and almost immediately encountered resistance to his authority. Obtaining the submission of Milan, he successfully besieged Tortona on 13 February 1155, razing it to the ground on 18 April. He moved on to Pavia, where he received the Iron Crown and the title of King of Italy on 24 April. Moving through Bologna and Tuscany, he was soon approaching the city of Rome. There, Pope Adrian IV was struggling with the forces of the republican city commune led by Arnold of Brescia, a student of Abelard. As a sign of good faith, Frederick dismissed the ambassadors from the revived Roman Senate, and Imperial forces suppressed the republicans. Arnold was captured and hanged for treason and rebellion. Despite his unorthodox teaching concerning theology, Arnold was not charged with heresy.
As Frederick approached the gates of Rome, the Pope advanced to meet him. At the royal tent the king received him, and after kissing the pope's feet, Frederick expected to receive the traditional kiss of peace. Frederick had declined to hold the Pope's stirrup while leading him to the tent, however, so Adrian refused to give the kiss until this protocol had been complied with. Frederick hesitated, and Adrian IV withdrew; after a day's negotiation, Frederick agreed to perform the required ritual, reportedly muttering, ""Pro Petro, non Adriano" -- For Peter, not for Adrian." Rome was still in an uproar over the fate of Arnold of Brescia, so rather than marching through the streets of Rome, Frederick and Adrian retired to the Vatican.
The next day, 18 June 1155, Adrian IV crowned Frederick I Holy Roman Emperor at St Peter's Basilica, amidst the acclamations of the German army. The Romans began to riot, and Frederick spent his coronation day putting down the revolt, resulting in the deaths of over 1,000 Romans and many more thousands injured. The next day, Frederick, Adrian, and the German army travelled to Tivoli. From there, a combination of the unhealthy Italian summer and the effects of his year-long absence from Germany meant he was forced to put off his planned campaign against the Normans of Sicily. On their way northwards, they attacked Spoleto and encountered the ambassadors of Manuel I Comnenus, who showered Frederick with costly gifts. At Verona, Frederick declared his fury with the rebellious Milanese before finally returning to Germany.
Disorder was again rampant in Germany, especially in Bavaria, but general peace was restored by Frederick's vigorous, but conciliatory, measures. The duchy of Bavaria was transferred from Henry II Jasomirgott, margrave of Austria, to Frederick's formidable younger cousin Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, of the House of Guelph, whose father had previously held both duchies. Henry II Jasomirgott was named Duke of Austria in compensation for his loss of Bavaria. As part of his general policy of concessions of formal power to the German princes and ending the civil wars within the kingdom, Frederick further appeased Henry by issuing him with the Privilegium Minus, granting him unprecedented entitlements as Duke of Austria. This was a large concession on the part of Frederick, who realized that Henry the Lion had to be accommodated, even to the point of sharing some power with him. Frederick could not afford to make an outright enemy of Henry.
On 9 June 1156 at Würzburg, Frederick married Beatrice of Burgundy, daughter and heiress of Renaud III, thus adding to his possessions the sizeable realm of the County of Burgundy. In an attempt to create comity, Emperor Frederick proclaimed the Peace of the Land, written between 1152 and 1157, which enacted punishments for a variety of crimes, as well as systems for adjudicating many disputes. He also declared himself the sole Augustus of the Roman world, ceasing to recognise Manuel I at Constantinople.
The retreat of Frederick in 1155 forced Pope Adrian IV to come to terms with King William I of Sicily, granting to William I territories that Frederick viewed as his dominion. This aggrieved Frederick, and he was further displeased when Papal Legates chose to interpret a letter from Adrian to Frederick in a manner that seemed to imply that the imperial crown was a gift from the Papacy and that in fact the Empire itself was a fief of the Papacy. Disgusted with the pope, and still wishing to crush the Normans in the south of Italy, in June 1158, Frederick set out upon his second Italian expedition, accompanied by Henry the Lion and his Saxon troops. This expedition resulted in the revolt and capture of Milan, the Diet of Roncaglia that saw the establishment of imperial officers and ecclesiastical reforms in the cities of northern Italy, and the beginning of the long struggle with Pope Alexander III.
The death of Pope Adrian IV in 1159 led to the election of two rival popes, Alexander III and the antipope Victor IV, and both sought Frederick's support. Frederick, busy with the siege of Crema, appeared unsupportive of Alexander III, and after the sacking of Crema demanded that Alexander appear before the emperor at Pavia and to accept the imperial decree. Alexander refused, and Frederick recognised Victor IV as the legitimate pope in 1160. In response, Alexander III excommunicated both Frederick I and Victor IV. Frederick attempted to convoke a joint council with King Louis VII of France in 1162 to decide the issue of who should be pope. Louis neared the meeting site, but when he became aware that Frederick had stacked the votes for Alexander, Louis decided not to attend the council. As a result, the issue was not resolved at that time.
The political result of the struggle with Pope Alexander was an alliance formed between the Norman state of Sicily and Pope Alexander III against Frederick. In the meantime, Frederick had to deal with another rebellion at Milan, in which the city surrendered on 6 March 1162; much of it was destroyed three weeks later on the emperor's orders. The fate of Milan led to the submission of Brescia, Placentia, and many other northern Italian cities. Returning to Germany towards the close of 1162, Frederick prevented the escalation of conflicts between Henry the Lion from Saxony and a number of neighbouring princes who were growing weary of Henry's power, influence, and territorial gains. He also severely punished the citizens of Mainz for their rebellion against Archbishop Arnold. In Frederick's third visit to Italy in 1163, his plans for the conquest of Sicily were ruined by the formation of a powerful league against him, brought together mainly by opposition to imperial taxes.
In 1164 Frederick took what are believed to be the relics of the "Biblical Magi" (the Wise Men or Three Kings) from the Basilica di Sant'Eustorgio in Milan and gave them as a gift (or as loot) to the Archbishop of Cologne, Rainald of Dassel. The relics had great religious significance and could be counted upon to draw pilgrims from all over Christendom. Today they are kept in the Shrine of the Three Kings in the Cologne cathedral. After the death of the antipope Victor IV, Frederick supported antipope Paschal III, but he was soon driven from Rome, leading to the return of Pope Alexander III in 1165.
In the meantime Frederick was focused on restoring peace in the Rhineland, where he organized a magnificent celebration of the canonization of Charles the Great (Charlemagne) at Aachen, under the authority of the antipope Paschal III. Concerned over rumours that Alexander III was about to enter into an alliance with the Byzantine Emperor Manuel I, in October 1166 Frederick embarked on his fourth Italian campaign, hoping as well to secure the claim of Paschal III and the coronation of his wife Beatrice as Holy Roman Empress. This time, Henry the Lion refused to join Frederick on his Italian trip, tending instead to his own disputes with neighbors and his continuing expansion into Slavic territories in northeastern Germany. In 1167 Frederick began besieging Ancona, which had acknowledged the authority of Manuel I; at the same time, his forces achieved a great victory over the Romans at the Battle of Monte Porzio. Heartened by this victory, Frederick lifted the siege of Ancona and hurried to Rome, where he had his wife crowned empress and also received a second coronation from Paschal III. Unfortunately, his campaign was halted by the sudden outbreak of an epidemic (malaria or the plague), which threatened to destroy the Imperial army and drove the emperor as a fugitive to Germany, where he remained for the ensuing six years. During this period, Frederick decided conflicting claims to various bishoprics, asserted imperial authority over Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary, initiated friendly relations with Manuel I, and tried to come to a better understanding with Henry II of England and Louis VII of France. Many Swabian counts, including his cousin the young Duke of Swabia, Frederick IV, died in 1167, so he was able to organize a new mighty territory in the Duchy of Swabia under his reign in this time. Consequently, his younger son Frederick V became the new Duke of Swabia in 1167, while his eldest son Henry was crowned King of the Romans in 1169, alongside his father who also retained the title.
Increasing anti-German sentiment swept through Lombardy, culminating in the restoration of Milan in 1169. In 1174 Frederick made his fifth expedition to Italy. (It was probably during this time that the famous "Tafelgüterverzeichnis", a record of the royal estates, was made.) He was opposed by the pro-papal Lombard League (now joined by Venice, Sicily, and Constantinople), which had previously formed to stand against him. The cities of northern Italy had become exceedingly wealthy through trade, representing a marked turning point in the transition from medieval feudalism. While continental feudalism had remained strong socially and economically, it was in deep political decline by the time of Frederick Barbarossa. When the northern Italian cities inflicted a defeat on Frederick at Alessandria in 1175, the European world was shocked. With the refusal of Henry the Lion to bring help to Italy, the campaign was a complete failure. Frederick suffered a heavy defeat at the Battle of Legnano near Milan, on 29 May 1176, where he was wounded and for some time was believed to be dead. This battle marked the turning point in Frederick's claim to empire. He had no choice other than to begin negotiations for peace with Alexander III and the Lombard League. In the Peace of Anagni in 1176, Frederick recognized Alexander III as pope, and in the Peace of Venice in 1177, Frederick and Alexander III were formally reconciled.
The scene was similar to that which had occurred between Pope Gregory VII and Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor at Canossa a century earlier. The conflict was the same as that resolved in the Concordat of Worms: Did the Holy Roman Emperor have the power to name the pope and bishops? The Investiture controversy from previous centuries had been brought to a tendentious peace with the Concordat of Worms and affirmed in the First Council of the Lateran. Now it had recurred, in a slightly different form. Frederick had to humble himself before Alexander III at Venice. The emperor acknowledged the pope's sovereignty over the Papal States, and in return Alexander acknowledged the emperor's overlordship of the Imperial Church. Also in the Peace of Venice, a truce was made with the Lombard cities, which took effect in August 1178. The grounds for a permanent peace were not established until 1183, however, in the Peace of Constance, when Frederick conceded their right to freely elect town magistrates. By this move, Frederick recovered his nominal domination over Italy, which became his chief means of applying pressure on the papacy.
In a move to consolidate his reign after the disastrous expedition into Italy, Frederick was formally crowned King of Burgundy at Arles on 30 June 1178. Although traditionally the German kings had automatically inherited the royal crown of Arles since the time of Conrad II, Frederick felt the need to be crowned by the Archbishop of Arles, regardless of his laying claim to the title from 1152.
Frederick did not forgive Henry the Lion for refusing to come to his aid in 1176. By 1180, Henry had successfully established a powerful and contiguous state comprising Saxony, Bavaria, and substantial territories in the north and east of Germany. Taking advantage of the hostility of other German princes to Henry, Frederick had Henry tried in absentia by a court of bishops and princes in 1180, declared that imperial law overruled traditional German law, and had Henry stripped of his lands and declared an outlaw. He then invaded Saxony with an imperial army to force his cousin to surrender. Henry's allies deserted him, and he finally had to submit to Frederick at an Imperial Diet in Erfurt in November 1181. Henry spent three years in exile at the court of his father-in-law Henry II of England in Normandy before being allowed back into Germany. He finished his days in Germany, as the much-diminished Duke of Brunswick. Frederick's desire for revenge was sated. Henry the Lion lived a relatively quiet life, sponsoring arts and architecture. Frederick's victory over Henry did not gain him as much in the German feudalistic system as it would have in the English feudalistic system. While in England the pledge of fealty went in a direct line from overlords to those under them, the Germans pledged oaths only to the direct overlord, so that in Henry's case, those below him in the feudal chain owed nothing to Frederick. Thus, despite the diminished stature of Henry the Lion, Frederick did not gain his allegiances.
Frederick was faced with the reality of disorder among the German states, where continuous civil wars were waged between pretenders and the ambitious who wanted the crown for themselves. Italian unity under German rule was more myth than truth. Despite proclamations of German hegemony, the pope was the most powerful force in Italy. When Frederick returned to Germany after his defeat in northern Italy, he was a bitter and exhausted man. The German princes, far from being subordinated to royal control, were intensifying their hold on wealth and power in Germany and entrenching their positions. There began to be a generalized social desire to "create greater Germany" by conquering the Slavs to the east.
Although the Italian city states had achieved a measure of independence from Frederick as a result of his failed fifth expedition into Italy, the emperor had not given up on his Italian dominions. In 1184, he held a massive celebration, the Diet of Pentecost, when his two eldest sons were knighted, and thousands of knights were invited from all over Germany. While payments upon the knighting of a son were part of the expectations of an overlord in England and France, only a "gift" was given in Germany for such an occasion. Frederick's monetary gain from this celebration is said to have been modest. Later in 1184, Frederick again moved into Italy, this time joining forces with the local rural nobility to reduce the power of the Tuscan cities. In 1186, he engineered the marriage of his son Henry to Constance of Sicily, heiress to the Kingdom of Sicily, over the objections of Pope Urban III.
Pope Urban III died shortly after, and was succeeded by Gregory VIII, who was more concerned with troubling reports from the Holy Land than with a power struggle with Barbarossa.
Around 23 November 1187, Frederick received letters that had been sent to him from the rulers of the Crusader states in the Near East urging him to come to their aid. Around 1 December, Cardinal Henry of Marcy preached a crusade sermon before Frederick and a public assembly in Strasbourg. Frederick expressed support for the crusade but declined to take the cross on the grounds of his ongoing conflict with Archbishop Philip of Cologne. He did, however, urge King Philip II of France to take the cross through messengers and then in a personal meeting on 25 December on the border between Ivois and Mouzon.
On 27 March 1188, at the Diet of Mainz, the archbishop of Cologne submitted to Frederick. Bishop of Würzburg preached a crusade sermon and Frederick asked the assembly whether he should take the cross. At the universal acclaim of the assembly, he took the crusader's vow. His second son, the duke of Swabia, followed suit. The eldest, Henry VI, was to remain behind in Germany as regent. At Mainz Frederick proclaimed a "general expedition against the pagans". He set the period of preparation as 17 April 1188 to 8 April 1189 and scheduled the army to assemble at Regensburg on 23 April 1189.
At Strasbourg, Frederick had imposed a small tax on the Jews of Germany to fund the crusade. He also put the Jews under his protection and forbade anyone to preach against the Jews. When mobs threatened the Jews of Mainz on the eve of the assembly in March, Frederick sent the imperial marshal Henry of Kalden to disperse them. Rabbi Moses then met with the emperor, which resulted in an imperial edict threatening maiming or death for anyone who maimed or killed a Jew. On 29 March, Frederick and the rabbi rode through the streets together. Frederick successfully prevented a repeat of the massacres that had accompanied the First Crusade and Second Crusade in Germany.
Because Frederick had signed a treaty of friendship with Saladin in 1175, he felt it necessary to give Saladin notice of the termination of their alliance. On 26 May 1188, he sent Count Henry II of Dietz to present an ultimatum to Saladin. A few days after Christmas 1188, Frederick received Hungarian, Byzantine, Serbian and Seljuk envoys in Nuremberg. The Hungarians and Seljuks promised provisions and safe-conduct to the crusaders. The envoys of Stefan Nemanja, grand prince of Serbia, announced that their prince would receive Frederick in Niš. Only with difficulty was an agreement reached with the Byzantine envoy, John Kamateros. Frederick sent a large embassy ahead to make preparations in Byzantium.
On 15 April 1189 in Haguenau, Frederick formally and symbolically accepted the staff and scrip of a pilgrim and set out. His crusade was "the most meticulously planned and organized" up to that time. According to one source written in the 1220s, Frederick organized a grand army of 100,000 men (including 20,000 knights) and set out on the overland route to the Holy Land; Some historians believe that this is an exaggeration, however, and use other contemporary sources to estimate an army of 12,000–15,000 men, including 3,000–4,000 knights.
The Crusaders passed through Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria before entering Byzantine territory. Matters were complicated by a secret alliance between the Emperor of Constantinople, Isaac II Angelos, and Saladin, warning of which was supplied by a note from Sibylla, ex-Queen of Jerusalem. While in Hungary, Barbarossa personally asked the Hungarian Prince Géza, brother of King Béla III of Hungary, to join the Crusade. The king agreed, and a Hungarian army of 2,000 men led by Géza escorted the German emperor's forces.
Later on, Frederick camped in Philippopolis, then in Adrianople in the autumn of 1189 to avoid winter climate in Anatolia, in the meantime, he received imprisoned German emissaries who were held in Constantinople, and exchanged hostages with Isaac II, as a guarantee that the crusaders do not sack local settlements until they depart the Byzantine territory. In March 1190, Frederick left Adrianople to Gallipoli at the Dardanelles to embark to Asia Minor.
The armies coming from western Europe pushed on through Anatolia, where they were victorious at the Battle of Philomelium and defeated the Turks in the Battle of Iconium, eventually reaching as far as Cilician Armenia. The approach of Barbarossa's victorious German army greatly concerned Saladin, who was forced to weaken his force at the Siege of Acre and send troops to the north to block the arrival of the Germans.
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa opted on the local Armenians' advice to follow a shortcut along the Saleph river, meanwhile the army started to traverse the mountain path. On 10 June 1190, he drowned near Silifke Castle in the Saleph river. There are several conflicting accounts of the event:
Frederick's death caused several thousand German soldiers to leave the force and return home through the Cilician and Syrian ports. The German-Hungarian army was struck with an onset of disease near Antioch, weakening it further. Only 5,000 soldiers, a third of the original force, arrived in Acre. Barbarossa's son, Frederick VI of Swabia, carried on with the remnants of the German army, along with the Hungarian army under the command of Prince Géza, with the aim of burying the emperor in Jerusalem, but efforts to preserve his body in vinegar failed. Hence, his flesh was interred in the Church of St Peter in Antioch, his bones in the cathedral of Tyre, and his heart and inner organs in Saint Paul's Church, Tarsus.
The unexpected demise of Frederick left the Crusader army under the command of the rivals Philip II and Richard, who had traveled to Palestine separately by sea, and ultimately led to its dissolution. Richard continued to the East where he fought Saladin, winning territories along the shores of Palestine, but ultimately failed to win the war by conquering Jerusalem itself before he was forced to return to his own territories in north-western Europe, known as the Angevin Empire. He returned home after he signed the Treaty of Ramla agreeing that Jerusalem would remain under Muslim control while allowing unarmed Christian pilgrims and traders to visit the city. The treaty also reduced the Latin Kingdom to a geopolitical coastal strip extending from Tyre to Jaffa.
The increase in wealth of the trading cities of northern Italy led to a revival in the study of the Justinian Code, a Latin legal system that had become extinct centuries earlier. Legal scholars renewed its application. It is speculated that Pope Gregory VII personally encouraged the Justinian rule of law and had a copy of it. The historian Norman Cantor described Corpus Iuris Civilis (Justinian Body of Civil Law) as "the greatest legal code ever devised". It envisaged the law of the state as a reflection of natural moral law (as seen by the men of the Justinian system), the principle of rationality in the universe. By the time Frederick assumed the throne, this legal system was well established on both sides of the Alps. He was the first to utilize the availability of the new professional class of lawyers. The Civil Law allowed Frederick to use these lawyers to administer his kingdom in a logical and consistent manner. It also provided a framework to legitimize his claim to the right to rule both Germany and northern Italy. In the old days of Henry V and Henry VI, the claim of divine right of kings had been severely undermined by the Investiture controversy. The Church had won that argument in the common man's mind. There was no divine right for the German king to also control the church by naming both bishops and popes. The institution of the Justinian code was used, perhaps unscrupulously, by Frederick to lay claim to divine powers.
In Germany, Frederick was a political realist, taking what he could and leaving the rest. In Italy, he tended to be a romantic reactionary, reveling in the antiquarian spirit of the age, exemplified by a revival of classical studies and Roman law. It was through the use of the restored Justinian code that Frederick came to view himself as a new Roman emperor. Roman law gave a rational purpose for the existence of Frederick and his imperial ambitions. It was a counterweight to the claims of the Church to have authority because of divine revelation. The Church was opposed to Frederick for ideological reasons, not the least of which was the humanist nature found in the revival of the old Roman legal system. When Pepin the Short sought to become king of the Franks in the 8th century, the church needed military protection, so Pepin found it convenient to make an ally of the pope. Frederick, however, desired to put the pope aside and claim the crown of old Rome simply because he was in the likeness of the greatest emperors of the pre-Christian era. Pope Adrian IV was naturally opposed to this view and undertook a vigorous propaganda campaign designed to diminish Frederick and his ambition. To a large extent, this was successful.
Frederick did little to encourage economic development in Germany prior to the autumn of 1165. In that year he visited the lower Rhineland, the most economically advanced region in Germany. He had already travelled to northern Italy, the most economically advanced region in the Empire, three times. From 1165 on, Frederick pursued economic policies to encourage growth and trade. There is no question that his reign was a period of major economic growth in Germany, but it is impossible now to determine how much of that growth was owed to Frederick's policies.
The number of mints in Germany increased ninefold in the reign of Frederick and his son Henry, from about two dozen mints at the start of his reign to 215 mints in 1197 and from a mere two royal mints to 28. Frederick himself established at least twelve royal mints, including those of Aachen, Donauwörth, Ulm, Haguenau, Duisberg, Kaiserswerth, Frankfurt, Gelnhausen and Dortmund. He also granted privileges exempting the merchants of Aachen, Gelnhausen, Haguenau, Monza, Rome, Pisa and Venice from all tolls within the Empire.
Historians have compared Frederick to Henry II of England. Both were considered the greatest and most charismatic leaders of their age. Each possessed a rare combination of qualities that made them appear superhuman to their contemporaries: longevity, boundless ambition, extraordinary organizing skill, and greatness on the battlefield. Both were handsome and proficient in courtly skills, without appearing effeminate or affected. Both came to the throne in the prime of manhood. Each had an element of learning, without being considered impractical intellectuals but rather more inclined to practicality. Each found himself in the possession of new legal institutions that were put to creative use in governing. Both Henry and Frederick were viewed to be sufficiently and formally devout to the teachings of the Church, without being moved to the extremes of spirituality seen in the great saints of the 12th century. In making final decisions, each relied solely upon his own judgment, and both were interested in gathering as much power as they could.
In keeping with this view of Frederick, his uncle, Otto of Freising, wrote an account of Frederick's reign entitled "Gesta Friderici I imperatoris" (Deeds of the Emperor Frederick), which is considered to be an accurate history of the king. Otto's other major work, the "Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus" ("Chronicle or History of the Two Cities") had been an exposition of the "Civitas Dei" ("The City of God") of St. Augustine of Hippo, full of Augustinian negativity concerning the nature of the world and history. His work on Frederick is of opposite tone, being an optimistic portrayal of the glorious potentials of imperial authority. Otto died after finishing the first two books, leaving the last two to Rahewin, his provost. Rahewin's text is in places heavily dependent on classical precedent. For example, Rahewin's physical description of Frederick reproduces word-for-word (except for details of hair and beard) a description of another monarch, Theodoric II written nearly eight hundred years earlier by Sidonius Apollinaris:
Frederick's charisma led to a fantastic juggling act that, over a quarter of a century, restored the imperial authority in the German states. His formidable enemies defeated him on almost every side, yet in the end he emerged triumphant. When Frederick came to the throne, the prospects for the revival of German imperial power were extremely thin. The great German princes had increased their power and land holdings. The king had been left with only the traditional family domains and a vestige of power over the bishops and abbeys. The backwash of the Investiture controversy had left the German states in continuous turmoil. Rival states were in perpetual war. These conditions allowed Frederick to be both warrior and occasional peace-maker, both to his advantage.
Frederick is the subject of many legends, including that of a sleeping hero, like the much older British Celtic legends of Arthur or Bran the Blessed. Legend says he is not dead, but asleep with his knights in a cave in the Kyffhäuser mountains in Thuringia or Mount Untersberg at the border between Bavaria, Germany, and Salzburg, Austria, and that when the ravens cease to fly around the mountain he will awake and restore Germany to its ancient greatness. According to the story, his red beard has grown through the table at which he sits. His eyes are half closed in sleep, but now and then he raises his hand and sends a boy out to see if the ravens have stopped flying. A similar story, set in Sicily, was earlier attested about his grandson, Frederick II. To garner political support the German Empire built atop the Kyffhäuser the Kyffhäuser Monument, which declared Kaiser Wilhelm I the reincarnation of Frederick; the 1896 dedication occurred on 18 June, the day of Frederick's coronation.
In medieval Europe, the Golden Legend became refined by Jacopo da Voragine. This was a popularized interpretation of the Biblical end of the world. It consisted of three things: (1) terrible natural disasters; (2) the arrival of the Antichrist; (3) the establishment of a good king to combat the anti-Christ. German propaganda played into the exaggerated fables believed by the common people by characterizing Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II as personification of the "good king".
Another legend states that when Barbarossa was in the process of seizing Milan in 1158, his wife, the Empress Beatrice, was taken captive by the enraged Milanese and forced to ride through the city on a donkey in a humiliating manner. Some sources of this legend indicate that Barbarossa implemented his revenge for this insult by forcing the magistrates of the city to remove a fig from the anus of a donkey using only their teeth. Another source states that Barbarossa took his wrath upon every able-bodied man in the city, and that it was not a fig they were forced to hold in their mouth, but excrement from the donkey. To add to this debasement, they were made to announce, ""Ecco la fica"" (meaning "behold the fig"), with the feces still in their mouths. It used to be said that the insulting gesture, (called fico), of holding one's fist with the thumb in between the middle and forefinger came by its origin from this event.
Frederick's first marriage, to Adelheid of Vohburg, did not produce any children and was annulled.
From his second marriage, to Beatrice of Burgundy, he had the following children: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39699 |
Social contract
In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order. The relation between natural and legal rights is often a topic of social contract theory. The term takes its name from "The Social Contract" (French: "Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique"), a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that discussed this concept. Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy.
The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent of any political order (termed the "state of nature" by Thomas Hobbes). In this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience. From this shared starting point, social contract theorists seek to demonstrate why a rational individual would voluntarily consent to give up their natural freedom to obtain the benefits of political order. Prominent of 17th- and 18th-century theorists of social contract and natural rights include Hugo Grotius (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel von Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762) and Immanuel Kant (1797), each approaching the concept of political authority differently. Grotius posited that individual humans had natural rights. Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature", human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder; there would be an endless "war of all against all" ("bellum omnium contra omnes"). To avoid this, free men contract with each other to establish political community (civil society) through a social contract in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign, one man or an assembly of men. Though the sovereign's edicts may well be arbitrary and tyrannical, Hobbes saw absolute government as the only alternative to the terrifying anarchy of a state of nature. Hobbes asserted that humans consent to abdicate their rights in favor of the absolute authority of government (whether monarchical or parliamentary). Pufendorf disputed Hobbes's equation of a state of nature with war. Alternatively, Locke and Rousseau argued that we gain civil rights in return for accepting the obligation to respect and defend the rights of others, giving up some freedoms to do so.
The central assertion that social contract theory approaches is that law and political order are not natural, but human creations. The social contract and the political order it creates are simply the means towards an end—the benefit of the individuals involved—and legitimate only to the extent that they fulfill their part of the agreement. Hobbes argued that government is not a party to the original contract and citizens are not obligated to submit to the government when it is too weak to act effectively to suppress factionalism and civil unrest. According to other social contract theorists, when the government fails to secure their natural rights (Locke) or satisfy the best interests of society (called the "general will" by Rousseau), citizens can withdraw their obligation to obey, or change the leadership through elections or other means including, when necessary, violence. Locke believed that natural rights were inalienable, and therefore the rule of God superseded government authority, while Rousseau believed that democracy (self-rule) was the best way to ensure welfare while maintaining individual freedom under the rule of law. The Lockean concept of the social contract was invoked in the United States Declaration of Independence. Social contract theories were eclipsed in the 19thcentury in favor of utilitarianism, Hegelianism and Marxism; they were revived in the 20thcentury, notably in the form of a thought experiment by John Rawls.
The concept of the social contract was originally posed by Glaucon, as described by Plato in "The Republic", BookII.
The social contract theory also appears in "Crito", another dialogue from Plato. Over time, the social contract theory became more widespread after Epicurus (341-270 BC), the first philosopher who saw justice as a social contract, and not as existing in Nature due to divine intervention (see below and also Epicurean ethics), decided to bring the theory to the forefront of his society. As time went on, philosophers of traditional political and social thought, such as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau put forward their opinions on social contract, which then caused the topic to become much more mainstream.
Social contract formulations are preserved in many of the world's oldest records. The Buddhist text of the second century BCE, Mahāvastu, recounts the legend of Mahasammata. The story goes as follows:
In his rock edicts, the Buddhist king Asoka was said to have argued for a broad and far-reaching social contract. The Buddhist "vinaya" also reflects social contracts expected of the monks; one such instance is when the people of a certain town complained about monks felling saka trees, the Buddha tells his monks that they must stop and give way to social norms.
Epicurus in the fourth century BCE seemed to have had a strong sense of social contract, with justice and law being rooted in mutual agreement and advantage, as evidenced by these lines, among others, from his "Principal Doctrines" (see also Epicurean ethics):
Quentin Skinner has argued that several critical modern innovations in contract theory are found in the writings from French Calvinists and Huguenots, whose work in turn was invoked by writers in the Low Countries who objected to their subjection to Spain and, later still, by Catholics in England. Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), from the School of Salamanca, might be considered an early theorist of the social contract, theorizing natural law in an attempt to limit the divine right of absolute monarchy. All of these groups were led to articulate notions of popular sovereignty by means of a social covenant or contract, and all of these arguments began with proto-"state of nature" arguments, to the effect that the basis of politics is that everyone is by nature free of subjection to any government.
These arguments, however, relied on a corporatist theory found in Roman law, according to which "a populus" can exist as a distinct legal entity. Thus, these arguments held that a group of people can join a government because it has the capacity to exercise a single will and make decisions with a single voice in the absence of sovereign authority—a notion rejected by Hobbes and later contract theorists.
In the early 17th century, Grotius (1583–1645) introduced the modern idea that individuals had "natural rights" that enabled self-preservation, employing this idea as a basis for moral consensus in the face of religious diversity and the rise of natural science. He seeks to find a parsimonious basis for a moral beginning for society, a kind of natural law that everyone could accept. He goes so far as to say in his "On the Law of War and Peace" that even if we were to concede what we cannot concede without the utmost wickedness, namely that there is no God, these laws would still hold.
The idea was considered incendiary since it suggested that power can ultimately go back to the individuals if the political society that they have set up forfeits the purpose for which it was originally established, which is to preserve themselves. In other words, individual persons are sovereign. Grotius says that the people are "sui juris" (under their own jurisdiction). People have rights as human beings, but there is a delineation of those rights because of what is possible for everyone to accept morally; everyone has to accept that each person as an individual is entitled to try to preserve himself. Each person should, therefore, avoid doing harm to, or interfering with, another, and any breach of these rights should be punished.
The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic" (without leadership or the concept of sovereignty). Individuals in the state of nature were apolitical and asocial. This state of nature is followed by the social contract.
The social contract was seen as an "occurrence" during which individuals came together and ceded some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs. This resulted in the establishment of the state, a sovereign entity like the individuals now under its rule used to be, which would create laws to regulate social interactions. Human life was thus no longer "a war of all against all".
The state system, which grew out of the social contract, was, however, also anarchic (without leadership). Just as the individuals in the state of nature had been sovereigns and thus guided by self-interest and the absence of rights, so states now acted in their self-interest in competition with each other. Just like the state of nature, states were thus bound to be in conflict because there was no sovereign over and above the state (more powerful) capable of imposing some system such as social-contract laws on everyone by force. Indeed, Hobbes' work helped to serve as a basis for the realism theories of international relations, advanced by E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau. Hobbes wrote in "Leviathan" that humans ("we") need the "terrour of some Power" otherwise humans will not heed the law of reciprocity, "(in summe) doing to others, as wee would be done to".
John Locke's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that persons in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state. Locke believed that individuals in a state of nature would be bound morally, by the Law of Nature, not to harm each other in their lives or possessions. Without government to defend them against those seeking to injure or enslave them, Locke further believed people would have no security in their rights and would live in fear. Individuals, to Locke, would only agree to form a state that would provide, in part, a "neutral judge", acting to protect the lives, liberty, and property of those who lived within it.
While Hobbes argued for near-absolute authority, Locke argued for inviolate freedom under law in his "Second Treatise of Government". Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in his influential 1762 treatise "The Social Contract", outlined a different version of social-contract theory, as the foundations of political rights based on unlimited popular sovereignty. Although Rousseau wrote that the British were perhaps at the time the freest people on earth, he did not approve of their representative government. Rousseau believed that liberty was possible only where the people as a whole ruled directly through lawmaking, where popular sovereignty was indivisible and inalienable. However, he also maintained that the people often did not know their "real will", and that a proper society would not occur until a great leader ("the Legislator") arose to change the values and customs of the people, likely through the strategic use of religion.
Rousseau's political theory differs in important ways from that of Locke and Hobbes. Rousseau's collectivism is most evident in his development of the "luminous conception" (which he credited to Denis Diderot) of the general will. Rousseau argues that a citizen cannot pursue his true interest by being an egoist but must instead subordinate himself to the law created by the citizenry acting as a collective.
Rousseau's striking phrase that man must "be forced to be free" should be understood this way: since the indivisible and inalienable popular sovereignty decides what is good for the whole, then if an individual lapses back into his ordinary egoism and disobeys the law, he will be forced to listen to what was decided when the people acted as a collectivity (as citizens). Thus the law, inasmuch as it is created by the people acting as a body, is not a limitation of individual freedom, but rather its expression.
Thus enforcement of laws, including criminal law, is not a restriction on individual liberty: the individual, as a citizen, explicitly agreed to be constrained if, as a private individual, he did not respect his own will as formulated in the general will. Because laws represent the restraints of civil freedom, they represent the leap made from humans in the state of nature into civil society. In this sense, the law is a civilizing force, and therefore Rousseau believed that the laws that govern a people help to mold their character.
Rousseau also analyses the social contract in terms of risk management,
thus suggesting the origins of the state as a form of mutual insurance.
While Rousseau's social contract is based on popular sovereignty and not on individual sovereignty, there are other theories espoused by individualists, libertarians, and anarchists that do not involve agreeing to anything more than negative rights and creates only a limited state, if any.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) advocated a conception of social contract that did not involve an individual surrendering sovereignty to others. According to him, the social contract was not between individuals and the state, but rather among individuals who refrain from coercing or governing each other, each one maintaining complete sovereignty upon him- or herself:
Building on the work of Immanuel Kant with its presumption of limits on the state, John Rawls (1921–2002), in "A Theory of Justice" (1971), proposed a contractarian approach whereby rational people in a hypothetical "original position" would set aside their individual preferences and capacities under a "veil of ignorance" and agree to certain general principles of justice and legal organization. This idea is also used as a game-theoretical formalization of the notion of fairness.
David Gauthier "neo-Hobbesian" theory argues that cooperation between two independent and self-interested parties is indeed possible, especially when it comes to understanding morality and politics. Gauthier notably points out the advantages of cooperation between two parties when it comes to the challenge of the prisoner's dilemma. He proposes that, if two parties were to stick to the original agreed-upon arrangement and morals outlined by the contract, they would both experience an optimal result. In his model for the social contract, factors including trust, rationality, and self-interest keep each party honest and dissuade them from breaking the rules.
Philip Pettit (b. 1945) has argued, in "Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government" (1997), that the theory of social contract, classically based on the consent of the governed, should be modified. Instead of arguing for explicit consent, which can always be manufactured, Pettit argues that the absence of an effective rebellion against it is a contract's only legitimacy.
An early critic of social contract theory was Rousseau's friend, the philosopher David Hume, who in 1742 published an essay "Of Civil Liberty". The second part of this essay, entitled "Of the Original Contract", stresses that the concept of a "social contract" is a convenient fiction:
Hume argued that consent of the governed was the ideal foundation on which a government should rest, but that it had not actually occurred this way in general.
Legal scholar Randy Barnett has argued that, while presence in the territory of a society may be necessary for consent, this does not constitute consent to "all" rules the society might make regardless of their content. A second condition of consent is that the rules be consistent with underlying principles of justice and the protection of natural and social rights, and have procedures for effective protection of those rights (or liberties). This has also been discussed by O.A. Brownson, who argued that, in a sense, three "constitutions" are involved: first, the "constitution of nature" that includes all of what the Founders called "natural law"; second, the "constitution of society", an unwritten and commonly understood set of rules for the society formed by a social contract before it establishes a government, by which it does establish the third, a "constitution of government". To consent, a necessary condition is that the rules be "constitutional" in that sense.
The theory of an implicit social contract holds that by remaining in the territory controlled by some society, which usually has a government, people give consent to join that society and be governed by its government if any. This consent is what gives legitimacy to such a government.
Other writers have argued that consent to join the society is not necessarily consent to its government. For that, the government must be set up according to a constitution of government that is consistent with the superior unwritten constitutions of nature and society.
The theory of an implicit social contract also goes under the principles of explicit consent. The main difference between tacit consent and explicit consent is that explicit consent is meant to leave no room for misinterpretation. Moreover, you should directly state what it is that you want and the person has to respond in a concise manner that either confirms or denies the proposition.
According to the will theory of contract, a contract is not presumed valid unless all parties voluntarily agree to it, either tacitly or explicitly, without coercion. Lysander Spooner, a 19th-century lawyer and staunch supporter of a right of contract between individuals, argued in his essay "No Treason" that a supposed social contract cannot be used to justify governmental actions such as taxation because government will initiate force against anyone who does not wish to enter into such a contract. As a result, he maintains that such an agreement is not voluntary and therefore cannot be considered a legitimate contract at all.
Modern Anglo-American law, like European civil law, is based on a will theory of contract, according to which all terms of a contract are binding on the parties because they chose those terms for themselves. This was less true when Hobbes wrote "Leviathan"; at that time more importance was attached to consideration, meaning a mutual exchange of benefits necessary to the formation of a valid contract, and most contracts had implicit terms that arose from the nature of the contractual relationship rather than from the choices made by the parties. Accordingly, it has been argued that social contract theory is more consistent with the contract law of the time of Hobbes and Locke than with the contract law of our time, and that certain features in the social contract which seem anomalous to us, such as the belief that we are bound by a contract formulated by our distant ancestors, would not have seemed as strange to Hobbes' contemporaries as they do to us. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39704 |
Edward V of England
Edward V (2 November 1470) succeeded his father, Edward IV, as King of England and Lord of Ireland upon the latter's death on 9 April 1483. Edward V was never crowned, and his brief reign was dominated by the influence of his uncle and Lord Protector, the Duke of Gloucester, who deposed him to reign as Richard III on 26 June 1483; this was confirmed by the Act entitled Titulus Regius, which denounced any further claims through his father's heirs.
Edward and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, were the Princes in the Tower who disappeared after being sent to heavily guarded royal lodgings in the Tower of London. Responsibility for their deaths is widely attributed to Richard III, but the lack of any solid evidence and conflicting contemporary accounts allow for other possibilities.
Edward was born on 2 November 1470 in Cheyneygates, the medieval house of the Abbot of Westminster adjoining Westminster Abbey. His mother, Elizabeth Woodville, had sought sanctuary there from Lancastrians who had deposed his father, the Yorkist king Edward IV, during the course of the Wars of the Roses. Edward was created Prince of Wales in June 1471, following Edward IV's restoration to the throne, and in 1473 was established at Ludlow Castle on the Welsh Marches as nominal president of a newly created Council of Wales and the Marches. In 1479, his father conferred the earldom of Pembroke on him; it became merged into the crown on his succession.
Prince Edward was placed under the supervision of the queen's brother Anthony, Earl Rivers, a noted scholar, and in a letter to Rivers, Edward IV set down precise conditions for the upbringing of his son and the management of his household. The prince was to "arise every morning at a convenient hour, according to his age". His day would begin with matins and then Mass, which he was to receive uninterrupted. After breakfast, the business of educating the prince began with "virtuous learning". Dinner was served from ten in the morning, and then the prince was to be read "noble stories ... of virtue, honour, cunning, wisdom, and of deeds of worship" but "of nothing that should move or stir him to vice". Perhaps aware of his own vices, the king was keen to safeguard his son's morals, and instructed Rivers to ensure that no one in the prince's household was a habitual "swearer, brawler, backbiter, common hazarder, adulterer, [or user of] words of ribaldry". After further study, in the afternoon the prince was to engage in sporting activities suitable for his class, before evensong. Supper was served from four, and curtains were to be drawn at eight. Following this, the prince's attendants were to "enforce themselves to make him merry and joyous towards his bed". They would then watch over him as he slept.
King Edward's diligence appeared to bear fruit, as Dominic Mancini reported of the young Edward V:
As with several of his other children, Edward IV planned a prestigious European marriage for his eldest son, and in 1480 concluded an alliance with the Duke of Brittany, Francis II, whereby Prince Edward was betrothed to the duke's four-year-old heir, Anne. The two were to be married upon their majority, and the devolution of Brittany would have been given to the second child to be born, the first becoming Prince of Wales. Those plans disappeared together with Edward V.
It was at Ludlow that the 12-year-old prince received news, on Monday 14 April 1483, of his father's sudden death five days before. Edward IV's will, which has not survived, nominated his trusted brother Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as Protector during the minority of his son. Both the new king and his party from the west, and Richard from the north, set out for London, converging in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire. On the night of 29 April Richard met and dined with Earl Rivers and Edward's half-brother, Richard Grey, but the following morning Rivers and Grey, along with the king's chamberlain, Thomas Vaughan, were arrested and sent north. They were all subsequently executed. Dominic Mancini, an Italian who visited England in the 1480s, reports that Edward protested, but the remainder of his entourage was dismissed and Richard escorted him to London. On 19 May 1483, the new king took up residence in the Tower of London, where, on 16 June, he was joined by his younger brother Richard, Duke of York.
The council had originally hoped for an immediate coronation to avoid the need for a protectorate. This had previously happened with Richard II, who had become king at the age of ten. Another precedent was Henry VI whose protectorate (which started when he inherited the crown aged 9 months) had ended with his coronation aged seven. Richard, however, repeatedly postponed the coronation.
On 22 June, Ralph Shaa preached a sermon declaring that Edward IV had already been contracted to marry Lady Eleanor Butler when he married Elizabeth Woodville, thereby rendering his marriage to Elizabeth invalid and their children together illegitimate. The children of Richard's older brother George, Duke of Clarence, were barred from the throne by their father's attainder, and therefore, on 25 June, an assembly of Lords and Commons declared Richard to be the legitimate king (this was later confirmed by the act of parliament "Titulus Regius"). The following day he acceded to the throne as King Richard III.
Dominic Mancini recorded that after Richard III seized the throne, Edward and his younger brother Richard were taken into the "inner apartments of the Tower" and then were seen less and less until the end of the summer of 1483, when they disappeared from public view altogether. During this period Mancini records that Edward was regularly visited by a doctor, who reported that Edward, "like a victim prepared for sacrifice, sought remission of his sins by daily confession and penance, because he believed that death was facing him." The Latin reference to had previously been translated to mean "a Strasbourg doctor", because in Roman times Strasbourg was called ; however, D.E. Rhodes suggests it may actually refer to "Doctor Argentine", whom Rhodes identifies as John Argentine, an English physician who would later serve as provost of King's College, Cambridge, and as doctor to Arthur, Prince of Wales, eldest son of King Henry VII of England (Henry Tudor).
Edward and his brother Richard's fate after their disappearance remains unknown, but the most widely accepted theory is that they were murdered on the orders of their uncle, King Richard. Thomas More wrote that the princes were smothered to death with their pillows, and his account forms the basis of William Shakespeare's play "Richard III", in which Tyrrell murders the princes on Richard's orders. Subsequent re-evaluations of Richard III have questioned his guilt, beginning with William Cornwallis early in the 17th century. In the period before the boys' disappearance, Edward was regularly being visited by a doctor; historian David Baldwin extrapolates that contemporaries may have believed Edward had died of an illness (or as the result of attempts to cure him). In the absence of hard evidence a number of other theories have been put forward, of which the most widely discussed are that they were murdered on the orders of the Duke of Buckingham or by Henry Tudor. However, Pollard points out that these theories are less plausible than the straightforward one that they were murdered by their uncle who in any case controlled access to them and was therefore regarded as responsible for their welfare. An alternative theory is that Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be a pretender to the throne, was indeed Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York as he claimed, having escaped to Flanders after his uncle's defeat at Bosworth to be raised with an aunt.
Bones belonging to two children were discovered in 1674 by workmen rebuilding a stairway in the Tower. On the orders of King Charles II, these were subsequently placed in Westminster Abbey, in an urn bearing the names of Edward and Richard. The bones were reexamined in 1933, at which time it was discovered the skeletons were incomplete and had been interred with animal bones. It has never been proven that the bones belonged to the princes, and it is possible that they were buried before the reconstruction of that part of the Tower of London. Permission for a subsequent examination has been refused.
In 1789, workmen carrying out repairs in St George's Chapel, Windsor, rediscovered and accidentally broke into the vault of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. Adjoining this was another vault, which was found to contain the coffins of two children. This tomb was inscribed with the names of two of Edward IV's children: George, 1st Duke of Bedford, who had died at the age of 2; and Mary of York, who had died at the age of 14. Both had died before the King. However, the remains of these two children were later found elsewhere in the chapel, leaving the occupants of the children's coffins within the tomb unknown.
In 1486 Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth, sister of Edward V, married Henry VII, thereby uniting the Houses of York and Lancaster.
As outlined above, on the orders of Charles II, the presumed bones of Edward V (and his brother) were interred in Westminster Abbey; he was thus buried in the place of his birth. The white marble sarcophagus was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and made by Joshua Marshall. The sarcophagus can be found in the north aisle of the Henry VII Chapel, near Elizabeth I's tomb.
The Latin inscription on the urn can be translated as follows:
The original Latin text is as follows (original all in capitals):
Edward appears as a character in the play "Richard III" by William Shakespeare. Edward appears alive in only one scene of the play (Act 3 Scene 1), during which he and his brother are portrayed as bright, precocious children who see through their uncle's ambitions. Edward in particular is portrayed as wiser than his years (something his uncle notes) and ambitious about his kingship. Edward and his brother's deaths are described in the play, but occur offstage. Their ghosts return in one more scene (Act 5 Scene 3) to haunt their uncle's dreams and promise success to his rival, Richmond. In film and television adaptations of this play, Edward V has been portrayed by the following actors:
Edward V is also featured as a mute role in another of Shakespeare's plays, "Henry VI, Part 3", where he appears as a newborn baby in the final scene. His father Edward IV addresses his own brothers thus: "Clarence, and Gloster, love my lovely queen, And kiss your princely nephew, brothers both." Gloster, the future Richard III, is at the close of this play already encompassing his nephew's demise, as he mutters in an aside, "To say the truth, so Judas kiss'd his master, And cried – All hail! when as he meant – all harm."
As heir apparent, Edward bore the royal arms (quarterly France and England) differenced by a label of three points argent. During his brief reign he used the royal arms undifferenced, supported by a lion and a hart as had his father. His livery badges were the traditional Yorkist symbols of the fetterlocked falcon and the rose argent. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39709 |
Fertile Crescent
The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, the northeast and Nile valley regions of Egypt, together with the southeastern region of Turkey and the western fringes of Iran. Some authors also include Cyprus.
The region has been called the "cradle of civilization" because it is where settled farming first emerged as people started the process of clearance and modification of natural vegetation in order to grow newly domesticated plants as crops. Early human civilizations such as Sumer in Mesopotamia flourished as a result. Technological advances in the region include the development of agriculture and the use of irrigation, of writing, the wheel, and glass, most emerging first in Mesopotamia.
The term "Fertile Crescent" was popularized by archaeologist James Henry Breasted in "Outlines of European History" (1914) and "Ancient Times, A History of the Early World" (1916). Breasted wrote:This fertile crescent is approximately a semicircle, with the open side toward the south, having the west end at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean, the center directly north of Arabia, and the east end at the north end of the Persian Gulf (see map, p. 100). It lies like an army facing south, with one wing stretching along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean and the other reaching out to the Persian Gulf, while the center has its back against the northern mountains. The end of the western wing is Palestine; Assyria makes up a large part of the center; while the end of the eastern wing is Babylonia.This great semicircle, for lack of a name, may be called the Fertile Crescent.1 It may also be likened to the shores of a desert-bay, upon which the mountains behind look down—a bay not of water but of sandy waste, some across, forming a northern extension of the Arabian desert and sweeping as far north as the latitude of the northeast corner of the Mediterranean. This desert-bay is a limestone plateau of some height—too high indeed to be watered by the Tigris and Euphrates, which have cut cañons obliquely across it. Nevertheless, after the meager winter rains, wide tracts of the northern desert-bay are clothed with scanty grass, and spring thus turns the region for a short time into grasslands. The history of Western Asia may be described as an age-long struggle between the mountain peoples of the north and the desert wanderers of these grasslands—a struggle which is still going on—for the possession of the Fertile Crescent, the shores of the desert-bay.1 There is no name, either geographical or political, which includes all of this great semicircle (see map, p. 100). Hence we are obliged to coin a term and call it the Fertile Crescent.
In current usage, the Fertile Crescent includes Israel, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan, as well as the surrounding portions of Turkey and Iran. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, riverwater sources include the Jordan River. The inner boundary is delimited by the dry climate of the Syrian Desert to the south. Around the outer boundary are the Anatolian and Armenian highlands to the north, the Sahara Desert to the west, Sudan to the south, and the Iranian Plateau to the east.
As crucial as rivers and marshlands were to the rise of civilization in the Fertile Crescent, they were not the only factor. The area is geographically important as the "bridge" between North Africa and Eurasia, which has allowed it to retain a greater amount of biodiversity than either Europe or North Africa, where climate changes during the Ice Age led to repeated extinction events when ecosystems became squeezed against the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. The Saharan pump theory posits that this Middle Eastern land bridge was extremely important to the modern distribution of Old World flora and fauna, including the spread of humanity.
The area has borne the brunt of the tectonic divergence between the African and Arabian plates and the converging Arabian and Eurasian plates, which has made the region a very diverse zone of high snow-covered mountains.
The Fertile Crescent had many diverse climates, and major climatic changes encouraged the evolution of many "r" type annual plants, which produce more edible seeds than "K" type perennial plants. The region's dramatic variety in elevation gave rise to many species of edible plants for early experiments in cultivation. Most importantly, the Fertile Crescent was home to the eight Neolithic founder crops important in early agriculture (i.e., wild progenitors to emmer wheat, einkorn, barley, flax, chick pea, pea, lentil, bitter vetch), and four of the five most important species of domesticated animals—cows, goats, sheep, and pigs; the fifth species, the horse, lived nearby. The Fertile Crescent flora comprises a high percentage of plants that can self-pollinate, but may also be cross-pollinated. These plants, called "selfers", were one of the geographical advantages of the area because they did not depend on other plants for reproduction.
As well as possessing many sites with the skeletal and cultural remains of both pre-modern and early modern humans (e.g., at Tabun and Es Skhul caves in Israel), later Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and Epipalaeolithic semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers (the Natufians); the Fertile Crescent is most famous for its sites related to the origins of agriculture. The western zone around the Jordan and upper Euphrates rivers gave rise to the first known Neolithic farming settlements (referred to as Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA)), which date to around 9,000 BCE and includes very ancient sites such as Göbekli Tepe and Jericho (Tell es-Sultan).
This region, alongside Mesopotamia (Greek for "between rivers", between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, lies in the east of the Fertile Crescent), also saw the emergence of early complex societies during the succeeding Bronze Age. There is also early evidence from the region for writing and the formation of hierarchical state level societies. This has earned the region the nickname "The cradle of civilization".
It is in this region where the first libraries appeared, about 4,500 years ago. The oldest known libraries are found in Nippur (in Sumer) and Ebla (in Syria), both from c. 2500 BCE.
Both the Tigris and Euphrates start in the Taurus Mountains of what is modern-day Turkey. Farmers in southern Mesopotamia had to protect their fields from flooding each year; northern Mesopotamia had just enough rain to make some farming possible. To protect against flooding, they made levees.
Since the Bronze Age, the region's natural fertility has been greatly extended by irrigation works, upon which much of its agricultural production continues to depend. The last two millennia have seen repeated cycles of decline and recovery as past works have fallen into disrepair through the replacement of states, to be replaced under their successors. Another ongoing problem has been salination—gradual concentration of salt and other minerals in soils with a long history of irrigation.
Prehistoric seedless figs were discovered at Gilgal I in the Jordan Valley, suggesting that fig trees were being planted some 11,400 years ago. Cereals were already grown in Syria as long as 9,000 years ago. Small cats ("Felis silvestris") also were domesticated in this region. In addition to cereals, legumes including peas, lentils and chickpea were domesticated in this region.
Domesticated animals include the cattle, sheep, goat, domestic pig, cat, domestic goose.
Modern analyses comparing 24 craniofacial measurements reveal a relatively diverse population within the pre-Neolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age Fertile Crescent, supporting the view that several populations occupied this region during these time periods. Similar arguments do not hold true, however, for the Basques and Canary Islanders of the same time period, as the studies demonstrate those ancient peoples to be "clearly associated with modern Europeans". Additionally, no evidence from the studies demonstrates Cro-Magnon influence, contrary to former suggestions.
The studies further suggest a diffusion of this diverse population away from the Fertile Crescent, with the early migrants moving away from the Near East—westward into Europe and North Africa, northward to Crimea, and eastward to Mongolia. They took their agricultural practices with them and interbred with the hunter-gatherers whom they subsequently came in contact with while perpetuating their farming practices. This supports prior genetic and archaeological studies which have all arrived at the same conclusion.
Consequently contemporary in-situ peoples absorbed the agricultural way of life of those early migrants who ventured out of the Fertile Crescent. This is contrary to the suggestion that the spread of agriculture disseminated out of the Fertile Crescent by way of sharing of knowledge. Instead the view now supported by a preponderance of the evidence is that it occurred by actual migration out of the region, coupled with subsequent interbreeding with indigenous local populations whom the migrants came in contact with.
The studies show also that not all present day Europeans share strong genetic affinities to the Neolithic and Bronze Age inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent; instead the closest ties to the Fertile Crescent rest with Southern Europeans. The same study further demonstrates all present-day Europeans to be closely related.
Linguistically, the Fertile Crescent was a region of great diversity. Historically, Semitic languages generally prevailed in the modern regions of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Sinai and the fringes of southeast Turkey and northwest Iran, as well as the Sumerian (a Language Isolate) in Iraq, whilst in the mountainous areas to the east and north a number of generally unrelated language isolates were found, including; Elamite, Gutian and Kassite in Iran, and Hattic, Kaskian and Hurro-Urartian in Turkey. The precise affiliation of these, and their date of arrival, remain topics of scholarly discussion. However, given lack of textual evidence for the earliest era of prehistory, this debate is unlikely to be resolved in the near future.
The evidence that does exist suggests that, by the third millennium BCE and into the second, several language groups already existed in the region. These included:
Links between Hurro-Urartian and Hattic and the indigenous languages of the Caucasus have frequently been suggested, but are not generally accepted. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39715 |
1936 Summer Olympics
The 1936 Summer Olympics (German: "Olympische Sommerspiele 1936"), officially known as the Games of the XI Olympiad (German: "Spiele der XI. Olympiade"), was an international multi-sport event held in 1936 in Berlin, Germany. Berlin won the bid to host the Games over Barcelona, Spain, on 26 April 1931, at the 29th IOC Session in Barcelona. It marked the second and most recent time the International Olympic Committee gathered to vote in a city that was bidding to host those Games.
To outdo the Los Angeles games of 1932, Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler had a new 100,000-seat track and field stadium built, as well as six gymnasiums and many other smaller arenas. The games were the first to be televised, and radio broadcasts reached 41 countries. Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was commissioned by the German Olympic Committee to film the Games for $7 million. Her film, titled "Olympia", pioneered many of the techniques now common in the filming of sports.
Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy and antisemitism, and the official Nazi party paper, the "Völkischer Beobachter", wrote in the strongest terms that Jews should not be allowed to participate in the Games. German Jewish athletes were barred or prevented from taking part by a variety of methods, although some women swimmers from the Jewish sports club, Hakoah Vienna, did take part. Jewish athletes from other countries seem to have been side-lined in order not to offend the Nazi regime.
Total ticket revenues were 7.5 million Reichsmark, generating a profit of over one million ℛℳ. The official budget did not include outlays by the city of Berlin (which issued an itemized report detailing its costs of 16.5 million ℛℳ) or outlays of the German national government (which did not make its costs public, but is estimated to have spent US$30 million).
Jesse Owens won four gold medals in the sprint and long jump events and became the most successful athlete to compete in Berlin while Germany was the most successful country overall with 89 medals total, with the United States coming in second with 56 medals. These were the final Olympics under the presidency of Henri de Baillet-Latour and the final Olympic Games for 12 years due to the disruption of the Second World War. The next Olympic Games were held in 1948 (the Winter in Switzerland and then the Summer in London).
At the 28th IOC Session, held in 1930, in Berlin, 14 cities announced their intention to bid to host the 1936 Summer Olympic Games. The bidding for these Olympic Games was the first to be contested by IOC members casting votes for their own favorite host cities.
The vote occurred in 1931, at the 29th IOC Session held in Barcelona that year. The vote was held days after the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic and during the final years of the Weimar Republic. This was two years before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, in 1933.
By the time of the 1931 IOC Session, only Barcelona and Berlin were left in contention for the delegate vote. Rome withdrew on the eve of the vote. How other candidates withdrew is unclear, as is the seriousness of intent behind all of the listed candidate cities. The other cities who announced an intention to hold the games, but which withdrew from the race, were Alexandria, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Cologne, Dublin, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Lausanne, Montevideo, Nuremberg, Rio de Janeiro, and Rome. Helsinki, Rome, Barcelona and Rio de Janeiro would go on to host the Olympic Games in 1952, 1960, 1992 and 2016, respectively.
The selection procedure marked the second and final time that the International Olympic Committee would gather to vote in a city which was bidding to host those Games. The only other time this occurred was at the inaugural IOC Session in Paris, France, on 24 April 1894. Then, Athens and Paris were chosen to host the 1896 and 1900 Games, respectively.
The city of Barcelona held a multi-sport festival at the same time as the 1931 IOC Session. This included a football match between Spain and the Irish Free State, which was watched by 70,000 spectators. The political uncertainty around the declaration of the Second Spanish Republic, which had happened days before the IOC Session, was likely to have been a greater factor in the decision taken by delegates regarding the host city for 1936. Berlin prevailed.
After the Nazis took control of Germany, and began instituting antisemitic policies, the IOC held private discussions among its delegates about changing the decision to hold the Games in Berlin. However, Hitler's regime gave assurances that Jewish athletes would be allowed to compete on a German Olympic team. One year before the games, the American Olympic Association suggested to change the venue to Rome; they saw Rome as a good replacement because Rome was originally selected to hold the 1908 Summer Olympics.
Hans von Tschammer und Osten, as "Reichssportführer" (i.e., head of the Deutscher Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (DRL), the Reich Sports Office), played a major role in the structure and organisation of the Olympics. He promoted the idea that the use of sports would harden the German spirit and instill unity among German youth. At the same time he also believed that sports was a "way to weed out the weak, Jewish, and other undesirables".
Von Tschammer trusted the details of the organisation of the games to Theodor Lewald and Carl Diem, the former president and secretary of the "Deutscher Reichsausschuss für Leibesübungen", the forerunner of the Reich Sports Office. Among Diem's ideas for the Berlin Games was the introduction of the Olympic torch relay between Greece and the host nation.
The 1936 Summer Olympics torch relay was the first of its kind, following on from the reintroduction of the Olympic Flame at the 1928 Games. It pioneered the modern convention of moving the flame via a relay system from Greece to the Olympic venue. Leni Riefenstahl filmed the relay for the 1938 film "Olympia".
The games were the first to have live television coverage. The German Post Office, using equipment from Telefunken, broadcast over 70 hours of coverage to special viewing rooms throughout Berlin and Potsdam and a few private TV sets, transmitting from the Paul Nipkow TV Station. They used three different types of TV cameras, so blackouts would occur when changing from one type to another.
The 1936 Olympic village was located at Elstal in Wustermark (at ), on the western edge of Berlin. The site, which is from the centre of the city, consisted of one and two-floor dormitories, a large dining hall, "Dining Hall of the Nations", a swimming facility, gymnasium, track, and other training facilities. Its layout was designed and construction overseen by appointed village commander "Hauptmann" Wolfgang Fürstner beginning in 1934. Less than two months before the start of the Olympic Games, Fürstner was abruptly demoted to vice-commander, and replaced by "Oberstleutnant" Werner von Gilsa, commander of the Berlin Guard-Regiment. The official reason for the replacement was that Fürstner had not acted "with the necessary energy" to prevent damage to the site as 370,000 visitors passed through it between 1 May and 15 June. However, this was just a cover story to explain the sudden demotion of the half-Jewish officer. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws, passed during the period Fürstner was overseeing the Olympic Village, had classified him as a Jew, and as such, the career officer was to be expelled from the "Wehrmacht". Two days after the conclusion of the Berlin Olympics, vice-commander Fürstner had been removed from active "Wehrmacht" duty, and committed suicide because he realised he had no future under the Nazis.
After the completion of the Olympic Games, the village was repurposed for the "Wehrmacht" into the Olympic Döberitz Hospital (), and Army Infantry School (), and was used as such through the Second World War. In 1945 it was taken over by the Soviet Union and became a military camp of the union occupation forces. Late 20th-century efforts were made to restore parts of the former village, but little progress was made. More recently, the vast majority of the land of the Olympic village has been managed by the DKB Foundation, with more success; efforts are being made to restore the site into a living museum. The dormitory building used by Jesse Owens, Weissen House, has been fully restored, with the gymnasium and swimming hall partially restored. Seasonally, tours are given daily to small groups and students.
The site remains relatively unknown even in Germany, but some tournaments are held at the site in an effort to boost knowledge of the venues.
Twenty-two venues were used for the 1936 Summer Olympics. Many were located in the Reich Sportsfeld complex.
Sailing was held in the Bay of Kiel, which would serve as the sailing venue for the 1972 Summer Olympics held in Munich. The Olympic Stadium would later be part of two FIFA World Cups and then host an IAAF World Championships in Athletics along with undergoing a renovation in the early 2000s to give new life to the stadium. Avus Motor Road (AVUS) was started in 1907, but was not completed until 1921 due to World War I. The track was rebuilt for the 1936 Games. AVUS continued being used after World War II though mainly in Formula 2 racing. The German Grand Prix was last held at the track in 1959. Dismantling of the track first took place in 1968 to make way for a traffic crossing for touring cars that raced there until 1998.
BSV 92 Field was first constructed in 1910 for use in football, handball, athletics, and tennis. The Reich Sports Field, which consisted of the Olympic Stadium, the Dietrich Ecekrt Open-Air Theatre, the Olympic Swimming Stadium, Mayfield, the Hockey Stadiums, the Tennis Courts, and the Haus des Deutschen Sports, was planned for the aborted 1916 Summer Olympics, but was not completed until 1934. Mayfield was the last venue completed prior to the 1936 Games in April 1936. Deutschland Hall was opened in 1935. Mommenstadion opened in 1930. Basketball was held outdoors at the request of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA). The tennis courts were used, which turned to mud during heavy rain at the final. The K-1 1000 m canoeing final was also affected by heavy rain at Grünau that included thunder and lightning. During World War II, Deutschlandhalle suffered heavy aerial bombing damage. After the second world war, the hall was reconstructed and expansion has continued . The Deutschlandhalle in Berlin, where the boxing, weightlifting, and wrestling events took place, was used as venue, but was increasingly closed for repairs, last in 2009 when it was close for repairs, It was demolished in December 2011. the Mommsenstadion was renovated in 1987 and was still in use in 2010.
The Olympic Stadium was used as an underground bunker in World War II as the war went against Nazi Germany's favor. The British reopened the Stadium in 1946 and parts of the stadium were rebuilt by the late 1950s. As a host venue for the 1974 FIFA World Cup, the stadium had its roof partially covered on the North and South Stands. British occupation of the stadium ended in 1994. Restoration was approved in 1998 with a contractor being found to do the work in 2000. This restoration ran from 2000 to 2004. The modernized Stadium reopened in 2004, with a capacity of 74,228 people. The seating has been changed greatly, especially the sections that were reserved for German and international political leaders. The stadium now plays host to Hertha BSC (1963–present), and is expected to remain the home of the team for years to come. For the 2006 FIFA World Cup, the venue was where the final took place between Italy and France. Three years later, the venue hosted the World Athletics Championships.
The opening ceremony was held at the Berlin Olympic Stadium on 1 August 1936. A flyover by the German airship "Hindenburg" flying the Olympic flag behind it was featured early in the opening ceremonies. After the arrival of Hitler and his entourage, the parade of nations proceeded, each nation with its own unique costume. As the birthplace of the Olympics, Greece entered the stadium first. The host nation, Germany, entered last. Some nations' athletes purposefully gave the Nazi salute as they passed Hitler. Others gave the Olympic salute (a similar one, given with the same arm), or a different gesture entirely, such as hats-over-hearts, as the United States and China did. All nations lowered their flags as they passed the Führer, save the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the Commonwealth of the Philippines. (The United States doing this was explained later as an army regulation.) Writer Thomas Wolfe, who was there, described the opening as an "almost religious event, the crowd screaming, swaying in unison and begging for Hitler. There was something scary about it; his cult of personality."
After a speech by the president of the German Olympic Committee, the games were officially declared open by Adolf Hitler who quoted (in German): "I proclaim open the Olympic Games of Berlin, celebrating the Eleventh Olympiad of the modern era." Hitler opened the games from his own box, on top of others. Writer David Wallechinsky has commented on the event, saying, "This was his event, he wanted to be glorified."
Although the Olympic flame was first introduced in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, this was the first instance of the torch relay. The Nazis invented the concept of the torch run from ancient Olympia to the host city. Thus as swimmer Iris Cummings Critchell later related, "once the athletes were all in place, the torch bearer ran in through the tunnel to go around the stadium". A young man chosen for this task ran up the steps all the way up to the top of the stadium there to light a cauldron which would start this eternal flame that would burn through the duration of the games.
But in spite of all the pomp and ceremony, and the glorification of Hitler, all did not go according to plan, and there was a rather humorous aspect in the opening ceremony. U.S. distance runner Louis Zamperini, one of the athletes present, related it on camera:
129 events in 25 disciplines, comprising 19 sports, were part of the Olympic program in 1936. The number of events in each discipline is noted in parentheses.
Basketball and handball made their debut at the Olympics, both as outdoor sports. Handball did not appear again on the program until the next German summer Olympic games in Munich in 1972. Demonstration sports were Art, Baseball, Gliding, Wushu and Kabaddi.
The ten nations that won most medals at the 1936 Games.
Germany had a successful year in the equestrian events, winning individual and team gold in all three disciplines, as well as individual silver in dressage. In the cycling match sprint finals, the German Toni Merkens fouled Arie van Vliet of the Netherlands. Instead of being disqualified, he was fined 100 ℛℳ and kept his gold. German gymnasts Konrad Frey and Alfred Schwarzmann both won three gold medals.
American Jesse Owens won four gold medals in the sprint and long jump events. His German competitor Luz Long offered Owens advice after he almost failed to qualify in the long jump and was posthumously awarded the Pierre de Coubertin medal for sportsmanship. Mack Robinson, brother of Jackie Robinson, won the 200-meter sprint silver medal behind Owens by 0.4 seconds. Although he did not win a medal, future American war hero Louis Zamperini, lagging behind in the 5,000-meter final, made up ground by clocking a 56-second final lap. This effort caught the attention of German leader Adolf Hitler who personally commended Zamperini on his speed. In one of the most dramatic 800-meter races in history, American John Woodruff won gold after slowing to jogging speed in the middle of the final in order to free himself from being boxed in. Glenn Edgar Morris, a farm boy from Colorado, won gold in the decathlon. Rower Jack Beresford won his fifth Olympic medal in the sport, and his third gold medal. The U.S. eight-man rowing team from the University of Washington won the gold medal, coming from behind to defeat the Germans and Italians with Hitler in attendance.
Jack Lovelock of New Zealand won the 1500 m gold medal, coming through a strong field to win in world record time of 3:47.8.
In the marathon, the ethnic Koreans Sohn Kee-chung and Nam Sung-yong won one gold and one bronze medal; as Korea was annexed by Japan at the time, they were running for Japan.
India won the gold medal in the field hockey event once again (they won the gold in all Olympics from 1928 to 1956), defeating Germany 8–1 in the final. However, Indians were officially considered Indo-Aryans by the Germans so there was no controversy regarding the victory. Rie Mastenbroek of the Netherlands won three gold medals and a silver in swimming. Estonia's Kristjan Palusalu won gold medals in both Men's heavyweight Wrestling styles, marking the last time Estonia competed as an independent nation in the Olympics until 1992.
After winning the middleweight class, the Egyptian weightlifter Khadr El Touni continued to compete for another 45 minutes, finally exceeding the total of the German silver medalist by 35 kg. The 20-year-old El Touni lifted a total of 387.5 kg, crushing two German world champions and breaking the then-Olympic and world records, while the German lifted 352.5 kg. Furthermore, El Touni had lifted 15 kg more than the light-heavyweight gold medalist, a feat only El Touni has accomplished. El Touni's new world records stood for 13 years. Fascinated by El Touni's performance, Adolf Hitler rushed down to greet this human miracle. Prior to the competition, Hitler was said to have been sure that Rudolf Ismayr and Adolf Wagner would embarrass all other opponents. Hitler was so impressed by El Touni's domination in the middleweight class that he ordered a street named after him in Berlin's Olympic village. The Egyptian held the No. 1 position on the IWF list of history's 50 greatest weightlifters for 60 years, until the 1996 Games in Atlanta where Turkey's Naim Süleymanoğlu surpassed him to top the list.
Italy's football team continued their dominance under head coach Vittorio Pozzo, winning the gold medal in these Olympics between their two consecutive World Cup victories (1934 and 1938). Much like the successes of German athletes, this triumph was claimed by supporters of Benito Mussolini's regime as a vindication of the superiority of the fascist system. Austria won the silver; a controversial win after Hitler called for a rematch of the quarterfinals match to discount Peru's 4–2 win over Austria. The Peruvian national Olympic team refused to play the match again and withdrew from the games. In the quarter-finals of the football tournament, Peru beat Austria 4–2 in extra-time. Peru rallied from a two-goal deficit in the final 15 minutes of normal time. During extra-time, Peruvian fans allegedly ran onto the field and attacked an Austrian player. In the chaos, Peru scored twice and won, 4–2. However, Austria protested and the International Olympic Committee ordered a replay without any spectators. The Peruvian government refused and their entire Olympic squad left in protest as did Colombia.
A remarkable story from the track and field competition was the gold medal won by the US women's 4 × 100 m relay team. The German team were the heavy favourites, but dropped the baton at one hand-off. Of notable interest on the US team was Betty Robinson. She was the first woman ever awarded an Olympic gold medal for track and field, winning the women's 100 m event at the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam. In 1931, Robinson was involved in a plane crash, and was severely injured. Her body was discovered in the wreckage and it was wrongly thought that she was dead. She was placed in the trunk of a car and taken to an undertaker, where it was discovered that she was not dead, but in a coma. She awoke from the coma seven months later, although it was another six months before she could get out of a wheelchair, and two years before she could walk normally again. Due to the length of her recovery, she had to miss participating in the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, in her home country.
A total of 49 nations attended the Berlin Olympics, up from 37 in 1932. Five nations made their first official Olympic appearance at these Games: Afghanistan, Bermuda, Bolivia, Costa Rica and Liechtenstein.
Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler saw the Games as an opportunity to promote his government and ideals of racial supremacy. The official Nazi party paper, the "Völkischer Beobachter", wrote in the strongest terms that Jewish people and Black people should not be allowed to participate in the Games. However, when threatened with a boycott of the Games by other nations, he relented and allowed Black people and Jewish people to participate, and added one token participant to the German team—a German woman, Helene Mayer, who had a Jewish father. At the same time, the party removed signs stating "Jews not wanted" and similar slogans from the city's main tourist attractions. In an attempt to "clean up" the host city, the German Ministry of the Interior authorized the chief of police to arrest all Romani and keep them in a "special camp", the Berlin-Marzahn concentration camp.
United States Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage became a main supporter of the Games being held in Germany, arguing that "politics has no place in sport", despite having initial doubts.
French Olympians gave a Roman salute at the opening ceremony: known as the "salut de Joinville" per the battalion , the Olympic salute was part of the Olympic traditions since the 1924 games. However, due to the different context this action was mistaken by the crowd for a support to fascism (the Olympic salute was discarded after 1946).
Although Haiti attended only the opening ceremony, an interesting vexillological fact was noticed: its flag and the flag of Liechtenstein were coincidentally identical, and this was not discovered until then. The following year, a crown was added to Liechtenstein's to distinguish one flag from the other.
Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were originally slated to compete in the American 4x100 relay team but were replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe prior to the start of the race. There were speculations that their Jewish heritage contributed to the decision "not to embarrass the German hosts"; however, given that African-Americans were also heavily disliked by the Nazis, Glickman and Stoller's replacement with black American athletes Owens and Metcalfe does not support this theory. Others just say that Owens and Metcalfe were in a better physical condition, and that was the main reason behind the replacement.
In 1937, Hollywood released the film "Charlie Chan at the Olympics". The plot concerned members of the Berlin police force helping the Chinese detective apprehend a group of spies (of unnamed nationality) trying to steal a new aerial guidance system. Despite pertaining to the Berlin Olympics, actual Games' footage used by the filmmakers was edited to remove any Nazi symbols.
After the Olympics, Jewish participation in German sports was further limited, and persecution of Jews started to become ever more lethal. The Olympic Games had provided a nine-month period of relative calmness.
The German Olympic committee, in accordance with Nazi directives, virtually barred Germans who were Jewish or Roma or had such an ancestry from participating in the Games (Helene Mayer, who had one Jewish parent, was the only German Jew to compete at the Berlin Games). This decision meant exclusion for many of the country's top athletes such as shotputter and discus thrower Lilli Henoch, who was a four-time world record holder and 10-time German national champion, and Gretel Bergmann who was suspended from the German team just days after she set a record of 1.60 meters in the high jump.
Individual Jewish athletes from a number of countries chose to boycott the Berlin Olympics, including South African Sid Kiel, and Americans Milton Green and Norman Cahners. In the United States, the American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee supported a boycott.
Prior to and during the Games, there was considerable debate outside Germany over whether the competition should be allowed or discontinued. Berlin had been selected by the IOC as the host city in 1931, but after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933, observers in many countries began to question the morality of going ahead with an Olympic Games hosted by the Nazi regime. A number of brief campaigns to boycott or relocate the Games emerged in the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and the United States. Exiled German political opponents of Hitler's regime also campaigned against the Berlin Olympics through pro-Communist newspapers such as the "Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung".
The protests were ultimately unsuccessful; forty-nine teams from around the world participated in the 1936 Games, the largest number of participating nations of any Olympics to that point.
Fencer Albert Wolff qualified for the French Olympic Team but boycotted the 1936 Summer Olympics, withdrawing from France's national team on principle because he was a Jew. He said: "I cannot participate in anything sponsored by Adolf Hitler, even for France."
The Spanish government led by the newly elected left-wing Popular Front boycotted the Games and organized the People's Olympiad as a parallel event in Barcelona. Some 6,000 athletes from 49 countries registered. However, the People's Olympiad was aborted because of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War just one day before the event was due to start.
The Soviet Union had not participated in international sporting events since the 1920 Olympics. The Soviet government was not invited to the 1920 Games, with the Russian Civil War still raging, and they did not participate in the 1924 Olympics and forward on ideological grounds. Instead, through the auspices of the Red Sport International, it had participated in a left-wing workers' alternative, the Spartakiad, since 1928. The USSR had intended to attend the People's Olympiad in Barcelona until it was cancelled; the Soviets did attend the Spartakiad-sponsored 1937 Workers' Summer Olympiad in Antwerp, Belgium. The Soviet Union started competing in the Olympics in 1952, when Soviet leaders realized that they can use the event to fulfil their political and ideological agenda.
Halet Çambel and Suat Fetgeri Așani, the first Turkish and Muslim women athletes to participate in the Olympics (fencing), refused an offer by their guide to be formally introduced to Adolf Hitler, saying they would not shake hands with him due to his approach to Jews, as stated by Ms. Çambel in a "Milliyet" newspaper interview in 2000.
Traditionally, the United States sent one of the largest teams to the Olympics, and there was a considerable debate over whether the nation should participate in the 1936 Games.
Those involved in the debate on whether to boycott the Olympics included Ernest Lee Jahncke, Judge Jeremiah Mahoney, and future IOC President Avery Brundage. Some within the United States considered requesting a boycott of the Games, as to participate in the festivity might be considered a sign of support for the Nazi regime and its antisemitic policies. However, others such as Brundage (see below) argued that the Olympic Games should not reflect political views, but rather should be strictly a contest of the greatest athletes.
Avery Brundage, then of the United States Olympic Committee, opposed the boycott, stating that Jewish athletes were being treated fairly and that the Games should continue. Brundage asserted that politics played no role in sports, and that they should never be entwined. Brundage also believed that there was a "Jewish-Communist conspiracy" that existed to keep the United States from competing in the Olympic Games. Somewhat ironically, Brundage would be later accused of being a Soviet dupe for his controversial stance on the Soviet sports system that allowed them to circumvent the amateur rules. On the subject of Jewish discrimination, he stated, "The very foundation of the modern Olympic revival will be undermined if individual countries are allowed to restrict participation by reason of class, creed, or race."
During a fact-finding trip that Brundage went on to Germany in 1934 to ascertain whether German Jews were being treated fairly, Brundage found no discrimination when he interviewed Jews and his Nazi handlers translated for him, and Brundage commiserated with his hosts that he belonged to a sports club in Chicago that did not allow Jews entry, either.
Unlike Brundage, Jeremiah Mahoney supported a boycott of the Games. Mahoney, the president of the Amateur Athletic Union, led newspaper editors and anti-Nazi groups to protest against American participation in the Berlin Olympics. He contested that racial discrimination was a violation of Olympic rules and that participation in the Games was tantamount to support for the Third Reich.
Most African-American newspapers supported participation in the Olympics. The Philadelphia "Tribune" and the "Chicago Defender" both agreed that black victories would undermine Nazi views of Aryan supremacy and spark renewed African-American pride. American Jewish organizations, meanwhile, largely opposed the Olympics. The American Jewish Congress and the Jewish Labor Committee staged rallies and supported the boycott of German goods to show their disdain for American participation. The JLC organized the World Labor Athletic Carnival, held on 15 and 16 August at New York's Randall's Island, to protest the holding of the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany.
Eventually, Brundage won the debate, convincing the Amateur Athletic Union to close a vote in favor of sending an American team to the Berlin Olympics. Mahoney's efforts to incite a boycott of the Olympic games in the United States failed.
US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his administration did not become involved in the debate due to a tradition of allowing the US Olympic Committee to operate independently of government influence. However, several American diplomats including William E. Dodd, the American ambassador to Berlin, and George Messersmith, head of the US legation in Vienna, deplored the US Olympic Committee's decision to participate in the games. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39721 |
Roger Williams
Roger Williams (c. 21 December 1603 – between 27 January and 15 March 1683) was a Puritan minister, theologian, and author who founded Providence Plantations, which became the Colony of Rhode Island. He was a staunch advocate for religious freedom, separation of church and state, and fair dealings with American Indians, and he was one of the first abolitionists.
Williams was expelled by the Puritan leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for spreading "new and dangerous ideas", and he established the Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge offering what he called "liberty of conscience". In 1638, he founded the First Baptist Church in America, also known as the First Baptist Church of Providence. He studied the Indian languages and wrote the first book on the Narragansett language, and he organized the first attempt to prohibit slavery in any of England's North American colonies.
Roger Williams was born in London around 1603, though the exact date is unknown because his birth records were destroyed when St. Sepulchre's Church was burned during the Great Fire of London in 1666. His father James Williams (1562–1620) was a merchant tailor in Smithfield, London, and his mother was Alice Pemberton (1564–1635).
Williams had a spiritual conversion at an early age, of which his father disapproved. He was apprenticed as a teen under Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) the famous jurist, and he was educated at Charterhouse School under Coke's patronage, and also at Pembroke College, Cambridge (Bachelor of Arts, 1627). He seemed to have a gift for languages and early acquired familiarity with Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Dutch, and French. Years later, he tutored John Milton in Dutch and American Indian languages in exchange for refresher lessons in Hebrew.
Williams took holy orders in the Church of England in connection with his studies, but he became a Puritan at Cambridge and thus ruined his chance for preferment in the Anglican church. After graduating from Cambridge, he became the chaplain to Sir William Masham. In April 1629, he proposed marriage to Jane Whalley, the niece of Lady Joan (Cromwell) Barrington, but she declined. Later that year, he married Mary Bernard (1609–76), the daughter of Rev. Richard Bernard, a notable Puritan preacher and author, at the Church of High Laver, Essex, England. They had six children, all born in America: Mary, Freeborn, Providence, Mercy, Daniel, and Joseph.
Williams knew that Puritan leaders planned to migrate to the New World. He did not join the first wave, but he decided before the year ended that he could not remain in England under Archbishop William Laud's rigorous administration. He regarded the Church of England as corrupt and false, and he had arrived at the Separatist position by the time that he and his wife boarded the "Lyon" in early December 1630.
The Boston church offered Williams a post in 1631 filling in for Rev. John Wilson while Wilson returned to England to fetch his wife. However, Williams declined the position on grounds that it was "an unseparated church". In addition, he asserted that civil magistrates must not punish any sort of "breach of the first table" of the Ten Commandments such as idolatry, Sabbath-breaking, false worship, and blasphemy, and that individuals should be free to follow their own convictions in religious matters. These three principles became central to his teachings and writings: separatism, liberty of conscience, and separation of church and state.
As a Separatist, Williams considered the Church of England irredeemably corrupt and believed that one must completely separate from it to establish a new church for the true and pure worship of God. The Salem church was also inclined to Separatism, and they invited him to become their teacher. The leaders in Boston vigorously protested, and Salem withdrew its offer. As the summer of 1631 ended, Williams moved to Plymouth Colony where he was welcomed, and he informally assisted the minister there. He regularly preached and, according to Governor William Bradford, "his teachings were well approved".
After a time, Williams decided that the Plymouth church was not sufficiently separated from the Church of England. Furthermore, his contact with the Narragansett Indians had caused him to question the validity of the colonial charters that did not include legitimate purchase of Indian land. Governor Bradford later wrote that Williams fell "into some strange opinions which caused some controversy between the church and him". In December 1632, Williams wrote a lengthy tract that openly condemned the King's charters and questioned the right of Plymouth to the land without first buying it from the Indians. He even charged that King James had uttered a "solemn lie" in claiming that he was the first Christian monarch to have discovered the land. Williams moved back to Salem by the fall of 1633 and was welcomed by Rev. Samuel Skelton as an unofficial assistant.
The Massachusetts Bay authorities were not pleased at Williams' return. In December 1633, they summoned him to appear before the General Court in Boston to defend his tract attacking the King and the charter. The issue was smoothed out, and the tract disappeared forever, probably burned. In August 1634, Williams became acting pastor of the Salem church, the Rev. Skelton having died. In March 1635, he was again ordered to appear before the General Court, and he was summoned yet again for the Court's July term to answer for "erroneous" and "dangerous opinions". The Court finally ordered that he be removed from his church position.
This latest controversy welled up as the town of Salem petitioned the General Court to annex some land on Marblehead Neck. The Court refused to consider the request unless the church in Salem removed Williams. The church felt that this order violated their independence, and sent a letter of protest to the other churches. However, the letter was not read publicly in those churches, and the General Court refused to seat the delegates from Salem at the next session. Support for Williams began to wane under this pressure, and he withdrew from the church and began meeting with a few of his most devoted followers in his home.
Finally, in October 1635, the General Court tried Williams and convicted him of sedition and heresy. They declared that he was spreading "diverse, new, and dangerous opinions"
and ordered that he be banished. The execution of the order was delayed because Williams was ill and winter was approaching, so he was allowed to stay temporarily, provided that he ceased publicly teaching his opinions. He failed to do so, and the sheriff came in January 1636, only to discover that he had slipped away three days earlier during a blizzard. He traveled 55 miles through the deep snow, from Salem to Raynham, Massachusetts where the local Wampanoags offered him shelter at their winter camp. Sachem Massasoit hosted Williams there for the three months until spring.
In the spring of 1636, Williams and a number of others from Salem began a new settlement on land which he had bought from Massasoit in Rumford, Rhode Island. However, Plymouth authorities asserted that he was within their land grant and were concerned that his presence there might anger the leaders of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Williams and his friends had already planted their crops, but they decided to move across the Seekonk River just the same, as that territory lay beyond any charter. They rowed across and encountered Narragansett Indians who greeted them with the phrase, "What cheer, Neetop" (hello, friend). Williams acquired land from Canonicus and Miantonomi, chief sachems of the Narragansetts. He and 12 "loving friends" then established a new settlement which Williams called "Providence" because he felt that God's Providence had brought them there. Williams named his third child Providence, the first to be born in the new settlement.
Williams wanted his settlement to be a haven for those "distressed of conscience", and it soon attracted a collection of dissenters and otherwise-minded individuals. From the beginning, a majority vote of the heads of households governed the new settlement, but only in civil things. Newcomers could also be admitted to full citizenship by a majority vote. In August 1637, a new town agreement again restricted the government to civil things. In 1640, 39 freemen (men who had full citizenship and voting rights) signed another agreement which declared their determination "still to hold forth liberty of conscience". Thus, Williams founded the first place in modern history where citizenship and religion were separate, providing religious liberty and separation of church and state. This was combined with the principle of majoritarian democracy.
In November 1637, the General Court of Massachusetts disarmed, disenfranchised, and forced into exile some of the Antinomians, including the followers of Anne Hutchinson. John Clarke was among them, and he learned from Williams that Rhode Island might be purchased from the Narragansetts; Williams helped him to make the purchase, along with William Coddington and others, and they established the settlement of Portsmouth. In spring 1638, some of those settlers split away and founded the nearby settlement of Newport, also situated on Rhode Island (which is today called Aquidneck Island).
In the meantime, the Pequot War had broken out. Massachusetts Bay asked for Williams' help, which he gave despite his exile, and he became the Bay colony's eyes and ears, and also dissuaded the Narragansetts from joining with the Pequots. Instead, the Narragansetts allied themselves with the Colonists and helped to crush the Pequots in 1637–38. The Narragansetts thus became the most powerful Indian tribe in southern New England.
Williams formed firm friendships and developed deep trust among the Indian tribes, especially the Narragansetts. He was able to keep the peace between the Indians and the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations for nearly 40 years by his constant mediation and negotiation. He twice surrendered himself as a hostage to the Indians to guarantee the safe return of a great sachem from a summons to a court: Pessicus in 1645 and Metacom ("King Philip") in 1671. Williams was trusted by the Indians more than any other Colonist, and he proved trustworthy.
However, the other New England colonies began to fear and mistrust the Narragansetts, and soon came to regard the Rhode Island colony as a common enemy. In the next three decades, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth exerted pressure to destroy both Rhode Island and the Narragansetts. In 1643, the neighboring colonies formed a military alliance called the United Colonies which pointedly excluded the towns around Narragansett Bay. The object was to put an end to the heretic settlements, which they considered an infection. In response, Williams traveled to England to secure a charter for the colony.
Williams arrived in London in the midst of the English Civil War. Puritans held power in London, and he was able to obtain a charter through the offices of Sir Henry Vane the Younger, despite strenuous opposition from Massachusetts' agents. His first published book "A Key into the Language of America" (1643) proved crucial to the success of his charter, albeit indirectly. It combined a phrase-book with observations about life and culture as an aid to communicate with the Indians of New England, covering everything from salutations to death and burial. Williams also sought to correct English attitudes of superiority toward the American Indians:
Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood;Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good.Of one blood God made Him, and Thee and All,As wise, as fair, as strong, as personal.
"Key" was the first dictionary of any Indian language, and it fed the great curiosity of English people about the American Indians. It was printed by John Milton's publisher Gregory Dexter who had become a resident of Providence Plantations, and it quickly became a bestseller and provided Williams with a large and favorable reputation.
Williams secured his charter from Parliament for Providence Plantations in July 1644, after which he published his most famous book "The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience". This produced a great uproar, and Parliament responded in August by ordering the public hangman to burn all copies—but Williams himself was already on his way back to New England.
It took Williams several years to get the four towns around Narragansett Bay to unite under a single government because of William Coddington's opposition on Aquidneck Island (which they called Rhode Island at the time), but the four settlements finally united in 1647 into the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. Freedom of conscience was again proclaimed, and the colony became a safe haven for people who were persecuted for their beliefs, including Baptists, Quakers, and Jews. Still, the divisions between the towns and among powerful personalities did not bode well for the colony. Coddington never liked Williams, nor did he like being subordinated to the new charter government. He sailed to England and returned to Rhode Island in 1651 with his own patent making him "Governor for Life" over Aquidneck Island and Conanicut Island.
As a result, Providence, Warwick, and Coddington's opponents on Aquidneck dispatched Roger Williams and John Clarke to England to get Coddington's commission canceled. Williams sold his trading post at Cocumscussec (near Wickford, Rhode Island) to pay for his journey even though it was his main source of income. He and Clarke succeeded in getting Coddington's patent rescinded, and Clarke remained in England for the next decade to protect the colonists' interests and secure a new charter. Williams returned to America in 1654 and was immediately elected the colony's President. He subsequently served in many offices in town and colonial governments.
In 1641, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed the first laws to make slavery legal in the colonies, and these laws were applied in Plymouth and Connecticut with the creation of the United Colonies in 1643. Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton both opposed slavery, and Providence Plantations (Providence and Warwick) passed a law on 18 May 1652 intended to prevent slavery in the colony during the time when Coddington's followers had separated from Providence. However, when the four towns of the colony were reunited, the Aquidneck towns refused to accept this law, making it a dead letter. For the next century, Newport was the economic and political center of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and that town disregarded the anti-slavery law. Instead, Newport entered the African slave trade in 1700, after Williams' death, and became the leading port for American ships carrying slaves in the colonial American triangular trade until the American Revolutionary War.
Ezekiel Holliman baptized Williams in late 1638. A few years later, Dr. John Clarke established the First Baptist Church in Newport, Rhode Island, and both Roger Williams and John Clarke became the founders of the Baptist faith in America. Williams did not affiliate himself with any church, but he remained interested in the Baptists, agreeing with their rejection of infant baptism and most other matters. Both enemies and admirers sometimes called him a "Seeker", associating him with a heretical movement that accepted Socinianism and Universal Reconciliation, but Williams rejected both of these ideas.
King Philip's War (1675–1676) pitted the colonists against Indians with whom Williams had good relations in the past. Williams, although in his 70s, was elected captain of Providence's militia. That war proved to be one of the bitterest events in his life, as his efforts ended with the burning of Providence in March 1676, including his own house.
Williams died sometime between January and March in 1683 and was buried on his own property. Fifty years later, his house collapsed into the cellar and the location of his grave was forgotten. According to the National Park Service, in 1860, Providence residents determined to raise a monument in his honor "dug up the spot where they believed the remains to be, they found only nails, teeth, and bone fragments. They also found an apple tree root", which they thought followed the shape of a human body; the root followed the shape of a spine, split at the hips, bent at the knees, and turned up at the feet. The Rhode Island Historical Society has cared for this tree root since 1860 as representative of Rhode Island's founder, and has had it on display in the John Brown House since 2007.
Williams was a staunch advocate of separation of church and state. He was convinced that civil government had no basis for meddling in matters of religious belief. He declared that the state should concern itself only with matters of civil order, not with religious belief, and he rejected any attempt by civil authorities to enforce the "first Table" of the Ten Commandments, those commandments that deal with an individual's relationship with and belief in God. Williams believed that the state must confine itself to the commandments dealing with the relations between people: murder, theft, adultery, lying, and honoring parents. He wrote of a "hedge or wall of Separation between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the world", and Thomas Jefferson used the metaphor in his "Letter to Danbury Baptists" (1801).
Williams considered it "forced worship" if the state attempted to promote any particular religious idea or practice, and he declared, "Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils." He considered Constantine the Great to be a worse enemy to Christianity than Nero because the subsequent state involvement in religious matters corrupted Christianity and led to the death of the Christian church. He described the attempt of the state to pass laws concerning an individual's religious beliefs as "rape of the soul" and spoke of the "oceans of blood" shed as a result of trying to command conformity. The moral principles in the Scriptures ought to inform the civil magistrates, he believed, but he observed that well-ordered, just, and civil governments existed even where Christianity was not present. Thus, all governments had to maintain civil order and justice, but Williams decided that none had a warrant to promote or repress any religious views. Most of his contemporaries criticized his ideas as a prescription for chaos and anarchy, and the vast majority believed that each nation must have its national church and could require that dissenters conform.
Williams's career as an author began with "A Key into the Language of America" (London, 1643), written during his first voyage to England. His next publication was "Mr. Cotton's Letter lately Printed, Examined and Answered" (London, 1644; reprinted in "Publications of the Narragansett Club", vol. ii, along with John Cotton's letter which it answered). His most famous work is "The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience" (published in 1644), considered by some to be one of the best defenses of liberty of conscience.
An anonymous pamphlet was published in London in 1644 entitled "Queries of Highest Consideration Proposed to Mr. Tho. Goodwin, Mr. Phillip Nye, Mr. Wil. Bridges, Mr. Jer. Burroughs, Mr. Sidr. Simpson, all Independents, etc." which is now ascribed to Williams. These "Independents" were members of the Westminster Assembly; their "Apologetical Narration" sought a way between extreme Separatism and Presbyterianism, and their prescription was to accept the state church model of Massachusetts Bay.
Williams published "The Bloody Tenent yet more Bloudy: by Mr. Cotton's Endeavor to wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb; of whose precious Blood, spilt in the Bloud of his Servants; and of the Blood of Millions spilt in former and later Wars for Conscience sake, that most Bloody Tenent of Persecution for cause of Conscience, upon, a second Tryal is found more apparently and more notoriously guilty, etc." (London, 1652) during his second visit to England. This work reiterated and amplified the arguments in "Bloudy Tenent", but it has the advantage of being written in answer to Cotton's "A Reply to Mr. Williams his Examination" ("Publications of the Narragansett Club", vol. ii.).
Other works by Williams include:
A volume of his letters is included in the Narragansett Club edition of Williams' "Works " (7 vols., Providence, 1866–74), and a volume was edited by J. R. Bartlett (1882).
Brown University's John Carter Brown Library has long housed a 234-page volume referred to as the "Roger Williams Mystery Book". The margins of this book are filled with notations in handwritten code, believed to be the work of Roger Williams. In 2012, Brown University undergraduate Lucas Mason-Brown cracked the code and uncovered conclusive historical evidence attributing its authorship to Williams. Translations are revealing transcriptions of a geographical text, a medical text, and 20 pages of original notes addressing the issue of infant baptism. Mason-Brown has since discovered more writings by Williams employing a separate code in the margins of a rare edition of "Eliot's Indian Bible".
Williams' defense of American Indians, his accusations that Puritans had reproduced the "evils" of the Anglican Church, and his insistence that England pay the Indians for their land all put him at the center of many political debates during his life. He was considered an important historical figure of religious liberty at the time of American independence, and he was a key influence on the thinking of the Founding Fathers.
Tributes to Williams include: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39731 |
The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch is an American sitcom created by Sherwood Schwartz that aired from September 26, 1969, to March 8, 1974, on ABC. The series revolves around a large blended family with six children. Considered one of the last of the old-style family sitcoms, the series aired for five seasons and, after its cancellation in 1974, went into syndication in September 1975. While the series was never a critical success or hit series during its original run, it has since become a popular staple in syndication, especially among children and teenaged viewers.
"The Brady Bunch"s success in syndication led to several television reunion films and spin-off series: "The Brady Bunch Hour" (1976–77), "The Brady Girls Get Married" (1981), "The Brady Brides" (1981), "A Very Brady Christmas" (1988), and "The Bradys" (1990). In 1995, the series was adapted into a satirical comedy theatrical film titled "The Brady Bunch Movie", followed by "A Very Brady Sequel" in 1996. A second sequel, "The Brady Bunch in the White House", aired on Fox in November 2002 as a made-for-television film. In 1997, "Getting Davy Jones" (season three, episode 12) was ranked number 37 on "TV Guide"s 100 Greatest Episodes of All-Time. The enduring popularity of the show has resulted in it becoming widely recognized as an American cultural icon.
Mike Brady (Robert Reed), a widowed architect with three sons, Greg (Barry Williams), Peter (Christopher Knight), and Bobby (Mike Lookinland), marries Carol Martin (Florence Henderson), who herself has three daughters: Marcia (Maureen McCormick), Jan (Eve Plumb), and Cindy (Susan Olsen). The wife and daughters take the Brady surname. Included in the blended family are Mike's live-in housekeeper, Alice Nelson (Ann B. Davis), and the boys' dog, Tiger. (In the pilot episode, the girls also have a pet: a cat named Fluffy. Fluffy never appeared in any episodes following the pilot.) The setting is a large, suburban, two-story house designed by Mike, in a Los Angeles suburb.
In the first season, awkward adjustments, accommodations, gender rivalries, and resentments inherent in blended families dominate the stories. In an early episode, Carol tells Bobby that the only "steps" in their household lead to the second floor (in other words, that the family contains no "stepchildren", only "children"). Thereafter, the episodes focus on typical preteen and teenaged adjustments such as sibling rivalry, puppy love, self-image, character building, and responsibility. Noticeably absent was any political commentary, especially regarding the Vietnam War, which was being waged at its largest extent during the height of the series.
The regular cast appeared in an opening title sequence in which video head shots were arranged in a three-by-three grid, with each cast member appearing to look at the other cast members. The sequence used the then-new "multi-dynamic image technique" created by Canadian filmmaker Christopher Chapman; as a result of the popular attention it garnered in this sequence, it has been referred to in the press as "the Brady Bunch effect". In a 2010 issue of "TV Guide", the show's opening title sequence ranked number eight on a list of TV's top-10 credits sequences, as selected by readers.
Image:Brady Bunch.jpg|320px|right|thumb|alt=A 3 × 3 grid of squares with face shots of all nine starring characters of the television series: three blond girls in the left three squares, three brown-haired boys in the right three squares, and the middle three squares feature a blond, motherly woman, a dark-haired woman, and a brown-haired man; all the faces are on blue backgrounds.|Cast of "The Brady Bunch" in the signature three-by-three grid featured in the show open. Click on a character for the actor's biography.
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rect 0 0 106 79 Marcia Brady (Maureen McCormick)
rect 0 80 106 159 Jan Brady (Eve Plumb)
rect 0 160 106 239 Cindy Brady (Susan Olsen)
rect 107 0 213 79 Carol Brady (Florence Henderson)
rect 107 80 213 159 Alice Nelson (Ann B. Davis)
rect 214 0 319 79 Greg Brady (Barry Williams)
rect 214 80 319 159 Peter Brady (Christopher Knight)
rect 214 160 319 239 Bobby Brady (Mike Lookinland)
rect 107 160 213 239 Mike Brady (Robert Reed)
In 1966, following the success of his TV series "Gilligan's Island", Sherwood Schwartz conceived the idea for "The Brady Bunch" after reading in "The Los Angeles Times" that "30% of marriages [in the United States] have a child or children from a previous marriage." He set to work on a pilot script for a series tentatively titled "Mine and Yours". Schwartz then developed the script to include three children for each parent. While Mike Brady is depicted as being a widower, Schwartz originally wanted the character of Carol Brady to have been a divorcée, but the network objected to this. A compromise was reached whereby Carol's marital status (whether she was divorced or widowed) was never directly revealed.
Schwartz shopped the series to the "big three" television networks of the era. ABC, CBS, and NBC all liked the script, but each network wanted changes before they would commit to filming, so Schwartz shelved the project. Although similarities exist between the series and two 1968 theatrical release films, United Artists' "Yours, Mine and Ours" (starring Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball) and CBS's "With Six You Get Eggroll" (starring Brian Keith and Doris Day), the original script for "The Brady Bunch" predated the scripts for both of these films. Nonetheless, the outstanding success of "Yours, Mine and Ours" (the 11th-highest-grossing film of 1968) was a factor in ABC's decision to order episodes for the series.
After receiving a commitment for 13 weeks of television shows from ABC in 1968, Schwartz hired film and television director John Rich to direct the pilot, then called "The Brady Brood," cast the six children from 264 interviews during that summer, and hired the actors to play the mother role, the father role, and the housekeeper role. As the sets were built on Paramount Television stage 5, adjacent to the stage where "H.R. Pufnstuf" was filmed by Sid and Marty Krofft, who later produced "The Brady Bunch Hour", the production crew prepared the back yard of a home in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, as the exterior location for the chaotic backyard wedding scene. Filming of the pilot began on Friday, October 4, 1968, and lasted eight days.
The theme song, written by Schwartz and Frank De Vol, and originally arranged, sung, and performed by Paul Parrish, Lois Fletcher, and John Beland under the name the Peppermint Trolley Company, quickly communicated to audiences that the Bradys were a blended family. As described above, the Brady family is shown in a three-by-three grid, tic-tac-toe board-style graphic with Carol on the top center, Alice in the middle block, and Mike on bottom middle. To the right are three blocks with the boys from the oldest on top to the youngest. To the left are three blocks with the girls from the oldest to the youngest. In season two, the Brady kids took over singing the theme song. In season three, the boys sing the first verse, girls sing the second verse, and all sing together for the third and last verse. In season four, a new version is recorded with the same structure as the season three version, but in season five, the season three version returns. Utilizing Christopher Chapman’s "multi-dynamic image technique," a version of which had famously appeared in the 1968 film "The Thomas Crown Affair", the sequence was created and filmed by Howard A. Anderson, Jr., a visual effects pioneer who worked on the title sequences for many popular television series. The use of this innovation here became so familiar through the sitcom’s popularity that it was referred to in the press as the “Brady Bunch effect.”
The end credits feature an instrumental version of the theme song's third verse. In season one, it was recorded by the Peppermint Trolley Company. From season two on, the theme was recorded in-house by Paramount musicians.
The house, built in 1959 and used in exterior shots, originally bore little relation to the interior layout (until 2018, when the interior of the house was rebuilt to match the soundstage sets) of the Bradys' on screen home, is located in Studio City, within the city limits of Los Angeles. According to a 1994 article in the "Los Angeles Times", the San Fernando Valley house was built in 1959 and selected as the Brady residence because series creator Schwartz felt it looked like a home where an architect would live. A false window was attached to the front's A-frame section to give the illusion that it had two full stories (the 2018/2019 renovation installed a real window where the false one was in the TV show footage). Contemporary establishing shots of the house were filmed with the owner's permission for the 1990 TV series "The Bradys". The owner refused to allow Paramount to restore the property to its 1969 look for "The Brady Bunch Movie" in 1995, so a facade resembling the original home was built around an existing house.
The house was put up for sale, for the first time since 1973, in the summer of 2018 with an asking price of $1.885 million. Cable network HGTV outbid seven others for it, including NSYNC's Lance Bass. HGTV has expanded the home for its original series "A Very Brady Renovation", with the goal of recreating each of the interior rooms used in the TV series (which had only existed as a Paramount Studios set) while maintaining the original exterior look from the street, and to make it fully habitable (unlike the sets made on Paramount soundstage #5). The six actors who played the TV children, and who also actively participated in the 2018/2019 renovation, posed for a photo in front on November 1, 2018.
In the series, the address of the house was given as 4222 Clinton Way (as read aloud by Carol from an arriving package in the first-season episode entitled "Lost Locket, Found Locket"). Although no city was ever specified, it was presumed from references to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Los Angeles Rams, and a Hollywood movie studio, among many others, that the Bradys lived in Southern California, most likely Los Angeles or one of its suburbs.
The interior sets of the Brady house were used at least three times, for other Paramount TV shows, while "The Brady Bunch" was still in production. Twice for "Mannix" and once for "". In the case of "Mission: Impossible", the Brady furniture was also used. A re-creation of the Brady house was constructed for the "X-Files" episode "Sunshine Days", which also revolved around "The Brady Bunch".
Since its first airing in syndication in September 1975, an episode of the show has been broadcast somewhere in the United States and abroad every day of the year. Episodes were also shown on ABC daytime from July 9, 1973 to April 18, 1975 and from June 30 to August 29, 1975, at 11:30 a.m. EST/10:30 CST.
The show was aired on TBS starting in the 1980s until 1997, Nick at Nite in 1995 (for a special event), and again from 1998 to 2003 (and briefly during the spring of 2012), The N from March to April 2004, on TV Land on and off from 2002 to 2015, Nick Jr. (as part of the NickMom block from 2012 to 2013), and Hallmark Channel from January to June 2013 and again starting September 5, 2016, until September 30, 2016.
Episodes in the syndicated version have been edited for time to allow for commercial breaks, down from the original version of 25–26 minutes.
Since its launch as a national network in 2010, the Weigel Broadcasting owned classic TV network MeTV airs a weekly two-hour block of the show every Sunday morning/early afternoon promoted as the "Brady Bunch Brunch". In the years following, MeTV has also periodically aired the series weekday mornings. Decades - a sister network of MeTV - also occasionally airs the show.
The show is also available through the video-on-demand services Hulu and CBS All Access, though not every episode is available on either service.
In the UK the series aired on ITV from 1975 to 1982 and was later repeated on Sky 1. The series was never a big hit in Britain.
Paramount Home Entertainment released all five seasons on DVD in Region 1 from 2005 to 2006, before CBS Home Entertainment took over DVD rights to the Paramount Television library (though CBS DVD releases are still distributed by Paramount). Paramount/CBS has released the series on DVD in other countries as well.
On April 3, 2007, CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment released the complete series box set, which includes the TV movies "A Very Brady Christmas" and "The Brady 500" (an episode of "The Bradys"), as well as two episodes of "The Brady Kids" animated series. The box art for this set features green shag carpeting and 1970s-style wood paneling.
8 years later on April 7, 2015, CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment re-released the complete series box set, a repackaged version at a lower price, but it does not include the bonus disc that was part of the original complete series release.
The TV movie "A Very Brady Christmas" was released as a stand-alone DVD in Region 1 on October 10, 2017.
In conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the original series, CBS/Paramount released "The Brady-est Brady Bunch TV & Movie Collection" in Region 1 on June 4, 2019. The collection contains every episode of "The Brady Bunch", "The Brady Kids", "The Brady Brides", and "The Bradys", as well as the movies "A Very Brady Christmas", "The Brady Bunch Movie", "A Very Brady Sequel", "The Brady Bunch in the White House", and "Growing Up Brady".
The first two seasons are also available on Region 2 DVD for the UK, with audio in English and subtitle choices in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, or Finnish.
The series has also been released on VHS.
Ratings data prior to 1972 is scarce for shows that did not place in the Top 30. Beginning in 2017, The TV Ratings Guide began publishing vintage television ratings as they became readily available from old newspaper publishings. Season 4 ratings came from "Variety" year-end rankings dated May 30, 1973. "The Brady Bunch" earned steady ratings during its primetime run (but never placed in the top 30 during the five years it aired) and was cancelled in 1974 after five seasons and 117 episodes; it was cancelled shortly after the series crossed the minimum threshold for syndication. At that point in the storyline, Greg graduated from high school and was about to enroll in college.
"The Brady Bunch" was not an award-winning show at the time of its original broadcast in the 1970s. The series and its cast and crew were not nominated for an award until 1989, when Barry Williams was honored with the Former Child Star Lifetime Achievement Award at the 10th Youth in Film Awards.
All other awards and nominations for the series have come from the TV Land Awards:
During the series' original run, the six Brady kids recorded several albums on Paramount's record label, all credited to "The Brady Bunch". Note that Florence Henderson and Robert Reed did not participate in these recordings, and are not pictured on the album sleeves.
While session musicians provided backing, the actors from the series provided their own singing voices (which was not always the case for early 1970s television crossover acts). In addition, Chris Knight & Maureen McCormick issued a duet LP in 1973, and five of the six Brady kids also released solo singles between 1970 and 1974; only Susan Olsen did not. None of the singles from The Brady Bunch, or any single or album from the assorted spin-off acts, ever became hits on any national music charts. The group's 1972 album "Meet The Brady Bunch" was their only charting release, hitting #108 on Billboard's album charts.
Also includes solo singles as indicated.
Several spin-offs and sequels and reality series, to the original series have been made, featuring all or most of the original cast. These include another sitcom, an animated series, a variety show, television movies, a dramatic series, a stage play, theatrical movies, and a reality series:
A final-season "Brady Bunch" episode, "Kelly's Kids", was intended as a pilot for a prospective spin-off series of the same name. Ken Berry starred as Ken Kelly, a friend and neighbor of the Bradys, who with his wife Kathy (Brooke Bundy) adopted three orphaned boys of different racial backgrounds. One of the adopted sons was played by Todd Lookinland, the younger brother of Mike Lookinland. While "Kelly's Kids" was not subsequently picked up as a full series, producer Sherwood Schwartz reworked the basic premise for the short-lived 1980s sitcom "Together We Stand" starring Elliott Gould and Dee Wallace.
A 22-episode animated Saturday morning cartoon series, produced by Filmation and airing on ABC from September 1972 to August 1974, is about the Brady kids having various adventures. The family's adults were never seen or mentioned, and the "home" scenes were in a very large, well-appointed tree house. Several animals were regular characters, including two non-English-speaking pandas (Ping and Pong), a talking bird (Marlon) which could do magic, and an ordinary pet dog (Mop Top, not Tiger). The first 17 episodes featured the voices of all six of the original child actors from the show, but Barry Williams, Maureen McCormick, and Christopher Knight were replaced for the last five episodes due to a contract dispute.
On November 28, 1976, a one-hour television special entitled "The Brady Bunch Variety Hour" aired on ABC. Eve Plumb was the only regular cast member from the original show who declined to be in the series and the role of Jan was recast with Geri Reischl. Produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, the sibling team behind "H.R. Pufnstuf", "Donny and Marie", and other variety shows and children's series of the era, the show was intended to air every fifth week in the same slot as "The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries", but ended up being scheduled sporadically throughout the season, leading to inconsistent ratings and its inevitable cancellation.
In 2009, "Brady Bunch" cast member Susan Olsen, with Lisa Sutton, published a book, "Love to Love You Bradys", which dissects and celebrates the "Variety Hour" as a cult classic.
A TV reunion movie called "The Brady Girls Get Married" was produced in 1981. Although scheduled to be shown in its original full-length movie format, NBC at the last minute divided it into half-hour segments and showed one part a week for three weeks, and the fourth week debuted a spin-off sitcom titled "The Brady Brides". The reunion movie featured the entire original cast; this proved to be the only time the entire cast worked together on a single project following the cancellation of the original series. The movie's opening credits featured the season-one "Grid" and theme song, with the addition of "The Brady Girls Get Married" title. The movie shows what the characters had been doing since the original series ended: Mike is still an architect, Carol is a real-estate agent, Greg is a doctor, Marcia is a fashion designer, Peter is in the Air Force, Jan is also an architect, Bobby and Cindy are in college, and Alice has married Sam. Eventually, they all reunite for Marcia and Jan's double wedding.
"The Brady Brides" features Maureen McCormick and Eve Plumb reprising their respective roles as Marcia and Jan Brady. The series begins with Marcia and Jan and their new husbands buying a house and living together. The clashes between Jan's uptight and conservative husband, Philip Covington III (a college professor in science who is several years older than Jan, played by Ron Kuhlman) and Marcia's slovenly and more bohemian husband, Wally Logan (a fun-loving salesman for a large toy company, played by Jerry Houser), were the pivot on which many of the stories were based, not unlike "The Odd Couple". Florence Henderson and Ann B. Davis also appeared regularly. Ten episodes were aired before the sitcom was cancelled. This was the only Brady show in sitcom form to be filmed in front of a live studio audience. Bob Eubanks guest-starred as himself in an episode where the two couples appear on "The Newlywed Game".
Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, "The Brady Girls Get Married" was rerun on various networks in its original full-length movie format.
In 2019, the series was released on DVD for the first time as a part of "The Brady-est Brady Bunch TV & Movie Collection".
A second TV reunion movie, "A Very Brady Christmas", aired in December 1988 on CBS and featured most of the regular cast (except Susan Olsen, who was on her honeymoon at the time of filming; the role of Cindy was played by Jennifer Runyon), as well as three grandchildren, Peter's girlfriend, Valerie, and the spouses of Greg, Marcia, and Jan (Nora, Wally, and Phillip, respectively). The Nielsen ratings for "A Very Brady Christmas" were the highest of any television movie that season for CBS.
Due to the success of "A Very Brady Christmas", CBS asked "Brady Bunch" creator Sherwood Schwartz and his son Lloyd to create a new series for the network. According to Lloyd Schwartz, his father and he initially balked at the idea because they felt a new series would harm the Brady franchise. They finally relented because CBS was "desperate for programming". A new series featuring the Brady clan was created entitled "The Bradys". All the original "Brady Bunch" cast members returned for the series, except for Maureen McCormick (Marcia), who was replaced with Leah Ayres.
As with "A Very Brady Christmas", "The Bradys" also featured elements of comedy and drama and featured storylines that were of a more serious nature than that of the original series and its subsequent spin-offs. Lloyd Schwartz later said he compared "The Bradys" to another dramedy of the time, "thirtysomething". The two-hour series premiere episode aired on February 9, 1990, at 9 pm on CBS and initially drew respectable ratings. Subsequent episodes were moved to 8 pm, where ratings quickly declined. Due to the decline, CBS cancelled the series after six episodes.
A one-hour TV special retrospective of "The Brady Bunch" hosted by Florence Henderson who introduces a montage of various episodes of the original series, and also examines the show's phenomenal after-life, illustrated by clips from spin-offs and other incarnations of the series. Also, cast members Christopher Knight, Susan Olsen, Mike Lookinland, Barry Williams, Ann B. Davis, and creator Sherwood Schwartz reflect on the impact of the show on their lives. Directed by Malcolm Leo, the special was originally broadcast on ABC on May 19, 1993.
The "Day by Day" episode titled "A Very Brady Episode" (February 5, 1989), on NBC, reunited six of the original "The Brady Bunch" cast members: Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, Ann B. Davis, Christopher Knight, Mike Lookinland and Maureen McCormick.
In November 2018, it was announced that Christopher Knight, Mike Lookinland, Maureen McCormick, Susan Olsen, Eve Plumb, and Barry Williams were reuniting for the 2019 HGTV series "A Very Brady Renovation", which follows a full renovation (interior mostly) of the real house, used for the sitcom's exterior shots, into the fictional Brady house.
In conjunction with the Renovation series, in the autumn of 2019, The Food Network aired two episodes of their program "Chopped" with the siblings as guest judges. Season 43, episode 3 - "Brady Bunch Bash" featured Williams, Plumb, and Lookinland judging meals made from Hawaiian ingredients. Season 43, episode 4 - "A Very Brady Chopped" featured McCormick, Knight, and Olsen judging meals from "groovy" ingredients of the 70's.
Twenty years following the conclusion of the original series, a film adaptation, "The Brady Bunch Movie," went into production and was released in 1995 from Paramount Pictures. The film is set in the present day (1990s) and the Bradys, still living their lives as if it were the 1970s, are unfamiliar with their surroundings. It stars Gary Cole and Shelley Long as Mike and Carol Brady, with Christopher Daniel Barnes (Greg), Christine Taylor (Marcia), Paul Sutera (Peter), Jennifer Elise Cox (Jan), Jesse Lee (Bobby), Olivia Hack (Cindy), Henriette Mantel (Alice), and cameo appearances from Ann B. Davis as a long-haul truck driver, Barry Williams as a record label executive, Christopher Knight as a gym teacher at Westdale High, and Florence Henderson as Carol's mother. Mike Lookinland, Susan Olsen and Maureen McCormick appeared in deleted scenes.
A sequel, "A Very Brady Sequel", was released in 1996. The cast of the first film returned for the sequel. Another sequel, "The Brady Bunch in the White House," was made-for-television and aired on Fox in 2002. Gary Cole and Shelley Long returned for the third film, while the Brady kids and Alice were recast. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39732 |
Edmund of Abingdon
Saint Edmund of Abingdon (circa 11741240) (also known as Edmund Rich, St Edmund of Canterbury, Edmund of Pontigny, French: St Edme) was an English born prelate who served as Archbishop of Canterbury. He became a respected lecturer in mathematics, dialectics and theology at the Universities of Paris and Oxford, promoting the study of Aristotle. Having already an unsought reputation as an ascetic, he was ordained a priest, took a doctorate in divinity and soon became known not only for his lectures on theology but as a popular preacher, spending long years travelling within England, and engaging in 1227 preaching the sixth crusade. Obliged to accept an appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Gregory IX, he combined a gentle personal temperament with a strong public stature and severity towards King Henry III in defence of Magna Carta and in general of good civil and Church government and justice. He also worked for strict observance in monastic life and negotiated peace with Llywelyn the Great. His policies earned him hostility and jealousy from the king, and opposition from several monasteries and from the clergy of Canterbury Cathedral. He died in France at the beginning of a journey to Rome in 1240. He was canonised in 1246.
Edmund was born circa 1174, possibly on 20 November (the feast of St Edmund the Martyr), in Abingdon in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), 7 miles south of Oxford, England. He was the oldest of four children.
"Rich" was an epithet sometimes given to his wealthy merchant father, Reynold. It was never applied to Edmund or his siblings in their lifetimes. His father retired, with his wife's consent, to the monastery at Eynsham Abbey, leaving in her hands the education of their family. Her name was Mabel; she was a devout woman who lived an ascetic life and encouraged her children to do the same. Both her daughters took the veil.
Edmund may have been educated at the monastic school in Abingdon. He developed a taste for religious learning, saw visions while still at school, and at the age of twelve took a vow of perpetual chastity in the Virgin's church at Oxford. His early studies were in England, but he completed his higher learning in France at the University of Paris. About 1195, in company with his brother Richard, he was sent to the schools of Paris. He studied at the universities of Oxford and Paris and became a teacher about 1200, or a little earlier. For six years he lectured on mathematics and dialectics, apparently dividing his time between Oxford and Paris, and helped introduce the study of Aristotle.
Edmund became one of Oxford's first lecturers with a Master of Arts, but was not Oxford's first Doctor of Divinity. Long hours at night spent in prayer had the result that he often "nodded off" during his lectures. There is a long-established tradition that he utilised his lecture-fees to build the Lady Chapel of St Peter's in the East at Oxford. The site where he lived and taught was formed into a mediaeval academic hall in his name and later incorporated as the college of St Edmund Hall.
His mother's influence then led to his taking up the study of theology.
Though for some time Edmund resisted the change, he finally entered upon his new career between 1205 and 1210. He spent a year in retirement with the Augustinian canons of Merton Priory, received ordination, took a doctorate in divinity and soon became known as a lecturer on theology and as an extemporaneous preacher. In this capacity he gained some reputation for eloquence. He spent the fees which he received in charity, and refused to spend upon himself the revenues which he derived from several benefices. He often retired for solitude to Reading Abbey, and it is possible that he would have become a monk if that profession had afforded more scope for his gifts as a preacher and expositor.
Some time between 1219 and 1222 he was appointed vicar of the parish of Calne in Wiltshire, and treasurer of Salisbury Cathedral. He held this position for eleven years, during which time he also engaged in preaching. In 1227 he preached the sixth crusade through a large part of England. He formed a friendship with Ela, countess of Salisbury, and her husband, William Longespée, and was noted for his works of charity and the austerity of his life.
In 1233 came the news of Edmund's appointment, by Pope Gregory IX, to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The chapter had already made three selections which the pope had declined to confirm. Edmund's name had been proposed as a compromise by Gregory, perhaps on account of his work for the crusade. He was consecrated on 2 April 1234.
Before his consecration Edmund became known for supporting ecclesiastical independence from Rome, maintenance of the Magna Carta and the exclusion of foreigners from civil and ecclesiastical office. Reluctant to accept appointment as archbishop, Edmund was persuaded when it was pointed out that if he refused, the Pope might very well appoint a foreign ecclesiastic. He chose as his chancellor Richard of Wich, known to later ages as St Richard of Chichester.
In the name of his fellow bishops Edmund admonished Henry III of England at Westminster, on 2 February 1234, to heed the example of his father, John of England. A week after his consecration he again appeared before the king with the barons and bishops, this time threatening Henry with excommunication if he refused to dismiss his councillors, many of them foreign, and particularly Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester. Henry yielded, and the favourites were dismissed, Hubert de Burgh (whom they had imprisoned) was released and reconciled to the king and soon the archbishop was sent to Wales to negotiate peace with Llywelyn the Great. Edmund's success, however, turned the king against him.
Edmund was valued by the local people for his teaching, preaching, study, and his prayer; but his uncompromising stand in favour of good discipline in both civil and ecclesial government, of strict observance in monastic life, and of justice in high quarters brought him into conflict with Henry III, with several monasteries, and with the priests of Canterbury cathedral. He claimed and exercised metropolitan rights of visitation, this was often challenged and he had to resort to litigation to maintain his authority, not the least with his own monastic chapter at Canterbury.
In 1236, with the object of emancipating himself from Edmund's control, the king asked the pope to send him a legate. On the arrival of Cardinal Odo in 1237 the archbishop found himself thwarted and insulted at every point. The politically significant marriage between Simon de Montfort and Henry's sister Eleanor, which Edmund had pronounced invalid, was ratified at Rome upon appeal. The king and legate upheld the monks of Canterbury in their opposition to Edmund's authority. Edmund protested to the king, and excommunicated in general terms all who had infringed the liberties of Canterbury. These measures had no impact, and the pope could not be moved to reverse the legate's decisions. Edmund complained that the discipline of the national church was ruined by this conflict of powers, and began to consider retirement.
Notwithstanding the gentleness of his disposition, Edmund firmly defended the rights of Church and State against the exactions and usurpations of Henry III. In December 1237 Edmund set out for Rome to plead his cause in person. From this futile mission he returned to England in August 1238 where his efforts to foster reform were frustrated. Edmund submitted to the papal demands and, early in 1240 paid to the pope's agents one fifth of his revenue, which had been levied for the pope's war against Emperor Frederick II. Other English prelates followed his example.
The papacy then ordered that 300 English benefices should be assigned to Romans. In 1240 Edmund set out for Rome. At the Cistercian Pontigny Abbey in France he became sick, began travelling back to England, but died only 50 miles further north, on 16 November 1240, at the house of Augustinian Canons at Soisy-Bouy and was taken back to Pontigny.
In less than a year after Edmund's death miracles were alleged to be wrought at his grave. Despite Henry's opposition, he was canonised only 6 years after his death, in December 1246. His feast day is 16 November. A few years later the first chapel dedicated to him, St Edmund's Chapel, was consecrated in Dover by his friend Richard of Chichester (making it the only chapel dedicated to one English saint by another).
At Salisbury a collegiate church and an altar in the cathedral were dedicated to Saint Edmund.
Today he is remembered in the name of St Edmund Hall, Oxford and St Edmund's College, Cambridge.
His is the name given also to St Edmund's College, Ware, St Edmund's School, Canterbury , St Edmund's School, Hindhead and St Edmund's Catholic School, Portsmouth.
Edmund's body was never translated to Canterbury, because the Benedictine community there resented what they regarded as Edmund's attacks on their independence. After his death he was taken back to Pontigny Abbey, where his main relics are now found in a baroque reliquary tomb dating to the 17th century.
An arm is enshrined in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Assumption at St. Edmund's Retreat on Enders Island off the coast of Mystic, Connecticut. The retreat is operated by the Society of the Fathers and Brothers of St. Edmund.
In 1853, the fibula of the Edmund's left leg was presented to St Edmund's College, Ware, by Cardinal Wiseman. Many local cures of serious illnesses were attributed to the intercession of St Edmund; one of the earliest of these was of a student who nearly died after a fall in 1871. His complete healing led to the accomplishment of a vow to extend the beautiful Pugin chapel with a side chapel to honour the saint.
The Islamic silk chasuble, with the main fabric probably made in Al-Andaluz, that Edmund had with him at his death remains in a local church, with a stole and maniple.
Edmund's life was one of self-sacrifice and devotion to others. From boyhood he practised asceticism; such as fasting on Saturdays on bread and water, and wearing a hair shirt. After snatching a few hours' sleep, most of the night he spent in prayer and meditation.
Besides his "Constitutions," issued in 1236 (printed in W. Lynwood's "Constitutiones Angliae", Oxford, 1679), Edmund wrote a work in the genre of the Speculum literature entitled "Speculum ecclesiae" (London, 1521; Eng. transl., 1527; reprinted in M. de la Bigne's "Bibliotheca veterum patrum", v., Paris, 1609).
Edmund's life inspired the formation of the Society of Saint Edmund at Pontigny, France, in 1843 by Revs. Jean Baptiste Muard and Pierre Boyer. The Society intended to keep Saint Edmund's memory and life alive by conducting parish missions in the archdiocese of Sens, so as to revitalize the faith of the people who had become alienated from the Church. Members of the Society, based in Pontigny, fled to the United States in 1889 after widespread anticlericalism in France. The Society of Saint Edmund settled in Winooski Park, Vermont and in 1904 established Saint Michael's College where the deeds and values of Saint Edmund's life continue through the college mission. Today members of the Society of Saint Edmund devote themselves to parochial work in the Diocese of Burlington, Vermont, ministry to the African American community through the Edmundite Missions in Selma, Alabama, to higher education at Saint Michael's College, and retreat ministry at Saint Anne's Shrine in Vermont. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39735 |
Binomial nomenclature
Binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin grammatical forms, although they can be based on words from other languages. Such a name is called a binomial name (which may be shortened to just "binomial"), a binomen, name or a scientific name; more informally it is also called a Latin name.
The first part of the name – the "generic name" – identifies the genus to which the species belongs, while the second part – the specific name or specific epithet – identifies the species within the genus. For example, humans belong to the genus "Homo" and within this genus to the species "Homo sapiens". "Tyrannosaurus rex" is probably the most widely known binomial. The "formal" introduction of this system of naming species is credited to Carl Linnaeus, effectively beginning with his work "Species Plantarum" in 1753. But Gaspard Bauhin, in as early as 1622, had introduced in his book "Pinax theatri botanici" (English, "Illustrated exposition of plants") many names of genera that were later adopted by Linnaeus.
The application of binomial nomenclature is now governed by various internationally agreed codes of rules, of which the two most important are the "International Code of Zoological Nomenclature" ("ICZN") for animals and the "International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants" ("ICNafp"). Although the general principles underlying binomial nomenclature are common to these two codes, there are some differences, both in the terminology they use and in their precise rules.
In modern usage, the first letter of the first part of the name, the genus, is always capitalized in writing, while that of the second part is not, even when derived from a proper noun such as the name of a person or place. Similarly, both parts are italicized when a binomial name occurs in normal text (or underlined in handwriting). Thus the binomial name of the annual phlox (named after botanist Thomas Drummond) is now written as "Phlox drummondii".
In scientific works, the authority for a binomial name is usually given, at least when it is first mentioned, and the date of publication may be specified.
The name is composed of two word-forming elements: "bi", a Latin prefix for two, and "-nomial", literally translated as "name". The word "binomium" was used in Medieval Latin to signify one of the terms in a two-term binomial expression in mathematics.
Prior to the adoption of the modern binomial system of naming species, a scientific name consisted of a generic name combined with a specific name that was from one to several words long. Together they formed a system of polynomial nomenclature. These names had two separate functions. First, to designate or label the species, and second, to be a diagnosis or description; however these two goals were eventually found to be incompatible. In a simple genus, containing only two species, it was easy to tell them apart with a one-word genus and a one-word specific name; but as more species were discovered, the names necessarily became longer and unwieldy, for instance, "Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatus pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti" ("plantain with pubescent ovate-lanceolate leaves, a cylindric spike and a terete scape"), which we know today as "Plantago media".
Such "polynomial names" may sometimes look like binomials, but are significantly different. For example, Gerard's herbal (as amended by Johnson) describes various kinds of spiderwort: "The first is called "Phalangium ramosum", Branched Spiderwort; the second, "Phalangium non ramosum", Unbranched Spiderwort. The other ... is aptly termed "Phalangium Ephemerum Virginianum", Soon-Fading Spiderwort of Virginia". The Latin phrases are short descriptions, rather than identifying labels.
The Bauhins, in particular Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624), took some important steps towards the binomial system, by pruning the Latin descriptions, in many cases to two words. The adoption by biologists of a system of strictly binomial nomenclature is due to Swedish botanist and physician Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). It was in Linnaeus's 1753 "Species Plantarum" that he began consistently using a one-word "trivial name" () after a generic name (genus name) in a system of binomial nomenclature. Trivial names had already appeared in his "Critica Botanica" (1737) and "Philosophia Botanica" (1751). This trivial name is what is now known as a specific epithet ("ICNafp") or specific name ("ICZN"). The Bauhins' genus names were retained in many of these, but the descriptive part was reduced to a single word.
Linnaeus's trivial names introduced an important new idea, namely that the function of a name could simply be to give a species a unique label. This meant that the name no longer need be descriptive; for example both parts could be derived from the names of people. Thus Gerard's "Phalangium ephemerum virginianum" became "Tradescantia virginiana", where the genus name honoured John Tradescant the Younger, an English botanist and gardener. A bird in the parrot family was named "Psittacus alexandri", meaning "Alexander's parrot", after Alexander the Great, whose armies introduced eastern parakeets to Greece. Linnaeus's trivial names were much easier to remember and use than the parallel polynomial names and eventually replaced them.
The value of the binomial nomenclature system derives primarily from its economy, its widespread use, and the uniqueness and stability of names it generally favors:
Binomial nomenclature for species has the effect that when a species is moved from one genus to another, sometimes the specific name or epithet must be changed as well. This may happen because the specific name is already used in the new genus, or to agree in gender with the new genus. Some biologists have argued for the combination of the genus name and specific epithet into a single unambiguous name, or for the use of uninomials (as used in nomenclature of ranks above species).
Because binomials are unique only within a kingdom, it is possible for two or more species to share the same binomial if they occur in different kingdoms. At least 1241 instances of such binomial duplication occur.
Nomenclature (including binomial nomenclature) is not the same as classification, although the two are related. Classification is the ordering of items into groups based on similarities or differences; in biological classification, species are one of the kinds of item to be classified. In principle, the names given to species could be completely independent of their classification. This is not the case for binomial names, since the first part of a binomial is the name of the genus into which the species is placed. Above the rank of genus, binomial nomenclature and classification are partly independent; for example, a species retains its binomial name if it is moved from one family to another or from one order to another, unless it better fits a different genus in the same or different family, or it is split from its old genus and placed in a newly created genus. The independence is only partial since the names of families and other higher taxa are usually based on genera.
Taxonomy includes both nomenclature and classification. Its first stages (sometimes called "alpha taxonomy") are concerned with finding, describing and naming species of living or fossil organisms. Binomial nomenclature is thus an important part of taxonomy as it is the system by which species are named. Taxonomists are also concerned with classification, including its principles, procedures and rules.
A complete binomial name is always treated grammatically as if it were a phrase in the Latin language (hence the common use of the term "Latin name" for a binomial name). However, the two parts of a binomial name can each be derived from a number of sources, of which Latin is only one. These include:
The first part of the name, which identifies the genus, must be a word which can be treated as a Latin singular noun in the nominative case. It must be unique within each kingdom, but can be repeated between kingdoms. Thus "Huia recurvata" is an extinct species of plant, found as fossils in Yunnan, China, whereas "Huia masonii" is a species of frog found in Java, Indonesia.
The second part of the name, which identifies the species within the genus, is also treated grammatically as a Latin word. It can have one of a number of forms:
Whereas the first part of a binomial name must be unique within a kingdom, the second part is quite commonly used in two or more genera (as is shown by examples of "hodgsonii" above). The full binomial name must be unique within a kingdom.
From the early 19th century onwards it became ever more apparent that a body of rules was necessary to govern scientific names. In the course of time these became nomenclature codes. The "International Code of Zoological Nomenclature" ("ICZN") governs the naming of animals, the "International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants" ("ICNafp") that of plants (including cyanobacteria), and the "International Code of Nomenclature of Bacteria" ("ICNB") that of bacteria (including Archaea). Virus names are governed by the "International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses" ("ICTV"), a taxonomic code, which determines taxa as well as names. These codes differ in certain ways, e.g.:
Unifying the different codes into a single code, the ""BioCode"", has been suggested, although implementation is not in sight. (There is also a code in development for a different system of classification which does not use ranks, but instead names clades. This is called the "PhyloCode".)
As noted above, there are some differences between the codes in the way in which binomials can be formed; for example the "ICZN" allows both parts to be the same, while the "ICNafp" does not. Another difference is in the way in which personal names are used in forming specific names or epithets. The "ICNafp" sets out precise rules by which a personal name is to be converted to a specific epithet. In particular, names ending in a consonant (but not "er") are treated as first being converted into Latin by adding "-ius" (for a man) or "-ia" (for a woman), and then being made genitive (i.e. meaning "of that person or persons"). This produces specific epithets like "lecardii" for Lecard (male), "wilsoniae" for Wilson (female), and "brauniarum" for the Braun sisters. By contrast the "ICZN" does not require the intermediate creation of a Latin form of a personal name, allowing the genitive ending to be added directly to the personal name. This explains the difference between the names of the plant "Magnolia hodgsonii" and the bird "Anthus hodgsoni". Furthermore, the "ICNafp" requires names not published in the form required by the code to be corrected to conform to it, whereas the "ICZN" is more protective of the form used by the original author.
By tradition, the binomial names of species are usually typeset in italics; for example, "Homo sapiens". Generally, the binomial should be printed in a font style different from that used in the normal text; for example, ""Several more "Homo sapiens" fossils were discovered"." When handwritten, a binomial name should be underlined; for example, Homo sapiens.
The first part of the binomial, the genus name, is always written with an initial capital letter. In current usage, the second part is never written with an initial capital. Older sources, particularly botanical works published before the 1950s, use a different convention. If the second part of the name is derived from a proper noun, e.g. the name of a person or place, a capital letter was used. Thus the modern form "Berberis darwinii" was written as "Berberis Darwinii". A capital was also used when the name is formed by two nouns in apposition, e.g. "Panthera Leo" or "Centaurea Cyanus".
When used with a common name, the scientific name often follows in parentheses, although this varies with publication. For example, "The house sparrow ("Passer domesticus") is decreasing in Europe."
The binomial name should generally be written in full. The exception to this is when several species from the same genus are being listed or discussed in the same paper or report, or the same species is mentioned repeatedly; in which case the genus is written in full when it is first used, but may then be abbreviated to an initial (and a period/full stop). For example, a list of members of the genus "Canis" might be written as ""Canis lupus", "C. aureus", "C. simensis"". In rare cases, this abbreviated form has spread to more general use; for example, the bacterium "Escherichia coli" is often referred to as just "E. coli", and "Tyrannosaurus rex" is perhaps even better known simply as "T. rex", these two both often appearing in this form in popular writing even where the full genus name has not already been given.
The abbreviation "sp." is used when the actual specific name cannot or need not be specified. The abbreviation "spp." (plural) indicates "several species". These abbreviations are not italicised (or underlined). For example: ""Canis" sp." means "an unspecified species of the genus "Canis"", while ""Canis" spp." means "two or more species of the genus "Canis"". (The abbreviations "sp." and "spp." can easily be confused with the abbreviations "ssp." (zoology) or "subsp." (botany), plurals "sspp." or "subspp.", referring to one or more subspecies. See trinomen (zoology) and infraspecific name.)
The abbreviation "cf." (i.e. "confer" in Latin) is used to compare individuals/taxa with known/described species. Conventions for use of the "cf." qualifier vary. In paleontology, it is typically used when the identification is not confirmed. For example, ""Corvus" cf. "nasicus"" was used to indicate "a fossil bird similar to the Cuban crow but not certainly identified as this species". In molecular systematics papers, "cf." may be used to indicate one or more undescribed species assumed related to a described species. For example, in a paper describing the phylogeny of small benthic freshwater fish called darters, five undescribed putative species (Ozark, Sheltowee, Wildcat, Ihiyo, and Mamequit darters), notable for brightly colored nuptial males with distinctive color patterns, were referred to as ""Etheostoma" cf. "spectabile"" because they had been viewed as related to, but distinct from, "Etheostoma spectabile" (orangethroat darter). This view was supported in varying degrees by DNA analysis. The somewhat informal use of taxa names with qualifying abbreviations is referred to as open nomenclature and it is not subject to strict usage codes.
In some contexts the dagger symbol ("†") may be used before or after the binomial name to indicate that the species is extinct.
In scholarly texts, at least the first or main use of the binomial name is usually followed by the "authority" – a way of designating the scientist(s) who first published the name. The authority is written in slightly different ways in zoology and botany. For names governed by the "ICZN" the surname is usually written in full together with the date (normally only the year) of publication. The "ICZN" recommends that the "original author and date of a name should be cited at least once in each work dealing with the taxon denoted by that name." For names governed by the "ICNafp" the name is generally reduced to a standard abbreviation and the date omitted. The International Plant Names Index maintains an approved list of botanical author abbreviations. Historically, abbreviations were used in zoology too.
When the original name is changed, e.g. the species is moved to a different genus, both codes use parentheses around the original authority; the "ICNafp" also requires the person who made the change to be given. In the "ICNafp", the original name is then called the basionym. Some examples:
Binomial nomenclature, as described here, is a system for naming species. Implicitly it includes a system for naming genera, since the first part of the name of the species is a genus name. In a classification system based on ranks there are also ways of naming ranks above the level of genus and below the level of species. Ranks above genus (e.g., family, order, class) receive one-part names, which are conventionally not written in italics. Thus the house sparrow, "Passer domesticus", belongs to the family Passeridae. Family names are normally based on genus names, although the endings used differ between zoology and botany.
Ranks below species receive three-part names, conventionally written in italics like the names of species. There are significant differences between the "ICZN" and the "ICNafp". In zoology, the only rank below species is subspecies and the name is written simply as three parts (a trinomen). Thus one of the subspecies of the olive-backed pipit is "Anthus hodgsoni berezowskii". In botany, there are many ranks below species and although the name itself is written in three parts, a "connecting term" (not part of the name) is needed to show the rank. Thus the American black elder is "Sambucus nigra" subsp. "canadensis"; the white-flowered form of the ivy-leaved cyclamen is "Cyclamen hederifolium" f. "albiflorum". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39736 |
Myles Coverdale
Myles Coverdale, first name also spelt Miles (1488 – 20 January 1569), was an English ecclesiastical reformer chiefly known as a Bible translator, preacher and, briefly, Bishop of Exeter (1551–1553). Regarding his probable birth county, Daniell cites John Bale, author of a sixteenth century scriptorium, giving it as Yorkshire. Having studied philosophy and theology in Cambridge, Coverdale became an Augustinian friar and went to the house of his order, also in Cambridge. In 1514 John Underwood, a suffragan bishop and archdeacon of Norfolk, ordained him priest in Norwich. He was at the house of the Augustinians when in about 1520, Robert Barnes returned from Louvain to become its prior. In 1535, Coverdale produced the first complete printed translation of the Bible into English. His theological development is a paradigm of the progress of the English Reformation from 1530 to 1552. By the time of his death, he had transitioned into an early Puritan, affiliated to Calvin, yet still advocating the teachings of Augustine.
Coverdale studied at Cambridge, becoming bachelor of canon law in 1513. He was ordained in Norwich in 1514 and entered the house of the Augustinian friars in Cambridge, where Robert Barnes had returned from Louvain to become its prior. This is thought to have been about 1520–1525.
According to Trueman, Barnes returned to Cambridge in the early to mid-1520s. At Louvain Barnes had studied under Erasmus and had developed humanist sympathies. In Cambridge, he read aloud to his students from St. Paul's epistles in translation and taught from classical authors. This undoubtedly influenced them towards Reform. In February 1526, Coverdale was part of a group of friars that travelled from Cambridge to London to present the defence of their superior, after Barnes was summoned before Cardinal Wolsey. Barnes had been arrested as a heretic after being accused of preaching Lutheran views in St Edward's Church, Cambridge on Christmas Eve. Coverdale is said to have acted as Barnes' secretary during the trial. By the standards of the time, Barnes received relatively lenient treatment, being made to do public penance by carrying a faggot to Paul's Cross. However on 10 June 1539, Parliament passed the Act of Six Articles, marking a turning point in the progress of radical protestantism.
Barnes was burned at the stake on 30 July 1540, at Smithfield, along with two other reformers. Also executed that day were three Roman Catholics, who were hanged, drawn and quartered.
Coverdale probably met Thomas Cromwell some time before 1527. A letter survives showing that later, in 1531, he wrote to Cromwell, requesting his guidance on his behaviour and preaching; also stating his need for books. By Lent 1528, he had left the Augustinians and, wearing simple garments, was preaching in Essex against transubstantiation, the use of idols, and Confession to a Priest. At that date, such views were very dangerous, for the future course of the religious revolution that began during the reign of Henry VIII was as yet very uncertain. Reforms, both of the forms proposed by Lollardy, and those preached by Luther, were being pursued by a vigorous campaign against heresy. Consequently, towards the end of 1528, Coverdale fled from England to the Continent.
From 1528 to 1535 Coverdale spent most of his time in continental Europe, mainly in Antwerp. Celia Hughes believes that upon arriving there, he rendered considerable assistance to William Tyndale in his revisions and partial completion of his English versions of the bible. In 1531, Tyndale spoke to Stephen Vaughan of his poverty and the hardships of exile, although he was relatively safe in the English House in Antwerp, where the inhabitants supposedly enjoyed diplomatic immunity. But in the spring of 1535 a "debauched and villainous young Englishman wanting money" named Henry Phillips insinuated himself into Tyndale's trust. Phillips had gambled away money from his father and had fled abroad. He promised the authorities of the Holy Roman Emperor that he would betray Tyndale for cash. On the morning of 21 May 1535, having arranged for the imperial officers to be ready, Phillips tricked Tyndale into leaving the English House, whereupon he was immediately seized. Tyndale languished in prison throughout the remainder of 1535 and despite attempts to have him released, organised by Cromwell through Thomas Poyntz at the English House, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake in October 1536. Meanwhile Coverdale continued his work alone to produce what became the first complete English Bible in print, namely the Coverdale Bible. Not yet proficient in Hebrew or Greek, he used Latin, English and German sources plus the translations of Tyndale himself.
In 1534 Canterbury Convocation petitioned Henry VIII that the whole Bible might be translated into English. Consequently, in 1535, Coverdale dedicated this complete Bible to the King. After much scholarly debate, it is now considered very probable that the place of printing of the Coverdale Bible was Antwerp. The printing was financed by Jacobus van Meteren. The printing of the first edition was finished on 4 October 1535. Coverdale based the text in part on Tyndale's translation of the New Testament (following Tyndale's November 1534 Antwerp edition) and of those books which were translated by Tyndale: the Pentateuch, and the book of Jonah. Other Old Testament Books he translated from the German of Luther and others. Based on Coverdale's translation of the Book of Psalms in his 1535 Bible, his later Psalter has remained in use in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer down to the present day, and is retained with various minor corrections in the 1926 Irish Book of Common Prayer, the 1928 US Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, and the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, etc.
In 1537 the Matthew Bible was printed, also in Antwerp, at the expense of Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch who issued it in London. It comprised Tyndale's Pentateuch; a version of Joshua 2 and Chronicles translated from the Hebrew, probably by Tyndale and not previously published; the remainder of the Old Testament from Coverdale; Tyndale's New Testament from 1535. It was dedicated to Henry VIII who licensed it for general reading. "Thomas Matthew", the supposed editor, was an alias for John Rogers.
The Matthew Bible was theologically controversial. Furthermore it bore evidence of its origin from Tyndale. If Henry VIII had become aware of this, the position of Cromwell and Cranmer would have been precarious. Consequently in 1538 Coverdale was sent to Paris by Cromwell to superintend the printing of the planned "Great Bible". François Regnault, who had supplied all English service books from 1519 to 1534, was selected as the printer because his typography was more sumptuous than that available in England. According to Kenyon, the assent of the French king was obtained. In May 1538 printing began. Nevertheless, a coalition of English bishops together with French theologians at the Sorbonne interfered with the operations and the Pope issued an edict that the English Bibles should be burned and the presses stopped. Some completed sheets were seized, but Coverdale rescued others, together with the type, transferring them to London. Ultimately, the work was completed in London by Grafton and Whitchurch.
Also in 1538, editions were published, both in Paris and in London, of a diglot (dual-language) New Testament. In this, Coverdale compared the Latin Vulgate text with his own English translation, in parallel columns on each page.
An injunction was issued by Cromwell in September 1538, strengthening an earlier one that had been issued but widely ignored in 1536. This second injunction firmly declared opposition to "pilgrimages, feigned relics, or images, or any such superstitions" whilst correspondingly placing heavy emphasis on scripture as "the very lively word of God". Coverdale’s Great Bible was now almost ready for circulation and the injunction called for the use of "one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume" in every English church. However at the time insufficient Great Bibles were actually printed in London so an edition of the Matthew Bible that had been re-edited by Coverdale started to be used. The laity were also intended to learn other core items of worship in English, including the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments.
In February 1539, Coverdale was in Newbury communicating with Thomas Cromwell. The printing of the London edition of the Great Bible was in progress. It was finally published in April of the same year. John Winchcombe, son of "Jack O'Newbury", a famous clothier, served as a confidential messenger to Coverdale who was performing an ecclesiastical visitation. Coverdale commended Winchcombe for "his true heart towards the King's Highness" and in 1540, Henry VIII granted to Winchcombe the manor of Bucklebury, a former demesne of Reading Abbey.
Also from Newbury, Coverdale reported to Cromwell via Winchcombe about breaches in the king's laws against papism, sought out churches in the district where the sanctity of Becket was still maintained, and arranged to burn primers and other church books which had not been altered to match the king's proceedings.
Sometime between 1535 and 1540 (the exact dates being uncertain), separate printings were made of Coverdale's translations into English of the psalms. These first versions of his psalm renditions were based mainly or completely upon his translation of the Book of Psalms in the 1535 Coverdale Bible.
In the final years of the decade, the conservative clerics, led by Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, were rapidly recovering their power and influence, opposing Cromwell's policies. On 28 June 1539 the Act of Six Articles became law, ending official tolerance of religious reform. Cromwell was executed on 28 July 1540. This was close to the date of the burning of Coverdale's Augustinian mentor Robert Barnes. Cromwell had protected Coverdale since at least 1527 and the latter was obliged to seek refuge again.
In April 1540 there was a second edition of the Great Bible, this time with a prologue by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. For this reason, the Great Bible is sometimes known as Cranmer’s Bible although he had no part in its translation. According to Kenyon, there were seven editions in total, up until the end of 1541, with the later versions including some revisions.
Before leaving England, Coverdale married Elizabeth Macheson (d. 1565), a Scotswoman of noble family who had come to England with her sister and brother-in-law as religious exiles from Scotland. They went first to Strasbourg, where they remained for about three years. He translated books from Latin and German and wrote an important defence of Barnes. This is regarded as his most significant reforming statement apart from his Bible prefaces. He received the degree of DTh from Tübingen and visited Denmark, where he wrote reforming tracts. In Strasbourg he befriended Conrad Hubert, Martin Bucer's secretary and a preacher at the church of St Thomas. Hubert was a native of Bergzabern (now Bad Bergzabern) in the duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken. In September 1543, on the recommendation of Hubert, Coverdale became assistant minister in Bergzabern as well as schoolmaster in the town's grammar school. During this period, he opposed Luther's attack on the Reformed view of the Lord's Supper. He also began to learn Hebrew, becoming competent in the language, as had been Tyndale.
Edward VI (1547–53) was only 9 years old when he succeeded his father on 28 January 1547. For most of his reign he was being educated, whilst his uncle, Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, acted as Lord Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King's Person. Immediately upon receiving these appointments he became Duke of Somerset.
Coverdale did not immediately return to England, although the prospects looked better for him. Religious policy followed that of the chief ministers and during Edward's reign this moved towards Protestantism. However in March 1548 he wrote to John Calvin that he was now returning, after eight years of exile for his faith. He was well received at the court of the new monarch. He became a royal chaplain in Windsor, and was appointed almoner to the queen dowager, Catherine Parr.
On 10 June 1549, the Prayer Book Rebellion broke out in Devon and Cornwall. There, Coverdale was directly involved in preaching and pacification attempts. Recognising the continuing unpopularity of the Book of Common Prayer in such areas, the Act of Uniformity had been introduced, making the Latin liturgical rites unlawful from Whitsunday 1549 onward. The west-country rebels complained that the new English liturgy was "but lyke a Christmas game" – men and women should form separate files to receive communion, reminding them of country dancing. The direct spark of rebellion occurred at Sampford Courtenay where, in attempting to enforce the orders, an altercation led to a death, with a proponent of the changes being run through with a pitchfork.
Unrest was said also to have been fuelled by several years of increasing social dissatisfaction. Lord John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford was sent by the Lord Protector to put down the rapidly spreading rebellion and Coverdale accompanied him as chaplain. The Battle of Sampford Courtenay effectively ended the rebellion by the end of August. However Coverdale remained in Devon for several more months, helping to pacify the people and doing the work that properly belonged to the Bishop of Exeter. The incumbent, John Vesey, was eighty-six, and had not stirred from Sutton Coldfield in Warwickshire, his birthplace and long-term residence.
Coverdale spent Easter 1551 in Oxford with the Florentine-born Augustinian reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli. At that time, Martyr was Regius Professor of divinity, belonging to Magdalen College. He had been assisting Cranmer with a revision of the Anglican prayer book. Coverdale attended Martyr's lectures on the Epistle to the Romans and Martyr called him a "a good man who in former years acted as parish minister in Germany" who now "labours greatly in Devon in preaching and explaining the Scriptures". He predicted that Coverdale would become Bishop of Exeter and this took place on 14 August 1551 when John Vesey was ejected from his see.
Edward VI died of tuberculosis on 6 July 1553. Shortly before, he had attempted to deter a Roman Catholic revival by switching the succession from Mary daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon to Lady Jane Grey. However his settlement of the succession lasted barely a fortnight. After a brief struggle between the opposing factions, Mary was proclaimed Queen of England on 19 July. The renewed danger to reformers such as Coverdale was obvious. He was summoned almost immediately to appear before the Privy Council and on 1 September he was placed under house arrest in Exeter. On 18 September, he was ejected from his see and Vesey, now ninety and still in Warwickshire, was reinstated. Following an intervention by his brother-in-law, chaplain to the king of Denmark, Coverdale and his wife were permitted to leave for that country. They then went on to Wesel, and finally back to Bergzabern.
On 24 October 1558, Coverdale received leave to settle in Geneva. Commenting on his contribution to the Geneva Bible (the exact details of which are scarce), Daniell says: ″Although his Hebrew, and ... now his Greek, could not match the local scholars' skills, Coverdale would no doubt have special things to offer as one who nearly two dozen years before had first translated the whole Bible ... the only Englishman to have done so, and then revised it under royal authority for the successive editions of the Great Bible.″ On 29 November 1558 Coverdale stood godfather to John Knox's son. On 16 December he became an elder of the English church in Geneva, and participated in a reconciling letter from its leaders to other English churches on the continent.
In August 1559, Coverdale and his family returned to London, where they lodged with the Duchess of Suffolk, whom they had known at Wesel. He was appointed as preacher and tutor to her children. He wrote to William Cole in Geneva, saying that the duchess had "like us, the greatest abhorrence of the ceremonies" (meaning the increasing reversion to the use of vestments).
His stance on vestments was one of the reasons why he was not reinstated to his bishopric. However Hughes believes that it is likely that in his own opinion, he felt too elderly to undertake the responsibility properly. From 1564 to 1566, he was rector of St Magnus the Martyr in the City of London near London Bridge. Coverdale’s first wife, Elizabeth, died early in September 1565, and was buried in St Michael Paternoster Royal, City of London, on the 8th. On 7 April 1566 he married his second wife, Katherine, at the same church. After the summer of 1566, when he had resigned his last living at St Magnus, Coverdale became popular in early Puritan circles, because of his quiet but firm stance against ceremonies and elaborate clerical dress. Due to his opposition to official church practices, the wandering priest died in poverty on 26 May 1569, in London and was buried at St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange with a multitude of mourners present. When that church was demolished in 1840 to make way for the new Royal Exchange, his remains were moved to St Magnus, where there is a tablet in his memory on the east wall, close to the altar. T. S. Eliot described these church walls in part 3 of The Waste Land as having the "inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold." Coverdale left no will and on 23 January 1569 letters of administration were granted to his second wife, Katherine. Daniell says that it appears that he has no living descendants.
Coverdale's legacy has been far-reaching, especially that of his first complete English Bible of 1535.
For the 400th anniversary of the Authorised King James Bible, in 2011, the Church of England issued a resolution, which was endorsed by the General Synod. Starting with the Coverdale Bible, the text included a brief description of the continuing significance of the Authorised King James Bible (1611) and its immediate antecedents:
As indicated above, Coverdale was involved with the first four of the above. He was partially responsible for Matthew's Bible. In addition to those mentioned above, he produced a diglot New Testament in 1538. He was extensively involved with editing and producing the Great Bible. He was also part of the group of "Geneva Exiles" who produced the Geneva Bible – the edition preferred, some ninety-five years later, by Oliver Cromwell's army and his parliamentarians.
Coverdale's translation of the Psalms (based on Luther's version and the Latin Vulgate) have a particular importance in the history of the English Bible. His translation is still used in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It is the most familiar translation for many in the Anglican Communion worldwide, particularly those in collegiate and cathedral churches. Many musical settings of the psalms also make use of the Coverdale translation. For example Coverdale's renderings are used in Handel's Messiah, based on the Prayer Book Psalter rather than the King James Bible version.
His translation of the Roman Canon is still used in some Anglican and Anglican Use Roman Catholic churches.
Less well known is Coverdale’s early involvement in hymn books. Celia Hughes believes that in the days of renewed biblical suppression after 1543, the most important work of Coverdale, apart from his principal Bible translation, was his "“Ghostly Psalms and Spiritual Songs”" . This she calls "“the first English hymn book”" and "“the only one until the publication of the collection by Sternhold and Hopkins.”" (This was more than twenty years later). The undated print probably was done parallel to his Bible translation in 1535. Coverdale’s first three hymns are based on the Latin Veni Creator Spiritus, preceding its other English translations such as that of 1625 by Bishop J. Cosin by more than ninety years. However, the majority of the hymns are based on the Protestant hymnbooks from Germany, particularly Johann Walter's settings of Martin Luther's hymns such as "Ein feste Burg". Coverdale intended his "“godly songs” for “our young men ... and our women spinning at the wheels.”" Thus Hughes argues that he realised that for the less-privileged, his scriptural teaching could be learnt and retained more readily by song rather than by direct access to the Bible, which could often be prohibited. However, his hymnbook also ended up on the list of forbidden books in 1539 and only one complete copy of it survives which is today held in The Queen's College, Oxford. Two fragments survived as binding material and are now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and in the Beinecke Library, Yale.
Coverdale is honoured, together with William Tyndale, with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on 6 October. His extensive contacts with English and Continental Reformers was integral to the development of successive versions of the bible in the English language. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39737 |
Confocal
In geometry, confocal means having the same foci: confocal conic sections. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39739 |
Szczerbiec
Szczerbiec () is the coronation sword that was used in crowning ceremonies of most Polish monarchs from 1320 to 1764. It is currently on display in the treasure vault of the Royal Wawel Castle in Kraków as the only preserved piece of the medieval Polish Crown Jewels. The sword is characterized by a hilt decorated with magical formulas, Christian symbols and floral patterns, as well as a narrow slit in the blade which holds a small shield with the coat of arms of Poland. Its name, derived from the Polish word "szczerba," meaning a gap, notch or chip, is sometimes rendered into English as "the Notched Sword" or "the Jagged Sword", although its blade has straight and smooth edges.
A legend links Szczerbiec with King Bolesław I the Brave who was said to have chipped the sword by hitting it against the Golden Gate, Kiev (now in Ukraine) during his intervention in the Kievan succession crisis in 1018. However, the Golden Gate was only constructed in 1037 and the sword is actually dated to the late 12th or 13th century. It was first used as a coronation sword by Władysław I the Elbow-high in 1320. Looted by Prussian troops in 1795, it changed hands several times during the 19th century until it was purchased in 1884 for the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The Soviet Union returned it to Poland in 1928. During World War II, Szczerbiec was evacuated to Canada and did not return to Kraków until 1959. In the 20th century, an image of the sword was adopted as a symbol by Polish nationalist and far-right movements.
Szczerbiec is a ceremonial sword bearing rich Gothic ornamentation, dated to the mid-13th century. It is classified as a type XII sword with a type pommel and a type 6 crossguard according to the Oakeshott typology, although the blade may have changed its shape due to centuries of corrosion and intensive cleaning before every coronation.
The hilt consists of a round pommel, a flat grip and an arched crossguard. The grip is long, thick, and from wide. It is rectangular in cross-section and its hard edges make it difficult to handle and impractical for fighting, which is indicative of the sword's purely ceremonial usage. The pommel is in diameter and thick, with a chamfered outer ring that is wide. The crossguard forms an arch that is wide in the middle and widens up to at both ends. It is thick near the grip and measures in length along its upper edge.
The pommel and the crossguard are made of silver. The core of the grip is a brass chest encasing the tang of the blade. It was probably made in the 19th century to replace an original organic core, which had decomposed. At the same time the tang was riveted to the top of the pommel. The head of the rivet, which is in diameter, rests atop a rectangular washer measuring .
All parts of the hilt are covered with golden plates, which are engraved with sharp or rounded styli and decorated with niello, or black metallic inlay that contrasts against the golden background. Each plate is thick and made of about 18-carat gold. The niello designs include inscriptions written in late Romanesque majuscule (with some uncial additions), Christian symbols, and floral patterns. The floral ornaments are in negative, that is, golden against a black, nielloed background.
On the obverse side of the hilt, the pommel bears a large stylized letter T on top of a letter C or G (the latter could be just a decorative element of the letter T) between the Greek letters Α and ω (alpha and omega) surmounted with little crosses. Below the letter T, there is another cross placed within a cloud or flower with twelve petals. On the chamfered edge around this design runs a circular Latin inscription in two rings which reads: "Rec figura talet ad amorem regum / et principum iras iudicum" ("This sign rouses the love of kings and princes, the wrath of judges"). The grip bears the symbols of two of the Four Evangelists: the lion of Saint Mark and the ox of Saint Luke, as well as an "Agnus Dei" (Lamb of God). The crossguard bears the following Latin inscription: "Quicumque hec / nomina Deii secum tu/lerit nullum periculum / ei omnino nocebit" ("Whoever will carry these names of God with him, no danger will harm him").
The reverse side of the pommel is decorated with a vine bush surrounded by a wreath of vine leaves. On the reverse of the grip, there are the eagle of Saint John and the angel of Saint Matthew, and another "Agnus Dei". The crossguard bears, above another pattern of vine leaves, an inscription in corrupted Hebrew in Latin script: "Con citomon Eeve Sedalai Ebrebel" ("Fervent faith incite the names of God: Sedalai and Ebrehel"). On the opposite ends of the crossguard, there are again the symbols of Saints John and Matthew.
The circumference of the pommel is decorated with a rhombic pattern, while the upper side of the crossguard – with a similar triangular pattern. The narrow sides of the grip used to be embellished with inscribed silver plates, which, however, were lost in the 19th century. These lost inscriptions are partly known from graphical documentation made by King Stanislaus Augustus's court painter, Johann Christoph Werner, in 1764 and by Jacek Przybylski in 1792. One of the plates had already been broken by that time with only part of the inscription preserved: "Liste est glaud... h Bolezlai Duc..." ("This is a sword of... Duke Boleslaus..."); the inscription on the other plate continued: "Cum quo ei D[omi]n[us] SOS "["Salvator Omnipotens Salvator"]" auxiletur ad[ver]sus partes amen" ("With whom is the Omnipotent Lord and Savior, to help him against his enemies. Amen"). The missing part of the first inscription is only known from an old replica of Szczerbiec which once belonged to the Radziwiłł family "(see Historical replicas below)". The full inscription read: "Iste est gladius Principis et haeredis Boleslai Ducis Poloniae et Masoviae, Lanciciae" ("This is a sword of Hereditary Prince Boleslaus, Duke of Poland, Masovia, and Łęczyca"). The identity of this Duke Boleslaus is uncertain.
Use-wear analysis indicates that the plates on the pommel and the crossguard were made by the same artist, while the plates on the grip were added later. The latter – obverse and reverse – were probably decorated in the same workshop and using the same tools, but by two different craftsmen. Moreover, a side plate with a rhombic pattern was added in the 19th century to replace one of the lost inscribed side plates.
Preserved images of Szczerbiec from various points in time indicate that the decorative plates were several times dismounted and placed again on the hilt in variable configurations. The current composition, with the symbols of the Evangelists duplicated on each side of the hilt, matches that known from the earliest preserved depiction drafted by Johann Christoph Werner in 1794. It is possible, though, that the original placement of the golden plates was different, with the symbols of Saints John and Matthew on the obverse of the grip, so that each side of the hilt displayed the symbols of all four of the Evangelists.
The blade is long, up to wide (about 5 cm from the crossguard) and thick. The fuller is about long and, on average, wide. Metallographic analysis has shown that the blade was forged from unevenly carburized semi-hard bloomery steel. Apart from iron, the material contains, by weight, 0.6 percent of carbon, 0.153 percent of silicon, 0.092 percent of phosphorus, and other elements. Numerous slag inclusions found in the steel are typical for medieval iron smelting technology. Part of the blade was hardened by quenching. Unlike the hilt, the blade would have been fully functional as a weapon of war. The surface of the blade is covered with deep scratches along its length, a result of intensive cleaning from rust before every coronation, probably with sand or brick powder. Inactive spots of corrosion may be also found on the entire surface.
Just below the hilt, there are three perforations in the fuller of the blade. The largest is a rectangular slot that is long and wide. This opening, known in Polish as "szczyrba" or "szczerba", was originally caused by rust and, in the 19th century, polished into a regular shape. A small heraldic shield colored with oil paint is fastened to the slot. It is roughly triangular in shape, with the sides measuring from . The shield, bearing the White Eagle of Poland, was originally attached to the scabbard, or sheath. The Gothic scabbard, with a golden or silver locket and chape, was probably created in 1320 and lost between 1819 and 1874. The shield is the only preserved element of the sheath. It was tilted to the left – from the onlooker's point of view – while it was fastened to the scabbard's locket, but today it is aligned with the blade. The eagle on the red field of the shield is white, with a golden crown, bands across the wings, ring on the tail, and talons. The two other perforations are round holes, apart. The upper one, just below the slot, is in diameter, while the other measures only . They were probably punched in the 19th century to fasten the heraldic shield to the blade.
Szczerbiec is owned by the Wawel Royal Castle National Art Collection (inventory number 137) in Kraków, the former capital city of Poland. As the only preserved of Polish medieval coronation insignia, it is a prominent part of the museum's Treasury and Armory permanent exhibition. The sword is suspended horizontally inside a glass case in the middle of the Jagiełło and Hedwig Vault located on the ground floor in the northeastern corner of the Wawel Castle.
Historical accounts related to the early history of the Polish coronation sword are scant and often mixed with legend. The earliest known use of the name "Szczerbiec" appeared in the "Chronicle of Greater Poland" at the turn of the 14th century. According to this source, the sword was given to King Boleslaus the Brave (reigned 992–1025) by an angel; Polish kings were supposed to always carry it in battle to triumph over their enemies. During Boleslaus's invasion of Kievan Rus', he hit it against the Golden Gate of Kiev while capturing the city. It was the notch that appeared on the edge of the blade which gave the sword its name. This account, written three centuries after the events it describes, is implausible not only because of the customary reference to the sword's supernatural origin (compare Excalibur), but also because Boleslaus's intervention in the Kievan succession crisis took place in 1018, or about 19 years before the actual construction of the Golden Gate in 1037.
It is plausible, though, that Boleslaus did chip his sword by striking it against an earlier gate in Kiev. His great-grandson, Boleslaus the Bold (), hit the Golden Gate with a sword in 1069, which would indicate that it was a customary gesture of gaining control over a city. It is also possible that this sword was preserved as a souvenir of past victories venerated by Boleslaus the Brave's successors. According to Wincenty Kadłubek's "Chronicle", Boleslaus Wrymouth () had a favorite sword he called "Żuraw" or "Grus" ("Crane"). A scribe who copied the chronicle in 1450 added the word "Szczurbycz" above the word "Żuraw", but whether these two swords were one and the same is uncertain.
According to the "Chronicle of Greater Poland", the sword was kept in the treasury of the Wawel Cathedral. The ultimate fate of the original Szczerbiec is unknown. It may have been taken to Prague, together with other royal insignia, by King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia after his coronation as king of Poland in Gniezno in 1300. What happened with these insignia thereafter remains a mystery. Although Boleslaus the Brave's notched sword has not been preserved and even its very existence is doubtful, its legend had a great impact on Polish historical memory and the treatment of its successor, the modern Szczerbiec.
The sword currently known as Szczerbiec was forged and decorated in a style characteristic of the late 12th and 13th centuries, so it could not have belonged to any of the three great Boleslauses of the 11th and early 12th centuries. Additionally, it is a purely ceremonial sword which, unlike the original Szczerbiec, was never used in combat. It was originally used as a sword of justice ("gladius iustitiae"), or insignia of the sovereign's judicial power, by one of the many local dukes during Poland's Age of Fragmentation. A silver plate, now lost, on the sword's grip bore an inscription which indicated a duke by the name Boleslaus as its original owner. An inscription on the Radziwiłłs' replica of Szczerbiec, now also lost, could provide an additional hint as to the duke's identity: "Boleslaus, Duke of Poland, Masovia, and Łęczyca" – except that no duke of this name and titles ever existed. Historians have variously identified the duke in question as Boleslaus the Curly (), Boleslaus the Chaste (), Boleslaus I of Masovia () or Boleslaus the Pious of Greater Poland ().
As a coronation sword, Szczerbiec was first specifically mentioned by Jan Długosz in his account of the crowning of King Casimir IV (), but it was probably first used in a coronation ceremony by King Vladislaus the Elbow-High () in 1320, by which time he had reunited most of the core territories of Poland. If Szczerbiec had previously belonged to his uncle, Boleslaus I of Masovia, or his father-in-law, Boleslaus the Pious, then he could have inherited it. If it had belonged to any of the two Boleslauses who had ruled from Kraków as high dukes of all Poland, then Vladislaus could have simply found it in the Wawel Cathedral. Thereafter, Szczerbiec became an integral part of the Polish Crown Jewels, shared their fate, and was the principal ceremonial sword used in coronations of all Polish kings until 1764, except Vladislaus II Jogaila (1386), Stephen Báthory (1576), Stanislaus I Leszczyński (1705), and Augustus III Wettin (1734).
Szczerbiec, together with other crown jewels, was removed from the Wawel Hill on several occasions during that period. After his Polish coronation in 1370, King Louis I of Hungary took the crown jewels with him to Buda; his successor on the Hungarian throne, Emperor Sigismund, rendered them to Poland in 1412. On two occasions, in mid-17th and early 18th centuries, they were evacuated across Poland's southern border to protect them from invading Swedish armies. In 1733, during the War of the Polish Succession, supporters of King Stanislaus I concealed the jewels in a Warsaw church for three years to prevent Augustus III from using them in his coronation. In 1764, they were sent to Warsaw again, to be used in a coronation for the last time – that of Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski. They were returned to Kraków afterwards.
During a typical Polish coronation ceremony in the times of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the king-elect received Szczerbiec after his anointment and before being crowned and enthroned. The primate of Poland, that is the archbishop of Gniezno, picked up the unsheathed sword from the altar and handed it to the kneeling king. At the same time, he recited a formula which asked the monarch to use the sword to rule justly, defend the Church, fight evil, protect widows and orphans, and to "rebuild what is damaged, maintain what is rebuilt, avenge what is unjust, reinforce what is well managed," etc. Then, the king handed the sword to the Crown sword-bearer ("miecznik koronny"), who slid it into the scabbard and passed on to the primate. The primate, aided by the Crown and Lithuanian sword-bearers, fastened the scabbard to the king's belt. The king stood up and, facing onlookers, withdrew Szczerbiec, made three times the sign of the cross with it, and wiped it against his left arm before replacing it in the scabbard. The king's sword-wielding abilities were closely watched by his new subjects during this part of the ritual. When Augustus III betrayed his poor fencing skills at his coronation, nobles joked that they were going to have "a peaceful lord". After Szczerbiec, a bishop handed the sovereign the Grunwald Swords symbolizing the monarch's reign over the two constituent nations of the Commonwealth.
Throughout the period from Casimir the Great () to Stanislaus Augustus, Polish crown jewels were commonly believed to date back to the times of Boleslaus the Brave. This conviction helped maintain a sense of continuity of Polish statehood and provide legitimacy for the nation's kings, implicitly making each Polish monarch a successor of the ancient and glorious legacy of the first king of the House of Piast. Accordingly, the coronation sword took over the name and the legend of the original Szczerbiec. The corrosion-induced slit in the blade became associated with the fabled "szczerba", or notch that Boleslaus had purportedly made on his sword in Kiev. The power of tradition was so strong that when Stanislaus Augustus's court painter, Marcello Bacciarelli, who had made detailed studies of Polish crown jewels, painted an imaginary portrait of Boleslaus the Brave, he chose to depict Szczerbiec so that its appearance agreed with legend rather than reality. The images of the coronation crown and sword are overall meticulously accurate, but Bacciarelli's Szczerbiec lacks the slit and has a chipped edge instead.
In 1794, during the failed Kościuszko Uprising which led to the final partition of Poland a year later, Prussian troops captured Kraków. In the following year, on King Frederick William II's orders, the treasure vault of the Wawel Castle was looted and the crown jewels taken to Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland), then to Berlin, and finally to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia). Between 1809 and 1811 most of the jewels were melted down, but some, including Szczerbiec, were put up for sale. The coronation sword was acquired by the future Russian minister of justice, Prince Dmitry Lobanov-Rostovsky, who probably hoped to resell it to one of Polish aristocrats. In 1819, he approached General Wincenty Krasiński, speaker of the Sejm (parliament) of the "Congress" Kingdom of Poland. The prince did not disclose the actual source of the sword and claimed to have bought it in Moscow from an Armenian merchant who had found the weapon somewhere between Belgrade and Rusçuk (now Ruse in Bulgaria) during the recent Russo-Turkish War. Krasiński, who was a known antique weapon collector, suspected it could be Szczerbiec, but asked Prof. Sebastiano Ciampi, a historian of the Warsaw University, for opinion. Ciampi examined the lithography Krasiński had had made of the sword, but was unsure whether it was the actual Szczerbiec. As a consequence, Krasiński declined Lobanov-Rostovsky's offer.
Lobanov-Rostovsky ultimately sold Szczerbiec to Prince Anatole Demidov who kept it together with the rest of the Demidov collection in his Villa San Donato near Florence. In 1870, the sword was bought for 20,000 French francs by Alexander Basilevsky, Russian ambassador to France and great art collector. In 1878, he displayed Szczerbiec at the World's Fair in Paris. By that time, the scabbard had been lost and the sword itself was presented as of Teutonic origin. It was seen by several Polish visitors who speculated whether it could be the Polish coronation sword. In 1884, the entire Basilevsky collection was purchased by Emperor Alexander III of Russia for the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. Both Polish and other experts at the time expressed doubts as to the authenticity of Szczerbiec held in Russia's largest museum "(see Historical replicas below)". An international museum congress held in Saint Petersburg in 1913 pronounced the sword a 17th-century replica.
In 1917, as a result of the October Revolution, Russia became a communist state. In the aftermath of World War I, Poland reemerged as an independent country in the following year. From 1919 to 1921, the two states fought the Polish–Soviet War which was concluded with the Peace of Riga. Article 11 of the peace treaty required that the Soviet side return all culturally significant collections and items that had been removed from Poland since the First Partition in 1772. A special bilateral committee was set up to carry out the restitution of cultural goods. In 1928, the committee's efforts resulted in the return to Poland of, among other national treasures, Szczerbiec, which, after 133 years, was deposited back in the Wawel Castle.
On 3 September 1939, two days after Germany invaded Poland triggering the Second World War, began the evacuation of the most precious national treasures, including Szczerbiec, from the Wawel Castle. The cargo was transported on barges, wagons, buses and trucks to Romania. From there, it was shipped by sea to France and later to Britain. On the way from Bordeaux to Falmouth, the ship carrying Polish national treasures came under fire from the Luftwaffe. Karol Estreicher, who oversaw the evacuation, decided then to remove Szczerbiec from a chest and sandwich it between two wooden planks, and to attach to them an explanatory message in a bottle – so that in the event that the ship was sunk, at least the coronation sword could be salvaged. When the German bombing of Britain began in July 1940, the valuables were transported aboard the Polish ocean liner MS "Batory" to Canada and finally deposited at the Polish consulate and then other locations in Ottawa. After the war, one of the custodians of the national treasures, who remained loyal to the London-based Polish government-in-exile, was reluctant to return them to Poland, which had fallen under communist rule and Soviet influence. After lengthy negotiations, the first batch of the most important objects, including Szczerbiec, was ultimately returned in 1959; the rest followed in 1961. Since then, the Polish coronation sword has been on permanent display in the treasure vault of the Wawel Castle.
A treasury inventory of the Radziwiłł family's Nieśwież Castle (now Nesvizh in Belarus) made in 1740 includes a detailed description of a sword decorated with symbols of the Evangelists and inscriptions identical to those on Szczerbiec. According to the inventory, it was a gift from Crown Prince Jakub Sobieski to Prince Michał Radziwiłł, but the original source of the supposed replica was not given. An inventory made in 1738 of the treasure vault of the Sobieski family's Żółkiew Castle (now Zhovkva in Ukraine) mentions "an estoc ("koncerz") covered with golden plates bearing images of the Four Evangelists; Skanderbek's." Based on this record, historian Aleksander Czołowski hypothesized that a replica of Szczerbiec was forged as early as 1457 and awarded to George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, the national leader of Albania, in recognition of his victory over the Ottoman forces (see Battle of Ujëbardha). After King John III Sobieski defeated the Ottomans in the Battle of Vienna in 1683, Albanians presumably returned the sword to him. His son, Jakub, possibly passed it on to Michał Radziwiłł as a present.
There are doubts, however, whether the swords known to have been at Żółkiew in 1738 and at Nieśwież two years later, were in fact the same sword. The Radziwiłłs' castle was plundered by the Russian army in 1812 and the subsequent fate of their replica of Szczerbiec is unknown. This fact cast doubts over the authenticity of Szczerbiec held in the Hermitage. Some experts suspected that the sword possessed by the Russian imperial museum was in fact the Nieśwież replica, not part of the original royal insignia.
Another historically notable replica of Szczerbiec was produced probably in Dresden, Saxony, at the time when the original was in Prussian hands. It is modest and inexact; the handle is carved in bovine bone and the niello is imitated with black paint. Designs on the handle are patterned on those of the genuine Szczerbiec, except that the crosses and letters on the pommel were replaced with the coat of arms of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The blade was initially shorter than that of the original, actually typical for a stiletto. It was purchased in Dresden by art historian Edward Rastawiecki, who in 1869 donated it to the archeological collection of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków. The university lost it during the German occupation in World War II. After the war, the replica found itself in the hands of Tadeusz Janowski who smuggled it to the United States in 1947. At around that time, the short stiletto blade was replaced with a long blade of a 16th-century German sword. To imitate Szczerbiec, a slit was cut in the blade and small heraldic shields were attached to it on both sides. During the communist rule in Poland, the Polish American community of Chicago treated the replica as a symbol of Poland's independence. In 1968, it was demonstrated to U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy while he was meeting with Polish Americans during his presidential campaign. Janowski returned the sword to the Jagiellonian University in 2003.
In the interwar period, a simplified image of Szczerbiec wrapped three times in a white-and-red ribbon was adopted as a symbol of Polish nationalist organizations led by Roman Dmowski – the Camp of Great Poland ("Obóz Wielkiej Polski"), the National Party ("Stronnictwo Narodowe"), and the All-Polish Youth ("Młodzież Wszechpolska"). Their members wore it as a badge called "", or "Little Sword of [Boleslaus] the Brave". The symbol was also sewn onto the left sleeve of the sand shirt which was part of the Camp of Great Poland uniform. Among the politicians who wore the badge before World War II were Roman Dmowski, Władysław Grabski, Wojciech Korfanty, Roman Rybarski, and Wojciech Jaruzelski. During World War II, the badge was used by right-wing anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet military resistance groups, the National Armed Forces ("Narodowe Siły Zbrojne") and the National Military Organization ("Narodowa Organizacja Wojskowa"). After the fall of communism in Poland, the "Mieczyk Chrobrego" symbol was readopted by new or reactivated nationalist and far-right organizations, including League of Polish Families ("Liga Polskich Rodzin"), All-Polish Youth and the Camp of Great Poland. Additionally, "Szczerbiec" is the title of a periodical published since 1991 by a minor radical nationalist party, the National Revival of Poland ("Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski").
In 2005, the Polish Football Association, in an attempt to fight racism among Polish football fans, prepared a blacklist of most common racist and fascist symbols to be banned from Polish football stadiums. The catalog, co-authored by independent anti-fascist organization Never Again ("Nigdy Więcej"), listed the "Mieczyk Chrobrego" as one of the extreme right symbols that are often displayed at the Polish stadiums. The catalog listed other racist and fascist symbols like the Nazi swastika, the Celtic cross, and the Confederate Flag. After a protest by MEP Sylwester Chruszcz of the League of Polish Families, additional consultations were held with historians, academic researchers and other experts and as a result the symbol is still listed in the catalog of extreme-right symbols banned at Polish football stadiums. It was also banned by UEFA during Euro 2008 and 2012.
The symbolic use of Szczerbiec became a bone of contention again in 2009. After a monument to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army ("Ukrayins'ka Povstans'ka Armiya") on the Chryszczata Mountain in southeastern Poland was vandalized, authorities of the Ukrainian city of Lviv demanded the removal of an image of Szczerbiec from the local Polish military cemetery. The Ukrainians, recalling the legendary use of the original sword in a Polish invasion of Kiev, argued it was a Polish nationalist, militaristic and anti-Ukrainian symbol. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39740 |
Stomach
The stomach is a muscular, hollow organ in the gastrointestinal tract of humans and many other animals, including several invertebrates. The stomach has a dilated structure and functions as a vital digestive organ. In the digestive system the stomach is involved in the second phase of digestion, following chewing. It performs a chemical breakdown due to enzymes and hydrochloric acid.
In humans and many other animals, the stomach is located between the oesophagus and the small intestine. It secretes digestive enzymes and gastric acid to aid in food digestion. The pyloric sphincter controls the passage of partially digested food (chyme) from the stomach into the duodenum where peristalsis takes over to move this through the rest of the intestines.
In humans, the stomach lies between the oesophagus and the duodenum (the first part of the small intestine). It is in the left upper part of the abdominal cavity. The top of the stomach lies against the diaphragm. Lying behind the stomach is the pancreas. A large double fold of visceral peritoneum called the greater omentum hangs down from the greater curvature of the stomach. Two sphincters keep the contents of the stomach contained; the lower oesophageal sphincter (found in the cardiac region), at the junction of the oesophagus and stomach, and the pyloric sphincter at the junction of the stomach with the duodenum.
The stomach is surrounded by parasympathetic (stimulant) and sympathetic (inhibitor) plexuses (networks of blood vessels and nerves in the anterior gastric, posterior, superior and inferior, celiac and myenteric), which regulate both the secretory activity of the stomach and the motor (motion) activity of its muscles.
Because it is a organ, it normally expands to hold about one litre of food. The stomach of a newborn human baby will only be able to retain about 30 millilitres. The maximum stomach volume in adults is between 2 and 4 litres.
In classical anatomy the human stomach is divided into four sections, beginning at the cardia.
The cardia is defined as the region following the "z-line" of the gastroesophageal junction, the point at which the epithelium changes from stratified squamous to columnar. Near the cardia is the lower oesophageal sphincter. Recent research has shown that the cardia is not an anatomically distinct region of the stomach but a region of the oesophageal lining damaged by reflux.
The stomach bed refers to the structures upon which the stomach rests in mammals. These include the pancreas, spleen, left kidney, left suprarenal gland, transverse colon and its mesocolon, and the diaphragm. The term was introduced around 1896 by Philip Polson of the Catholic University School of Medicine, Dublin. However this was brought into disrepute by surgeon anatomist J Massey.
The lesser curvature of the human stomach is supplied by the right gastric artery inferiorly and the left gastric artery superiorly, which also supplies the cardiac region. The greater curvature is supplied by the right gastroepiploic artery inferiorly and the left gastroepiploic artery superiorly. The fundus of the stomach, and also the upper portion of the greater curvature, is supplied by the short gastric arteries, which arise from the splenic artery.
Like the other parts of the gastrointestinal tract, the human stomach walls consist of a mucosa, submucosa, muscularis externa, subserosa and serosa.
The inner part of the lining of the stomach, the gastric mucosa, consists of an outer layer of column-shaped cells, a lamina propria, and a thin layer of smooth muscle called the muscularis mucosa. Beneath the mucosa lies the submucosa, consisting of fibrous connective tissue. Meissner's plexus is in this layer.
Outside of the submucosa lies another muscular layer, the muscularis externa. It consists of three layers of muscular fibres, with fibres lying at angles to each other. These are the inner oblique, inner circular, and outer longitudinal layers. The presence of the inner oblique layer is distinct from other parts of the gastrointestinal tract, which do not possess this layer.
The "outer longitudinal layer" is responsible for moving the bolus towards the pylorus of the stomach through muscular shortening.
To the outside of the muscularis externa lies a serosa, consisting of layers of connective tissue continuous with the peritoneum.
The mucosa lining the stomach is lined with a number of these pits, which receive gastric juice, secreted by between 2 and 7 gastric glands. Gastric juice is an acidic fluid containing hydrochloric acid and the digestive enzyme pepsin. The glands contains a number of cells, with the function of the glands changing depending on their position within the stomach.
Within the body and fundus of the stomach lie the "fundic glands". In general, these glands are lined by column-shaped cells that secrete a protective layer of mucus and bicarbonate. Additional cells present include parietal cells that secrete hydrochloric acid and intrinsic factor, chief cells that secrete pepsin, and neuroendocrine cells that secrete serotonin.
Glands differ where the stomach meets the oesophagus, and near the pylorus. Near the junction between the stomach and the oesophagus lie "cardiac glands", which primarily secrete mucus. They are fewer in number than the other gastric glands and are more shallowly positioned in the mucosa. There are two kinds - either simple tubular with short ducts or compound racemose resembling the duodenal Brunner's glands. Near the pylorus lie "pyloric glands" and are located in the antrum of the pylorus. They secrete mucus, as well as gastrin produced by their G cells.
About 20,000 protein coding genes are expressed in human cells and nearly 70% of these genes are expressed in the normal stomach. Just over 150 of these genes are more specifically expressed in the stomach compared to other organs, with only some 20 genes being highly specific. The corresponding specific proteins expressed in stomach are mainly involved in creating a suitable environment for handling the digestion of food for uptake of nutrients. Highly stomach-specific proteins include GKN1, expressed in the mucosa; pepsinogen PGC and the lipase LIPF, expressed in chief cells; and gastric ATPase ATP4A and gastric intrinsic factor GIF, expressed in parietal cells.
In early human embryogenesis, the ventral part of the embryo abuts the yolk sac. During the second week of development, as the embryo grows, it begins to surround parts of the sac. The enveloped portions form the basis for the adult gastrointestinal tract. The sac is surrounded by a network of vitelline arteries. Over time, these arteries consolidate into the three main arteries that supply the developing gastrointestinal tract: the celiac artery, superior mesenteric artery, and inferior mesenteric artery. The areas supplied by these arteries are used to define the foregut, midgut, and hindgut. The surrounded sac becomes the primitive gut. Sections of this gut begin to differentiate into the organs of the gastrointestinal tract, and the esophagus, and stomach form from the foregut.
In the human digestive system, a bolus (a small rounded mass of chewed up food) enters the stomach through the esophagus via the lower esophageal sphincter. The stomach releases proteases (protein-digesting enzymes such as pepsin) and hydrochloric acid, which kills or inhibits bacteria and provides the acidic pH of 2 for the proteases to work. Food is churned by the stomach through muscular contractions of the wall called peristalsis – reducing the volume of the bolus, before looping around the fundus and the body of stomach as the boluses are converted into chyme (partially digested food). Chyme slowly passes through the pyloric sphincter and into the duodenum of the small intestine, where the extraction of nutrients begins.
Gastric juice in the stomach also contains pepsinogen. Hydrochloric acid activates this inactive form of enzyme into the active form, pepsin. Pepsin breaks down proteins into polypeptides.
Although the absorption in the human digestive system is mainly a function of the small intestine, some absorption of certain small molecules nevertheless does occur in the stomach through its lining. This includes:
The parietal cells of the human stomach are responsible for producing intrinsic factor, which is necessary for the absorption of vitamin B12. B12 is used in cellular metabolism and is necessary for the production of red blood cells, and the functioning of the nervous system.
The movement and the flow of chemicals into the stomach are controlled by both the autonomic nervous system and by the various digestive hormones of the digestive system:
Other than gastrin, these hormones all act to turn off the stomach action. This is in response to food products in the liver and gall bladder, which have not yet been absorbed. The stomach needs to push food into the small intestine only when the intestine is not busy. While the intestine is full and still digesting food, the stomach acts as storage for food.
Epidermal growth factor (EGF) results in cellular proliferation, differentiation, and survival. EGF is a low-molecular-weight polypeptide first purified from the mouse submandibular gland, but since then found in many human tissues including the submandibular gland, and the parotid gland. Salivary EGF, which also seems to be regulated by dietary inorganic iodine, also plays an important physiological role in the maintenance of oro-oesophageal and gastric tissue integrity. The biological effects of salivary EGF include healing of oral and gastroesophageal ulcers, inhibition of gastric acid secretion, stimulation of DNA synthesis, and mucosal protection from intraluminal injurious factors such as gastric acid, bile acids, pepsin, and trypsin and from physical, chemical, and bacterial agents.
The human stomach can "taste" sodium glutamate using glutamate receptors and this information is passed to the lateral hypothalamus and limbic system in the brain as a palatability signal through the vagus nerve. The stomach can also sense, independently of tongue and oral taste receptors, glucose, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. This allows the brain to link nutritional value of foods to their tastes.
This syndrome defines the association between thyroid disease and chronic gastritis which was first described in the 1960s. This term was coined also to indicate the presence of thyroid autoantibodies or autoimmune thyroid disease in patients with pernicious anemia, a late clinical stage of atrofic gastritis. In 1993, has been published a more complete investigation on the stomach and thyroid , reporting that the thyroid is, embryogenetically and phylogenetically, derived from primitive stomach, and that the thyroid cells, such as primitive gastroenteric cells, during vertebrate evolution, migrated and specialized in uptake of iodide and in storage and elaboration of iodine compounds. In fact, stomach and thyroid share iodine-concentranting ability and many morphological and functional similarities, such as cell polarity and apical microvilli, similar organ-specific antigens and also associated autoimmune diseases, secretion of glycoproteins (thyroglobulin and mucin) and peptide hormones, the digesting and readsorbing ability and, lastly, similar ability to form iodotyrosines by peroxidase activity, where iodide acts as electron donor in the presence of H2O2. In the following years, many researchers published reviews about this syndrome.
A series of radiographs can be used to examine the stomach for various disorders. This will often include the use of a barium swallow. Another method of examination of the stomach, is the use of an endoscope. A gastric emptying scan is considered the gold standard to assess gastric emptying rate.
A large number of studies have indicated that most cases of peptic ulcers, and gastritis, in humans are caused by "Helicobacter pylori" infection, and an association has been seen with the development of stomach cancer.
A stomach rumble is actually noise from the intestines.
In humans, many bariatric surgery procedures involve the stomach, in order to lose weight. A gastric band may be placed around the cardia area, which can adjust to limit intake. The anatomy of the stomach may be modified, or the stomach may be bypassed entirely.
Surgical removal of the stomach is called a gastrectomy, and removal of the cardia area is a called a cardiectomy. "Cardiectomy" is a term that is also used to describe the removal of the heart. A gastrectomy may be carried out because of gastric cancer or severe perforation of the stomach wall.
Fundoplication is stomach surgery in which the fundus is wrapped around the lower esophagus and stitched into place. It is used to treat gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD).
There were previously conflicting statements in the academic anatomy community over whether the cardia is part of the stomach, part of the oesophagus or a distinct entity. Modern surgical and medical textbooks have agreed that "the gastric cardia is now clearly considered to be part of the stomach."
The word "stomach" is derived from the Latin "" which has roots from the Greek word "stomachos" (), ultimately from "stoma" (), "mouth". "Gastro-" and "gastric" (meaning "related to the stomach") are both derived from the Greek word "gaster" (, meaning "belly").
Although the precise shape and size of the stomach varies widely among different vertebrates, the relative positions of the oesophageal and duodenal openings remain relatively constant. As a result, the organ always curves somewhat to the left before curving back to meet the pyloric sphincter. However, lampreys, hagfishes, chimaeras, lungfishes, and some teleost fish have no stomach at all, with the oesophagus opening directly into the anus. These animals all consume diets that require little storage of food, no predigestion with gastric juices, or both.
The gastric lining is usually divided into two regions, an anterior portion lined by fundic glands and a posterior portion lined with pyloric glands. Cardiac glands are unique to mammals, and even then are absent in a number of species. The distributions of these glands vary between species, and do not always correspond with the same regions as in humans. Furthermore, in many non-human mammals, a portion of the stomach anterior to the cardiac glands is lined with epithelium essentially identical to that of the oesophagus. Ruminants, in particular, have a complex stomach, the first three chambers of which are all lined with oesophageal mucosa.
In birds and crocodilians, the stomach is divided into two regions. Anteriorly is a narrow tubular region, the proventriculus, lined by fundic glands, and connecting the true stomach to the crop. Beyond lies the powerful muscular gizzard, lined by pyloric glands, and, in some species, containing stones that the animal swallows to help grind up food.
In insects there is also a crop. The insect stomach is called the midgut.
Information about the stomach in echinoderms or molluscs can be found under the respective articles. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39747 |
Marching band
A marching band is a group of instrumental musicians who perform while marching, often for entertainment or competition. Instrumentation typically includes brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments. Most marching bands wear a uniform, often of a military-style, that includes an associated organization's colors, name or symbol. Most high school marching bands, and some college marching bands, are accompanied by a color guard, a group of performers who add a visual interpretation to the music through the use of props, most often flags, rifles, and sabres.
Marching bands are generally categorized by function, size, age, instrumentation, marching style, and type of show they perform. In addition to traditional parade performances, many marching bands also perform field shows at sporting events and marching band competitions. Increasingly, marching bands perform indoor concerts that implement many songs, traditions, and flair from outside performances. In some cases, at higher level competitions, bands will be placed into classes based on school size.
Percussion and wind instruments were used on the battlefield since ancient times.
An Iron Age example would be the carnyx.
The development of the military band from such predecessors was a gradual development of the medieval and early modern period.
A prototype of the Ottoman military band may be mentioned in the 11th-century "Divânu Lügati't-Türk".
The European tradition of military bands formed in the Baroque period, partly influenced by the Ottoman tradition.
17th-century traveler Evliya Çelebi noted the existence of 40 guilds of musicians in Istanbul.
In the 18th century, each regiment in the British Army maintained its own military band. Until 1749 bandsmen were civilians hired at the expense of the colonel commanding a regiment. Subsequently, they became regular enlisted men who accompanied the unit on active service to provide morale enhancing music on the battlefield or, from the late nineteenth century on, to act as stretcher bearers. Instruments during the 18th century included fifes, drums, the oboe (hautbois), French horn, clarinet and bassoon. Drummers summoned men from their farms and ranches to muster for duty. In the chaotic environment of the battlefield, musical instruments were the only means of commanding the men to advance, stand or retire. In the mid 19th century each smaller unit had their own fifer and drummer, who sounded the daily routine. When units massed for battle a band of musicians was formed for the whole.
In the United States, modern marching bands are most commonly associated with performing during American football games. The oldest American college marching band, the University of Notre Dame Band of the Fighting Irish, was founded in 1845 and first performed at a football game in 1887. Many American universities had marching bands before the twentieth century, which were typically associated with military ROTC programs. In 1907, breaking from traditional rank and file marching, the first pictorial formation on a football field was the "Block P" created by Paul Spotts Emrick, director of the Purdue All-American Marching Band. Spotts had seen a flock of birds fly in a "V" formation and decided that a band could replicate the action in the form of show formations on a field. The first halftime show at an American football game was performed by the University of Illinois Marching Illini, also in 1907, at a game against the University of Chicago.
Appearing at roughly the same time as the field show and pictorial marching formations at universities was the fight song, which today is often closely associated with a university's band. The first university fight song, "For Boston," was created at Boston College. Many more recognizable and popular university fight songs are borrowed and played by high schools across the United States. Four such fight songs commonly used by high schools are the University of Michigan's "The Victors", the University of Illinois' "Illinois Loyalty", the University of Notre Dame's "Victory March", and the United States Naval Academy's "Anchors Aweigh". During the 20th century, many marching bands added further pageantry elements, including baton twirlers, majorettes, dance lines, and color guards.
After World War I, the presence and quality of marching bands in the American public school system expanded as military veterans with service band experience began to accept music teaching positions within schools across the country, eventually bringing wind music and marching band into both educational curriculum and school culture. With high school programs on the rise, marching bands started to become competitive organizations, with the first national contest being held in 1923 in Chicago, Illinois. State and national contests became common, often featuring parades and mass-band concerts featuring all participating groups. By 1938, competitive band programs had become numerous and widespread, making a national contest too large to manage and leading to multiple state and regional contests in its place. Today, state contests continue to be the primary form of marching band competition in the United States.
Since the inception of Drum Corps International in the 1970s, many marching bands that perform field shows have adopted changes to the activity that parallel developments with modern drum and bugle corps. These bands are said to be "corps-style" bands. Areas where changes have been adopted from drum corps include:
Marching bands are categorized by style based on primary function, instrumentation, and technique, although many organizations may fill multiple roles.
Military bands or corps of drums were historically the first marching bands. Instrumentation in these bands varies but generally consists of brass, woodwinds, and percussion. Due to their original purpose, military marching bands typically march in a forward direction with consistent straight lines. Music is performed at a constant tempo (120–140 BPM) to facilitate the steady marching of the entire military group the band is playing with. The marching step size, or interval, is consistent, and usually at a "6 to 5" (six steps per five yards) or "8 to 5" (eight steps to five yards). This style includes field music units such as drum and bugle corps or bugle bands, pipe bands, and fife and drum corps.
Active duty military marching bands often perform in parades with other military units and march in the same manner as other military personnel. Due to a lack of appreciation, competition venues, and military personnel, almost all military marching bands have disappeared from schools in the United States, with exceptions including the Fightin' Texas Aggie Band from Texas A&M University, the Highty-Tighties of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, and the Cadets of Norwich University Military College of Vermont. There is also a pocket of about 80 high school military-style marching bands in Eastern Texas.
Unlike in the United States, military-style marching bands have a strong presence in Latin American countries, especially those that have strong military traditions, most importantly of Prussian, French, Spanish and Portuguese origins. Such bands are found in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, and Peru. In Ecuador and Venezuela in particular, corps of drums is the main military-style band for schools. Military-style corps of drums are also seen in schools, colleges, and universities in Mexico and Mexican schools in the US using only the snare drum and the bugle (though in some schools the instrumentation can be larger). These bands also are present in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama, as well as in Commonwealth and ex-French nations in the Caribbean and Belize and Guayana, given British and French influences. Also, Vietnam has a strong military marching band tradition in schools, following the French and Soviet/Russian tradition.
The United Kingdom keeps the military-style tradition with many civil and youth bands in all of the UK keeping the military band traditions of the country, either as marching wind bands, Corps of Drums, bugle bands, pipe bands, and in Northern Ireland, fife and drum bands. Examples would be the Royal British Legion bands and the bands of the various UK youth uniformed organizations. Styled on the UK military tradition, Fiji's Military Forces also have a marching band and the military band traditions of the Commonwealth of Nations, by extension, reached almost every country of it with military, school, civil and schools bands styled on the traditions of the British Armed Forces and the armed services of Commonwealth countries which were trained by British military personnel.
Corps style bands directly reflect the trends seen in modern drum and bugle corps of Drum Corps International (DCI). Unlike the military band style, drum corps style step sizes are constantly changing to accommodate the differing forms the band is creating on the field. Forms may be linear, curvilinear, or scatter. Music selections can include anything from symphonic music, film scores, to world music, jazz, rock, or pop music.
Unlike a military band's use of baton twirlers, Corps Style bands may include a "color guard" that spin flags, rifles, sabres—and may also incorporate dance. Other visual elements unique to the corps style is the usage of props, backdrops, and even costuming – to add more theatrical elements to the show.
Other elements unique to the Corps Style bands are the incorporation of the "front ensemble". This includes the usage of keyboard percussion such as xylophone, marimba, and bells; or any other color percussion instruments such as timpani, cymbals, conga, tambourine, triangle, drum set, etc. The front ensemble may also use sound amplification or electronic instruments such as synthesizers.
The "corps style" constantly evolves, with contributions from college bands, high school bands, and drum and bugle corps throughout the United States. Typically, corps style bands gear their performances for marching competitions and marching festivals. Competitions featuring the corps style on the national level include Drum Corps International, Winter Guard International, and Bands Of America. The competitive high school marching band is modeled after the corps style band.
Corps style is a competitive style, judged in several "captions" that include Visual Analysis, Visual Proficiency, Color Guard, Music Analysis, Brass, Percussion, and General Effect.
Traditional style bands, also known as show bands, are marching bands geared primarily towards crowd entertainment and perform on football fields. Typically, they perform a routine before the game, another at halftime, and sometimes after the game as well. Competitive show bands perform only one show that is continually refined throughout a season, while bands that focus on entertainment rather than competition usually perform a unique show for each game. These shows normally consists of three to five musical pieces accompanied by formations rooted in origin from "Patterns in Motion", a book penned by band director William C. "Bill" Moffit, bandmaster of Purdue University All-American Marching Band and University of Houston Spirit of Houston.
A recognizable style of show band is the one fielded by historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). HBCU bands utilize the traditional "ankle-knee" high step and music selections are largely based on R&B, hip-hop, and contemporary popular music. In addition to traditional drill formations, HBCU bands feature heavily choreographed dance routines as part of their performances. Many of these bands may have a twirler line or a dancer line, but not necessarily flag twirlers. One of the most notable depictions of HBCU bands is the 2002 film "Drumline". The history of African-American marching bands was explored through a 2018 exhibition called "Marching On: The Politics of Performance" in New York City. HBCU bands are a significant part of African-American musical culture and HBCU bands often surpass their associated football teams in popularity, a phenomenon that is uncommon among collegiate and high school marching bands. In 1989, as part of the celebrations for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, the Florida A&M University Marching 100, one of the most prolific HBCU bands in the country, was selected as the official representative of the United States in the bicentennial parade.
Another style of show band is that used by many of the Big Ten Conference marching bands, a semi-military and semi-corps style. These bands perform a show that is designed to entertain the audience but feature more traditional symphonic styles of music (marches, film scores, jazz, or older pop music) as well as some contemporary music. Big Ten style show bands have been influential in creating some of the earliest marching band innovations, and the style is used in high schools throughout much of the United States.
Most show bands of either type include the traditional military band instrumentation of woodwinds, brass, and battery percussion. Some also include the front ensemble keyboard percussion, and may also incorporate the use of a color guard for flag, and rifle routines as well as a dance line.
Carnival bands are a United Kingdom variant of show bands. Carnival bands typically march in time to the music, and may also participate in parades and competitions. They contain brass and percussion, but may or may not use woodwinds. In The United States, specifically in California, carnival bands (known as Parade bands in the states) perform regularly in parades and parade competitions. These US bands are also modeled on the country's military band tradition.
Scramble bands (also referred to as 'Scatter' bands) are a variation on show bands. They generally do not march in time with the music, but, as their name implies, scramble from design to design and often incorporate comedic elements into their performances. Most of the bands in the Ivy League use this style, excepting only Cornell University.
The size and composition of a marching band can vary greatly. Some bands have fewer than twenty members, and some have over 500. American marching bands vary considerably in their instrumentation. Some bands omit some or all woodwinds, but it is not uncommon to see piccolos, flutes, soprano clarinets, alto saxophones, and tenor saxophones (woodwinds are not used in corps style marching). E♭ clarinets, alto clarinets, bass clarinets, and baritone saxophones are less common, but can be found in some bands. Bassoons and oboes are very seldom found on a field due to the risk of incidental damage, the impracticality of marching with an exposed double reed, and high sensitivity to weather.
The brass section usually includes trumpets or cornets; French horns, alto horns, or mellophones; tenor trombones; baritone horns or euphoniums; and tubas or sousaphones. E♭soprano cornets are sometimes used to supplement or replace the high woodwinds, while the mellophone often is used in place of the French horn. Some especially large bands use flugelhorns and bass trombones. Specially designed versions of the lower brass have been created for use while marching. These are typically wrapped in such a way that allows the bell to face toward the audience at all times. Bands may also modify their instrumentation to remove slide trombones completely and replace them with another instrument, such as a valved trombone or marching baritone horn.
Marching percussion (often referred to as the drumline, battery, or back battery) typically includes snare drums, tenor drums, bass drums, and cymbals and are responsible for keeping tempo for the band. All of these instruments have been adapted for mobile, outdoor use. Marching versions of the glockenspiel (bells), xylophone, and marimba are also rarely used by some ensembles. Historically, the percussion section also employed mounted timpani that featured manual controls.
For bands that include a front ensemble (also known as the pit or auxiliary percussion), stationary instrumentation may include orchestral percussion such as timpani, tambourines, maracas, cowbells, congas, wood blocks, marimbas, xylophones, bongos, vibraphones, timbales, claves, guiros, and chimes or tubular bells, concert bass drums, and gongs, as well as a multitude of auxiliary percussion equipment, all depending on the instrumentation of the field show. Drum sets, purpose-built drum racks, and other mounted instruments are also placed here. Until the advent of the pit in the early 1980s, many of these instruments were carried on the field by marching percussionists by hand or on mounting brackets. Some bands also include electronic instruments such as synthesizers, electric guitars, and bass guitar, along with the requisite amplification. If double-reed or string instruments are used, they are usually placed here, but even this usage is very rare due to their relative fragility. Unusual percussive instruments are sometimes used, including brake drums, empty propane tanks, trashcans, railroad ties, stomping rigs, and other interesting sounds. In modern marching band, there is a use of amplification of the front ensemble to help balance out the wind and drumline sections. The use of synthesizers and electronics in the front ensemble can not only help the front ensemble, or "pit", be heard better by the audience and judges, but it can add soundscapes such as voice-overs to help tell the story of a field show, or to add sound effects (for example, a show about nature could have bird/wind/rain sound samples performed by a front ensemble member playing the synthesizer).
A rare inclusion in a marching band that is becoming more popular is the use of electrophones in a marching band. The most common electric instrument seen is a bass guitar, but some schools also use keyboards and lead guitar. To make the electric instruments usable, external power in the stadium is often used, but some groups may use a car-battery mechanism that requires a car battery and a converter to give the instruments and amplifiers remote power. Also, some groups may use a small gasoline-powered generator.
Many bands have auxiliaries that add a visual component to the performance. For ceremonial bands, this could be a traditional color guard or honor guard. For drum & bugle corps and corps-style field bands, this could include Dance lines, majorettes, Auxiliary units may be collectively referred to as color guard or visual ensemble.
Auxiliaries may perform as independent groups. In the early 1970s, color guards began to hold their own competitions in the winter (after the American football season, and before the beginning of the summer drum and bugle corps season). These became known as winter guard. There are also numerous dance competitions in the off-season.
The color guard of a marching band or drum and bugle corps may contain sabers, mock rifles, and tall flags. In modern bands, other props are often used: flags of all sizes, horizontal banners, vertical banners, streamers, pom-poms, even tires, balls, and hula hoops or custom-built props. The color guard may also employ stage dressing such as backdrops, portable flats, or other structures. These can be used simply as static scenery or moved to emphasize drill, and are often used to create a "backstage" area to store equipment and hide personnel when necessary.
While military color guards were typically male, band color guards tend to be primarily female, though it is becoming more common for men to join as well. A few independent units are all-male. Guard members nearly always wear a special uniform or costume that is distinctive from that of the band, not necessarily matching in design or color. The men's and women's guard uniforms are usually designed in one of two ways: nearly identically, but with gender-specific parts (i.e. skirts) adapted for the use of the opposite sex; or complimentarily, with the two uniforms designed similarly but with variations in color or form. The color guard uniform, especially in a high school marching band, need not be in school colors; in fact, they rarely are. These uniforms are designed to represent a certain aspect of the halftime show, characterize the guard members through costumes, or tell some sort of story, and can thus be in any design or color (a surprisingly common complaint among the high school audience is that guard uniforms and equipment "aren't school colors").
Indoor color guards have become popular within high schools and universities throughout the United States. These groups perform a theme-based show in competitions after the outdoor marching band season ends. Indoor color guard shows are typically performed in school gymnasiums and are adjudicated.
Irishman Patrick S. Gilmore started the concept of a bandleader. A marching band is typically led by one or more drum majors, also called field commanders, who are usually responsible for conducting the band (sometimes using a large baton or mace, though such tools are used rarely in modern marching bands for conducting) and are commonly referred to as the leader of the band. When there is more than one drum major, one may be the head drum major, who often stands upon an elevated podium located on the 50-yard line while conducting, whereas the other(s) often conduct from convenient angles (should the marching block not be facing forward) and function as an apprentice of sorts. The number of members in the band often determines how many drum majors are needed, based on the complexity of the show (in which case, in a three-person scenario, one stands on the 50-yard line while another stands on the 30-yard line and the third stands on the other 30-yard line), and occasionally, additional individuals may be asked to perform brief conducting duties if beneficial in a particularly tricky part of the show (more often, such people are those on the sidelines or in the pit). The modern-day concept of the drum major has been exponentially expanded upon by George N. Parks, often known as the "Dynamic Drum Major," through his Drum Major Academy. Bands may also be led by a more traditional conductor, especially during field shows, where a stationary conductor on a ladder or platform may be visible throughout the performance. Aural commands—such as vocal orders, clapping, or a whistle—may be used to issue commands as well. In show bands, particularly in HBCU and Big Ten bands, drum majors often have a visual on-field role with a baton or mace, with the job of conducting assigned to the band director(s). In these cases, the number of drum majors is often based on tradition, rather than being in proportion with the number of musicians. For example, the Florida A&M Marching 100 fields one drum major for each president in the university's history. Other leaders within the band may include field lieutenants and captains of sections such as brass, drumline, and woodwinds, and members that lead a section, squad, row, etc.
Some bands assign drum majors the dual role of leading and conducting the ensemble on the field. This is most common in traditional military-style groups, such as Texas A&M's Fightin' Texas Aggie Band: the drum majors march with the band, sound whistles to coordinate movement, and use maces to keep time by thrusting them up and down (rather than toward and away from the body, as is typical in American military bands).
The size of the band may not only determine how many drum majors there are, but how many section instructors are needed as well. Section instructors function like the music director but are mainly responsible for teaching members of a given section. Because they are commonly previous members of the section they teach, they can provide better instruction to combine the needs of the show with the characteristics of the given instrument.
As bands require leadership from within as well as from without, section leaders are usually selected from among the members of each instrumental section (a "section" comprises all the band members who play the same musical instrument). The section leader is always an experienced band member and is usually selected by the band director (rather than elected or self-appointed) for his or her leadership skills and experience. The section leader is responsible for the minute-to-minute instruction of his or her section members, and reports to the drum majors and the band director. Many larger bands appoint more than one section leader per section, with each having a "head" section leader, whether formally or informally designated as such. College-level military bands may use the term "section sergeant" or "section officer" in place of "section leader."
The director provides general guidance, selects the repertoire, interprets commentary and evaluations from judges, and auditions or recruits prospective members. What content is not provided by the director may be contracted from arrangers (who compose original works or adapt existing works) and copyists (who reproduce parts of the score), choreographers, and drill designers (primarily for field bands). With the assistance of section instructors, the director also teaches performance techniques—musical, martial, and visual—and assesses the pool of talent, choosing leaders and soloists as needed. The director also selects venues for public performance and oversees the staff that help provide funding and equipment. Many opportunities for member improvement are present: the director may organize clinics with various professionals, send representatives to specialty schools or camps, or plan trips abroad for education or exhibition.
Large bands also require many support staff who can move equipment, repair instruments, and uniforms, create and manipulate props used in performances, and provide food, water, and medical assistance. Additional staff may be utilized when the band hosts functions such as competitions and reviews. In high school bands, these activities are usually performed by volunteers, typically parents of band members or the band members of the lower grades. These people are often referred to as "runners" or "boosters". Significant support staff for college bands and independent corps are typically paid by the university or the corps organization, respectively.
The goal of each band's performance is different. Some aim for maximum uniformity and precision; others—especially scramble bands—want to be as entertaining as possible. Many U.S. university marching bands aim for maximum sound impact on the audience. Some bands perform primarily for the enjoyment of their members. However, there are some common elements in almost all band performances. The following overview is heavily focused on the U.S. marching band tradition.
The traditional music of the marching band is the military march, but since show bands also evolved from the concert and brass band traditions, music has always been varied. Often, music from other genres is adapted for the specific instrumentation of a marching band.
Commercial arrangements that are tailored for the average band instrumentation are also available. Many bands typically have a repertoire of traditional music associated with the organization they serve. Some competitive bands use an arrangement of popular music varied for marching band, as well as music from a movie or other such theme. However, the largest and most successful marching bands tend to steer clear of show tunes and popular music, instead preferring compilations or arrangements of classical or traditional concert pieces (i.e. Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" or Puccini's "Nessun Dorma") or of entirely new compositions.
Music may be memorized, or it may be carried on flip folders, which are held by lyres that clip onto the instruments. Having music memorized is usually considered an advantage for competitive bands, and at competitions, there is usually a penalty for the use of the sheet music on the field written into the scoring rubric. Practically, memorization prevents obstruction of vision caused by the folders. The memorization of music is usually a matter of pride for the marching band, however, bands that regularly pull from expansive libraries and perform dozens of new works each season are more likely to utilize flip folders.
The glide step, also commonly known as the "roll step," involves bringing the heel gently to the ground with the toe pointed up, and then rolling forward onto the toes before lifting the foot to continue forward. While marching to the rear, the weight is placed continually on the ball of the foot with the heel elevated. This style is used by both marching bands as well as drum and bugle corps. The style, in comparison to high step, gives drill formations a more fluid appearance, allowing for better control of more difficult formations and various styles of music. With this control also comes the ability to perform a much broader range of tempos. Proper execution of a roll step gives a player marching at 40 beats per minute the same smooth tone as a player marching at 180. The roll step allows for much better control of the upper body, and thus better control of the air support needed for playing.
Some bands, and a select few drum and bugle corps, use a bent-knee variant of roll step, usually known simply as "bent knee," in which the members roll from heel to toe but lead the next step with the knee instead of the foot, then planting the heel of the next foot by straightening the leg.
The high step is a style of marching used by many colleges and universities, including most bands of HBCUs and the Big Ten. Three primary sub-variants of the high are used:
An integral part of this style of marching is known as "stop action," meaning that all movement ceases momentarily at the apex of each step. This requires a band to have a great deal of stamina, though is effective visually. High step marching is often accompanied by a horizontal swing of the player's body or instrument.
When band members are marching in one direction but want to focus their sound in another, they may rotate their bodies at the waist, so that only the upper portion of the body faces in the direction of play. This is known as "lateral marching", but is more commonly known as either "shifting", "traversing", or "sliding". A lateral march is not a change in the direction of march, only in the direction the upper body faces. Percussion players, whose large drum harnesses often prevent them from twisting their torsos, and sometimes tuba and sousaphone players, instead uses a "crab step" when moving sideways. During a crab step, the musician crosses one leg over the other, either marching on the toes or rolling the foot sideways. Percussionists may also substitute roll step when their instruments would interfere with performing the high step.
A true direction change involving the feet moving in a new direction requires either a "prep step" or a "pivot", both of which are sometimes referred to as a "flank" or “stab”. To perform a prep step, on the last count of movement in the first direction a marcher plants the foot with the heel turned outward at half the angle of the turn desired, with the upper body still facing forward. On the next count, the other foot snaps into position completing the turn. The upper body may or may not turn with the lower body. Some bands plant the heel on the prep step rather than the toe but preserving the angle of the foot. To perform a pivot, the marcher pivots between directions over the ball of the foot on the last count instead of using a prep step.
A "back march" may be used when the band wishes to move in the opposite direction from where it is projecting its sound. There are several ways to back march, one of which is to walk backward, putting each foot down and rolling from the toe to the heel (the exact reverse of the roll step). Another variation involves marching on the platforms of the feet, dragging the toe of the moving foot on the ground. Backward marching usually employs the same preference for leg straightness as forward marching (if the band marches with legs completely straight while marching forwards, they also do so while marching backward, to preserve uniformity of style). Using peripheral vision to align oneself to formations or field markings is even more important during backward marching.
When a band is not moving, the members may "mark time", or march in place. The step used usually resembles the step that is used for marching forward, though mixing a high step mark time with a roll step march (or vice versa) produces an interesting visual effect. For a typical mark time, the foot is raised to the ankle bone of the opposite leg. The toe should not come off the ground and the knee should not come out much past the still-straight leg.
Some bands mark time by bringing their feet up to their knee—known as "high-mark time". Some bands practice marking time during concert arch with the toes coming off of the ground to give the marcher a greater sense of marching while standing still. The heel should hit the ground on the beat. Some bands forgo marking time and instead come to a complete halt when not marching. Traditionally, the drumline would put their feet in a V-shape and lift their feet fully off the ground a few inches. This is to avoid hitting the drums.
Even when marking time, it is considered good form for all band members to stay "in step"—that is, step with the same foot at the same time. A large majority of bands "step off" with, or start marching on, the left foot. Staying in step is generally easier when the band is playing music or when the drums are playing a marching cadence.
When the band and percussion are not playing, rhythm may be maintained in a variety of ways: a drummer may play taps or rim shots, the drum major may clap or use a woodblock, a drum major or band member may vocalize a sharp syllable like "hit," "hut," or "dut," or band members may chant the military call of "left, left, left right left." Band members may count the steps of the move out loud to keep the entire band together. Typically, most moves consist of any number of steps that are a multiples of two or four, due to most marching band music being in even-numbered time signatures. Even-numbered time signatures aid in staying in step because they assign odd-numbered counts to the left foot, and even-numbered counts to the right foot. If a band member is on the wrong foot, for instance, odd on the right foot and even on the left, this is referred to as being "out of step". When a band member is completely off tempo, it is referred to as being "out of phase".
In parades, bands usually line up in a marching block composed of ranks and files. Each member tries to stay within his or her given rank and file, and to maintain even spacing with neighboring musicians. It is traditionally the responsibility of the people at the end of each rank and the front of each file to be in the correct location; this allows other band members to use them as a reference, also known as "guiding".
Band members also try to keep a constant pace or step size while marching in parade. Step sizes usually vary between 22 and 30 inches (56–76 cm) per stride. A step size of 22.5 inches is called an "8-to-5" step because the marcher covers five yards (about 4.6 m) in eight steps. A step size of 30 inches is called "6-to-5" because five yards are covered in six steps. Because yard lines on an American football field are five yards apart, exact 8-to-5 and 6-to-5 steps are most useful for field shows.
A drum cadence, sometimes called a "walk beat" or "street beat," is usually played when the band is marching, oftentimes alternating with a song, and is typically how a band keeps time while not playing music. Alternatively, a drum or rim shot may be given on the odd beats to keep the band in step. Between songs and cadences, a roll is usually given to indicate what beat in the measure the band is at. Cadence tempo varies from group to group but is generally between 112 and 144 beats per minute to facilitate marching.
In Minnesota, Upstate New York, and Wisconsin, bands may perform on city streets with compact formation elements, sometimes referred to as a street show. These shows are judged using similar criteria as any other marching band competition. Elements of difficulty increase with street marching competitions because of the varying widths of streets in each community. Street marching is typical for bands who operate during the spring and early summer months. Typically, a band that performs in street marching competitions does not become involved with field marching, and vice versa. Various venues exist for street marching competitions between high school marching bands.
While playing music during a field show, the band makes a series of formations, called drill, on the field, which may be pictures, geometric shapes, curvilinear designs, or blocks of musicians, although sometimes it may be pure abstract designs using no specific form.
Typically, each band member has an assigned position in each formation. In many show bands and most drum corps, these positions are illustrated in a handheld booklet called a drill book (also known as a dot book). Drill books, or drill charts, show where each person stands during each set of the show. The drill charts include yard lines and hashes as they would be on an actual football field, which shows the band members where to stand relative to the yard lines and hashes. There are many ways of getting from one formation to the next:
Players may point the bells of their instruments in the direction they are moving, or "slide" (also called traverse) with all the bells facing in the same direction. They may also point it towards the center of the field. Bands that march in time with the music typically also synchronize the direction of individuals' turns and try to maintain even spacing between individuals in formations (called intervals). Sometimes bands specifically have wind players turn their instruments away from the audience to emphasize the dynamics of the music.
Auxiliaries can also add to the visual effect. Backdrops and props ("scrims") may be used on the field that fit the theme of the show or the music being performed. In comedic shows, particularly for university bands, an announcer may read jokes or a funny script between songs; formations that are words or pictures (or the songs themselves) may serve as punch lines.
In some marching bands, the drum majors have the option to give out a set of commands to the rest of the band either vocally, by hand command, or by a whistle. These commands originated from the military history of marching band. Different bands might have different sets of procedures such as the number of counts it takes to carry out the command, but the overall result is the same.
Aside from field show and parade, competitions among secondary schools can also have the "march off" (also "concentration block" or "drill down"). This event involves all participants on the field following the commands of the director or a drum major. If a participant makes a mistake, either by execution or wrong timing, then the participant falls out of the field. A winner is crowned when there is only one participant left on the field.
Each musician in a marching band creates sound waves. The waves from each musician, traveling at the speed of sound, reach the other musicians, field conductors, and listeners at slightly different times. If the distance between musicians is large enough, listeners may perceive waves to be . Typically, in this case, listeners perceive that one section of the band is playing their parts slightly after another section. This "delay" effect is informally referred to as "ensemble tear" or "phasing" (not to be confused with the music composition technique of the same name).
Consider also that viewers perceive the movement of marchers as light waves. Since light travels faster than sound, viewers may perceive that movement is out of phase with the sound. Sound waves may also reflect off parts of the stadium or nearby buildings.
For example, if two musicians, one standing on the front sideline of the football field and one on the back sideline, begin playing exactly when they see the beat of the conductor's baton or hand, the sound produced by the musician on the front sideline reaches listeners in the stands noticeably before the sound played by the back musician, and the musicians are seen to move before the sound reaches the stands.
Ensemble tears can occur when musicians on the field listen to the pit. Because of the way sound waves travel, the sound pit produces first bounces off the back bleachers and then is heard by the ensemble. By the time the ensemble hears them, they are already late in timing. Because of this reason, the norm is to ignore the pit and let them listen to the ensemble for timing.
Delay can be reduced in several ways, including:
Nearly all marching band personnel wear some kind of uniform. Military-style uniforms are most common, but there are bands that use everything from matching T-shirts and shorts to formal wear. The school or organization's name, symbol, or colors are commonly applied to uniforms. Uniforms may also have substantially different colors on the front and back, so if band members turn suddenly ("flank"), the audience sees a striking change of color. Band members at many Ivy League schools wear a jacket and tie while performing. The Southern Methodist University band wear a different combination of jackets, vests, ties, shirts, and pants for each half (changing before halftime) of each game and no clothing or uniform combinations are repeated during the marching season. The Alma College Kiltie Marching Band is famous for wearing kilts made of the official Alma College tartan.
The components of a band uniform are numerous. Common design elements include hats (typically shakos, pith helmets, combination hats or other styles of helmets) with feather plumes, capes, gloves, rank cords, and other embellishments. The USC Spirit of Troy Marching Band and Troy University's Sound of the South Marching Band wear traditional Trojan helmets. It is also common for band uniforms to have a stripe down the leg and light-colored shoes, or spats over dark shoes to emphasize the movement of the legs while marching. Similarly, uniforms may feature additional components which highlight movement of the upper body, such as the "wings" worn by the University of Minnesota's marching band to highlight flanking movements on the field. Competitive bands, however, many times opt for matching uniforms, especially pants and shoes (usually white or black) to hide the visual effect of members who are out of step as seen from a distance. Occasionally, a band forgoes traditional uniforms in favor of costumes that fit the theme of its field show. The costumes may or may not be uniform throughout the band. This kind of specialized uniform change is usually confined to competitive marching bands.
Drum Majors, the field commanders and band directors, usually do not wear the regular band uniform, to better distinguish them from the rest of the band. Some wear more formal outfits or costumes that match the theme of the music, or most commonly a differently-designed version of the regular band uniform, often employing different colors (especially white) or features such as capes. Some (especially at the college level) still employ the tall wool-lined shako or much larger bearskin (both often derisively referred to as a "Q-Tip hat"). Sousaphone players may use a military-style beret or entirely forgo the use of a head covering, as most hats may be in the way of the bell. Some auxiliary groups use uniforms that resemble gymnastics outfits: Often, these uniforms are themed, drawing inspiration from the music. Many auxiliary groups change the outfits they use from season to season based on the needs of the band, although some that do also have a "base" uniform for occasions such as parades or other ceremonies.
Music for parade and show bands is typically learned separately, in a concert band setting. It may even be memorized before any of the marching steps are learned. When rehearsing drill, positions and maneuvers are usually learned without playing the music simultaneously—a common technique for learning drill is to have members sing their parts or march to a recording produced during a music rehearsal. Many bands learn drill one "picture" or form at a time, and later combine these and add music.
Rehearsals may also include physical warm-up (calisthenics, running, etc.), "music warm-up" (generally consisting of breathing exercises, scales, technical exercises, chorales, and tuning), "basics" (simple marching in a block to practice proper technique), and "sectionals" (in which either staff or band members designated "section leaders" rehearse individual sections).
When learning positions for drill, an American football field may be divided into a 5-yard grid, with the yard lines serving as one set of guides. The locations where the perpendicular grid lines cross the yard lines sometimes called "zero points" or gacks, may be marked on a practice field at eight-, four-, or two-step intervals. Alternately, band members may only use field markings—yard lines, the centerline, hash marks, and yard numbers—as guides (but note that different leagues put these markings in different places).
For members to learn their positions more quickly, they may be given "drill charts", which map their locations relative to the grid or field markings for each formation. In other groups, spray chalk or colored markers are used to mark the location of each person after each set of drill, with a different color and, sometimes, shape for each move.
Some bands use small notebooks, also known as a dot book or drill book, which they hang about their necks, on the drum harness, or around the waist. These contain pages of "drill charts", which often either give a picture or list coordinates that band members use to find 'pages' or 'sets' on the field. Coordinates are normally listed in 8-to-5 steps off the front sideline and front and back hashes, along with the number of 8–5 steps off of the yard line listed on each page. Some bands are even using small plastic pouches that hang about their neck on an adjustable strap, which has a zipper pocket for holding drill, flags to mark sets, and a pencil. There is also a clear plastic window in front to display the current part of drill being worked on at that point in time.
Members may also group into squads, ranks, sections, or (especially with scramble bands that primarily form words) letters. Instead of each member having an individual move, moves are then learned on a squad-by-squad (rank-by-rank) basis.
Most bands meet in the summer, normally in August for summer training, or prior to the specific marching season (known as band camp). This involves learning basic marching fundamentals such as the type of marching step the band uses, commands from the drum major, and how to move on field. The band is also given music to learn for their show. Drill for the show may or may not be provided to learn during band camp. The camp takes place outdoors on the field for marching, and in a band hall for music-only rehearsals. Sectionals, or rehearsals including all of one instrument (e.g. flute sectional), take place during this time. Directors may use time during band camp to place band members in their sections based on playing or marching level and ability. This time can also be used for the potential drum majors to showcase their abilities and for the band director to choose who is head drum major. For bands that require auditions for the band, drumline, or auxiliary, auditions may happen the first few days for placement. Band camp usually lasts 1–2 weeks, but in the case of a more advanced marching band, camp may last up to a month. In most university bands, band camp means an earlier move-in date for university students in the band.
Marching bands serve as entertainment during American football games, which may also be known as pep band. For college and high school marching bands, this is the primary purpose of the ensemble. The home team's band plays the national anthem before kickoff (often as part of a pre-game show), as well as other music while in the stands during the game. Bands cheer with the cheerleaders, and some bands create their cheers. Marching bands then perform a show during halftime. When both teams' bands are present, it is a common protocol for the visiting band to perform first. After halftime, some high school bands use the third quarter of the game to take a break and get food. College bands and some high school bands do not have such breaks but continue playing in the stands during the entirety of the game. The band often stays the entire game, playing the school's fight song and alma mater at the end of the game regardless of the outcome.
Three National Football League teams designate an official marching band: the Washington Redskins, Buffalo Bills and Baltimore Ravens. Marching bands were once common fare during Super Bowl halftime shows during its earlier years but were later replaced by short stadium rock concerts from high-profile recording artists, some of which have incorporated marching bands into their performances. Marching bands are otherwise uncommon at the professional level.
In competition, marching bands are usually judged on criteria such as musicality, uniformity, visual impact, artistic interpretation, and the difficulty of the music and drill. Competition exists at all levels but is most common in the U.S. among secondary school bands and drum and bugle corps. Performances designed for a competition setting usually include more esoteric music (including but not limited to adaptations of modern orchestral pieces). Many traditional-style bands compete in contests known as a Battle of the Bands, similar to the Atlanta Classic from the movie Drumline. There are also competitions at the national level, such as the Bands of America (BOA) Grand National Championships through Music for All.
Although its legitimacy is often called into question, competitive marching band is sometimes considered a sport, due in large part to the physical exertion required in combination with teamwork. Many HBCU marching band fans refer to marching band as "marching sport." Sports Illustrated considered the activity a sport in 1987, describing the Drum Corps International World Championships “one of the biggest sporting events of the summer.” In the same article, Sports Illustrated quoted basketball coach Bobby Knight, "If a basketball team trained as hard as these kids do, it would be unbelievable. I like to take my players [to watch drum corps] to show them what they can accomplish with hard work and teamwork. Besides, once they see them practice 12 hours a day, my players think I’m a helluva lot easier.”
In his presentation to the American College of Sports Medicine's annual meeting in 2009, researcher and exercise physiologist Gary Granata presented research after studying members of the Avon High School Marching Black and Gold, noting "At the top levels of marching band and drum corps, you get a level of competition and athleticism that is equal to a Division I athletic program." Granata further pointed out, "Performers are constantly moving, and often running, at velocities that reach 180 steps or more per minute while playing instruments that weigh up to 40 pounds."
Moreover, in an ESPN segment from 2005, researchers from Indiana State University placed devices on Drum Corps members that recorded metabolic rates during performances and practices, utilizing measurements of oxygen consumption, carbon dioxide production, and heart rate. The findings were that the performer's metabolic rates matched those of marathon runners halfway through a marathon, while the heart rate was more along the lines of someone who was running a "400 or 800-meter dash."
Spring and early summer parade marching (or street marching) are popular in the northern midwest and Upstate New York, where temperatures are moderate enough for students to march distances in standard uniforms. Performance styles range from traditional block marching to elaborate productions with evolving drill patterns.
Some circuits in the United States continue to hold field show competitions during the summer months. Much like drum corps, these bands rehearse and tour full-time for about a month from mid-June to mid-August. Such circuits include the Mid-America Competing Band Directors Association, or MACBDA, and the Catholic Youth Organization circuits.
MACBDA is currently host to more than 20 actively competing, summer-only field show bands from the US (Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan) and Canada (Saskatchewan and Alberta). The circuit sponsors fourteen field show competitions each summer and the circuit championships move on a three-year-rotation from Calgary, AB, Canada, to Traverse City, MI, to the Southern Wisconsin / Northern Illinois area.
The Honda Battle of the Bands is an annual marching band exhibition that features performances by HBCU bands. Seemingly contradictory to the name, Honda's "battle" is not a competition in the traditional sense. That is, no winner is crowned during the event. Rather, the bands compete for the favor of the audience, each other, and the greater community.
WAMSB (World Association of Marching Show Bands) is an international organization holding many competitions throughout the world. Its World Championships are held annually in the summer in a different country. Past host nations include Canada, Brazil, Japan, Malaysia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, & Australia. WAMSB sanctioned events happen in 32 nations.
The Central Indiana Track Show Association hosts contests in Indiana during the summer. The championships for CITSA is the Indiana State Fair Band Day competition, held every August at the Indiana State Fair.
Most high school marching band competitions occur in the fall when the majority of schools begin classes. In the United States, there are two national competition circuits in which bands can compete: Bands of America and the United States Scholastic Band Association (USSBA).
The USSBA was formed in 1988 through the help of the Cadets Drum and Bugle Corps. Over 700 high school bands compete during the Fall season with bands of similar size and talent. Each competition provides approximately 40 professional judges who give feedback on the show's programming and design. At the season's end, the top 50 bands are invited to compete in the US Scholastic Band Championship, which is hosted at a college or professional stadium.
Bands of America is the other major circuit that conducts several competitions throughout the fall season. Competitions include Regional Championships, held in collegiate stadiums in locations such as Pennsylvania, California, Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina, and Super Regional Championships held in NFL stadiums in cities such as Atlanta, Indianapolis, and St. Louis. The season accumulates with the holding of Grand National Championships, considered the top event for high school marching. Grand Nationals takes place in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana in early to mid-November. The three-day event concludes with the top 12 highest scoring high school bands, out of the more than 90 who participate, performing in Grand National Finals on Saturday night. Due to the stiff competition, with bands traveling to the event from throughout the country, many people consider the champion the best high school marching band in the country. There are no qualifications for any Bands of America events, including Grand Nationals. Admittance is based on a first-come, first-served basis.
Many states have their own competition circuits, as well as their own rules for competitions in their circuits. Several colleges host annual independent competitions, with varying degrees of prestige—such as the Contest of Champions at Middle Tennessee State University, which is the longest-running high school band contest in the United States.
To make competitions fair, bands normally split into different "classes" or "divisions" based on certain factors. One popular classification system uses the size of the school to split up the competing bands. This is the method used by Bands of America, the Indiana State School Music Association, Kentucky Music Educators Association and the University Interscholastic League. Alternatively, the number of band members determines the class—with the largest bands being Division I, and smaller bands being classified as Division II, III, and IV.
The Sudler Trophy and Sudler Shields are awards bestowed each year by the John Philip Sousa Foundation on one university marching band and one high school marching band. The awards do not represent the winner of any championship, but rather a band surrounded by great tradition that has become respected nationally. No school may be honored with either award twice while under the same director.
Most marching bands in Canada are organized by the Canadian Band Association or by Canadian universities:
Although many bands have still retained the British tradition for marching bands, most have also adopted the style utilized by their American counterparts. Canadian military bands are often associated with civilian marching bands. Many of the civilian marching bands that exist today, such as the Oshawa Civic Band, The Concert Band of Cobourg and the Toronto Signals Band, have military roots and were formerly Canadian Army bands. In the case of the aforementioned bands, their lineage is shared with the bands of The Ontario Regiment, the 6th Northumberland Militia and the 2nd Armoured Divisional Signals Regiment respectively. In the early to mid 20th century, the Canadian Forces maintained drum and bugle corps, which were similar in instrumentation and organization to civilian marching bands.
In Taiwan, the National Marching Band Association is the main organizer of local marching bands in the country. It is currently located at its headquarters in the Neihu District of Taipei City. The Taipei First Girls' High School currently sports one of the most acclaimed marching bands in the country.
The first marching bands were introduced in Malaysia during the British colonial period and has since grown and increased its importance. The most common are found in the Malaysian Armed Forces, however, in recent years, there has been a rise in the number of show bands and drum corps in the country. Although the Ministry of Education organizes most school marching bands, other organizations have made consistent efforts to organize local marching bands.
In Russia, there are not many school or local marching bands in existence, with most being government-sponsored military and police bands, as well as several bands operated by the local governments. The marching bands of the Russian Armed Forces are organized by the Military Band Service in the Ministry of Defence. Also known as "Marshiruyushchiye orkestr" (loosely translated to Марширующие оркестр, which means Marching Orchestra in Russian), notable Russian marching bands include the Band and Corps of Drums of the Moscow Military Music College, whose cadets are famous for setting the pace for the annual Victory Day Parades on Red Square. These types of bands only came into existence after 1991 when the Soviet Union ceased to exist. During the Soviet era, civilian like marching bands were extremely rare, with one of the only non-military bands having been employed in the late 1930s and early 1940s during National Sports Day parades in the capital of Moscow. Other Russian marching bands include the Drummers Group of the Boarding School for Girls of the Ministry of Defense of Russia and the Moscow & District Pipe Band. The country has hosted many marching band tattoos within the last 70 years, including the Spasskaya Tower Military Music Festival and Tattoo in Moscow and the Amur Waves International Military Bands Festival in Khabarovsk. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39748 |
Cartoon Network Studios
Cartoon Network Studios is an American animation studio owned by Warner Bros. Entertainment. Located in Burbank, California, the studio primarily produces and develops animated programs and shorts for Cartoon Network. In the 2010s, their programs began to expand into their sister companies Adult Swim and HBO Max. The company has only produced one theatrically released film, "The Powerpuff Girls Movie", which was distributed by what is now its sister company, Warner Bros. Pictures.
The actual animation service for their productions is done overseas, mostly in South Korea at Digital eMation, Saerom Animation, Rough Draft Korea, and Sunmin Image Pictures, with pre-production and post-production being United States-based.
Cartoon Network Studios originated as a division of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, Inc. that focused on producing original programming for Cartoon Network, including "What a Cartoon!", "Dexter's Laboratory", "Johnny Bravo", and "The Powerpuff Girls". Following the 1996 merger of Hanna-Barbera's parent, Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner, and after being located on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles since 1963, the Hanna-Barbera studio, its archives, and its extensive animation art collection, were relocated in 1998 to Sherman Oaks Galleria in Sherman Oaks, California, where Warner Bros. Animation was located. This relocation was executed by its chief executive, Jean MacCurdy. After Hanna-Barbera was completely folded into Warner Bros. Animation in 2001 amid William Hanna's death, Cartoon Network Studios was resurrected as a separate entity.
In 2000, Cartoon Network Studios transferred its production offices to a new facility located at 300 N 3rd St in Burbank, California, which was the location of a former Pacific Bell telephone exchange. Former DiC and Nickelodeon employees Brian A. Miller and Jennifer Pelphrey have managed the company since it began production in 2000.
In 2002, Cartoon Network Studios produced two television pilots for Cartoon Network's late night programming block Adult Swim: "Welcome to Eltingville" and "The Groovenians". Neither of them were picked as full series. Also, the studio released this year its only theatrical film to date: "The Powerpuff Girls Movie", based on "The Powerpuff Girls", which bombed at the box-office, but had modest reviews from critics. In 2006, Cartoon Network Studios collaborated with sister studio Williams Street for the first time for "Korgoth of Barbaria", a television pilot made for Adult Swim, which was also not green-lit as a series.
In 2007, Cartoon Network Studios began its first foray into live action with the hybrid series "Out of Jimmy's Head", and then its first fully live action project, "" and its sequel, "", along with the television pilots "Locker 514", "Siblings" and "Stan the Man". The studio's first live action series "Tower Prep" would arrive in 2010. Former New Line Television reality producer Mark Costa was hired to oversee the projects and Cartoon Network Studios' live action production company Alive and Kicking, Inc.. "Incredible Crew" was the last series in that genre the studio produced for Cartoon Network. Despite the failure of live action on the channel, the studio's infrastructure was retained to produce live action fare for sibling programming block Adult Swim, identifying on-air as Alive and Kicking, along with two other companies (Rent Now Productions and Factual Productions), instead of using the Cartoon Network Studios banner.
In 2010, "Adventure Time" premiered on Cartoon Network. It began life as a short featured on Nicktoons' "Random! Cartoons" that was ultimately not green-lit as a series by that channel. Cartoon Network picked it up later. The show ran until 2018 with 10 seasons and 283 episodes. A film was announced in 2015, but in 2018 Adam Muto said that the movie was never officially announced. In 2019, a continuation, titled "", was announced for HBO Max with a release in 2020. Also this year, "The Cartoonstitute", an incubator series similar to "What a Cartoon!", debuted on Cartoon Network Video. The pilots of "Regular Show" and "Uncle Grandpa" were presented here among with other shorts, with the "Uncle Grandpa" pilot also serving as a basis for "Secret Mountain Fort Awesome", which preceded the actual series.
In 2014, Cartoon Network Studios produced its first miniseries, "Over the Garden Wall". The following year, "Long Live the Royals" was also premiered.
In 2016, Cartoon Network Studios produced two reboots based on "The Powerpuff Girls" and "Ben 10" respectively. Also, the studio produced its first television series based on a series of online shorts, "Mighty Magiswords".
In 2017, after plans as old as 2002 for a movie failed to work, "Samurai Jack" was revived for a fifth and final season for Adult Swim, to critical acclaim, concluding the series after its cancellation from Cartoon Network in 2004. Also this year, it was announced that Cartoon Network Studios, in collaboration with Studio T, would produce an adult animated series titled "Close Enough" created by "Regular Show" creator J. G. Quintel. Originally planned for TBS, the series was eventually dropped from there after the failure of its planned animation block; eventually, in 2019, HBO Max picked it up from TBS.
In 2019, after handling a few episodes of "Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law", the second season of "Black Dynamite", the above-mentioned fifth season of "Samurai Jack" and producing the above-mentioned television pilots "Welcome to Eltingville", "The Groovenians" and "Korgoth of Barbaria", Cartoon Network Studios produced its first full program for Adult Swim: "Primal", an adult animated series from Genndy Tartakovsky. The first five episodes were also packaged for a limited theatrical release as a feature film titled "Primal: Tales of Savagery".
In 2020, Cartoon Network Studios will mark its first foray into producing content for streaming services since the second season of "Secret Mountain Fort Awesome" and "The Problem Solverz", which were released exclusively on iTunes in 2012 (for the first) and on Netflix in 2013 (for the second), with "Adventure Time: Distant Lands", "Tig N' Seek" and "The Fungies!" planned for HBO Max.
This is a list of Cartoon Network Studios/Cartoon Network original shorts that were not pilots.
All the films are theatrically distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39749 |
Colour guard
In military organizations, a colour guard (or color guard) is a detachment of soldiers assigned to the protection of regimental colours. This duty is so prestigious that the colour is generally carried by a young officer (Ensign), while experienced non-commissioned officers (colour sergeants) are assigned to the protection of the flag. These NCOs, accompanied sometimes by warrant officers (as is the case in several countries), can be ceremonially armed with either sabres or rifles to protect the colour. Colour guards are generally dismounted, but there are also mounted colour guard formations as well.
As armies became trained and adopted set formations, each regiment's ability to keep its formation was potentially critical to its, and therefore its army's, success. In the chaos of battle, not least due to the amount of dust and smoke on a battlefield, soldiers needed to be able to determine where their regiment was. Flags and banners have been used by many armies in battle to serve this purpose.
Regimental flags were generally awarded to a regiment by a head-of-State during a ceremony and colours may be inscribed with battle honours or other symbols representing former achievements. They were therefore treated with reverence as they represented the honour and traditions of the regiment. The loss of a unit's flag was not only shameful, but losing this central point of reference could make the unit break up. So regiments tended to adopt colour guards, a detachment of experienced or élite soldiers, to protect their colours. As a result, the capture of an enemy's standard was considered as a great feat of arms.
Due to the advent of modern weapons, and subsequent changes in tactics, colours are no longer used in battle, but continue to be carried by colour guards at events of formal character.
Colour guards are used in the military throughout the Commonwealth of Nations, including Australia, Canada, Jamaica, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. A colour guard unit typically consists of the standard-bearer, who is of the rank of second lieutenant or equivalent (pilot officer or sub-lieutenant), positioned in the centre of the colour guard, flanked by two or more individuals, typically armed with rifles or sabres. A colour sergeant major typically stands behind the colours carrying a pace stick. So, the formation (when the colours are combined on parade) is as follows:
Aside from presenting arms and sabres, colour guards of the Commonwealth of Nations are expected to lower their flags to the ground in full and regular salutes in ceremonies and parades. Civilians should stand during such times and soldiers are expected to salute them when not in formation.
As the British Army, the Royal Air Force, the Royal Marines and the Royal Navy have several types of colours, there are also colour guards for these colours and these colours and their colour guards are as follows:
In the cavalry, the Queen's Standard or Guidon and the Regimental/Squadron Standard or Guidon (for the light cavalry only) are the equivalents to the Queen's and Regimental Colours.
Colour guards in the artillery units are technically the lead gun's crew and leader (except in the Honourable Artillery Company which uses both guns and Colours) and there are no colour guards in the rifle regiments (nowadays The Rifles), the Royal Gurkha Rifles (which use the Queen's Truncheon) and in the Royal Hospital in Chelsea.
All of the RN's Queen's Colours are identical. Within the RN a colour guard unit consists of:
In the Chinese People's Liberation Army, are colour guards composed of
In the parades of the 1950s, this configuration was present in every unit of the PLA up to the parade of 1959, but with the ensign and escorts drawn from individual formations. Today, only honor guards are granted colour guard duty to represent the whole of the PLA. Being the seniormost branch of the PLA, the Ground Forces representative serves as the ensign in the service colour guard, with the officer to his/her right being from the Navy and the officer to their left being from the Air Force. Since 1981, the PLA has continued a tradition of the colour guard detail with the PLA flag leading the Beijing Garrison Honor Guard Battalion in military parades. In December 2017, the Beijing Garrison Colour Guard Company of the People's Armed Police, which is present during flag ceremonies in Tiananmen Square in Beijing carrying the national flag, was officially attached to the honor guard battalion.
In Taiwan, the colour guard tradition of the Republic of China Armed Forces is modeled on the German, Russian and US practice. Until 1976, each military unit sported a singular stand of colours on parade, as opposed to the honor guard of the ROCAF, which is more aligned with the traditions of the US Joint Service Honor Guard of the Joint Force Headquarters National Capital Region. All colour bearers of formations above company level must be, following US tradition, holding the rank of sergeant or above as a non-commissioned officer, while the colour escorts are lower ranking enlisted personnel. All wear full dress, service dress or battle dress uniforms. Since the National Day parade of 1978, the format of unit colour guards in ROCAF formations of battalion size (and of equivalent formations) is:
Brigade-level colours (and above) are guided by the left and right escorts only.
The joint service colour guard of the ROCAF General Headquarters, today as in the past, is similarly composed but is more larger, with its composition being
French colour guards are composed of:
The colour guards of France's military academies tend to wear swords; those of NCO schools, other educational institutions and active units carry rifles instead. This design is used in other countries with Francophone populations.
French colour guards render honors on the command of present arms (présentez arme). On command, the 2 NCOs and 3 enlisted will execute present arms, whether it be by presenting their sabre vertically or by putting the right hand over the handle of their weapon while the ensign lowers the national colour/unit colour somewhere close to their legs. On some occasions, the flag is not lowered unless the guard is in the presence of a dignitary (such as the President of the Republic) or a military leader (such as the Chief of the Defence Staff).
In Indonesia, the Colour guard is known as "'Pataka'" an abbreviation from ""Pasukan Tanda Kehormatan"" which is the term used in various uniformed institutions including the Indonesian National Armed Forces, the Indonesian National Police, the Municipal Police Units, etc. referring to the white-uniformed 9-man or 12-man guard present during ceremonial events carrying and escorting the Colour of the institution. The Pataka are modeled from the former Dutch practice and is led by a Colour sergeant positioned at the middle of the guard (rear of the ensign), while the ensign who carries the Colour is usually a junior lieutenant (2nd Lieutenant or Ensign). For a battalion level, the Colour is carried by a Sergeant/chief petty officer. If in massed colour guards, a colour officer of 2nd Lieutenant or Ensign (or 1st Lieutenant/Lieutenant (junior grade) rank leads the formation. Only one formation, the Cavalry Detachment of the Army Education, Training and Doctrine Command, has a mounted colour guard unit.
Composition of the Indonesian colour guard unit
The uniform of the colour guard is basically all-white, with a white ceremonial combat helmet similar to the M1 helmet, white full dress uniform, white leather flag carrier worn by the ensign, and white parade boots. The colour guard personnel of the Armed Forces and the National Police usually carries the M1 Garand rifle, but sometimes the M-16, FN FAL or Pindad SS1 rifle is used.
In Mexico, an "Escolta de la bandera" or "Escolta" is used to describe colour guards and flag parties in the Spanish language. In Mexico these formations are made up of six individuals: the flag party commander and the escort proper of around 5, following the French practice. In the Mexican Armed Forces, National Guard and state police formations the colour escort squad is made up of:
The Dutch armed forces have similar ranks corresponding to a colour guard, the "vaandrig" and "kornet" (aspirant officers who have not been sworn in yet). The colour guard practice mirrors that of the United Kingdom, with an ensign of second lieutenant rank (or equivalent), armed escorts, and a colour guard commander.
The practices of the colour guards for the armed forces of a number of post-Soviet states are similar to one another, adopting the practice from the former Soviet Armed Forces. Colour guards from these states are typically composed of a colour officer, one ensign or senior NCO holding the flag of their respective country as the national colour or the unit colour, and two enlisted personnel assisting the ensign. Active units, military academies, and guards of honor carry sabers in the colour guard, if needed, rifles may be substituted.
If there are multiple colour guards marching in a parade at the same time, one guard is required to march directly behind the first guard. During the Soviet era, the Soviet flag was never allowed to be paraded by a military colour guard, with military and regimental flags only being paraded in colour guards. On occasion during the Soviet era, the Victory Banner was also used in colour guard teams, with the last known occasions being in 1975, 1977, 1985, 1987 and 1990.
However, several post-Soviet armed forces have deviated/modified the practices of the former Soviet colour guard; evident with the colour guards of the Turkmen Ground Forces, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, whose colour guards dip their flags as a form of salute.
The customs practiced by the colour guards of the former Soviet Armed Forces was also adopted by the Mongolian Armed Forces, given the historical relationship between the two countries.
Given a shared heritage with Austria and Turkey plus its own traditions, the modern Serbian Armed Forces maintains a colour guard component. Every unit of the Armed Forces has a colour company that is made up of:
In Sweden the colour guard can be composed in three distinct manners: Greater colour guard, smaller colour guard and an officers guard. Each regiment, or military unit that carries a colour, in Sweden sets up its own colour guard. The Swedish military rank of fänrik (and the corresponding cavalry rank of "kornet") was originally intended for the holder of the company flag. This duty was considered so prestigious that an officer was necessary to carry it out. Today, it is a regular officer rank.
This is composed of two commissioned officers, called "fanförare" ("carriers of the colour") and eight enlisted soldiers. This stems from the time of king Gustavus Adolphus and the Thirty Years' War when all Swedish regiments had eight battalions. Each battalion contributed one soldier to the common colour guard.
This is composed of one commissioned officer and four enlisted soldiers.
This is composed of three commissioned officers.
In the military of the United States, the colour guard carries the national colour and other flags appropriate to its position in the chain of command. Typically these include a unit flag and a departmental flag (Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, or Coast Guard). In addition to the flag bearers, who are positioned in the center of the colour guard, there are two or more individuals who carry rifles and or sabres. This is a symbol that the flag (and its nation) will always be protected.
In the U.S., traditionally, the unit's sergeant major is responsible for the safeguarding, care, and display of the organizational colours. The sergeant major is also responsible for the selection, training, and performance of the members. The colour guard consists of enlisted members and is commanded by the senior (color) Sergeant, who carries the National Colors and gives the necessary commands for movements and rendering honors during drill exercises or parade ceremonies.
Being assigned to the colour guard is considered an honor due to the fact that these individuals present and carry the symbols of their unit and country. Depending on the circumstance and subject to the orders of their commander, members may wear full dress or less formal uniforms. It is mandatory for all members of the colour guard to wear headgear, for example, a garrison cap, beret, or service cap. On occasion, certain colour guards can be horse-mounted.
A US colour guard is made up of a "Color Sergeant" carrying the National Colors and serves as the unit commander, a unit or command colour bearer, and two colour escorts carrying rifles and/or sabres. If multiple colours are carried, multiple colour bearers may be needed.
The colour guard is formed and marched in one rank at close interval (shoulder-to-shoulder). Since the National Colors must always be in the position of honor on the right, the colour guard must execute a special movement to reverse direction. It does not execute rear march, nor does it execute about face. Rather, it performs a maneuver derived from the standard countercolumn command, generally known as "counter march" or "colour reverse march", in order to keep the precedence of flags in order.
Other drill movements performed by the colour guard include presenting arms, left and right wheel (turns) marches, eyes right (upon passing the reviewing stand during a parade), casing/uncasing the colour, and fixing/unfixing bayonets (by the arms bearers).
The colour guard renders honors when the national anthem is played or sung, when passing in review during a parade, or in certain other circumstances. In these cases, the unit and departmental flags salute by dipping (leaning the flag forward). However, with the exception of a response to a naval salute, the United States national flag renders no salute. This is enshrined in the United States Flag Code and U.S. law.
In the U.S. military, individuals or units passing or being passed by uncased (unfurled) colours render honors when outdoors. Individuals who are not part of any formation begin the hand salute when the colours are six paces distant and hold it until they have passed six paces beyond the colours.
Civilians are expected to stand at the position of attention with their right hand placed over their heart for the same period, and the hand salute applies to uniformed organizations as well (specifically the Boy Scouts of America and Girl Scouts of America). Since recently, veterans are expected to hand salute the colours too, like their military counterparts including personnel not in uniform. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39750 |
Multi-user software
Multi-user software is software that allows access by multiple users of a computer. Time-sharing systems are multi-user systems. Most batch processing systems for mainframe computers may also be considered "multi-user", to avoid leaving the CPU idle while it waits for I/O operations to complete. However, the term "multitasking" is more common in this context.
An example is a Unix server where multiple remote users have access (such as via a serial port or Secure Shell) to the Unix shell prompt at the same time. Another example uses multiple X Window sessions spread across multiple terminals powered by a single machine - this is an example of the use of thin client. Similar functions were also available under MP/M, Concurrent DOS, Multiuser DOS and FlexOS.
Some multi-user operating systems such as Windows versions from the Windows NT family support simultaneous access by multiple users (for example, via Remote Desktop Connection) as well as the ability for a user to disconnect from a local session while leaving processes running (doing work on their behalf) while another user logs into and uses the system. The operating system provides isolation of each user's processes from other users, while enabling them to execute concurrently.
Management systems are implicitly designed to be used by multiple users, typically one system administrator or more and an end-user community.
The complementary term, single-user, is most commonly used when talking about an operating system being usable only by one person at a time, or in reference to a single-user software license agreement. Multi-user operating systems such as Unix sometimes have a single user mode or runlevel available for emergency maintenance. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39751 |
Sousaphone
The sousaphone () is a brass instrument in the same family as the more widely known tuba. Created around 1893 by J.W. Pepper at the direction of American bandleader John Philip Sousa (after whom the instrument was then named), it was designed to be easier to play than the concert tuba while standing or marching, as well as to carry the sound of the instrument above the heads of the band. Like the tuba, sound is produced by moving air past the lips, causing them to vibrate or "buzz" into a large cupped mouthpiece. Unlike the tuba, the instrument is bent in a circle to fit around the body of the musician; it ends in a large, flaring bell that is pointed forward, projecting the sound ahead of the player. Because of the ease of carrying and the direction of sound, it is widely employed in marching bands, as well as various other musical genres. Sousaphones were originally made out of brass but in the mid-20th century started to be made from lighter materials like fiberglass; today both types are in wide use.
The first sousaphone was built by James Welsh Pepper in 1893 at the request of John Philip Sousa, who was dissatisfied with the hélicons in use by the United States Marine Band. Some sources credit C.G. Conn with its construction, because of the first sousaphone he built later in 1898. Sousa wanted a tuba-like instrument that would send sound upward and over the band, much like a concert (upright) tuba. The new instrument had an oversized bell pointing straight up, rather than the directional bell of a normal hélicon.
The sousaphone was initially developed as a concert instrument rather than for marching. Sousa wanted the new instrument for the professional band which he started after leaving the Marines, and this band marched only once. Sousa mainly used sousaphones built by C.G. Conn. Although less balanced on a player's body than a helicon, because of the large spectacular bell high in the air, the sousaphone retained the tuba-like sound by widening the bore and throat of the instrument significantly. Its upright bell led to the instrument being dubbed a "rain-catcher". Some versions of this design allowed the bell to also rotate forward, projecting the sound to the front of the band. This bell configuration remained the standard for several decades and is the standard today.
The instrument proved practical for marching, and by 1908 the United States Marine Band adopted it.
Versions with the characteristic extra 90° bend making a forward-facing bell were developed in the early 1900s. Early sousaphones had bells, with bells popular in the 1920s. From the mid-1930s onward, sousaphone bells have been standardized at a diameter of . Some larger sousaphones (Monster, Grand, Jumbo, Giant or Grand Jumbo, depending on brand) were produced in limited quantities.
The sousaphone is a valved brass instrument with the same tube length and musical range as other tubas. The sousaphone's shape is such that the bell is above the tubist's head and projecting forward. The valves are situated directly in front of the musician slightly above the waist and all of the weight rests on the left shoulder. The bell is normally detachable from the instrument body to facilitate transportation and storage. Except for the instrument's general shape and appearance, the sousaphone is technically similar to a tuba.
For simplicity and light weight, modern sousaphones almost always use three non-compensating piston valves in their construction, in direct contrast to their concert counterparts' large variation in number, type, and orientation. Both the tuba and sousaphone are semi-conical brass instruments. No valved brass instrument can be entirely conical, since the middle section containing the valves must be cylindrical. While the degree of bore conicity does affect the timbre of the instrument, much as in a cornet and trumpet, or a euphonium and a trombone, the bore profile of a sousaphone is similar to that of most tubas.
To facilitate making the mouthpiece accessible to players of different height or body shapes, most sousaphones contain a detachable tubing gooseneck which arises from the lead pipe on the upwind side of the valves. One or two slightly-angled bit(s) (short tubing lengths) are inserted into the gooseneck, and then the mouthpiece is inserted into the terminal bit. This arrangement may be adjusted in height and yaw angle to place the mouthpiece comfortably at the player's lips.
Most sousaphones are manufactured from sheet brass, usually yellow or silver, with silver, lacquer, and gold plating options, much like many brass instruments. However, the sousaphone (uniquely) is also commonly seen manufactured from fiberglass, due to its lower cost, greater durability, and significantly lighter weight.
The weight of a sousaphone can be between and .
Most modern sousaphones are made in the key of BB (Low B Flat) and like tubas (which are commonly made in pitches of BB, CC, EE, and F) the instrument's part is written in "concert pitch", not transposed by key for a specific instrument. Although sousaphones may have a more restricted range than their concert tuba counterpart (most sousaphones have 3 valves instead of 4 to reduce weight), generally they can all play the same music and usually have parts written in the bass clef and the indicated octave is played (unlike double bass or electric bass that sound an octave lower than the indicated note). Many older sousaphones were pitched in the key of E, but current production of sousaphones in that key is limited.
Although most major instrument manufacturers have made, and many continue to make, sousaphones, Conn and King (H.N. White) instruments are generally agreed among players to be the standards against which other sousaphones are judged for tone quality and playability. Perhaps the most highly regarded sousaphone ever built is the Conn model 20K, introduced in the mid-1930s and still in production. Some players, especially those who find the 20K too heavy for marching, prefer the slightly smaller King model 1250, first made in the late 1920s and also still in production as model 2350. Historically, Holton, York and Martin sousaphones have also been considered fine horns. Unlike with other brass instruments, some players dislike the sousaphones made by non-American manufacturers.
Very large bore (>= 0.750 inch) sousaphones, with oversized bells as large as in diameter, were made by Conn ("Grand Jumbo" [46K (3-valve) & 48K (4-valve)]) and King ("Jumbo" [1265 (3- & 4-valve versions)] & "Giant" [1270 (3-valve) & 1271 (4-valve)]) in the mid-1920s and 1930s, and by Martin, York, & Buescher, but they disappeared from the catalogs during the Depression or at the onset of World War II. Because of their weight and cost, few were made and even fewer survive, especially the 4-valve models.
In recent years, sousaphones have been available made of fiberglass reinforced plastics instead of brass. The fiberglass versions are used mainly for marching, with brass instruments being used for all other situations. Depending on the model, the fiberglass version does not have as dark and rich a tone as the brass (King fiberglass sousaphones tended to have smooth fiberglass and a tone somewhat more like a brass sousaphone; Conn fiberglass sousaphones often had rough fiberglass exteriors and a thinner sound; the Conn is also lighter).
In the 1920s and 1930s, four-valved sousaphones were often used by professional players, especially E sousaphones; today, however, four-valved B sousaphones are uncommon and are prized by collectors, especially those made by Conn, King (H.N. White), and Holton. Jupiter Company started production of four-valve BB sousaphones in the late 2000s, and Dynasty USA makes a four-valve BBb sousaphone as well. Criticisms of the fourth valve on a sousaphone center around additional weight, although the fourth valve improves intonation and facilitates playing of the lower register.
Due to the large size of most sousaphones, the sub-contra register (for which the fourth valve is largely intended) is already covered by alternate resonances, known as "false tones" (see Tuba article). Many beginners are not aware of the false-tone resonances on their sousaphones because these notes reside in the sub-contra register, which is nearly impossible for most beginners to access. Some professionals develop a "raised embouchure" to securely play these notes. This is where either the upper or lower lip (depending on the player) takes up most of the mouthpiece area. The embouchure provides almost twice the room for vibration of the single lip (compared to the 50–50 embouchure).
Asian sousaphones made in China and India are gaining popularity in the street band market. In Switzerland and Southern Germany, "Guggenmusik" bands often use these instruments that provide great display and passable tone. Most are tuned in E. Brands like Zweiss with older British designs make affordable sousaphones that have broken the €500 barrier. These are mostly in the medium-bell size of . Chinese brands are mostly reverse-engineered models and quite passable.
In large marching bands of the United States, the bell is often covered with a tight fitting cloth, called a sock, which enables the sousaphone section to spell out the school's name, initials, or mascot. The Leland Stanford Junior University Marching Band Tööbz! have a tradition of painting the front surface of their sousaphone bells with a variety of images.
Sousaphone players are also known to perform the 'flaming tubas' in which flash paper is ignited in the bell, thus making it appear as if the musician is breathing fire. David Silverman (AKA Tubatron ) developed a propane powered flaming sousaphone with a trigger valve to control an array of flame jets across the top of the bell of his horn.
The Yale Precision Marching Band has made a tradition of setting fire to the tops of the bells of their sousaphones, including in the fall of 1992 when sousaphones served as the "candles" of a "wedding cake" formed by the band when two band alumni were married during a halftime show. They also utilize what they refer to as the "Überphone", a sousaphone that was disassembled from its coiled format and welded back together on a twelve-foot frame to extend straight up from the player's shoulders. Used in many places
John Philip Sousa was a benefactor of the University of Illinois music program and a friend of the university's Director of Bands Albert Austin Harding. The Marching Illini became the first band to march in a football halftime show, and were the first band to use sousaphones on the field.
The sousaphone sections of some marching bands have developed specialized performance traditions. The University of California Marching Band Bass section traditionally "struts" during the band's pregame show. During the "strut" the section separates from the rest of the band, circles the North goal post, and rejoins the band to complete the Script Cal. The University of Southern California Trojan Marching Band sousaphones play John Williams' "Imperial March" from "Star Wars" in single file when crossing streets on their way to and from performances on the USC campus. When The Ohio State University Marching Band performs its traditional Script Ohio formation, a senior sousaphone player dots the "i".
The Fightin' Texas Aggie Band sousaphone section (called "Bass Horns" within the university but never, ever "tubas") execute a distinct two-step and four-step counter-march during marching performances. During halftime performances this is accompanied (specifically for the last rank consisting all of 12 bass horns) by a "huh! huh!" from the crowd.
The University of Delaware Fightin' Blue Hen Marching Band has several traditions involving sousaphone players. During pre-game, they branch off from the rest of the band. From here, the sousaphone players run in a snake around the field jumping to drum line cadence. At most pre-games they act out a skit as well. At post game, "In My Life" by The Beatles is played featuring a sousaphone solo while the band sings.
After every pre-game show at Florida State University when the section (known by all the marching band members as "Flush"- short for "Royal Flush") run in a circle, with their horns tipped up parallel to the ground, around the Seminole head on the field with the head drum major in the center of the circle. This is called "Flushing the field" or "Flushing the Indian Head", derived from the section's nickname "Flush".
The Marching Virginians of Virginia Tech perform a version of the Hokie Pokie featuring the sousaphone section putting their sousaphones in, taking their sousaphones out, putting their sousaphones in, and shaking them all about – followed by an all-sousaphone kick line.
The University of Toledo Sousaphone line (also called The RMB Dosbas) march off the field in a snake line after home games and performs the song "sonic boom" when the rest of the band meets back with them.
For the last 20 years The University of Idaho Vandals Marching Band Sousaphone section all wear long skirts that were originally used by the 1948 University Women's Chorus. University of Idaho Vandals Sousaphone Section
The sousaphone is an important fixture of the New Orleans brass band tradition and is still used in groups such as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band by Kirk Joseph. Soul Rebels Brass Band from New Orleans features sousaphone player Edward Lee, Jr.
Sinaloa, a state of Mexico, has a type of music called Banda Sinaloense, and the sousaphone is used there as a tuba.
Damon "Tuba Gooding Jr." Bryson from The Roots plays the sousaphone on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
Nat Mcintosh is the sousaphone player and co-founder of Youngblood Brass Band, who play a mixture of traditional New Orleans style brass band music and hip hop.
The Lemon Bucket Orkestra, a Canadian self-described "Balkan-Klezmer-Gypsy-Punk-Super-Party-Band", features a sousaphone as one of their instruments.
Red Baraat, a Brooklyn-based dhol & brass band that fuses North Indian Bhangra with hip-hop, go-go and jazz music, features John Altieri on sousaphone.
Warren G. Harding, the 29th President of the United States, was a sousaphone player who played well enough to join the band celebrating his election.
Jeanie Schroder of the band DeVotchKa plays sousaphone on several of the band's songs.
Tuba Gooding, Jr. (Damon Bryson) plays sousaphone for The Roots | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39752 |
John Philip Sousa
John Philip Sousa (; November 6, 1854 – March 6, 1932) was an American composer and conductor of the late Romantic era known primarily for American military marches. He is known as "The March King" or the "American March King", to distinguish him from his British counterpart Kenneth J. Alford who is also known as "The March King". Among his best-known marches are "The Stars and Stripes Forever" (National March of the United States of America), "Semper Fidelis" (official march of the United States Marine Corps), "The Liberty Bell", "The Thunderer", and "The Washington Post".
Sousa began his career playing violin and studying music theory and composition under John Esputa and George Felix Benkert. His father enlisted him in the United States Marine Band as an apprentice in 1868. He left the band in 1875 and learned to conduct. From 1880 until his death, he focused exclusively on conducting and writing music. He eventually rejoined the Marine Band and served there for 12 years as director, after which he organized his own band. Sousa aided in the development of the sousaphone, a large brass instrument similar to the helicon and tuba.
Upon the outbreak of World War I, Sousa was awarded a wartime commission of lieutenant commander to lead the Naval Reserve Band in Illinois. He then returned to conduct the Sousa Band until his death in 1932. (In the 1920s, he was promoted to the permanent rank of lieutenant commander in the naval reserve, but he never saw active service again.)
John Philip Sousa was born in Washington, D.C., the third of ten children of João António de Sousa (John Anthony Sousa) (22 September 1824 – 27 April 1892) who was born in Spain, though of Portuguese ancestry, and his wife Maria Elisabeth Trinkaus (20 May 1826 – 25 August 1908) from Fränkisch-Crumbach who was of German ancestry. He began his music education under the tuition of John Esputa Sr., who taught him solfeggio. This was short-lived, however, because of the teacher's frequent bad temper. His real music education began in 1861 or 1862 as a pupil of John Esputa Jr., the son of his previous teacher under whom Sousa studied violin, piano, flute, several brass instruments, and singing. Esputa shared his father's bad temper, and the relationship between teacher and pupil was often strained, but Sousa progressed very rapidly and was also found to have perfect pitch. He wrote his first composition "An Album Leaf" during this period, but Esputa dismissed it as "bread and cheese" and the composition was subsequently lost.
His father was a trombonist in the Marine Band, and he enlisted Sousa in the United States Marine Corps as an apprentice at age 13 to keep him from joining a circus band. In the same year, he began studying music under George Felix Benkert. Sousa was enlisted under a minority enlistment meaning that he would not be discharged until his 21st birthday.
Sousa completed his apprenticeship in 1875 and began performing on the violin. He then joined a theatrical pit orchestra where he learned to conduct. He returned to the Marine Band as its head in 1880 and remained as its conductor until 1892. He led "The President's Own" band under five presidents from Rutherford B. Hayes to Benjamin Harrison. His band played at the inaugural balls of James A. Garfield in 1881 and Benjamin Harrison in 1889.
The marching brass bass or sousaphone is a modified helicon created in 1893 by Philadelphia instrument maker J. W. Pepper at Sousa's request, using several of his suggestions in its design. He wanted a tuba that could sound upward and over the band whether its player was seated or marching. C.G. Conn recreated the instrument in 1898, and this was the model that Sousa preferred to use.
Sousa organized The Sousa Band the year that he left the Marine Band, and it toured from 1892 to 1931 and performed at 15,623 concerts, both in America and around the world, including at the World Exposition in Paris and at the Royal Albert Hall in London. In Paris, the Sousa Band marched through the streets to the Arc de Triomphe, one of only eight parades that the band marched in during its 40 years.
Sousa served two periods of service in the Marine Corps. He first enlisted on June 9, 1868 at age 13 as an apprentice musician, his rank listed as "boy". He re-enlisted on July 8, 1872 and was promoted to musician. He left the Marine Corps in 1875 at age 20. His second period of Marine service was from 1880 to 1892, during which he was the leader of the Marine Band in Washington, D.C. Some sources state that he served with the rank of Sergeant Major and was eventually promoted to Warrant Officer, but this is erroneous, as the leader of the band was a separate rank from sergeant major and the Marine Corps did not have warrant officers until 1916. The Marine Band became the premier military band in the United States under his leadership.
The Columbia Phonograph Company produced 60 recordings of the Marine Band conducted by Sousa which led to his national fame. In July 1892, Sousa requested a discharge from the Marine Corps to pursue a financially promising civilian career as a band leader. He conducted a farewell concert at the White House on July 30, 1892 and was discharged from the Marine Corps the next day.
Sousa was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve on May 31, 1917, shortly after the United States declared war on Germany and entered World War I. He was 62 years old, which was the mandatory retirement age for Navy officers. During the war, he led the Navy Band at the Great Lakes Naval Station near Chicago, and he donated all of his naval salary except a token $1 per month to the Sailors' and Marines' Relief Fund. He was discharged from active duty after the war's end in November 1918 and returned to conducting his own band, but he continued to wear his naval uniform for many of his concerts and other public appearances. In the early 1920s, he was promoted to lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserve but did not return to active duty. He frequently wore his Navy uniform during performances for the remainder of his life.
For this service during the war, Sousa received the World War I Victory Medal and was elected as a Veteran Companion of the Military Order of Foreign Wars. He was also a member New York Athletic Club Post 754 of the American Legion.
On December 30, 1879, Sousa married Jane van Middlesworth Bellis (1862–1944), and their children were John Philip, Jr. (April 1, 1881 – May 18, 1937), Jane Priscilla (August 7, 1882 – October 28, 1958), and Helen (January 21, 1887 – October 14, 1975). All were buried in the John Philip Sousa plot in the Congressional Cemetery. Jane was descended from Adam Bellis who served in the New Jersey troops during the American Revolutionary War.
On March 15, 1881, the "March King" was initiated to the Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the Hiram Lodge No. 10, Washington, DC and later became Master Mason for 51 years.
Late in his life, Sousa lived in Sands Point, New York. He died of heart failure at age 77 on March 6, 1932 in his room at the Abraham Lincoln Hotel in Reading, Pennsylvania. He had conducted a rehearsal of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" the previous day with the Ringgold Band as its guest conductor. He is buried in Washington, D.C.'s Congressional Cemetery. His house "Wild Bank" has been designated a National Historic Landmark, although it remains a private home and is not open to the public.
Sousa was decorated with the palms of the Order of Public Instruction of Portugal and the Order of Academic Palms of France. He also received the Royal Victorian Medal from King Edward VII of the United Kingdom in December 1901 for conducting a private birthday concert for Queen Alexandra.
In 1922, he accepted the invitation of the national chapter to become an honorary member of Kappa Kappa Psi, the national honorary band fraternity. In 1932, he was initiated as an honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national fraternity for men in music, by the fraternity's Alpha Xi chapter at the University of Illinois.
The World War II Liberty Ship was named in his honor.
In 1952, 20th Century Fox honored Sousa in their Technicolor feature film "Stars and Stripes Forever" with Clifton Webb portraying him. It was loosely based on Sousa's memoirs "Marching Along".
In 1987, an act of Congress named "The Stars and Stripes Forever" as the national march of the United States.
He was posthumously enshrined in the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1976.
Sousa was a member of the Sons of the Revolution, Military Order of Foreign Wars, American Legion, Freemasons and the Society of Artists and Composers. He was also a member of the Salmagundi, Players, Musicians, New York Athletic, Lambs, Army and Navy and the Gridiron clubs of Washington.
Sousa wrote over 130 marches, 15 operettas, 5 overtures, 11 suites, 24 dances, 28 fantasies, and countless arrangements of nineteenth-century western European symphonic works.
Sousa wrote over 130 marches, published by Harry Coleman of Philadelphia, Carl Fischer Music, the John Church Company, and the Sam Fox Publishing Company, the last association beginning in 1917 and continuing until his death. Some of his more well-known marches include:
Sousa wrote marches for several American universities, including the University of Minnesota, University of Illinois, University of Nebraska, Kansas State University, Marquette University, and Pennsylvania Military College, now Widener University.
Sousa wrote many notable operettas including:
Marches and waltzes have been derived from many of these stage-works. Sousa also composed the music for six operettas that were either unfinished or not produced: "The Devils' Deputy", "Florine", "The Irish Dragoon", "Katherine", "The Victory", and "The Wolf".
In addition, Sousa wrote a march based on themes from Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado, the elegant overture "Our Flirtations", a number of musical suites, etc. He frequently added Sullivan opera overtures or other Sullivan pieces to his concerts. He was quoted saying, "My religion lies in my composition".
Sousa ranked as one of the all-time great trapshooters and was enshrined in the Trapshooting Hall of Fame. He organized the first national trapshooting organization, a forerunner to today's Amateur Trapshooting Association (ATA). He also wrote numerous articles about trapshooting. He was a regular competitor representing the Navy in trapshooting competitions, particularly against the Army. Records indicate that he registered more than 35,000 targets during his shooting career. "Let me say that just about the sweetest music to me is when I call, 'pull,' the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect key announces, 'dead'."
In his 1902 novella "The Fifth String", a virtuoso violinist makes a deal with the Devil for a magic violin with five strings. The first four strings excite the emotions of Pity, Hope, Love, and Joy, but the fifth string, made from the hair of Eve, will cause the player's death once played. The violinist wins the love of the woman he desires, but out of jealous suspicion, she commands him to play the death string, which he does. He published "Pipetown Sandy" in 1905, which includes a satirical poem titled "The Feast of the Monkeys". He wrote a 40,000-word story entitled "The Transit of Venus" in 1920. He also wrote the booklet "A manual for trumpet and drum", published by the Ludwig drum company with advice for playing drums and trumpet. An early version of the trumpet solo to "Semper Fidelis" was included in this volume.
Sousa held a very low opinion of the emerging recording industry and he derided recordings as "canned music", a reference to the early wax cylinder records that came in can-like cylindrical cardboard boxes. He argued to a congressional hearing in 1906:
Sousa's antipathy to recording was such that he did not conduct his band when it was being recorded. Nevertheless, the band made numerous recordings, the earliest being issued on cylinders by several companies, followed by many recordings on discs by the Berliner Gramophone Company and its successor the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA Victor). The Berliner recordings were conducted by Henry Higgins (one of Sousa's cornet soloists) and Arthur Pryor (Sousa's trombone soloist and assistant conductor). Sousa claimed that he had "never been in the gramophone company's office in my life". Sousa did conduct a few of the Victor recordings, but most were conducted by Pryor, Herbert L. Clarke, Edwin H. Clarke, Walter B. Rogers (who had also been a cornet soloist with Sousa), Rosario Bourdon, Josef Pasternack, or Nathaniel Shilkret. Details of the Victor recordings are available in the external link below to the EDVR.
Sousa also appeared with his band in newsreels and on radio broadcasts, beginning with a 1929 nationwide broadcast on NBC. In 1999, "Legacy" Records released some of his historic recordings on CD.
Even after death, Sousa continues to be remembered as "The March King" through the John Philip Sousa Foundation. The non-profit organization founded in 1981, recognizes one superior student in marching band for "musicianship, dependability, loyalty, and cooperation." The John Philip Sousa Foundation provides awards, scholarships, and projects such as The Sudler Trophy, The Sudler Shield, The Sudler Silver Scroll, The Sudler Flag of Honor, The Historic Roll of Honor, The Sudler Cup, The Hawkins Scholarship, National Young Artists, The National Community Band, and The Junior Honor Band Project. He won many honorable awards across his lifetime.
Articles
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Casimir Funk
Kazimierz Funk (; February 23, 1884 – November 19, 1967), commonly anglicized as Casimir Funk, was a Polish biochemist, generally credited with being among the first to formulate (in 1912) the concept of vitamins, which he called "vital amines" or "vitamines".
After reading an article by the Dutchman Christiaan Eijkman that indicated that persons who ate brown rice were less vulnerable to beri-beri than those who ate only the fully milled product, Funk tried to isolate the substance responsible, and he succeeded. Because that substance contained an amine group, he called it "vitamine". It was later to be known as vitamin B3 (niacin), though he thought that it would be thiamine (vitamin B1) and described it as "anti-beri-beri-factor". In 1911 he published his first paper in English, on dihydroxyphenylalanine. Funk was sure that more than one substance like Vitamin B1 existed, and in his 1912 article for the Journal of State Medicine, he proposed the existence of at least four vitamins: one preventing beriberi (“antiberiberi”); one preventing scurvy (“antiscorbutic”); one preventing pellagra (“antipellagric”); and one preventing rickets (“antirachitic”). From there, Funk published a book, "The Vitamines", in 1912, and later that year received a Beit Fellowship to continue his research.
Funk proposed the hypothesis that other diseases, such as rickets, pellagra, coeliac disease, and scurvy could also be cured by vitamins.
Funk was an early investigator of the problem of pellagra. He suggested that a change in the method of milling corn was responsible for the outbreak of pellagra, but no attention was paid to his article on this subject.
The "e" at the end of "vitamine" was later removed, when it was realized that vitamins need not be nitrogen-containing amines.
He postulated the existence of other essential nutrients, which became known as vitamins B1, B2, C, and D.
In 1936 he determined the molecular structure of thiamine, though he was not the first to isolate it.
Funk also conducted research into hormones, diabetes, peptic ulcers, and the biochemistry of cancer.
After returning to the United States, in 1940 he became president of the Funk Foundation for Medical Research. He spent his last years studying the causes of neoplasms ("cancers").
The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA) annually honors Polish-American scientists with the Casimir Funk Natural Sciences Award. Past winners have included Nobel Laureate Roald Hoffmann, Aleksander Wolszczan, Hilary Koprowski, Peter T. Wolczanski, Wacław Szybalski, Zbyszek Darzynkiewicz and Benoit Mandelbrot. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39760 |
Adnams
Adnams is a regional brewery founded in 1872 in Southwold, Suffolk, England, by George and Ernest Adnams. It produces cask ale and pasteurised bottled beers. Annual production is around 85,000 barrels.
In 2010, the company established the Copper House distillery for the production of gin, vodka and whisky.
The earliest recorded brewing on the Adnams site was in 1396 by Johanna de Corby.
The Sole Bay Brewery in Southwold was purchased in 1872 by George and Ernest Adnams. The company was incorporated in 1890, and has remained independent since then, producing a range of beers for distribution mainly in East Anglia. The Adnams family was joined in 1902 by Pierse Loftus, who brought strategic vision, technical expertise and sound financial principles, building the base on which succeeding generations have been able to build. Adnams is now a PLC, with numerous shareholders, but still has family representation on the board, with Jonathan Adnams as Chairman.
Until 1953 and from 1970 to 2006, casks of Adnams ale were delivered to the six pubs of Southwold by horse and dray; the tradition ended when a new distribution depot was built three miles from the brewery.
The company founded a charity, "The Adnams Charity", in 1990 to celebrate its centenary as a public company. A percentage of the company's annual profits is used to support worthwhile causes within a 25-mile radius of Southwold.
In 1993, Adnams Extra won the Champion Beer of Britain, an award presented by the Campaign for Real Ale at the annual Great British Beer Festival. Adnams remains committed to brewing cask ale and operating non-themed pubs. Cask ale is available in all its 70 pubs, and it supplies more than 1000 other outlets direct. New fermenting vessels were installed in March 2001 to cope with demand, and the brewhouse was completely re-equipped in July 2006, making it one of the most energy efficient in Europe.
At the beginning of 2004, Adnams purchased land in neighbouring village of Reydon to expand its business with a new distribution centre, designed by architect Jeremy Blake, which was nominated for the 2007 RICS East of England Award for Sustainability. Adnams was awarded a Queen's Award for Enterprise in the sustainable development category in 2005.
The distribution centre features the UK's largest living roof known as the Sky Garden which is made up of a variety of sedum species. Not only does this help to insulate the building, but the water stored in the sedum plants is also harvested and used to flush the staff toilets and clean company vehicles. This, combined with the solar panels and the environmental construction have meant the energy bills have been cut by half.
In June 2009, Adnams signed a five-year agreement to supply Ipswich Town FC with beers at their Portman Road stadium, replacing the 14-year-old association with Greene King.
In early 2019, Adnams launched a new English cider called Wild Wave.
Adnams produce regular cask ales, seasonal ales, pasteurised bottled beers, "international" beers and "commemorative" beers and cider :
From time to time, Adnams produce limited brews of specialty beers, either in the styles of non-UK beers, or using special international ingredients. These beers are usually available only from selected outlets. Past and current international beers have included:
Adnams have a long history of producing limited and one-off special beers to commemorate events of local or national importance. These are generally available for a limited period in bottles, and in cask at a few selected outlets. Recent beers include:- | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39761 |
Norman Rockwell
Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was an American painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of American culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for "The Saturday Evening Post" magazine over nearly five decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the "Willie Gillis" series, "Rosie the Riveter", "The Problem We All Live With", "Saying Grace", and the "Four Freedoms" series. He is also noted for his 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), during which he produced covers for their publication "Boys' Life", calendars, and other illustrations. These works include popular images that reflect the "Scout Oath" and "Scout Law" such as "The Scoutmaster", "A Scout is Reverent" and "A Guiding Hand", among many others.
Norman Rockwell was a prolific artist, producing more than 4,000 original works in his lifetime. Most of his surviving works are in public collections. Rockwell was also commissioned to illustrate more than 40 books, including "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" as well as painting the portraits for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as those of foreign figures, including Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jawaharlal Nehru. His portrait subjects included Judy Garland. One of his last portraits was of Colonel Sanders in 1973. His annual contributions for the Boy Scouts calendars between 1925 and 1976 (Rockwell was a 1939 recipient of the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America), were only slightly overshadowed by his most popular of calendar works: the "Four Seasons" illustrations for Brown & Bigelow that were published for 17 years beginning in 1947 and reproduced in various styles and sizes since 1964. He painted six images for Coca-Cola advertising. Illustrations for booklets, catalogs, posters (particularly movie promotions), sheet music, stamps, playing cards, and murals (including "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "God Bless the Hills", which was completed in 1936 for the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey) rounded out Rockwell's œuvre as an illustrator.
Rockwell's work was dismissed by serious art critics in his lifetime. Many of his works appear overly sweet in the opinion of modern critics, especially the "Saturday Evening Post" covers, which tend toward idealistic or sentimentalized portrayals of American life. This has led to the often-deprecatory adjective, "Rockwellesque". Consequently, Rockwell is not considered a "serious painter" by some contemporary artists, who regard his work as bourgeois and kitsch. Writer Vladimir Nabokov stated that Rockwell's brilliant technique was put to "banal" use, and wrote in his book "Pnin": "That Dalí is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by Gypsies in babyhood". He is called an "illustrator" instead of an artist by some critics, a designation he did not mind, as that was what he called himself.
In his later years, however, Rockwell began receiving more attention as a painter when he chose more serious subjects such as the series on racism for "Look" magazine. One example of this more serious work is "The Problem We All Live With", which dealt with the issue of school racial integration. The painting depicts a young black girl, Ruby Bridges, flanked by white federal marshals, walking to school past a wall defaced by racist graffiti. This painting was displayed in the White House when Bridges met with President Barack Obama in 2011.
Norman Rockwell was born on February 3, 1894, in New York City, to Jarvis Waring Rockwell and Anne Mary "Nancy" Rockwell, born Hill. His earliest American ancestor was John Rockwell (1588–1662), from Somerset, England, who immigrated to colonial North America, probably in 1635, aboard the ship "Hopewell" and became one of the first settlers of Windsor, Connecticut. He had one brother, Jarvis Waring Rockwell, Jr., older by a year and a half. Jarvis Waring, Sr., was the manager of the New York office of a Philadelphia textile firm, George Wood, Sons & Company, where he spent his entire career.
Rockwell transferred from high school to the Chase Art School at the age of 14. He then went on to the National Academy of Design and finally to the Art Students League. There, he was taught by Thomas Fogarty, George Bridgman, and Frank Vincent DuMond; his early works were produced for "St. Nicholas Magazine", the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) magazine "Boys' Life", and other youth publications. As a student, Rockwell was given small jobs of minor importance. His first major breakthrough came at age 18 with his first book illustration for Carl H. Claudy's "Tell Me Why: Stories about Mother Nature".
After that, Rockwell was hired as a staff artist for "Boys' Life" magazine. In this role, he received 50 dollars' compensation each month for one completed cover and a set of story illustrations. It is said to have been his first paying job as an artist. At 19, he became the art editor for "Boys' Life", published by the Boy Scouts of America. He held the job for three years, during which he painted several covers, beginning with his first published magazine cover, "Scout at Ship's Wheel", which appeared on the "Boys' Life" September 1913 edition.
Rockwell's family moved to New Rochelle, New York, when Norman was 21 years old. They shared a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe, who worked for "The Saturday Evening Post". With Forsythe's help, Rockwell submitted his first successful cover painting to the "Post" in 1916, "Mother's Day Off" (published on May 20). He followed that success with "Circus Barker and Strongman" (published on June 3), "Gramps at the Plate" (August 5), "Redhead Loves Hatty Perkins" (September 16), "People in a Theatre Balcony" (October 14), and "Man Playing Santa" (December 9). Rockwell was published eight times on the "Post" cover within the first year. Ultimately, Rockwell published 323 original covers for "The Saturday Evening Post" over 47 years. His "Sharp Harmony" appeared on the cover of the issue dated September 26, 1936; it depicts a barber and three clients, enjoying an a cappella song. The image was adopted by SPEBSQSA in its promotion of the art.
Rockwell's success on the cover of the "Post" led to covers for other magazines of the day, most notably the "Literary Digest", the "Country Gentleman", "Leslie's Weekly", "Judge", "Peoples Popular Monthly" and "Life" magazine.
When Rockwell's tenure began with "The Saturday Evening Post" in 1916, he left his salaried position at "Boys' Life", but continued to include scouts in "Post" cover images and the monthly magazine of the "American Red Cross". He resumed work with the Boy Scouts of America in 1926 with production of his first of fifty-one original illustrations for the official Boy Scouts of America annual calendar, which still may be seen in the "Norman Rockwell Art Gallery" at the National Scouting Museum in the city of Cimarron in New Mexico.
During World War I, he tried to enlist into the U.S. Navy but was refused entry because, at , he was eight pounds underweight for someone tall. To compensate, he spent one night gorging himself on bananas, liquids and doughnuts, and weighed enough to enlist the next day. He was given the role of a military artist, however, and did not see any action during his tour of duty.
In 1943, during World War II, Rockwell painted the "Four Freedoms" series, which was completed in seven months and resulted in him losing fifteen pounds. The series was inspired by a speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt, wherein Roosevelt described and articulated Four Freedoms for universal rights. Rockwell then painted "Freedom from Want", "Freedom of Speech", "Freedom of Worship" and "Freedom from Fear".
The paintings were published in 1943 by "The Saturday Evening Post". Rockwell used the Pennell shipbuilding family from Brunswick, Maine as models for two of the paintings, "Freedom from Want" and "A Thankful Mother", and would combine models from photographs and his own vision to create his idealistic paintings. The United States Department of the Treasury later promoted war bonds by exhibiting the originals in sixteen cities. Rockwell considered "Freedom of Speech" to be the best of the four.
That same year, a fire in his studio destroyed numerous original paintings, costumes, and props. Because the period costumes and props were irreplaceable, the fire split his career into two phases, the second phase depicting modern characters and situations. Rockwell was contacted by writer Elliott Caplin, brother of cartoonist Al Capp, with the suggestion that the three of them should make a daily comic strip together, with Caplin and his brother writing and Rockwell drawing. King Features Syndicate is reported to have promised a $1,000 per week deal, knowing that a Capp-Rockwell collaboration would gain strong public interest. The project was ultimately aborted, however, as it turned out that Rockwell, known for his perfectionism as an artist, could not deliver material so quickly as would be required of him for a daily comic strip.
During the late 1940s, Norman Rockwell spent the winter months as artist-in-residence at Otis College of Art and Design. Students occasionally were models for his "Saturday Evening Post" covers. In 1949, Rockwell donated an original "Post" cover, "April Fool", to be raffled off in a library fund raiser.
In 1959, after his wife Mary died suddenly from a heart attack, Rockwell took time off from his work to grieve. It was during that break that he and his son Thomas produced Rockwell's autobiography, "My Adventures as an Illustrator", which was published in 1960. The "Post" printed excerpts from this book in eight consecutive issues, the first containing Rockwell's famous "Triple Self-Portrait".
Rockwell's last painting for the "Post" was published in 1963, marking the end of a publishing relationship that had included 321 cover paintings. He spent the next 10 years painting for "Look" magazine, where his work depicted his interests in civil rights, poverty, and space exploration.
In 1966, Rockwell was invited to Hollywood to paint portraits of the stars of the film "Stagecoach", and also found himself appearing as an extra in the film, playing a "mangy old gambler".
In 1968, Rockwell was commissioned to do an album cover portrait of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper for their record, "The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper".
In 1969, as a tribute to Rockwell's 75th anniversary of his birth, officials of Brown & Bigelow and the Boy Scouts of America asked Rockwell to pose in "Beyond the Easel", the calendar illustration that year.
In 1969 the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation commissioned Rockwell to paint the Glen Canyon Dam.
His last commission for the Boy Scouts of America was a calendar illustration entitled "The Spirit of 1976", which was completed when Rockwell was 82, concluding a partnership which generated 471 images for periodicals, guidebooks, calendars, and promotional materials. His connection to the BSA spanned 64 years, marking the longest professional association of his career. His legacy and style for the BSA has been carried on by Joseph Csatari.
For "vivid and affectionate portraits of our country", Rockwell was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, in 1977 by President Gerald Ford. Rockwell's son, Jarvis, accepted the award.
Rockwell died on November 8, 1978, of emphysema at age 84 in his Stockbridge, Massachusetts home. First Lady Rosalynn Carter attended his funeral.
Rockwell married his first wife, Irene O'Connor, in 1916. Irene was Rockwell's model in "Mother Tucking Children into Bed", published on the cover of The "Literary Digest" on January 19, 1921. The couple divorced in 1930.
Depressed, he moved briefly to Alhambra, California as a guest of his old friend Clyde Forsythe. There he painted some of his best-known paintings including "The Doctor and the Doll". While there he met and married schoolteacher Mary Barstow in 1930. The couple returned to New York shortly after their marriage. They had three children: Jarvis Waring, Thomas Rhodes, and Peter Barstow. The family lived at 24 Lord Kitchener Road in the Bonnie Crest neighborhood of New Rochelle, New York. For multiple reasons, Rockwell and his wife were not regular church attendees, although they were members of St. John's Wilmot Church, an Episcopal church near their home, where their sons were baptized. Rockwell moved to Arlington, Vermont, in 1939 where his work began to reflect small-town life. He would later be joined by his good friend, John Carlton Atherton
In 1953, the Rockwell family moved to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, so that his wife could be treated at the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric hospital at 25 Main Street, close to where Rockwell set up his studio. Rockwell also received psychiatric treatment, seeing the analyst Erik Erikson, who was on staff at Riggs. Erikson is said to have told the artist that he painted his happiness, but did not live it. In 1959, Mary died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
Rockwell married his third wife, retired Milton Academy English teacher, Mary Leete "Mollie" Punderson (1896-1985), on October 25, 1961. His Stockbridge studio was located on the second floor of a row of buildings; directly underneath Rockwell's studio was, for a time in 1966, the Back Room Rest, better known as the famous "Alice's Restaurant." During his time in Stockbridge, chief of police William Obanhein was a frequent model for Rockwell's paintings.
From 1961 until his death, Rockwell was a member of the Monday Evening Club, a men's literary group based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. At his funeral, five members of the club served as pallbearers, along with Jarvis Rockwell.
A custodianship of his original paintings and drawings was established with Rockwell's help near his home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and the Norman Rockwell Museum still is open today year-round. The museum's collection includes more than 700 original Rockwell paintings, drawings, and studies. The Rockwell Center for American Visual Studies at the Norman Rockwell Museum is a national research institute dedicated to American illustration art.
Rockwell's work was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2001. Rockwell's "Breaking Home Ties" sold for $15.4 million at a 2006 Sotheby's auction. A 12-city U.S. tour of Rockwell's works took place in 2008.
In 2008, Rockwell was named the official state artist of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The 2013 sale of "Saying Grace" for $46 million (including buyer's premium) established a new record price for Rockwell. Rockwell's work was exhibited at the Reading Public Museum and the Church History Museum in 2013–2014.
Rockwell designed six film posters during his career, and one album cover.
In addition to the above, Rockwell was also commissioned by English musician David Bowie to design the cover artwork for his 1975 album "Young Americans"; Bowie ultimately retracted the offer, however, after Rockwell informed him that he would need at least half a year to complete a painting for the album. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39762 |
Millennium Dome
The Millennium Dome, also referred to simply as The Dome, is the original name of a large dome-shaped building originally used to house the Millennium Experience, a major exhibition celebrating the beginning of the third millennium. It is the ninth largest building in the world by usable volume. Located on the Greenwich Peninsula in South East London, England, the exhibition was open to the public from 1 January to 31 December 2000. The project and exhibition was highly political and attracted barely half the 12 million customers its sponsors forecast, so was deemed a failure by the press. All the original exhibition elements were sold on or dismantled.
In a 2005 report, the cost of selling the Dome and surrounding land (which increased to 170 acres from the initial offering of the 48 acres enclosed by the Dome) and managing the Dome until the deal was closed was £28.7 million. The value of the 48 acres occupied by the Dome was estimated at £48 million, which could have been realised by demolishing the structure, but it was considered preferable to preserve the Dome. The structure itself still exists, and it is now a key exterior feature of The O2.
The Prime Meridian passes the western edge of the Dome and the nearest London Underground station is North Greenwich on the Jubilee line.
The dome is one of the largest of its type in the world. Externally, it appears as a large white marquee with twelve 100 m-high yellow support towers, one for each month of the year, or each hour of the clock face, representing the role played by Greenwich Mean Time. In plan view it is circular, 365 m (one metre for each day in a standard year) in diameter. It has become one of the United Kingdom's most recognizable landmarks. It can be identified on satellite images of London. Its exterior is reminiscent of the Dome of Discovery built for the Festival of Britain in 1951.
The architect was Richard Rogers and the contractor was a joint venture company, McAlpine/Laing Joint Venture (MLJV) formed between Sir Robert McAlpine and Laing Management. The building structure was engineered by Buro Happold, and the entire roof structure weighs less than the air contained within the building. Although referred to as a dome it is not strictly one as it is not self-supporting, but is, in fact, a giant Big Top, the canopy being supported by a dome-shaped cable network, from twelve king posts. For this reason, it has been disparagingly referred to as the Millennium Tent. The twelve posts represent the twelve months of the year, another reference to time in its dimensions, alongside its height and diameter.
The canopy is made of PTFE-coated glass fibre fabric, a durable and weather-resistant plastic, and is 52 m high in the middle – one metre for each week of the year. Its symmetry is interrupted by a hole through which a ventilation shaft from the Blackwall Tunnel rises.
The critic Jonathan Meades has scathingly referred to the Millennium Dome as a "Museum of Toxic Waste", and apart from the dome itself, the project included the reclamation of the entire Greenwich Peninsula. The land was previously derelict and contaminated by toxic sludge from East Greenwich Gas Works that operated from 1889 to 1985. The clean-up operation was seen by the then Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine as an investment that would add a large area of useful land to the crowded capital. This was billed as part of a larger plan to regenerate a large, sparsely populated area to the east of London and south of the River Thames, an area initially called the East Thames Corridor but latterly marketed as the "Thames Gateway".
The Dome project was conceived, originally on a somewhat smaller scale, under John Major's Conservative government, as a Festival of Britain or World's Fair-type showcase to celebrate the third millennium. The incoming Labour government elected in 1997 under Tony Blair greatly expanded the size, scope and funding of the project, and construction began in June 1997. It also significantly increased expectations of what would be delivered. Just before its opening Blair claimed the Dome would be "a triumph of confidence over cynicism, boldness over blandness, excellence over mediocrity". In the words of BBC correspondent Robert Orchard, "the Dome was to be highlighted as a glittering New Labour achievement in the next election manifesto", but criticised in the 2001 Conservative Party manifesto as "banal, anonymous and rootless", and lacking "a sense of Britain’s history or culture".
Before its opening, the Dome was excoriated in Iain Sinclair's diatribe, "Sorry Meniscus – Excursions to the Millennium Dome" (Profile Books: London 1999, ), which forecast the hype, the associated political posturing, and the eventual disillusion. The post-exhibition plan had been to convert the Dome into a European football stadium which would last for 25 years: Charlton Athletic at one point considered a possible move but instead chose to redevelop their own stadium. Local team Fisher Athletic were at one time interested in moving to the Dome, but they were considered to have too small a fan base to make this feasible. The Dome was planned to take over the functions performed by the London Arena after its closure. This is the function which The O2 Arena has now undertaken.
After a private opening on the evening of 31 December 1999, the Millennium Experience at the Dome was open to the public for the whole of 2000, and contained a large number of attractions and exhibits.
The interior space was subdivided into 14 "zones" (with the lead designers of the zones):
Who we are:
What we do:
Where we live:
Surrounded by the zones was a performance area in the centre of the dome. With music composed by Peter Gabriel and an acrobatic cast of 160, the Millennium Dome Show was performed 999 times over the course of the year. Throughout the year, the specially-commissioned film "" was shown in Skyscape (a separate cinema on the site sponsored by BSkyB). There was also the McDonald's "Our Town Story" project in which each Local Education Authority in the UK was invited to perform a show of their devising which characterised their area and its people.
As well as the above, the first ever series of "Techno Games" was filmed there and shown on BBC Two the same year.
There were a number of other attractions both in and outside of The Dome. Inside the Dome there was a play area named Timekeepers of the Millennium (featuring the characters Coggsley and Sprinx), The Millennium Coin Minting Press in association with the Royal Mint, the 1951 Festival of Britain Bus, and the Millennium Star Jewels (focus of the failed Millennium Diamond heist.) Outside was the Millennium Map (thirteen metres high), the Childhood Cube, "Looking Around" (a hidden installation), Greenwich Pavilion, the Hanging Gardens at the front of the Dome, as well as a number of other art installations and sculptures.
Two of the remaining are installations form the start of The Line a modern art trail connecting the O2 to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
The project was largely reported by the press to have been a failure. During 2000 the organisers repeatedly asked for, and received, more cash from the Millennium Commission, the Lottery body which supported it. Numerous changes at management and Board level, before and during the exhibition, had only limited, if any, results. Jennifer Page was sacked as chief executive of the New Millennium Experience Company just one month after the dome's opening. Press reports suggested that the then Prime Minister Tony Blair personally placed a high priority on making the Dome a success. But part of the problem was that the financial predictions were based on an unrealistically high forecast of visitor numbers at 12 million. During the 12 months it was open there were approximately 6.5 million visitors – significantly fewer than the approximately 10 million paying visitors that attended the Festival of Britain, which only ran from May to September. Empire Exhibition, Scotland 1938 held in Glasgow attracted more than 12 million visitors being open May to October. Unlike the press, visitor feedback was extremely positive. It was the most popular tourist attraction in 2000, second was the London Eye; third was Alton Towers, which had been first in 1999.
According to the UK National Audit Office, the total cost of The Dome at the liquidation of the New Millennium Experience Company in 2002 was £789 million, of which £628 million was covered by National Lottery grants and £189 million through sales of tickets etc. A surplus of £25 million over costs meant that the full lottery grant was not required. However, the £603 million of lottery money was still £204 million in excess of the original estimate of £399 million required, due to the shortfall in visitor numbers.
It was, however, still of interest to the press, the government's difficulties in selling the Dome being the subject of much critical comment. The amount spent on maintaining the closed building was also criticised. Shortly after it had closed, Lord Falconer reported that The Dome was costing over £1 million per month to maintain.
Following closure of the Dome, some Zones were dismantled by the sponsoring organisations, but much of the content was auctioned. This included a number of artworks specially commissioned from contemporary British artists. A piece by Gavin Turk was sold for far below his then auction price though Turk stated that he did not think the piece had worked. The Timekeepers of the Millennium attraction was acquired by the Chessington World of Adventures theme park in Surrey. A unique record of the memorabilia and paraphernalia of the Millennium Experience is held by a private collector in the United States. Many of the fixtures and fittings were also purchased by Paul Scally, chairman of Gillingham F.C., for the club's stadium.
Despite the ongoing debate about the Dome's future use, the Dome opened again during December 2003 for the "Winter Wonderland 2003" experience. The event, which featured a large funfair, ice rink, and other attractions, culminated in a laser and firework display on New Year's Eve. It also served as the venue for a number of free music festivals organised by the Mayor of London under the "Respect" banner.
Over the 2004 Christmas period, part of the main dome was used as a shelter for the homeless and others in need, organised by the charity Crisis after superseding the London Arena, which had previously hosted the event. In 2005, when work began for the redevelopment of the Dome, the London Arena hosted the event again.
By late 2000, a proposal had been made for a high-tech business park to be erected under the tent area, creating an "indoor city" complete with streets, parks, and buildings. The business park was actually the original 1996 proposal for the site of the peninsula before the plans for the Millennium Dome were proposed.
In December 2001, it was announced that Meridian Delta Ltd. had been chosen by the government to develop the Dome as a sports and entertainment centre, and to develop housing, shops and offices on of surrounding land. It also hoped to relocate some of London's tertiary education establishments to the site. Meridian Delta is backed by the American billionaire Philip Anschutz, who has interests in oil, railways, and telecommunications, as well as a string of sports-related investments.
A report in 2005 by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee found that the cost of the process of selling the Dome and surrounding land (which increased to 170 acres from the initial offering of the 48 acres enclosed by the Dome) and managing the Dome until the deal was closed was £28.7 million. £33 million were expected to be returned to the taxpayer by 2009. The value of the 48 acres occupied by the Dome was estimated at £48 million, which could have been realised by demolishing the structure, but it was considered preferable to preserve the Dome.
The dome was publicly renamed as The O2 on 31 May 2005, in a £6 million-per-year deal with telecommunications company O2 plc, now a subsidiary of Telefónica Europe. This announcement, which presaged a major redevelopment of the site that retained little beyond the shell of the dome, gave publicity to the dome's transition into an entertainment district including an indoor arena, a music club, a cinema, an exhibition space and bars and restaurants. This redevelopment was undertaken by the dome's new owners, the Anschutz Entertainment Group, to a design by HOK SVE and Buro Happold. It cost £600 million, and the resulting venue opened to the public on 24 June 2007, with a concert by rock band Bon Jovi.
During the 2012 Summer Olympics, the artistic gymnastics events, along with the medal rounds of basketball, were held at The O2. It also held wheelchair basketball events during the 2012 Summer Paralympics. For sponsorship reasons, during those times the arena was temporarily renamed the North Greenwich Arena.
Issues related to the Dome damaged the political careers of government ministers Peter Mandelson and John Prescott. The scheme was seen as an early example of what some saw as Tony Blair's often excessive optimism, who stated at the Dome's opening: "In the Dome we have a creation that, I believe, will truly be a beacon to the world". The fact that Mandelson's grandfather was Herbert Morrison - who as a minister had been involved with the Festival of Britain - was often drawn on for negative comparisons. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39763 |
Jacques Chirac
Jacques René Chirac ( , , ; 29 November 1932 – 26 September 2019) was a French politician who served as President of France from 1995 to 2007. Chirac was previously the Prime Minister of France from 1974 to 1976 and from 1986 to 1988, as well as the Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.
After attending the École nationale d'administration, Chirac began his career as a high-level civil servant, entering politics shortly thereafter. Chirac occupied various senior positions, including Minister of Agriculture and Minister of the Interior. Chirac's internal policies initially included lower tax rates, the removal of price controls, strong punishment for crime and terrorism, and business privatisation. After pursuing these policies in his second term as Prime Minister, he changed his views. He argued for more socially responsible economic policies and was elected President in the 1995 presidential election with 52.6% of the vote in the second round, beating Socialist Lionel Jospin, after campaigning on a platform of healing the "social rift" ("fracture sociale"). Then, Chirac's economic policies, based on "dirigisme", allowing for state-directed investment, stood in opposition to the "laissez-faire" policies of the United Kingdom under the ministries of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, which Chirac described as "Anglo-Saxon ultraliberalism".
He was also known for his stand against the American-led assault on Iraq, his recognition of the collaborationist French Government's role in deporting Jews, and his reduction of the presidential term from 7 years to 5 through a referendum in 2000. At the 2002 French presidential election, he won 82.2% of the vote in the second round against the far-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen. During his second term, however, he had a very low approval rating and was considered one of the least popular presidents in modern French political history.
In 2011, the Paris court declared Chirac guilty of diverting public funds and abusing public confidence, giving him a two-year suspended prison sentence.
Chirac was born in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. He was the son of Abel François Marie Chirac (1898–1968), a successful executive for an aircraft company, and Marie-Louise Valette (1902–1973), a housewife. His grandparents were teachers from Sainte-Féréole in Corrèze. His great-grandparents on both sides were peasants in the rural south-western region of the Corrèze.
According to Chirac, his name "originates from the langue d'oc, that of the troubadours, therefore that of poetry". He was a Roman Catholic.
Chirac was an only child (his elder sister, Jacqueline, died in infancy before his birth). He was educated in Paris at the Cours Hattemer, a private school. He then attended the Lycée Carnot and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. After his baccalauréat, he served for three months as a sailor on a coal-transport.
Chirac played rugby union for Brive's youth team, and also played at university level. He played no. 8 and second row.
Inspired by Charles de Gaulle, Chirac started to pursue a civil service career in the 1950s. During this period, he joined the French Communist Party, sold copies of "L'Humanité", and took part in meetings of a communist cell. In 1950, he signed the Soviet-inspired Stockholm Appeal for the abolition of nuclear weapons – which led him to be questioned when he applied for his first visa to the United States.
In 1953, after graduating from the Sciences Po, he attended a non-credit course at Harvard University's summer school, before entering the École nationale d'administration, which trains France's top civil servants, in 1957.
In the United States Chirac worked at Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, Missouri.
Chirac trained as a reserve military officer in armoured cavalry at Saumur. He then volunteered to fight in the Algerian War, using personal connections to be sent despite the reservations of his superiors. His superiors did not want to make him an officer because they suspected he had communist leanings. In 1965, he became an auditor in the Court of Auditors.
In April 1962, Chirac was appointed head of the personal staff of Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. This appointment launched Chirac's political career. Pompidou considered Chirac his protégé, and referred to him as "my bulldozer" for his skill at getting things done. The nickname "Le Bulldozer" caught on in French political circles, where it also referred to his abrasive manner. As late as the 1988 presidential election, Chirac maintained this reputation.
At Pompidou's suggestion, Chirac ran as a Gaullist for a seat in the National Assembly in 1967. He was elected deputy for his home Corrèze "département", a stronghold of the left. This surprising victory in the context of a Gaullist ebb permitted him to enter the government as Minister of Social Affairs. Although Chirac was well-situated in de Gaulle's entourage, being related by marriage to the general's sole companion at the time of the Appeal of 18 June 1940, he was more of a "Pompidolian" than a "Gaullist". When student and worker unrest rocked France in May 1968, Chirac played a central role in negotiating a truce. Then, as state secretary of economy (1968–1971), he worked closely with Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who headed the ministry of economy and finance.
After some months in the ministry for Relations with Parliament, Chirac's first high-level post came in 1972 when he became Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development under Pompidou, who had been elected president in 1969, after de Gaulle retired. Chirac quickly earned a reputation as a champion of French farmers' interests, and first attracted international attention when he assailed U.S., West German, and European Commission agricultural policies which conflicted with French interests.
On 27 February 1974, after the resignation of Raymond Marcellin, Chirac was appointed Minister of the Interior. On 21 March 1974, he cancelled the SAFARI project due to privacy concerns after its existence was revealed by "Le Monde". From March 1974, he was entrusted by President Pompidou with preparations for the presidential election then scheduled for 1976. These elections were moved forward because of Pompidou's sudden death on 2 April 1974.
Chirac vainly attempted to rally Gaullists behind Prime Minister Pierre Messmer. Jacques Chaban-Delmas announced his candidacy in spite of the disapproval of the "Pompidolians". Chirac and others published the "call of the 43" in favour of Giscard d'Estaing, the leader of the non-Gaullist part of the parliamentary majority. Giscard d'Estaing was elected as Pompidou's successor after France's most competitive election campaign in years. In return, the new president chose Chirac to lead the cabinet.
When Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became president, he nominated Chirac as prime minister on 27 May 1974, to reconcile the "Giscardian" and "non-Giscardian" factions of the parliamentary majority. At the age of 41, Chirac stood out as the very model of the "jeunes loups" ("young wolves") of French politics, but he was faced with the hostility of the "Barons of Gaullism" who considered him a traitor for his role during the previous presidential campaign. In December 1974, he took the lead of the Union of Democrats for the Republic (UDR) against the will of its more senior personalities.
As prime minister, Chirac quickly set about persuading the Gaullists that, despite the social reforms proposed by President Giscard, the basic tenets of Gaullism, such as national and European independence, would be retained. Chirac was advised by Pierre Juillet and Marie-France Garaud, two former advisers of Pompidou. These two organised the campaign against Chaban-Delmas in 1974. They advocated a clash with Giscard d'Estaing because they thought his policy bewildered the conservative electorate. Citing Giscard's unwillingness to give him authority, Chirac resigned as Prime Minister in 1976. He proceeded to build up his political base among France's several conservative parties, with a goal of reconstituting the Gaullist UDR into a Neo-Gaullist group, the Rally for the Republic (RPR). Chirac's first tenure as prime minister was also an arguably progressive one, with improvements in both the minimum wage and the social welfare system carried out during the course of his premiership.
After his departure from the cabinet, Chirac wanted to gain the leadership of the political right, to gain the French presidency in the future. The RPR was conceived as an electoral machine against President Giscard d'Estaing. Paradoxically, Chirac benefited from Giscard's decision to create the office of mayor in Paris, which had been in abeyance since the 1871 Commune, because the leaders of the Third Republic (1871–1940) feared that having municipal control of the capital would give the mayor too much power. In 1977, Chirac stood as a candidate against Michel d'Ornano, a close friend of the president, and he won. As mayor of Paris, Chirac's political influence grew. He held this post until 1995.
Chirac supporters point out that, as mayor, he provided programmes to help the elderly, people with disabilities, and single mothers, and introduced the street-cleaning Motocrotte, while providing incentives for businesses to stay in Paris. His opponents contend that he installed "clientelist" policies.
In 1978, Chirac attacked the pro-European policy of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing (VGE), and made a nationalist turn with the December 1978 Call of Cochin, initiated by his counsellors Marie-France Garaud and Pierre Juillet, which had first been called by Pompidou. Hospitalised in Hôpital Cochin after a car crash, he declared that "as always about the drooping of France, the pro-foreign party acts with its peaceable and reassuring voice". He appointed Yvan Blot, an intellectual who would later join the National Front, as director of his campaigns for the 1979 European election. After the poor results of the election, Chirac broke with Garaud and Juillet. Vexed Marie-France Garaud stated: "We thought Chirac was made of the same marble of which statues are carved in, we perceive he's of the same faience bidets are made of." His rivalry with Giscard d'Estaing intensified. Although it has been often interpreted by historians as the struggle between two rival French right-wing families (the Bonapartists, represented by Chirac, and the Orleanists, represented by VGE), both figures in fact were members of the liberal, Orleanist tradition, according to historian Alain-Gérard Slama. But the eviction of the Gaullist barons and of President Giscard d'Estaing convinced Chirac to assume a strong neo-Gaullist stance.
Chirac made his first run for president against Giscard d'Estaing in the 1981 election, thus splitting the centre-right vote. He was eliminated in the first round with 18% of the vote. He reluctantly supported Giscard in the second round. He refused to give instructions to the RPR voters but said that he supported the incumbent president "in a private capacity", which was interpreted as almost "de facto" support of the Socialist Party's (PS) candidate, François Mitterrand, who was elected by a broad majority.
Giscard has always blamed Chirac for his defeat. He was told by Mitterrand, before his death, that the latter had dined with Chirac before the election. Chirac told the Socialist candidate that he wanted to "get rid of Giscard". In his memoirs, Giscard wrote that between the two rounds, he phoned the RPR headquarters. He passed himself off, as a right-wing voter, by changing his voice. The RPR employee advised him "certainly do not vote Giscard!" After 1981, the relationship between the two men became tense, with Giscard, even though he had been in the same government coalition as Chirac, criticising Chirac's actions openly.
After the May 1981 presidential election, the right also lost the subsequent legislative election that year. However, as Giscard had been knocked out, Chirac appeared as the principal leader of the right-wing opposition. Due to his attacks against the economic policy of the Socialist government, he gradually aligned himself with prevailing economically liberal opinion, even though it did not correspond with Gaullist doctrine. While the far-right National Front grew, taking advantage of the proportional representation electoral system which had been introduced for the 1986 legislative elections, he signed an electoral pact with the Giscardian (and more or less Christian Democratic) party Union for French Democracy (UDF).
When the RPR/UDF right-wing coalition won a slight majority in the National Assembly in the 1986 election, Mitterrand (PS) appointed Chirac prime minister (though many in Mitterrand's inner circle lobbied him to choose Jacques Chaban-Delmas instead). This unprecedented power-sharing arrangement, known as cohabitation, gave Chirac the lead in domestic affairs. However, it is generally conceded that Mitterrand used the areas granted to the President of the Republic, or "reserved domains" of the Presidency, Defence and Foreign Affairs, to belittle his Prime Minister.
Chirac's cabinet sold many public companies, renewing the liberalisation initiated under Laurent Fabius's Socialist government of 1984–1986, and abolished the solidarity tax on wealth (ISF), a symbolic tax on those with high value assets introduced by Mitterrand's government. Elsewhere, the plan for university reform (plan Devaquet) caused a crisis in 1986 when a student called Malik Oussekine was killed by the police, leading to massive demonstrations and the proposal's withdrawal. It has been said during other student crises that this event strongly affected Jacques Chirac, who was afterwards careful about possible police violence during such demonstrations (e.g., maybe explaining part of the decision to "promulgate without applying" the First Employment Contract (CPE) after large student demonstrations against it).
One of his first acts concerning foreign policy was to call back Jacques Foccart (1913–1997), who had been de Gaulle's and his successors' leading counsellor for African matters, called by journalist Stephen Smith the "father of all "networks" on the continent, at the time [in 1986] aged 72." Foccart, who had also co-founded the Gaullist SAC militia (dissolved by Mitterrand in 1982 after the Auriol massacre) along with Charles Pasqua, and who was a key component of the "Françafrique" system, was again called to the Elysée Palace when Chirac won the 1995 presidential election. Furthermore, confronted by anti-colonialist movements in New Caledonia, Prime Minister Chirac ordered a military intervention against the separatists in the Ouvéa cave, leading to several tragic deaths. He allegedly refused any alliance with Jean-Marie Le Pen's "Front National".
Chirac ran against Mitterrand for a second time in the 1988 election. He obtained 20 percent of the vote in the first round, but lost the second with only 46 percent. He resigned from the cabinet and the right lost the next legislative election.
For the first time, his leadership over the RPR was challenged. Charles Pasqua and Philippe Séguin criticised his abandonment of Gaullist doctrines. On the right, a new generation of politicians, the "renovation men", accused Chirac and Giscard of being responsible for the electoral defeats. In 1992, convinced a candidate could not become President whilst advocating anti-European policies, he called for a "yes" vote in the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, against the opinion of Pasqua, Séguin and a majority of the RPR voters, who chose to vote "no".
While he still was mayor of Paris (since 1977), Chirac went to Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire) where he supported President Houphouët-Boigny (1960–1993), although the latter was being called a "thief" by the local population. Chirac then declared that multipartism was a "kind of luxury."
Nevertheless, the right won the 1993 legislative election. Chirac announced that he did not want to come back as prime minister, suggesting the appointment of Edouard Balladur, who had promised that he would not run for the presidency against Chirac in 1995. However, benefiting from positive polls, Balladur decided to be a presidential candidate, with the support of a majority of right-wing politicians. Balladur broke from Chirac along with a number of friends and allies, including Charles Pasqua, Nicolas Sarkozy, etc., who supported his candidacy. A small group of "fidels" would remain with Chirac, including Alain Juppé and Jean-Louis Debré. When Nicolas Sarkozy became President in 2007, Juppé was one of the few "chiraquiens" to serve in François Fillon's government.
During the 1995 presidential campaign, Chirac criticised the "sole thought" ("pensée unique") of neoliberalism represented by his challenger on the right and promised to reduce the "social fracture", placing himself more to the centre and thus forcing Balladur to radicalise himself. Ultimately, he obtained more votes than Balladur in the first round (20.8 percent), and then defeated the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the second round (52.6 percent).
Chirac was elected on a platform of tax cuts and job programmes, but his policies did little to ease the labour strikes during his first months in office. On the domestic front, neo-liberal economic austerity measures introduced by Chirac and his conservative prime minister Alain Juppé, including budgetary cutbacks, proved highly unpopular. At about the same time, it became apparent that Juppé and others had obtained preferential conditions for public housing, as well as other perks. At the year's end Chirac faced major workers' strikes which turned, in November–December 1995, into a general strike, one of the largest since May 1968. The demonstrations were largely pitted against Juppé's plan for pension reform, and ultimately led to his dismissal.
Shortly after taking office, Chiracundaunted by international protests by environmental groupsinsisted upon the resumption of nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia in 1995, a few months before signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Reacting to criticism, Chirac said, "You only have to look back at 1935...There were people then who were against France arming itself, and look what happened." On 1 February 1996, Chirac announced that France had ended "once and for all" its nuclear testing and intended to accede to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Elected as President of the Republic, he refused to discuss the existence of French military bases in Africa, despite requests by the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The French Army thus remained in Côte d'Ivoire as well as in Omar Bongo's Gabon.
Prior to 1995, the French government had maintained that the French Republic had been dismantled when Philippe Pétain instituted a new French State during World War II and that the Republic had been re-established when the war was over. It was not for France, therefore, to apologise for the roundup of Jews for deportation that happened while the Republic had not existed and was carried out by a state, Vichy France, which it did not recognise. President François Mitterrand had reiterated this position: "The Republic had nothing to do with this. I do not believe France is responsible," he said in September 1994.
Chirac was the first President of France to take responsibility for the deportation of Jews during the Vichy regime. In a speech made on 16 July 1995 at the site of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, where 13,000 Jews had been held for deportation to concentration camps in July 1942, Chirac said, "France, on that day, committed the irreparable". Those responsible for the roundup were "4,500 policemen and gendarmes, French, under the authority of their leaders [who] obeyed the demands of the Nazis. ... the criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the French State".
In 1997, Chirac dissolved parliament for early legislative elections in a gamble designed to bolster support for his conservative economic program. But instead, it created an uproar, and his power was weakened by the subsequent backlash. The Socialist Party (PS), joined by other parties on the left, soundly defeated Chirac's conservative allies, forcing Chirac into a new period of cohabitation with Jospin as prime minister (1997–2002), which lasted five years.
Cohabitation significantly weakened the power of Chirac's presidency. The French president, by a constitutional convention, only controls foreign and military policy— and even then, allocation of funding is under the control of Parliament and under the significant influence of the prime minister. Short of dissolving parliament and calling for new elections, the president was left with little power to influence public policy regarding crime, the economy, and public services. Chirac seized the occasion to periodically criticise Jospin's government.
Nevertheless, his position was weakened by scandals about the financing of RPR by Paris municipality. In 2001, the left, represented by Bertrand Delanoë (PS), won a majority on the city council of the capital. Jean Tiberi, Chirac's successor at the Paris city hall, was forced to resign after having been put under investigations in June 1999 on charges of "trafic d'influences" in the HLMs of Paris affairs (related to the illegal financing of the RPR). Tiberi was finally expelled from the Rally for the Republic, Chirac's party, on 12 October 2000, declaring to the "Figaro magazine" on 18 November 2000: "Jacques Chirac is not my friend anymore". After the publication of the Jean-Claude Méry by "Le Monde" on 22 September 2000, in which Jean-Claude Méry, in charge of the RPR's financing, directly accused Chirac of organizing the network, and of having been physically present on 5 October 1986, when Méry gave in cash 5 million Francs, which came from companies who had benefited from state deals, to Michel Roussin, personal secretary ("directeur de cabinet") of Chirac, Chirac refused to attend court in response to his summons by judge Eric Halphen, and the highest echelons of the French justice system declared that he could not be inculpated while in office.
During his two terms, he increased the Elysee Palace's total budget by 105 percent (to €90 million, whereas 20 years before it was the equivalent of €43.7 million). He doubled the number of presidential cars – to 61 cars and seven scooters in the Palace's garage. He has hired 145 extra employees – the total number of the people he employed simultaneously was 963.
As the Supreme Commander of the French armed forces, he reduced the military budget, as did his predecessor. At the end of his first term it accounted for three percent of GDP. In 1997 the aircraft carrier "Clemenceau" was decommissioned after 37 years of service, with her sister ship "Foch" decommissioned in 2000 after 37 years of service, leaving the French Navy with no aircraft carrier until 2001, when "Charles de Gaulle" was commissioned. He also reduced expenditure on nuclear weapons and the French nuclear arsenal was reduced to include 350 warheads, compared to the Russian nuclear arsenal of 16,000 warheads. He also published a plan to reduce the number of fighters the French military had by 30.
After François Mitterrand left office in 1995, Chirac began a rapprochement with NATO by joining the Military Committee and attempting to negotiate a return to the integrated military command, which failed after the French demand for parity with the United States went unmet. The possibility of a further attempt foundered after Chirac was forced into cohabitation with a Socialist-led cabinet between 1997 and 2002, then poor Franco-American relations after the French UN veto threat over Iraq in 2003 made transatlantic negotiations impossible.
On 25 July 2000, as Chirac and the first lady were returning from the G7 Summit in Okinawa, Japan, they were placed in a dangerous situation by Air France Flight 4590 after they landed at Charles de Gaulle International Airport. The first couple were in an Air France Boeing 747 taxiing toward the terminal when the jet had to stop and wait for Flight 4590 to take off. The departing plane, an Aérospatiale-BAC Concorde, ran over a strip of metal on takeoff puncturing its left fuel tank and sliced electrical wires near the left landing gear. The sequence of events ignited a large fire and caused the Concorde to veer left on its takeoff roll. As it reached takeoff speed and lifted off the ground, it came within 30 feet of hitting Chirac's 747. The photograph of Flight 4590 ablaze, the only picture taken of the Concorde on fire, was taken by passenger Toshihiko Sato on Chirac's jetliner.
At the age of 69, Chirac faced his fourth presidential campaign in 2002. He received 20% of the vote in the first ballot of the presidential elections in April 2002. It had been expected that he would face incumbent prime minister Lionel Jospin (PS) in the second round of elections; instead, Chirac faced far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front (FN), who came in 200,000 votes ahead of Jospin. All parties other than the National Front (except for Lutte ouvrière) called for opposing Le Pen, even if it meant voting for Chirac. The 14-day period between the two rounds of voting was marked by demonstrations against Le Pen and slogans such as "Vote for the crook, not for the fascist" or "Vote with a clothespin on your nose". Chirac won re-election by a landslide, with 82 percent of the vote on the second ballot. However, Chirac became increasingly unpopular during his second term. According to a July 2005 poll, 32 percent judged Chirac favourably and 63 percent unfavorably. In 2006, "The Economist" wrote that Chirac "is the most unpopular occupant of the Elysée Palace in the fifth republic's history."
As the left-wing Socialist Party was in thorough disarray following Jospin's defeat, Chirac reorganised politics on the right, establishing a new party – initially called the Union of the Presidential Majority, then the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). The RPR had broken down; a number of members had formed Eurosceptic breakaways. While the Giscardian liberals of the Union for French Democracy (UDF) had moved to the right, the UMP won the parliamentary elections that followed the presidential poll with ease.
During an official visit to Madagascar on 21 July 2005, Chirac described the repression of the 1947 Malagasy uprising, which left between 80,000 and 90,000 dead, as "unacceptable".
Despite past opposition to state intervention the Chirac government approved a €2.8 billion euro aid package to troubled manufacturing giant Alstom. In October 2004, Chirac signed a trade agreement with PRC President Hu Jintao where Alstom was given €1 billion euro in contracts and promises of future investment in China.
On 14 July 2002, during Bastille Day celebrations, Chirac survived an assassination attempt by a lone gunman with a rifle hidden in a guitar case. The would-be assassin fired a shot toward the presidential motorcade, before being overpowered by bystanders. The gunman, Maxime Brunerie, underwent psychiatric testing; the violent far-right group with which he was associated, Unité Radicale, was then administratively dissolved.
Along with Vladimir Putin (who he called "a personal friend"), Hu Jintao, and Gerhard Schröder, Chirac emerged as a leading voice against George W. Bush and Tony Blair in 2003 during the organisation and deployment of American and British forces participating in a military coalition to forcibly remove the government of Iraq controlled by the Ba'ath Party under the leadership of Saddam Hussein that resulted in the 2003–2011 Iraq War. Despite British and American pressure, Chirac threatened to veto, at that given point, a resolution in the UN Security Council that would authorise the use of military force to rid Iraq of alleged weapons of mass destruction, and rallied other governments to his position. "Iraq today does not represent an immediate threat that justifies an immediate war", Chirac said on 18 March 2003. Future Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin acquired much of his popularity for his speech against the war at the United Nations (UN).
After Togo's leader Gnassingbé Eyadéma's death on 5 February 2005, Chirac gave him tribute and supported his son, Faure Gnassingbé, who has since succeeded his father.
On 19 January 2006, Chirac said that France was prepared to launch a nuclear strike against any country that sponsors a terrorist attack against French interests. He said his country's nuclear arsenal had been reconfigured to include the ability to make a tactical strike in retaliation for terrorism.
Chirac criticized the Israeli offensive into Lebanon on 14 July 2006. However, Israeli Army Radio later reported that Chirac had secretly told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that France would support an Israeli invasion of Syria and the overthrow of the government of President Bashar al-Assad, promising to veto any moves against Israel in the United Nations or European Union. Whereas the disagreement on Iraq had caused a rift between Paris and Washington, recent analysis suggests that both governments worked closely together on the Syria file to end the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, and that Chirac was a driver of this diplomatic cooperation.
In July 2006, the G8 met to discuss international energy concerns. Despite the rising awareness of global warming issues, the G8 focused on "energy security" issues. Chirac continued to be the voice within the G8 summit meetings to support international action to curb global warming and climate change concerns. Chirac warned that "humanity is dancing on a volcano" and called for serious action by the world's leading industrialised nations.
After Chirac's death in 2019, the street leading to the Louvre Abu Dhabi was named Jacques Chirac Street on November 2019 in celebration of Chirac's efforts to bolster links between France and the United Arab Emirates during his presidency.
Chirac requested the "Landau-report" (published in September 2004) and combined with the "Report of the Technical Group on Innovative Financing Mechanisms" formulated upon request by the Heads of State of Brazil, Chile, France and Spain (issued in December 2004), these documents present various opportunities for innovative financing mechanisms while equally stressing the advantages (stability and predictability) of tax-based models. The UNITAID project was born. Today the organisation executive board is chaired by Philippe Douste-Blazy.
On 29 May 2005, a referendum was held in France to decide whether the country should ratify the proposed treaty for a Constitution of the European Union (TCE). The result was a victory for the No campaign, with 55 percent of voters rejecting the treaty on a turnout of 69 percent, dealing a devastating blow to Chirac and the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, and to part of the centre-left which had supported the TCE. Following the referendum defeat, Chirac replaced his Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin with Domenique de Villepin. In an address to the nation, Chirac declared that the new cabinet's top priority was to curb unemployment, which was consistently hovering above 10 percent, calling for a "national mobilisation" to that effect.
Following major student protests in spring 2006, which followed civil unrest in autumn 2005 after the death of two young boys in Clichy-sous-Bois, one of the poorest communes in Paris' suburbs, Chirac retracted the proposed First Employment Contract (CPE) by "promulgating [it] without applying it", an unheard-of – and, some claim, illegal – move intended to appease the protesters while giving the appearance of not making a "volte-face" regarding the contract, and therefore to continue his support for his Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.
In early September 2005, Chirac suffered an event that his doctors described as a "vascular incident". It was officially reported as a "minor stroke" or a mild stroke (also known as a transient ischemic attack). He recovered and returned to his duties soon afterward.
In a pre-recorded television broadcast aired on 11 March 2007, he announced, in a widely predicted move, that he would not choose to seek a third term as president. (In 2000 the constitution had been amended to reduce the length of the presidential term to five years, so his second term was shorter than his first.) "My whole life has been committed to serving France, and serving peace", Chirac said, adding that he would find new ways to serve France after leaving office. He did not explain the reasons for his decision. He did not, during the broadcast, endorse any of the candidates running for election, but did devote several minutes of his talk to a plea against extremist politics that was considered a thinly disguised invocation to voters not to vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen and a recommendation to Nicolas Sarkozy not to orient his campaign so as to include themes traditionally associated with Le Pen.
Shortly after leaving office, he launched the Fondation Chirac in June 2008. Since then it has been striving for peace through five advocacy programmes: conflict prevention, access to water and sanitation, access to quality medicines and healthcare, access to land resources, and preservation of cultural diversity. It supports field projects that involve local people and provide concrete and innovative solutions. Chirac chaired the jury for the Prize for Conflict Prevention awarded every year by his foundation.
As a former President of France, he was entitled to a lifetime pension and personal security protection, and was an "ex officio" member for life of the Constitutional Council. He sat for the first time on the Council on 15 November 2007, six months after leaving the presidency. Immediately after Sarkozy's victory, Chirac moved into a duplex on the Quai Voltaire in Paris lent to him by the family of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. During the Didier Schuller affair, the latter accused Hariri of having participated in illegal funding of the RPR's political campaigns, but the judge closed the case without further investigations.
In Volume 2 of his memoirs published in June 2011, Chirac mocked his successor Nicolas Sarkozy as "irritable, rash, impetuous, disloyal, ungrateful, and un-French". Chirac wrote that he considered firing Sarkozy previously, and conceded responsibility in allowing Jean-Marie Le Pen to advance in 2002. A poll conducted in 2010 suggested he was the most admired political figure in France, while Sarkozy was 32nd.
On 11 April 2008, Chirac's office announced that he had undergone successful surgery to fit a pacemaker.
Chirac suffered from frail health and memory loss in later life. In February 2014 he was admitted to hospital because of pains related to gout. On 10 December 2015, Chirac was hospitalised in Paris for undisclosed reasons, although his state of health did not "give any cause for concern", he remained for about a week in ICU. According to his son-in-law Frederic Salat-Baroux, Chirac was again hospitalised in Paris with a lung infection on 18 September 2016.
Chirac died at his home in Paris on 26 September 2019, surrounded by his family. His requiem mass was held at the Saint-Sulpice Church on 30 September 2019, celebrated by Michel Aupetit, Archbishop of Paris, and attended by representatives from about 175 countries, included 69 past and present heads of state, government and international organizations (notable names included António Guterres, Jean-Claude Juncker, Jens Stoltenberg, Vladimir Putin, Sergio Mattarella, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Charles Michel, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Saad Hariri, Borut Pahor, Salome Zourabichvili, Tony Blair, Jean Chretien, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, Bill Clinton, Hamid Karzai, Dai Bingguo, ...) plus many ministers. The day was declared a national day of mourning in France and a minute of silence was held nationwide at 15:00. Following the public ceremony, Chirac was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery with only his closest family in attendance.
Because of Jacques Chirac's long career in visible government positions, he was often parodied or caricatured: Young Jacques Chirac is the basis of a young, dashing bureaucrat character in the 1976 Asterix comic strip album "Obelix and Co.", proposing methods to quell Gallic unrest to elderly, old-style Roman politicians. Chirac was also featured in "Le Bêbête Show" as an overexcited, jumpy character.
Jacques Chirac was a favorite character of "Les Guignols de l'Info", a satiric latex puppet show. He was originally portrayed as a rather likable, though overexcited, character; following the corruption allegations, however, he was depicted as a kind of dilettante and incompetent who pilfered public money and lied through his teeth. His character for a while developed a superhero alter ego, "Super Menteur" ("Super Liar") to get him out of embarrassing situations. Because of his alleged improprieties, he was lambasted in a song "Chirac en prison" ("Chirac in prison") by French punk band Les Wampas, with a video clip made by the "Guignols".
He was given the Ig Nobel prize for peace, for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima with atomic bomb tests in the Pacific (1996).
Charles Fathy appears as Chirac in the Oliver Stone film "W." Marc Rioufol plays him in Richard Loncraine's 2010 film "The Special Relationship".
Bernard Le Coq portrays Chirac in "La Dernière Campagne" and "The Conquest" by Xavier Durringer.
At the invitation of Saddam Hussein (then vice-president of Iraq, but "de facto" dictator), Chirac made an official visit to Baghdad in 1975. Saddam approved a deal granting French oil companies a number of privileges plus a 23-percent share of Iraqi oil. As part of this deal, France sold Iraq the Osirak MTR nuclear reactor, designed to test nuclear materials.
The Israeli Air Force alleged that the reactor's imminent commissioning was a threat to its security, and pre-emptively bombed the Osirak reactor on 7 June 1981, provoking considerable anger from French officials and the United Nations Security Council.
The Osirak deal became a controversy again in 2002–2003, when an international military coalition led by the United States invaded Iraq and forcibly removed Hussein's government from power. France led several other European countries in an effort to prevent the invasion. The Osirak deal was then used by parts of the American media to criticise the Chirac-led opposition to starting a war in Iraq, despite French involvement in the Gulf War.
Chirac has been named in several cases of alleged corruption that occurred during his term as mayor, some of which have led to felony convictions of some politicians and aides. However, a controversial judicial decision in 1999 granted Chirac immunity while he was president of France. He refused to testify on these matters, arguing that it would be incompatible with his presidential functions. Investigations concerning the running of Paris's city hall, the number of whose municipal employees increased by 25% from 1977 to 1995 (with 2,000 out of approximately 35,000 coming from the Corrèze region where Chirac had held his seat as deputy), as well as a lack of financial transparency ("marchés publics") and the communal debt, were thwarted by the legal impossibility of questioning him as president. The conditions of the privatisation of the Parisian water system acquired very cheaply by the Compagnie Générale des Eaux and the Lyonnaise des Eaux, then directed by Jérôme Monod, a close friend of Chirac, were also criticised. Furthermore, the satirical newspaper "Le Canard enchaîné" revealed the astronomical "food expenses" paid by the Parisian municipality (€15 million a year according to the "Canard"), expenses managed by Roger Romani (who allegedly destroyed all archives of the period 1978–93 during night raids in 1999–2000). Thousands of people were invited each year to receptions in the Paris city hall, while many political, media and artistic personalities were hosted in private flats owned by the city.
Chirac's immunity from prosecution ended in May 2007, when he left office as president. In November 2007 a preliminary charge of misuse of public funds was filed against him. Chirac is said to be the first former French head of state to be formally placed under investigation for a crime. On 30 October 2009, a judge ordered Chirac to stand trial on embezzlement charges, dating back to his time as mayor of Paris.
On 7 March 2011, he went on trial on charges of diverting public funds, accused of giving fictional city jobs to twenty-eight activists from his political party while serving as the mayor of Paris (1977–95). Along with Chirac, nine others stood trial in two separate cases, one dealing with fictional jobs for 21 people and the other with jobs for the remaining seven. The President of Union for a Popular Movement, who later served as France's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Alain Juppé, was sentenced to a 14-month suspended prison sentence for the same case in 2004.
On 15 December 2011, Chirac was found guilty and given a suspended sentence of two years. He was convicted of diverting public funds, abuse of trust and illegal conflict of interest. The suspended sentence meant he did not have to go to prison, and took into account his age, health, and status as a former head of state. He did not attend his trial, since medical doctors deemed that his neurological problems damaged his memory. His defence team decided not to appeal.
During April and May 2006, Chirac's administration was beset by a crisis as his chosen Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, was accused of asking Philippe Rondot, a top level French spy, for a secret investigation into Villepin's chief political rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, in 2004. This matter has been called the second Clearstream Affair. On 10 May 2006, following a Cabinet meeting, Chirac made a rare television appearance to try to protect Villepin from the scandal and to debunk allegations that Chirac himself had set up a Japanese bank account containing 300 million francs in 1992 as Mayor of Paris. Chirac said that "The Republic is not a dictatorship of rumours, a dictatorship of calumny."
In 1956, Chirac married Bernadette Chodron de Courcel, with whom he had two daughters: (4 March 195814 April 2016) and Claude (born 6 December 1962). Claude was a long-term public relations assistant and personal adviser to her father, while Laurence, who suffered from anorexia nervosa in her youth, did not participate in her father's political activities. Chirac was the grandfather of Martin Rey-Chirac by the relationship of Claude with French judoka Thierry Rey. A former Vietnamese refugee, Anh Dao Traxel, is a foster daughter of Jacques and Bernadette Chirac.
Chirac remained married, but had several other relationships.
In 1954, Chirac presented "The Development of the Port of New-Orleans", a short geography/economic thesis to the "Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po)", which he had entered three years before. The 182-page typewritten work, supervised by Professor Jean Chardonnet, is illustrated by photographs, sketches and diagrams.
President of the French Republic: 1995–2007. Reelected in 2002.
Member of the Constitutional Council of France: Since 2007.
Governmental functions
Prime minister: 1974–76 (Resignation) / 1986–88.
Minister of Interior: March–May 1974.
Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development: 1972–74.
Minister of Relation with Parliament: 1971–72.
Secretary of State for Economy and Finance: 1968–71.
Secretary of State for Social Affairs: 1967–68.
Electoral mandates
European Parliament
Member of European Parliament: 1979–80 (Resignation). Elected in 1979.
National Assembly of France
Elected in 1967, reelected in 1968, 1973, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1988, 1993: Member for Corrèze: March–April 1967 (became Secretary of State in April 1967), reelected in 1968, 1973, but he remained a minister in 1976–1986 (became Prime Minister in 1986), 1988–95 (resigned to become President of the French Republic in 1995).
General Council
President of the General Council of Corrèze: 1970–1979. Reelected in 1973, 1976.
General councillor of Corrèze: 1968–88. Reelected in 1970, 1976, 1982.
Municipal Council
Mayor of Paris: 1977–95 (Resignation, became President of the French Republic in 1995). Reelected in 1983, 1989.
Councillor of Paris: 1977–1995 (Resignation). Reelected in 1983, 1989.
Municipal councillor of Sainte-Féréole: 1965–77. Reelected in 1971.
Political function
President of the Rally for the Republic: 1976–94 (Resignation). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39764 |
History of Sweden
The History of Sweden can be traced back to the melting of the Northern Polar Ice Caps. From as early as 12,000 BC, humans have inhabited this area. Throughout the Stone Age, between 8,000 BC and 6,000 BC, early inhabitants used stone-crafting methods to make tools and weapons for hunting, gathering and fishing as means of survival.
Written sources about Sweden before 1,000 AD are rare and short, usually written by outsiders. It was not until the 14th century that longer historical texts were produced in Sweden. It is therefore usually accepted that Swedish recorded history, in contrast with pre-history, starts around the 11th century, when sources are common enough that they can be contrasted with each other.
The modern Swedish state was formed over a long period of unification and consolidation. Historians have set different standards for when it can be considered complete, resulting in dates from the 6th to 16th centuries. Some common laws were present from the second half of the 13th century. At this time, Sweden consisted of most of what is today the southern part of the country (except for Scania, Blekinge, Halland and Bohuslän), as well as parts of modern Finland. Over the following centuries, Swedish influence would expand into the North and East, even if borders were often ill-defined or nonexistent.
In the late 14th Century, Sweden was becoming increasingly intertwined with Denmark and Norway, with the three eventually uniting in the Kalmar Union. During the following century, a series of rebellions lessened Sweden's ties to the union, sometimes even leading to the election of a separate Swedish king. The fighting reached a climax following the Stockholm Bloodbath in 1520, a mass execution of accused heretics orchestrated by Christian II of Denmark. One of the few members of the most powerful noble families not present, Gustav Vasa, was able to raise a new rebellion and eventually was crowned King in 1523. His reign proved lasting and marked the end of Sweden's participation in the Kalmar Union.
Gustav Vasa furthermore encouraged Protestant preachers, finally breaking with the papacy and establishing the Lutheran Church in Sweden, seizing Catholic Church property and wealth.
During the 17th century, after winning wars against Denmark-Norway, Russia, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Sweden emerged as a great power by taking direct control of the Baltic region. Sweden's role in the Thirty Years' War determined the political and religious balance of power in Europe. The Swedish state expanded enormously into the modern Baltic states, northern Germany, and several regions that to this day are part of Sweden.
Before the end of the 17th century, a secret alliance was formed between Denmark-Norway, Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Russia against Sweden. This coalition acted at the start of the 18th century when Denmark-Norway and the Commonwealth launched surprise attacks on Sweden. In 1721, Russia and its allies won the war against Sweden. As a result, Russia was able to annex the Swedish territories of Estonia, Livonia, Ingria, and Karelia. This effectively put an end to the Swedish Empire, and crippled her Baltic Sea power.
Sweden joined in the Enlightenment culture of the day in the arts, architecture, science, and learning. Between 1570 and 1800, Sweden experienced two periods of urban expansion. Finland was lost to Russia in a war in 1808–1809.
In the early 19th century, Finland and the remaining territories outside the Scandinavian Peninsula were lost. Sweden's last war was the Swedish–Norwegian War (1814). Sweden was victorious in this war, leading to the Danish king being forced to cede Norway to Sweden. Norway was then forced to enter into a personal union with Sweden that lasted until 1905. Since 1814, Sweden has been at peace, adopting a non-aligned foreign policy in peacetime and neutrality in wartime. During World War I, Sweden remained neutral, but let the Germans travel in the country. Post-war prosperity provided the foundations for the social welfare policies characteristic of modern Sweden. During World War II, Sweden once again remained neutral, avoiding the fate of occupied Norway.
The country attempted to stay out of alliances and remain officially neutral during the entire Cold War, and declined to join NATO. The social democratic party held government for 44 years (1932–1976). The 1976 parliamentary elections brought a liberal/right-wing coalition to power. During the Cold War, Sweden was suspicious of the superpowers, but this sentiment lessened as the situation progressed, and Sweden continued to remain neutral.
Sweden has a large number of petroglyphs ("hällristningar" in Swedish), with the highest concentration in the province of Bohuslän and the northern part of the county of Kalmar, also called "Tjust". The earliest images can be found in the province of Jämtland, dating from 5000 BC. They depict wild animals such as elk, reindeer, bears and seals. 2300–500 BC was the most intensive carving period, with carvings of agriculture, warfare, ships, domesticated animals, etc. Petroglyphs with themes have also been found in Bohuslän, dating from 800–500 BC.
For centuries, the Swedes were merchant seamen well known for their far-reaching trade. During the 11th and 12th centuries, Sweden gradually became a unified Christian kingdom that later included Finland. Until 1060, the kings of Uppsala ruled most of modern Sweden except for the southern and western coastal regions, which remained under Danish rule until the 17th century. After a century of civil wars, a new royal family emerged, which strengthened the power of the crown at the expense of the nobility, while giving the nobles privileges such as exemption from taxation in exchange for military service. Sweden never had a fully developed feudal system, and its peasants were never reduced to serfdom.
The Vikings from Sweden mainly traveled east into Russia, but also took part in the raids of the Western and Southern regions of Europe. The large Russian mainland and its many navigable rivers offered good prospects for merchandise and plundering. During the 9th century, extensive Scandinavian settlements began on the east side of the Baltic Sea.
The conversion from Norse paganism to Christianity was a complex, gradual, and at times violent (see Temple at Uppsala) process. The main early source of religious influence was England, due to interactions between Scandinavians and Saxons in the Danelaw, and with Irish missionary monks. German influence was less obvious in the beginning, despite an early missionary attempt by Ansgar, but gradually emerged as the dominant religious force in the area, especially after the Norman conquest of England. Despite the close relations between Swedish and Russian aristocracy (see also Rus'), there is no direct evidence of Orthodox influence.
Around the year 1000, Olof Skötkonung became the first king to rule both Svealand and Götaland. Historical details about early medieval kings are obscure, and even the dates of their reigning periods remain unclear.
In the 12th century, Sweden was still undergoing dynastic struggles between the Erik and Sverker clans. Svealand and the Swedes were usually more supportive of the Erik dynasty and Götaland and Geats more supportive of the Sverker dynasty, which wanted friendlier relations with Denmark. This further divided the country between parties because the ruler was not clear. The country elected their king from each district by selecting 12 people from the local nobles, who then elected the king at the Stones of Mora. The divide ended when a third clan married into the Erik clan and founded the Bjelbo dynasty. This dynasty gradually consolidated a pre-Kalmar-Union Sweden to a strong state.
In 1332 the king of Denmark, Christopher II, died as a "king without a country" after he and his older brother and predecessor had divided Denmark into smaller polities. King Magnus took advantage of his neighbours' weakness, purchasing lands for the eastern Danish provinces for 6500 kg of silver, which included Scania. On 21 July 1336, Magnus was crowned king of Norway and Sweden in Stockholm. Scania was later reconquered by the Danish king Valdemar in 1360.
During the early Middle Ages, the Swedish kingdom also expanded to control Norrland and Finland. This expansion sparked tension with the Russian states, a tension that was to continue throughout Swedish history.
After the Black Death and internal power struggles in Sweden, Queen Margaret I of Denmark united the Nordic countries in the Union of Kalmar in 1397, with the approval of the Swedish nobility.
In the 16th century, Gustav Vasa (1490–1560) fought for an independent Sweden, crushing an attempt to restore the Union of Kalmar and laying the foundation for modern Sweden. At the same time, he broke with the papacy and established the Lutheran Church in Sweden.
The Union's final disintegration in the early 16th century brought on a long-lived rivalry between Norway and Denmark on one side and Sweden on the other. The Catholic bishops had supported the Danish King Christian II, but he was overthrown by Gustavus Vasa, and Sweden became independent again. Gustavus used the Protestant Reformation to curb the power of the church and was crowned as King Gustavus I in 1523. In 1527, he persuaded the Riksdag of Västerås (comprising the nobles, clergy, burghers, and freehold peasants) to confiscate church lands, which comprised 21% of the farmland. Gustavus took the Lutheran reformers under his protection and appointed his men as bishops. Gustavus suppressed aristocratic opposition to his ecclesiastical policies and efforts at centralization.
Tax reforms took place in 1538 and 1558, whereby multiple complex taxes on independent farmers were simplified and standardized throughout the district; tax assessments per farm were adjusted to reflect an ability to pay. Crown tax revenues increased, but more importantly, the new system was perceived as fairer and more acceptable. A war with Luebeck in 1535 resulted in the expulsion of the Hanseatic traders, who previously had had a monopoly of foreign trade. With its own businessmen in charge, Sweden's economic strength grew rapidly, and by 1544 Gustavus controlled 60% of the farmlands in all of Sweden. Sweden now built the first modern army in Europe, supported by a sophisticated tax system and government bureaucracy. Gustavus proclaimed the Swedish crown hereditary and the house of Vasa ruled Sweden (1523–1654) and Poland (1587–1668).
During the 17th century, after winning wars against Denmark, Russia, and Poland, Sweden (with scarcely more than 1 million inhabitants) emerged as a great power by taking direct control of the Baltic region, which was Europe's main source of grain, iron, copper, timber, tar, hemp, and furs.
Sweden had first gained a foothold on territory outside its traditional provinces in 1561, when Estonia opted for vassalage to Sweden during the Livonian War. While, in 1590, Sweden had to cede Ingria and Kexholm to Russia, and Sigismund tried to incorporate Swedish Estonia into the Duchy of Livonia, Sweden gradually expanded at the eastern Baltic during the following years. In a series of Polish–Swedish War (1600–1629) and the Russo-Swedish Ingrian War, Gustavus Adolphus retook Ingria and Kexholm (formally ceded in the Treaty of Stolbovo, 1617) as well as the bulk of Livonia (formally ceded in the Treaty of Altmark, 1629).
Sweden's role in the Thirty Years' War determined the political as well as the religious balance of power in Europe. From bridgeheads in Stralsund (1628) and Pomerania (1630), the Swedish army advanced to the south of the Holy Roman Empire, and in a side theater of the war deprived Denmark–Norway of Danish Estonia, Jämtland, Gotland, Halland, Härjedalen, Idre and Särna, became exempt from the Sound Dues, and established claims to Bremen-Verden, all of which was formalized in the Treaty of Brömsebro (1645). In 1648, Sweden became a guarantor power for the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War and left her with the additional dominions of Bremen-Verden, Wismar and Swedish Pomerania. From 1638 Sweden also held the colony of New Sweden, along the Delaware River in North America.
In 1655, in the Second Northern War, Charles X Gustav of Sweden invaded and occupied western Poland–Lithuania, the eastern half of which was already occupied by Russia. The rapid Swedish advance became known in Poland as the Swedish Deluge. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania became a Swedish fief, the Polish–Lithuanian regular armies surrendered and the Polish King John II Casimir Vasa fled to the Habsburgs. The Deluge lasted for five years and took a great toll on Poland and Lithuania, with some historians crediting this invasion as the start of the downfall of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The country was devastated, treasures stolen, and insurmountable loss of lives occurred.
Sweden was able to establish control of the Eastern bank of the Sound, formalised in the Treaty of Roskilde (1658), and gain recognition of her southeastern dominions by the European great powers in the Treaty of Oliva (1660); but Sweden was barred from further expansion at the Southern coast of the Baltic. Sweden came out of the Scanian War with only minor losses largely due to France forcing Sweden's adversaries into the treaties of Fontainebleau (1679) (confirmed at Lund) and Saint-Germain (1679).
The following period of peace allowed Charles XI of Sweden to reform and stabilise the realm. He consolidated the finances of the Crown by the great reduction of 1680; further changes were made in finance, commerce, national maritime and land armaments, judicial procedure, church government and education.
Russia, Saxony–Poland, and Denmark–Norway pooled their power in 1700 and attacked the Swedish empire. Although the young Swedish King Charles XII (1682–1718; reigned 1697–1718) won spectacular victories in the early years of the Great Northern War, most notably in the stunning success against the Russians at the Battle of Narva (1700), his plan to attack Moscow and force Russia into peace proved too ambitious.
The Russians won decisively at the Battle of Poltava in June 1709, capturing much of the exhausted Swedish army. Charles XII and the remnants of his army were cut off from Sweden and fled south into Ottoman territory, where he remained three years. He overstayed his welcome, refusing to leave until the Ottoman Empire joined him in a new war against Tsar Peter I of Russia. He established a powerful political network in Constantinople, which included even the mother of the sultan. Charles's persistence worked, as Peter's army was checked by Ottoman troops. However, Turkish failure to pursue the victory enraged Charles and from that moment his relations with the Ottoman administration soured. During the same period, the behavior of his troops worsened and turned disastrous. Lack of discipline and contempt for the locals soon created an unbearable situation in Moldavia. The Swedish soldiers behaved badly, destroying, stealing, raping, and killing. Meanwhile, back in the north, Sweden was invaded by its enemies; Charles returned home in 1714, too late to restore his lost empire and impoverished homeland; he died in 1718. In the subsequent peace treaties, the allied powers, joined by Russia and Great Britain-Hanover, ended Sweden's reign as a great power. Russia now dominated the north. The war-weary Riksdag asserted new powers and reduced the crown to a constitutional monarchy, with power held by a civilian government controlled by the Riksdag. A new "Age of Freedom" opened, and the economy was rebuilt, supported by large exports of iron and lumber to Britain. The Riksdag developed into an active parliament. This tradition continued into the nineteenth century, laying the basis for the transition towards a modern democracy.
The reign of Charles XII (1697–1718) has stirred up great controversy. Historians have puzzled over why this military genius overreached and greatly weakened Sweden. Although most early-19th-century historians tended to follow Voltaire's lead in bestowing extravagant praise on the warrior-king, others have criticised him as a fanatic, a bully, and a bloodthirsty warmonger. A more balanced view suggests a highly capable military ruler whose oft-reviled peculiarities seemed to have served him well, but who neglected his base in Sweden in pursuit of foreign adventure. Slow to learn the limits of Sweden's diminished strength, a party of nobles, who called themselves the "Hats", dreamed of revenge on Russia and ruled the country from 1739 to 1765; they engaged in wars in 1741, 1757, 1788, and 1809, with more or less disastrous results as Russian influence grew after every Swedish defeat.
Sweden joined in the Enlightenment culture of the day in the arts, architecture, science, and learning. A new law in 1766 established for the first time the principle of freedom of the press, a notable step towards liberty of political opinion. The Academy of Science was founded in 1739 and the Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities in 1753. The outstanding cultural leader was Carl Linnaeus (1707–78), whose work in biology and ethnography had a major impact on European science.
Following half a century of parliamentary domination came the reaction from the monarchy. King Gustav III (1746–1792) came to the throne in 1771, and in 1772 led a coup d'état, with French support, that established him as an "enlightened despot", who ruled at will. The Age of Freedom and party politics was over. Precocious and well educated, he became a patron of the arts and music. His edicts reformed the bureaucracy, repaired the currency, expanded trade, and improved defense. The population had reached two million and the country was prosperous, although rampant alcoholism was a growing social problem. Gustav III weakened the nobility and promoted numerous major social reforms. He felt the Swedish monarchy could survive and flourish by achieving a coalition with the newly emerged middle classes against the nobility. He personally disliked the French Revolution, but decided to promote additional anti-feudal reforms to strengthen his hand among the middle classes.
After Gustav made war on Russia and did poorly, he was assassinated by a conspiracy of nobles who were angry that he tried to restrict their privileges for the benefit of the peasants. Under the successor, King Gustav IV, Sweden joined various coalitions against Napoleon but was badly defeated and lost much of its territory, especially Finland and Pomerania. The king was overthrown by the army, which in 1810 decided to bring in one of Napoleon's marshals, Jean Bernadotte, as the heir apparent.
Sweden experimented briefly with overseas colonies, including "New Sweden" in Colonial America and the "Swedish Gold Coast" in present-day Ghana, which began in the 1630s. Sweden purchased the small Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy from France in 1784, then sold it back in 1878; the population had included slaves until they were freed by the Swedish government in 1847.
Between 1570 and 1800, Sweden experienced two periods of urban expansion, c. 1580–1690 and in the mid-18th century, separated by relative stagnation from the 1690s to about 1720. The initial phase was the more active, including an increase in the percentage of urban dwellers in Stockholm – a pattern comparable to increasing urban populations in other European capital and port cities – as well as the foundation of a number of small new towns. The second period of urban growth began around 1750 in response to shifts in Swedish trade patterns from the Baltic to the North Atlantic. It was characterised by increasing populations in the small towns of the north and west.
Finland was lost to Russia in a war that lasted from February 1808 to September 1809. As a result of the peace agreement, Finland became a Grand Duchy and thus was officially ruled by the Tsar of Russia though it was not strictly part of Russia. Humanitarian aid from England did not succeed in preventing Sweden from adopting more Napoleon-friendly policies after the Swedish coup d'état in 1809.
In 1810, French Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, one of Napoleon's top generals, was elected as Charles XIV John of Sweden (1818–44) by the Riksdag. He had a Jacobin background and was well-grounded in revolutionary principles, but put Sweden in the coalition that opposed Napoleon. In 1813, his forces joined the allies against Napoleon and defeated the Danes at Bornhöved. In the Treaty of Kiel, Denmark ceded mainland Norway to the Swedish king. Norway, however, declared its independence, adopted a constitution and chose a new king. Sweden invaded Norway to enforce the terms of the Kiel treaty in the last war Sweden has fought. After brief fighting, the peace established a personal union between the two states. Even though they shared the same king, Norway was largely independent of Sweden, except Sweden controlled foreign affairs. The king's rule was not well received and when Sweden refused to allow Norway to have its own diplomats, Norway rejected the King of Sweden in 1905 and selected its own king.
During Charles XIV's reign, the first stage of the Industrial Revolution reached Sweden. This first take-off was founded on rural forges, textile proto-industries and sawmills.
The 19th century was marked by the emergence of a liberal opposition press, the abolition of guild monopolies in trade and manufacturing in favor of free enterprise, the introduction of taxation and voting reforms, the installation of a national military service, and the rise in the electorate of three major party groups: the Social Democratic Party, the Liberal Party, and the Conservative Party.
Sweden, much like Japan at the same time, transformed from a stagnant rural society to a vibrant industrial society between the 1860s and 1910. The agricultural economy shifted gradually from a communal village to a more efficient private farm-based agriculture. There was less need for manual labor on the farm so many went to the cities and a million Swedes emigrated to the United States between 1850 and 1890. Many returned and brought word of the higher productivity of American industry, thus stimulating faster modernization.
In 1873, Sweden and Denmark formed the Scandinavian Monetary Union.
The late 19th century saw the emergence of an opposition press, the abolition of guild monopolies on craftsmen and the reform of taxation. Two years of military service was made compulsory for young men although there was no warfare.
The steady decline of death rates in Sweden began about 1810. For men and women of working age, the death rate trend diverged, however, leading to increased excess male mortality during the first half of the century. There were very high rates of infant and child mortality before 1800. Among infants and children between the ages of one and four, smallpox peaked as a cause of death in the 1770–1780s and declined afterward. Mortality also peaked during this period due to other air-, food-, and waterborne diseases, but these declined as well during the early 19th century. The decline of several diseases during this time created a more favorable environment that increased children's resistance to disease and dramatically lowered child mortality.
The introduction of compulsory gymnastics in Swedish schools in 1880 rested partly on a long tradition, from Renaissance humanism to the Enlightenment, of the importance of physical as well as intellectual training. More immediately, the promotion of gymnastics as a scientifically sound form of physical discipline coincided with the introduction of conscription, which gave the state a strong interest in educating children physically as well as mentally for the role of citizen soldiers. Skiing is a major recreation in Sweden and its ideological, functional, ecological, and social impact has been great on Swedish nationalism and consciousness. Swedes perceived skiing as virtuous, masculine, heroic, in harmony with nature, and part of the country's culture. A growing awareness of strong national sentiments and an appreciation of natural resources led to the creation of the Swedish Ski Association in 1892 in order to combine nature, leisure, and nationalism. The organization focused its efforts on patriotic, militaristic, heroic, and environmental Swedish traditions as they relate to ski sports and outdoor life.
With a broader voting franchise, the nation saw the emergence of three major party groups – Social Democrat, Liberal, and Conservative. The parties debated further expansion of the voting franchise. The Liberal Party, based on the middle class, put forth in 1907 a program for local voting rights later accepted in the Riksdag. The majority of Liberals wanted to require some property ownership before a man could vote, while the Social Democrats called for total male suffrage without property limitations. The strong farmer representation in the Second Chamber of the Riksdag maintained a conservative view, but their decline after 1900 gradually ended opposition to full suffrage.
Religion maintained a major role but public school religious education changed from the drill in the Lutheran catechism to biblical-ethical studies.
Sweden was neutral in World War I, although the Swedish government was sympathetic to both sides at different times during the conflict, even briefly occupying the Åland islands jointly with the Germans. At first, the Swedish government flirted with the possibility of changing their neutral stance to side with the Central Powers, and made concessions to them including mining the Öresund straits to close them to Allied warships wishing to enter the Baltic. Later the Swedish signed agreements allowing trade with the Allied powers and limiting trade with Central Powers, though this brought about the fall of the government of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld.
During the First World War and the 1920s, its industries expanded to meet the European demand for Swedish steel, ball bearings, wood pulp, and matches. Post-war prosperity provided the foundations for the social welfare policies characteristic of modern Sweden.
Sweden created a successful model of social democracy because of the unique way in which Sweden's labor leaders, politicians, and classes cooperated during the early development of Swedish democracy. Sweden's socialist leaders chose a moderate, reformist political course with broad-based public support. This helped Sweden avoid the severe extremist challenges and political and class divisions that plagued many European countries that attempted to develop social democratic systems after 1911. By dealing early, cooperatively, and effectively with the challenges of industrialization and its impact on Swedish social, political, and economic structures, Swedish social democrats were able to create one of the most successful social democratic systems in the world, including both a welfare state and extensive protections of civil liberties.
When the Social Democratic Party came into power in 1932, its leaders introduced a new political decision-making process, which later became known as "the Swedish model" or the "Folkhemmet" ("The People's Home"). The party took a central role, but tried as far as possible to base its policy on mutual understanding and compromise. Different interest groups were always involved in official committees that preceded government decisions.
Foreign policy concerns in the 1930s centered on Soviet and German expansionism, which pursuing abortive efforts at Nordic defense co-operation.
Sweden followed a policy of armed neutrality during World War II, although thousands of Swedish volunteers fought in the Winter War against the Soviets. Sweden did permit German troops to pass through its territory to and from occupation duties in Norway, and supplied the Nazi regime with steel and ball-bearings.
The dominant historiography for decades after the war ignored the Holocaust and used what it called the "small state realist" argument. It held that that neutrality and co-operation with Germany were necessary for survival since Germany was vastly more powerful, concessions were limited and were only made when the threat was too great. Neutrality was bent but not broken; national unity was paramount; and in any case, Sweden had the neutral right to trade with Germany. Germany needed Swedish iron, and Sweden had nothing to gain and much to lose from an invasion. The nation was run by a national unity government, which included all major parties in the Riksdag except the communist party. Its key leaders included Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, King Gustav V, and Foreign Minister Christian Günther.
Humanitarian aid to Jews facing the Holocaust was the mission of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. As the secretary of the 1944 Swedish delegation to Hungary, to co-ordinate humanitarian relief for the Jews of Europe during the Jewish Holocaust. He helped to rescue tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary in late 1944. He disappeared in January 1945, and probably died in a Soviet prison in 1947.
Sweden was one of the first non-participants of World War II to join the United Nations (in 1946). Apart from this, the country tried to stay out of alliances and remained officially neutral during the entire Cold War, never joining NATO.
The social democratic party held government for 44 years (1932–1976). They spent much of the 1950s and 1960s building "Folkhemmet" ("The People's Home"), the Swedish welfare state. Sweden's industry had not been damaged by the war and it was in a position to help re-build Northern Europe in the decades following 1945. This led to an economic upswing in the post-war era that made the welfare system feasible. However, by the 1970s, the economies of the rest of Western Europe were prosperous and growing rapidly, while the Swedish economy stagnated. Many economists blamed its large tax funded public sector.
In 1976, the social democrats lost their majority. The 1976 parliamentary elections brought a liberal/right-wing coalition to power. Over the next six years, four governments ruled and fell, composed by all or some of the parties that had won in 1976. The fourth liberal government in these years came under fire by Social Democrats and trade unions and the Moderate Party, culminating in the Social Democrats regaining power in 1982.
During the Cold War Sweden maintained a dual approach, publicly the strict neutrality policy was forcefully maintained, but unofficially strong ties were kept with the U.S., Norway, Denmark, West Germany, and other NATO countries. Swedes hoped that the U.S. would use conventional and nuclear weapons in case of a Soviet attack on Sweden. A strong ability to defend against an amphibious invasion was maintained, complete with Swedish-built warplanes, but there was no long-range bombing capability.
In the early 1960s, U.S. nuclear submarines armed with mid-range Polaris A-1 nuclear missiles were deployed not far from the Swedish west coast. Range and safety considerations made this a good area from which to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike on Moscow. The U.S. secretly provided Sweden with a military security guarantee, promising to provide military force in aid of Sweden in case of Soviet aggression. As part of the military cooperation, the U.S. provided much help in the development of the Saab 37 Viggen, as a strong Swedish air force was seen as necessary to keep Soviet anti-submarine aircraft from operating in the missile launch area. In return, Swedish scientists at the Royal Institute of Technology made considerable contributions to enhancing the targeting performance of the Polaris missiles.
On February 28, 1986, the Social Democratic leader and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was murdered; shocked Swedes worried whether the nation had "lost its innocence".
In the early 1990s, there was an economic crisis with high unemployment and several banks and companies going bankrupt. In 1995, a few years after the end of the Cold War, Sweden became a member of the European Union and the old term "policy of neutrality" fell out of use.
In a referendum held in 2003, the majority voted not to adopt the Euro as the country's official currency.
According to Lönnroth (1998) in the 19th century and early 20th century, Swedish historians saw their writing in terms of literature and storytelling, rather than analysis and interpretation. Harald Hjärne (1848–1922) pioneered modern historical scholarship. In 1876, he attacked the traditional myths of the social and legal conditions of ancient Greece and Rome inherited from the classical authors. He was inspired by German scholar Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831), a founder of modern German historiography. As a professor of history at Uppsala University, Hjärne became a spokesman for the Conservative Party and the Swedish monarchy by 1900. Hjärne had an enormous influence on his students and, indeed, on an entire generation of historians, who mostly became political conservatives and nationalists. Another movement emerged at Lund University around 1910, where critical scholars began using the source critics' methods to the early history of Scandinavia. The brothers Lauritz Weibull and Curt Weibull were the leaders, and they had followers at Lund and Göteborg universities. The result was a half-century of often embittered controversy between traditionalists and revisionists that lasted until 1960. There was a blurring of the ideological fronts resulting from experiences during and after World War II. In the meantime, in the general expansion of university education in the postwar period, history was generally neglected. Only through the activities of the National Research Council of the Humanities and the dedicated efforts of certain ambitious university professors created some expansion of historical scholarship. After 1990, there were signs of revival in historiography, with a strong new emphasis on 20th-century topics, as well as the application of social history and computerized statistical techniques to the demographic history of ordinary villagers before 1900.
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History of the European Union
The European Union is a geo-political entity covering a large portion of the European continent. It is founded upon numerous treaties and has undergone expansions and secessions that have taken it from 6 member states to 27, a majority of the states in Europe.
Apart from the ideas of federation, confederation, or customs union such as Winston Churchill's 1946 call for a "United States of Europe", the original development of the European Union was based on a supranational foundation that would "make war unthinkable and materially impossible" and reinforce democracy amongst its members as laid out by Robert Schuman and other leaders in the Schuman Declaration (1950) and the Europe Declaration (1951). This principle was at the heart of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) (1951), the Treaty of Paris (1951), and later the Treaty of Rome (1958) which established the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EAEC). The ECSC expired in 2002, while the EAEC maintains a distinct legal identity despite sharing members and institutions.
The Maastricht Treaty (1992) created the European Union with its pillars system, including foreign and home affairs alongside the European Community. This in turn led to the creation of the single European currency, the euro (launched 1999). The Maastricht Treaty has been amended by the treaties of Amsterdam (1997), Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2007).
The original development of the European Union was based on a supranational foundation that would "make war unthinkable and materially impossible"
A peaceful means of some consolidation of European territories used to be provided by dynastic unions; less common were country-level unions, such as the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1818, Tsar Alexander, as the most advanced internationalist of the day, suggested a kind of permanent European union and even proposed the maintenance of international military forces to provide recognised states with support against changes by violence.
An example of an organisation formed to promote the association of states between the wars to promote the idea of European union is the Pan-Europa movement.
World War II from 1939 to 1945 saw a human and economic catastrophe which hit Europe hardest. It demonstrated the horrors of war, and also of extremism, through the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once again, there was a desire to ensure it could never happen again, particularly with the war giving the world nuclear weapons. Most European countries failed to maintain their Great Power status, with the exception of the USSR, which became a superpower after World War II and maintained the status for 45 years. This left two rival ideologically opposed superpowers.
To ensure Germany could never threaten the peace again, its heavy industry was partly dismantled (See: Allied plans for German industry after World War II) and its main coal-producing regions were detached (Saarland, Silesia), or put under international control (Ruhr area). (See: Monnet Plan)
With statements such as Winston Churchill's 1946 call for a "United States of Europe" becoming louder, the Council of Europe was established in 1949 as the first pan-European organisation. In the year following, on 9 May 1950, the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman proposed a community to integrate the coal and steel industries of Europe – these being the two elements necessary to make weapons of war. (See: Schuman declaration).
On the basis of that speech, France, Italy, the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) together with West Germany signed the Treaty of Paris (1951) creating the European Coal and Steel Community the following year; this took over the role of the International Authority for the Ruhr and lifted some restrictions on German industrial productivity. It gave birth to the first institutions, such as the High Authority (now the European Commission) and the Common Assembly (now the European Parliament). The first presidents of those institutions were Jean Monnet and Paul-Henri Spaak respectively.
The formation of the European Coal and Steel Community was advanced by American Secretary of State George C. Marshall. His namesake plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of World War II contributed more than $100 billion in today's dollars to the Europeans, helping to feed Europeans, deliver steel to rebuild industries, provide coal to warm homes, and construct dams to help provide power. In doing so, the Marshall Plan encouraged the integration of European powers into the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to present-day European Union, by illustrating the effects of economic integration and the need for coordination. The potency of the Marshall's plan caused German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to remark that "[the] United States ought not to forget that the emerging European Union is one of its greatest achievements: it would never have happened without the Marshall Plan."
The attempt to turn the Saar protectorate into a "European territory" was rejected by a referendum in 1955. The Saar was to have been governed by a statute supervised by a European Commissioner reporting to the Council of Ministers of the Western European Union.
After failed attempts at creating defence (European Defence Community) and political communities (European Political Community), leaders met at the Messina Conference and established the Spaak Committee which produced the Spaak report. The report was accepted at the Venice Conference (29 and 30 May 1956) where the decision was taken to organise an Intergovernmental Conference. The Intergovernmental Conference on the Common Market and Euratom focused on economic unity, leading to the Treaties of Rome being signed in 1957 which established the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) among the members.
The two new communities were created separately from ECSC, although they shared the same courts and the Common Assembly. The executives of the new communities were called Commissions, as opposed to the "High Authority". The EEC was headed by Walter Hallstein (Hallstein Commission) and Euratom was headed by Louis Armand (Armand Commission) and then Etienne Hirsch. Euratom would integrate sectors in nuclear energy while the EEC would develop a customs union between members.
Throughout the 1960s tensions began to show with France seeking to limit supranational power and rejecting the membership of the United Kingdom. However, in 1965 an agreement was reached to merge the three communities under a single set of institutions, and hence the Merger Treaty was signed in Brussels and came into force on 1 July 1967 creating the European Communities. Jean Rey presided over the first merged Commission (Rey Commission).
While the political progress of the Communities was hesitant in the 1960s, this was a fertile period for European legal integration. Many of the foundational legal doctrines of the Court of Justice were first established in landmark decisions during the 1960s and 1970s, above all in the "Van Gend en Loos" decision of 1963 that declared the "direct effect" of European law, that is to say, its enforceability before national courts by private parties. Other landmark decisions during this period included "Costa v ENEL", which established the supremacy of European law over national law and the "Dairy Products" decision, which declared that general international law principles of reciprocity and retaliation were prohibited within the European Community. All three of these judgments were made after the appointment of French judge Robert Lecourt in 1962, and Lecourt appears to have become a dominant influence on the Court of Justice over the 1960s and 1970s.
After much negotiation, and following a change in the French Presidency, Denmark, Ireland and the United Kingdom (with Gibraltar) eventually joined the European Communities on 1 January 1973. This was the first of several enlargements which became a major policy area of the Union (see: Enlargement of the European Union).
In 1979, the European Parliament held its first direct elections by universal suffrage. 410 members were elected, who then elected the first female President of the European Parliament, Simone Veil.
A further enlargement took place in 1981 with Greece joining on 1 January, six years after applying. In 1982, Greenland voted to leave the Community after gaining home rule from Denmark (See also: Special member state territories and the European Union). Spain and Portugal joined (having applied in 1977) on 1 January 1986 in the third enlargement.
Recently appointed Commission President Jacques Delors (Delors Commission) presided over the adoption of the European flag by the Communities in 1986. In the first major revision of the treaties since the Merger Treaty, leaders signed the Single European Act in February 1986. The text dealt with institutional reform, including extension of community powers – in particular in regarding foreign policy. It was a major component in completing the single market and came into force on 1 July 1987.
In 1987 Turkey formally applied to join the Community and began the longest application process for any country. After the 1988 Polish strikes and the Polish Round Table Agreement, the first small signs of opening in Central Europe appeared. The opening of a border gate between Austria and Hungary at the Pan-European Picnic on August 19, 1989 then set in motion a peaceful chain reaction, at the end of which there was no longer a GDR and the Eastern Bloc had disintegrated. Otto von Habsburg and Imre Pozsgay saw the event as an opportunity to test Mikhail Gorbachev`s reaction to an opening of the Iron Curtain. In particular, it was examined whether Moscow would give the Soviet troops stationed in Hungary the command to intervene. But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic, the subsequent hesitant behavior of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany and the non-intervention of the Soviet Union broke the dams. So the bracket of the Eastern Bloc was broken and as a result the Berlin Wall fell together with the whole Iron Curtain. Germany reunified and the door to enlargement to the former Eastern Bloc was opened (See also: Copenhagen Criteria).
With a wave of new enlargements on the way, the Maastricht Treaty was signed on 7 February 1992 which established the European Union when it came into force the following year.
On 1 November 1993, under the third Delors Commission, the Maastricht Treaty became effective, creating the European Union with its pillar system, including foreign and home affairs alongside the European Community. The 1994 European elections were held resulting in the Socialist group maintaining their position as the largest party in Parliament. The Council proposed Jacques Santer as Commission President but he was seen as a second choice candidate, undermining his position. Parliament narrowly approved Santer but his commission gained greater support, being approved by 416 votes to 103. Santer had to use his new powers under Maastricht to flex greater control over his choice of Commissioners. They took office on 23 January 1995.
On 30 March 1994, accession negotiations concluded with Austria, Sweden and Finland. Meanwhile, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein joined the European Economic Area (which entered into force on 1 January 1994), an organisation that allowed European Free Trade Association states to enter the Single European Market. The following year, the Schengen Agreement came into force between seven members, expanding to include nearly all others by the end of 1996. The 1990s also saw the further development of the euro. 1 January 1994 saw the second stage of the Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union begin with the establishment of the European Monetary Institute and at the start of 1999 the euro as a currency was launched and the European Central Bank was established. On 1 January 2002, notes and coins were put into circulation, replacing the old currencies entirely.
During the 1990s, the conflicts in the Balkans gave impetus to developing the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The EU failed to react during the beginning of the conflict, and UN peacekeepers from the Netherlands failed to prevent the Srebrenica massacre (July 1995) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) finally had to intervene in the war, forcing the combatants to the negotiation table. The early foreign policy experience of the EU led to foreign policy being emphasised in the Treaty of Amsterdam (which created the High Representative).
However, any success was overshadowed by the budget crisis in March 1999. The Parliament refused to approve the Commission's 1996 community's budget on grounds of financial mismanagement, fraud and nepotism. With Parliament ready to throw them out, the entire Santer Commission resigned. The post-Delors mood of euroscepticism became entrenched with the Council and Parliament constantly challenging the Commission's position in coming years.
In the following elections, the Socialists lost their decades-old majority to the new People's Party and the incoming Prodi Commission was quick to establish the new European Anti-fraud Office (OLAF). Under the new powers of the Amsterdam Treaty, Prodi was described by some as the 'First Prime Minister of Europe'. On 4 June, Javier Solana was appointed Secretary General of the Council and the strengthened High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy admitted the intervention in Kosovo – Solana was also seen by some as Europe's first Foreign Minister. The Nice Treaty was signed on 26 February 2001 and entered into force on 1 February 2003 which made the final preparations before the 2004 enlargement to 10 new members.
On 10–13 June 2004, the 25 member states participated in the largest trans-national election in history (with the second largest democratic electorate in the world). The result of the sixth Parliamentary election was a second victory for the European People's Party-European Democrats group. It also saw the lowest voter turnout of 45.5%, the second time it had fallen below 50%. On 22 July 2004, José Manuel Barroso was approved by the new Parliament as the next Commission President. However, his new team of 25 Commissioners faced a tougher road. With Parliament raising objections to a number of his candidates he was forced to withdraw his selection and try once more. The Prodi Commission had to extend their mandate to 22 November after the new line-up of commissioners was finally approved.
A proposed constitutional treaty was signed by plenipotentiaries from EU member states on 28 October 2004. The document was ratified in most member states, including two positive referendums. The referendums that were held in France and the Netherlands failed however, killing off the treaty. The European Council agreed that the constitution proposal would be abandoned, but most of its changes would be retained in an amending treaty. On 13 December 2007 the treaty was signed, containing opt-outs for the more eurosceptic members and no state-like elements. The Lisbon treaty finally came into force on 1 December 2009. It created the post of President of the European Council and significantly expanded the post of High Representative. After much debate about what kind of person should be President, the European Council agreed on a low-key personality and chose Herman Van Rompuy while foreign policy-novice Catherine Ashton became High Representative.
The 2009 elections again saw a victory for the European People's Party, despite losing the British Conservatives who formed a smaller eurosceptic grouping with other anti-federalist right wing parties. Parliament's presidency was once again divided between the People's Party and the Socialists, with Jerzy Buzek elected as the first President of the European Parliament from an ex-communist country.
Barroso was nominated by the Council for a second term and received backing from EPP who had declared him as their candidate before the elections. However, the Socialists and Greens led the opposition against him despite not agreeing on an opposing candidate. Parliament finally approved Barroso II, though once more several months behind schedule.
In 2007, the fifth enlargement completed with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria on 1 January 2007. Also, in 2007 Slovenia adopted the euro, Malta and Cyprus in 2008 and Slovakia in 2009. However trouble developed with existing members as the eurozone entered its first recession in 2008. Members cooperated and the ECB intervened to help restore economic growth and the euro was seen as a safe haven, particularly by those outside such as Iceland.
However, with the risk of a default in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and other members in late 2009–10, eurozone leaders agreed to provisions for loans to member states who could not raise funds. Accusations that this was a U-turn on the EU treaties, which rule out any bail out of a euro member in order to encourage them to manage their finances better, were countered by the argument that these were loans, not grants, and that neither the EU nor other Member States assumed any liabilities for the debts of the aided countries. With Greece struggling to restore its finances, other member states also at risk and the repercussions this would have on the rest of the eurozone economy, a loan mechanism was agreed. The crisis also spurred consensus for further economic integration and a range of proposals such as a European Monetary Fund or federal treasury.
The European Union received the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for having "contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe." The Nobel Committee stated that "that dreadful suffering in World War II demonstrated the need for a new Europe [...] today war between Germany and France is unthinkable. This shows how, through well-aimed efforts and by building up mutual confidence, historical enemies can become close partners." The Nobel Committee's decision was subject to considerable criticism.
On 1 July 2013, Croatia joined the EU, and on 1 January 2014 the French Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte was added as an outermost region.
On 23 June 2016, the citizens of the United Kingdom voted to withdraw from the European Union in a referendum and subsequently became the first and to date only member to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU). The vote was in favour of leaving the EU by a margin of 51.9% in favour to 48.1% against. The UK's withdrawal was completed on 31 January 2020. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39767 |
Erich Honecker
Erich Ernst Paul Honecker (; 25 August 1912 – 29 May 1994) was a German politician who was the General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). As party leader he worked closely with Moscow (which had a large army stationed in East Germany). He controlled the government of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from 1971 until he was forced out in the weeks preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989. From 1976 onward he was also the country's official head of state as Chairman of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic following Willi Stoph's relinquishment of the post.
Honecker's political career began in the 1930s when he became an official of the Communist Party of Germany, a position for which he was imprisoned by the Nazi government of Germany. Following World War II, he was freed by the Soviet army and relaunched his political activities, founding the youth organisation the Free German Youth in 1946 and serving as the group's chairman until 1955. As the Security Secretary of the Party's Central Committee in the new East Germany, he was the prime organiser of the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and, in this function, bore responsibility for the "order to fire" along the Inner German border.
In 1970, he initiated a political power struggle that led, with support of the Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev, to his replacing Walter Ulbricht as First Secretary of the Central Committee and as chairman of the state's National Defense Council. Under his command, the country adopted a programme of "consumer socialism" and moved toward the international community by normalising relations with West Germany and also becoming a full member of the UN, in what is considered one of his greatest political successes.
As Cold War tensions eased in the late 1980s with the advent of perestroika and glasnost – the liberal reforms introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev – Honecker refused all but cosmetic changes to the East German political system. He cited the continual hardliner attitudes of Kim Il-sung and Fidel Castro, whose respective regimes of North Korea and Cuba had been critical of reforms. As anticommunist protests grew, Honecker begged Gorbachev to intervene with the Soviet army to suppress the protests to maintain communist rule in East Germany as Moscow had done with Czechoslovakia in the Prague Spring of 1968 and with the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 but Gorbachev refused. Honecker was forced to resign by his party in October 1989 in a bid to improve the government's image in the eyes of the public. Honecker's eighteen years at the helm of the German Democratic Republic came to an end. The entire regime collapsed in the following weeks.
Following German reunification in 1990, he sought asylum in the Chilean embassy in Moscow in 1991 but was extradited back to Germany a year later to stand trial for his role in the human rights abuses committed by his East German government. However, the proceedings were abandoned due to his illness and he was freed from custody to travel to join his family in exile in Chile, where he died in May 1994 from liver cancer.
Honecker was born in Neunkirchen, in what is now Saarland, as the son of Wilhelm Honecker (1881–1969), a coal miner and political activist, who had married Caroline Catharine Weidenhof (1883–1963) in 1905. The couple had six children: Katharina (Käthe, 1906–1925), Wilhelm (Willi, 1907–1944), Frieda (1909–1974), Erich, Gertrud (1917–2010) and Karl-Robert (1923–1947). Erich, their fourth child, was born on 25 August 1912 during the period in which the family resided on Max-Braun-Straße, before later moving to Kuchenbergstraße 88 in the present-day Neunkirchen city district of Wiebelskirchen.
After World War I, the Territory of the Saar Basin was occupied by France. This change from the strict rule of Baron von Stumm to French military occupation provided the backdrop for what Wilhelm Honecker understood as proletarian exploitation, and introduced young Erich to communism. After his tenth birthday in 1922, Erich Honecker became a member of the Spartacus League's children's group in Wiebelskirchen. Aged 14 he entered the KJVD, the Young Communist League of Germany, for whom he later served the organisation's leader of Saarland from 1931.
Honecker did not find an apprenticeship immediately after leaving school, but instead worked for a farmer in Pomerania for almost two years. In 1928 he returned to Wiebelskirchen and began a traineeship as a roofer with his uncle, but quit to attend the International Lenin School in Moscow and Magnitogorsk after the KJVD hand-picked him for a course of study there. There, sharing a room with Anton Ackermann, he studied under the cover name "Fritz Malter".
In 1930, aged 18, Honecker entered the KPD, the Communist Party of Germany. His political mentor was Otto Niebergall, who later represented the KPD in the Reichstag. After returning from Moscow in 1931 following his studies at the International Lenin School, he became the leader of the KJVD in the Saar region. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Communist activities were only possible within Germany undercover; the Saar region however still remained outside the German Reich under a League of Nations mandate. Honecker was arrested in Essen, Germany but soon released. Following this he fled to the Netherlands and from there oversaw KJVD's activities in Pfalz, Hesse and Baden-Württemberg.
He returned to the Saar in 1934 and worked alongside Johannes Hoffmann on the campaign against the region's re-incorporation into Germany. A referendum on the area's future in January 1935 however saw 90.73% vote in favour of reunifying with Germany. Like 4,000 to 8,000 others, Honecker then fled the region, initially relocating to Paris.
On 28 August 1935 he illegally travelled to Berlin under the alias "Marten Tjaden", with a printing press in his luggage. From there he worked closely together with then-KPD official Herbert Wehner in opposition/resistance to the Nazi state. On 4 December 1935 Honecker was detained by the Gestapo and until 1937 remanded in Berlin's Moabit detention centre. On 3 July 1937 he was sentenced to ten years imprisonment for the "preparation of high treason alongside the severe falsification of documents".
Honecker spent the majority of his incarceration in the Brandenburg-Görden Prison, where he also carried out tasks as a handyman. In early 1945 he was moved to the Barnimstraße Women's Prison in Berlin due to good behaviour and to be put to work repairing the bomb-damaged building, as he was a skilled roofer. During an Allied bombing raid on 6 March 1945 he managed to escape and hid himself at the apartment of Lotte Grund, a female prison guard. After several days she persuaded him to turn himself in and his escape was then covered up by the guard. Honecker spent most of his time in prison under solitary confinement.
After the liberation of the prisons by advancing Soviet troops on 27 April 1945, Honecker remained in Berlin. His "escape" from prison and his relationships during his captivity later led to him experiencing difficulties within the Socialist Unity Party, as well as straining his relations with his former inmates. In later interviews and in his personal memoirs, Honecker falsified many of the details of his life during this period. Material from the East German State Security Service has been used to allege that, to be released from prison, Honecker offered the Gestapo evidence incriminating fellow imprisoned Communists, claimed he had renounced Communism "for good", and was willing to serve in the German army.
In May 1945 Honecker was "picked up" by chance in Berlin by Hans Mahle and taken to the Ulbricht Group, a collective of exiled German communists that had returned from the Soviet Union to Germany after the end of the Nazi regime. Through Waldemar Schmidt, Honecker befriended Walter Ulbricht, who had not been aware of him at that point. Honecker's future role in the group was still undecided until well into the summer months, as he had yet to face a party process. This ended in a reprimand due to his "undisciplined conduct" in fleeing from prison at the start of the year, an action which was debated upon it jeopardizing the other (communist) inmates.
In 1946 he became the co-founder of the Free German Youth (FDJ), whose chairmanship he also undertook. After the formation of the SED, the Socialist Unity Party, in April 1946 through a merger of the KPD and SPD, Honecker swiftly became a leading party member and took his place in the party's Central Committee.
On 7 October 1949 the German Democratic Republic was formed with the adoption of a new constitution, establishing a political system similar to that of the Soviet Union. Within the state's socialistic single party government, Honecker determinedly resumed his political career and the following year was nominated as a candidate for the Politbüro of the SED's Central Committee. As President of the Free German Youth movement, he organised the inaugural ""Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend"" in East Berlin in May 1950 and the 3rd World Festival of Youth and Students in 1951, although the latter was beset with organisational problems.
During the internal party unrest following the suppressed uprising of June 1953, Honecker sided with First Secretary Walter Ulbricht, despite the majority of the Politburo attempting to depose Ulbricht in favour of Rudolf Herrnstadt. Honecker himself though faced questioning from party members about his inadequate qualifications for his position. On 27 May 1955 he handed the Presidency of the FDJ over to Karl Namokel, and departed for Moscow to study for two years at the School of the Soviet Communist Party at Ulbricht's request. During this period he witnessed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in person, where its First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin.
After returning to East Germany in 1958 Honecker became a fully-fledged member of the Politburo, taking over responsibility for military and security issues. As the Party Security Secretary he was the prime organiser of the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 and also a proponent of the "order to fire" along the Inner German border.
While Ulbricht had replaced the state's command economy with, firstly the "New Economic System", then the Economic System of Socialism, as he sought to improve the country's failing economy, Honecker declared the main task to in fact be the "unity of economic and social politics", essentially through which living standards (with increased consumer goods) would be raised in exchange for political loyalty. Tensions had already led to his once-mentor Ulbricht removing Honecker from the position of Second Secretary in July 1970, only for the Soviet leadership to swiftly reinstate him. Honecker played up the thawing East-West German relationship as Ulbricht's strategy, to win the support of the Soviet leadership under Leonid Brezhnev. With this secured, Honecker was appointed First Secretary (from 1976 titled General Secretary) of the Central Committee on 3 May 1971 after the Soviet leadership forced Ulbricht to step aside "for health reasons".
After also succeeding Ulbricht as Chairman of the National Defence Council in 1971, Honecker was eventually also elected Chairman of the State Council (a post equivalent to that of president) on 29 October 1976. With this, Honecker reached the height of power within East Germany. From there on, he, along with Economic Secretary Günter Mittag and Minister of State Security Erich Mielke, made all key government decisions. Until 1989 the "little strategic clique" composed of these three men was unchallenged as the top level of East Germany's ruling class. Honecker's closest colleague was , the SED's Agitation and Propaganda Secretary. Alongside him, Honecker held daily meetings concerning the party's media representation in which the layout of the party's own newspaper "Neues Deutschland", as well as the sequencing of news items in the national news bulletin "Aktuelle Kamera", were determined.
Under Honecker's leadership, East Germany adopted a programme of "consumer socialism", which resulted in a marked improvement in living standards already the highest among the Eastern bloc countries. More attention was placed on the availability of consumer goods, and the construction of new housing was accelerated, with Honecker promising to "settle the housing problem as an issue of social relevance". His policies were initially marked by a liberalisation toward culture and art, though this was less about the replacement of Ulbricht by Honecker and more for propaganda purposes. While 1973 brought the World Festival of Youth and Students to East Berlin, soon dissident artists such as Wolf Biermann were expelled and the Ministry for State Security raised its efforts to suppress political resistance. Honecker remained committed to the expansion of the Inner German border and the "order to fire" policy along it. During his time in office around 125 East German citizens were killed while trying to reach the West.
After the Federal Republic had secured an agreement with the Soviet Union on cooperation and a policy of non-violence, it became possible to reach a similar agreement with the GDR. The Basic Treaty between East and West Germany in 1972 sought to normalise contacts between the two governments.
East Germany also participated in the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe held in Helsinki in 1975, which attempted to improve relations between the West and the Eastern Bloc, and became a full member of the United Nations. These acts of diplomacy were considered Honecker’s greatest successes in foreign politics.
He received additional high-profile personal recognitions including an honorary doctorate by Tokyo’s Nihon University in 1981 and the Olympic Order from the IOC in 1985. In September 1987, he became the first East German head of state to visit West Germany, where he was received with full state honours by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in an act that seemed to confirm West Germany's acceptance of East Germany's existence. During this trip he also journeyed to his birthplace in Saarland, where he held an emotional speech in which he spoke of a day when Germans would no longer be separated by borders. This trip had been planned twice before, including September 1984, but was initially blocked by the Soviet leadership which mistrusted the special East-West German relationship, particularly efforts to expand East Germany's limited independence in the realm of foreign policy.
In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced "glasnost" and "perestroika", reforms to liberalise communism. Frictions between him and Honecker had grown over these policies and numerous additional issues from 1985 onward. East Germany refused to implement similar reforms, with Honecker reportedly telling Gorbachev: "We have done our perestroika; we have nothing to restructure". Gorbachev grew to dislike Honecker, and by 1988 was lumping him in with Bulgaria's Todor Zhivkov, Czechoslovakia's Gustáv Husák and Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu as a "Gang of Four": a group of inflexible hardliners unwilling to make reforms.
According to White House experts Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Gorbachev looked to Communist leaders in Eastern Europe to follow his example of perestroika and glasnost. They argue:
Western analysts, according to Zelikow and Rice, believed in 1989 that Communism was still secure in East Germany:
Honecker felt betrayed by Gorbachev in his German policy and ensured that official texts of the Soviet Union, especially those concerning "perestroika", could no longer be published or sold in East Germany.
At the Warsaw Pact summit on 7–8 July 1989 in Bucharest, the Soviet Union reaffirmed its shift from the Brezhnev Doctrine of the limited sovereignty of its member states, and announced "freedom of choice". The Bucharest statement prescribed that its nations henceforth developed their "own political line, strategy and tactics without external intervention". This called into question the Soviet guarantee of existence for the Communist states in Europe. Already in May 1989 Hungary had begun dismantling its border with Austria, creating the first gap in the so-called Iron Curtain, through which several thousand East Germans quickly fled in hopes of reaching West Germany by way of Austria. But with the mass exodus at the Pan-European Picnic, the subsequent hesitant behavior of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany and the non-intervention of the Soviet Union broke the dams. Thus the bracket of the Eastern Bloc was broken. The reaction to this from Erich Honecker in the "Daily Mirror" of August 19, 1989 was too late and showed the current loss of power: “Habsburg distributed leaflets far into Poland, on which the East German holidaymakers were invited to a picnic. When they came to the picnic, they were given gifts, food and Deutsche Mark, and then they were persuaded to come to the West.” Now tens of thousands of the media-informed East Germans made their way to Hungary, which was no longer ready to keep its borders completely closed or to oblige its border troops to use force of arms. Per a 1969 treaty, the Hungarian government should have forced the East Germans back home. However, starting on 11 September 1989, the Hungarians let the refugees pass into Austria, telling their outraged East German counterparts that international treaties on refugees took precedence.
At the time Honecker was sidelined through illness, leaving his colleagues unable to act decisively. He had taken ill with biliary colic during the Warsaw Pact summit. He was shortly after flown home to East Berlin. After an initial health stabilisation, he underwent surgery on 18 August 1989 to remove his inflamed gallbladder and, due to a perforation, part of his colon. According to the urologist Peter Althaus, the surgeons left a suspected carcinogenic nodule in Honecker’s right kidney due to his weak condition, and also failed to inform the patient of the suspected cancer; other sources say the tumor was simply undetected. As a result of this operation, Honecker was away from his office until late September 1989.
Back in office, Honecker had to contend with the rising number and strength of demonstrations across East Germany that had first been sparked by reports in the West German media of fraudulent results in local elections on 7 May 1989, the same results he had labelled a "convincing reflection" of the populace's faith in his leadership. He also had to deal with a new refugee problem. Several thousand East Germans tried to go to West Germany by way of Czechoslovakia, only to have that government bar them from passing. Several thousands of them headed straight for the West German embassy in Prague and demanded safe passage to West Germany. With some reluctance, Honecker allowed them to go—but forced them to go back through East Germany on sealed trains and stripped them of their East German citizenship. Several members of the SED "Politbüro" realised this was a serious blunder and made plans to get rid of him.
As unrest visibly grew, large numbers began fleeing the country through the West German embassies in Prague and in Budapest and over the borders of the "socialist brother" states. Each month saw tens of thousands more exit. On 3 October 1989 East Germany closed its borders to its eastern neighbors and prevented visa-free travel to Czechoslovakia; a day later these measures were also extended to travel to Bulgaria and Romania. East Germany was now not only behind the Iron Curtain to the West, but also cordoned off from most other Eastern bloc states.
On 6–7 October 1989 the national celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the East German state took place with Gorbachev in attendance. To the surprise of Honecker and the other SED leaders in attendance, several hundred members of the Free German Youth—reckoned as the future vanguard of the party and nation—began chanting, ""Gorby, help us! Gorby, save us!"". In a private conversation between the two leaders Honecker praised the success of the nation, but Gorbachev knew that, in reality, it faced bankruptcy; East Germany had already accepted billions of dollars in loans from West Germany during the decade as it sought to stabilise its economy. Attempting to make Honecker accept a need for reforms, Gorbachev warned Honecker that "He who is too late is punished by life", yet Honecker maintained that "we will solve our problems ourselves with socialist means". Protests outside the reception at the Palace of the Republic led to hundreds of arrests in which many were brutally beaten by soldiers and police.
As the reform movement spread throughout Central and Eastern Europe, mass demonstrations against the East German government erupted, most prominently in Leipzig—the first of several demonstrations which took place on Monday nights across the country. In response, an elite paratroop unit was dispatched to Leipzig—almost certainly on Honecker's orders, since he was commander-in-chief of the Army. A bloodbath was averted only when local party officials themselves ordered the troops to pull back. In the following week, Honecker faced a torrent of criticism. This gave his "Politburo" comrades the impetus they needed to replace him.
After a crisis meeting of the Politburo on 10–11 October 1989, Honecker's planned state visit to Denmark was cancelled and, despite his resistance, at the insistence of the regime's number-two-man, Egon Krenz, a public statement was issued that called for "suggestions for attractive socialism". Over the following days Krenz worked to secure himself the support of the military and the Stasi and arranged a meeting between Gorbachev and Politburo member Harry Tisch, who was in Moscow, to inform the Kremlin about the now-planned removal of Honecker; Gorbachev reportedly wished them good luck.
The sitting of the SED Central Committee planned for the end of November 1989 was pulled forward a week, with the most urgent item on the agenda now being the composition of the Politburo. Krenz and Mielke attempted by telephone on the night of 16 October to win other Politburo members over to remove Honecker. At the beginning of the session on 17 October, Honecker asked his routine question of "Are there any suggestions for the agenda?" Stoph replied, "Please, General Secretary, Erich, I propose that a new item be placed on the agenda. It is the release of Erich Honecker as General Secretary and the election of Egon Krenz in his place." Honecker reportedly calmly responded: "Well, then I open the debate".
All those present then spoke, in turn, but none in favour of Honecker. Günter Schabowski even extended the dismissal of Honecker to also include his posts in the State Council and as Chairman of the National Defence Council while childhood friend Günter Mittag moved away from Honecker. Mielke supposedly blamed Honecker for almost all the country's current ills and threatened to publish compromising information that he possessed, if Honecker refused to resign. A ZDF documentary on the matter claims this information was contained in a large red briefcase found in Mielke's possession in 1990. After three hours the Politburo voted to remove Honecker. In accordance with longstanding practice, Honecker voted for his own removal. When the public announcement was made, it was branded as a voluntary decision on Honecker's part, ostensibly "due to health reasons". Krenz was unanimously elected as his successor as General Secretary.
Communist rule in East Germany survived Honecker's removal by only two months. Three weeks after Honecker's ousting the Berlin Wall fell, and the SED swiftly lost control of the country. On 1 December, its guaranteed right to rule was deleted from the East German constitution. Two days later he was expelled from the SED along with other former officials. He went on to join the newly founded Communist Party, remaining a member from 1992 until his death.
During November the People's Chamber had already set up a committee to investigate corruption and abuses of office, with Honecker being alleged to have received annual donations from the National Academy of Architecture of around 20,000 marks as an "honorary member". On 5 December 1989 the chief public prosecutor in East Germany formally launched a judicial inquiry against him on charges of high treason, abuses of confidence and embezzlement to the serious disadvantage of socialist property (the charge of high treason was dropped in March 1990). As a result, Honecker was placed under house arrest for a month.
Following the lifting of his house arrest, Honecker and his wife Margot were forced to vacate their apartment in the Waldsiedlung housing area in Wandlitz, exclusively used by senior SED party members, after the People's Chamber decided to put it to use as a sanatorium for the disabled. In any case, Honecker spent the majority of January 1990 in hospital after having the error of the tumour missed in 1989 corrected after the suspicion of cancer was confirmed. Upon leaving the hospital on 29 January he was re-arrested and held at the Berlin-Rummelsburg remand centre. However, on the evening of the following day, 30 January, Honecker was again released from custody: The district court had annulled the arrest warrant and, due to medical reports, certified him unfit for detention and interrogation.
Lacking a home, Honecker instructed his lawyer Wolfgang Vogel to ask the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg for help. Pastor Uwe Holmer, leader of the Hoffnungstal Institute in Lobetal, Bernau bei Berlin, offered the couple a home in his vicarage. This drew immediate condemnation and later demonstrations against the church for assisting the Honeckers, given they had both discriminated against Christians who did not conform with the SED regime's ideology. Aside from a stay at a holiday home in Lindow in March 1990 that lasted only one day before protests swiftly brought it to an end, the couple resided at the Holmer residence until 3 April 1990.
The couple then moved into a three-room living quarters within the Soviet military hospital in Beelitz. Here, doctors diagnosed a malignant liver tumour following another re-examination. Following German reunification, prosecutors in Berlin issued a further arrest warrant for Honecker in November 1990 on charges that he gave the order to fire on escapees at the Inner German border in 1961 and had repeatedly reiterated that command (most specifically in 1974). However, this warrant was not enforceable because Honecker lay under the protection of Soviet authorities in Beelitz. On 13 March 1991 the Honeckers fled Germany from the Soviet-controlled Sperenberg Airfield to Moscow on a military jet with the aid of Soviet hardliners.
The German Chancellery had only been informed by Soviet diplomats about the Honeckers’ flight to Moscow one hour in advance. It limited its response to a public protest, claiming the existence of an arrest warrant meant the Soviet Union was breaching international law by admitting Honecker. The initial Soviet reaction was that Honecker was now too ill to travel and was receiving medical treatment after a deterioration of his health. He underwent further surgery the following month.
On 11 December 1991 the Honeckers sought refuge in the Chilean Embassy in Moscow, while also applying for political asylum in the Soviet Union. Despite an offer of help from North Korea, Honecker instead hoped for special protection from Chile as, under his rule, East Germany had granted many Chileans exile following the military coup of 1973 by Augusto Pinochet. In addition his daughter Sonja was married to a Chilean. Chilean authorities, however, stated he could not enter their country without a valid German passport.
Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 25 December 1991 and ceded all the powers still vested in it to Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. Russian authorities had long been keen on expelling Honecker, against the wishes of Gorbachev, and the new government now demanded that he leave the country or else face deportation.
In June 1992, Chilean President Patricio Aylwin, leader of a left-centrist coalition, finally assured German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that Honecker would be leaving the embassy in Moscow. Reportedly against his will, Honecker was ejected from the embassy on 29 July 1992 and flown to Berlin's Tegel Airport, where he was arrested and detained in Moabit Prison. By contrast, his wife Margot travelled on a direct flight from Moscow to Santiago, Chile, where she initially stayed with her daughter Sonja. Honecker's lawyers unsuccessfully appealed for him to be released from detention in the period leading up to his trial.
On 12 May 1992, while under protection in the Chilean embassy in Moscow, Honecker, along with several co-defendants, including Erich Mielke, Willi Stoph, Heinz Kessler, Fritz Streletz and Hans Albrecht, was accused in a 783-page indictment of his part in the "collective manslaughter" of 68 people as they attempted to flee East Germany. It was alleged that Honecker, in his role as Chairman of the National Defence Council, had both given the decisive order in 1961 for the construction of the Berlin Wall and also, at subsequent meetings, ordered the extensive expansion of the border fortifications around West Berlin and the barriers to the West so as to make any passing impossible. In addition, specifically at a May 1974 sitting of the National Defence Council, he had stated that the development of the border must continue, that lines of fire were warranted along the whole border and, as prior, the use of firearms was essential: "Comrades who have successfully used their firearms [are] to be praised". Honecker, in his role of chairman of the party, was responsible for the deaths of many more than the 68 mentioned above. As of 22 April 2015, well over 1,000 deaths have been discovered mainly through secret East German documentation: "It is still not known for sure how many people died on the inner German border or who they were, as the East German state treated such information as a closely guarded secret. But numbers have risen steadily since unification, as evidence has been gathered from East German records. Current unofficial estimates put the figure at up to 1,100 people." From the same article, "In 1974, Erich Honecker, as Chairman of the GDR's National Defence Council, ordered: "Firearms are to be ruthlessly used in the event of attempts to break through the border, and the comrades who have successfully used their firearms are to be commended.", as quoted in Hans-Hermann Hertle's book from the same citation. Honecker was surely responsible for the deaths of many of the 1,100 during his long reign, as can be evidenced from his order that "firearms are to be ruthlessly used" to prevent border crossings.
The charges were approved by the Berlin District Court on 19 October 1992 at the opening of the trial. On the same day, it was decided that the hearing of 56 charges would be postponed and the remaining twelve cases would be the subject of the trial to begin on 12 November 1992. The question of under which laws the former East German leader could be tried was highly controversial and, in the view of many jurists, the process had an uncertain outcome.
During his 70-minute-long statement to the court on 3 December 1992, Honecker admitted political responsibility for the building of the Berlin Wall and subsequent deaths at the borders, but claimed he was "without juridical, legal or moral guilt". He blamed the escalation of the Cold War for the building of the Berlin Wall, saying the decision had not been taken solely by the East German leadership but all the Warsaw Pact nations that had collectively concluded in 1961 that a "Third World War with millions dead" would be unavoidable without this action. He quoted several West German politicians who had opined that the wall had indeed reduced and stabilised the two factions. He stated that he had always regretted every death, both from a human point of view and due to the political damage they caused.
Making reference to past trials in Germany against communists and socialists such as Karl Marx and August Bebel, he claimed that the legal process against him was politically motivated and a "show trial" against communism. He stated that no court lying in the territory of West Germany had the legal right to place him, his co-defendants or any East German citizen on trial, and that the portrayal of East Germany as an ""Unrechtsstaat"" was contradictory to its recognition by over one hundred other nations and the UN Security Council. Furthermore, he questioned how a German court could now legally judge his political decisions in the light of the lack of legal action taken over various military operations that had been carried out by Western nations with either overt support or absence of condemnation from (West) Germany. He dismissed public criticism of the Stasi, arguing that journalists in Western countries were praised for denouncing others. While accepting political responsibility for the deaths at the Wall, he believed he was free of any "legal or moral guilt", and thought that East Germany would go down in history as "a sign that socialism is possible and is better than capitalism."
By the time of the proceedings Honecker was already seriously ill. A new CT scan in August 1992 had confirmed an ultrasound examination made in Moscow and the existence of a malignant tumour in the right lobe of his liver. Based on these findings and additional medical testimonies, Honecker’s lawyers requested that the legal proceedings, as far as they were aimed against their client, be abandoned and the arrest warrant against him withdrawn; the cases against both Mielke and Stoph had already been postponed due to their ill health. Arguing that his life expectancy was estimated to be three to six months, while the legal process was forecast to take at least two years, his lawyers questioned whether it was humane to try a dying man. Their application was rejected on 21 December 1992 when the court concluded that, given the seriousness of the charges, no obstacle to the proceedings existed.
Honecker lodged a constitutional complaint to the recently created Berlin Constitutional Court, stating that the decision to proceed violated his fundamental right to human dignity, which was an overriding principle in the Constitution of Berlin, above even the state penal system and criminal justice. On 12 January 1993 Honecker's complaint was upheld and the Berlin District Court therefore abandoned the case and withdrew their arrest warrant. An application for a new arrest warrant was rejected on 13 January. The court also refused to commence with the trial related to the indictment of 12 November 1992, and withdrew the second arrest warrant related to these charges. After a total of 169 days Honecker was released from custody, drawing protests both from victims of the East German regime as well as German political figures.
Honecker flew via Brazil to Santiago, Chile, to reunite with his wife and his daughter Sonja, who lived there with her son Roberto. Upon his arrival he was greeted by the leaders of the Chilean Communist and Socialist parties. In contrast, his co-defendants Heinz Kessler, Fritz Streletz and Hans Albrecht were sentenced on 16 September 1993 to imprisonment of between four and seven-and-a-half years. On 13 April 1993 a final attempt to separate and continue the trial against Honecker in his absence was discontinued. Four days later, on the 66th birthday of his wife Margot, he gave a final public speech, ending with the words: "Socialism is the opposite of what we have now in Germany. For that I would like to say that our beautiful memories of the German Democratic Republic are testimony of a new and just society. And we want to always remain loyal to these things".
On 29 May 1994, he died of liver cancer at the age of 81 in a terraced house in the La Reina district of Santiago. His funeral, arranged by the Communist Party of Chile, was conducted the following day at central cemetery in Santiago.
Honecker was married three times. After being liberated from prison in 1945, he married the prison warden Charlotte Schanuel (née Drost), nine years his senior, on 23 December 1946. She died suddenly from a brain tumour in June 1947. Details of this marriage were not revealed until 2003, well after his death.
By the time of her death, Honecker was already romantically involved with the Free German Youth official Edith Baumann, whom he met on a trip to Moscow. With her, he had a daughter, Erika (b. 1950), who later gave him his granddaughter Anke. Sources differ on whether Honecker and Baumann married in 1947 or 1949, but in 1952 he fathered an illegitimate daughter, Sonja (b. December 1952), with Margot Feist, a People's Chamber member and chairperson of the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation.
In September 1950, Baumann wrote directly to Walter Ulbricht to inform him of her husband's extramarital activity in the hope of him pressuring Honecker to end his relationship with Feist. Following his divorce and reportedly under pressure from the Politburo, he married Feist, however sources again differ on both the year of his divorce from Baumann and of his marriage to Feist; depending on the source, the events took place either in 1953 or 1955. For more than twenty years, Margot Honecker served as Minister of National Education. In 2012 intelligence reports collated by West German spies alleged that both Honecker and his wife had secret affairs but did not divorce for political reasons, however, his bodyguard Bernd Brückner in a book about his time spent in Honecker's service, denied the claims.
Honecker had three grandchildren from his daughter Sonja, who had married the Chilean-born exile Leonardo Yáñez Betancourt; Roberto, (b. 1974) Mariana, (b. 1985) who died in 1988 at the age of two leaving Honecker himself heartbroken, and Vivian (b. 1988). Roberto's origins are debated; he is claimed to be the illegally adopted son of Heidi Stein, Dirk Schiller, born on 13 June 1975 in Görlitz, who disappeared in March 1979, due to alleged physical similarities between Dirk and Yáñez, Stein suspecting that her son might have been kidnapped at three years old by Stasi agents for Honecker's younger daughter.
Honecker's daughter, who divorced Yáñez in 1993, grandson, and granddaughter still live in Santiago.
The 1983 Udo Lindenberg song "Sonderzug nach Pankow", aimed at the State Council and their lack of looseness, also achieved great popularity in East Germany. In 1987 Honecker sent Lindenberg a shawm—an instrument he had played in his youth as a member of the "Roter Frontkämpferbund"—in response to the gift of a leather jacket from him.
Dmitri Vrubel's 1990 mural on the Berlin Wall "My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love", depicting a socialist "fraternal kiss" between Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev, became known around the world. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39768 |
IBM System i
The IBM System i was a line of midrange computer systems from IBM. The platform was first introduced as the AS/400 (Application System/400) in June 1988, with the operating system being called OS/400. In 2000, it was renamed to the eServer iSeries (with the 400 sometimes added). As part of IBM's re-branding initiative in 2006, it was again renamed to System i.
In April 2008, it was replaced by a modern standards-based (PCI, FiberChannel, RAID, etc) rack-friendly server line, IBM Power Systems. IBM Power Systems support the AIX and GNU/Linux operating systems, as well as IBM i. IBM i running on IBM Power Systems has the ability to run applications built for IBM System i and its predecessors.
The predecessor to AS/400, IBM System/38, was first made available in August 1979 and was marketed as a minicomputer for general business and departmental use. It was sold alongside other product lines, each with a different architecture (System/3, System/32, System/34, System/36).
Realizing the importance of compatibility with the thousands of programs written in legacy code, IBM launched the AS/400 midrange computer line in 1988. AS stands for "Application System." Great effort was made during development of the AS/400 to enable programs written for the System/34 and System/36 to be moved to the AS/400. Programs on the System/38 were directly compatible with the new AS/400 (after they were 're-encapsulated' by the operating system).
In 2000, in accordance with IBM's eServer initiative, the AS/400 series was rebranded as the eServer iSeries. In 2006, it was again rebranded as the IBM System i. In 2008, almost 20 years after being introduced, the System i and IBM System p product lines were combined into a new product line called the IBM Power Systems line.
The AS/400 operating system was originally named OS/400 (following the pattern begun with OS/360 and followed with OS/2). The operating system has undergone name changes along with the rebranding of IBM's server lineup. The operating system was rebranded as i5/OS to correspond with the introduction of POWER5 processors and the rebranding of the hardware to eServer iSeries. Ultimately, the operating system was replaced by IBM i's 6.1 release.
The operating system is object-based. Features include a RDBMS (DB2/400), a menu-driven interface, support for multiple users, block-oriented terminal support (IBM 5250), and printers. IBM i has built-in security, and support for communications, and web-based applications which can be executed inside the optional IBM WebSphere Application Server or as PHP/MySQL applications inside a native port of the Apache web server.
Unlike the "everything is a file" feature of Unix and its derivatives, on IBM i everything is an object (with built-in persistence and garbage collection). IBM i offers Unix-like file directories using the Integrated File System. Java compatibility is implemented through a native port of the Java virtual machine.
Like IBM's mainframe operating systems, IBM i uses EBCDIC as the inherent encoding.
OS/400 Version 4, Release 4 (V4R4) introduced LPARs (logical partitions) allowing multiple virtual systems to run on a single hardware footprint.
The IBM System i platform extended the System/38 architecture of an object-based system with an integrated DB2 relational database. Equally important are the virtual machine and single-level storage concepts which established the platform as an advanced business computer.
One feature that has contributed to the longevity of the IBM System i platform is its high-level instruction set (called TIMI for "Technology Independent Machine Interface" by IBM), which allows application programs to take advantage of advances in hardware and software without recompilation. TIMI is a virtual instruction set independent of the underlying machine instruction set of the CPU. User-mode programs contain both TIMI instructions and the machine instructions of the CPU, thus ensuring hardware independence. This is conceptually somewhat similar to the virtual machine architecture of programming environments such as Smalltalk, Java and .NET. The key difference is that it is embedded so deeply into the AS/400's design as to make applications effectively binary-compatible across different processor families.
Unlike some other virtual-machine architectures in which the virtual instructions are interpreted at run time, TIMI instructions are never interpreted. They constitute an intermediate compile time step and are translated into the processor's instruction set as the final compilation step. The TIMI instructions are stored within the final program object, in addition to the executable machine instructions. This is how application objects compiled on one processor family (e.g., the original CISC AS/400 48-bit processors) could be moved to a new processor (e.g., PowerPC 64-bit) without re-compilation. An application saved from the older 48-bit platform can simply be restored onto the new 64-bit platform where the operating system discards the old machine instructions and re-translates the TIMI instructions into 64-bit instructions for the new processor.
The system's instruction set defines all pointers as 128-bit. This was the original design feature of the System/38 (S/38) in the mid 1970s planning for future use of faster processors, memory and an expanded address space. When at a point in the future 128-bit general purpose processors would appear, IBM i will already be fully 128-bit enabled. The original AS/400 CISC models used the same 48-bit address space as the S/38. The address space was expanded in 1995 when ith the RISC PowerPC RS64 64-bit CPU processor replaced the 48-bit CISC processor.
For 64-bit PowerPC processors, the virtual address resides in the rightmost 64 bits of a pointer while it was 48 bits in the S/38 and CISC AS/400. The 64-bit address space references main memory and disk as a single address set which is the single-level storage concept.
The IBM System i includes an extensive library-based operating system, IBM i, and is also capable of supporting multiple instances of AIX, Linux, Lotus Domino, Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. While IBM i, AIX, Linux and Lotus Domino are supported on the POWER processors, Windows is supported with either single-processor internal blade servers (IXS) or externally linked multiple-processor servers (IXA and iSCSI). iSCSI also provides support for attachment of IBM Bladecenters. Windows, Linux, and VMware ESX(VI3) are supported on iSCSI attached servers.
LPAR (Logical PARtitioning), a feature introduced from IBM's mainframe computers, facilitates running multiple operating systems simultaneously on one IBM System i unit. A system configured with LPAR can run various operating systems on separate partitions while ensuring that one OS cannot run over the memory or resources of another. Each LPAR is given a portion of system resources (memory, hard disk space, and CPU time) via a system of weights that determines where unused resources are allocated at any given time. The operating systems supported (and commonly used) under the LPAR scheme are IBM i, AIX, and Linux.
Other features include an integrated DB2 database management system, a menu-driven interface, multi-user support, non-programmable terminals (IBM 5250) and printers, security, communications, client–server and web-based applications. Much of the software necessary to run the IBM System i is included and integrated into the base operating system.
The IBM System i also supports common client–server systems such as ODBC and JDBC for accessing its database from client software such as Java, Microsoft .NET languages and others.
Programming languages available for the AS/400 include RPG, assembly language, C, C++, Pascal, Java, EGL, Perl, Smalltalk, COBOL, SQL, BASIC, PHP, PL/I, Python and REXX. Several CASE tools are available: CA Plex (formerly AllFusion Plex) , Synon, IBM Rational Business Developer Extension, Accelerator, LANSA, Uniface and GeneXus.
The ILE (Integrated Language Environment) programming environment allows programs from ILE compatible languages (C, C++, COBOL, RPG, Fortran, and CL), to be bound into the same executable and call procedures written in any of the other ILE languages.
The IBM System i fully supports the Java language, including 32- and 64-bit Java Virtual Machines (JVM).
Commands in the Control Language (CL) are promptable using the keyboard F4 function key, and most provide cursor-sensitive help to make specifying command parameters simpler. All command names and parameter keywords are based upon uniform standardized and mostly 3-letter abbreviations for verbs and subjects, making for easy rendering and interpretation by the application developer, as opposed to other operating systems with often cryptic or inconsistent command names for related functions or command parameter switches. For instance, the parameter keyword to apply a text description to any object to be created or changed is spelled the same way for all such commands.
Examples:
For traditional business programming languages such as RPG, COBOL, and C, the IBM System i provides an interface to the integrated database that allows these languages to treat database tables much like other platforms treat ISAM or VSAM files.
Support for 5250 display operations is provided via display files, an interface between workstations, keyboards and displays, and interactive applications, as opposed to batch processing with little or no user interaction. ASCII terminals and PC workstations are equally and well supported, also via internet or LAN network access supplemented by either IBM or non-IBM communication software, for example TELNET or TELNET 5250.
IBM systems may also come with programming and development software like Programming Development Manager.
The IBM System i, then known as the AS/400, was the continuation of the System/38 database machine architecture (announced by IBM in October 1978 and delivered in August 1979). The AS/400 removed capability-based addressing. The AS/400 added source compatibility with the System/36 combining the two primary computers manufactured by the IBM Rochester plant. The System/36 was IBM's most successful mini-computer but the architecture had reached its limit.
The first AS/400 systems (known by the development code names Silverlake, named for Silver Lake in downtown Rochester, Minnesota, where development of the system took place, and Olympic) were delivered in 1988 under the tag line "Best of Both Worlds" and the product line has been refreshed continually since then. Guy Dehond from Inventive Designers was one of the beta-testers of Silverlake. The programmers who worked on OS/400, the operating system of the AS/400, did not have a UNIX background. Dr Frank Soltis, the chief architect, says that this is the main difference between this and any other operating system.
The AS/400 was one of the first general-purpose computer systems to attain a C2 security rating from the NSA (Gould UTX/C2, a UNIX-based system was branded in 1986), and in 1995 was extended to employ a 64-bit processor and operating system.
The 1995 change-over from IMPI, with 48-bit addresses, to PowerAS, with 64-bit addresses, required that all programs be 'observable', i.e. that the debugging information had not been stripped out of the compiled code. This caused problems for those who had bought third-party products that had no source and no observability. In 2008, the replacement of IBM System i with IBM i on Power Systems caused similar problems.
In 2000 IBM renamed the AS/400 to iSeries, as part of its e-Server branding initiative. At that time, it adopted more PC server like features, such as PS/2 keyboards and mice and VGA video output, mostly coming from IBM PS/2 and Intel server line (called eServer xSeries), replacing proprietary technologies. In 2001, it switched to the POWER4 processor from the PowerAS processors used by previous generations.
The product line was further extended in 2004 with the introduction of the i5 servers, the first to use the IBM POWER5 processor. The architecture of the system allows for future implementation of 128-bit processors when they become available.
Although announced in 1988, the AS/400 remains IBM's most recent major architectural shift that was developed wholly internally. Since the arrival of Lou Gerstner in 1993, IBM has viewed such colossal internal developments as too risky. Instead, IBM now prefers to make key product strides through acquisition (e.g., the takeovers of Lotus Software and Rational Software) and to support the development of open standards, particularly Linux. After the departure of CEO John Akers in 1993, when IBM looked likely to be split up, Bill Gates commented that the only part of IBM that Microsoft would be interested in was the AS/400 division. (At the time, many of Microsoft's business and financial systems ran on the AS/400 platform, something that ceased to be the case around 1999, with the introduction of Windows 2000.)
In 1986, System/38 announced support for Distributed Data Management Architecture (DDM). This enabled programs to create, manage, and access record-oriented files on remote System/36, System/38, and IBM mainframe systems running CICS. This support was extended into the AS/400 and its follow-ons. It was enhanced to support additional services that had been defined by DDM and to support AS/400-specific extensions, as allowed by DDM.
In 1990, the AS/400 announced support for Distributed Relational Database Architecture, which is based on DDM.
The AS/400 was originally based on a custom IBM CISC CPU which had an instruction set architecture, known as Internal MicroProgrammed Interface (IMPI), similar to that of the IBM System/370. It was later migrated to a POWER-based RISC CPU family eventually known as RS64.
The System i5 uses POWER CPUs. These CPUs are developed and manufactured by IBM. The POWER 4/5/5+ chips contain two cores. There are Multi-Chip Modules (MCM) available. They have 2 CPUs (4 cores) or 4 CPUs (8 cores) in one MCM. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39769 |
IBM System p
The System p, formerly known as RS/6000, was IBM's RISC/UNIX-based server product line.
In April 2008, IBM announced a rebranding of the System p and its unification with the System i platform. The resulting product line is called IBM Power Systems.
RS/6000 was originally a line of workstations and servers. The server line was then renamed to the "e"Server pSeries in 2000 as part of its e-Server branding initiative.
In 2004, with the advent of the POWER5 processor, the family was rebranded the "e"Server p5.
In 2005, following IBM's move to streamline its server and storage brands, worldwide, and incorporating the System brand, with the Systems Agenda, the family was renamed yet again as System p5.
The System p5 now encompasses the IBM OpenPower product line.
After the introduction of POWER6 processor models, the new models were released under the System p brand, dropping the p (numbered) designation.
Whereas RS/6000 used a mix of early POWER and PowerPC processors, when pSeries came along this had evolved into RS64-III and POWER3 across the board—POWER3 for its excellent floating-point performance and RS64 for its scalability, throughput, and integer performance.
IBM developed the POWER4 processor to replace both POWER3 and the RS64 line in 2001. After that the differences between throughput and number crunching-optimized systems no longer existed. Since then System p machines evolved to use the POWER5 but also the PowerPC 970 for the low-end and blade systems.
The last System p systems used the POWER6 processor, such as the POWER6-based System p 570 and the JS22 blade. In addition IBM introduced during the SuperComputing 2007 (SC07) conference in Reno a new POWER6-based System p 575 with 32 POWER6 cores at 4.7 GHz and up to 256 GB of RAM with water cooling.
All IBM System p5 and IBM "e"Server p5 machines support DLPAR (Dynamic Logical Partitioning) with Virtual I/O and Micro-partitioning.
System p generally uses the AIX operating system and, more recently, 64-bit versions of the Linux operating system.
The IBM p690 was, at the time of its release in late 2001, the flagship of IBM's high end Unix servers (pSeries) during the POWER4 era of processors. It was built to run IBM AIX Unix, although it is possible to run a version of Linux minus some POWER4 specific features. It was discontinued in late 2005.
It can support up to thirty-two 1.50, 1.70 or 1.90 GHz POWER4+ processors and 1 TB of RAM. It weighs well over 1000 kg. It was used in a supercomputer at Forschungszentrum Jülich in 2004.
System p was rebranded Power Systems in 2008.
OpenPower was the name of a range of servers in the System p line from IBM. They featured IBM's POWER5 CPUs and run only 64-bit versions of Linux. IBM's own UNIX variant, AIX is not supported since the OpenPower servers are not licensed for this operating system.
There were two models available, with a variety of configurations.
Before 2005, OpenPower belonged to the eServer product line but were eventually rolled into the IBM's Power Systems product portfolio. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39770 |
Cape Cod Canal
The Cape Cod Canal is an artificial waterway in the U.S. state of Massachusetts connecting Cape Cod Bay in the north to Buzzards Bay in the south, and is part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. The approximately canal traverses the narrow neck of land joining Cape Cod to the state's mainland. Most of its length follows tidal rivers widened to and deepened to at mean low water, shaving off the journey around the Cape for its approximately 14,000 annual users.
Most of the canal is located in Bourne, Massachusetts, but its northeastern terminus is in Sandwich, Massachusetts. Scusset Beach State Reservation lies near the canal's north entrance, the Massachusetts Maritime Academy near its south. A swift running current changes direction every six hours and can reach during the receding ebb tide. The waterway is maintained by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and has no toll fees. It is spanned by the Cape Cod Canal Railroad Bridge, the Bourne Bridge, and the Sagamore Bridge. Traffic lights at either end govern the approach of vessels over .
The canal is occasionally used by whales and dolphins, including endangered North Atlantic right whales; these can cause closure of the canal.
Construction of a canal was first considered by Myles Standish of the Plymouth Colony in 1623, and the Pilgrims scouted the low-lying stretch of land between the Manomet and Scusset rivers for potential routes. William Bradford established the Aptucxet Trading Post in 1627 at the portage between the rivers. Trade prospered with the American Indians of Narragansett Bay and the Dutch of New Netherland, and this was a major factor enabling the Pilgrims to pay off their indebtedness. In 1697, the General Court of Massachusetts considered the first formal proposal to build the canal but took no action. In 1717, a canal was created in Orleans, Massachusetts called Jeremiah's Gutter which spanned a narrower portion of the Cape some distance to the east, but it only remained active until the late 1800s. More energetic planning with surveys took place repeatedly in 1776 (by George Washington), 1791, 1803, 1818, 1824–1830, and 1860. None of these efforts came to fruition.
The first attempts at actually building a canal did not take place until the late 19th century; earlier planners either ran out of money or were overwhelmed by the project's size. The engineers finally decided which route to take through the hillsides by connecting and widening the Manomet and Scusset Rivers.
On June 22, 1909, construction finally began for a working canal under the direction of August Belmont Jr.'s Boston, Cape Cod & New York Canal Company using designs by engineer William Barclay Parsons. There were many problems that the canal engineers encountered, such as huge boulders underwater. Divers were hired to blow them up, but the effort slowed dredging. Another problem was cold winter storms which forced the engineers to stop dredging altogether and wait for spring. Nevertheless, the canal opened on a limited basis on July 29, 1914, and it was completed in 1916. The privately owned toll canal had a maximum width of and a maximum depth of , and it took a somewhat difficult route from Phinney Harbor at the head of Buzzards Bay. Several accidents occurred due to the narrow channel and navigation difficulty, and these limited traffic and tarnished the canal's reputation. Toll revenues failed to meet investors' expectations as a result, despite shortening the trade route from New York City to Boston by .
The German U-boat surfaced off Orleans, Massachusetts on July 21, 1918 and shelled the tugboat "Perth Amboy" and her string of four barges. The Director General of the United States Railroad Administration took over jurisdiction and operation of the canal four days later under a presidential proclamation. The United States Army Corps of Engineers re-dredged the channel to deep while it remained under government control until 1920. In 1928, the government purchased the canal for $11.4 million as a free public waterway, and $21 million was spent between 1935 and 1940 increasing the canal's width to and its depth to . As a result, it became the widest sea-level canal of its time. The southern entrance to the canal was rebuilt for direct access from Buzzards Bay rather than through Phinney Harbor. Before construction began, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a huge scale model of the canal (9 feet to a mile, roughly actual size) to study the hydraulic effects of tidal currents on the enlarged and rerouted canal.
During World War II, shipping again used the canal to avoid "Kriegsmarine" U-boats patrolling offshore. It was protected by coastal artillery batteries at the Sagamore Hill Military Reservation at the northern entrance and the Butler Point Military Reservation at the southern entrance. The artillery was never fired in defense of the canal.
The Mystic Steamship Company's collier "USS Stephen R. Jones (ID-4526)" was grounded and sank in the canal on June 28, 1942. Shipping was routed around Cape Cod, and one diverted ship was the Liberty ship "SS Alexander Macomb" which was torpedoed by the "Kriegsmarine's" U-215 on July 3 with the loss of 10 lives. The canal reopened on July 31 after the wrecked "Stephen R. Jones" was removed with the help of 17 tons of dynamite.
The canal is used extensively by recreational and commercial vessels. Service roads on both sides of the canal provide access for fishing and are heavily used by in-line skaters, bicyclists, and walkers. Several parking areas are maintained at access points. Bourne Scenic Park is leased by the Corps of Engineers to the Town of Bourne Recreation Authority for use as a tent and RV campground adjacent to the Canal.
The Army Corps of Engineers maintains the Cape Cod Canal Visitor Center which introduces visitors to the history, features, and operation of the canal. Features include a retired US Army Corps of Engineers patrol boat, a 46-seat theater showing continuous DVD presentations on canal history, canal flora and fauna, real time radar and camera images of the waterway, and a variety of interactive exhibits. Corps Park Rangers staff the center and provide free public programs on a variety of subjects. The Visitor Center is open seasonally from May to October, and admission is free. It is located on Moffitt Drive in Sandwich near the canal's east end. A second seasonally staffed center is at the Herring Run along Scenic Highway.
Scusset Beach State Reservation lies just north of the east end of the canal and offers beach facilities as well as tent and RV camping. A trail there leads to Sagamore Hill, once an Indian meeting ground and the site of a World War II coastal fortification. Bournedale Hills Trail extends along the north side of the Canal from Bourne Scenic Park campground to the Herring Run. The trail includes a self-guided loop which interprets the Canal's historic and natural features.
A spoof became popular during the late 20th century concerning a fictitious tunnel, allegedly built in the 1960s under the Cape Cod Canal. It came into popular usage in Massachusetts as a commentary on the severe traffic entering and exiting Cape Cod during the summer months. Since 1994, decals have been sold in shops around the Cape as popular souvenirs purporting to be "permits" allowing the bearer to use the tunnel; the popularity of these "permits" briefly led to a lawsuit among several different sellers. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39772 |
Optical rotation
Optical rotation, also known as polarization rotation or circular birefringence, is the rotation of the orientation of the plane of polarization about the optical axis of linearly polarized light as it travels through certain materials. Circular birefringence and circular dichroism are the manifestations of optical activity. Optical activity occurs only in chiral materials, those lacking microscopic mirror symmetry. Unlike other sources of birefringence which alter a beam's state of polarization, optical activity can be observed in fluids. This can include gases or solutions of chiral molecules such as sugars, molecules with helical secondary structure such as some proteins, and also chiral liquid crystals. It can also be observed in chiral solids such as certain crystals with a rotation between adjacent crystal planes (such as quartz) or metamaterials.
The rotation of the plane of polarization may be either clockwise, to the right (dextrorotary — d-rotary), or to the left (levorotary — l-rotary) depending on which stereoisomer is present (or dominant). For instance, sucrose and camphor are d-rotary whereas cholesterol is l-rotary. For a given substance, the angle by which the polarization of light of a specified wavelength is rotated is proportional to the path length through the material and (for a solution) proportional to its concentration.
Optical activity is measured using a polarized source and polarimeter. This is a tool particularly used in the sugar industry to measure the sugar concentration of syrup, and generally in chemistry to measure the concentration or enantiomeric ratio of chiral molecules in solution. Modulation of a liquid crystal's optical activity, viewed between two sheet polarizers, is the principle of operation of liquid-crystal displays (used in most modern televisions and computer monitors).
Rotation of light's plane of polarization may also occur through the Faraday effect which involves a static magnetic field, however this is a distinct phenomenon that is not classified under "optical activity." Optical activity is reciprocal, i.e. it is the same for opposite directions of wave propagation through an optically active medium, for example clockwise polarization rotation from the point of view of an observer. In case of optically active isotropic media, the rotation is the same for any direction of wave propagation. In contrast, the Faraday effect is non-reciprocal, i.e opposite directions of wave propagation through a Faraday medium will result in clockwise and anti-clockwise polarization rotation from the point of view of an observer. Faraday rotation depends on the propagation direction relative to that of the applied magnetic field. All compounds can exhibit polarization rotation in the presence of an applied magnetic field, provided that (a component of) the magnetic field is oriented in the direction of light propagation. The Faraday effect is one of the first discoveries of the relationship between light and electromagnetic effects.
The rotation of the orientation of linearly polarized light was first observed in 1811 in quartz by French physicist François Jean Dominique Arago. In 1820, the English astronomer Sir John F.W. Herschel discovered that different individual quartz crystals, whose crystalline structures are mirror images of each other (see illustration), rotate linear polarization by equal amounts but in opposite directions. Jean Baptiste Biot also observed the rotation of the axis of polarization in certain liquids and vapors of organic substances such as turpentine. Simple polarimeters have been used since this time to measure the concentrations of simple sugars, such as glucose, in solution. In fact one name for D-glucose (the biological isomer), is "dextrose", referring to the fact that it causes linearly polarized light to rotate to the right or dexter side. In a similar manner, levulose, more commonly known as fructose, causes the plane of polarization to rotate to the left. Fructose is even more strongly levorotatory than glucose is dextrorotatory. Invert sugar syrup, commercially formed by the hydrolysis of sucrose syrup to a mixture of the component simple sugars, fructose, and glucose, gets its name from the fact that the conversion causes the direction of rotation to "invert" from right to left.
In 1849, Louis Pasteur resolved a problem concerning the nature of tartaric acid. A solution of this compound derived from living things (to be specific, wine lees) rotates the plane of polarization of light passing through it, but tartaric acid derived by chemical synthesis has no such effect, even though its reactions are identical and its elemental composition is the same. Pasteur noticed that the crystals come in two asymmetric forms that are mirror images of one another. Sorting the crystals by hand gave two forms of the compound: Solutions of one form rotate polarized light clockwise, while the other form rotate light counterclockwise. An equal mix of the two has no polarizing effect on light. Pasteur deduced that the molecule in question is asymmetric and could exist in two different forms that resemble one another as would left- and right-hand gloves, and that the organic form of the compound consists of purely the one type.
In 1874, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff and Joseph Achille Le Bel independently proposed that this phenomenon of optical activity in carbon compounds could be explained by assuming that the 4 saturated chemical bonds between carbon atoms and their neighbors are directed towards the corners of a regular tetrahedron. If the 4 neighbors are all different, then there are two possible orderings of the neighbors around the tetrahedron, which will be mirror images of each other. This led to a better understanding of the three-dimensional nature of molecules.
In 1945, Charles William Bunn predicted optical activity of achiral structures, if the wave's propgation direction and the achiral structure form an experimental arrangement that is different from its mirror image. Such optical activity due to extrinsic chirality was observed in the 1960s in liquid crystals.
In 1950, Sergey Vavilov predicted optical activity that depends on the intensity of light and the effect of nonlinear optical activity was observed in 1979 in lithium iodate crystals.
Optical activity is normally observed for transmitted light, however, in 1988, M. P. Silverman discovered that polarization rotation can also occur for light reflected from chiral substances. Shortly after, it was observed chiral media can also reflect left-handed and right-handed circularly polarized waves with different efficiencies. These phenomena of specular circular birefringence and specular circular dichroism are jointly known as specular optical activity. Specular optical activity is very weak in natural materials.
In 1898 Jagadish Chandra Bose described the ability of twisted artificial structures to rotate the polarization of microwaves. Since the early 21st century, the development of artificial materials has led to the prediction and realization of chiral metamaterials with optical activity exceeding that of natural media by orders of magnitude in the optical part of the spectrum. Extrinsic chirality associated with oblique illumination of metasurfaces lacking two-fold rotational symmetry has been observed to lead to large linear optical activity in transmission and reflection, as well as nonlinear optical acitvity exceeding that of lithium iodate by 30 million times.
Optical activity occurs due to molecules dissolved in a fluid or due to the fluid itself only if the molecules are one of two (or more) stereoisomers; this is known as an enantiomer. The structure of such a molecule is such that it is "not" identical to its mirror image (which would be that of a different stereoisomer, or the "opposite enantiomer"). In mathematics, this property is also known as chirality. For instance, a metal rod is "not" chiral, since its appearance in a mirror is not distinct from itself. However a screw or light bulb base (or any sort of helix) "is" chiral; an ordinary right-handed screw thread, viewed in a mirror, would appear as a left-handed screw (very uncommon) which could not possibly screw into an ordinary (right-handed) nut. A human viewed in a mirror would have their heart on the right side, clear evidence of chirality, whereas the mirror reflection of a doll might well be indistinguishable from the doll itself.
In order to display optical activity, a fluid must contain only one, or a preponderance of one, stereoisomer. If two enantiomers are present in equal proportions then their effects cancel out and no optical activity is observed; this is termed a racemic mixture. But when there is an enantiomeric excess, more of one enantiomer than the other, the cancellation is incomplete and optical activity is observed. Many naturally occurring molecules are present as only one enantiomer (such as many sugars). Chiral molecules produced within the fields of organic chemistry or inorganic chemistry are racemic unless a chiral reagent was employed in the same reaction.
At the fundamental level, polarization rotation in an optically active medium is caused by circular birefringence, and can best be understood in that way. Whereas linear birefringence in a crystal involves a small difference in the phase velocity of light of two different linear polarizations, circular birefringence implies a small difference in the velocities between right and left-handed "circular polarization"s. Think of one enantiomer in a solution as a large number of little helices (or screws), all right-handed, but in random orientations. Birefringence of this sort is possible even in a fluid because the handedness of the helices is not dependent on their orientation: even when the direction of one helix is reversed, it still appears right handed. And circularly polarized light itself is chiral: as the wave proceeds in one direction the electric (and magnetic) fields composing it are rotating clockwise (or counterclockwise for the opposite circular polarization), tracing out a right (or left) handed screw pattern in space. In addition to the bulk refractive index which substantially lowers the phase velocity of light in any dielectric (transparent) material compared to the speed of light (in vacuum), "there is an additional interaction between the chirality of the wave and the chirality of the molecules." Where their chiralities are the same, there will be a small additional effect on the wave's velocity, but the opposite circular polarization will experience an opposite small effect as its chirality is opposite that of the molecules.
The phase velocity of light in a medium is commonly expressed using the index of refraction "n", defined as the speed of light (in free space) divided by its speed in the medium. The difference in the refractive indices between the two circular polarizations quantifies the strength of the circular birefringence (polarization rotation),
While formula_2 is small in natural materials, examples of giant circular birefringence resulting in a negative refractive index for one circular polarization have been reported for chiral metamaterials.
The familiar rotation of the axis of "linear" polarization relies on the understanding that a linearly polarized wave can as well be described as the superposition (addition) of a left and right circularly polarized wave in equal proportion. The phase difference between these two waves is dependent on the orientation of the linear polarization which we'll call formula_3, and their electric fields have a relative phase difference of formula_4 which then add to produce linear polarization:
where formula_6 is the electric field of the net wave, while formula_7 and formula_8 are the two circularly polarized basis functions (having zero phase difference). Assuming propagation in the "+z" direction, we could write formula_7 and formula_8 in terms of their "x" and "y" components as follows:
where formula_13 and formula_14 are unit vectors, and "i" is the imaginary unit, in this case representing the 90 degree phase shift between the "x" and "y" components that we have decomposed each circular polarization into. As usual when dealing with phasor notation, it is understood that such quantities are to be multiplied by formula_15 and then the actual electric field at any instant is given by the "real part" of that product.
Substituting these expressions for formula_7 and formula_8 into the equation for formula_6 we obtain:
The last equation shows that the resulting vector has the "x" and "y" components in phase and oriented exactly in the formula_3 direction, as we had intended, justifying the representation of any linearly polarized state at angle formula_23 as the superposition of right and left circularly polarized components with a relative phase difference of formula_24. Now let us assume transmission through an optically active material which induces an additional phase difference between the right and left circularly polarized waves of formula_25. Let us call formula_26 the result of passing the original wave linearly polarized at angle formula_23 through this medium. This will apply additional phase factors of formula_28 and formula_29 to the right and left circularly polarized components of formula_30:
Using similar math as above we find:
thus describing a wave linearly polarized at angle formula_33, thus rotated by formula_34 relative to the incoming wave :formula_30
We defined above the difference in the refractive indices for right and left circularly polarized waves of formula_2. Considering propagation through a length "L" in such a material, there will be an additional phase difference induced between them of formula_25 (as we used above) given by:
where formula_39 is the wavelength of the light (in vacuum). This will cause a rotation of the linear axis of polarization by formula_29 as we have shown.
In general, the refractive index depends on wavelength (see dispersion) and the differential refractive index formula_2 will also be wavelength dependent. The resulting variation in rotation with the wavelength of the light is called optical rotatory dispersion (ORD). ORD spectra and circular dichroism spectra are related through the Kramers–Kronig relations. Complete knowledge of one spectrum allows the calculation of the other.
So we find that the degree of rotation depends on the color of the light (the yellow sodium D line near 589 nm wavelength is commonly used for measurements), and is directly proportional to the path length formula_42 through the substance and the amount of circular birefringence of the material formula_2 which, for a solution, may be computed from the substance's specific rotation and its concentration in solution.
Although optical activity is normally thought of as a property of fluids, particularly aqueous solutions, it has also been observed in crystals such as quartz (SiO2). Although quartz has a substantial linear birefringence, that effect is cancelled when propagation is along the optic axis. In that case, rotation of the plane of polarization is observed due to the relative rotation between crystal planes, thus making the crystal formally chiral as we have defined it above. The rotation of the crystal planes can be right or left-handed, again producing opposite optical activities. On the other hand, amorphous forms of silica such as fused quartz, like a racemic mixture of chiral molecules, has no net optical activity since one or the other crystal structure does not dominate the substance's internal molecular structure.
For a pure substance in solution, if the color and path length are fixed and the specific rotation is known, the observed rotation can be used to calculate the concentration. This usage makes a polarimeter a tool of great importance to those trading in or using sugar syrups in bulk. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39774 |
Denial-of-service attack
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to the Internet. Denial of service is typically accomplished by flooding the targeted machine or resource with superfluous requests in an attempt to overload systems and prevent some or all legitimate requests from being fulfilled.
In a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack), the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single source.
A DoS or DDoS attack is analogous to a group of people crowding the entry door of a shop, making it hard for legitimate customers to enter, thus disrupting trade.
Criminal perpetrators of DoS attacks often target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks or credit card payment gateways. Revenge, blackmail and activism can motivate these attacks.
Panix, the third-oldest ISP in the world, was the target of what is thought to be the first DoS attack. On September 6, 1996, Panix was subject to a SYN flood attack which brought down its services for several days while hardware vendors, notably Cisco, figured out a proper defense.
Another early demonstration of DoS attack was made by Khan C. Smith in 1997 during a DEF CON event, disrupting Internet access to the Las Vegas Strip for over an hour. The release of sample code during the event led to the online attack of Sprint, EarthLink, E-Trade, and other major corporations in the year to follow.
On March 5, 2018, an unnamed customer of the US-based service provider Arbor Networks fell victim to the largest DDoS in history, reaching a peak of about 1.7 terabits per second. The previous record was set a few days earlier, on March 1, 2018, GitHub was hit by an attack of 1.35 terabits per second.
During the Hong Kong anti-extradition protests in June 2019, the messaging app Telegram was subject to a DDoS attack, aimed at preventing protesters from using it to coordinate movements. The founders of Telegram have stated that this attack appears to be that of a "State sized actor" via IP addresses originating in China.
On September 6 and 7, 2019, Wikipedia was taken down by a DDoS attack in Germany and some parts of Europe. Social media users, while waiting for the Wikipedia recovery, created a hashtag #WikipediaDown on Twitter in an effort to draw public attention.
Denial-of-service attacks are characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate use of a service. There are two general forms of DoS attacks: those that crash services and those that flood services. The most serious attacks are distributed.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) is a large-scale DoS attack where the perpetrator uses more than one unique IP address or machines, often from thousands of hosts infected with malware. A distributed denial of service attack typically involves more than around 3–5 nodes on different networks; fewer nodes may qualify as a DoS attack but is not a DDoS attack. Since the incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from different sources, it may be impossible to stop the attack simply by using ingress filtering. It also makes it difficult to distinguish legitimate user traffic from attack traffic when spread across multiple points of origin. As an alternative or augmentation of a DDoS, attacks may involve forging of IP sender addresses (IP address spoofing) further complicating identifying and defeating the attack.
The scale of DDoS attacks has continued to rise over recent years, by 2016 exceeding a terabit per second. Some common examples of DDoS attacks are UDP flooding, SYN flooding and DNS amplification.
An application layer DDoS attack (sometimes referred to as layer 7 DDoS attack) is a form of DDoS attack where attackers target application-layer processes. The attack over-exercises specific functions or features of a website with the intention to disable those functions or features. This application-layer attack is different from an entire network attack, and is often used against financial institutions to distract IT and security personnel from security breaches. In 2013, application-layer DDoS attacks represented 20% of all DDoS attacks. According to research by Akamai Technologies, there have been "51 percent more application layer attacks" from Q4 2013 to Q4 2014 and "16 percent more" from Q3 2014 over Q4 2014. In November 2017; Junade Ali, a Computer Scientist at Cloudflare noted that whilst network-level attacks continue to be of high capacity, they are occurring less frequently. Ali further notes that although network-level attacks are becoming less frequent, data from Cloudflare demonstrates that application-layer attacks are still showing no sign of slowing down.
The OSI model (ISO/IEC 7498-1) is a conceptual model that characterizes and standardizes the internal functions of a communication system by partitioning it into abstraction layers. The model is a product of the Open Systems Interconnection project at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The model groups similar communication functions into one of seven logical layers. A layer serves the layer above it and is served by the layer below it. For example, a layer that provides error-free communications across a network provides the communications path needed by applications above it, while it calls the next lower layer to send and receive packets that traverse that path.
In the OSI model, the definition of its application layer is narrower in scope than is often implemented. The OSI model defines the application layer as being the user interface. The OSI application layer is responsible for displaying data and images to the user in a human-recognizable format and to interface with the presentation layer below it. In an implementation, the application and presentation layers are frequently combined.
An application layer DDoS attack is done mainly for specific targeted purposes, including disrupting transactions and access to databases. It requires fewer resources than network layer attacks but often accompanies them. An attack may be disguised to look like legitimate traffic, except it targets specific application packets or functions. The attack on the application layer can disrupt services such as the retrieval of information or search functions on a website. It is very common for attackers to use pre-built applications and open-source projects to run the attack.
An advanced persistent DoS (APDoS) is associated with an advanced persistent threat and requires specialised DDoS mitigation. These attacks can persist for weeks; the longest continuous period noted so far lasted 38 days. This attack involved approximately 50+ petabits (50,000+ terabits) of malicious traffic.
Attackers in this scenario may tactically switch between several targets to create a diversion to evade defensive DDoS countermeasures but all the while eventually concentrating the main thrust of the attack onto a single victim. In this scenario, attackers with continuous access to several very powerful network resources are capable of sustaining a prolonged campaign generating enormous levels of un-amplified DDoS traffic.
APDoS attacks are characterised by:
Some vendors provide so-called "booter" or "stresser" services, which have simple web-based front ends, and accept payment over the web. Marketed and promoted as stress-testing tools, they can be used to perform unauthorized denial-of-service attacks, and allow technically unsophisticated attackers access to sophisticated attack tools. Usually powered by a botnet, the traffic produced by a consumer stresser can range anywhere from 5-50 Gbit/s, which can, in most cases, deny the average home user internet access.
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has identified symptoms of a denial-of-service attack to include:
A wide array of tools and techniques are used to launch DoS-attacks.
The simplest DoS attack relies primarily on brute force, flooding the target with an overwhelming flux of packets, oversaturating its connection bandwidth or depleting the target's system resources. Bandwidth-saturating floods rely on the attacker's ability to generate the overwhelming flux of packets. A common way of achieving this today is via distributed denial-of-service, employing a botnet.
In cases such as MyDoom and Slowloris the tools are embedded in malware and launch their attacks without the knowledge of the system owner. Stacheldraht is a classic example of a DDoS tool. It uses a layered structure where the attacker uses a client program to connect to handlers which are compromised systems that issue commands to the zombie agents which in turn facilitate the DDoS attack. Agents are compromised via the handlers by the attacker using automated routines to exploit vulnerabilities in programs that accept remote connections running on the targeted remote hosts. Each handler can control up to a thousand agents.
In other cases a machine may become part of a DDoS attack with the owner's consent, for example, in Operation Payback organized by the group Anonymous. The Low Orbit Ion Cannon has typically been used in this way. Along with High Orbit Ion Cannon a wide variety of DDoS tools are available today, including paid and free versions, with different features available. There is an underground market for these in hacker related forums and IRC channels.
Application-layer attacks employ DoS-causing exploits and can cause server-running software to fill the disk space or consume all available memory or CPU time. Attacks may use specific packet types or connection requests to saturate finite resources by, for example, occupying the maximum number of open connections or filling the victim's disk space with logs. An attacker with shell-level access to a victim's computer may slow it until it is unusable or crash it by using a fork bomb. Another kind of application-level DoS attack is XDoS (or XML DoS) which can be controlled by modern web application firewalls (WAFs).
Another target of DDoS attacks may be to produce added costs for the application operator, when the latter uses resources based on cloud computing. In this case normally application-used resources are tied to a needed quality of service (QoS) level (e.g. responses should be less than 200 ms) and this rule is usually linked to automated software (e.g. Amazon CloudWatch) to raise more virtual resources from the provider in order to meet the defined QoS levels for the increased requests. The main incentive behind such attacks may be to drive the application owner to raise the elasticity levels in order to handle the increased application traffic, in order to cause financial losses or force them to become less competitive.
A "banana attack" is another particular type of DoS. It involves redirecting outgoing messages from the client back onto the client, preventing outside access, as well as flooding the client with the sent packets. A LAND attack is of this type.
Pulsing zombies are compromised computers that are directed to launch intermittent and short-lived floodings of victim websites with the intent of merely slowing it rather than crashing it. This type of attack, referred to as "degradation-of-service", can be more difficult to detect and can disrupt and hamper connection to websites for prolonged periods of time, potentially causing more overall disruption than a denial-of-service attack. Exposure of degradation-of-service attacks is complicated further by the matter of discerning whether the server is really being attacked or is experincing higher than normal legitimate traffic loads.
The goal of DoS L2 (possibly DDoS) attack is to cause a launching of a defense mechanism which blocks the network segment from which the attack originated. In case of distributed attack or IP header modification (that depends on the kind of security behavior) it will fully block the attacked network from the Internet, but without system crash.
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers. Such an attack is often the result of multiple compromised systems (for example, a botnet) flooding the targeted system with traffic. A botnet is a network of zombie computers programmed to receive commands without the owners' knowledge. When a server is overloaded with connections, new connections can no longer be accepted. The major advantages to an attacker of using a distributed denial-of-service attack are that multiple machines can generate more attack traffic than one machine, multiple attack machines are harder to turn off than one attack machine, and that the behavior of each attack machine can be stealthier, making it harder to track and shut down. These attacker advantages cause challenges for defense mechanisms. For example, merely purchasing more incoming bandwidth than the current volume of the attack might not help, because the attacker might be able to simply add more attack machines. This, after all, will end up completely crashing a website for periods of time.
Malware can carry DDoS attack mechanisms; one of the better-known examples of this was MyDoom. Its DoS mechanism was triggered on a specific date and time. This type of DDoS involved hardcoding the target IP address prior to release of the malware and no further interaction was necessary to launch the attack.
A system may also be compromised with a trojan, allowing the attacker to download a zombie agent, or the trojan may contain one. Attackers can also break into systems using automated tools that exploit flaws in programs that listen for connections from remote hosts. This scenario primarily concerns systems acting as servers on the web. Stacheldraht is a classic example of a DDoS tool. It uses a layered structure where the attacker uses a client program to connect to handlers, which are compromised systems that issue commands to the zombie agents, which in turn facilitate the DDoS attack. Agents are compromised via the handlers by the attacker, using automated routines to exploit vulnerabilities in programs that accept remote connections running on the targeted remote hosts. Each handler can control up to a thousand agents. In some cases a machine may become part of a DDoS attack with the owner's consent, for example, in Operation Payback, organized by the group Anonymous. These attacks can use different types of internet packets such as: TCP, UDP, ICMP etc.
These collections of systems compromisers are known as botnets / rootservers. DDoS tools like Stacheldraht still use classic DoS attack methods centered on IP spoofing and amplification like smurf attacks and fraggle attacks (these are also known as bandwidth consumption attacks). SYN floods (also known as resource starvation attacks) may also be used. Newer tools can use DNS servers for DoS purposes. Unlike MyDoom's DDoS mechanism, botnets can be turned against any IP address. Script kiddies use them to deny the availability of well known websites to legitimate users. More sophisticated attackers use DDoS tools for the purposes of extortioneven against their business rivals.
Simple attacks such as SYN floods may appear with a wide range of source IP addresses, giving the appearance of a well distributed DoS. These flood attacks do not require completion of the TCP three way handshake and attempt to exhaust the destination SYN queue or the server bandwidth. Because the source IP addresses can be trivially spoofed, an attack could come from a limited set of sources, or may even originate from a single host. Stack enhancements such as syn cookies may be effective mitigation against SYN queue flooding, however complete bandwidth exhaustion may require involvement.
If an attacker mounts an attack from a single host it would be classified as a DoS attack. In fact, any attack against availability would be classed as a denial-of-service attack. On the other hand, if an attacker uses many systems to simultaneously launch attacks against a remote host, this would be classified as a DDoS attack.
It has been reported that there are new attacks from internet of things (IoT) devices which have been involved in denial of service attacks.
In one noted attack that was made peaked at around 20,000 requests per second which came from around 900 CCTV cameras.
UK's GCHQ has tools built for DDoS, named PREDATORS FACE and ROLLING THUNDER.
In 2015, DDoS botnets such as DD4BC grew in prominence, taking aim at financial institutions. Cyber-extortionists typically begin with a low-level attack and a warning that a larger attack will be carried out if a ransom is not paid in Bitcoin. Security experts recommend targeted websites to not pay the ransom. The attackers tend to get into an extended extortion scheme once they recognize that the target is ready to pay.
First discovered in 2009, the HTTP slow POST attack sends a complete, legitimate HTTP POST header, which includes a 'Content-Length' field to specify the size of the message body to follow. However, the attacker then proceeds to send the actual message body at an extremely slow rate (e.g. 1 byte/110 seconds). Due to the entire message being correct and complete, the target server will attempt to obey the 'Content-Length' field in the header, and wait for the entire body of the message to be transmitted, which can take a very long time. The attacker establishes hundreds or even thousands of such connections until all resources for incoming connections on the server (the victim) are used up, hence making any further (including legitimate) connections impossible until all data has been sent. It is notable that unlike many other (D)DoS attacks, which try to subdue the server by overloading its network or CPU, an HTTP slow POST attack targets the "logical" resources of the victim, which means the victim would still have enough network bandwidth and processing power to operate. Further combined with the fact that Apache will, by default, accept requests up to 2GB in size, this attack can be particularly powerful. HTTP slow POST attacks are difficult to differentiate from legitimate connections and are therefore able to bypass some protection systems. OWASP, an open source web application security project, released a tool to test the security of servers against this type of attacks.
A Challenge Collapsar (CC) attack is an attack that standard HTTP requests are sent to a targeted web server frequently, in which the Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) require complicated time-consuming algorithms or database operations, in order to exhaust the resources of the targeted web server.
In 2004, a Chinese hacker nicknamed KiKi invented a hacking tool to send these kinds of requests to attack a NSFOCUS firewall named "Collapsar", and thus the hacking tool was known as "Challenge Collapsar", or CC for short. Consequently, this type of attack got the name "CC attack".
A smurf attack relies on misconfigured network devices that allow packets to be sent to all computer hosts on a particular network via the broadcast address of the network, rather than a specific machine. The attacker will send large numbers of IP packets with the source address faked to appear to be the address of the victim. Most devices on a network will, by default, respond to this by sending a reply to the source IP address. If the number of machines on the network that receive and respond to these packets is very large, the victim's computer will be flooded with traffic. This overloads the victim computer and can even make it unusable during such attack.
Ping flood is based on sending the victim an overwhelming number of ping packets, usually using the "ping" command from Unix-like hosts (the -t flag on Windows systems is much less capable of overwhelming a target, also the -l (size) flag does not allow sent packet size greater than 65500 in Windows). It is very simple to launch, the primary requirement being access to greater bandwidth than the victim.
Ping of death is based on sending the victim a malformed ping packet, which will lead to a system crash on a vulnerable system.
The BlackNurse attack is an example of an attack taking advantage of the required Destination Port Unreachable ICMP packets.
A Nuke is an old denial-of-service attack against computer networks consisting of fragmented or otherwise invalid ICMP packets sent to the target, achieved by using a modified ping utility to repeatedly send this corrupt data, thus slowing down the affected computer until it comes to a complete stop.
A specific example of a nuke attack that gained some prominence is the WinNuke, which exploited the vulnerability in the NetBIOS handler in Windows 95. A string of out-of-band data was sent to TCP port 139 of the victim's machine, causing it to lock up and display a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
Attackers have found a way to exploit a number of bugs in peer-to-peer servers to initiate DDoS attacks. The most aggressive of these peer-to-peer-DDoS attacks exploits DC++. With peer-to-peer there is no botnet and the attacker does not have to communicate with the clients it subverts. Instead, the attacker acts as a "puppet master," instructing clients of large peer-to-peer file sharing hubs to disconnect from their peer-to-peer network and to connect to the victim's website instead.
Permanent denial-of-service (PDoS), also known loosely as phlashing, is an attack that damages a system so badly that it requires replacement or reinstallation of hardware. Unlike the distributed denial-of-service attack, a PDoS attack exploits security flaws which allow remote administration on the management interfaces of the victim's hardware, such as routers, printers, or other networking hardware. The attacker uses these vulnerabilities to replace a device's firmware with a modified, corrupt, or defective firmware image—a process which when done legitimately is known as "flashing." This therefore "bricks" the device, rendering it unusable for its original purpose until it can be repaired or replaced.
The PDoS is a pure hardware targeted attack which can be much faster and requires fewer resources than using a botnet or a root/vserver in a DDoS attack. Because of these features, and the potential and high probability of security exploits on Network Enabled Embedded Devices (NEEDs), this technique has come to the attention of numerous hacking communities. BrickerBot, a piece of malware that targeted IoT devices, used PDoS attacks to disable its targets.
PhlashDance is a tool created by Rich Smith (an employee of Hewlett-Packard's Systems Security Lab) used to detect and demonstrate PDoS vulnerabilities at the 2008 EUSecWest Applied Security Conference in London.
A distributed denial-of-service attack may involve sending forged requests of some type to a very large number of computers that will reply to the requests. Using Internet Protocol address spoofing, the source address is set to that of the targeted victim, which means all the replies will go to (and flood) the target. (This reflected attack form is sometimes called a "DRDOS".)
ICMP Echo Request attacks (Smurf attack) can be considered one form of reflected attack, as the flooding host(s) send Echo Requests to the broadcast addresses of mis-configured networks, thereby enticing hosts to send Echo Reply packets to the victim. Some early DDoS programs implemented a distributed form of this attack.
Amplification attacks are used to magnify the bandwidth that is sent to a victim. This is typically done through publicly accessible DNS servers that are used to cause congestion on the target system using DNS response traffic. Many services can be exploited to act as reflectors, some harder to block than others. US-CERT have observed that different services may result in different amplification factors, as tabulated below:
DNS amplification attacks involve a new mechanism that increased the amplification effect, using a much larger list of DNS servers than seen earlier. The process typically involves an attacker sending a DNS name look up request to a public DNS server, spoofing the source IP address of the targeted victim. The attacker tries to request as much information as possible, thus amplifying the DNS response that is sent to the targeted victim. Since the size of the request is significantly smaller than the response, the attacker is easily able to increase the amount of traffic directed at the target. SNMP and NTP can also be exploited as reflector in an amplification attack.
An example of an amplified DDoS attack through the Network Time Protocol (NTP) is through a command called monlist, which sends the details of the last 600 hosts that have requested the time from the NTP server back to the requester. A small request to this time server can be sent using a spoofed source IP address of some victim, which results in a response 556.9 times the size of the request being sent to the victim. This becomes amplified when using botnets that all send requests with the same spoofed IP source, which will result a massive amount of data being sent back to the victim.
It is very difficult to defend against these types of attacks because the response data is coming from legitimate servers. These attack requests are also sent through UDP, which does not require a connection to the server. This means that the source IP is not verified when a request is received by the server. In order to bring awareness of these vulnerabilities, campaigns have been started that are dedicated to finding amplification vectors which has led to people fixing their resolvers or having the resolvers shut down completely.
This attack works by using a worm to infect hundreds of thousands of IoT devices across the internet. The worm propagates through networks and systems taking control of poorly protected IoT devices such as thermostats, Wi-Fi enabled clocks and washing machines. When the device becomes enslaved usually the owner or user will have no immediate indication. The IoT device itself is not the direct target of the attack, it is used as a part of a larger attack. These newly enslaved devices are called slaves or bots. Once the hacker has acquired the desired number of bots, they instruct the bots to try to contact an ISP. In October 2016, a Mirai botnet attacked Dyn which is the ISP for sites such as Twitter, Netflix, etc. As soon as this occurred, these websites were all unreachable for several hours. This type of attack is not physically damaging, but it will certainly be costly for any large internet companies that get attacked.
RUDY attack targets web applications by starvation of available sessions on the web server. Much like Slowloris, RUDY keeps sessions at halt using never-ending POST transmissions and sending an arbitrarily large content-length header value.
Manipulating maximum segment size and selective acknowledgement (SACK) it may be used by a remote peer to cause a denial of service by an integer overflow in the Linux kernel, causing even a Kernel panic. Jonathan Looney discovered on June 17, 2019.
The shrew attack is a denial-of-service attack on the Transmission Control Protocol where the attacker employs man-in-the-middle techniques. It uses short synchronized bursts of traffic to disrupt TCP connections on the same link, by exploiting a weakness in TCP's re-transmission timeout mechanism.
A slow read attack sends legitimate application layer requests, but reads responses very slowly, thus trying to exhaust the server's connection pool. It is achieved by advertising a very small number for the TCP Receive Window size, and at the same time emptying clients' TCP receive buffer slowly, which causes a very low data flow rate.
A sophisticated low-bandwidth DDoS attack is a form of DoS that uses less traffic and increases their effectiveness by aiming at a weak point in the victim's system design, i.e., the attacker sends traffic consisting of complicated requests to the system. Essentially, a sophisticated DDoS attack is lower in cost due to its use of less traffic, is smaller in size making it more difficult to identify, and it has the ability to hurt systems which are protected by flow control mechanisms.
A SYN flood occurs when a host sends a flood of TCP/SYN packets, often with a forged sender address. Each of these packets are handled like a connection request, causing the server to spawn a half-open connection, by sending back a TCP/SYN-ACK packet (Acknowledge), and waiting for a packet in response from the sender address (response to the ACK Packet). However, because the sender address is forged, the response never comes. These half-open connections saturate the number of available connections the server can make, keeping it from responding to legitimate requests until after the attack ends.
A teardrop attack involves sending mangled IP fragments with overlapping, oversized payloads to the target machine. This can crash various operating systems because of a bug in their TCP/IP fragmentation re-assembly code. Windows 3.1x, Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, as well as versions of Linux prior to versions 2.0.32 and 2.1.63 are vulnerable to this attack.
(Although in September 2009, a vulnerability in Windows Vista was referred to as a "teardrop attack", this targeted SMB2 which is a higher layer than the TCP packets that teardrop used).
One of the fields in an IP header is the “fragment offset” field, indicating the starting position, or offset, of the data contained in a fragmented packet relative to the data in the original packet. If the sum of the offset and size of one fragmented packet differs from that of the next fragmented packet, the packets overlap. When this happens, a server vulnerable to teardrop attacks is unable to reassemble the packets - resulting in a denial-of-service condition.
Voice over IP has made abusive origination of large numbers of telephone voice calls inexpensive and readily automated while permitting call origins to be misrepresented through caller ID spoofing.
According to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, telephony denial-of-service (TDoS) has appeared as part of various fraudulent schemes:
Telephony denial-of-service can exist even without Internet telephony. In the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal, telemarketers were used to flood political opponents with spurious calls to jam phone banks on election day. Widespread publication of a number can also flood it with enough calls to render it unusable, as happened by accident in 1981 with multiple +1-area code-867-5309 subscribers inundated by hundreds of misdialed calls daily in response to the song 867-5309/Jenny.
TDoS differs from other telephone harassment (such as prank calls and obscene phone calls) by the number of calls originated; by occupying lines continuously with repeated automated calls, the victim is prevented from making or receiving both routine and emergency telephone calls.
Related exploits include SMS flooding attacks and black fax or fax loop transmission.
It takes more router resources to drop a packet with a TTL value of 1 or less than it does to forward a packet with higher TTL value. When a packet is dropped due to TTL expiry, the router CPU must generate and send an ICMP time exceeded response. Generating many of these responses can overload the router's CPU.
This attack uses an existing vulnerability in Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol to get around a considerable amount of the present defense methods and flood a target's network and servers. The attack is based on a DNS amplification technique, but the attack mechanism is a UPnP router which forwards requests from one outer source to another disregarding UPnP behavior rules. Using the UPnP router returns the data on an unexpected UDP port from a bogus IP address, making it harder to take simple action to shut down the traffic flood. According to the Imperva researchers, the most effective way to stop this attack is for companies to lock down UPnP routers.
Defensive responses to denial-of-service attacks typically involve the use of a combination of attack detection, traffic classification and response tools, aiming to block traffic that they identify as illegitimate and allow traffic that they identify as legitimate. A list of prevention and response tools is provided below:
Application front-end hardware is intelligent hardware placed on the network before traffic reaches the servers. It can be used on networks in conjunction with routers and switches. Application front end hardware analyzes data packets as they enter the system, and then identifies them as priority, regular, or dangerous. There are more than 25 bandwidth management vendors.
Approaches to DDoS attacks against cloud-based applications may be based on an application layer analysis, indicating whether incoming bulk traffic is legitimate and thus triggering elasticity decisions without the economical implications of a DDoS attack. These approaches mainly rely on an identified path of value inside the application and monitor the progress of requests on this path, through markers called Key Completion Indicators.
In essence, these technique are statistical methods of assessing the behavior of incoming requests to detect if something unusual or abnormal is going on.
An analogy is to a bricks-and-mortar department store where customers spend, on average, a known percentage of their time on different activities such as picking up items and examining them, putting them back, filling a basket, waiting to pay, paying, and leaving. These high-level activities correspond to the Key Completion Indicators in a service or site, and once normal behavior is determined, abnormal behavior can be identified. If a mob of customers arrived in store and spent all their time picking up items and putting them back, but never made any purchases, this could be flagged as unusual behavior.
The department store can attempt to adjust to periods of high activity by bringing in a reserve of employees at short notice. But if it did this routinely, were a mob to start showing up but never buying anything, this could ruin the store with the extra employee costs. Soon the store would identify the mob activity and scale back the number of employees, recognising that the mob provides no profit and should not be served. While this may make it more difficult for legitimate customers to get served during the mob's presence, it saves the store from total ruin.
In the case of elastic cloud services where a huge and abnormal additional workload may incur significant charges from the cloud service provider, this technique can be used to scale back or even stop the expansion of server availability to protect from economic loss.
With blackhole routing, all the traffic to the attacked DNS or IP address is sent to a "black hole" (null interface or a non-existent server). To be more efficient and avoid affecting network connectivity, it can be managed by the ISP.
A DNS sinkhole routes traffic to a valid IP address which analyzes traffic and rejects bad packets. Sinkholing is not efficient for most severe attacks.
Intrusion prevention systems (IPS) are effective if the attacks have signatures associated with them. However, the trend among the attacks is to have legitimate content but bad intent. Intrusion-prevention systems which work on content recognition cannot block behavior-based DoS attacks.
An ASIC based IPS may detect and block denial-of-service attacks because they have the processing power and the granularity to analyze the attacks and act like a circuit breaker in an automated way.
A rate-based IPS (RBIPS) must analyze traffic granularly and continuously monitor the traffic pattern and determine if there is traffic anomaly. It must let the legitimate traffic flow while blocking the DoS attack traffic.
More focused on the problem than IPS, a DoS defense system (DDS) can block connection-based DoS attacks and those with legitimate content but bad intent. A DDS can also address both protocol attacks (such as teardrop and ping of death) and rate-based attacks (such as ICMP floods and SYN floods).
In the case of a simple attack, a firewall could have a simple rule added to deny all incoming traffic from the attackers, based on protocols, ports or the originating IP addresses.
More complex attacks will however be hard to block with simple rules: for example, if there is an ongoing attack on port 80 (web service), it is not possible to drop all incoming traffic on this port because doing so will prevent the server from serving legitimate traffic. Additionally, firewalls may be too deep in the network hierarchy, with routers being adversely affected before the traffic gets to the firewall. Also, many security tools still do not support IPv6 or may not be configured properly, so the firewalls often might get bypassed during the attacks.
Similar to switches, routers have some rate-limiting and ACL capability. They, too, are manually set. Most routers can be easily overwhelmed under a DoS attack. Cisco IOS has optional features that can reduce the impact of flooding.
Most switches have some rate-limiting and ACL capability. Some switches provide automatic and/or system-wide rate limiting, traffic shaping, delayed binding (TCP splicing), deep packet inspection and Bogon filtering (bogus IP filtering) to detect and remediate DoS attacks through automatic rate filtering and WAN Link failover and balancing.
These schemes will work as long as the DoS attacks can be prevented by using them. For example, SYN flood can be prevented using delayed binding or TCP splicing. Similarly content based DoS may be prevented using deep packet inspection. Attacks originating from dark addresses or going to dark addresses can be prevented using bogon filtering. Automatic rate filtering can work as long as set rate-thresholds have been set correctly. Wan-link failover will work as long as both links have DoS/DDoS prevention mechanism.
All traffic is passed through a "cleaning center" or a "scrubbing center" via various methods such as proxies, tunnels, digital cross connects, or even direct circuits, which separates "bad" traffic (DDoS and also other common internet attacks) and only sends good traffic beyond to the server. The provider needs central connectivity to the Internet to manage this kind of service unless they happen to be located within the same facility as the "cleaning center" or "scrubbing center". DDoS attacks can overwhelm any type of hardware firewall, and passing malicious traffic through large and mature networks becomes more and more effective and economically sustainable against DDoS.
An unintentional denial-of-service can occur when a system ends up denied, not due to a deliberate attack by a single individual or group of individuals, but simply due to a sudden enormous spike in popularity. This can happen when an extremely popular website posts a prominent link to a second, less well-prepared site, for example, as part of a news story. The result is that a significant proportion of the primary site's regular userspotentially hundreds of thousands of peopleclick that link in the space of a few hours, having the same effect on the target website as a DDoS attack. A VIPDoS is the same, but specifically when the link was posted by a celebrity.
When Michael Jackson died in 2009, websites such as Google and Twitter slowed down or even crashed. Many sites' servers thought the requests were from a virus or spyware trying to cause a denial-of-service attack, warning users that their queries looked like "automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application".
News sites and link sitessites whose primary function is to provide links to interesting content elsewhere on the Internetare most likely to cause this phenomenon. The canonical example is the Slashdot effect when receiving traffic from Slashdot. It is also known as "the Reddit hug of death" and "the Digg effect".
Routers have also been known to create unintentional DoS attacks, as both D-Link and Netgear routers have overloaded NTP servers by flooding NTP servers without respecting the restrictions of client types or geographical limitations.
Similar unintentional denials-of-service can also occur via other media, e.g. when a URL is mentioned on television. If a server is being indexed by Google or another search engine during peak periods of activity, or does not have a lot of available bandwidth while being indexed, it can also experience the effects of a DoS attack.
Legal action has been taken in at least one such case. In 2006, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation sued YouTube: massive numbers of would-be YouTube.com users accidentally typed the tube company's URL, utube.com. As a result, the tube company ended up having to spend large amounts of money on upgrading their bandwidth. The company appears to have taken advantage of the situation, with utube.com now containing ads for advertisement revenue.
In March 2014, after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing, DigitalGlobe launched a crowdsourcing service on which users could help search for the missing jet in satellite images. The response overwhelmed the company's servers.
An unintentional denial-of-service may also result from a prescheduled event created by the website itself, as was the case of the Census in Australia in 2016. This could be caused when a server provides some service at a specific time. This might be a university website setting the grades to be available where it will result in many more login requests at that time than any other.
In computer network security, backscatter is a side-effect of a spoofed denial-of-service attack. In this kind of attack, the attacker spoofs (or forges) the source address in IP packets sent to the victim. In general, the victim machine cannot distinguish between the spoofed packets and legitimate packets, so the victim responds to the spoofed packets as it normally would. These response packets are known as backscatter.
If the attacker is spoofing source addresses randomly, the backscatter response packets from the victim will be sent back to random destinations. This effect can be used by network telescopes as indirect evidence of such attacks.
The term "backscatter analysis" refers to observing backscatter packets arriving at a statistically significant portion of the IP address space to determine characteristics of DoS attacks and victims.
Many jurisdictions have laws under which denial-of-service attacks are illegal.
On January 7, 2013, Anonymous posted a petition on the whitehouse.gov site asking that DDoS be recognized as a legal form of protest similar to the Occupy protests, the claim being that the similarity in purpose of both are same. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39776 |
Simplex
In geometry, a simplex (plural: simplexes or simplices) is a generalization of the notion of a triangle or tetrahedron to arbitrary dimensions.
For example,
Specifically, a "k"-simplex is a "k"-dimensional polytope which is the convex hull of its "k" + 1 vertices.
More formally, suppose the "k" + 1 points formula_1 are affinely independent, which means formula_2 are linearly independent.
Then, the simplex determined by them is the set of points
A regular simplex is a simplex that is also a regular polytope. A regular "n"-simplex may be constructed from a regular ("n" − 1)-simplex by connecting a new vertex to all original vertices by the common edge length.
The standard simplex or probability simplex is the simplex formed from the "k" + 1 standard unit vectors, or
In topology and combinatorics, it is common to “glue together” simplices to form a simplicial complex. The associated combinatorial structure is called an abstract simplicial complex, in which context the word “simplex” simply means any finite set of vertices.
The concept of a simplex was known to William Kingdon Clifford, who wrote about these shapes in 1886 but called them "prime confines".
Henri Poincaré, writing about algebraic topology in 1900, called them "generalized tetrahedra".
In 1902 Pieter Hendrik Schoute described the concept first with the Latin superlative "simplicissimum" ("simplest") and then with the same Latin adjective in the normal form "simplex" ("simple").
The regular simplex family is the first of three regular polytope families, labeled by Coxeter as "αn", the other two being the cross-polytope family, labeled as "βn", and the hypercubes, labeled as "γn". A fourth family, the tessellation of n-dimensional space by infinitely many hypercubes, he labeled as "δn".
The convex hull of any nonempty subset of the "n" + 1 points that define an "n"-simplex is called a face of the simplex. Faces are simplices themselves. In particular, the convex hull of a subset of size "m" + 1 (of the "n" + 1 defining points) is an "m"-simplex, called an "m"-face of the "n"-simplex. The 0-faces (i.e., the defining points themselves as sets of size 1) are called the vertices (singular: vertex), the 1-faces are called the edges, the ("n" − 1)-faces are called the facets, and the sole "n"-face is the whole "n"-simplex itself. In general, the number of "m"-faces is equal to the binomial coefficient formula_5. Consequently, the number of "m"-faces of an "n"-simplex may be found in column ("m" + 1) of row ("n" + 1) of Pascal's triangle. A simplex "A" is a coface of a simplex "B" if "B" is a face of "A". "Face" and "facet" can have different meanings when describing types of simplices in a simplicial complex; see simplical complex for more detail.
The number of 1-faces (edges) of the "n"-simplex is the "n"-th triangle number, the number of 2-faces of the "n"-simplex is the ("n" − 1)th tetrahedron number, the number of 3-faces of the "n"-simplex is the ("n" − 2)th 5-cell number, and so on.
In layman's terms, an "n"-simplex is a simple shape (a polygon) that requires "n" dimensions. Consider a line segment "AB" as a "shape" in a 1-dimensional space (the 1-dimensional space is the line in which the segment lies). One can place a new point "C" somewhere off the line. The new shape, triangle "ABC", requires two dimensions; it cannot fit in the original 1-dimensional space. The triangle is the 2-simplex, a simple shape that requires two dimensions. Consider a triangle "ABC", a shape in a 2-dimensional space (the plane in which the triangle resides). One can place a new point "D" somewhere off the plane. The new shape, tetrahedron "ABCD", requires three dimensions; it cannot fit in the original 2-dimensional space. The tetrahedron is the 3-simplex, a simple shape that requires three dimensions. Consider tetrahedron "ABCD", a shape in a 3-dimensional space (the 3-space in which the tetrahedron lies). One can place a new point "E" somewhere outside the 3-space. The new shape "ABCDE", called a 5-cell, requires four dimensions and is called the 4-simplex; it cannot fit in the original 3-dimensional space. (It also cannot be visualized easily.) This idea can be generalized, that is, adding a single new point outside the currently occupied space, which requires going to the next higher dimension to hold the new shape. This idea can also be worked backward: the line segment we started with is a simple shape that requires a 1-dimensional space to hold it; the line segment is the 1-simplex. The line segment itself was formed by starting with a single point in 0-dimensional space (this initial point is the 0-simplex) and adding a second point, which required the increase to 1-dimensional space.
More formally, an ("n" + 1)-simplex can be constructed as a join (∨ operator) of an "n"-simplex and a point, ( ). An ("m" + "n" + 1)-simplex can be constructed as a join of an "m"-simplex and an "n"-simplex. The two simplices are oriented to be completely normal from each other, with translation in a direction orthogonal to both of them. A 1-simplex is the join of two points: ( ) ∨ ( ) = 2 · ( ). A general 2-simplex (scalene triangle) is the join of three points: ( ) ∨ ( ) ∨ ( ). An isosceles triangle is the join of a 1-simplex and a point: { } ∨ ( ). An equilateral triangle is 3·( ) or {3}. A general 3-simplex is the join of 4 points: ( ) ∨ ( ) ∨ ( ) ∨ ( ). A 3-simplex with mirror symmetry can be expressed as the join of an edge and two points: { } ∨ ( ) ∨ ( ). A 3-simplex with triangular symmetry can be expressed as the join of an equilateral triangle and 1 point: 3.( )∨( ) or {3}∨( ). A regular tetrahedron is 4 · ( ) or {3,3} and so on.
In some conventions, the empty set is defined to be a (−1)-simplex. The definition of the simplex above still makes sense if "n" = −1. This convention is more common in applications to algebraic topology (such as simplicial homology) than to the study of polytopes.
These Petrie polygons (skew orthogonal projections) show all the vertices of the regular simplex on a circle, and all vertex pairs connected by edges.
The standard "n"-simplex (or unit "n"-simplex) is the subset of R"n"+1 given by
The simplex Δ"n" lies in the affine hyperplane obtained by removing the restriction "t""i" ≥ 0 in the above definition.
The "n" + 1 vertices of the standard "n"-simplex are the points "e""i" ∈ R"n"+1, where
There is a canonical map from the standard "n"-simplex to an arbitrary "n"-simplex with vertices ("v"0, ..., "v""n") given by
The coefficients "t""i" are called the barycentric coordinates of a point in the "n"-simplex. Such a general simplex is often called an affine "n"-simplex, to emphasize that the canonical map is an affine transformation. It is also sometimes called an oriented affine "n"-simplex to emphasize that the canonical map may be orientation preserving or reversing.
More generally, there is a canonical map from the standard formula_9-simplex (with "n" vertices) onto any polytope with "n" vertices, given by the same equation (modifying indexing):
These are known as generalized barycentric coordinates, and express every polytope as the "image" of a simplex: formula_11
A commonly used function from R"n" to the interior of the standard formula_9-simplex is the softmax function, or normalized exponential function; this generalizes the standard logistic function.
An alternative coordinate system is given by taking the indefinite sum:
This yields the alternative presentation by "order," namely as nondecreasing "n"-tuples between 0 and 1:
Geometrically, this is an "n"-dimensional subset of formula_15 (maximal dimension, codimension 0) rather than of formula_16 (codimension 1). The facets, which on the standard simplex correspond to one coordinate vanishing, formula_17 here correspond to successive coordinates being equal, formula_18 while the interior corresponds to the inequalities becoming "strict" (increasing sequences).
A key distinction between these presentations is the behavior under permuting coordinates – the standard simplex is stabilized by permuting coordinates, while permuting elements of the "ordered simplex" do not leave it invariant, as permuting an ordered sequence generally makes it unordered. Indeed, the ordered simplex is a (closed) fundamental domain for the action of the symmetric group on the "n"-cube, meaning that the orbit of the ordered simplex under the "n"! elements of the symmetric group divides the "n"-cube into formula_19 mostly disjoint simplices (disjoint except for boundaries), showing that this simplex has volume formula_20 Alternatively, the volume can be computed by an iterated integral, whose successive integrands are formula_21
A further property of this presentation is that it uses the order but not addition, and thus can be defined in any dimension over any ordered set, and for example can be used to define an infinite-dimensional simplex without issues of convergence of sums.
Especially in numerical applications of probability theory a projection onto the standard simplex is of interest. Given formula_22 with possibly negative entries, the closest point formula_23 on the simplex has coordinates
where formula_25 is chosen such that formula_26
formula_25 can be easily calculated from sorting formula_28.
The sorting approach takes formula_29 complexity, which can be improved to formula_30 complexity via median-finding algorithms. Projecting onto the simplex is computationally similar to projecting onto the formula_31 ball.
Finally, a simple variant is to replace "summing to 1" with "summing to at most 1"; this raises the dimension by 1, so to simplify notation, the indexing changes:
This yields an "n"-simplex as a corner of the "n"-cube, and is a standard orthogonal simplex. This is the simplex used in the simplex method, which is based at the origin, and locally models a vertex on a polytope with "n" facets.
The coordinates of the vertices of a regular "n"-dimensional simplex can be obtained from these two properties,
These can be used as follows. Let vectors ("v"0, "v"1, ..., "v""n") represent the vertices of an "n"-simplex center the origin, all unit vectors so a distance 1 from the origin, satisfying the first property. The second property means the dot product between any pair of the vectors is formula_34. This can be used to calculate positions for them.
For example, in three dimensions the vectors ("v"0, "v"1, "v"2, "v"3) are the vertices of a 3-simplex or tetrahedron. Write these as
Choose the first vector "v"0 to have all but the first component zero, so by the first property it must be (1, 0, 0) and the vectors become
By the second property the dot product of "v"0 with all other vectors is -, so each of their "x" components must equal this, and the vectors become
Next choose "v"1 to have all but the first two elements zero. The second element is the only unknown. It can be calculated from the first property using the Pythagorean theorem (choose any of the two square roots), and so the second vector can be completed:
The second property can be used to calculate the remaining "y" components, by taking the dot product of "v"1 with each and solving to give
From which the "z" components can be calculated, using the Pythagorean theorem again to satisfy the first property, the two possible square roots giving the two results
This process can be carried out in any dimension, using "n" + 1 vectors, applying the first and second properties alternately to determine all the values.
The volume of an "n"-simplex in "n"-dimensional space with vertices ("v"0, ..., "v""n") is
where each column of the "n" × "n" determinant is the difference between the vectors representing two vertices. A more symmetric way to write it is
formula_42
Another common way of computing the volume of the simplex is via the Cayley–Menger determinant. It can also compute the volume of a simplex embedded in a higher-dimensional space, e.g., a triangle in formula_43.
Without the 1/"n"! it is the formula for the volume of an "n"-parallelotope.
This can be understood as follows: Assume that "P" is an "n"-parallelotope constructed on a basis formula_44 of formula_45.
Given a permutation formula_46 of formula_47, call a list of vertices formula_48 a "n"-path if
(so there are "n"! "n"-paths and formula_50 does not depend on the permutation). The following assertions hold:
If "P" is the unit "n"-hypercube, then the union of the "n"-simplexes formed by the convex hull of each "n"-path is "P", and these simplexes are congruent and pairwise non-overlapping. In particular, the volume of such a simplex is
If "P" is a general parallelotope, the same assertions hold except that it is no more true, in dimension > 2, that the simplexes need to be pairwise congruent; yet their volumes remain equal, because the "n"-parallelotop is the image of the unit "n"-hypercube by the linear isomorphism that sends the canonical basis of formula_45 to formula_64. As previously, this implies that the volume of a simplex coming from a "n"-path is:
Conversely, given an "n"-simplex formula_66 of formula_45, it can be supposed that the vectors formula_68 form a basis of formula_45. Considering the parallelotope constructed from formula_70 and formula_64, one sees that the previous formula is valid for every simplex.
Finally, the formula at the beginning of this section is obtained by observing that
From this formula, it follows immediately that the volume under a standard "n"-simplex (i.e. between the origin and the simplex in R"n"+1) is
The volume of a regular "n"-simplex with unit side length is
as can be seen by multiplying the previous formula by "x""n"+1, to get the volume under the "n"-simplex as a function of its vertex distance "x" from the origin, differentiating with respect to "x", at formula_75 (where the "n"-simplex side length is 1), and normalizing by the length formula_76 of the increment, formula_77, along the normal vector.
Any two (n-1)-dimensional faces of a regular "n"-dimensional simplex are themselves regular ("n-1)"-dimensional simplices, and they have the same dihedral angle of cos−1(1/"n").
This can be seen by noting that the center of the standard simplex is formula_78, and the centers of its faces are coordinate permutations of formula_79. Then, by symmetry, the vector pointing from formula_78 to formula_79 is perpendicular to the faces. So the vectors normal to the faces are permutations of formula_82, from which the dihedral angles are calculated.
An "orthogonal corner" means here that there is a vertex at which all adjacent edges are pairwise orthogonal. It immediately follows that all adjacent faces are pairwise orthogonal. Such simplices are generalizations of right triangles and for them there exists an "n"-dimensional version of the Pythagorean theorem:
The sum of the squared ("n" − 1)-dimensional volumes of the facets adjacent to the orthogonal corner equals the squared ("n" − 1)-dimensional volume of the facet opposite of the orthogonal corner.
where formula_84 are facets being pairwise orthogonal to each other but not orthogonal to formula_85, which is the facet opposite the orthogonal corner.
For a 2-simplex the theorem is the Pythagorean theorem for triangles with a right angle and for a 3-simplex it is de Gua's theorem for a tetrahedron
with an orthogonal corner.
The Hasse diagram of the face lattice of an "n"-simplex is isomorphic to the graph of the ("n" + 1)-hypercube's edges, with the hypercube's vertices mapping to each of the "n"-simplex's elements, including the entire simplex and the null polytope as the extreme points of the lattice (mapped to two opposite vertices on the hypercube). This fact may be used to efficiently enumerate the simplex's face lattice, since more general face lattice enumeration algorithms are more computationally expensive.
The "n"-simplex is also the vertex figure of the ("n" + 1)-hypercube. It is also the facet of the ("n" + 1)-orthoplex.
Topologically, an "n"-simplex is equivalent to an "n"-ball. Every "n"-simplex is an "n"-dimensional manifold with corners.
In probability theory, the points of the standard "n"-simplex in ("n" + 1)-space are the space of possible parameters (probabilities) of the categorical distribution on "n" + 1 possible outcomes.
Since all simplices are self-dual, they can form a series of compounds;
In algebraic topology, simplices are used as building blocks to construct an interesting class of topological spaces called simplicial complexes. These spaces are built from simplices glued together in a combinatorial fashion. Simplicial complexes are used to define a certain kind of homology called simplicial homology.
A finite set of "k"-simplexes embedded in an open subset of R"n" is called an affine "k"-chain. The simplexes in a chain need not be unique; they may occur with multiplicity. Rather than using standard set notation to denote an affine chain, it is instead the standard practice to use plus signs to separate each member in the set. If some of the simplexes have the opposite orientation, these are prefixed by a minus sign. If some of the simplexes occur in the set more than once, these are prefixed with an integer count. Thus, an affine chain takes the symbolic form of a sum with integer coefficients.
Note that each facet of an "n"-simplex is an affine ("n" − 1)-simplex, and thus the boundary of an "n"-simplex is an affine "n" − 1-chain. Thus, if we denote one positively oriented affine simplex as
with the formula_87 denoting the vertices, then the boundary formula_88 of "σ" is the chain
It follows from this expression, and the linearity of the boundary operator, that the boundary of the boundary of a simplex is zero:
Likewise, the boundary of the boundary of a chain is zero: formula_91.
More generally, a simplex (and a chain) can be embedded into a manifold by means of smooth, differentiable map formula_92. In this case, both the summation convention for denoting the set, and the boundary operation commute with the embedding. That is,
where the formula_94 are the integers denoting orientation and multiplicity. For the boundary operator formula_95, one has:
where ρ is a chain. The boundary operation commutes with the mapping because, in the end, the chain is defined as a set and little more, and the set operation always commutes with the map operation (by definition of a map).
A continuous map formula_97 to a topological space "X" is frequently referred to as a singular "n"-simplex. (A map is generally called "singular" if it fails to have some desirable property such as continuity and, in this case, the term is meant to reflect to the fact that the continuous map need not be an embedding.)
Since classical algebraic geometry allows to talk about polynomial equations, but not inequalities, the "algebraic standard n-simplex" is commonly defined as the subset of affine ("n" + 1)-dimensional space, where all coordinates sum up to 1 (thus leaving out the inequality part). The algebraic description of this set is
which equals the scheme-theoretic description formula_99 with
the ring of regular functions on the algebraic "n"-simplex (for any ring formula_101).
By using the same definitions as for the classical "n"-simplex, the "n"-simplices for different dimensions "n" assemble into one simplicial object, while the rings formula_102 assemble into one cosimplicial object formula_103 (in the category of schemes resp. rings, since the face and degeneracy maps are all polynomial).
The algebraic "n"-simplices are used in higher K-theory and in the definition of higher Chow groups. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39781 |
N-sphere
In mathematics, an -sphere is a topological space that is homeomorphic to a "standard" -"sphere", which is the set of points in -dimensional Euclidean space that are situated at a constant distance from a fixed point, called the "center". It is the generalization of an ordinary sphere in the ordinary three-dimensional space. The "radius" of a sphere is the constant distance of its points to the center. When the sphere has unit radius, it is usual to call it the unit -sphere or simply the -sphere for brevity. In terms of the standard norm, the -sphere is defined as
and an -sphere of radius can be defined as
The 0-sphere is a pair of points on the line at unit distance from the origin, the 1-sphere is a circle in the plane, and the 2-sphere is an ordinary sphere within 3-dimensional space.
The dimension of -sphere is , and must not be confused with the dimension of the Euclidean space in which it is naturally embedded. An -sphere is the surface or boundary of an -dimensional ball.
In particular:
For , the -spheres that are differential manifolds can be characterized (up to a diffeomorphism) as the simply connected -dimensional manifolds of constant, positive curvature. The -spheres admit several other topological descriptions: for example, they can be constructed by gluing two -dimensional Euclidean spaces together, by identifying the boundary of an -cube with a point, or (inductively) by forming the suspension of an -sphere. The 1-sphere is the 1-manifold that is a circle, which is not simply connected. The 0-sphere is the 0-manifold consisting of two points, which is not even connected.
For any natural number , an -sphere of radius is defined as the set of points in -dimensional Euclidean space that are at distance from some fixed point , where may be any positive real number and where may be any point in -dimensional space. In particular:
The set of points in -space, , that define an -sphere, formula_3, is represented by the equation:
where = is a center point, and is the radius.
The above -sphere exists in -dimensional Euclidean space and is an example of an -manifold. The volume form of an -sphere of radius is given by
where is the Hodge star operator; see for a discussion and proof of this formula in the case . As a result,
The space enclosed by an -sphere is called an -ball. An -ball is closed if it includes the -sphere, and it is open if it does not include the -sphere.
Specifically:
Topologically, an -sphere can be constructed as a one-point compactification of -dimensional Euclidean space. Briefly, the -sphere can be described as , which is -dimensional Euclidean space plus a single point representing infinity in all directions.
In particular, if a single point is removed from an -sphere, it becomes homeomorphic to . This forms the basis for stereographic projection.
The constants and (for , the unit ball and sphere) are related by the recurrences:
The surfaces and volumes can also be given in closed form:
where is the gamma function. Derivations of these equations are given in this section.
In general, the volume of the -ball in -dimensional Euclidean space, and the surface area of the -sphere in -dimensional Euclidean space, of radius , are proportional to the th power of the radius, (with different constants of proportionality that vary with ). We write for the volume of the -ball and for the surface area of the -sphere, both of radius , where and are the values for the unit-radius case.
In theory, one could compare the values of and for . However, this is somewhat nonsensical. For example, if and then the comparison is like comparing a number of square meters to a different number of cubic meters. The same lack of sense applies to a comparison of and for .
The 0-ball consists of a single point. The 0-dimensional Hausdorff measure is the number of points in a set. So,
The unit 1-ball is the interval of length 2. So,
The 0-sphere consists of its two end-points, . So,
The unit 1-sphere is the unit circle in the Euclidean plane, and this has circumference (1-dimensional measure)
The region enclosed by the unit 1-sphere is the 2-ball, or unit disc, and this has area (2-dimensional measure)
Analogously, in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, the surface area (2-dimensional measure) of the unit 2-sphere is given by
and the volume enclosed is the volume (3-dimensional measure) of the unit 3-ball, given by
The "surface area", or properly the -dimensional volume, of the -sphere at the boundary of the -ball of radius is related to the volume of the ball by the differential equation
or, equivalently, representing the unit -ball as a union of concentric -sphere "shells",
So,
We can also represent the unit -sphere as a union of tori, each the product of a circle (1-sphere) with an -sphere. Let and , so that and . Then,
Since , the equation
holds for all .
This completes the derivation of the recurrences:
Combining the recurrences, we see that
So it is simple to show by induction on "k" that,
where denotes the double factorial, defined for odd natural numbers by and similarly for even numbers .
In general, the volume, in -dimensional Euclidean space, of the unit -ball, is given by
where is the gamma function, which satisfies , , and .
By multiplying by , differentiating with respect to , and then setting , we get the closed form
The recurrences can be combined to give a "reverse-direction" recurrence relation for surface area, as depicted in the diagram:
Index-shifting to then yields the recurrence relations:
where , , and .
The recurrence relation for can also be proved via integration with 2-dimensional polar coordinates:
We may define a coordinate system in an -dimensional Euclidean space which is analogous to the spherical coordinate system defined for 3-dimensional Euclidean space, in which the coordinates consist of a radial coordinate , and angular coordinates , where the angles range over radians (or over degrees) and ranges over radians (or over degrees). If are the Cartesian coordinates, then we may compute from with:
Except in the special cases described below, the inverse transformation is unique:
where if for some but all of are zero then when , and (180 degrees) when .
There are some special cases where the inverse transform is not unique; for any will be ambiguous whenever all of are zero; in this case may be chosen to be zero.
Expressing the angular measures in radians, the volume element in -dimensional Euclidean space will be found from the Jacobian of the transformation:
and the above equation for the volume of the -ball can be recovered by integrating:
Similarly the surface area element of the -sphere, which generalizes the area element of the 2-sphere, is given by
The natural choice of an orthogonal basis over the angular coordinates is a product of ultraspherical polynomials,
for , and the for the angle in concordance with the spherical harmonics.
Just as a two-dimensional sphere embedded in three dimensions can be mapped onto a two-dimensional plane by a stereographic projection, an -sphere can be mapped onto an -dimensional hyperplane by the -dimensional version of the stereographic projection. For example, the point on a two-dimensional sphere of radius 1 maps to the point on the -plane. In other words,
Likewise, the stereographic projection of an -sphere of radius 1 will map to the -dimensional hyperplane perpendicular to the -axis as
To generate uniformly distributed random points on the unit -sphere (that is, the surface of the unit -ball), gives the following algorithm.
Generate an -dimensional vector of normal deviates (it suffices to use , although in fact the choice of the variance is arbitrary), . Now calculate the "radius" of this point:
The vector is uniformly distributed over the surface of the unit -ball.
An alternative given by Marsaglia is to uniformly randomly select a point in the unit -cube by sampling each independently from the uniform distribution over , computing as above, and rejecting the point and resampling if (i.e., if the point is not in the -ball), and when a point in the ball is obtained scaling it up to the spherical surface by the factor ; then again is uniformly distributed over the surface of the unit -ball.
With a point selected uniformly at random from the surface of the unit -sphere (e.g., by using Marsaglia's algorithm), one needs only a radius to obtain a point uniformly at random from within the unit -ball. If is a number generated uniformly at random from the interval and is a point selected uniformly at random from the unit -sphere, then is uniformly distributed within the unit -ball.
Alternatively, points may be sampled uniformly from within the unit -ball by a reduction from the unit -sphere. In particular, if is a point selected uniformly from the unit -sphere, then is uniformly distributed within the unit -ball (i.e., by simply discarding two coordinates).
If is sufficiently large, most of the volume of the -ball will be contained in the region very close to its surface, so a point selected from that volume will also probably be close to the surface. This is one of the phenomena leading to the so-called curse of dimensionality that arises in some numerical and other applications.
Hypercube
In geometry, a hypercube is an "n"-dimensional analogue of a square () and a cube (). It is a closed, compact, convex figure whose 1-skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space's dimensions, perpendicular to each other and of the same length. A unit hypercube's longest diagonal in "n" dimensions is equal to formula_1.
An "n"-dimensional hypercube is more commonly referred to as an n"-cube or sometimes as an n"-dimensional cube. The term measure polytope (originally from Elte, 1912) is also used, notably in the work of H. S. M. Coxeter who also labels the hypercubes the γn polytopes.
The hypercube is the special case of a hyperrectangle (also called an "n-orthotope").
A "unit hypercube" is a hypercube whose side has length one unit. Often, the hypercube whose corners (or "vertices") are the 2"n" points in R"n" with each coordinate equal to 0 or 1 is called "the" unit hypercube.
A hypercube can be defined by increasing the numbers of dimensions of a shape:
This can be generalized to any number of dimensions. This process of sweeping out volumes can be formalized mathematically as a Minkowski sum: the "d"-dimensional hypercube is the Minkowski sum of "d" mutually perpendicular unit-length line segments, and is therefore an example of a zonotope.
The 1-skeleton of a hypercube is a hypercube graph.
A unit hypercube of "n" dimensions is the convex hull of the points given by all sign permutations of the Cartesian coordinates formula_2. It has an edge length of 1 and an "n"-dimensional volume of 1.
An "n"-dimensional hypercube is also often regarded as the convex hull of all sign permutations of the coordinates formula_3. This form is often chosen due to ease of writing out the coordinates. Its edge length is 2, and its "n"-dimensional volume is 2n.
Every "n"-cube of n > 0 is composed of elements, or "n"-cubes of a lower dimension, on the ("n"−1)-dimensional surface on the parent hypercube. A side is any element of ("n"−1)-dimension of the parent hypercube. A hypercube of dimension "n" has 2"n" sides (a 1-dimensional line has 2 endpoints; a 2-dimensional square has 4 sides or edges; a 3-dimensional cube has 6 2-dimensional faces; a 4-dimensional tesseract has 8 cells). The number of vertices (points) of a hypercube is formula_4 (a cube has formula_5 vertices, for instance).
The number of "m"-dimensional hypercubes (just referred to as "m"-cube from here on) on the boundary of an "n"-cube is
For example, the boundary of a 4-cube (n=4) contains 8 cubes (3-cubes), 24 squares (2-cubes), 32 lines (1-cubes) and 16 vertices (0-cubes).
This identity can be proved by combinatorial arguments; each of the formula_8 vertices defines a vertex in
a "m"-dimensional boundary. There are formula_9 ways of choosing which lines ("sides") that defines the subspace that the boundary is in. But, each side is counted formula_10 times since it has that many vertices, we need to divide by this number.
This identity can also be used to generate the formula for the "n"-dimensional cube surface area. The surface area of a hypercube is: formula_11.
These numbers can also be generated by the linear recurrence relation
For example, extending a square via its 4 vertices adds one extra line (edge) per vertex, and also adds the final second square, to form a cube, giving formula_18 = 12 lines in total.
An "n"-cube can be projected inside a regular 2"n"-gonal polygon by a skew orthogonal projection, shown here from the line segment to the 15-cube.
The hypercubes are one of the few families of regular polytopes that are represented in any number of dimensions.
The hypercube (offset) family is one of three regular polytope families, labeled by Coxeter as "γn". The other two are the hypercube dual family, the cross-polytopes, labeled as "βn," and the simplices, labeled as "αn". A fourth family, the infinite tessellations of hypercubes, he labeled as "δn".
Another related family of semiregular and uniform polytopes is the demihypercubes, which are constructed from hypercubes with alternate vertices deleted and simplex facets added in the gaps, labeled as "hγn".
"n"-cubes can be combined with their duals (the cross-polytopes) to form compound polytopes:
The graph of the "n"-hypercube's edges is isomorphic to the Hasse diagram of the ("n"−1)-simplex's face lattice. This can be seen by orienting the "n"-hypercube so that two opposite vertices lie vertically, corresponding to the ("n"-1)-simplex itself and the null polytope, respectively. Each vertex connected to the top vertex then uniquely maps to one of the ("n"-1)-simplex's facets ("n"-2 faces), and each vertex connected to those vertices maps to one of the simplex's "n"-3 faces, and so forth, and the vertices connected to the bottom vertex map to the simplex's vertices.
This relation may be used to generate the face lattice of an ("n-1")-simplex efficiently, since face lattice enumeration algorithms applicable to general polytopes are more computationally expensive.
Regular complex polytopes can be defined in complex Hilbert space called "generalized hypercubes", γ = "p"{4}2{3}...2{3}2, or ... Real solutions exist with "p"=2, i.e. γ = γ"n" = 2{4}2{3}...2{3}2 = {4,3..,3}. For "p">2, they exist in formula_19. The facets are generalized ("n"-1)-cube and the vertex figure are regular simplexes.
The regular polygon perimeter seen in these orthogonal projections is called a petrie polygon. The generalized squares (n=2) are shown with edges outlined as red and blue alternating color "p"-edges, while the higher n-cubes are drawn with black outlined "p"-edges.
The number of "m"-face elements in a "p"-generalized "n"-cube are: formula_20. This is "p""n" vertices and "pn" facets.
Rotation
A rotation is a circular movement of an object around a center (or point) of rotation. A three-dimensional object can always be rotated about an infinite number of imaginary lines called "rotation axis" ( ). If the axis passes through the body's center of mass, the body is said to rotate upon itself, or spin. A rotation around an external point, e.g. the planet Earth around the Sun, is called a "revolution" or "orbital revolution", typically when it is produced by gravity. The axis is called a pole.
Mathematically, a rotation is a rigid body movement which, unlike a translation, keeps a point fixed. This definition applies to rotations within both two and three dimensions (in a plane and in space, respectively.)
All rigid body movements are rotations, translations, or combinations of the two.
A rotation is simply a progressive radial orientation to a common point. That common point lies within the axis of that motion. The axis is 90 degrees perpendicular to the plane of the motion. If the axis of the rotation lies external of the body in question then the body is said to orbit. There is no fundamental difference between a “rotation” and an “orbit” and or "spin". The key distinction is simply where the axis of the rotation lies, either within or outside of a body in question. This distinction can be demonstrated for both “rigid” and “non rigid” bodies.
If a rotation around a point or axis is followed by a second rotation around the same point/axis, a third rotation results. The reverse (inverse) of a rotation is also a rotation. Thus, the rotations around a point/axis form a group. However, a rotation around a point or axis and a rotation around a different point/axis may result in something other than a rotation, e.g. a translation.
Rotations around the "x", "y" and "z" axes are called "principal rotations". Rotation around any axis can be performed by taking a rotation around the "x" axis, followed by a rotation around the "y" axis, and followed by a rotation around the "z" axis. That is to say, any spatial rotation can be decomposed into a combination of principal rotations.
In flight dynamics, the principal rotations are known as "yaw", "pitch", and "roll" (known as Tait–Bryan angles). This terminology is also used in computer graphics.
In astronomy, rotation is a commonly observed phenomenon. Stars, planets and similar bodies all spin around on their axes. The rotation rate of planets in the solar system was first measured by tracking visual features. Stellar rotation is measured through Doppler shift or by tracking active surface features.
This rotation induces a centrifugal acceleration in the reference frame of the Earth which slightly counteracts the effect of gravity the closer one is to the equator. One effect is that an object weighs slightly less at the equator. Another is that the Earth is slightly deformed into an oblate spheroid.
Another consequence of the rotation of a planet is the phenomenon of precession. Like a gyroscope, the overall effect is a slight "wobble" in the movement of the axis of a planet. Currently the tilt of the Earth's axis to its orbital plane (obliquity of the ecliptic) is 23.44 degrees, but this angle changes slowly (over thousands of years). (See also Precession of the equinoxes and Pole star.)
While revolution is often used as a synonym for rotation, in many fields, particularly astronomy and related fields, revolution, often referred to as orbital revolution for clarity, is used when one body moves around another while rotation is used to mean the movement around an axis. Moons revolve around their planet, planets revolve about their star (such as the Earth around the Sun); and stars slowly revolve about their galaxial center. The motion of the components of galaxies is complex, but it usually includes a rotation component.
Most planets in our solar system, including Earth, spin in the same direction as they orbit the Sun. The exceptions are Venus and Uranus. Uranus rotates nearly on its side relative to its orbit. Current speculation is that Uranus started off with a typical prograde orientation and was knocked on its side by a large impact early in its history. Venus may be thought of as rotating slowly backward (or being "upside down"). The dwarf planet Pluto (formerly considered a planet) is anomalous in this and other ways.
The speed of rotation is given by the angular frequency (rad/s) or frequency (turns per time), or period (seconds, days, etc.). The time-rate of change of angular frequency is angular acceleration (rad/s²), caused by torque. The ratio of the two (how heavy is it to start, stop, or otherwise change rotation) is given by the moment of inertia.
The angular velocity vector (an "axial vector") also describes the direction of the axis of rotation. Similarly the torque is an axial vector.
The physics of the rotation around a fixed axis is mathematically described with the axis–angle representation of rotations. According to the right-hand rule, the direction away from the observer is associated with clockwise rotation and the direction towards the observer with counterclockwise rotation, like a screw.
The laws of physics are currently believed to be invariant under any fixed rotation. (Although they do appear to change when viewed from a rotating viewpoint: see rotating frame of reference.)
In modern physical cosmology, the cosmological principle is the notion that the distribution of matter in the universe is homogeneous and isotropic when viewed on a large enough scale, since the forces are expected to act uniformly throughout the universe and have no preferred direction, and should, therefore, produce no observable irregularities in the large scale structuring over the course of evolution of the matter field that was initially laid down by the Big Bang.
In particular, for a system which behaves the same regardless of how it is oriented in space, its Lagrangian is rotationally invariant. According to Noether's theorem, if the action (the integral over time of its Lagrangian) of a physical system is invariant under rotation, then angular momentum is conserved.
Euler rotations provide an alternative description of a rotation. It is a composition of three rotations defined as the movement obtained by changing one of the Euler angles while leaving the other two constant. Euler rotations are never expressed in terms of the external frame, or in terms of the co-moving rotated body frame, but in a mixture. They constitute a mixed axes of rotation system, where the first angle moves the line of nodes around the external axis "z", the second rotates around the line of nodes and the third one is an intrinsic rotation around an axis fixed in the body that moves.
These rotations are called precession, nutation, and "intrinsic rotation".
In flight dynamics, the principal rotations described with Euler angles above are known as "pitch", "roll" and "yaw". The term rotation is also used in aviation to refer to the upward pitch (nose moves up) of an aircraft, particularly when starting the climb after takeoff.
Principal rotations have the advantage of modelling a number of physical systems such as gimbals, and joysticks, so are easily visualised, and are a very compact way of storing a rotation. But they are difficult to use in calculations as even simple operations like combining rotations are expensive to do, and suffer from a form of gimbal lock where the angles cannot be uniquely calculated for certain rotations.
Many amusement rides provide rotation. A Ferris wheel has a horizontal central axis, and parallel axes for each gondola, where the rotation is opposite, by gravity or mechanically. As a result, at any time the orientation of the gondola is upright (not rotated), just translated. The tip of the translation vector describes a circle. A carousel provides rotation about a vertical axis. Many rides provide a combination of rotations about several axes. In Chair-O-Planes the rotation about the vertical axis is provided mechanically, while the rotation about the horizontal axis is due to the centripetal force. In roller coaster inversions the rotation about the horizontal axis is one or more full cycles, where inertia keeps people in their seats.
Rotation of a ball or other object, usually called "spin", plays a role in many sports, including topspin and backspin in tennis, "English", "follow" and "draw" in billiards and pool, curve balls in baseball, spin bowling in cricket, flying disc sports, etc. Table tennis paddles are manufactured with different surface characteristics to allow the player to impart a greater or lesser amount of spin to the ball.
Rotation of a player one or more times around a vertical axis may be called "spin" in figure skating, "twirling" (of the baton or the performer) in baton twirling, or "360", "540", "720", etc. in snowboarding, etc. Rotation of a player or performer one or more times around a horizontal axis may be called a flip, roll, somersault, "heli", etc. in gymnastics, waterskiing, or many other sports, or a "one-and-a-half", "two-and-a-half", "gainer" (starting facing away from the water), etc. in diving, etc. A combination of vertical and horizontal rotation (back flip with 360°) is called a "möbius" in waterskiing freestyle jumping.
Rotation of a player around a vertical axis, generally between 180 and 360 degrees, may be called a "spin move" and is used as a deceptive or avoidance maneuver, or in an attempt to play, pass, or receive a ball or puck, etc., or to afford a player a view of the goal or other players. It is often seen in hockey, basketball, football of various codes, tennis, etc.
The "end result" of any sequence of rotations of any object in 3D about a fixed point is always equivalent to a rotation about an axis. However, an object may "physically" rotate in 3D about a fixed point on more than one axis simultaneously, in which case there is no single fixed axis of rotation - just the fixed point. However, these two descriptions can be reconciled - such a physical motion can always be re-described in terms of a single axis of rotation, provided the orientation of that axis relative to the object is allowed to change moment by moment.
2 dimensional rotations, unlike the 3 dimensional ones, possess no axis of rotation. This is equivalent, for linear transformations, with saying that there is no direction in the place which is kept unchanged by a 2 dimensional rotation, except, of course, the identity.
The question of the existence of such a direction is the question of existence of an eigenvector for the matrix A representing the rotation. Every 2D rotation around the origin through an angle formula_1 in counterclockwise direction can be quite simply represented by the following matrix:
A standard eigenvalue determination leads to the characteristic equation
which has
as its eigenvalues. Therefore, there is no real eigenvalue whenever formula_5, meaning that no real vector in the plane is kept unchanged by A.
Knowing that the trace is an invariant, the rotation angle formula_6 for a proper orthogonal 3x3 rotation matrix formula_7 is found by
formula_8
Using the principal arc-cosine, this formula gives a rotation angle satisfying formula_9. The corresponding rotation axis must be defined to point in a direction that limits the rotation angle to not exceed 180 degrees. (This can always be done because any rotation of more than 180 degrees about an axis formula_10 can always be written as a rotation having formula_9 if the axis is replaced with formula_12.)
Every proper rotation formula_7 in 3D space has an axis of rotation, which is defined such that any vector formula_14 that is aligned with the rotation axis will not be affected by rotation. Accordingly, formula_15, and the rotation axis therefore corresponds to an eigenvector of the rotation matrix associated with an eigenvalue of 1. As long as the rotation angle formula_6 is nonzero (i.e., the rotation is not the identity tensor), there is one and only one such direction. Because A has only real components, there is at least one real eigenvalue, and the remaining two eigenvalues must be complex conjugates of each other (see Eigenvalues and eigenvectors#Eigenvalues and the characteristic polynomial). Knowing that 1 is an eigenvalue, it follows that the remaining two eigenvalues are complex conjugates of each other, but this does not imply that they are complex—they could be real with double multiplicity. In the degenerate case of a rotation angle formula_17, the remaining two eigenvalues are both equal to -1. In the degenerate case of a zero rotation angle, the rotation matrix is the identity, and all three eigenvalues are 1 (which is the only case for which the rotation axis is arbitrary).
A spectral analysis is not required to find the rotation axis. If formula_18 denotes the unit eigenvector aligned with the rotation axis, and if formula_6 denotes the rotation angle, then it can be shown that formula_20. Consequently, the expense of an eigenvalue analysis can be avoided by simply normalizing this vector "if it has a nonzero magnitude." On the other hand, if this vector has a zero magnitude, it means that formula_21. In other words, this vector will be zero if and only if the rotation angle is 0 or 180 degrees, and the rotation axis may be assigned in this case by normalizing any column of formula_22 that has a nonzero magnitude.
This discussion applies to a proper rotation, and hence formula_23. Any improper orthogonal 3x3 matrix formula_24 may be written as formula_25, in which formula_7 is proper orthogonal. That is, any improper orthogonal 3x3 matrix may be decomposed as a proper rotation (from which an axis of rotation can be found as described above) followed by an inversion (multiplication by -1). It follows that the rotation axis of formula_7 is also the eigenvector of formula_24 corresponding to an eigenvalue of -1.
As much as every tridimensional rotation has a rotation axis, also every tridimensional rotation has a plane, which is perpendicular to the rotation axis, and which is left invariant by the rotation. The rotation, restricted to this plane, is an ordinary 2D rotation.
The proof proceeds similarly to the above discussion. First, suppose that all eigenvalues of the 3D rotation matrix A are real. This means that there is an orthogonal basis, made by the corresponding eigenvectors (which are necessarily orthogonal), over which the effect of the rotation matrix is just stretching it. If we write A in this basis, it is diagonal; but a diagonal orthogonal matrix is made of just +1's and -1's in the diagonal entries. Therefore, we don't have a proper rotation, but either the identity or the result of a sequence of reflections.
It follows, then, that a proper rotation has some complex eigenvalue. Let v be the corresponding eigenvector. Then, as we showed in the previous topic, formula_29 is also an eigenvector, and formula_30 and formula_31 are such that their scalar product vanishes:
because, since formula_33 is real, it equals its complex conjugate formula_34, and formula_35 and formula_36 are both representations of the same scalar product between formula_37 and formula_29.
This means formula_30 and formula_31 are orthogonal vectors. Also, they are both real vectors by construction. These vectors span the same subspace as formula_37 and formula_29, which is an invariant subspace under the application of A. Therefore, they span an invariant plane.
This plane is orthogonal to the invariant axis, which corresponds to the remaining eigenvector of A, with eigenvalue 1, because of the orthogonality of the eigenvectors of A.
3-sphere
In mathematics, a 3-sphere, or glome, is a higher-dimensional analogue of a sphere. It may be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space as the set of points equidistant from a fixed central point. Analogous to how the boundary of a ball in three dimensions is an ordinary sphere (or 2-sphere, a two-dimensional surface), the boundary of a ball in four dimensions is a 3-sphere (an object with three dimensions). A 3-sphere is an example of a 3-manifold and an n-sphere.
In coordinates, a 3-sphere with center and radius is the set of all points in real, 4-dimensional space () such that
The 3-sphere centered at the origin with radius 1 is called the unit 3-sphere and is usually denoted :
It is often convenient to regard as the space with 2 complex dimensions () or the quaternions (). The unit 3-sphere is then given by
or
This description as the quaternions of norm one identifies the 3-sphere with the versors in the quaternion division ring. Just as the unit circle is important for planar polar coordinates, so the 3-sphere is important in the polar view of 4-space involved in quaternion multiplication. See polar decomposition of a quaternion for details of this development of the three-sphere.
This view of the 3-sphere is the basis for the study of elliptic space as developed by Georges Lemaître.
The 3-dimensional cubic hyperarea of a 3-sphere of radius is
while the 4-dimensional quartic hypervolume (the volume of the 4-dimensional region bounded by the 3-sphere) is
Every non-empty intersection of a 3-sphere with a three-dimensional hyperplane is a 2-sphere (unless the hyperplane is tangent to the 3-sphere, in which case the intersection is a single point). As a 3-sphere moves through a given three-dimensional hyperplane, the intersection starts out as a point, then becomes a growing 2-sphere that reaches its maximal size when the hyperplane cuts right through the "equator" of the 3-sphere. Then the 2-sphere shrinks again down to a single point as the 3-sphere leaves the hyperplane.
A 3-sphere is a compact, connected, 3-dimensional manifold without boundary. It is also simply connected. What this means, in the broad sense, is that any loop, or circular path, on the 3-sphere can be continuously shrunk to a point without leaving the 3-sphere. The Poincaré conjecture, proved in 2003 by Grigori Perelman, provides that the 3-sphere is the only three-dimensional manifold (up to homeomorphism) with these properties.
The 3-sphere is homeomorphic to the one-point compactification of . In general, any topological space that is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere is called a topological 3-sphere.
The homology groups of the 3-sphere are as follows: and are both infinite cyclic, while for all other indices . Any topological space with these homology groups is known as a homology 3-sphere. Initially Poincaré conjectured that all homology 3-spheres are homeomorphic to , but then he himself constructed a non-homeomorphic one, now known as the Poincaré homology sphere. Infinitely many homology spheres are now known to exist. For example, a Dehn filling with slope on any knot in the 3-sphere gives a homology sphere; typically these are not homeomorphic to the 3-sphere.
As to the homotopy groups, we have and is infinite cyclic. The higher-homotopy groups () are all finite abelian but otherwise follow no discernible pattern. For more discussion see homotopy groups of spheres.
The 3-sphere is naturally a smooth manifold, in fact, a closed embedded submanifold of . The Euclidean metric on induces a metric on the 3-sphere giving it the structure of a Riemannian manifold. As with all spheres, the 3-sphere has constant positive sectional curvature equal to where is the radius.
Much of the interesting geometry of the 3-sphere stems from the fact that the 3-sphere has a natural Lie group structure given by quaternion multiplication (see the section below on group structure). The only other spheres with such a structure are the 0-sphere and the 1-sphere (see circle group).
Unlike the 2-sphere, the 3-sphere admits nonvanishing vector fields (sections of its tangent bundle). One can even find three linearly independent and nonvanishing vector fields. These may be taken to be any left-invariant vector fields forming a basis for the Lie algebra of the 3-sphere. This implies that the 3-sphere is parallelizable. It follows that the tangent bundle of the 3-sphere is trivial. For a general discussion of the number of linear independent vector fields on a -sphere, see the article vector fields on spheres.
There is an interesting action of the circle group on giving the 3-sphere the structure of a principal circle bundle known as the Hopf bundle. If one thinks of as a subset of , the action is given by
The orbit space of this action is homeomorphic to the two-sphere . Since is not homeomorphic to , the Hopf bundle is nontrivial.
There are several well-known constructions of the three-sphere. Here we describe gluing a pair of three-balls and then the one-point compactification.
A 3-sphere can be constructed topologically by "gluing" together the boundaries of a pair of 3-balls. The boundary of a 3-ball is a 2-sphere, and these two 2-spheres are to be identified. That is, imagine a pair of 3-balls of the same size, then superpose them so that their 2-spherical boundaries match, and let matching pairs of points on the pair of 2-spheres be identically equivalent to each other. In analogy with the case of the 2-sphere (see below), the gluing surface is called an equatorial sphere.
Note that the interiors of the 3-balls are not glued to each other. One way to think of the fourth dimension is as a continuous real-valued function of the 3-dimensional coordinates of the 3-ball, perhaps considered to be "temperature". We take the "temperature" to be zero along the gluing 2-sphere and let one of the 3-balls be "hot" and let the other 3-ball be "cold". The "hot" 3-ball could be thought of as the "upper hemisphere" and the "cold" 3-ball could be thought of as the "lower hemisphere". The temperature is highest/lowest at the centers of the two 3-balls.
This construction is analogous to a construction of a 2-sphere, performed by gluing the boundaries of a pair of disks. A disk is a 2-ball, and the boundary of a disk is a circle (a 1-sphere). Let a pair of disks be of the same diameter. Superpose them and glue corresponding points on their boundaries. Again one may think of the third dimension as temperature. Likewise, we may inflate the 2-sphere, moving the pair of disks to become the northern and southern hemispheres.
After removing a single point from the 2-sphere, what remains is homeomorphic to the Euclidean plane. In the same way, removing a single point from the 3-sphere yields three-dimensional space.
An extremely useful way to see this is via stereographic projection. We first describe the lower-dimensional version.
Rest the south pole of a unit 2-sphere on the -plane in three-space. We map a point of the sphere (minus the north pole ) to the plane by sending to the intersection of the line with the plane. Stereographic projection of a 3-sphere (again removing the north pole) maps to three-space in the same manner. (Notice that, since stereographic projection is conformal, round spheres are sent to round spheres or to planes.)
A somewhat different way to think of the one-point compactification is via the exponential map. Returning to our picture of the unit two-sphere sitting on the Euclidean plane: Consider a geodesic in the plane, based at the origin, and map this to a geodesic in the two-sphere of the same length, based at the south pole. Under this map all points of the circle of radius are sent to the north pole. Since the open unit disk is homeomorphic to the Euclidean plane, this is again a one-point compactification.
The exponential map for 3-sphere is similarly constructed; it may also be discussed using the fact that the 3-sphere is the Lie group of unit quaternions.
The four Euclidean coordinates for are redundant since they are subject to the condition that . As a 3-dimensional manifold one should be able to parameterize by three coordinates, just as one can parameterize the 2-sphere using two coordinates (such as latitude and longitude). Due to the nontrivial topology of it is impossible to find a single set of coordinates that cover the entire space. Just as on the 2-sphere, one must use "at least" two coordinate charts. Some different choices of coordinates are given below.
It is convenient to have some sort of hyperspherical coordinates on in analogy to the usual spherical coordinates on . One such choice — by no means unique — is to use , where
where and run over the range 0 to , and runs over 0 to 2. Note that, for any fixed value of , and parameterize a 2-sphere of radius , except for the degenerate cases, when equals 0 or , in which case they describe a point.
The round metric on the 3-sphere in these coordinates is given by
and the volume form by
These coordinates have an elegant description in terms of quaternions. Any unit quaternion can be written as a versor:
where is a unit imaginary quaternion; that is, a quaternion that satisfies . This is the quaternionic analogue of Euler's formula. Now the unit imaginary quaternions all lie on the unit 2-sphere in so any such can be written:
With in this form, the unit quaternion is given by
where are as above.
When is used to describe spatial rotations (cf. quaternions and spatial rotations), it describes a rotation about through an angle of .
For unit radius another choice of hyperspherical coordinates, , makes use of the embedding of in . In complex coordinates we write
This could also be expressed in as
Here runs over the range 0 to , and and can take any values between 0 and 2. These coordinates are useful in the description of the 3-sphere as the Hopf bundle
For any fixed value of between 0 and , the coordinates parameterize a 2-dimensional torus. Rings of constant and above form simple orthogonal grids on the tori. See image to right. In the degenerate cases, when equals 0 or , these coordinates describe a circle.
The round metric on the 3-sphere in these coordinates is given by
and the volume form by
To get the interlocking circles of the Hopf fibration, make a simple substitution in the equations above
In this case , and specify which circle, and specifies the position along each circle. One round trip (0 to 2) of or equates to a round trip of the torus in the 2 respective directions.
Another convenient set of coordinates can be obtained via stereographic projection of from a pole onto the corresponding equatorial hyperplane. For example, if we project from the point we can write a point in as
where is a vector in and . In the second equality above, we have identified with a unit quaternion and with a pure quaternion. (Note that the numerator and denominator commute here even though quaternionic multiplication is generally noncommutative). The inverse of this map takes in to
We could just as well have projected from the point , in which case the point is given by
where is another vector in . The inverse of this map takes to
Note that the coordinates are defined everywhere but and the coordinates everywhere but . This defines an atlas on consisting of two coordinate charts or "patches", which together cover all of . Note that the transition function between these two charts on their overlap is given by
and vice versa.
When considered as the set of unit quaternions, inherits an important structure, namely that of quaternionic multiplication. Because the set of unit quaternions is closed under multiplication, takes on the structure of a group. Moreover, since quaternionic multiplication is smooth, can be regarded as a real Lie group. It is a nonabelian, compact Lie group of dimension 3. When thought of as a Lie group is often denoted or .
It turns out that the only spheres that admit a Lie group structure are , thought of as the set of unit complex numbers, and , the set of unit quaternions. One might think that , the set of unit octonions, would form a Lie group, but this fails since octonion multiplication is nonassociative. The octonionic structure does give one important property: "parallelizability". It turns out that the only spheres that are parallelizable are , , and .
By using a matrix representation of the quaternions, , one obtains a matrix representation of . One convenient choice is given by the Pauli matrices:
This map gives an injective algebra homomorphism from to the set of 2 × 2 complex matrices. It has the property that the absolute value of a quaternion is equal to the square root of the determinant of the matrix image of .
The set of unit quaternions is then given by matrices of the above form with unit determinant. This matrix subgroup is precisely the special unitary group . Thus, as a Lie group is isomorphic to .
Using our Hopf coordinates we can then write any element of in the form
Another way to state this result is if we express the matrix representation of an element of as a linear combination of the Pauli matrices. It is seen that an arbitrary element can be written as
The condition that the determinant of is +1 implies that the coefficients are constrained to lie on a 3-sphere.
In Edwin Abbott Abbott's "Flatland", published in 1884, and in "Sphereland", a 1965 sequel to Flatland by Dionys Burger, the 3-sphere is referred to as an oversphere, and a 4-sphere is referred to as a hypersphere.
Writing in the American Journal of Physics, Mark A. Peterson describes three different ways of visualizing 3-spheres and points out language in "The Divine Comedy" that suggests Dante viewed the Universe in the same way.
Sailor Moon (character)
, also known as , is a fictional superheroine who is the main protagonist and title character of the "Sailor Moon" manga series written by Naoko Takeuchi. She is introduced in chapter #1, "Usagi – Sailor Moon" (originally published in Japan's "Nakayoshi" magazine on December 28, 1991), as a carefree schoolgirl who can transform into Sailor Moon, the de facto leader of the Sailor Soldiers. Initially believing herself to be an ordinary girl, she is later revealed to be the reincarnated form of the Princess of the Moon Kingdom, and she subsequently discovers her original name, .
In "Sailor Moon", Usagi meets Luna, a magical talking black cat that is searching for the Moon Princess. Luna reveals that Usagi is destined to save Earth from the forces of evil and gives her a brooch to transform into Sailor Moon. She asks Usagi to form the Sailor Soldiers, find their princess and protect the "Silver Crystal". As Usagi matures, she becomes a powerful warrior and protects her adopted home planet, Earth, from villains who wish to harm it. Usagi is depicted as usually carefree and cheerful, but with cry-baby tendencies that show themselves when things don't go her way.
As the protagonist, Usagi appears in every episode, film, and television special of the anime adaptations, "Sailor Moon" and "Sailor Moon Crystal"; as well as the live action adaptation, "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon". She also cameos in the sister series "". She has been the subject of parodies and has appeared in special events. Most Western audiences were introduced to Usagi appearing in the "Sailor Moon" anime, which is an adaptation of the manga series. Usagi's critical reception has been largely positive and she is recognized as one of the most important and popular female superheroes of all time.
Usagi is first introduced as living the life of a normal teenage schoolgirl in 20th-century Tokyo. Although well-meaning, she is an underachieving, accident-prone crybaby. One day, Usagi encounters a mysterious cat, who later reveals herself to be Luna, a mentor archetype who introduces Usagi to her new heroic role. Luna gives Usagi a magical brooch and explains how to use it to transform into Sailor Moon (the Soldier of Love and Justice); she tells Usagi that she is a Sailor Soldier who must fight for peace and find the rest of the Sailor Soldiers, as well as their princess. Usagi is a reluctant heroine at first, she grows more confident and mature over time. As Sailor Moon, she sets out to fight the villains from her past life and to protect the Earth using the Silver Crystal. This provides most of the conflict in both the manga and the anime.
Usagi lives in Azabu Jūban with her mother, Ikuko Tsukino; her father, Kenji Tsukino; and her brother, Shingo Tsukino. These names reflect those of Naoko Takeuchi's real-life family members. Out of all the Sailor Soldiers, only Usagi and Minako Aino live in a conventional nuclear family, and Usagi is the only one known to have a sibling.
Usagi has a boyfriend named Mamoru Chiba (also known as Tuxedo Mask). Mamoru and Usagi's relationship is a significant part of Usagi's personal life, as well as the series as a whole. Mamoru and Usagi date for a long time in the series and the love they share helps her through many challenges. In the anime adaptation, Mamoru gives Usagi a heart-shaped promise ring just before he leaves for America. The ring represents a promise to Usagi that they will eventually marry.
Once she forms the Sailor Soldiers, Usagi learns that she comes from a race belonging to the Silver Millennium, and that her mother sent her to Earth to be reincarnated. In the second series, Usagi learns that she will give birth to a daughter (Chibiusa) by her boyfriend and future husband. She also discovers that she will become a "Sovereign of the Earth", known as Neo-Queen Serenity, by the 30th century.
Usagi loves sweet foods and they easily distract her. Cake is listed as a favorite food of hers in the manga, and her favorite subject is listed as home economics. She is said to dislike carrots, and is poor with both English and mathematics. She is afraid of dentists, ghosts and lightning, and her greatest dream is to be a bride. She is apparently a member of the Manga Drawing Club at school, though her skill level varies widely when shown in the anime. She stands 150 cm tall.
In the manga and anime, Mamoru refers to her as "odango" (a kind of rice dumpling), based on her distinctive hairstyle. At first, this is always accompanied with the suffix "atama", meaning "head", but this is gradually dropped. Usagi hates the name at first, but it develops into a sign of affection as they become close. Later in the series Haruka and Seiya, other important figures in her life, adopt the name as well. Since there is no North American equivalent to "odango", the original English adaptation almost always used the phrases "meatball head" or "moon face". In the Tokyopop Manga adaptation, Mamoru calls Usagi "buns", which is an approximation of "odango" and is short for "Bunny". In the Viz Media English adaptation, she is referred to as "bun head".
Usagi's character is inconsistent between versions the series. In the manga she starts out as a crybaby, but quickly matures and learns to make decisions for herself.
The series often portrays Usagi as lazy rather than lacking intelligence, such as when she passes her high school exams without trouble when threatened with separation from her friends.
The original anime often portrays Usagi as more childlike. She often bickers with her daughter Chibiusa, but can show just as much caring as her manga counterpart. She does evolve during the course of the series, but other than the last few episodes of each story arc, she generally lacks the maturity she has in the manga.
In the live-action series, Usagi differs slightly from her manga and anime counterparts. She is more outgoing and extroverted, and makes friends very easily. This immediately puts her personality in conflict with the other Sailor Soldiers, each of whom is solitary to some degree. She rarely uses formal grammar with those of her age (though she does with adults), and refers to everyone as ""given name"-chan" (which is very informal and a way of expressing closeness). She teases Ami when Ami continues calling her "Tsukino-san" (a formal way of speaking to classmates), saying that it is as if they are not friends. Every time a new Sailor Soldier appears, Usagi immediately tries to make friends, even though almost all of them resist. However, Usagi eventually makes the other Sailor Soldiers realize that they are stronger together than alone. Usagi also has a habit of forcing her interests on the people that she makes friends with. This is prominent in her relationship with Rei, where she repeatedly tries to get her to sing.
Being a character with a long lifetime (spanning the ancient Silver Millennium era and 30th century), as well as multiple incarnations, special powers and transformations, Usagi has various aliases such as Princess Serenity, Sailor Moon, Princess Sailor Moon, Super Sailor Moon, Eternal Sailor Moon, and Neo-Queen Serenity. In all of her incarnations (barring disguises), Usagi is always depicted with her hair up in twin buns with twin pigtails.
The series often refers to Usagi's Sailor Soldier identity, Sailor Moon, as the "Soldier of Love and Justice", and once as the "Soldier of Mystery". Throughout most of the series, Sailor Moon wears a white and blue "sailor fuku" uniform; white and reddishpink gloves and boots; and crescentmoon earrings. She also wears red hairpieces and white barrettes resembling feathers, both of which can be used for minor attacks. Her personality is no different from when she is a civilian, though her Sailor Moon form has certain powers.
The names for Sailor Moon's attacks center around the Moon, love, mystery and light. Starting out as a frightened, reluctant girl often in need of help, she gradually accepts her full identity. She eventually becomes the most powerful Sailor Soldier in the galaxy, but her capacity for caring for others is shown to be more powerful still.
Salior Moon's appearance and title change at key points when she grows stronger or gains additional powers. The first change takes place during the third major story arc – act 30 of the manga and episode 111 of the anime – when she obtains the Holy Grail and becomes "Super Sailor Moon". In this form, her costume becomes more ornate and her powers are increased. At first she is unable to take this form without the Grail, but she later gains this ability permanently. This happens when Pegasus grants both her and Sailor Chibi Moon new transformation brooches – in arc 34 of the manga and in episode 130 of the anime. However, in this "Super" version, her white back bow is shorter than in the Holy Grail version.
Sailor Moon receives her third and final form at the end of the fourth major story arc, as the combined power of the other Sailor Soldiers transforms her into "Eternal Sailor Moon", whom Diana says is the closest in power to Neo-Queen Serenity. Her uniform is radically altered, including the addition of two pairs of angelic wings on her back which replace her back bow.
The plot of "Sailor Moon" contains several examples of asynchrony, including appearances of Sailor Moon from different time periods. ChibiChibi is a young girl from the future who turns out to be a future form of Sailor Moon. She comes back to the present to aid Eternal Sailor Moon in her fight against Sailor Galaxia. Like Chibiusa, she hypnotizes Usagi's family into believing that she is part of their family. In the manga, ChibiChibi transforms into "Sailor Cosmos" which is implied to be Sailor Moon's ultimate form. However, Sailor Cosmos admits that she is a coward that ran away from her battles and could never match Eternal Sailor Moon's final show of courage and power.
In the manga, Eternal Sailor Moon uses the Silver Moon Crystal, an evolved form of the Silver Crystal, to carry out her attacks.
is a past incarnation of Sailor Moon that lived in the Moon Kingdom during the age of Silver Millennium. She was the daughter of Queen Serenity, who ruled Silver Millennium and watched over the Earth. Princess Serenity's guardians and closest friends were Sailor Mercury, Sailor Mars, Sailor Jupiter, and Sailor Venus, who were princesses of their own respective planets that sometimes lived on the Moon. On one of her visits to Earth, she met and fell in love with Endymion, the crown prince of Earth.
During the attack that caused the Moon Kingdom's downfall, Prince Endymion died protecting Serenity. In the manga she then commits suicide out of grief, while in the anime Queen Metallia killed them both. Serenity's mother, the Queen, was able to seal away the evil that had created the attack, but everyone involved was killed. Before her own death, the Queen used the Silver Crystal to give her daughter (and others) another chance at life, hoping that Serenity and Endymion would be able to find happiness together in their new lives. In the live-action series, it is Princess Serenity herself who destroys the Moon Kingdom when Endymion was killed during the war.
Serenity reincarnates as Usagi Tsukino in the 20th century. Usagi occasionally takes the form of Princess Serenity during the series, often at climactic moments when more strength is needed than Sailor Moon can usually access. Usagi discovers her identity as a princess in act 9 of the manga, episode 34 of the anime, and act 25 of the live-action series.
While Takeuchi draws Usagi with white, yellow, and even pink hair, Serenity almost always has white hair. In the anime, both characters are always blond. In the live-action series, Serenity has black hair and brown eyes, just like Usagi, and she wears her hair straight down rather than in pigtails. This makes her identity more ambiguous before the storyline reveals her to be Usagi.
At climactic moments, Serenity sometimes gains a pair of functioning angelic wings. She does this during the final battles of "SuperS", after she jumps off a tower to save Chibiusa and the two of them collide with Pegasus while falling. It also happens in "Sailor Stars" during the fight with the fully possessed Galaxia when she grabs the Sword of Sealing. It remains unclear if this power comes from her past life, if it belongs to Usagi herself, or if it came from Pegasus and the Sword of Sealing.
Princess Sailor Moon is a powerful combination of Sailor Moon and Princess Serenity that only exists in the live-action series. She is introduced when Usagi is possessed by the spirit of her former self. She originally appears after Queen Beryl takes the shitennou hostage in exchange for Mamoru. Sailor Moon transforms into Princess Sailor Moon and stops Queen Beryl using her sword.
Princess Sailor Moon is not the same person as Usagi and they have completely different personalities. Princess Sailor Moon shows no remorse for the fate of the Four Kings of Heaven and she refers to Mamoru as "Endymion" rather than his civilian name. She is always angry, and has no misgivings about causing death or destruction. In one act, Usagi's friend Naru accidentally gets too close to Princess Sailor Moon and has to be hospitalized as a result. It is also shown that Princess Serenity has full control of the upgrade. Though smiling in most promotional material for the series, Princess Sailor Moon does not smile in the series itself until the end, after reconciling with Usagi.
During a confrontation with her current self as Princess Sailor Moon, Serenity tells Usagi that she would have no qualms about destroying the earth if Endymion were taken from her again. Usagi pleads with Serenity not to overuse her powers, but Serenity refuses. Afraid that she will eventually destroy the world, Usagi tires to suppress her powers. Usagi's internal conflict forces her to undergo endurance training to keep her powers and Princess Serenity persona at bay. Usagi initially succeeds but avoiding negative thoughts. However, when she is forced to kill a possessed Mamoru, Serenity overcomes Usagi's resistance and transforms into Princess Sailor Moon. Serenity even summons her own minions to fight the other Sailor Guardians to prevent them from stopping her. Princess Sailor Moon successfully destroys the world once again, but Serenity eventually realizes the extent to which she is responsible for this and uses the Silver Crystal to undo the harm she has done.
Princess Sailor Moon has a sword that can deflect enemy attacks or unleash devastating projectiles. The sword also doubles as a harp with invisible strings that Princess Sailor Moon plays while mourning her lost prince. The harp's main power is the ability to heal people and the land. Other than the healing powers, the exact effect of playing the harp is unclear, but it often causes her Silver Crystal to feed the power of Queen Metaria, accelerating the devastation of the planet.
As with other characters unique to the live-action series, Takeuchi designed Princess Sailor Moon's outfit. Her sailor outfit is considerably more elaborate than Sailor Moon's, and included pearls on her gloves and lace on her skirt. In fact, there is a very similar design on the back cover of "Sailor Moon: Short Stories" volume 1.
During the second major story arc, it is revealed that Usagi, as Serenity, will eventually become the queen regnant of a new Silver Millennium called Crystal Tokyo, in the 30th century. She is first seen in this future form in act 16 of the manga and episode 68 of the anime. Usagi learns that she will be given the title "Sovereign of Earth", and Mamoru will become King Endymion alongside her. It is stated in the anime that she becomes Neo-Queen Serenity after warding off a second Ice Age, though the specifics of this are never discussed.
This incarnation is shown to be more mature than the present day Usagi, though she is still childish in some ways. For example, in episode 104, Chibiusa gives the Sailor Soldiers a letter from the future, in which the Queen asks them to train her, but the letter is simplistic and contains almost no kanji. In episode 146, Diana says that the King and Queen would sometimes play sick to get out of things. Letters she sends through the Door of Space-Time to Chibiusa are sometimes signed with a drawing of herself (and sometimes King Endymion) instead of a name.
In the manga, Neo-Queen Serenity tells the present-day Sailor Soldiers that after she became queen, she lost her power as a Sailor Soldier. In the second arc of the anime she does not transform (into Sailor Moon) even when the others do. However, she is seen showing great powers in a flashback when the King Endymion of the future describes the great feats of Neo-Queen Serenity during the time she brought about peace.
She wears an altered version of the dress she wore as a princess. The shoulder pieces are omitted and a large, wing-shaped bow replaces the smaller one of the princess outfit. In the manga, Neo-Queen Serenity's dress is similar to her past form's outfit. She also wears a crown and new earrings. The crescent moon is always visible on her forehead, just as it is with her princess form. Her face and facial expressions are drawn to look more mature than the 20th century Usagi, but her iconic hairstyle is retained.
This form is the one that Chibiusa considers as truly being her mother, while she sees the Usagi of the past as a sister figure.
Usagi can transform into a "Sailor Soldier" by wearing a special device (usually a brooch) and shouting a special command that activates the device. Her original transformation command is . She gains a new basic transformation sequence for each of the five major story arcs. In the fifth arc she becomes Eternal Sailor Moon with "Silver Moon Crystal Power" in the manga, or "" in the anime adaptation (and once in the manga). At first, she is required to be in her Super Sailor Moon form to become Eternal Sailor Moon, as the upgrade to her brooch is temporary. When facing off with Nehelenia for the final time, the brooch is permanently upgraded allowing her to become Eternal Sailor Moon directly.
Most of the anime adaptations' transformation sequences involve the use of shiny red or pink ribbons that fly out of her brooch and form her uniform. Feathers and wings also figure prominently in some sequences, particularly the transformation into Eternal Sailor Moon.
As the protagonist and leader, Usagi has the most special powers of any character in the series. Her physical attacks, usually one-offs and not always successful, include the occasional use of her hair pins as projectile weapons. One of her techniques is the , which involves using her red hair pieces to amplify her screams.
The is a magical crystal that only the members of the Moon dynasty can use. The first English-dubbed anime sometimes calls it the "Imperium Silver Crystal" as well as various other names.
The Crystal possesses tremendous power, capable of reviving an entire world from ruin. However, the strain of using such power often costs the user her life, as the power derives from the life force of the Moon dynasty. The anime shows this happening three times. The first time is in a flashback with Queen Serenity; the second time when Usagi defeats Queen Metaria at the end of season one; and finally in the "R" movie. It is shown as the source of Queen Serenity's power during the age of Silver Millennium, with Usagi Tsukino and Chibiusa each going on to inherit the Crystal in some form. However, it is also shown in the "S" movie that the power of all the Senshi working in unison allows Sailor Moon to use the Crystal's full strength without the result being fatal (although she was still exhausted afterwards from using it).
Both the anime, manga and second anime series commonly portray the Silver Crystal as possibly the single most powerful artifact in the universe, able to focus the energy of its wielder to perform magnificent feats. However, several artifacts rival it in strength, including the Black Crystal of the Death Phantom, and the Saffer Crystal of Sailor Galaxia. In the fifth series of the anime, the crystal also appears to double as the Star Seed of Sailor Moon, which was hinted at in the "R" movie, and the manga implies that it is her Sailor Crystal. It takes on a multitude of shapes, including round, diamond, rose, heart, star, and lotus, and it turns pink while stored within the brooches of Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi Moon.
Because Chibiusa comes from the future – having eventually inherited the Silver Crystal from Usagi – two versions of it exist in the series. After the first and second story arcs, the owners of the crystals keep them in their respective transformation brooches and only remove them in times of urgent need.
The original anime features seven rainbow crystals that had the Seven Great Monsters (the most powerful monsters in the Dark Kingdom) sealed into them. They were sealed within seven separate shards of the Silver Crystal using Queen Serenity's power. They were then carried to Earth where they were reincarnated centuries later, with no memories of their prior existences. All seven rainbow crystals (and, as in the manga, one of Usagi's tears) are needed to recombine to form the Silver Crystal.
Usagi and "Sailor Moon" series evolved from Naoko Takeuchi's earlier one-shot series called "Codename: Sailor V". In Takeuchi's first proposal for the "Sailor Moon" series, each of the five heroines had a completely unique outfit. It was eventually decided that they would instead wear uniforms based on a single theme, whose design was closest to Sailor Moon's original costume concept. Sailor Moon's original had some small differences, including color changes, an exposed midriff, and ribbons around the gloves and boots. She also had a mask, which did appear in a few chapters of the manga before being discarded. These aspects of Sailor Moon's costume are shown in multiple pieces of early artwork, along with a gun and cloak, which were also parts of the original concept.
Takeuchi based Usagi's signature hairstyle on a "good luck charm" she had during her studies as a university student. Takeuchi would put her own hair up in "odango" before difficult classes or exams. Sailor Moon has pink hair in the initial sketches, but by the intermediate stages of development, Takeuchi planned to have the character's hair be blond in civilian form and change to silver when she transformed. Her editor, Fumio Osano, told her that silver hair would be too plain for cover art. Despite this, stylistic use of differently colored hair does sometimes appear in later artwork, and the concept of the heroines' hair changing color when transformed is used in "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon".
Of all the Sailor Soldiers, Usagi's personality is closest to Takeuchi's own personality at the time "Sailor Moon" was created.
The kanji of Usagi's surname translate as and . Her given name is in hiragana and so its meaning is not inherent, but the word means "rabbit" and this is used as a pun frequently throughout the series, including her hairstyle and possessions. Her name is structured as a pun, as the syllable "no" indicates a possessive, so her name can also be understood as "Rabbit of the Moon." This derives from a Japanese folktale about the rabbit which is said to be visible in the Moon's face, much like the Western Man in the Moon. The English-language manga – along with other localisations – gives her the nickname "Bunny" to partially preserve this pun. "Usagi" is not a common given name in Japan.
In the Japanese version of every "Sailor Moon" anime series and subsequent related media, Usagi has been voiced by Kotono Mitsuishi. For this role, Mitsuishi used a higher voice than her natural one. During recording sessions of the early episodes, Mitsuishi had to mentally prepare herself to play Usagi. While Mitsuishi was away during production of episodes 44–50, Kae Araki (who would later voice Usagi's own future daughter, Chibiusa) voiced Usagi as a stand-in. Mitsuishi would later reprise her role in "Sailor Moon Crystal", the only actress from the original cast to do so.
In DIC Entertainment's English dub of "Sailor Moon" (produced in association with Optimum Productions), Sailor Moon was voiced by Tracey Moore for the first 14 episodes (edited down to 11) after which Terri Hawkes took over as the voice for the remaining episodes of the DiC produced dub, as well as Pioneer's dub for the three films, though Moore would return to voice the character in two more episodes later on in the first season. Linda Ballantyne was the voice of Sailor Moon in Cloverway's dub of episodes 83–159 of Sailor Moon (produced in association with Optimum Productions). When Ballantyne first recorded the series, Ballantyne attempted to emulate Hawkes, but soon found it difficult to perform. She wanted the character to "have a lot more fun and just be a goofy teenager." Ballantyne cited her performance as "just more flighty... Until of course the world needed to be saved." American singer Jennifer Cihi provided the English vocals for Serena's songs in the first English adaptation.
Stephanie Sheh provides the voice in Viz Media's dub of the entire original "Sailor Moon" series (produced in association with Studiopolis), and also "Sailor Moon Crystal".
In the stage musicals, Usagi was portrayed by Anza Ohyama, Fumina Hara, Miyuki Kanbe (who played the character with a "cute and high voice"), Marina Kuroki, , Hotaru Nomoto, Sayuri Inoue, Mizuki Yamashita, Kanae Yumemiya, Natsuki Koga and Tomomi Kasai.
In the "SuperS" Musicals, Sanae Kimura, who played Sailor Uranus, provided the voice of Neo-Queen Serenity during "Over the Moon", a duet between Sailor Moon and Neo-Queen Serenity. A third, unknown person, was on stage in Serenity's costume while both Sailor Moon and Uranus were onstage. Uncredited body doubles are common in the musicals to allow the character to appear to transform instantly.
In "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon", Usagi was portrayed by Miyū Sawai.
Sheila Rose Browning describes Sailor Moon as "one of the most popular and well-known manga characters in Japan". Usagi influenced the hairstyle and personality of Misato Katsuragi from "Neon Genesis Evangelion", and of Gruier Serenity's anime version from "Bodacious Space Pirates". Sailor Moon was ranked 9th on IGN's "Top 25 Anime Characters of All Time", being the hightest-ranking female character in the list. Rebecca Silverman, writing about the 2011 re-release of the "Sailor Moon" manga, felt that Usagi's initial hesitancy about whether she is good enough to be Sailor Moon added authenticity to her claim of being an "ordinary girl". Silverman states that along with Itazura na Kiss and Marmalade Boy, Usagi gave rise to an "unintelligent heroine" character type, but feels that even in the first volume, Usagi's determination sets her apart.
Comedian Samantha Bee portrayed Sailor Moon in a live-action production at the Canadian National Exhibition. In "Robot Chicken", Sailor Moon faces one of Queen Beryl's minions, who develops a visible erection after her transformation because her very short skirt exposes her underpants without her even having to move. Sailor Moon and Luna are grossed out.
In "The Simpsons" couch gags from the episodes, "'Tis the Fifteenth Season" and "Fraudcast News", Lisa Simpson appears dressed as Sailor Moon.
The character Mina Loveberry resembles Sailor Moon including her hair in "Star vs. the Forces of Evil"
In the fourth-season episode "Number's Up" of the BET series "Hit the Floor" during an underground Vogue battle the character Kyle Hart (Katherine Bailess) wears a costume that highly resembles Sailors Moon's signature uniform.
An challenge in early 2020 called the Sailor Moon redraw challage where scenss of her in the series are drawn in different styles or have another fictional character taking her place.
Nature versus nurture
The nature versus nurture debate involves whether human behavior is determined by the environment, either prenatal or during a person's life, or by a person's genes. The alliterative expression "nature and nurture" in English has been in use since at least the Elizabethan period and goes back to medieval French.
The complementary combination of the two concepts is an ancient concept (Greek: ). Nature is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception e.g. the product of exposure, experience and learning on an individual.
The phrase in its modern sense was popularized by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton, the modern founder of eugenics and behavioral genetics, discussing the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement. Galton was influenced by "On the Origin of Species" written by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin.
The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" was termed "tabula rasa" ('blank tablet, slate') by John Locke in 1690. A "blank slate view" (sometimes termed "blank-slatism") in human developmental psychology, which assumes that human behavioral traits develop almost exclusively from environmental influences, was widely held during much of the 20th century.
The debate between "blank-slate" denial of the influence of heritability, and the view admitting both environmental and heritable traits, has often been cast in terms of nature "versus" nurture. These two conflicting approaches to human development were at the core of an ideological dispute over research agendas throughout the second half of the 20th century. As both "nature" and "nurture" factors were found to contribute substantially, often in an inextricable manner, such views were seen as naive or outdated by most scholars of human development by the 2000s.
The strong dichotomy of nature "versus" nurture has thus been claimed to have limited relevance in some fields of research. Close feedback loops have been found in which "nature" and "nurture" influence one another constantly, as seen in self-domestication. In ecology and behavioral genetics, researchers think nurture has an essential influence on nature. Similarly in other fields, the dividing line between an inherited and an acquired trait becomes unclear, as in epigenetics or fetal development.
John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690) is often cited as the foundational document of the "blank slate" view. In the "Essay", Locke specifically criticizes René Descartes's claim of an innate idea of God that is universal to humanity. Locke's view was harshly criticized in his own time. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, complained that by denying the possibility of any innate ideas, Locke "threw all order and virtue out of the world," leading to total moral relativism. By the 19th century, the predominant perspective was contrary to that of Locke's, tending to focus on "instinct."
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby noted that William James (1842–1910) argued that humans have "more" instincts than animals, and that greater freedom of action is the result of having more psychological instincts, not fewer.
The question of "innate ideas" or "instincts" were of some importance in the discussion of free will in moral philosophy. In 18th-century philosophy, this was cast in terms of "innate ideas" establishing the presence of a universal virtue, prerequisite for objective morals. In the 20th century, this argument was in a way inverted, since some philosophers (J. L. Mackie) now argued that the evolutionary origins of human behavioral traits forces us to concede that there is no foundation for ethics, while others (Thomas Nagel) treated ethics as a field of cognitively valid statements in complete isolation from evolutionary considerations.
In the early 20th century, there was an increased interest in the role of the environment, as a reaction to the strong focus on pure heredity in the wake of the triumphal success of Darwin's theory of evolution. During this time, the social sciences developed as the project of studying the influence of culture in clean isolation from questions related to "biology. Franz Boas's "The Mind of Primitive Man" (1911) established a program that would dominate American anthropology for the next 15 years. In this study, he established that in any given population, biology, language, material, and symbolic culture, are autonomous; that each is an equally important dimension of human nature, but that no one of these dimensions is reducible to another.
John B. Watson in the 1920s and 1930s established the school of "purist behaviorism" that would become dominant over the following decades. Watson is often said to have been convinced of the complete dominance of cultural influence over anything that heredity might contribute. This is based on the following quote which is frequently repeated without context, as the last sentence is frequently omitted, leading to confusion about Watson's position:Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.During the 1940s to 1960s, Ashley Montagu was a notable proponent of this purist form of behaviorism which allowed no contribution from heredity whatsoever: Man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture ... with the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless. In 1951, Calvin Hall suggested that the dichotomy opposing nature to nurture is ultimately fruitless.
In "African Genesis" (1961) and "The Territorial Imperative" (1966), Robert Ardrey argues for innate attributes of human nature, especially concerning territoriality. Desmond Morris in "The Naked Ape" (1967) expresses similar views. Organised opposition to Montagu's kind of purist "blank-slatism" began to pick up in the 1970s, notably led by E. O. Wilson ("On Human Nature", 1979).
The tool of twin studies was developed as a research design intended to exclude all confounders based on inherited behavioral traits. Such studies are designed to decompose the variability of a given trait in a given population into a genetic and an environmental component. Twin studies established that there was, in many cases, a significant heritable component. These results did not, in any way, point to overwhelming contribution of heritable factors, with heritability typically ranging around 40% to 50%, so that the controversy may not be cast in terms of "purist behaviorism" vs. "purist nativism". Rather, it was "purist behaviorism" that was gradually replaced by the now-predominant view that both kinds of factors usually contribute to a given trait, anecdotally phrased by Donald Hebb as an answer to the question "which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?" by asking in response, "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?"
In a comparable avenue of research, anthropologist Donald Brown in the 1980s surveyed hundreds of anthropological studies from around the world and collected a set of cultural universals. He identified approximately 150 such features, coming to the conclusion there is indeed a "universal human nature", and that these features point to what that universal human nature is.
At the height of the controversy, during the 1970s to 1980s, the debate was highly ideologised. In "" (1984), Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin criticise "genetic determinism" from a Marxist framework, arguing that "Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology ... If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers." The debate thus shifted away from whether heritable traits exist to whether it was politically or ethically permissible to admit their existence. The authors deny this, requesting that evolutionary inclinations be discarded in ethical and political discussions regardless of whether they exist or not.
Heritability studies became much easier to perform, and hence much more numerous, with the advances of genetic studies during the 1990s. By the late 1990s, an overwhelming amount of evidence had accumulated that amounts to a refutation of the extreme forms of "blank-slatism" advocated by Watson or Montagu.
This revised state of affairs was summarized in books aimed at a popular audience from the late 1990s. In "" (1998), Judith Rich Harris was heralded by Steven Pinker as a book that "will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology." However, Harris was criticized for exaggerating the point of "parental upbringing seems to matter less than previously thought" to the implication that "parents do not matter."
The situation as it presented itself by the end of the 20th century was summarized in "" (2002) by Steven Pinker. The book became a best-seller, and was instrumental in bringing to the attention of a wider public the paradigm shift away from the behaviourist purism of the 1940s to 1970s that had taken place over the preceding decades.
Pinker portrays the adherence to pure "blank-slatism" as an ideological dogma linked to two other dogmas found in the dominant view of human nature in the 20th century:
Pinker argues that all three dogmas were held onto for an extended period even in the face of evidence because they were seen as "desirable" in the sense that if any human trait is purely conditioned by culture, any undesired trait (such as crime or aggression) may be engineered away by purely cultural (political means). Pinker focuses on reasons he assumes were responsible for unduly repressing evidence to the contrary, notably the fear of (imagined or projected) political or ideological consequences.
It is important to note that the term "heritability" refers only to the degree of genetic variation between people on a trait. It does not refer to the degree to which a trait of a particular individual is due to environmental or genetic factors. The traits of an individual are always a complex interweaving of both. For an individual, even strongly genetically influenced, or "obligate" traits, such as eye color, assume the inputs of a typical environment during ontogenetic development (e.g., certain ranges of temperatures, oxygen levels, etc.).
In contrast, the "heritability index" statistically quantifies the extent to which variation "between individuals" on a trait is due to variation in the genes those individuals carry. In animals where breeding and environments can be controlled experimentally, heritability can be determined relatively easily. Such experiments would be unethical for human research. This problem can be overcome by finding existing populations of humans that reflect the experimental setting the researcher wishes to create.
One way to determine the contribution of genes and environment to a trait is to study twins. In one kind of study, identical twins reared apart are compared to randomly selected pairs of people. The twins share identical genes, but different family environments. Twins reared apart are not assigned at random to foster or adoptive parents. In another kind of twin study, identical twins reared together (who share family environment and genes) are compared to fraternal twins reared together (who also share family environment but only share half their genes). Another condition that permits the disassociation of genes and environment is adoption. In one kind of adoption study, biological siblings reared together (who share the same family environment and half their genes) are compared to adoptive siblings (who share their family environment but none of their genes).
In many cases, it has been found that genes make a substantial contribution, including psychological traits such as intelligence and personality. Yet heritability may differ in other circumstances, for instance environmental deprivation. Examples of low, medium, and high heritability traits include:
Twin and adoption studies have their methodological limits. For example, both are limited to the range of environments and genes which they sample. Almost all of these studies are conducted in Western, first-world countries, and therefore cannot be extrapolated globally to include poorer, non-western populations. Additionally, both types of studies depend on particular assumptions, such as the equal environments assumption in the case of twin studies, and the lack of pre-adoptive effects in the case of adoption studies.
Since the definition of "nature" in this context is tied to "heritability", the definition of "nurture" has necessarily become very wide, including any type of causality that is not heritable. The term has thus moved away from its original connotation of "cultural influences" to include all effects of the environment, including; indeed, a substantial source of environmental input to human nature may arise from stochastic variations in prenatal development and is thus in no sense of the term "cultural".
The interactions of genes with environment, called "gene–environment interactions", are another component of the nature–nurture debate. A classic example of gene–environment interaction is the ability of a diet low in the amino acid phenylalanine to partially suppress the genetic disease phenylketonuria. Yet another complication to the nature–nurture debate is the existence of gene–environment correlations. These correlations indicate that individuals with certain genotypes are more likely to find themselves in certain environments. Thus, it appears that genes can shape (the selection or creation of) environments. Even using experiments like those described above, it can be very difficult to determine convincingly the relative contribution of genes and environment.
Heritability refers to the origins of differences between people. Individual development, even of highly heritable traits, such as eye color, depends on a range of environmental factors, from the other genes in the organism, to physical variables such as temperature, oxygen levels etc. during its development or ontogenesis.
The variability of trait can be meaningfully spoken of as being due in certain proportions to genetic differences ("nature"), or environments ("nurture"). For highly penetrant Mendelian genetic disorders such as Huntington's disease virtually all the incidence of the disease is due to genetic differences. Huntington's animal models live much longer or shorter lives depending on how they are cared for.
At the other extreme, traits such as native language are environmentally determined: linguists have found that any child (if capable of learning a language at all) can learn any human language with equal facility. With virtually all biological and psychological traits, however, genes and environment work in concert, communicating back and forth to create the individual.
At a molecular level, genes interact with signals from other genes and from the environment. While there are many thousands of single-gene-locus traits, so-called complex traits are due to the additive effects of many (often hundreds) of small gene effects. A good example of this is height, where variance appears to be spread across many hundreds of loci.
Extreme genetic or environmental conditions can predominate in rare circumstances—if a child is born mute due to a genetic mutation, it will not learn to speak any language regardless of the environment; similarly, someone who is practically certain to eventually develop Huntington's disease according to their genotype may die in an unrelated accident (an environmental event) long before the disease will manifest itself.
Steven Pinker likewise described several examples:[C]oncrete behavioral traits that patently depend on content provided by the home or culture—which language one speaks, which religion one practices, which political party one supports—are not heritable at all. But traits that reflect the underlying talents and temperaments—how proficient with language a person is, how religious, how liberal or conservative—are partially heritable.When traits are determined by a complex interaction of genotype and environment it is possible to measure the heritability of a trait within a population. However, many non-scientists who encounter a report of a trait having a certain percentage heritability imagine non-interactional, additive contributions of genes and environment to the trait. As an analogy, some laypeople may think of the degree of a trait being made up of two "buckets," genes and environment, each able to hold a certain capacity of the trait. But even for intermediate heritabilities, a trait is always shaped by both genetic dispositions and the environments in which people develop, merely with greater and lesser plasticities associated with these heritability measures.
Heritability measures always refer to the degree of "variation between individuals in a population". That is, as these statistics cannot be applied at the level of the individual, it would be incorrect to say that while the heritability index of personality is about 0.6, 60% of one's personality is obtained from one's parents and 40% from the environment. To help to understand this, imagine that all humans were genetic clones. The heritability index for all traits would be zero (all variability between clonal individuals must be due to environmental factors). And, contrary to erroneous interpretations of the heritability index, as societies become more egalitarian (everyone has more similar experiences) the heritability index goes up (as environments become more similar, variability between individuals is due more to genetic factors).
One should also take into account the fact that the variables of heritability and environmentality are not precise and vary within a chosen population and across cultures. It would be more accurate to state that the degree of heritability and environmentality is measured in its reference to a particular phenotype in a chosen group of a population in a given period of time. The accuracy of the calculations is further hindered by the number of coefficients taken into consideration, age being one such variable. The display of the influence of heritability and environmentality differs drastically across age groups: the older the studied age is, the more noticeable the heritability factor becomes, the younger the test subjects are, the more likely it is to show signs of strong influence of the environmental factors.
A study conducted by T. J. Bouchard, Jr. showed data that has been evidence for the importance of genes when testing middle-aged twins reared together and reared apart. The results shown have been important evidence against the importance of environment when determining, happiness, for example. In the Minnesota study of twins reared apart, it was actually found that there was higher correlation for monozygotic twins reared apart (0.52) than monozygotic twins reared together (0.44). Also, highlighting the importance of genes, these correlations found much higher correlation among monozygotic than dizygotic twins that had a correlation of 0.08 when reared together and −0.02 when reared apart.
Some have pointed out that environmental inputs affect the expression of genes. This is one explanation of how environment can influence the extent to which a genetic disposition will actually manifest.
The social pre-wiring hypothesis (informally known as "wired to be social") refers to the ontogeny of social interaction. The theory questions whether there is a propensity to socially oriented action already present "before" birth. Research in the theory concludes that newborns are born into the world with a unique genetic wiring to be social.
Circumstantial evidence supporting the social pre-wiring hypothesis can be revealed when examining newborns' behavior. Newborns, not even hours after birth, have been found to display a preparedness for social interaction. This preparedness is expressed in ways such as their imitation of facial gestures. This observed behavior cannot be contributed to any current form of socialization or social construction. Rather, newborns most likely inherit to some extent social behavior and identity through genetics.
Principal evidence of this theory is uncovered by examining twin pregnancies. The main argument is, if there are social behaviors that are inherited and developed before birth, then one should expect twin foetuses to engage in some form of social interaction before they are born. Thus, ten foetuses were analyzed over a period of time using ultrasound techniques. Using kinematic analysis, the results of the experiment were that the twin foetuses would interact with each other for longer periods and more often as the pregnancies went on. Researchers were able to conclude that the performance of movements between the co-twins were not accidental but specifically aimed.
The social pre-wiring hypothesis was proven correct:The central advance of this study is the demonstration that 'social actions' are already performed in the second trimester of gestation. Starting from the 14th week of gestation twin foetuses plan and execute movements specifically aimed at the co-twin. These findings force us to predate the emergence of social behavior: when the context enables it, as in the case of twin foetuses, other-directed actions are not only possible but predominant over self-directed actions.
Traits may be considered to be adaptations (such as the umbilical cord), byproducts of adaptations (the belly button) or due to random variation (convex or concave belly button shape).
An alternative to contrasting nature and nurture focuses on "obligate vs. facultative" adaptations. Adaptations may be generally more obligate (robust in the face of typical environmental variation) or more facultative (sensitive to typical environmental variation). For example, the rewarding sweet taste of sugar and the pain of bodily injury are obligate psychological adaptations—typical environmental variability during development does not much affect their operation.
On the other hand, facultative adaptations are somewhat like "if-then" statements. An example of a facultative psychological adaptation may be adult attachment style. The attachment style of adults, (for example, a "secure attachment style," the propensity to develop close, trusting bonds with others) is proposed to be conditional on whether an individual's early childhood caregivers could be trusted to provide reliable assistance and attention. An example of a facultative physiological adaptation is tanning of skin on exposure to sunlight (to prevent skin damage). Facultative social adaptation have also been proposed. For example, whether a society is warlike or peaceful has been proposed to be conditional on how much collective threat that society is experiencing .
Quantitative studies of heritable traits throw light on the question.
Developmental genetic analysis examines the effects of genes over the course of a human lifespan. Early studies of intelligence, which mostly examined young children, found that heritability measured 40–50%. Subsequent developmental genetic analyses found that variance attributable to additive environmental effects is less apparent in older individuals, with estimated heritability of IQ increasing in adulthood.
Multivariate genetic analysis examines the genetic contribution to several traits that vary together. For example, multivariate genetic analysis has demonstrated that the genetic determinants of all specific cognitive abilities (e.g., memory, spatial reasoning, processing speed) overlap greatly, such that the genes associated with any specific cognitive ability will affect all others. Similarly, multivariate genetic analysis has found that genes that affect scholastic achievement completely overlap with the genes that affect cognitive ability.
Extremes analysis examines the link between normal and pathological traits. For example, it is hypothesized that a given behavioral disorder may represent an extreme of a continuous distribution of a normal behavior and hence an extreme of a continuous distribution of genetic and environmental variation. Depression, phobias, and reading disabilities have been examined in this context.
For a few highly heritable traits, studies have identified loci associated with variance in that trait, for instance in some individuals with schizophrenia.
Through studies of identical twins separated at birth, one-third of their creative thinking abilities come from genetics and two-thirds come from learning. Research suggests that between 37 and 42 percent of the explained variance can be attributed to genetic factors. The learning primarily comes in the form of human capital transfers of entrepreneurial skills through parental role modeling. Other findings agree that the key to innovative entrepreneurial success comes from environmental factors and working “10,000 hours” to gain mastery in entrepreneurial skills.
Evidence from behavioral genetic research suggests that family environmental factors may have an effect upon childhood IQ, accounting for up to a quarter of the variance. The American Psychological Association's report "" (1995) states that there is no doubt that normal child development requires a certain minimum level of responsible care. Here, environment is playing a role in what is believed to be fully genetic (intelligence) but it was found that severely deprived, neglectful, or abusive environments have highly negative effects on many aspects of children's intellect development. Beyond that minimum, however, the role of family experience is in serious dispute. On the other hand, by late adolescence this correlation disappears, such that adoptive siblings no longer have similar IQ scores.
Moreover, adoption studies indicate that, by adulthood, adoptive siblings are no more similar in IQ than strangers (IQ correlation near zero), while full siblings show an IQ correlation of 0.6. Twin studies reinforce this pattern: monozygotic (identical) twins raised separately are highly similar in IQ (0.74), more so than dizygotic (fraternal) twins raised together (0.6) and much more than adoptive siblings (~0.0). Recent adoption studies also found that supportive parents can have a positive effect on the development of their children.
Personality is a frequently cited example of a heritable trait that has been studied in twins and adoptees using behavioral genetic study designs. The most famous categorical organization of heritable personality traits were defined in the 1970s by two research teams led by Paul Costa & Robert R. McCrae and Warren Norman & Lewis Goldberg in which they had people rate their personalities on 1000+ dimensions they then narrowed these down into ""The Big Five"" factors of personality—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The close genetic relationship between positive personality traits and, for example, our happiness traits are the mirror images of comorbidity in psychopathology. These personality factors were consistent across cultures, and many studies have also tested the heritability of these traits.
Identical twins reared apart are far more similar in personality than randomly selected pairs of people. Likewise, identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins. Also, biological siblings are more similar in personality than adoptive siblings. Each observation suggests that personality is heritable to a certain extent. A supporting article had focused on the heritability of personality (which is estimated to be around 50% for subjective well-being) in which a study was conducted using a representative sample of 973 twin pairs to test the heritable differences in subjective well-being which were found to be fully accounted for by the genetic model of the Five-Factor Model’s personality domains. However, these same study designs allow for the examination of environment as well as genes.
Adoption studies also directly measure the strength of shared family effects. Adopted siblings share only family environment. Most adoption studies indicate that by adulthood the personalities of adopted siblings are little or no more similar than random pairs of strangers. This would mean that shared family effects on personality are zero by adulthood.
In the case of personality traits, non-shared environmental effects are often found to out-weigh shared environmental effects. That is, environmental effects that are typically thought to be life-shaping (such as family life) may have less of an impact than non-shared effects, which are harder to identify. One possible source of non-shared effects is the environment of pre-natal development. Random variations in the genetic program of development may be a substantial source of non-shared environment. These results suggest that "nurture" may not be the predominant factor in "environment". Environment and our situations, do in fact impact our lives, but not the way in which we would typically react to these environmental factors. We are preset with personality traits that are the basis for how we would react to situations. An example would be how extraverted prisoners become less happy than introverted prisoners and would react to their incarceration more negatively due to their preset extraverted personality. Behavioral genes are somewhat proven to exist when we take a look at fraternal twins. When fraternal twins are reared apart, they show the same similarities in behavior and response as if they have been reared together.
The relationship between personality and people's own well-being is influenced and mediated by genes (Weiss, Bates, & Luciano, 2008). There has been found to be a stable set point for happiness that is characteristic of the individual (largely determined by the individual's genes). Happiness fluctuates around that setpoint (again, genetically determined) based on whether good things or bad things are happening to us ("nurture"), but only fluctuates in small magnitude in a normal human. The midpoint of these fluctuations is determined by the "great genetic lottery" that people are born with, which leads them to conclude that how happy they may feel at the moment or over time is simply due to the luck of the draw, or gene. This fluctuation was also not due to educational attainment, which only accounted for less than 2% of the variance in well-being for women, and less than 1% of the variance for men.
They consider that the individualities measured together with personality tests remain steady throughout an individual’s lifespan. They further believe that human beings may refine their forms or personality but can never change them entirely. Darwin's Theory of Evolution steered naturalists such as George Williams and William Hamilton to the concept of personality evolution. They suggested that physical organs and also personality is a product of natural selection.
With the advent of genomic sequencing, it has become possible to search for and identify specific gene polymorphisms that affect traits such as IQ and personality. These techniques work by tracking the association of differences in a trait of interest with differences in specific molecular markers or functional variants. An example of a visible human trait for which the precise genetic basis of differences are relatively well known is eye color.
When discussing the significant role of genetic heritability in relation to one's level of happiness, it has been found that from 44% to 52% of the variance in one's well-being is associated with genetic variation. Based on the retest of smaller samples of twins studies after 4,5, and 10 years, it is estimated that the heritability of the genetic stable component of subjective well-being approaches 80%. Other studies that have found that genes are a large influence in the variance found in happiness measures, exactly around 35–50%.
In contrast to views developed in 1960s that gender identity is primarily learned (which led to policy-based surgical sex changed in children such as David Reimer), genomics has provided solid evidence that both sex and gender identities are primarily influenced by genes:
In their attempts to locate the genes responsible for configuring certain phenotypes, researches resort to two different techniques.
Linkage study facilitates the process of determining a specific location in which a gene of interest is located. This methodology is applied only among individuals that are related and does not serve to pinpoint specific genes. It does, however, narrow down the area of search, making it easier to locate one or several genes in the genome which constitute a specific trait.
Association studies, on the other hand, are more hypothetic and seek to verify whether a particular genetic variable really influences the phenotype of interest. In association studies it is more common to use case-control approach, comparing the subject with relatively higher or lower hereditary determinants with the control subject.
Dub, King of Scotland
Dub mac Maíl Coluim (Modern Gaelic: "Dubh mac Mhaoil Chaluim"), sometimes anglicised as Duff MacMalcolm, called Dén, "the Vehement" and Niger, "the Black" (born c. 928 - died 967) was king of Alba. He was son of Malcolm I and succeeded to the throne when Indulf was killed in 962.
While later chroniclers such as John of Fordun supplied a great deal of information on Dub's life and reign, and Hector Boece in his 'The history and chronicles of Scotland' tell tales of witchcraft and treason, almost all of them are rejected by modern historians. There are very few sources for the reign of Dub, of which the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba and a single entry in the Annals of Ulster are the closest to contemporary.
The Chronicle records that during Dub's reign bishop Fothach, most likely bishop of St Andrews or of Dunkeld, died. The remaining report is of a battle between Dub and Cuilén, son of king Ildulb. Dub won the battle, fought "upon the ridge of Crup", in which Duchad, abbot of Dunkeld, sometimes supposed to be an ancestor of Crínán of Dunkeld, and Dubdon, the mormaer of Atholl, died.
The various accounts differ on what happened afterwards. The Chronicle claims that Dub was driven out of the kingdom. The Latin material interpolated in Andrew of Wyntoun's "Orygynale Cronykl" states that he was murdered at Forres, and links this to an eclipse of the sun which can be dated to 20 July 966. The Annals of Ulster report only: "Dub mac Maíl Coluim, king of Alba, was killed by the Scots themselves"; the usual way of reporting a death in internal strife, and place the death in 967. It has been suggested that Sueno's Stone, near Forres, may be a monument to Dub, erected by his brother Kenneth II (Cináed mac Maíl Coluim). It is presumed that Dub was killed or driven out by Cuilén, who became king after Dub's death, or by his supporters.
It is related that his body was hidden under the bridge of Kinloss, and the sun did not shine till it was found and buried. An eclipse on 10 July 967 may have originated or confirmed this story.
Dub left at least one son, Kenneth III (Cináed mac Dub). Although his descendants did not compete successfully for the kingship of Alba after Cináed was killed in 1005, they did hold the mormaerdom of Fife. The MacDuib (or MacDuff) held the mormaerdom, and later earldom, until 1371.
William Rowan Hamilton
Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA (4 August 1805 – 2 September 1865)
was an Irish mathematician, Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He worked in both pure mathematics and mathematics for physics. He made important contributions to optics, classical mechanics and algebra. Although Hamilton was not a physicist–he regarded himself as a pure mathematician–his work was of major importance to physics, particularly his reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. This work has proven central to the modern study of classical field theories such as electromagnetism, and to the development of quantum mechanics. In pure mathematics, he is best known as the inventor of quaternions.
William Rowan Hamilton's scientific career included the study of geometrical optics, classical mechanics, adaptation of dynamic methods in optical systems, applying quaternion and vector methods to problems in mechanics and in geometry, development of theories of conjugate algebraic couple functions (in which complex numbers are constructed as ordered pairs of real numbers), solvability of polynomial equations and general quintic polynomial solvable by radicals, the analysis on Fluctuating Functions (and the ideas from Fourier analysis), linear operators on quaternions and proving a result for linear operators on the space of quaternions (which is a special case of the general theorem which today is known as the "Cayley–Hamilton theorem"). Hamilton also invented ""icosian calculus"", which he used to investigate closed edge paths on a dodecahedron that visit each vertex exactly once.
Hamilton was the fourth of nine children born to Sarah Hutton (1780–1817) and Archibald Hamilton (1778–1819), who lived in Dublin at 29 Dominick Street, later renumbered to 36. Hamilton's father, who was from Dublin, worked as a solicitor. By the age of three, Hamilton had been sent to live with his uncle James Hamilton, a graduate of Trinity College who ran a school in Talbots Castle in Trim, Co. Meath.
Hamilton is said to have shown immense talent at a very early age. Hamilton's predecessor as Royal Astronomer of Ireland and later Bishop of Cloyne Dr. John Brinkley remarked of the 18-year-old Hamilton, 'This young man, I do not say "will be", but "is", the first mathematician of his age.'
His uncle observed that Hamilton had a remarkable ability to learn languages, and from a young age, had displayed an uncanny ability to acquire them (although this is disputed by some historians, who claim he had only a very basic understanding of them). At the age of seven, he had already made very considerable progress in Hebrew, and before he was thirteen he had acquired, under the care of his uncle (a linguist), almost as many languages as he had years of age. These included the classical and modern European languages, and Persian, Arabic, Hindustani, Sanskrit, and even Marathi and Malay. He retained much of his knowledge of languages to the end of his life, often reading Persian and Arabic in his spare time, although he had long since stopped studying languages, and used them just for relaxation.
In September 1813, the American calculating prodigy Zerah Colburn was being exhibited in Dublin. Colburn was 9, a year older than Hamilton. The two were pitted against each other in a mental arithmetic contest with Colburn emerging the clear victor. In reaction to his defeat, Hamilton dedicated less time to studying languages and more time to studying mathematics.
Hamilton was part of a small but well-regarded school of mathematicians associated with Trinity College in Dublin, which he entered at age 18. The college awarded him two Optimes, or off-the-chart grades. He studied both classics and mathematics (BA in 1827, MA in 1837). While still an undergraduate he was appointed Andrews professor of Astronomy and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He then took up residence at Dunsink Observatory where he spent the rest of his life.
While attending Trinity College, Hamilton proposed to his friend's sister, who rejected him. Hamilton, being a sensitive young man, became sick and depressed, and almost committed suicide. He was rejected again in 1831 by Ellen de Vere, a sister of the poet Aubrey Thomas de Vere (1814-1902). His proposal to Helen Marie Bayly, a country preacher's daughter, was accepted, and they married in 1833. Hamilton had three children with Bayly: William Edwin Hamilton (born 1834), Archibald Henry (born 1835), and Helen Elizabeth (born 1840). Bayly proved to be pious, shy, timid, and chronically ill, and Hamilton's married life was reportedly difficult.
Hamilton retained his faculties unimpaired to the very last, and steadily continued the task of finishing the "Elements of Quaternions" which had occupied the last six years of his life. He died on 2 September 1865, following a severe attack of gout. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.
Hamilton is recognised as one of Ireland's leading scientists and, as Ireland becomes more aware of its scientific heritage, he is increasingly celebrated. The Hamilton Institute is an applied mathematics research institute at Maynooth University and the Royal Irish Academy holds an annual public Hamilton lecture at which Murray Gell-Mann, Frank Wilczek, Andrew Wiles, and Timothy Gowers have all spoken. The year 2005 was the 200th anniversary of Hamilton's birth and the Irish government designated that the "Hamilton Year, celebrating Irish science". Trinity College Dublin marked the year by launching the Hamilton Mathematics Institute.
Two commemorative stamps were issued by Ireland in 1943 to mark the centenary of the announcement of quaternions. A 10 Euros commemorative silver Proof coin was issued by the Central Bank of Ireland in 2005 to commemorate 200 years since his birth.
The newest maintenance depot for the Dublin LUAS tram system has been named after him. It is located adjacent to the Broombridge stop on the Green Line.
In his youth Hamilton owned a telescope, and became an expert at calculating celestial phenomena, for instance the locations of the visibility of eclipses of the moon. Also having received extremely high grades for both the Classics and Science, it was not too unusual that, on 16 June 1827, only 21 years old and still an undergraduate, he was elected Royal Astronomer of Ireland and came to live at Dunsink Observatory where he remained until his death in 1865.
In his early years at Dunsink, Hamilton observed the heavens quite regularly. Observational astronomy in those days mostly consisted of measuring star positions, which was not too interesting for a mathematical mind. But the main reason for ultimately leaving the regular observing completely to his astronomy assistant Charles Thompson was that Hamilton frequently suffered from illnesses after having observed.
Nowadays Hamilton is not seen as one of the great astronomers but in his lifetime he was. His Introductory lectures in astronomy were famous; in addition to his students, they attracted many scholars and poets, and even ladies–in those days a remarkable feat. The poet Felicia Hemans wrote her poem "The Prayer of the Lonely Student" after hearing one of his lectures.
Hamilton made important contributions to optics and to classical mechanics. His first discovery was in an early paper that he communicated in 1823 to Dr. Brinkley, who presented it under the title of ""Caustics"" in 1824 to the Royal Irish Academy. It was referred as usual to a committee. While their report acknowledged its novelty and value, they recommended further development and simplification before publication. Between 1825 and 1828 the paper grew to an immense size, mostly by the additional details that the committee had suggested. But it also became more intelligible, and the features of the new method were now easily seen. Until this period Hamilton himself seems not to have fully understood either the nature or importance of optics, as later he intended to apply his method to dynamics.
In 1827, Hamilton presented a theory of a single function, now known as Hamilton's principal function, that brings together mechanics, optics, and mathematics, and which helped to establish the wave theory of light. He proposed it when he first predicted its existence in the third supplement to his ""Systems of Rays"", read in 1832. The Royal Irish Academy paper was finally entitled ""Theory of Systems of Rays"" (23 April 1827), and the first part was printed in 1828 in the "Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy". The more important contents of the second and third parts appeared in the three voluminous supplements (to the first part) which were published in the same Transactions, and in the two papers ""On a General Method in Dynamics"", which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions in 1834 and 1835. In these papers, Hamilton developed his great principle of ""Varying Action"". The most remarkable result of this work is the prediction that a single ray of light entering a biaxial crystal at a certain angle would emerge as a hollow cone of rays. This discovery is still known by its original name, ""conical refraction"".
The step from optics to dynamics in the application of the method of ""Varying Action"" was made in 1827, and communicated to the Royal Society, in whose "Philosophical Transactions" for 1834 and 1835 there are two papers on the subject, which, like the ""Systems of Rays"", display a mastery over symbols and a flow of mathematical language almost unequaled. The common thread running through all this work is Hamilton's principle of ""Varying Action"". Although it is based on the calculus of variations and may be said to belong to the general class of problems included under the principle of least action which had been studied earlier by Pierre Louis Maupertuis, Euler, Joseph Louis Lagrange, and others, Hamilton's analysis revealed much deeper mathematical structure than had been previously understood, in particular the symmetry between momentum and position. Paradoxically, the credit for discovering the quantity now called the Lagrangian and Lagrange's equations belongs to Hamilton. Hamilton's advances enlarged greatly the class of mechanical problems that could be solved, and they represent perhaps the greatest addition which dynamics had received since the work of Isaac Newton and Lagrange. Many scientists, including Liouville, Jacobi, Darboux, Poincaré, Kolmogorov, and Arnold, have extended Hamilton's work, thereby expanding our knowledge of mechanics and differential equations.
While Hamiltonian mechanics is based on the same physical principles as the mechanics of Newton and Lagrange, it provides a powerful new technique for working with the equations of motion. More importantly, both the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian approaches, which were initially developed to describe the motion of discrete systems, have proven critical to the study of continuous classical systems in physics, and even quantum mechanical systems. Indeed, the techniques find use in electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, quantum relativity theory, and quantum field theory. In the Dictionary of Irish Biography David Spearman writes:
Hamilton's mathematical studies seem to have been undertaken and carried to their full development without any assistance whatsoever, and the result is that his writings do not belong to any particular ""school"". Not only was Hamilton an expert as an arithmetic calculator, but he seems to have occasionally had fun in working out the result of some calculation to an enormous number of decimal places. At the age of eight Hamilton engaged Zerah Colburn, the American ""calculating boy"", who was then being exhibited as a curiosity in Dublin. Two years later, aged ten, Hamilton stumbled across a Latin copy of Euclid, which he eagerly devoured; and at twelve he studied Newton's "Arithmetica Universalis". This was his introduction to modern analysis. Hamilton soon began to read the "Principia", and by age sixteen he had mastered a great part of it, as well as some more modern works on analytical geometry and the differential calculus.
Around this time Hamilton was also preparing to enter Trinity College, Dublin, and therefore had to devote some time to classics. In mid-1822 he began a systematic study of Laplace's "Mécanique Céleste".
From that time Hamilton appears to have devoted himself almost wholly to mathematics, though he always kept himself well acquainted with the progress of science both in Britain and abroad. Hamilton found an important defect in one of Laplace's demonstrations, and he was induced by a friend to write out his remarks, so that they could be shown to Dr. John Brinkley, then the first Royal Astronomer of Ireland, and an accomplished mathematician. Brinkley seems to have immediately perceived Hamilton's talents, and to have encouraged him in the kindest way.
Hamilton's career at College was perhaps unexampled. Amongst a number of extraordinary competitors, he was first in every subject and at every examination. He achieved the rare distinction of obtaining an optime both for Greek and for physics. Hamilton might have attained many more such honours (he was expected to win both the gold medals at the degree examination), if his career as a student had not been cut short by an unprecedented event. This was Hamilton's appointment to the Andrews Professor of Astronomy in the University of Dublin, vacated by Dr. Brinkley in 1827. The chair was not exactly offered to him, as has been sometimes asserted, but the electors, having met and talked over the subject, authorised Hamilton's personal friend (also an elector) to urge Hamilton to become a candidate, a step which Hamilton's modesty had prevented him from taking. Thus, when barely 22, Hamilton was established at the Dunsink Observatory, near Dublin.
Hamilton was not especially suited for the post, because although he had a profound acquaintance with theoretical astronomy, he had paid little attention to the regular work of the practical astronomer. Hamilton's time was better employed in original investigations than it would have been spent in observations made even with the best of instruments. Hamilton was intended by the university authorities who elected him to the professorship of astronomy to spend his time as he best could for the advancement of science, without being tied down to any particular branch. If Hamilton had devoted himself to practical astronomy, the University of Dublin would assuredly have furnished him with instruments and an adequate staff of assistants.
He was twice awarded the Cunningham Medal of the Royal Irish Academy. The first award, in 1834, was for his work on conical refraction, for which he also received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society the following year. He was to win it again in 1848.
In 1835, being secretary to the meeting of the British Association which was held that year in Dublin, he was knighted by the lord-lieutenant. Other honours rapidly succeeded, among which his election in 1837 to the president's chair in the Royal Irish Academy, and the rare distinction of being made a corresponding member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Later, in 1864, the newly established United States National Academy of Sciences elected its first Foreign Associates, and decided to put Hamilton's name on top of their list.
The other great contribution Hamilton made to mathematical science was his discovery of quaternions in 1843. However, in 1840, Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues had already reached a result that amounted to their discovery in all but name.
Hamilton was looking for ways of extending complex numbers (which can be viewed as points on a 2-dimensional plane) to higher spatial dimensions.
He failed to find a useful 3-dimensional system (in modern terminology, he failed to find a real, three-dimensional skew-field), but in working with four dimensions he created quaternions. According to Hamilton, on 16 October he was out walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin with his wife when the solution in the form of the equation
suddenly occurred to him; Hamilton then promptly carved this equation using his penknife into the side of the nearby Broom Bridge (which Hamilton called Brougham Bridge). This event marks the discovery of the quaternion group.
A plaque under the bridge was unveiled by the Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, himself a mathematician and student of quaternions, on 13 November 1958. Since 1989, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth has organised a pilgrimage called the "Hamilton Walk", in which mathematicians take a walk from Dunsink Observatory to the bridge, where no trace of the carving remains, though a stone plaque does commemorate the discovery.
The quaternion involved abandoning commutativity, a radical step for the time. Not only this, but Hamilton also invented the cross and dot products of vector algebra, the quaternion product being the cross product minus the dot product. Hamilton also described a quaternion as an ordered four-element multiple of real numbers, and described the first element as the 'scalar' part, and the remaining three as the 'vector' part. Hamilton coined the words tensor and scalar, and was the first to use the word vector in the modern sense.
Hamilton introduced, as a method of analysis, both quaternions and biquaternions, the extension to eight dimensions by introduction of complex number coefficients. When his work was assembled in 1853, the book "Lectures on Quaternions" had "formed the subject of successive courses of lectures, delivered in 1848 and subsequent years, in the Halls of Trinity College, Dublin". Hamilton confidently declared that quaternions would be found to have a powerful influence as an instrument of research.
When he died, Hamilton was working on a definitive statement of quaternion science. His son William Edwin Hamilton brought the "Elements of Quaternions", a hefty volume of 762 pages, to publication in 1866. As copies ran short, a second edition was prepared by Charles Jasper Joly, when the book was split into two volumes, the first appearing 1899 and the second in 1901. The subject index and footnotes in this second edition improved the "Elements" accessibility.
One of the features of Hamilton's quaternion system was the differential operator del which could be used to express the gradient of a vector field or to express the curl. These operations were applied by Clerk Maxwell to the electrical and magnetic studies of Michael Faraday in Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873). Though the del operator continues to be used, the real quaternions fall short as a representation of spacetime. On the other hand, the biquaternion algebra, in the hands of Arthur W. Conway and Ludwik Silberstein, provided representational tools for Minkowski space and the Lorentz group early in the twentieth century.
Today, the quaternions are used in computer graphics, control theory, signal processing, and orbital mechanics, mainly for representing rotations/orientations. For example, it is common for spacecraft attitude-control systems to be commanded in terms of quaternions, which are also used to telemeter their current attitude. The rationale is that combining quaternion transformations is more numerically stable than combining many matrix transformations. In control and modelling applications, quaternions do not have a computational singularity (undefined division by zero) that can occur for quarter-turn rotations (90 degrees) that are achievable by many Air, Sea and Space vehicles. In pure mathematics, quaternions show up significantly as one of the four finite-dimensional normed division algebras over the real numbers, with applications throughout algebra and geometry.
It is believed by some modern mathematicians that Hamilton's work on quaternions was satirized by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Alice in Wonderland. In particular, the Mad Hatter's tea party was meant to represent the folly of quaternions and the need to revert to Euclidean geometry.
Hamilton originally matured his ideas before putting pen to paper. The discoveries, papers, and treatises previously mentioned might well have formed the whole work of a long and laborious life. But not to speak of his enormous collection of books, full to overflowing with new and original matter, which have been handed over to Trinity College, Dublin, the previous mentioned works barely form the greater portion of what Hamilton has published. Hamilton developed the variational principle, which was reformulated later by Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. He also introduced the icosian game or "Hamilton's puzzle" which can be solved using the concept of a Hamiltonian path.
Hamilton's extraordinary investigations connected with the solution of algebraic equations of the fifth degree, and his examination of the results arrived at by N. H. Abel, G. B. Jerrard, and others in their researches on this subject, form another contribution to science. There is next Hamilton's paper on fluctuating functions, a subject which, since the time of Joseph Fourier, has been of immense and ever increasing value in physical applications of mathematics. There is also the extremely ingenious invention of the hodograph. Of his extensive investigations into the solutions (especially by numerical approximation) of certain classes of physical differential equations, only a few items have been published, at intervals, in the "Philosophical Magazine".
Besides all this, Hamilton was a voluminous correspondent. Often a single letter of Hamilton's occupied from fifty to a hundred or more closely written pages, all devoted to the minute consideration of every feature of some particular problem; for it was one of the peculiar characteristics of Hamilton's mind never to be satisfied with a general understanding of a question; Hamilton pursued the problem until he knew it in all its details. Hamilton was ever courteous and kind in answering applications for assistance in the study of his works, even when his compliance must have cost him much time. He was excessively precise and hard to please with reference to the final polish of his own works for publication; and it was probably for this reason that he published so little compared with the extent of his investigations.
Sigismund II Augustus
Sigismund II Augustus (, ; 1 August 1520 – 7 July 1572) was King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, the son of Sigismund I the Old, whom Sigismund II succeeded in 1548. He was the first ruler of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the last male monarch from the Jagiellonian dynasty.
Sigismund was the only son of Italian-born Bona Sforza and Sigismund the Old. From the beginning he was groomed and extensively educated as a successor. In 1529 he was crowned "vivente rege" while his father was still alive. Sigismund Augustus continued a tolerance policy towards minorities and maintained peaceful relations with neighbouring countries, with the exception of the Northern Seven Years' War which aimed to secure Baltic trade. Under his patronage the culture flourished in Poland; he was a collector of tapestries from the Low Countries and collected military memorabilia as well as swords, armours and jewellery. Sigismund Augustus' rule is widely considered as the apex of the Polish Golden Age; he established the first regular Polish navy and the first regular postal service in Poland, known today as Poczta Polska. In 1569 he oversaw the signing of the Union of Lublin between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and introduced an elective monarchy.
Sigismund Augustus married three times; his first wife, Elizabeth of Austria, died in 1545 at just eighteen. He was then involved in several relationships with mistresses, the most famous being Barbara Radziwiłł, who became Sigismund's second wife and Queen of Poland in spite of his mother's disapproval. The marriage was deemed scandalous and was fiercely opposed by the royal court and the nobility. Barbara died five months after her coronation, presumably due to ill health, however, rumours circulated that she was poisoned. Sigismund finally wedded Catherine of Austria, but remained childless throughout his life.
Sigismund Augustus was last male member of the Jagiellons. Following the death of his sister Anna in 1596 the Jagiellonian dynasty came to an end.
Sigismund Augustus was born in Kraków on 1 August 1520 to Sigismund I the Old and his wife, Bona Sforza of Milan. His paternal grandparents were Casimir IV Jagiellon, King of Poland, and Elizabeth of Austria. Sigismund's maternal grandparents, Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabella of Aragon, daughter of King Alfonso II of Naples, both ruled the Duchy of Milan until Sforza's suspicious death in 1494.
Throughout his youth, Sigismund Augustus was under the careful watch of his mother, Bona. Being the only legitimate male heir to the Polish throne throughout his father's reign, he was well educated and taught by the most renowned scholars in the country. It was also his mother's wish to name her only son Augustus, after the first Roman Emperor Gaius Octavius Augustus. However, this decision was met with Sigismund the Old's strong disapproval, who hoped for a lineage of Sigismunds on the Polish throne. Consequently, it was established that the child will bear two names to settle the conflict. The tradition of adopting Augustus as a second or middle name was also observed during the coronation of Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski who became King Stanisław II Augustus in 1764.
In 1530, the ten-year-old Sigismund Augustus was crowned by Primate Jan Łaski as co-ruler alongside his father, in accordance with the "vivente rege" law. Sigismund the Old hoped to secure his son's succession to the throne and maintain the Jagiellonian dynasty's position in Poland. The move was crucial to silence the members of nobility who were against the Jagiellons and viewed the action as a step towards absolutism. The law was officially abolished by the Henrician Articles, or the new constitution adopted between nobles and the newly elected king Henry of Valois in 1573.
When Sigismund Augustus was co-crowned, Chancellor Krzysztof Szydłowiecki organized a preliminary marriage treaty between the young king and Elizabeth of Austria, daughter of Emperor Ferdinand I. The marriage was signed on 10–11 November 1530 in Poznań, however, the arrangement was delayed by Queen Bona Sforza, who detested the new bride. The treaty was renewed on 16 June 1538 in Wrocław by Johannes Dantiscus and the betrothal ceremony took place on 17 July 1538 in Innsbruck. Bona continued to lobby against the marriage and instead proposed Margaret of France to potentially form an alliance with the French against the Habsburgs.
On 5 May 1543, Elizabeth's escorted convoy entered Kraków and was greeted with enthusiasm by both the nobles and the townsfolk. The same day 16-year-old Elizabeth married 22-year-old Sigismund Augustus, whom she met for the first time shortly before marriage vows. The ceremony was performed at the Wawel Cathedral and the wedding continued for two weeks. Bona began to plot against the new queen. As a result, the newly wedded couple decided to reside in Vilnius, far from the royal court.
Despite the initial euphoria demonstrated by royal subjects, the marriage was unsuccessful from the very beginning. Sigismund Augustus did not find Elizabeth attractive and continued to have extramarital affairs with several mistresses, the most famous being Barbara Radziwiłł. Elizabeth was also known to be timid, meek and apprehensive due to strict upbringing. The young and garrulous king was also repulsed by Elizabeth's newly diagnosed epilepsy and subsequent seizures. Only Sigismund the Old and some nobles showed compassion towards the new Queen, who was disregarded by her husband and scorned by Bona. Sigismund Augustus was indifferent to her health condition; when the seizures continued to intensify he abandoned Elizabeth and returned to Kraków to collect her dowry. He also sent for Ferdinand's doctors to travel the long distance from Vienna knowing that Elizabeth was ailing and deteriorating fast. She eventually died unattended and exhausted from the epileptic attacks on 15 June 1545 at the age of 18.
From the outset of his reign, Sigismund Augustus came into collision with the country's privileged nobility, who had already begun curtailing the power of the great families. The ostensible cause of the nobility's animosity to the King was his second marriage, secretly contracted before his accession to the throne, with the Lithuanian, Calvinist and former mistress, Barbara Radziwiłł, the daughter of Hetman Jerzy Radziwiłł. The marriage was announced by the king himself on 2 February 1548 in Piotrków Trybunalski.
The young and beautiful Barbara was despised by Queen Bona, who attempted to annul the marriage at any cost. The agitation was also abundant at Sigismund's first Sejm (parliament) sitting on 31 October 1548 where the deputies threatened to renounce their allegiance unless the new king repudiated Barbara. The nobles portrayed Barbara as an opportunistic prostitute that charmed the king for her own benefit. That perception was shared with Bona Sforza, who decisively eliminated all her rivals by any means to stay in power. The young monarch even considered abdicating. By 1550, when Sigismund summoned his second Sejm, the nobles had begun to be in his favor; the nobility was rebuked by Marshal Piotr Kmita Sobieński, who accused them of attempting to unduly diminish the legislative prerogatives of the Polish Crown. Furthermore, Bona was removed from Wawel and sent to Mazovia where she established her own small courtly entourage.
Unlike her predecessor, Barbara was disliked by the royal court and led a more secluded life with Sigismund Augustus, who was deeply in love with her. On the other hand, she was ambitious, intelligent, perceptive and had an exemplar taste in fashion. She always wore precious pearl necklaces when sitting for portraits. The mutual admiration between Sigismund and Barbara made the relationship "one of the greatest love affairs in Polish history". While still married to Elizabeth, Sigismund Augustus ordered the construction of a secret passage connecting the Royal Castle in Vilnius with the nearby Radziwiłł Palace so that the couple could meet frequently and discreetly.
Due to her unpopularity in Poland, Barbara often expressed her wish to reside permanently in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. To ease the situation, Sigismund Augustus provided a luxurious lifestyle and expensive gifts for his wife at Wawel Castle since her arrival in Kraków on 13 February 1549. The monarch also granted Barbara several provinces to administer and provide income. Although ambitious and bright, she showed lack of interest in political life, but had some influence over decisions made by Sigismund. This also caused an uproar among the nobility. To avoid an armed rebellion, Sigismund was forced to form an alliance with his former father-in-law, Emperor Ferdinand I. This allowed for Barbara's coronation as Queen of Poland on 7 December 1550 by Primate Mikołaj Dzierzgowski. Queen Bona eventually succumbed to her son's demand and accepted the marriage.
Since the day Sigismund and Barbara met, she complained of poor health, particularly stomach and abdominal pain. After the coronation her condition deteriorated rapidly. She was tormented by strong fever, diarrhea, nausea and lack of appetite. After careful observation by hired medics, a lump was discovered on her stomach filled with pus. Sigismund Augustus gravely despaired and sent for doctors and even folk healers from the entire country. He personally tended to his sick wife despite her foul smell and dedicated himself when necessary; the king hoped to take Barbara to the hunting castle at Niepołomice and ordered to demolish the small city gate so her carriage could pass freely. However, Barbara died on 8 May 1551 in Kraków after continuous pain and agony. It was her dying wish that she'd be buried in Lithuania, her homeland. The body was transported to Vilnius Cathedral, where she was finally buried on 23 June next to Elizabeth of Austria. Her death was a major blow to Sigismund; he often attended her coffin on foot while being transported to Vilnius in hot weather. Sigismund also became more serious and reserved; he avoided balls, temporarily renounced his mistresses and dressed black until death.
The cause of Barbara's death is debatable. Her opponents and family members suggested sexually transmitted diseases due to a number of affairs she had before marrying Sigismund. There were also persistent rumors that she was poisoned by Queen Bona Sforza, who had a long history of eliminating her rivals or enemies quickly and efficiently. However, contemporary historians and experts agree on cervical or ovarian cancer.
The death of Queen Barbara Radziwiłł, five months after her coronation and under distressing circumstances, compelled Sigismund to contract a third, purely political union with his first cousin, the Austrian archduchess Catherine, to avoid an Austro-Russian alliance. She was also the sister of his first wife, Elizabeth, who had died within a year of her marriage to him, before his accession. Catherine, unlike previous queens, was considered dull and obese. Sigismund Augustus found her immensely unattractive despite accepting the marriage and organizing a pompous wedding ceremony on 30 July 1553. On the other hand, Catherine showed resentment towards Sigismund because of how he treated her sister and first wife, Queen Elizabeth. She accused him of negligence and indifference during her sudden illness, which caused premature death. The correspondence between the two remained purely formal and political for the remainder of their lives.
Since her coronation, Catherine acted as Austria's puppet at the Polish court; she was tasked with espionage and obtaining important information for the benefit of the Habsburgs. Sigismund Augustus was aware of the scheme, but, by marrying Catherine, Austria promised to stay neutral and abandon plans with Russia. This neutrality was undermined by Catherine's actions, who followed her father's policy and objected the return of John Sigismund Zápolya and Isabella Jagiellon (Sigismund's sister) to Hungary. She would conspire with the Habsburg envoys prior to an audience with the king. She would also dictate what and how the envoys should express their views. When Sigismund Augustus found out of Catherine's intrigues, he sent her to Radom and excluded from political life.
As Sigismund lost all hope of children by his third bride; he was the last male Jagiellon in the direct line so the dynasty was threatened with extinction. He sought to remedy this by adultery with two of the most beautiful of his countrywomen, Barbara Giza and Anna Zajączkowska but was unable to impregnate either of them. The Sejm was willing to legitimize, and acknowledge as Sigismund's successor, any male heir who might be born to him; however, the King remained childless.
The King's marriage was a matter of great political import to Protestants and Catholics alike. The Polish Protestants hoped that he would divorce and remarry and thus bring about a breach with Rome at the very crisis of the religious struggle in Poland. He was not free to remarry until Queen Catherine's death on 28 February 1572, but he followed her to the grave less than six months later.
Unlike his father, Sigismund Augustus was more frail and sickly. Shortly before turning 50, his health rapidly declined. Being involved in many affairs and holding a large number of mistresses, historians agree that the king had venereal disease which caused him to be infertile. At 16, he also contracted malaria which further contributed to his inability of producing any offspring. By 1558 Sigismund had gout and since 1568 he also suffered from kidney stones, which triggered immense pain. He employed numerous medics, healers or even quack doctors and imported expensive ointments from Italy. By the end of his life, the king was losing teeth and vigour, possibly due to tuberculosis. Antonio Maria Graziani recalls that Sigismund was unable to keep standing without a cane when greeting Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Commendone.
During spring of 1572, Sigismund Augustus became feverish. Untreated tuberculosis made him feeble and impotent, but he was able to travel to his private retreat in Knyszyn. While at Knyszyn, he corresponded with his diplomats and nobles, highlighting that he was feeling well and hoped to recover. Great Marshal Jan Firlej denied these claims and reported that the king was bleeding severely due to consumption and was troubled by pain in the chest and lumbar.
Sigismund died in Knyszyn on 7 July 1572 at 6 in the afternoon, surrounded by a group of senators and envoys. The official cause of death given by the medics was consumption. His body placed on a catafalque and remained at the nearby Tykocin Castle until 10 September 1573 when it was transported back to Kraków through Warsaw. He was laid to rest at the Wawel Cathedral on 10 February 1574. The stately funeral ceremony, attended by his sister Anna Jagiellon, was the last spectacle of its kind in the Kingdom of Poland. No other Polish monarch was buried with such pomp and splendour. His death introduced an elective monarchy in Poland which lasted until the final partition at the end of the 18th century.
Sigismund Augustus was the last male member of the Jagiellonian dynasty. The death of his childless sister, Anna, in 1596 marked the end of the dynasty.
In addition to his family connections, Sigismund II Augustus was allied to the Habsburgs as member of the Order of the Golden Fleece.
Sigismund's reign was marked by a period of temporary stability and external expansion. He witnessed the bloodless introduction of the Protestant Reformation into Poland and Lithuania, and the "peero-cratic" upheaval that placed most political power in the hands of the Polish nobility; he saw the collapse of the Knights of the Sword in the north, which led to the Commonwealth's acquisition of Livonia as a Lutheran duchy and the consolidation of Turkey's power in the southeast. A less imposing figure than his father, the elegant and refined Sigismund II Augustus was nevertheless an even more effective statesman than the stern and majestic Sigismund I the Old.
Sigismund II possessed to a high degree the tenacity and patience that seem to have characterized all the Jagiellons, and he added to these qualities a dexterity and diplomatic finesse. No other Polish king seems to have so thoroughly understood the nature of the Polish Sejm and national assembly. Both the Austrian ambassadors and the papal legates testify to the care with which he controlled his nation. According to diplomats, everything went as Sigismund wished and he seemed to know everything in advance. He managed to obtain more funds from the Sejm than his father ever could, and at one of the parliament sittings he won the hearts of the assembled envoys by unexpectedly appearing in a simple grey coat of a Mazovian lord. Like his father, a pro-Austrian by conviction, he contrived even in this respect to carry with him the nation, often distrustful of the Germans. He also avoided serious complications and skirmishes with the powerful Turks.
During Sigismund Augustus' reign, Livonia was in political turmoil. His father, Sigismund I, permitted Albert of Prussia to introduce the Protestant Reformation and secularize the southern part of the Teutonic Order State. Albert then established Europe's first Protestant state in the Duchy of Prussia in 1525, but under Polish suzerainty. However, his efforts to introduce Protestantism to the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in the northernmost part of the region was met with fierce resistance and divided the Livonian Confederation. When Albert's brother Wilhelm and Archbishop of Riga attempted to implement a Lutheran church order in his diocese, the Catholic estates rebelled and arrested both Wilhelm and his bishop coadjutor, Duke Christopher of Mecklenburg.
As Prussia was a tributary state of the Polish Crown, Sigismund Augustus, a Catholic, was forced to intervene in favour of Protestant Albert and his brother Wilhelm. In July 1557 the Polish forces left for Livonia. The armed intervention proved to be successful; the Catholic Livonians surrendered and signed the Treaty of Pozvol on 14 September 1557. The agreement placed most Livonian territories under Polish protection and "de facto" became part of Poland. Gotthard Kettler, the last Master of the Order, was granted the newly established Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. Wilhelm was restored to his former position as archbishop on Sigismund's demand, with the Lutheran church order being enacted.
The incorporation of Courland into the Polish sphere of influence created an alliance which threatened Russia's plans on expanding into the Baltic coast. Sigismund directed the alliance against Ivan the Terrible to protect lucrative trade routes in Livonia, thus creating a new valid "casus belli" against the Russian Tsardom. On 22 January 1558, Ivan invaded the Baltic states and started the Livonian War, which lasted 25 years until 1583. Russia's eventual defeat in the war legally partitioned Livonia between Poland (Latvia, southern Estonia) and Sweden (central-northern Estonia). The Polish sector became subsequently known as Polish Livonia or "Inflanty"; it was settled with colonists from Poland proper resulting in systematic polonisation of these lands.
When the Kalmar Union between Sweden and Denmark was disbanded in 1523 due to Swedish resentment of Danish tyranny, Baltic trade became threatened. The port city of Gdańsk (Danzig), Poland's wealthiest city, faced difficulties due to ongoing conflict on the sea and piracy. The capital, Kraków, was also affected as the trade route from the Baltic ran through Gdańsk and along the Vistula River to the southern province of Lesser Poland. Gdańsk, which was privileged with its own army and government, resisted against Sigismund's order of sending privateers and creating the first Polish Admiralty in their city. Most of the deputies in the city council were merchants and tradesmen of German descent or Protestants who were either politically leaning towards Sweden or fighting for the status of an independent 'city state'. 11 Polish privateers sent by Sigismund were eventually executed, which greatly angered the king. Poland then joined Denmark against Sweden for Baltic domination.
The war ended as "status quo ante bellum" in 1570 with the Treaty of Stettin, which was signed by Bishop Martin Kromer on behalf of Sigismund. However, the ineffective conflict did have its input in establishing Poland's first registered naval fleet (Naval Commission) in 1568.
Sigismund's most striking legacy may have been the Union of Lublin, which united Poland and Lithuania into one state, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, jointly with German-speaking Royal Prussia and Prussian cities. This achievement might well have been impossible without the monarch's personal approach to politics and ability to mediate.
At first, the treaty was perceived as a threat to Lithuanian sovereignty. Lithuanian magnates were afraid of losing their powers, since the proposed union would lower their rank and status to an equivalent with petty nobility rather than wealthier Polish aristocracy. On the other hand, the unification would provide a strong alliance against Russian (Muscovite) attack from the east. Lithuania was ravaged by the Muscovite-Lithuanian Wars which endured for over 150 years. During the Second War, Lithuania lost of its territory to Russia, and the final defeat in the Livonian War would result in the country's incorporation into the Russian Tsardom. Furthermore, the Poles were reluctant to aid Lithuania without a "quid pro quo". The most vocal opponent of the union was Sigismund's brother-in-law, Mikołaj "the Red" Radziwiłł (), who viewed the agreement as "peaceful annexation of Lithuania" by Poland. He also resisted polonisation policies which forced ethnic Lithuanians to change their names and native language to Polish or Latin.
As another war with Russia loomed, Sigismund Augustus pressed the members of parliament (Sejm) for the union, gradually gaining more followers due to his persuasive abilities and auspicious diplomacy. The potential union agreement would lead to the eviction of Lithuanian landowners who opposed the transition of territory from multi-ethnic Lithuania to Poland. Such terms were causing an outrage among the most renowned members of Lithuanian upper classes, but Sigismund was decisive and ruthless in this matter. Moreover, the personal union between the two countries created by the marriage of Jadwiga with Jogaila in 1385 was not entirely constitutional. Being the last male member of the Jagiellons, childless Sigismund sought to preserve his dynasty's legacy. The newly proposed constitutional union would create one large Commonwealth state, with one elected monarch who would simultaneously reign over both domains.
The initial Sejm negotiations on unity in January 1569, near the Polish city of Lublin, were futile. The right of Poles to settle and own land in the Grand Duchy was questioned by Lithuanian envoys. Following Mikołaj Radziwiłł's departure from Lublin on 1 March 1569, Sigismund announced the incorporation of then-Lithuanian Podlachia, Volhynia, Podolia and Kiev provinces into Poland, with strong approval from the local Ruthenian (Ukrainian) gentry. Those historic regions, which once belonged to the Kievan Rus', were disputed between Lithuania and Russia. However, the Ruthenian nobles were eager to capitalise on the political or economic potential offered by the Polish sphere and agreed to the terms. Previously, the Kingdom of Ruthenia or "Ukraine" was abolished in 1349, after Poland and Lithuania split modern-day Ukraine in the aftermath of the Galicia–Volhynia Wars. Now, under the Union of Lublin, all Ukrainian and Ruthenian territories which were alien in culture, customs, religion and language to the Polish people would be annexed by Catholic Poland. Strong westernisation and polonisation would follow, including the clandestine suppression of the Ukrainian Eastern Orthodox Church by future king Sigismund III. Ruthenia remained under Polish rule until the Cossack uprisings against Polish domination and the Partitions of Poland, when Ukraine was annexed by the Russian Empire.
The Lithuanians were compelled to return to the Sejm negotiations under Jan Hieronim Chodkiewicz and continue negotiations. The Polish nobility once again pressed for the full incorporation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into Poland, however, the Lithuanians disapproved. The parties eventually agreed on a federal state on 28 June 1569 and on 1 July 1569 the Union of Lublin was signed at Lublin Castle, thus establishing the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Sigismund Augustus ratified the unification act on 4 July, and henceforth governed one of the largest and multicultural countries of 16th-century Europe.
In comparison to his staunchly Catholic father, Sigismund Augustus paid little attention to the matters of faith and religion. Having a large number of mistresses before, during and after being married, he was viewed by the clergy as an adulterer and libertine. Sigismund was also reasonably tolerant towards minorities and supported nobles of different faith and nationality to be part of the national assembly, the Sejm. He continued his father's policies, but was more accepting of the Protestant Reformation in Poland (only to the status of a minority religion). Several magnates converted to Calvinism or Lutheranism during the Reformation started by Martin Luther and John Calvin, most notably Stanisław Zamoyski, Jan Zamoyski, Mikołaj Rej, Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Johannes a Lasco (Jan Łaski) and Mikołaj "the Black" Radziwiłł.
Throughout the 16th century, Frycz Modrzewski advocated for renouncing Rome's authority and establishing a separate and independent Polish Church. His initiative was chiefly inspired by the creation of the Anglican Church by Henry VIII in 1534. Sigismund Augustus was lenient towards the idea, particularly due to the sudden spread of Protestantism among courtiers, advisors, nobles and peasants. Calvinism became especially popular among the upper classes as it promoted democratic freedoms and called for rebellion against absolutism, which the privileged Polish nobility favoured. During the 1555 Sejm session in Piotrków, the nobles intensively discussed the rights of priests in the newly proposed Polish Church and demanded the abolition of celibacy. Some Catholic bishops were supportive of the concepts and acknowledged the need for uniting Poland, Lithuania, Prussia and their vassals under a common religion. Sigismund agreed to the postulates, however, under the condition that Pope Paul IV will be in favour. Instead, Paul IV was enraged that such a proposition emerged for him to accept; he declined and refused to grant consent. Facing potential excommunication, the assembly were forced to abandon their plans. Nevertheless, Protestantism continued to flourish and spread. In 1565, the Polish Brethren came into existence as a Nontrinitarian sect of Calvinism.
One year after Sigismund's death the Warsaw Confederation was adopted as the first European act granting religious freedoms. Despite this, Protestantism in Poland ultimately declined during the fierce Counter-Reformation measures under the despotic and arch-Catholic Sigismund III Vasa, who ruled for nearly 45 years. For instance, the Polish Brethren were banned, hunted down and its leaders executed.
Sigismund died at his beloved Knyszyn on 6 July 1572, aged 51. After a brief interrex, Henry de Valois of France was elected in the first royal elections as monarch of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1573. However, he soon fled to France after the death of his brother Charles IX of France to inherit the French throne. He was deposed by the Sejm on 12 May 1575 after not returning to Poland. Shortly thereafter, Sigismund's sister, Anna, was crowned Queen on 15 December. She later married Stefan Batory who ruled Poland "jure uxoris" since 1 May 1576.
Sigismund Augustus carried on with the development of several royal residencies including Wawel, Vilnius Castle, Niepołomice and the Royal Castle in Warsaw. In the 1560s he acquired the Tykocin Castle and rebuilt it in Renaissance style. During the reign of Sigismund Augustus the structure served as a royal residence with an impressive treasury and library as well as the main arsenal of the crown.
Sigismund Augustus was a passionate collector of jewels and gemstones. According to nuncio Bernardo Bongiovanni's relation, his collection was cached in 16 chests. Among the precious items in his possession was Charles V's ruby of 80,000 scudos' worth, as well as the Emperor's diamond medal with Habsburgs Eagle on one side and two columns with a sign "Plus Ultra" on the other side. In 1571, after the death of his nephew John Sigismund Zápolya, he inherited the "Hungarian Crown" used by some Hungarian monarchs. A "Swedish Crown" was also made for him. The Polish king treated those crowns as a family keepsake, and kept them in a private vault in the Tykocin Castle. He had also a sultan's sword of 16,000 ducats' worth, 30 precious horse trappings and 20 different private-use armours. The king's possession included a rich collection of tapestries (360 pieces), commissioned by him in Brussels in the years 1550–1560.
The king enjoyed reading, especially short stories, poems and satires. Under the influence of bishop Piotr Myszkowski, Poland's then greatest writer and poet Jan Kochanowski joined the royal court in 1563. It is uncertain whether Sigismund and Kochanowski were friends, however, Kochanowski's correspondence clearly highlights that the two had close contact and he assisted the monarch at most important occasions, including military maneuvers in Lithuania in 1567. Kochanowski was also present during the signing of Lublin Union in 1569.
Sigismund was fond of foreign craft-makers and employed Italian goldsmiths, jewellers and medalists, very much like his father. One of the more renowned figures brought to Poland was Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio. In Italy, Caraglio was one of the first reproductive printmakers. In Poland, Sigismund tasked him with the production of cameos, medallions, coins and jewellery. Numerous medals and roundels from this period feature the last members of the Jagiellonian dynasty. When Sigismund's mother Bona died in 1557, Sigismund had to collect his inheritance from the Italian estates. On 18 October 1558, the king granted the right to arrange the first regular Polish postal service operating from Kraków to Venice, thus establishing Poczta Polska (Polish Post). All maintenance costs were borne by the Crown and the post was mostly managed by Italians or Germans. Additional couriers travelled between Kraków, Warsaw and Vilnius. Since 1562, the postal route also encompassed Vienna and cities in the Holy Roman Empire, which enabled continuous correspondence with the Habsburgs.
In 1573, the first permanent bridge over the Vistula River in Warsaw and also the longest wooden bridge in Europe at the time was named in Sigismund's honour.
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory for plasma physics and nuclear fusion science. Its primary mission is research into and development of fusion as an energy source.
PPPL grew out of the top secret Cold War project to control thermonuclear reactions, called Project Matterhorn. In 1961, after declassification, Project Matterhorn was renamed the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
PPPL is located on Princeton University's Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro Township, New Jersey. This is some distance from the main Princeton campus, but the lab has a Princeton address.
In 1950, John Wheeler was setting up a secret H-bomb research lab at Princeton University. Lyman Spitzer, Jr., an avid mountaineer, was aware of this program and suggested the name "Project Matterhorn".
Spitzer, a professor of Astronomy, had for many years been involved in the study of very hot rarefied gases in interstellar space. While leaving for a ski trip to Aspen in February 1951, his father called and told him to read the front page of the "New York Times". The paper had a story about claims released the day before in Argentina that a relatively unknown German scientist named Ronald Richter had achieved nuclear fusion in his Huemul Project. Spitzer ultimately dismissed these claims, and they were later proven erroneous, but the story got him thinking about fusion. While riding the chairlift at Aspen, he struck upon a new concept to confine a plasma for long periods so it could be heated to fusion temperatures. He called this concept the stellarator.
Later that year he took this design to the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington. As a result of this meeting and a review of the invention by scientists throughout the nation, the stellarator proposal was funded in 1951. As the device would produce high-energy neutrons, which could be used for breeding weapon fuel, the program was classified and carried out as part of Project Matterhorn. Matterhorn ultimately ended its involvement in the bomb field in 1954, becoming entirely devoted to the fusion power field.
In 1958, this magnetic fusion research was declassified following the 1955 United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. This generated an influx of graduate students eager to learn the "new" physics, which in turn influenced the lab to concentrate more on basic research.
The early figure-8 stellarators included : Model-A, Model-B, Model-B2, Model-B3. Model-B64 was a square with round corners, and Model-B65 was a racetrack configuration. The last and most powerful stellarator at this time was the 'racetrack' Model C (operating from 1961 to 1969). The Model C was reconfigured as a tokamak in 1969, becoming the Symmetric Tokamak (ST).
In the 1970s research at the PPPL refocused on the Russian tokamak design when it became evident that it was a more satisfactory containment design than the stellarator. In May 1972 the Adiabatic Toroidal Compressor (ATC) began operation. The Princeton Large Torus, a tokamak, operated from 1975.
By 1982, the PPPL under the direction of Harold Furth had the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) online, which operated until 1997. Beginning in 1993, TFTR was the first in the world to use 50/50 mixtures of deuterium-tritium. In 1994 it yielded an unprecedented 10.7 megawatts of fusion power.
In 1999, the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), based on the spherical tokamak concept, came online at the PPPL. Laboratory scientists are collaborating with researchers on fusion science and technology at other facilities, both domestic and foreign. Staff are applying knowledge gained in fusion research to a number of theoretical and experimental areas including materials science, solar physics, chemistry, and manufacturing.
Odd-parity heating was demonstrated in the 4 cm radius PFRC-1 experiment in 2006. PFRC-2 has a plasma radius of 8 cm. Studies of electron heating in PFRC-2 reached 500 eV with pulse lengths of 300 ms.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) completed the National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade (NSTX-U) that makes it the most powerful experimental fusion facility, or tokamak, of its type in the world. Experiments will test the ability of the upgraded spherical facility to maintain a high-performance plasma under conditions of extreme heat and power. Results could strongly influence the design of future fusion reactors.
In 2017, the group received a Phase II NIAC grant along with two NASA STTRs funding the RF subsystem and superconducting coil subsystem.
In 1961 Gottlieb became the first director of the renamed Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
Battering ram
A battering ram is a siege engine that originated in ancient times and was designed to break open the masonry walls of fortifications or splinter their wooden gates. In its simplest form, a battering ram is just a large, heavy log carried by several people and propelled with force against an obstacle; the ram would be sufficient to damage the target if the log were massive enough and/or it were moved quickly enough (that is, if it had enough momentum). Later rams encased the log in an arrow-proof, fire-resistant canopy mounted on wheels. Inside the canopy, the log was swung from suspensory chains or ropes.
Rams proved effective weapons of war because old fashioned wall-building materials such as stone and brick were weak in tension, and therefore prone to cracking when impacted with force. With repeated blows, the cracks would grow steadily until a hole was created. Eventually, a breach would appear in the fabric of the wall—enabling armed attackers to force their way through the gap and engage the inhabitants of the citadel.
The introduction in the later Middle Ages of siege cannons, which harnessed the explosive power of gunpowder to propel weighty stone or iron balls against fortified obstacles, spelled the end of battering rams and other traditional siege weapons. Smaller, hand-held versions of battering rams are still used today by law enforcement officers and military personnel to break open locked doors.
The earliest depiction of a possible battering ram is from the tomb of the 11th Dynasty noble Khety, where a pair of soldiers advance towards a fortress under the protection of a mobile roofed structure, carrying a long pole that may represent a simple battering ram.
During the Iron Age, in the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean,
the battering ram's log was slung from a wheeled frame by ropes or chains so that it could be made more massive and be more easily bashed against its target. Frequently, the ram's point would be reinforced with a metal head or cap while vulnerable parts of the shaft were bound with strengthening metal bands. Vitruvius details in his text "On Architecture" that Ceras the Carthaginian was the first to make a ram with a wooden base with wheels and a wooden superstructure. Within this the ram was hung so that it could be used against the wall. This structure moved so slowly, however, that he called it the testudo (the Latin word for "tortoise").
Another type of ram was one that maintained the normal shape and structure, but the support beams were instead made of saplings that were lashed together. The frame was then covered in hides as normal to defend from fire. The only solid beam present was the actual ram that was hung from the frame. The frame itself was so light that it could be carried on the shoulders of the men transporting the ram, and the same men could beat the ram against the wall when they reached it.
Many battering rams possessed curved or slanted wooden roofs and side-screens covered in protective materials, usually fresh wet hides, presumably skinned from animals eaten by the besiegers. These hide canopies stopped the ram from being set on fire. They also safeguarded the operators of the ram against arrow and spear volleys launched from above.
A well-known image of an Assyrian battering ram depicts how sophisticated attacking and defensive practices had become by the 9th century BC. The defenders of a town wall are trying to set the ram alight with torches and have also put a chain under it. The attackers are trying to pull on the chain to free the ram, while the aforementioned wet hides on the canopy provide protection against the flames.
The first confirmed employment of rams in the Occident happened from 503 to 502 BC when Opiter Verginius became consul of the Romans during the fight against Aurunci people:
Second appeared in 427 BC, when the Spartans besieged Plataea. The first use of rams within the actual Mediterranean Basin, featuring in this case the simultaneous employment of siege towers to shelter the rammers from attack, occurred on the island of Sicily in 409 BC, at the Selinus siege.
Defenders manning castles, forts or bastions would sometimes try to foil battering rams by dropping obstacles in front of the ram, such as a large sack of sawdust, just before the ram's head struck a wall or gate, or by using grappling hooks to immobilize the ram's log. Alternatively, the ram could be set ablaze, doused in fire-heated sand, pounded by boulders dropped from battlements or invested by a rapid sally of troops.
Some battering rams were not slung from ropes or chains, but were instead supported by rollers. This allowed the ram to achieve a greater speed before striking its target, making it more destructive. Such a ram, as used by Alexander the Great, is described by the writer Vitruvius.
Alternatives to the battering ram included the drill, the sapper's mouse, the pick, the siege hook, and the hunting ram. These devices were smaller than a ram and could be used in confined spaces.
Battering rams had an important effect on the evolution of defensive walls, which were constructed ever more ingeniously in a bid to nullify the effects of siege engines. Historical instances of the usage of battering rams in sieges of major cities include:
There is a popular myth in Gloucester that the famous children's rhyme, Humpty Dumpty, is about a battering ram used in the siege of Gloucester in 1643, during the English Civil War. However, the story is almost certainly untrue; during the siege, which lasted only one month, no battering rams were used, although many cannons were. The idea seems to have originated in a spoof history essay by Professor David Daube written for "The Oxford Magazine" in 1956, which was widely believed despite obvious improbabilities (e.g., planning to cross River Severn by running the ram down a hill at speed, although the river is about 30 m (100 feet) wide at this point).
A capped ram is a battering ram that has an accessory at the head (usually made of iron or steel and sometimes punningly shaped into the head and horns of an ovine ram) to do more damage to a building. It was much more effective at destroying enemy walls and buildings than an uncapped ram but was heavier to carry.
Pliny the Elder in his "Naturalis Historia" describes a battering ram used in mining, where hard rock needed to be broken down to release the ore. The pole possessed a metal tip weighing 150 pounds, so the whole device will have weighed at least twice as much in order to preserve its balance. Whether or not it was supported by being suspended with ropes from a frame remains unknown, but very likely given its total weight. Such devices were used during coal mining in the 19th century in Great Britain before the widespread use of explosives, which were expensive and dangerous to use in practice.
Battering rams still have a use in modern times. SWAT teams and other police forces often employ small, one-man or two-man metal rams for forcing open locked portals or effecting a door breaching. Modern battering rams sometimes incorporate a cylinder, along the length of which a piston fires automatically upon striking a hard object, thus enhancing the momentum of the impact significantly.
In the "Game of Thrones" episode "Blackwater" (Season 2, Episode 9), Stannis Baratheon's men attack the Mud Gate at King's Landing with a battering ram featuring a stag's head carving.
In the "Game of Thrones" episode “The Watchers on the Wall” (Season 4, Episode 9), giants wielded a battering ram to breach the gate at the Wall.
In "The Lord of the Rings", an enchanted battering ram named Grond was used to assault the Great Gate of Minas Tirith. It was 150 feet long and capped with an iron wolf's head.
Charles I of Anjou
Charles I (early 1226/12277 January 1285), commonly called Charles of Anjou, was a member of the royal Capetian dynasty and the founder of the second House of Anjou. He was Count of Provence (1246–85) and Forcalquier (1246–48, 1256–85) in the Holy Roman Empire, Count of Anjou and Maine (1246–85) in France; he was also King of Sicily (1266–85) and Prince of Achaea (1278–85). In 1272, he was proclaimed King of Albania; and in 1277 he purchased a claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The youngest son of Louis VIII of France and Blanche of Castile, Charles was destined for a Church career until the early 1240s. He acquired Provence and Forcalquier through his marriage to their heiress, Beatrice. His attempts to secure comital rights brought him into conflict with his mother-in-law, Beatrice of Savoy, and the nobility. He received Anjou and Maine from his brother, Louis IX of France, in appanage. He accompanied Louis during the Seventh Crusade to Egypt. Shortly after he returned to Provence in 1250, Charles forced three wealthy autonomous citiesMarseilles, Arles and Avignonto acknowledge his suzerainty.
Charles supported Margaret II, Countess of Flanders and Hainaut, against her eldest son, John, in exchange for Hainaut in 1253. Two years later Louis IX persuaded him to renounce the county, but compensated him by instructing Margaret to pay him 160,000 marks. Charles forced the rebellious Provençal nobles and towns into submission and expanded his suzerainty over a dozen towns and lordships in the Kingdom of Arles. In 1263, after years of negotiations, he accepted the offer of the Holy See to seize the Kingdom of Sicily from the Hohenstaufens. This kingdom included, in addition to the island of Sicily, southern Italy to well north of Naples and was known as the "Regno". Pope Urban IV declared a crusade against the incumbent Manfred of Sicily and assisted Charles to raise funds for the military campaign.
Charles was crowned king in Rome on 5 January 1266. He annihilated Manfred's army and occupied the "Regno" almost without resistance. His victory over Manfred's young nephew, Conradin, at the Battle of Tagliacozzo in 1268 strengthened his rule. In 1270 he took part in the Eighth Crusade (which had been organized by Louis IX) and forced the Hafsid caliph of Tunis to pay a yearly tribute to him. Charles' victories secured his undisputed leadership among the popes' Italian partisans (known as Guelphs), but his influence on papal elections and his strong military presence in Italy disturbed the popes. They tried to channel his ambitions towards other territories and assisted him in acquiring claims to Achaea, Jerusalem and Arles through treaties. In 1281 Pope Martin IV authorised Charles to launch a crusade against the Byzantine Empire. Charles' ships were gathering at Messina, ready to begin the campaign when a riotknown as the Sicilian Vespersbroke out on 30March 1282. It put an end to Charles' rule on the island of Sicily, but he was able to defend the mainland territories (or the Kingdom of Naples) with the support of France and the Holy See.
Charles was the youngest child of Louis VIII of France and Blanche of Castile. The date of his birth was not recorded, but he was probably a posthumous son, born in early 1227. Charles was Louis's only surviving son to be "born in the purple" (after his father's coronation), a fact he often emphasised in his youth, according to Matthew Paris. He was the first Capet to be named for Charlemagne.
Louis willed that his youngest sons were to be prepared for a career in the Roman Catholic Church. The details of Charles' tuition are unknown, but he received a good education. He understood the principal Catholic doctrines and could identify errors in Latin texts. His passion for poetry, medical sciences and law is well documented.
Charles said that their mother had a strong impact on her children's education. In reality, Blanche was fully engaged in state administration, and could likely spare little time for her youngest children. Charles lived at the court of a brother, Robert I, Count of Artois, from 1237. About four years later he was put into the care of his youngest brother, Alphonse, Count of Poitiers. His participation in his brothers' military campaign against Hugh X of Lusignan, Count of La Marche, in 1242 showed that he was no longer destined for a Church career.
Raymond Berengar V of Provence died in August 1245, bequeathing Provence and Forcalquier to his youngest daughter, Beatrice, allegedly because he had given generous dowries to her three sisters. The dowries were actually not fully discharged, causing two of her sisters, Margaret (Louis IX's wife) and Eleanor (the wife of Henry III of England), to believe that they had been unlawfully disinherited. Their mother, Beatrice of Savoy, claimed that Raymond Berengar had willed the usufruct of Provence to her.
Emperor Frederick II, Count Raymond VII of Toulouse and other neighbouring rulers proposed themselves or their sons as husbands for the young countess. Her mother put her under the protection of the Holy See. Louis IX and Margaret suggested that Beatrice should be given in marriage to Charles. To secure the support of France against Frederick II, Pope Innocent IV accepted their proposal. Charles hurried to Aix-en-Provence at the head of an army to prevent other suitors from attacking. He married Beatrice on 31January 1246. Provence was a part of the Kingdom of Arles and so of the Holy Roman Empire, but Charles never swore fealty to the emperor. He ordered a survey of the counts' rights and revenues, outraging both his subjects and his mother-in-law, who regarded this action as an attack against her rights.
Being a younger child, destined for a church career, Charles had not received an appanage (a hereditary county or duchy) from his father. Louis VIII had willed that his fourth son, John, should receive Anjou and Maine upon reaching the age of majority, but John died in 1232. Louis IX knighted Charles at Melun in May 1246 and three months later bestowed Anjou and Maine on him. Charles rarely visited his two counties and appointed baillies (or regents) to administer them.
While Charles was absent from Provence, Marseilles, Arles and Avignonthree wealthy cities, directly subject to the emperorformed a league and appointed a Provençal nobleman, Barral of Baux, as the commander of their combined armies. Charles' mother-in-law put the disobedient Provençals under her protection. Charles could not deal with the rebels as he was about to join his brother's crusade. To pacify his mother-in-law he acknowledged her right to rule Forcalquier and granted a third of his revenues from Provence to her.
In December 1244 Louis IX took a vow to lead a crusade. Ignoring their mother's strong opposition his three brothersRobert, Alphonse and Charlesalso took the cross. Preparations for the crusade lasted for years, with the crusaders embarking at Aigues-Mortes on 25August 1248. After spending several months in Cyprus they invaded Egypt on 5June 1249. They captured Damietta and decided to attack Cairo in November. During their advance Jean de Joinville noted Charles' personal courage which saved dozens of crusaders' lives. They were unable to reach Cairo because Egyptian troops surrounded them on 6April 1250. Charles was captured along with his brothers. They were released in exchange of 800,000 bezants and the surrender of Damietta on 6May.
During their voyage to Acre, Charles outraged Louis by gambling while the king was mourning the recent death of their brother, Robert of Artois. Louis remained in the Holy Land, but Charles returned to France in October 1250.
During Charles' absence rebellions had broken out in Provence. He applied both diplomacy and military force to deal with them. The Archbishop of Arles and the Bishop of Digne ceded their secular rights in the two towns to Charles in 1250. He received military assistance from his brother, Alphonse. Arles was the first town to surrender to them in April 1251. In May they forced Avignon to acknowledge their joint rule. A month later Barral of Baux also capitulated. Marseilles was the only town to resist for several months, but it also sought peace in July 1252. Its burghers acknowledged Charles as their lord, but retained their self-governing bodies.
Charles' officials continued to ascertain his rights, visiting each town and holding public enquiries to obtain information about all claims. The count's salt monopoly (or "gabelle") was introduced in the whole county. Income from the salt trade made up about 50% of comital revenues by the late 1250s. Charles abolished local tolls and promoted shipbuilding and the cereal trade. He ordered the issue of new coins, called , to enable the use of the local currency in smaller transactions.
Emperor Frederick II, who was also the ruler of Sicily, died in 1250. The Kingdom of Sicily, also known as the "Regno", included the island of Sicily and southern Italy nearly as far as Rome. Pope Innocent IV claimed that the "Regno" had reverted to the Holy See. The pope first offered the "Regno" to Richard of Cornwall, but Richard did not want to fight against Frederick's son, Conrad IV of Germany. Then the pope proposed to enfeoff Charles with the kingdom. Charles sought instructions from Louis IX who forbade him to accept the offer, because he regarded Conrad as the lawful ruler. After Charles informed the Holy See on 30October 1253 that he would not accept the "Regno", the pope offered it to Edmund of Lancaster.
Queen Blanche, who had administered France during Louis' crusade, died on 1December 1252. Louis made Alphonse and Charles co-regents, so that he could remain in the Holy Land. Margaret II, Countess of Flanders and Hainaut had come into conflict with her son by her first marriage, John of Avesnes. After her sons by her second marriage were captured in July 1253, she needed foreign assistance to secure their release. Ignoring Louis IX's 1246 ruling that Hainaut should pass to John, she promised the county to Charles. He accepted the offer and invaded Hainaut, forcing most local noblemen to swear fealty to him. After his return to France, Louis IX insisted that his ruling was to be respected. In November 1255 he ordered Charles to restore Hainaut to Margaret, but her sons were obliged to swear fealty to Charles. Louis also ruled that she was to pay 160,000 marks to Charles during the following 13 years.
Charles returned to Provence, which had become restive again. His mother-in-law continued to support the rebellious Boniface of Castellane and his allies, but Louis IX persuaded her to return Forcalquier to Charles and relinquish her claims for a lump sum payment from Charles and a pension from Louis in November 1256. A coup by Charles' supporters in Marseilles resulted in the surrender of all political powers there to his officials. Charles spent the next years expanding his power along the borders of Provence. He received territories in the Lower Alps from the Dauphin of Vienne. Raymond I of Baux, Count of Orange, ceded the title of regent of the Kingdom of Arles to him. The burghers of Cuneoa town strategically located on the routes to Lombardysought Charles' protection against Asti in July 1259. Alba, Cherasco, Savigliano and other nearby towns acknowledged his rule. The rulers of Mondovì, Ceva, Biandrate and Saluzzo did homage to him in 1260.
Emperor Frederick II's illegitimate son, Manfred, had been crowned king of Sicily in 1258. After the English barons had announced that they opposed a war against Manfred, Pope Alexander IV annulled the 1253 grant of Sicily to Edmund of Lancaster. Alexander's successor, Pope Urban IV, was determined to put an end to the Emperor's rule in Italy. He sent his notary, Albert of Parma, to Paris to negotiate with Louis IX for Charles to be placed on the Sicilian throne. Charles met with the Pope's envoy in early 1262.
Taking advantage of Charles' absence, Castellane stirred up a new revolt in Provence. The burghers of Marseilles expelled Charles' officials, but Barral of Baux stopped the spread of the rebellion before Charles' return. Charles renounced Ventimiglia in favour of Genoa to secure the neutrality of the republic. He defeated the rebels and forced Castellane into exile. The mediation of James I of Aragon brought about a settlement with Marseilles: its fortifications were dismantled and the townspeople surrendered their arms, but the town retained its autonomy.
Louis IX decided to support Charles' military campaign in Italy in May 1263. Pope Urban IV promised to proclaim a crusade against Manfred, while Charles pledged that he would not accept any offices in the Italian towns. Manfred staged a coup in Rome, but the Guelphs elected Charles senator (or the head of the civil government of Rome). He accepted the office, at which a group of cardinals requested that the Pope revoke the agreement with him, but the Pope, being otherwise defenceless against Manfred, could not break with Charles.
In the spring of 1264 Cardinals Simon of Brie and Guy Foulquois were sent to France to reach a compromise and start raising support for the crusade. Charles sent troops to Rome to protect the Pope against Manfred's allies. At Foulquois' request, Charles' sister-in-law Margaret (who had not abandoned her claims to her dowry) pledged that she would not take actions against Charles during his absence. Foulquois also persuaded the French and Provençal prelates to offer financial support for the crusade. Pope Urban died before the final agreement was concluded. Charles made arrangements for his campaign against Sicily during the interregnum; he concluded agreements to secure his army's route across Lombardy and had the leaders of the Provençal rebels executed.
Foulquois was elected pope in February 1265; he soon confirmed Charles' senatorship and urged him to come to Rome. Charles agreed that he would hold the Kingdom of Sicily as the popes' vassal for an annual tribute of 8,000 ounces of gold. He also promised that he would never seek the imperial title. He embarked at Marseilles on 10May and landed at Ostia ten days later. He was installed as senator on 21June and four cardinals invested him with the "Regno" a week later. To finance further military actions he borrowed money from Italian bankers with the Pope's assistance, who had authorised him to pledge Church property. Five cardinals crowned him king of Sicily on 5January 1266. The crusaders from France and Provencereportedly 6,000 fully equipped mounted warriors, 600 mounted bowmen and 20,000 foot soldiersarrived in Rome ten days later.
Charles decided to invade the "Regno" without delay, because he was unable to finance a lengthy campaign. He left Rome on 20January 1266. He marched towards Naples, but changed his strategy after learning of a muster of Manfred's forces near Capua. He led his troops across the Apennines towards Benevento. Manfred also hurried to the town and reached it before Charles. Worried that further delays might endanger his subjects' loyalty, Manfred attacked Charles' army, then in disarray from the crossing of the hills, on 26February 1266. In the ensuing battle, Manfred's army was defeated and he was killed.
Resistance throughout the "Regno" collapsed. All towns surrendered even before Charles' troops reached them. The Saracens of Luceraa Muslim colony established during Frederick II's reignpaid homage to him. His commander, Philip of Montfort, took control of the island of Sicily. Manfred's widow, Helena of Epirus, and their children were captured. Charles laid claim to her dowrythe island of Corfu and the region of Durazzo (now Durrës in Albania)by right of conquest. His troops seized Corfu before the end of the year.
Charles was lenient with Manfred's supporters, but they did not believe that this conciliatory policy could last. They knew that he had promised to return estates to the Guelph lords expelled from the "Regno". Neither could Charles gain the commoners' loyalty, partly because he continued enforcing the "subventio generalis" despite the popes declaring it an illegal charge. He introduced a ban on the use of foreign currency in large transactions and made a profit of the compulsory exchange of foreign coinage for locally minted currency. He also traded in grain, spices and sugar, through a joint venture with Pisan merchants.
Pope Clement censured Charles for his methods of state administration, describing him as an arrogant and obstinate monarch. The consolidation of Charles' power in northern Italy also alarmed Clement. To appease the pope, Charles resigned his senatorship in May 1267. His successors, Conrad Monaldeschi and Luca Savelli, soon demanded the re-payment of the money that Charles and the Pope had borrowed from the Romans.
Victories by the Ghibellines, the imperial family's supporters, forced the Pope to ask Charles to send his troops to Tuscany. Charles' troops ousted the Ghibellines from Florence in April 1267. After being elected the Podestà (ruler) of Florence and Lucca for seven years, Charles hurried to Tuscany. The Pope summoned him to Viterbo, forcing him to promise that he would abandon all claims to Tuscany in three years.
The Pope wanted to change the direction of Charles' ambitions. He persuaded Charles to conclude agreements with William of Villehardouin, Prince of Achaea, and the Latin Emperor Baldwin II in late May. According to the first treaty, Villehardouin acknowledged Charles' suzerainty and made Charles' younger son, Philip, his heir, also stipulating that Charles would inherit Achaea if Philip died childless. Baldwin confirmed the first agreement and renounced his claims to suzerainty over his vassals in favour of Charles. Charles pledged that he would assist Baldwin in recapturing Constantinople from the Byzantine emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, in exchange for one third of the conquered lands.
Charles returned to Tuscany and laid siege to the fortress of Poggibonsi, but it did not fall until the end of November. Manfred's staunchest supporters had meanwhile fled to Bavaria to attempt to persuade Conrad IV's 15-year-old son Conradin to assert his hereditary right to the "Regno". After Conradin accepted their proposal, Manfred's former vicar in Sicily, Conrad Capece, returned to the island and stirred up a revolt. At Capece's request Muhammad I al-Mustansir, the Hafsid caliph of Tunis, allowed Manfred's former ally, Frederick of Castile, to invade Sicily from North Africa. Frederick's brother, Henrywho had been elected senator of Romealso offered support to Conradin. Henry had been Charles' friend, but Charles had failed to repay a loan to him.
Conradin left Bavaria in September 1267. His supporters' revolt was spreading from Sicily to Calabria; the Saracens of Lucera also rose up. Pope Clement urged Charles to return to the "Regno", but he continued his campaign in Tuscany until March 1268, when he met with the Pope. In April, the Pope made Charles imperial vicar of Tuscany "during the vacancy of the empire", a move of dubious legality. Charles marched to southern Italy and laid siege to Lucera, but he then had to hurry north to prevent Conradin's invasion of Abruzzo in late August. At the Battle of Tagliacozzo, on 23August 1268, it appeared that Conradin had won the day, but a sudden charge by Charles' reserve routed Conradin's army.
The burghers of Potenza, Aversa and other towns in Basilicata and Apulia massacred their fellows who had agitated on Conradin's behalf, but the Sicilians and the Saracens of Lucera did not surrender. Charles marched to Rome where he was again elected senator in September. He appointed new officials to administer justice and collect state revenues. New coins bearing his name were struck. During the following decade, Rome was ruled by Charles' vicars, each appointed for one year.
Conradin was captured at Torre Astura. Most of his retainers were summarily executed, but Conradin and his friend, Frederick I, Margrave of Baden, were brought to trial for robbery and treason in Naples. They were sentenced to death and beheaded on 29October. Conrad of Antioch was Conradin's only partisan to be released, but only after his wife threatened to execute the Guelph lords she held captive in her castle. The Ghibelline noblemen of the "Regno" fled to the court of Peter III of Aragon, who had married Manfred's daughter, Constance.
Charles wife, Beatrice of Provence, had died in July 1267. The widowed Charles married Margaret of Nevers in November 1268. She was co-heiress to her father, Odo, the eldest son of Hugh IV, Duke of Burgundy. Pope Clement died on 29November 1268. The vacancy lasted for three years, which strengthened Charles' authority in Italy, but it also deprived him of the ecclesiastic support that only a pope could provide.
Charles returned to Lucera to personally direct its siege in April 1269. The Saracens and the Ghibellines who had escaped to the town resisted until starvation forced them to surrender in August 1269. Charles sent Philip and Guy of Montfort to Sicily to force the rebels there into submission, but they could only capture Augusta. Charles made William l'Estandart the commander of the army in Sicily in August 1269. L'Estandart captured Agrigento, forcing Frederick of Castile and Frederick Lancia to seek refuge in Tunis. After L'Estandart's subsequent victory at Sciacca, only Capece resisted, but he also had to surrender in early 1270.
Charles' troops forced Siena and Pisathe last towns to resist him in Tuscanyto sue for peace in August 1270. He granted privileges to the Tuscan merchants and bankers which strengthened their position in the "Regno". His influence was declining in Lombardy, because the Lombard towns no longer feared an invasion from Germany. In May 1269 Charles sent Walter of La Roche to represent him in the province, but this failed to strengthen his authority. In October Charles' officials convoked an assembly at Cremona, and invited the Lombard towns to attend. The Lombard towns accepted the invitation, but some townsMilan, Bologna, Alessandria and Tortonaonly confirmed their alliance with Charles, without acknowledging his rule.
Louis IX never abandoned the idea of the liberation of Jerusalem, but he decided to begin his new crusade with a military campaign against Tunis. According to his confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, Louis was convinced that al-Mustansir of Tunis was ready to convert to Christianity. The 13th-century historian Saba Malaspina stated that Charles persuaded Louis to attack Tunis, because he wanted to secure the payment of the tribute that the rulers of Tunis had paid to the former Sicilian monarchs.
The French crusaders embarked at Aigues-Mortes on 2July 1270; Charles departed from Naples six days later. He spent more than a month in Sicily, waiting for his fleet. By the time he landed at Tunis on 25August, dysentery and typhoid fever had decimated the French army. Louis died on the day of Charles' arrival.
The crusaders twice defeated Al-Mustansir's army, forcing him to sue for peace. According to the peace treaty, signed on 1November, Al-Mustansir agreed to fully compensate Louis' son and successor, Philip III of France, and Charles for the expenses of the military campaign and to release his Christian prisoners. He also promised to pay a yearly tribute to Charles and to expel Charles' opponents from Tunis. The gold from Tunis, along with silver from the newly opened mine at Longobucco, enabled Charles to mint new coins, known as "carlini", in the "Regno".
Charles and Philip departed Tunis on 10November. A storm dispersed their fleet at Trapani and most of Charles' galleys were lost or damaged. Genoese ships returning from the crusade were also sunk or forced to land in Sicily. Charles seized the damaged ships and their cargo, ignoring all protests from the Ghibelline authorities of Genoa. Before leaving Sicily he granted temporary tax concessions to the Sicilians, because he realised that the conquest of the island had caused much destruction.
Charles accompanied Philip III as far as Viterbo in March 1271. Here they failed to convince the cardinals to elect a new pope. Charles' brother, Alphonse of Poitiers, fell ill. Charles sent his best doctors to cure him, but Alphonse died. He claimed the major part of Alphonse inheritance, including the Marquisate of Provence and the County of Poitiers, because he was Alphonse's nearest kin. After Philip III objected, he took the case to the Parlement of Paris. In 1284 the court ruled that appanages escheated to the French crown if their rulers died without descendants.
An earthquake destroyed the walls of Durazzo in the late 1260s or early 1270s. Charles' troops took possession of the town with the assistance of the leaders of the nearby Albanian communities. Charles concluded an agreement with the Albanian chiefs, promising to protect them and their ancient liberties in February 1272. He adopted the title of King of Albania and appointed Gazzo Chinardo as his vicar-general. He also sent his fleet to Achaea to defend the principality against Byzantine attacks.
Charles hurried to Rome to attend the enthronement of Pope Gregory X on 27March 1272. The new pope was determined to put an end to the conflicts between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. While in Rome Charles met with the Guelph leaders who had been exiled from Genoa. After they offered him the office of captain of the people, Charles promised military assistance to them. In November 1272 Charles commanded his officials to take prisoner all Genoese within his territories, except for the Guelphs, and to seize their property. His fleet occupied Ajaccio in Corsica. Pope Gregory condemned his aggressive policy, but proposed that the Genoese should elect Guelph officials. Ignoring the pope's proposal, the Genoese made alliance with Alfonso X of Castille, William VII of Montferrat and the Ghibelline towns of Lombardy in October 1273.
The conflict with Genoa prevented Charles from invading the Byzantine Empire, but he continued to forge alliances in the Balkan Peninsula. The Bulgarian ruler, Konstantin Tih, was the first to conclude a treaty with him in 1272 or 1273. John I Doukas of Thessaly and Stefan Uroš I, King of Serbia, joined the coalition in 1273. However, Pope Gregory forbade Charles to attack, because he hoped to unify the Orthodox and Catholic churches with the assistance of Emperor Michael VIII.
The renowned theologian Thomas Aquinas died unexpectedly near Naples on 7March 1274, before departing to attend the Second Council of Lyon. According to a popular legend, immortalised by Dante, Charles had him poisoned, because he feared that Aquinas would make complaint against him. Historian Steven Runciman emphasises that "there is no evidence for supposing that the great doctor's death was not natural". Southern Italian churchmen at the council accused Charles of tyrannical acts. Their report reinforced the Pope's attempt to reach a compromise with Rudolf of Habsburg, who had been elected king by the prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire. In June, the Pope acknowledged Rudolf as the lawful ruler of both Germany and Italy. Charles' sisters-in-law, Margaret and Eleanor, approached Rudolf, claiming that they had been unlawfully disinherited in favour of Charles' late wife.
Michael VIII's personal envoy announced at the Council of Lyon on 6July that he had accepted the Catholic creed and papal primacy. About three weeks later, Pope Gregory again prohibited Charles from launching military actions against the Byzantine Empire. The Pope also tried to mediate a truce between Charles and Michael, but the latter choose to attack the smaller states of the Balkans, including Charles' vassals. The Byzantine fleet took control of the maritime routes between Albania and southern Italy in the late 1270s. Gregory only allowed Charles to send reinforcements to Achaea. The organisation of a new crusade to the Holy Land remained the Pope's principal object. He persuaded Charles to start negotiations with Maria of Antioch about purchasing her claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The High Court of Jerusalem had already rejected her in favour of Hugh III of Cyprus, but the Pope had a low opinion of Hugh.
The war with Genoa and the Lombard towns increasingly occupied Charles' attention. He appointed his nephew Robert II of Artois as his deputy in Piedmont in October 1274, but Artois could not prevent Vercelli and Alessandria from joining the Ghibelline League. The following summer, a Genoese fleet plundered Trapani and the island of Gozo. Convinced that only Rudolf I could achieve a compromise between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Pope urged the Lombard towns to send envoys to him. He also urged Charles to renounce Tuscany. In the autumn of 1275 the Ghibellines offered to make peace with Charles, but he did not accept their terms. Early the next year the Ghibellines defeated his troops at Col de Tende, forcing them to withdraw to Provence.
Pope Gregory X died on 10January 1276. After the hostility he experienced during Gregory's pontificate, Charles was determined to secure the election of a pope willing to support his plans. Gregory's successor, Pope Innocent V, had always been Charles' partisan and he rapidly confirmed Charles' ranks of senator of Rome and imperial vicar of Tuscany. He also mediated a peace treaty between Charles and Genoa, which was signed in Rome on 22June 1276. Charles restored the privileges of the Genoese merchants and renounced his conquests, and the Genoese acknowledged his rule in Ventimiglia.
Pope Innocent died on 30June 1276. After the cardinals assembled in the Lateran Palace, Charles' troops surrounded it, enabling only his allies to communicate with other cardinals and with outsiders. On 11July the cardinals elected Charles' old friend, Ottobuono de' Fieschi, pope, but he died on 18August. The cardinals met again, this time at Viterbo. Although Charles was staying in the nearby Vetralla, he could not directly influence the election. Pope John XXI, who was elected on 20September, excommunicated Charles' opponents in Piedmont and prohibited Rudolf from coming to Lombardy, but did not forbid the Lombardian Guelph leaders swearing fealty to Rudolf. The Pope also confirmed the treaty concluded by Charles and Maria of Antioch on 18March which transferred her claims to Jerusalem to Charles for 1,000 "bezants" and a pension of 4,000 "livres tournois".
Charles appointed Roger of San Severino to administer the Kingdom of Jerusalem as his bailiff. San Severino landed at Acre on 7June 1277. Hugh III's bailiff, Balian of Arsuf, surrendered the town without resistance. Although only the Knights Hospitaller and the Venetians acknowledged Charles as the lawful ruler, the barons of the realm also paid homage to San Severino in January 1278, after he had threatened to confiscate their estates. The Mamluks of Egypt had already confined the kingdom to a coastal strip covering and Charles had ordered San Severino to avoid conflicts with Egypt.
Pope John died on 20May 1277. Charles was ill and could not prevent the election of the head of the anti-French cardinals, Giovanni Gaetano Orsini (Pope Nicholas III), on 25November. The Pope soon declared that no foreign prince could rule in Rome and reminded Charles that he had been elected senator for ten years. Charles swore fealty to the new pope on 24May 1278 after lengthy negotiations. He had to pledge that he would renounce both the senatorship of Rome and the vicariate of Tuscany in four months. On the other hand, Nicholas III confirmed the excommunication of Charles' enemies in Piedmont and started negotiations with Rudolf to prevent him from making an alliance against Charles with Margaret of Provence and her nephew Edward I of England. The negotiations with Rudolf lay behind Nicholas' refusal to renew Charles' vicariate in Tuscany, to which Rudolf had appointed his own vicar.
Charles announced his resignation from the senatorship and the vicariate on 30August 1278. He was succeeded by the Pope's brother, Matteo Orsini, in Rome, and by the Pope's nephew, Cardinal Latino Malabranca, in Tuscany. To ensure that Charles fully abandoned his ambitions in central Italy the Pope started negotiations with Rudolf about the restoration of the Kingdom of Arles for Charles' grandson, Charles Martel. Margaret of Provence sharply opposed the plan, but Philip III of France did not stand by his mother. After lengthy negotiations, in the summer of 1279 Rudolf recognised Charles as the lawful ruler of Provence without demanding his oath of fealty. An agreement about Charles Martel's rule in Arles and his marriage to Rudolf's daughter, Clemence, was signed in May 1280. The plan disturbed the rulers of the lands along the Upper Rhone, especially Duke Robert II and Count Otto IV of Burgundy.
Charles had meanwhile inherited the Principality of Achaea from William II of Villehardouin, who had died on 1May 1278. He appointed the unpopular of Sicily, Galeran of Ivry, as his baillif in Achaea. Galeran could not pay his troops who started to pillage the peasants' homes. John I de la Roche, Duke of Athens, had to lend money to him to finance their salaries. Nicephoros I of Epirus acknowledged Charles' suzerainty on 14March 1279 to secure his assistance against the Byzantines. Nicephoros also ceded three townsButrinto, Sopotos and Panormosto Charles.
Pope Nicholas died on 22August 1280. Charles sent agents to Viterbo to promote the election of one of his supporters, taking advantage of the rift between the late pope's relatives and other Italian cardinals. When a riot broke out in Viterbo, after the cardinals had not reached a decision for months, Charles' troops took control of the town. On 22February 1281 his staunchest supporter, Simon of Brie, was elected pope. Pope Martin IV dismissed his predecessor's relatives and made Charles the senator of Rome again. Guido I da Montefeltro rose up against the pope, but Charles' troops under Jean d'Eppe stopped the spread of the rebellion at Forlì. Charles also sent an army to Piedmont, but Thomas I, Marquess of Saluzzo, annihilated it at Borgo San Dalmazzo in May.
Pope Martin excommunicated Emperor Michael VIII on 10April 1281 because the emperor had not imposed the Church union in his empire. The Pope soon authorised Charles to invade the empire. Charles' vicar in Albania, Hugh of Sully, had already laid siege to the Byzantine fortress of Berat. A Byzantine army of relief under Michael Tarchaneiotes and John Synadenos arrived in March 1281. Sully was ambushed and captured, his army put to flight and the interior of Albania was lost to the Byzantines. On 3July 1281 Charles and his son-in-law, Philip of Courtenay, the titular Latin emperor, made an alliance with Venice "for the restoration of the Roman Empire". They decided to start a full-scale campaign early the next year.
Margaret of Provence called Robert and Otto of Burgundy and other lords who held fiefs in the Kingdom of Arles to a meeting at Troyes in the autumn of 1281. They were willing to unite their troops to prevent Charles' army from taking possession of the kingdom, but Philip III of France strongly opposed his mother's plan and Edward I of England would not promise any assistance to them. Charles acknowledged that his wife held the County of Tonnerre and her other inherited estates as a Burgundian fief, which appeased Robert of Burgundy. Charles' ships started to assemble at Marseilles to sail up the Rhone in the spring of 1282. Another fleet was gathering at Messina to start the crusade against the Byzantine Empire.
Always in need of funds, Charles could not cancel the "subventio generalis", although it was the most unpopular tax in the "Regno". Instead he granted exemptions to individuals and communities, especially to the French and Provençal colonists, which increased the burden on those who did not enjoy such privileges. The yearly, or occasionally more frequent, obligatory exchange of the "deniers"the coins almost exclusively used in local transactionswas also an important, and unpopular, source of revenue for the royal treasury. Charles took out enforced loans whenever he needed "immediately a large sum of money for certain arduous and pressing business", as he explained in one of his decrees.
Purveyances, the requisitioning of goods, increased the unpopularity of Charles' government in the "Regno". His subjects were forced to guard prisoners or lodge soldiers in their homes. The restoration of old fortresses, bridges and aqueducts and the building of new castles required the employment of craftsmen, although most of them were unwilling to participate in such lengthy projects. Thousands of people were forced to serve in the army in foreign lands, especially after 1279. Trading in salt was declared a royal monopoly. In December 1281, Charles again ordered the collection of the "subventio generalis", requiring the payment of 150% of the customary amount.
Charles did not pay attention to the island of Sicily, although it had been the centre of resistance against him in 1268. He transferred the capital from Palermo to Naples. He did not visit the island after 1271, preventing Sicilians from directly informing him of their grievances. Sicilian noblemen were seldom employed as royal officials, although he often appointed their southern Italian peers to represent him in his other realms. Furthermore, having seized large estates on the island in the late 1260s Charles almost exclusively employed French and Provençal clerics to administer the royal demesne.
Popular stories credited John of ProcidaManfred of Sicily's former chancellorwith staging an international plot against Charles. Legend says that he visited Constantinople, Sicily and Viterbo in disguise in 1279 and 1280 to convince Michael VIII, the Sicilian barons and Pope Nicholas III to support a revolt. On the other hand, Michael VIII would later claim that he "was God's instrument in bringing freedom to the Sicilians" in his memoirs. The emperor's wealth enabled him to send money to the discontented Sicilian barons. Peter III of Aragon decided to lay claim to the "Regno" in late 1280: he did not hide his disdain when he met with Charles' son, Charles, Duke of Salerno, in Toulouse in December 1280. He began to assemble a fleet, ostensibly for another crusade to Tunis.
Rioting broke out in Sicily after a burgher of Palermo killed a drunken French soldier who had insulted his wife before the Church of the Holy Spirit on Easter Monday (30March) of 1282. When the soldier's comrades attacked the murderer, the mob turned against them and started to massacre all the French in the town. The riot, known since the 16th century as the Sicilian Vespers, developed into an uprising and most of Charles' officials were killed or forced to flee the island. Charles ordered the transfer of soldiers and ships from Achaea to Sicily, but could not stop the spread of the revolt to Calabria. San Severino also had to return to Italy, accompanied by the major part of the garrison at Acre. Odo Poilechien, who succeeded him in Acre, had limited authority.
The burghers of the major Sicilian towns established communes which sent delegates to Pope Martin, asking him to take them under the protection of the Holy See. Instead of accepting their offer, the pope excommunicated the rebels on 7May. Charles issued an edict on 10June, accusing his officials of having ignored his instructions on good administration, but he failed to promise fundamental changes. In July he sailed to Sicily and laid siege to Messina.
Peter III of Aragon's envoy, William of Castelnou, started negotiations with the rebels' leaders in Palermo. Realizing that they could not resist without foreign support, they acknowledged Peter and Constance as their king and queen. They appointed envoys to accompany Castelnou to Collo where the Aragonese fleet was assembling. After a short hesitation, Peter decided to intervene on the rebels' behalf and sailed to Sicily. He was declared king of Sicily at Palermo on 4September. Thereafter two realms, each ruled by a monarch styled king (or queen) of Sicily, coexisted for more than a century, with Charles and his successors ruling in southern Italy (known as the Kingdom of Naples) while Peter and his descendants ruled the island of Sicily.
In the face of the Aragonese landing, Charles was compelled to withdraw from the island, but the Aragonese moved swiftly and destroyed part of his army and most of his baggage. Peter took control of the whole island and sent troops to Calabria, but they could not prevent Charles of Salerno from leading an army of 600 French knights to join his father at Reggio Calabria. Further French troops arrived under the command of Charles' nephews, Robert II of Artois and Peter of Alençon, in November. In the same month, the pope excommunicated Peter.
Neither Peter nor Charles could afford to wage a lengthy war. Charles made an astonishing proposal in late December 1282, challenging Peter for a judicial duel. Peter insisted that the war should be continued, but agreed that a battle between the two kings, each accompanied by 100 knights, should decide the possession of Sicily. They agreed that the duel should take place at Bordeaux on 1June 1283, but they did not fix the hour. Charles appointed Charles of Salerno to administer the "Regno" during his absence. To secure the loyalty of the local lords in Achaea, he made one of their peers, Guy of Dramelay, baillif. Pope Martin declared the war against the Sicilians a crusade on 13January 1283. Charles met with the Pope in Viterbo on 9 March, but he ignored the Pope's ban on his duel with Peter of Aragon. After visiting Provence and Paris in April, he left for Bordeaux to meet with Peter. The duel turned into a farce; the two kings each arriving at different times on the same day, declaring a victory over their absent opponent, and departing.
Skirmishes and raids continued to occur in southern Italy. Aragonese guerillas attacked Catona and killed Peter of Alençon in January 1283; the Aragonese seized Reggio Calabria in February; and the Sicilian admiral, Roger of Lauria, annihilated a newly raised Provençal fleet at Malta in April. However, tensions arose between the Aragonese and the Sicilians and in May 1283 one of the leaders of the anti-Angevin rebellion, Walter of Caltagirone, was executed for his secret correspondence with Charles' agents. Pope Martin declared the war against Aragon a crusade and conferred the kingdom upon Philip III of France's son, Charles of Valois, on 2February 1284.
Charles started to raise new troops and a fleet in Provence, and instructed his son, Charles of Salerno, to maintain a defensive posture until his return. Roger of Lauria based a small squadron on the island of Nisida to blockade Naples in May 1284. Charles of Salerno attempted to destroy the squadron, but most of his fleet was captured, and he himself was taken prisoner after a short, sharp fight on 5June. News of the reverse caused a riot in Naples, but the papal legate, Gerard of Parma, crushed it with the assistance of local noblemen. Charles learnt of the disaster when he landed at Gaeta on 6June. He was furious at Charles of Salerno and his disobedience. He allegedly stated that "Who loses a fool loses nothing", referring to his son's capture.
Charles left Naples for Calabria on 24June 1284. A huge armyreportedly 10,000 mounted warriors and 40,000 foot-soldiersaccompanied him as far as Reggio Calabria. He laid siege to the town by sea and land in late July. He tried to land in Sicily, but his forces were forced to withdraw. After Lauria landed troops near Reggio Calabria, Charles had to lift the siege and retreat from Calabria on 3August.
Charles went to Brindisi and made preparations for a campaign against Sicily in the new year. He dispatched orders to his officials for the collection of the "subventio generalis". However, he fell seriously ill before moving to Foggia on 30December. He made his last will on 6January 1285, appointing Robert II of Artois regent for his grandson, Charles Martel, who was to rule his realms until Charles of Salerno was released. He died in the morning of 7January. He was buried in a marble sepulchre in Naples, but his heart was placed at the Couvent Saint-Jacques in Paris. His corpse was moved to a chapel of the newly built Naples Cathedral in 1296.
All records show that Charles was a faithful husband and a caring father. His first wife, Beatrice of Provence, gave birth to at least six children. According to contemporaneous gossips, she persuaded Charles to claim the "Regno", because she wanted to wear a crown like his sisters. Before she died in July 1267, she had willed the usufruct of Provence to Charles.
The widowed Charles first proposed himself to Margaret of Hungary. However, Margaret, who had been brought up in a Dominican nunnery, did not want to marry. According to legends, she disfigured herself to prevent the marriage. Charles and his second wife, Margaret of Nevers, had children who did not survive to adulthood.
The works of Bartholomaeus of Neocastro and Saba Malaspina strongly influenced modern views about Charles, although they were biased. The former described Charles as a tyrant to justify the Sicilian Vespers, the latter argued for the cancellation of the crusade against Aragon in 1285. Charles had continued his imperial predecessors' policies in several fields, including coinage, taxation, and the employment of unpopular officials from Amalfi. Nevertheless, the monarchy underwent a "Frenchification" or "Provençalistion" during his reign. He donated estates in the "Regno" to about 700 noblemen from France or Provence. He did not adopt the rich ceremonial robes, inspired by Byzantine and Islamic art, of earlier Sicilian kings, but dressed like other western European monarchs, or as "a simple knight", as it was observed by Thomas Tuscus in 1267.
Around 1310, Giovanni Villani stated that Charles had been the most powerful Christian monarch in the late 1270s. Luchetto Gattilusio compared Charles directly with Charlemagne. Both reports demonstrate that Charles was regarded almost as an emperor. Among modern historians, Runciman says that Charles tried to build an empire in the eastern Mediterraneum; Gérard Sivéry writes that he wanted to dominate the west; and Jean Dunbabin argues that his "agglomeration of lands was in the process of forming an empire".
Historian Hiroshi Takayama concludes that Charles' dominion "was too large to control". Nevertheless, economic links among his realms strengthened during his reign. Provençal salt was transported to his other lands, grain from the "Regno" was sold in Achaea, Albania, Acre and Tuscany, and Tuscan merchants settled in Anjou, Maine, Sicily and Naples. His highest-ranking officials were transferred from their homelands to represent him in other territories: his senechals in Provence were from Anjou; French and Provençal noblemen held the highest offices in the "Regno"; and he chose his vicars in Rome from among southern Italian and Provençal nobles. Although his empire collapsed before his death, his son retained southern Italy and Provence.
Charles always emphasised his royal rank, but did not adopt "imperial rhetoric". His renowned justiciar, Marino de Caramanico, developed a new political theory, which denied the emperors' monopoly on law-making and emphasised Charles' full competence to issue decrees. To promote legal education Charles paid high salaries20–50 ounces of gold in a yearto masters of law at the University of Naples. Masters of medicine received similar remunerations, and the university became a principal centre of medical science. Charles' personal interest in medicine grew during his life and he borrowed Arabic medical texts from the rulers of Tunis to have them translated. He employed at least one Jewish scholar, Moses of Palermo, who could translate texts from Arabic to Latin. Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi's medical encyclopaedia, known as "Kitab al-Hawi", was one of the books translated at his order.
Charles was also a poet, which distinguished him from his Capetian relatives. He composed lovesongs and a "partimen" (the latter with Pierre d'Angicourt). He was requested to judge at two poetic competitions in his youth, but modern scholars do not esteem his poetry. The Provençal troubadours were mostly critical when writing of Charles, but French poets were willing to praise him. Bertran d'Alamanon wrote a poem against the salt tax and Raimon de Tors de Marseilha rebuked Charles for invading the "Regno". Adam de la Halle dedicated an unfinished epic poem to Charles and Jean de Meun glorified his victories. Dante described Charles"who bears a manly nose"singing peacefully together with his one-time rival, Peter III of Aragon, in Purgatory.
Charles also showed interest in architecture. He designed a tower in Brindisi, but it soon collapsed. He ordered the erection of the Castel Nuovo in Naples, of which only the palatine chapel survives. He is also credited with the introduction of French-style glassed windows in southern Italy.
Correlation does not imply causation
In statistics, the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" refers to the inability to legitimately deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables solely on the basis of an observed association or correlation between them. The idea that "correlation implies causation" is an example of a questionable-cause logical fallacy, in which two events occurring together are taken to have established a cause-and-effect relationship. This fallacy is also known by the Latin phrase cum hoc ergo propter hoc ("with this, therefore because of this"). This differs from the fallacy known as "post hoc ergo propter hoc" ("after this, therefore because of this"), in which an event following another is seen as a necessary consequence of the former event.
As with any logical fallacy, identifying that the reasoning behind an argument is flawed does not necessarily imply that the resulting conclusion is false. Methods have been proposed that use correlation as the basis for hypothesis tests for causality, including the Granger causality test and convergent cross mapping.
In logic, the technical use of the word "implies" means "is a "Sufficient condition" for". This is the meaning intended by statisticians when they say causation is not certain. Indeed, "p implies q" has the technical meaning of the material conditional: "if p then q" symbolized as "p → q". That is "if circumstance "p" is true, then "q" follows." In this sense, it is always correct to say "Correlation does not "imply" causation." In casual use, the word "implies" loosely means "suggests" rather than "requires".
Where there is causation, there is correlation, but also a sequence in time from cause to effect, a plausible mechanism, and sometimes common and intermediate causes. While correlation is often used when inferring causation because it is a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient condition.
In a widely studied example of the difficulties this possibility of this statistical fallacy poses in deciding cause, numerous epidemiological studies showed that women taking combined hormone replacement therapy (HRT) also had a lower-than-average incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), leading doctors to propose that HRT was protective against CHD. But later randomized controlled trials showed that use of HRT led to a small but statistically significant "increase" in the risk of CHD. Reanalysis of the data from the epidemiological studies showed that women undertaking HRT were more likely to be from higher socioeconomic groups (ABC1), with better-than-average diet and exercise regimens. Thus the use of HRT and decreased incidence of coronary heart disease were coincident effects of a common cause (i.e., the benefits associated with a higher socioeconomic status), rather than one being a direct cause of the other, as had been supposed. The widely held (but mistaken) belief that RCTs provide stronger causal evidence than observational studies, the latter continued to consistently show benefits and subsequent analyses and follow-up studies have demonstrated a significant benefit for CHD risk in healthy women initiating oestrogen therapy soon after the onset of menopause.
Causal analysis is the field of experimental design and statistics pertaining to establishing cause and effect. For any two correlated events, A and B, their possible relationships include:
Thus there can be no conclusion made regarding the "existence" or the "direction" of a cause-and-effect relationship only from the fact that A and B are correlated. Determining whether there is an actual cause-and-effect relationship requires further investigation, even when the relationship between "A" and "B" is statistically significant, a large effect size is observed, or a large part of the variance is explained.
The nature of causality is systematically investigated in several academic disciplines, including philosophy and physics.
In academia, there are a significant number of theories on causality; "The Oxford Handbook of Causation" encompasses 770 pages. Among the more influential theories within philosophy are Aristotle's Four causes and Al-Ghazali's occasionalism. David Hume argued that beliefs about causality are based on experience, and experience similarly based on the assumption that the future models the past, which in turn can only be based on experience – leading to circular logic. In conclusion, he asserted that causality is not based on actual reasoning: only correlation can actually be perceived. Immanuel Kant, according to , held that "a causal principle according to which every event has a cause, or follows according to a causal law, cannot be established through induction as a purely empirical claim, since it would then lack strict universality, or necessity".
Outside the field of philosophy, theories of causation can be identified in classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, spacetime theories, biology, social sciences, and law. To establish a correlation as causal within physics, it is normally understood that the cause and the effect must connect through a local mechanism (cf. for instance the concept of impact) or a nonlocal mechanism (cf. the concept of field), in accordance with known laws of nature.
From the point of view of thermodynamics, universal properties of causes as compared to effects have been identified through the Second law of thermodynamics, confirming the ancient, medieval and Cartesian view that "the cause is greater than the effect" for the particular case of thermodynamic free energy. This, in turn, is challenged by popular interpretations of the concepts of nonlinear systems and the butterfly effect, in which small events cause large effects due to, respectively, unpredictability and an unlikely triggering of large amounts of potential energy.
Intuitively, causation seems to require not just a correlation, but a counterfactual dependence. Suppose that a student performed poorly on a test and guesses that the cause was his not studying. To prove this, one thinks of the counterfactual – the same student writing the same test under the same circumstances but having studied the night before. If one could rewind history, and change only one small thing (making the student study for the exam), then causation could be observed (by comparing version 1 to version 2). Because one cannot rewind history and replay events after making small controlled changes, causation can only be inferred, never exactly known. This is referred to as the Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference – it is impossible to directly observe causal effects.
A major goal of scientific experiments and statistical methods is to approximate as best possible the counterfactual state of the world. For example, one could run an experiment on identical twins who were known to consistently get the same grades on their tests. One twin is sent to study for six hours while the other is sent to the amusement park. If their test scores suddenly diverged by a large degree, this would be strong evidence that studying (or going to the amusement park) had a causal effect on test scores. In this case, correlation between studying and test scores would almost certainly imply causation.
Well-designed experimental studies replace equality of individuals as in the previous example by equality of groups. The objective is to construct two groups that are similar except for the treatment that the groups receive. This is achieved by selecting subjects from a single population and randomly assigning them to two or more groups. The likelihood of the groups behaving similarly to one another (on average) rises with the number of subjects in each group. If the groups are essentially equivalent except for the treatment they receive, and a difference in the outcome for the groups is observed, then this constitutes evidence that the treatment is responsible for the outcome, or in other words the treatment causes the observed effect. However, an observed effect could also be caused "by chance", for example as a result of random perturbations in the population. Statistical tests exist to quantify the likelihood of erroneously concluding that an observed difference exists when in fact it does not (for example see P-value).
When experimental studies are impossible and only pre-existing data are available, as is usually the case for example in economics, regression analysis can be used. Factors other than the potential causative variable of interest are controlled for by including them as regressors in addition to the regressor representing the variable of interest. False inferences of causation due to reverse causation (or wrong estimates of the magnitude of causation due the presence of bidirectional causation) can be avoided by using explanators (regressors) that are necessarily exogenous, such as physical explanators like rainfall amount (as a determinant of, say, futures prices), lagged variables whose values were determined before the dependent variable's value was determined, instrumental variables for the explanators (chosen based on their known exogeneity), etc. See Causality#Statistics and economics. Spurious correlation due to mutual influence from a third, common, causative variable, is harder to avoid: the model must be specified such that there is a theoretical reason to believe that no such underlying causative variable has been omitted from the model.
Reverse causation or reverse causality or wrong direction is an informal fallacy of questionable cause where cause and effect are reversed. The cause is said to be the effect and vice versa.
In this example, the correlation (simultaneity) between windmill activity and wind velocity does not imply that wind is caused by windmills. It is rather the other way around, as suggested by the fact that wind doesn't need windmills to exist, while windmills need wind to rotate. Wind can be observed in places where there are no windmills or non-rotating windmills—and there are good reasons to believe that wind existed before the invention of windmills.
In other cases it may simply be unclear which is the cause and which is the effect. For example:
This could easily be the other way round; that is, violent children like watching more TV than less violent ones.
A correlation between recreational drug use and psychiatric disorders might be either way around: perhaps the drugs cause the disorders, or perhaps people use drugs to self medicate for preexisting conditions. Gateway drug theory may argue that marijuana usage leads to usage of harder drugs, but hard drug usage may lead to marijuana usage (see also "confusion of the inverse"). Indeed, in the social sciences where controlled experiments often cannot be used to discern the direction of causation, this fallacy can fuel long-standing scientific arguments. One such example can be found in education economics, between the screening/signaling and human capital models: it could either be that having innate ability enables one to complete an education, or that completing an education builds one's ability.
A historical example of this is that Europeans in the Middle Ages believed that lice were beneficial to your health, since there would rarely be any lice on sick people. The reasoning was that the people got sick because the lice left. The real reason however is that lice are extremely sensitive to body temperature. A small increase of body temperature, such as in a fever, will make the lice look for another host. The medical thermometer had not yet been invented, so this increase in temperature was rarely noticed. Noticeable symptoms came later, giving the impression that the lice left before the person got sick.
In other cases, two phenomena can each be a partial cause of the other; consider poverty and lack of education, or procrastination and poor self-esteem. One making an argument based on these two phenomena must however be careful to avoid the fallacy of circular cause and consequence. Poverty is "a" cause of lack of education, but it is not the "sole" cause, and vice versa.
The third-cause fallacy (also known as "ignoring a common cause" or "questionable cause") is a logical fallacy where a spurious relationship is confused for causation. It asserts that X causes Y when, in reality, X and Y are both caused by Z. It is a variation on the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy and a member of the questionable cause group of fallacies.
All of these examples deal with a lurking variable, which is simply a hidden third variable that affects both causes of the correlation. A difficulty often also arises where the third factor, though fundamentally different from A and B, is so closely related to A and/or B as to be confused with them or very difficult to scientifically disentangle from them (see Example 4).
The above example commits the correlation-implies-causation fallacy, as it prematurely concludes that sleeping with one's shoes on causes headache. A more plausible explanation is that both are caused by a third factor, in this case going to bed drunk, which thereby gives rise to a correlation. So the conclusion is false.
This is a scientific example that resulted from a study at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. Published in the May 13, 1999 issue of "Nature", the study received much coverage at the time in the popular press. However, a later study at Ohio State University did not find that infants sleeping with the light on caused the development of myopia. It did find a strong link between parental myopia and the development of child myopia, also noting that myopic parents were more likely to leave a light on in their children's bedroom. In this case, the cause of both conditions is parental myopia, and the above-stated conclusion is false.
This example fails to recognize the importance of time of year and temperature to ice cream sales. Ice cream is sold during the hot summer months at a much greater rate than during colder times, and it is during these hot summer months that people are more likely to engage in activities involving water, such as swimming. The increased drowning deaths are simply caused by more exposure to water-based activities, not ice cream. The stated conclusion is false.
However, as encountered in many psychological studies, another variable, a "self-consciousness score", is discovered that has a sharper correlation (+.73) with shyness. This suggests a possible "third variable" problem, however, when three such closely related measures are found, it further suggests that each may have bidirectional tendencies (see "bidirectional variable", above), being a cluster of correlated values each influencing one another to some extent. Therefore, the simple conclusion above may be false.
Richer populations tend to eat more food and produce more CO2.
Further research has called this conclusion into question. Instead, it may be that other underlying factors, like genes, diet and exercise, affect both HDL levels and the likelihood of having a heart attack; it is possible that medicines may affect the directly measurable factor, HDL levels, without affecting the chance of heart attack.
Causality is not necessarily one-way; in a predator-prey relationship, predator numbers affect prey numbers, but prey numbers, i.e. food supply, also affect predator numbers. Another well-known example is that cyclists have a lower Body Mass Index than people who do not cycle. This is often explained by assuming that cycling increases physical activity levels and therefore decreases BMI. Because results from prospective studies on people who increase their bicycle use show a smaller effect on BMI than cross-sectional studies, there may be some reverse causality as well (i.e. people with a lower BMI are more likely to cycle).
The two variables aren't related at all, but correlate by chance. The more things are examined, the more likely it is that two unrelated variables will appear to be related. For example:
Much of scientific evidence is based upon a correlation of variables – they are observed to occur together. Scientists are careful to point out that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The assumption that A causes B simply because A correlates with B is often not accepted as a legitimate form of argument.
However, sometimes people commit the opposite fallacy – dismissing correlation entirely. This would dismiss a large swath of important scientific evidence. Since it may be difficult or ethically impossible to run controlled double-blind studies, correlational evidence from several different angles may be useful for "prediction" despite failing to provide evidence for "causation". For example, social workers might be interested in knowing how child abuse relates to academic performance. Although it would be unethical to perform an experiment in which children are randomly assigned to receive or not receive abuse, researchers can look at existing groups using a non-experimental correlational design. If in fact a negative correlation exists between abuse and academic performance, researchers could potentially use this knowledge of a statistical correlation to make predictions about children outside the study who experience abuse, even though the study failed to provide causal evidence that abuse decreases academic performance. The combination of limited available methodologies with the dismissing correlation fallacy has on occasion been used to counter a scientific finding. For example, the tobacco industry has historically relied on a dismissal of correlational evidence to reject a link between tobacco and lung cancer, as did biologist and statistician Ronald Fisher.
Correlation is a valuable type of scientific evidence in fields such as medicine, psychology, and sociology. But first correlations must be confirmed as real, and then every possible causative relationship must be systematically explored. In the end correlation alone cannot be used as evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship between a treatment and benefit, a risk factor and a disease, or a social or economic factor and various outcomes. It is one of the most abused types of evidence, because it is easy and even tempting to come to premature conclusions based upon the preliminary appearance of a correlation.
Jan Bos
Jan Bos (born 29 March 1975) is a Dutch speedskater and sprint cyclist. In the late 1990s he was world champion in speed skating and he competed in the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics.
In 1998 Bos both became the world champion sprint and won the silver medal that year in the 1000 meter sprint during the Winter Olympics in Nagano. He won the silver medal on that same distance in Salt Lake City.
He competed at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens in the team sprint track cycling event, together with his brother Theo Bos, who won the silver at the individual sprint, and Teun Mulder. The Dutch finished sixth after being knocked out by Japan.
Bos ended his career as a competitive speed skater in 2011.
In 2012 Bos (in cooperation with the Human Power Team from Delft) tried to become the fastest cyclist in the world during the World Human Powered Speed Challenge in Battle Mountain, Nevada. At the time, the International Human Powered Vehicle Association record was 133 km/h, held by the Canadian Sam Whittingham. Bos used a recumbent bicycle specially developed for the occasion by students of the Delft University of Technology and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, but only managed a maximum speed of 126.5 km/h. In September 2013, his teammate Sebastiaan Bowier did manage to break the record, reaching a speed of 133.78 kilometres per hour (83.13 mph)
Bos specialized in the sprint events but does have a Adelsalender score of 156.494
Source: www.sskating.com & SpeedskatingResults.com
Source: SpeedSkatingStats.com
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Gerard van Velde
Gerard Pieter Hendrik van Velde (born 30 November 1971) is a Dutch retired speed skater who specialised in sprinting. He won an Olympic gold medal in 2002.
Van Velde was considered the best Dutch sprinter during the early 1990s, but did not manage to win a medal in either the 1992 or 1994 Winter Olympics. The 1992 Games were particularly frustrating, as he missed a bronze medal by only one-hundredth of a second.
During the late 1990s, clap skates became standard in Olympic competition. Van Velde had such difficulty adjusting to the techniques required with these new skates that he retired from skating and became a car salesman. However, he was not finished with the skating world.
Rintje Ritsma, another Dutch skater invited Van Velde to be his training partner, and, during training, he mastered the clap skate techniques. He decided to try out for the 2002 Winter Olympics, in spite of the arrival of a new generation of Dutch sprinters such as Jan Bos, Erben Wennemars and Jakko Jan Leeuwangh. Van Velde became the fourth sprinter to qualify for the games.
In Salt Lake City, he started before all the other favorites and raced to a world record finish with a time of 1:07.18. This time he shaved more than half a second from the previous best world time, and more than a second from his personal best. The skaters who followed were unable to best him, and he won the gold medal.
In December 2005, at the Dutch Olympic trials in Heerenveen, van Velde failed to qualify for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. In retirement he became a coach.
Source: SpeedskatingResults.com
Source: SpeedSkatingStats.com
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Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motion pictures. The Academy's corporate management and general policies are overseen by a board of governors, which includes representatives from each of the craft branches.
As of April 2020, the organization was estimated to consist of around 9,921 motion picture professionals. The Academy is an international organization and membership is open to qualified filmmakers around the world.
The Academy is known around the world for its annual Academy Awards, now officially and popularly known as "The Oscars".
In addition, the Academy holds the Governors Awards annually for lifetime achievement in film; presents Scientific and Technical Awards annually; gives Student Academy Awards annually to filmmakers at the undergraduate and graduate level; awards up to five Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting annually; and operates the Margaret Herrick Library (at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study) in Beverly Hills, California, and the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Hollywood, Los Angeles. The Academy plans to open the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles in 2021.
The notion of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) began with Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). He said he wanted to create an organization that would mediate labor disputes without unions and improve the industry's image. He met with actor Conrad Nagel, director Fred Niblo, and the head of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, Fred Beetson to discuss these matters. The idea of this elite club having an annual banquet was discussed, but no mention of awards at that time. They also established that membership into the organization would only be open to people involved in one of the five branches of the industry: actors, directors, writers, technicians, and producers.
After their brief meeting, Mayer gathered up a group of thirty-six people involved in the film industry and invited them to a formal banquet at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on January 11, 1927. That evening Mayer presented to those guests what he called the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Everyone in the room that evening became a founder of the Academy. Between that evening and when the official Articles of Incorporation for the organization were filed on May 4, 1927, the "International" was dropped from the name, becoming the "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences".
Several organizational meetings were held prior to the first official meeting held on May 6, 1927. Their first organizational meeting was held on May 11 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. At that meeting Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was elected as the first president of the Academy, while Fred Niblo was the first vice-president, and their first roster, composed of 230 members, was printed. That night, the Academy also bestowed its first honorary membership, to Thomas Edison. Initially, the Academy was broken down into five main groups, or branches, although this number of branches has grown over the years. The original five were: Producers, Actors, Directors, Writers and Technicians.
The initial concerns of the group had to do with labor." However, as time went on, the organization moved "further away from involvement in labor-management arbitrations and negotiations." One of several committees formed in those initial days was for "Awards of Merit," but it was not until May 1928 that the committee began to have serious discussions about the structure of the awards and the presentation ceremony. By July 1928 the board of directors had approved a list of 12 awards to be presented. During July the voting system for the Awards was established, and the nomination and selection process began. This "award of merit for distinctive achievement" is what we know now as the Academy Awards.
The initial location of the organization was 6912 Hollywood Boulevard. In November 1927, the Academy moved to the Roosevelt Hotel at 7010 Hollywood Boulevard, which was also the month the Academy's library began compiling a complete collection of books and periodicals dealing with the industry from around the world. In May 1928, the Academy authorized the construction of a state of the art screening room, to be located in the Club lounge of the hotel. The screening room was not completed until April 1929.
With the publication of "Report on Incandescent Illumination" in 1928, the Academy began a long history of publishing books to assist its members. Another early initiative concerned training Army Signal Corps officers.
In 1929, Academy members in a joint venture with the University of Southern California created America's first film school to further the art and science of moving pictures. The school's founding faculty included Fairbanks (President of the Academy), D. W. Griffith, William C. deMille, Ernst Lubitsch, Irving Thalberg, and Darryl F. Zanuck.
1930 saw another move, to 7046 Hollywood Boulevard, in order to accommodate the enlarging staff, and by December of that year the library was acknowledged as "having one of the most complete collections of information on the motion picture industry anywhere in existence." They remained at that location until 1935 when further growth caused them to move once again. This time, the administrative offices moved to one location, to the Taft Building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, while the library moved to 1455 North Gordon Street.
In 1934, the Academy began publication of the "Screen Achievement Records Bulletin", which today is known as the "Motion Picture Credits Database". This is a list of film credits up for an Academy Award, as well as other films released in Los Angeles County, using research materials from the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library. Another publication of the 1930s was the first annual "Academy Players Directory" in 1937. The Directory was published by the Academy until 2006 when it was sold to a private concern. The Academy had been involved in the technical aspects of film making since its founding in 1927, and by 1938, the Science and Technology Council consisted of 36 technical committees addressing technical issues related to sound recording and reproduction, projection, lighting, film preservation, and cinematography.
In 2009, the inaugural Governors Awards were held, at which the Academy awards the Academy Honorary Award, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.
In 2016, the Academy became the target of criticism for its failure to recognize the achievements of minority professionals. For the second year in a row, all 20 nominees in the major acting categories were white. The president of the Academy Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first African American and third woman to lead the Academy, denied in 2015 that there was a problem. When asked if the Academy had difficulty with recognizing diversity, she replied "Not at all. Not at all." When the nominations for acting were all white for a second year in a row Gil Robertson IV, president of the African American Film Critics Association called it "offensive." The actors' branch is "overwhelmingly white" and the question is raised whether conscious or unconscious racial biases played a role.
Spike Lee, interviewed shortly after the all-white nominee list was published, pointed to Hollywood leadership as the root problem, "We may win an Oscar now and then, but an Oscar is not going to fundamentally change how Hollywood does business. I'm not talking about Hollywood stars. I'm talking about executives. We're not in the room." Boone Isaacs also released a statement, in which she said "I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation, and it's time for big changes." After Boone Isaac's statement, prominent African-Americans such as director Spike Lee, actors Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, and activist Rev. Al Sharpton called for a boycott of the 2016 Oscars for failing to recognize minority achievements, the board voted to make "historic" changes to its membership. The Academy stated that by 2020 it would double its number of women and minority members. While the Academy has addressed a higher profile for African-Americans, it has yet to raise the profile of its Asian-American artists, in front of and behind the camera.
Casting director David Rubin was elected President of the Academy in August, 2019.
In 2020, "Parasite" became the first non-English language film to win Best Picture.
The Academy's numerous and diverse operations are housed in three facilities in the Los Angeles area: the headquarters building in Beverly Hills, which was constructed specifically for the Academy, and two Centers for Motion Picture Study – one in Beverly Hills, the other in Hollywood – which were existing structures restored and transformed to contain the Academy's Library, Film Archive and other departments and programs.
The Academy Headquarters Building in Beverly Hills once housed two galleries that were open free to the public. The Grand Lobby Gallery and the Fourth Floor Gallery offered changing exhibits related to films, film-making and film personalities. These galleries have since been closed in preparation for the opening of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in 2020.
The building includes the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, which seats 1,012, and was designed to present films at maximum technical accuracy, with state-of-the-art projection equipment and sound system. The theater is busy year-round with the Academy's public programming, members-only screenings, movie premieres and other special activities (including the live television broadcast of the Academy Awards nominations announcement every January). The building once housed the Academy Little Theater, is a 67-seat screening facility, but this was converted to additional office space in a building remodel.
The Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, located in central Hollywood and named for legendary actress and Academy founder Mary Pickford, houses several Academy departments, including the Academy Film Archive, the Science and Technology Council, Student Academy Awards and Grants, and the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. The building, originally dedicated on August 18, 1948, is the oldest surviving structure in Hollywood that was designed specifically with television in mind. Additionally, it is the location of the Linwood Dunn Theater, which seats 286 people.
The Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study is located at 333 S. La Cienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It is home to the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library, a world-renowned, non-circulating reference and research collection devoted to the history and development of the motion picture as an art form and an industry. Established in 1928, the library is open to the public and used year-round by students, scholars, historians and industry professionals. The library is named for Margaret Herrick, the Academy's first librarian who also played a major role in the Academy's first televised broadcast, helping to turn the Oscar ceremony into a major annual televised event.
The building itself was built in 1928, where it was originally built to be a water treatment plant for Beverly Hills. Its "bell tower" held water-purifying hardware.
The Academy also has a New York City-based East Coast showcase theater, the Academy Theater at Lighthouse International. The 220-seat venue was redesigned in 2011 by renowned theater designer Theo Kalomirakis, including an extensive installation of new audio and visual equipment. The theater is in the East 59th Street headquarters of the non-profit vision loss organization, Lighthouse International. In July 2015, it was announced that the Academy was forced to move out, due to Lighthouse International selling the property the theater was in.
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a Los Angeles museum currently under construction, will be the newest facility associated with the Academy. It is scheduled to open on December 14, 2020 and will contain over of state-of-the-art galleries, exhibition spaces, movie theaters, educational areas, and special event spaces. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will be the world's premier museum devoted to exploring and curating the history and future of the moving image.
Membership in the Academy is by invitation only. Invitation comes from the Board of Governors. Membership eligibility may be achieved by earning a competitive Oscar nomination, or by the sponsorship of two current Academy members from the same branch to which the candidate seeks admission.
New membership proposals are considered annually in the spring. Press releases announce the names of those who have recently been invited to join. Membership in the Academy does not expire, even if a member struggles later in his or her career.
Academy membership is divided into 17 branches, representing different disciplines in motion pictures. Members may not belong to more than one branch. Members whose work does not fall within one of the branches may belong to a group known as "Members at Large". Members at Large have all the privileges of branch membership except for representation on the Board. Associate members are those closely allied to the industry but not actively engaged in motion picture production. They are not represented on the Board and do not vote on Academy Awards.
According to a February 2012 study conducted by the "Los Angeles Times" (sampling over 5,000 of its 5,765 members), the Academy at that time was 94% white, 77% male, 86% age 50 or older, and had a median age of 62. A third of members were previous winners or nominees of Academy Awards themselves. Of the Academy's 54-member Board of Governors, 25 are female.
June 29, 2016, saw a paradigm shift in the Academy's selection process, resulting in a new class comprising 46% women, and 41% people of color. The effort to diversify the Academy was led by social activist, and Broadway Black managing-editor, April Reign. Reign created the Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite as a means of criticizing the dearth of non-white nominees for the 2015 Academy Awards. Though the hashtag drew widespread media attention, the Academy remained obstinate on the matter of adopting a resolution that would make demonstrable its efforts to increase diversity. With the 2016 Academy Awards, many, including April Reign, were dismayed by the Academy's indifference about representation and inclusion, as the 2016 nominees were once again entirely white. April Reign revived #OscarsSoWhite, and renewed her campaign efforts, including multiple media appearances and interviews with reputable news outlets. As a result of Reign's campaign, the discourse surrounding representation and recognition in film spread beyond the United States of America and became a global discussion. Faced with mounting pressure to expand the Academy membership, the Academy capitulated and instituted all new policies to ensure that future Academy membership invitations would better represent the demographics of modern film-going audiences. The A2020 initiative was announced in January 2016 to double the number of women and people of color in membership by 2020.
Members are able to see many new films for free at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater within two weeks of their debut, and sometimes before release; in addition, some of the screeners are available through iTunes to its members.
Four people are known to have been expelled from the Academy. Academy officials acknowledge that other members have been expelled in the past, most for selling their Oscar tickets, but no numbers are available.
The 17 branches of the Academy are:
, the Board of Governors consists of 54 governors: three governors from each of the 17 Academy branches and three governors-at-large. The Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Branch, created in 2006, had only one governor until July 2013. The Casting Directors Branch, created in 2013, elected its first three governors in Fall 2013.
The Board of Governors is responsible for corporate management, control, and general policies. The Board of Governors also appoints a CEO and a COO to supervise the administrative activities of the Academy.
From the original formal banquet which was hosted by Louis B. Mayer in 1927, everyone invited became a founder of the Academy:
Presidents are elected for one-year terms and may not be elected for more than four consecutive terms.
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Margaret, Maid of Norway
Margaret ( ; March/April 1283 – September 1290), known as the Maid of Norway, was the queen-designate of Scotland from 1286 until her death. As she was never inaugurated, her status as monarch has been debated by historians.
Margaret was the daughter of King Eric II of Norway and Margaret of Scotland. By the end of the reign of her maternal grandfather, King Alexander III of Scotland, she was his only surviving descendant and recognized heir presumptive. Alexander III died in 1286, his posthumous child was stillborn, and Margaret inherited the crown. Owing to her young age, she remained in Norway rather than going to Scotland. Her father and the Scottish leaders negotiated her marriage to Edward of Caernarfon, son of King Edward I of England. She was finally sent to Great Britain in September 1290, but died in Orkney, sparking off the succession dispute between thirteen competitors for the crown of Scotland.
Margaret, Maid of Norway, was the only child of Eric II, King of Norway, and his first wife, Margaret, daughter of King Alexander III of Scotland. She was born in Tønsberg, a coastal town in southeastern Norway, between March and 9 April 1283, when her mother died, apparently from the complications of childbirth. Aged fifteen and possessing little royal authority, King Eric did not have much say about his daughter's future. The infant Margaret was instead in the custody of the leading Norwegian magnate, Narve, Bishop of Bergen. Margaret's upbringing in the city of Bergen shows that her future marriage was expected to be important to the kingdom's foreign policy. The 1281 treaty arranging the marriage of Eric of Norway and Margaret of Scotland specified that the Scottish princess and her children would succeed to the throne of Scotland if King Alexander died leaving no legitimate sons and if no legitimate son of King Alexander left legitimate children. It also stated that the couple's daughters could inherit the Norwegian throne "if it is the custom". The Scottish party seems to have been deceived because the succession law of Norway, codified in 1280, provided only for succession by males, meaning that the Maid could not have succeeded to her father's kingdom.
Alexander, brother of Margaret's mother and the last surviving child of the King of Scotland, died on 28 January 1284. The Maid was left as the only living descendant of Alexander III. The King did not wait to discover whether his son's widow, Margaret of Flanders, was pregnant. Already on 5 February he had all thirteen earls, twenty-four barons, and three clan chiefs come to Scone and swear to recognize his granddaughter as his successor if he died leaving neither son nor daughter and if no posthumous child was born to his son. By April it had presumably become clear that the young Alexander's widow was not expecting a child and that Margaret was the heir presumptive.
Alexander III's wife, another Margaret, sister of King Edward I of England, had died in 1275, and the oath he exacted strongly implied that he now intended to remarry. When Edward expressed his condolence to Alexander III that month for the death of his son, the latter responded that "much good may come to pass yet through your kinswoman, the daughter of your niece ... who is now our heir", suggesting that the two kings may have already been discussing a suitable marriage for Margaret. Alexander and his magnates may have hoped for an English match. The King took a new wife, Yolanda of Dreux, on 14 October 1285, hoping to father another child. On the evening of 18 March 1286, he set out to meet with Queen Yolanda, only to be found dead with a broken neck the next day.
Following the unexpected death of King Alexander, Scottish magnates gathered to discuss the future of the kingdom. They swore to preserve the throne for the right heir and chose six regents, known as guardians of Scotland, to govern the country. Although the succession had been laid out by the time King Alexander III died, Margaret's accession was not yet assured: Her stepgrandmother, Queen Yolanda, was pregnant and the child was expected to succeed to the throne. There was a dispute in parliament in April involving Robert Bruce, 5th Lord of Annandale, and John Balliol, Lord of Galloway. Bruce may have opposed the Maid's succession, or the two men may have both claimed to be next in line to the throne after Yolanda's child and Margaret. Queen Yolanda delivered a stillborn child in November, and within a few months King Eric's most prominent councilor, Bjarne Erlingsson, arrived in Scotland to claim the kingdom for Margaret. Bruce raised a rebellion with his son, Robert, Earl of Carrick, but was defeated in early 1287. The precariousness of the situation made King Eric reluctant to see his three-year-old daughter leave Norway for Scotland.
In May 1289, Eric II sent envoys to Edward I as part of the kings' unfolding discussion about the future of Margaret, whom they called "lady and queen". As Margaret was still with her father, the Scots could only observe the negotiations between the two kings. Eric was indebted to Edward, and Edward was determined to make the most of the situation. The guardians, accompanied by Bruce, finally met with English and Norwegian envoys at Salisbury in October. The Treaty of Salisbury was drawn up on 6 November, stating that Eric and Margaret, "queen and heir of the kingdom", asked Edward to intervene on behalf of his grandniece so "that she could ordain and enjoy therein as other kings do in their kingdoms". Margaret was to be sent, by 1 November 1290, to England directly or via Scotland. Once the Scots could assure Edward that Scotland was peaceful and safe, he would send her to them. Edward was allowed to choose her husband, though her father retained the right to veto the choice. At Edward's request, a papal dispensation permitting Margaret to marry her granduncle's son, Edward of Caernarfon, was issued on 16 November 1289. The guardians and other prelates and magnates wrote that they were firmly in favour of the English match for "the lady Margaret queen of Scotland, our lady". It was strongly implied that Margaret's husband would be king, and Edward insisted on referring to Margaret as queen in order to speed up the accession of his own son, though the Scots themselves normally described her only as their lady.
Negotiations about Margaret's marriage, dower, succession, and the nature of the intended personal union between England and Scotland continued into 1290. A lavishly provisioned ship failed to fetch the Maid in May because of diplomatic difficulties. The Treaty of Birgham, agreed on 18 July, provided that Scotland was to remain fully independent despite the personal union and that Margaret alone would be inaugurated as monarch at Scone. By late August 1290, Margaret was preparing to sail from Bergen to the island of Great Britain or was already at sea. The ship was her father's but he did not accompany her; the most prominent men in her entourage were Bishop Narve and Baron Tore Haakonsson. She must have embarked in good health, but became ill during her journey. The ship landed in Orkney, a Norwegian archipelago off the coast of Scotland, on about 23 September. Having suffered there for up to a week from food poisoning or, less likely, motion sickness, Margaret died between 26 and 29 September 1290 in the arms of Bishop Narve. The Scottish magnates, who had assembled at Scone for the child queen's inauguration, learned about her death in October. Her body was returned to Bergen, where King Eric insisted on having the coffin opened to confirm his daughter's identity. He then had it buried in the north wall of the chancel of Christ Church, now destroyed.
Margaret was the last legitimate scion of the line of King William the Lion. Thirteen men laid claim to succession, most notably Bruce and Balliol. King Eric half-heartedly claimed the Scottish crown as well, and died in 1299. In 1300, a German woman came with her husband from Lübeck to Bergen, insisting that she was the Maid of Norway and that she had been sold by Tore Haakonsson's wife Ingeborg. The woman, known as false Margaret, was 20 years older than Margaret would have been, and was burnt at the stake for treason in Nordnes in 1301. She may have been used by Audun Hugleiksson as a pawn in the plot against the Maid's uncle, Haakon V, who had succeeded Eric II.
Historians debate whether Margaret should be considered a queen and included in the list of Scottish monarchs. She was never inaugurated, and her contemporaries in Scotland described her as queen very rarely, referring to her instead as their "lady". She was called Scotland's "lady", "heir", or "lady and heir" during the deliberations of the Great Cause after her death. On the other hand, documents issued from late 1286 no longer refer to the "king whosoever he may be", indicating that the throne may have been regarded as already occupied by Margaret. Pope Nicholas IV considered Margaret to be the monarch of Scotland and treated her as such, sending to her a bull regarding the episcopal election of Matthew the Scot. In modern historiography she is nearly unanimously called "queen", and reference books give 19 March 1286, the date of Alexander III's death, as the start of her reign.
Margaret's family ties resulted from the marital diplomacy that sought to ensure peace among the three kingdoms on the North Sea – Norway, Scotland, and England, and placed her at the centre of the Scottish succession intrigues.
Roman villa
A Roman villa was typically a country house for wealthy people built in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.
Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) distinguished two kinds of villas near Rome: the "villa urbana", a country seat that could easily be reached from Rome (or another city) for a night or two; and the "villa rustica", the farmhouse estate permanently occupied by the servants who generally had charge of the estate. The Roman Empire contained many kinds of villas, not all of them lavishly appointed with mosaic floors and frescoes. In the provinces, any country house with some decorative features in the Roman style may be called a "villa" by modern scholars. Some were pleasure houses, like Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, that were sited in the cool hills within easy reach of Rome or, like the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, on picturesque sites overlooking the Bay of Naples. Some villas were more like the country houses of England, the visible seat of power of a local magnate, such as the famous palace rediscovered at Fishbourne in Sussex.
Suburban villas on the edge of cities also occurred, such as the Middle and Late Republican villas that encroached on the Campus Martius, at that time on the edge of Rome, and which can be also seen outside the city walls of Pompeii. These early suburban villas, such as the one at Rome's Parco della Musica or at Grottarossa in Rome, demonstrate the antiquity and heritage of the "villa suburbana" in Central Italy. It is possible that these early, suburban villas were also in fact the seats of power of regional strongmen or heads of important families ("gentes"). A third type of villa provided the organisational centre of the large holdings called "latifundia", which produced and exported agricultural produce; such villas might lack luxuries. By the 4th century, "villa" could simply connote an agricultural holding: Jerome translated in the Gospel of Mark (xiv, 32) "chorion", describing the olive grove of Gethsemane, with villa, without an inference that there were any dwellings there at all.
Under the Empire, a concentration of imperial villas grew up near the Bay of Naples, especially on the isle of Capri, at Monte Circeo on the coast and at Antium (Anzio). Wealthy Romans escaped the summer heat in the hills around Rome, especially around Frascati ("cf." Hadrian's Villa). Cicero allegedly possessed no fewer than seven villas, the oldest of them, which he inherited, near Arpinum in Latium. Pliny the Younger had three or four, of which the example near Laurentium is the best known from his descriptions.
By the first century BC, the "classic" villa took many architectural forms, with many examples employing atrium or peristyle, for enclosed spaces open to light and air. Upper class, wealthy Roman citizens in the countryside around Rome and throughout the Empire lived in villa complexes, the accommodation for rural farms. The villa-complex consisted of three parts:
Villas were often furnished with plumbed bathing facilities and many would have had an under-floor central heating known as the hypocaust.
A villa might be quite palatial, such as the villas of the imperial period, built on seaside slopes overlooking the Gulf of Naples at Baiae; others were preserved at Stabiae and Herculaneum by the ashfall and mudslide from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79, which also preserved the Villa of the Papyri and its library. Smaller in the countryside, even non-commercial villas operated as largely self-supporting units, with associated farms, olive groves, and vineyards. Roman writers refer with satisfaction to the self-sufficiency of their villas, where they drank their own wine and pressed their own oil, a commonly used literary "topos". An ideal Roman citizen was the independent farmer tilling his own land, and the agricultural writers wanted to give their readers a chance to link themselves with their ancestors through this image of self-sufficient villas. The truth was not too far from the image, either, while even the profit-oriented "latifundia", large slave-run villas, probably grew enough of all the basic foodstuffs to provide for their own consumption.
The late Roman Republic witnessed an explosion of villa construction in Italy, especially in the years following the dictatorship of Sulla (81 BC). In Etruria, the villa at Settefinestre was the centre of one of the "latifundia" that were involved in large-scale agricultural production. At Settefinestre and elsewhere, the central housing of such villas was not richly appointed. Other villas in the hinterland of Rome are interpreted in light of the agrarian treatises written by the elder Cato, Columella and Varro, all of whom sought to define the suitable lifestyle of conservative Romans, at least in idealistic terms.
Large villas dominated the rural economy of the Po Valley, Campania, and Sicily, and also operated in Gaul. Villas were centers of a variety of economic activity such as mining, pottery factories, or horse raising such as those found in northwestern Gaul. Villas specializing in the seagoing export of olive oil to Roman legions in Germany became a feature of the southern Iberian province of Hispania Baetica. Some luxurious villas have been excavated in North Africa in the provinces of Africa and Numidia.
Certain areas within easy reach of Rome offered cool lodgings in the heat of summer. Gaius Maecenas asked what kind of house could possibly be suitable at all seasons. The emperor Hadrian had a villa at Tibur (Tivoli), in an area that was popular with Romans of rank. Hadrian's Villa, dated to 123, was more like a palace, as Nero's palace, the Domus Aurea on the Palatine Hill in Rome, was disposed in groupings in a planned rustic landscape, more like a villa. Cicero had several villas. Pliny the Younger described his villas in his letters. The Romans invented the seaside villa: a vignette in a frescoed wall at the in Pompeii still shows a row of seafront pleasure houses, all with porticos along the front, some rising up in porticoed tiers to an "altana" at the top that would catch a breeze on the most stifling evenings.
Some late Roman villae had luxuries like hypocaust-heated rooms with mosaic floors; mosaics are known even from Roman Britain. As the Roman Empire collapsed, villas in Britain were abandoned. In other areas some at least survived; large working villas were donated by aristocrats and territorial magnates to individual monks, often to become the nucleus of famous monasteries. In this way, the villa system of late Antiquity was preserved into the Early Middle Ages. Benedict of Nursia established his influential monastery of Monte Cassino in the ruins of a villa at Subiaco that had belonged to Nero. Around 590, Saint Eligius was born in a highly placed Gallo-Roman family at the 'villa' of Chaptelat near Limoges, in Aquitaine. The abbey at Stavelot was founded ca 650 on the domain of a former villa near Liège and the abbey of Vézelay had a similar founding. As late as 698, Willibrord established an abbey at a Roman villa of Echternach, in Luxembourg near Trier, which Irmina of Oeren, daughter of Dagobert II, king of the Franks, presented to him.
As the empire expanded, villas spread into the Western provinces, including Gaul and Roman Britain. This was despite the fact that writers of the period could never quite decide on what was meant by villa, it is clear from the treatise of Palladius that the villa had an agricultural and political role. In Roman Gaul the term "villa" was applied to many different buildings. The villas in Roman Gaul were also subject to regional differences, for example in northern and central Gaul colonnaded facades and pavillions were the fashion, whereas Southern Gaul were in peristyle. The villas style, locations, room numbers and proximity to a lake or ocean were manners of displaying the owners wealth.
Villas were also centres of production, and Gallo-Roman villa appear to have been closely associated with vineries and wine production. The owners were probably a combination of local Gallic elites who became quickly romanised after the conquest, as well as Romans and Italiens who wished to exploit rich local resources. The villas would have been the centre of complex relationships with the local area. Much work would have been undertaken by slave labour or by local "coloni" ("tenant farmers"). There would have also have been a steward in addition to the inhabiting family.
Outboard motor
An outboard motor is a propulsion system for boats, consisting of a self-contained unit that includes engine, gearbox and propeller or jet drive, designed to be affixed to the outside of the transom. They are the most common motorized method of propelling small watercraft. As well as providing propulsion, outboards provide steering control, as they are designed to pivot over their mountings and thus control the direction of thrust. The skeg also acts as a rudder when the engine is not running. Unlike inboard motors, outboard motors can be easily removed for storage or repairs.
In order to eliminate the chances of hitting bottom with an outboard motor, the motor can be tilted up to an elevated position either electronically or manually. This helps when traveling through shallow waters where there may be debris that could potentially damage the motor as well as the propeller. If the electric motor required to move the pistons which raise or lower the engine is malfunctioning, every outboard motor is equipped with a manual piston release which will allow the operator to drop the motor down to its lowest setting.
Large outboards affixed to the transom using clamps and are either tiller steer up to approx 100hp. Generally 100hp plus is linked to controls at the helm. These range from 2-, 3-, and 4-cylinder models generating 15 to 135 horsepower suitable for hulls up to in length to powerful V6 and V8 cylinder blocks rated up to ., with sufficient power to be used on boats of or longer.
Small outboard motors, up to 15 horsepower or so are easily portable. They are affixed to the boat via clamps and thus easily moved from boat to boat. These motors typically use a manual start system, with throttle and gearshift controls mounted on the body of the motor, and a tiller for steering. The smallest of these weigh as little as , have integral fuel tanks, and provide sufficient power to move a small dinghy at around
This type of motor is typically used:
Electric outboard motors are self-contained propulsory units for boats, first invented in 1973 by Morton Ray of Ray Electric Outboards. These are not to be confused with trolling motors, which are not designed as a primary source of power. Most electric outboard motors have 0.5 to 4 kW direct current (DC) electric motors, operated at 12 to 60 volts DC. Recently developed outboard motors are powered with an alternating current (AC) or DC electric motor in the power head like a conventional petrol engine. With this setup, a motor can produce 10 kW output or more and is able to replace a petrol engine of 15 HP or more. The advantage of the induction or asynchronous motor is the power transfer to the rotor by means of electromagnetic induction. As these engines do not use permanent magnets, they require less maintenance and develop more torque at lower RPM.
Pump-jet propulsion is available as an option on most outboard motors. Although less efficient than an open propeller, they are particularly useful in applications where the ability to operate in very shallow water is important. They also eliminate the laceration dangers of an open propeller.
Propane outboard motors are available from several manufacturers. These products have several advantages such as lower emissions, absence of ethanol-related issues, and no need for choke once the system is pressurized. Lehr is regarded as the first manufacturer to have brought a propane-powered outboard motor to market by "Popular Mechanics" and other boating publications.
The first known outboard motor was a small 5 kilogram (11 lb) electric unit designed around 1870 by Gustave Trouvé, and patented in May 1880 (Patent N° 136,560). Later about 25 petrol powered outboards may have been produced in 1896 by American Motors Co—but neither of these two pioneering efforts appear to have had much impact.
The Waterman outboard engine appears to be the first gasoline-powered outboard offered for sale in significant numbers. Developed by Cameron Waterman, a young Yale Engineering student, it was developed from 1903, with a patent application filed in 1905 Starting in 1906, the company went on to make thousands of his "Porto-Motor" units, claiming 25,000 sales by 1914. The inboard boat motor firm of Caille Motor Company of Detroit were instrumental in making the cylinder and engines.
The most successful early outboard motor, was created by Norwegian-American inventor Ole Evinrude in 1909. Between 1909 and 1912, Evinrude made thousands of his outboards and the three-horsepower units were sold around the world. His Evinrude Outboard Co. was spun off to other owners, and he went on to success after starting the ELTO company to produce a two-cylinder motor - ELTO stood for Evinrude Light Twin Outboard. The 1920s were the first high-water mark for the outboard with Evinrude, Johnson, ELTO, Atwater Lockwood and dozens of other makers in the field.
Historically, a majority of outboards have been two-stroke powerheads fitted with a carburetor due to the design's inherent simplicity, reliability, low cost and light weight. Drawbacks include increased pollution, due to the high volume of unburned gasoline and oil in their exhaust, and louder noise.
Although four stroke outboards have been sold since the late 1920s, particularly Roness and Sharland, in 1962 Homelite introduced a commercially viable four cycle outboard a 55-horsepower motor, based on the 4 cylinder Crosley automobile engine. This was called the Bearcat and was later purchased by Fischer-Pierce, the makers of Boston Whaler, for use in their boats because of their advantages over two strokes. In 1964, Honda Motor Co. introduced its first four-stroke powerhead. In 1984, Yamaha introduced their first four-stroke powerhead. These motors were only available in the smaller horsepower range. In 1990 Honda released 35 hp and 45 hp four-stroke models. They continued to lead in the development of four-stroke engines throughout the 1990s as US and European exhaust emissions regulations such as CARB (California Air Resources Board) led to the proliferation of four-stroke outboards. At first, North American manufacturers such as Mercury and OMC used engine technology from Japanese manufacturers such as Yamaha and Suzuki until they were able to develop their own four-stroke engine. The inherent advantages of four-stroke motors included: lower pollution (especially oil in the water), noise reduction, increase fuel economy, and increased low rpm torque.
Honda Marine Group, Mercury Marine, Mercury Racing, Nissan Marine, Suzuki Marine, Tohatsu Outboards, Yamaha Marine, and China Oshen-Hyfong marine have all developed new four-stroke engines. Some are carburetted, usually the smaller engines. The balance are electronically fuel-injected. Depending on the manufacturer, newer engines benefit from advanced technology such as multiple valves per cylinder, variable camshaft timing (Honda's VTEC), boosted low end torque (Honda's BLAST), 3-way cooling systems, and closed loop fuel injection. Mercury Verado four-strokes are unique in that they are supercharged.
Mercury Marine, Mercury Racing, Tohatsu, Yamaha Marine, Nissan and Evinrude each developed computer-controlled direct-injected two-stroke engines. Each brand boasts a different method of DI.
Fuel economy on both direct injected and four-stroke outboards measures from a 10 percent to 80 percent improvement, compared with conventional two-strokes. Depending on rpm and load at cruising speeds, figure on about a 30 percent mileage improvement.
However, the gap between two-stroke and four-stroke outboard fuel economy is beginning to narrow. Two-stroke outboard motor manufacturers have recently introduced new technologies that help to improve two-stroke fuel economy.
In 2012, Lehr inc. introduced some small (<5hp) outboards based on modified Chinese petrol engines to run on propane gas. Tohatsu currently also produces propane powered models, all rated 5hp. Conversion of larger outboards to run on Liquified petroleum gas is considered unusual and exotic although some hobbyists continue to experiment.
It is important to select a motor that is a good match for the hull in terms of power and shaft length.
Overpowering is a dangerous condition that can lead to the transom accelerating past the rest of the vessel and underpowering often results in a boat that is incapable of performing in the role for which it was designed. Boats built in the US have a "Coast Guard Rating Plate", which specifies the maximum recommended horsepower for the hull. A motor with less than 75% of the maximum will most likely result in unsatisfactory performance.
Outboard motor shaft lengths are standardized to fit 15-inch, 20-inch and 25-inch transoms. If the shaft is too long it will extend farther into the water than necessary creating drag, which will impair performance and fuel economy. If the shaft is too short, the motor will be prone to ventilation. Even worse, if the water intake ports on the lower unit are not sufficiently submerged, engine overheating is likely, which can result in severe damage.
Different outboard engine brands require different transom dimensions and sizes, that affects performance and trim.
Motor height on the transom is an important factor in achieving optimal performance. The motor should be as high as possible without ventilating or loss of water pressure. This minimizes the effect of hydrodynamic drag while underway, allowing for greater speed. Generally, the antiventilation plate should be about the same height as, or up to two inches higher than, the keel, with the motor in neutral trim.
Trim is the angle of the motor in relation to the hull, as illustrated below. The ideal trim angle is the one in which the boat rides level, with most of the hull on the surface instead of plowing through the water.
If the motor is trimmed out too far, the bow will ride too high in the water. With too little trim, the bow rides too low. The optimal trim setting will vary depending on many factors including speed, hull design, weight and balance, and conditions on the water (wind and waves). Many large outboards are equipped with "power trim", an electric motor on the mounting bracket, with a switch at the helm that enables the operator to adjust the trim angle on the fly. In this case, the motor should be trimmed fully in to start, and trimmed out (with an eye on the tachometer) as the boat gains momentum, until it reaches the point just before ventilation begins or further trim adjustment results in an RPM increase with no increase in speed. Motors not equipped with power trim are manually adjustable using a pin called a topper tilt lock.
Ventilation is a phenomenon that occurs when surface air or exhaust gas (in the case of motors equipped with through-hub exhaust) is drawn into the spinning propeller blades. With the propeller pushing mostly air instead of water, the load on the engine is greatly reduced, causing the engine to race and the propeller to spin fast enough to result in cavitation, at which point little thrust is generated at all. The condition continues until the prop slows enough for the air bubbles to rise to the surface. The primary causes of ventilation are: motor mounted too high, motor trimmed out excessively, damage to the antiventilation plate, damage to propeller, foreign object lodged in the diffuser ring.
If the helmsman goes overboard, the boat may continue under power but uncontrolled, risking serious or fatal injuries to the helmsman and others in the water. A safety measure is a "kill cord" attached to the boat and helmsman, which cuts the motor if the helmsman falls overboard.
The most common type of cooling used on outboards of all eras use a rubber impeller to pump water from below the waterline up into the engine. This design has remained the standard due mainly to the efficiency and simplicity of its design. One disadvantage to this system is that if the impeller is run dry for a length of time (such as leaving the engine running when pulling the boat out of the water or in some cases tilting the engine out of the water while running), the impeller is likely to be ruined in the process.
Air cooled outboard engines are currently produced by some manufacturers, these tend to be small engines of less than 5 horsepower. Outboard engines made by Briggs & Stratton are air-cooled
Outboards manufactured by Seven Marine use a closed-loop cooling system with heat exchanger. This means saltwater is not pumped through the engine block as is the case with most outboards but still has to be pumped through the heat exchanger
In Vietnam and other parts of southeast Asia a long-tailed motor design is used. In Vietnam these they are called "May Duoi Tom"(Shrimp Tail Motor). The outboard motors, which can be smallish air-cooled or water-cooled gasoline, diesel or even modified automotive engines, are bolted to a welded steel tube frame, with another long steel tube up to 3 m long to hold the drive shaft, driving a conventional looking propeller. The frame that holds the motor has a short, swiveling steel pin/tube approximately 15 cm long underneath, to be inserted into a corresponding hole on the transom, or a solid block or wood purposely built-in thereof.,
This drop-in arrangement enables extremely quick transfer of the motor to another boat or for storage - all that is needed is to lift it out. The pivoting design allows the outboard motor to be swiveled by the operator in almost all directions: Sideways for direction, up and down to change the thrust line according to speed or bow lift, elevate completely out of water for easy starting, placing the drive shaft and the propeller forward along the side of the boat for reverse, or put them inside the boat for propeller replacement, which can be a regular occurrence to the cheap cast aluminum propellers on the often debris-prone inland waterways. This design is utilized to propel long-tail boats. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39782 |
Hypercube
In geometry, a hypercube is an "n"-dimensional analogue of a square () and a cube (). It is a closed, compact, convex figure whose 1-skeleton consists of groups of opposite parallel line segments aligned in each of the space's dimensions, perpendicular to each other and of the same length. A unit hypercube's longest diagonal in "n" dimensions is equal to formula_1.
An "n"-dimensional hypercube is more commonly referred to as an n"-cube or sometimes as an n"-dimensional cube. The term measure polytope (originally from Elte, 1912) is also used, notably in the work of H. S. M. Coxeter who also labels the hypercubes the γn polytopes.
The hypercube is the special case of a hyperrectangle (also called an "n-orthotope").
A "unit hypercube" is a hypercube whose side has length one unit. Often, the hypercube whose corners (or "vertices") are the 2"n" points in R"n" with each coordinate equal to 0 or 1 is called "the" unit hypercube.
A hypercube can be defined by increasing the numbers of dimensions of a shape:
This can be generalized to any number of dimensions. This process of sweeping out volumes can be formalized mathematically as a Minkowski sum: the "d"-dimensional hypercube is the Minkowski sum of "d" mutually perpendicular unit-length line segments, and is therefore an example of a zonotope.
The 1-skeleton of a hypercube is a hypercube graph.
A unit hypercube of "n" dimensions is the convex hull of the points given by all sign permutations of the Cartesian coordinates formula_2. It has an edge length of 1 and an "n"-dimensional volume of 1.
An "n"-dimensional hypercube is also often regarded as the convex hull of all sign permutations of the coordinates formula_3. This form is often chosen due to ease of writing out the coordinates. Its edge length is 2, and its "n"-dimensional volume is 2n.
Every "n"-cube of n > 0 is composed of elements, or "n"-cubes of a lower dimension, on the ("n"−1)-dimensional surface on the parent hypercube. A side is any element of ("n"−1)-dimension of the parent hypercube. A hypercube of dimension "n" has 2"n" sides (a 1-dimensional line has 2 endpoints; a 2-dimensional square has 4 sides or edges; a 3-dimensional cube has 6 2-dimensional faces; a 4-dimensional tesseract has 8 cells). The number of vertices (points) of a hypercube is formula_4 (a cube has formula_5 vertices, for instance).
The number of "m"-dimensional hypercubes (just referred to as "m"-cube from here on) on the boundary of an "n"-cube is
For example, the boundary of a 4-cube (n=4) contains 8 cubes (3-cubes), 24 squares (2-cubes), 32 lines (1-cubes) and 16 vertices (0-cubes).
This identity can be proved by combinatorial arguments; each of the formula_8 vertices defines a vertex in
a "m"-dimensional boundary. There are formula_9 ways of choosing which lines ("sides") that defines the subspace that the boundary is in. But, each side is counted formula_10 times since it has that many vertices, we need to divide by this number.
This identity can also be used to generate the formula for the "n"-dimensional cube surface area. The surface area of a hypercube is: formula_11.
These numbers can also be generated by the linear recurrence relation
For example, extending a square via its 4 vertices adds one extra line (edge) per vertex, and also adds the final second square, to form a cube, giving formula_18 = 12 lines in total.
An "n"-cube can be projected inside a regular 2"n"-gonal polygon by a skew orthogonal projection, shown here from the line segment to the 15-cube.
The hypercubes are one of the few families of regular polytopes that are represented in any number of dimensions.
The hypercube (offset) family is one of three regular polytope families, labeled by Coxeter as "γn". The other two are the hypercube dual family, the cross-polytopes, labeled as "βn," and the simplices, labeled as "αn". A fourth family, the infinite tessellations of hypercubes, he labeled as "δn".
Another related family of semiregular and uniform polytopes is the demihypercubes, which are constructed from hypercubes with alternate vertices deleted and simplex facets added in the gaps, labeled as "hγn".
"n"-cubes can be combined with their duals (the cross-polytopes) to form compound polytopes:
The graph of the "n"-hypercube's edges is isomorphic to the Hasse diagram of the ("n"−1)-simplex's face lattice. This can be seen by orienting the "n"-hypercube so that two opposite vertices lie vertically, corresponding to the ("n"-1)-simplex itself and the null polytope, respectively. Each vertex connected to the top vertex then uniquely maps to one of the ("n"-1)-simplex's facets ("n"-2 faces), and each vertex connected to those vertices maps to one of the simplex's "n"-3 faces, and so forth, and the vertices connected to the bottom vertex map to the simplex's vertices.
This relation may be used to generate the face lattice of an ("n-1")-simplex efficiently, since face lattice enumeration algorithms applicable to general polytopes are more computationally expensive.
Regular complex polytopes can be defined in complex Hilbert space called "generalized hypercubes", γ = "p"{4}2{3}...2{3}2, or ... Real solutions exist with "p"=2, i.e. γ = γ"n" = 2{4}2{3}...2{3}2 = {4,3..,3}. For "p">2, they exist in formula_19. The facets are generalized ("n"-1)-cube and the vertex figure are regular simplexes.
The regular polygon perimeter seen in these orthogonal projections is called a petrie polygon. The generalized squares (n=2) are shown with edges outlined as red and blue alternating color "p"-edges, while the higher n-cubes are drawn with black outlined "p"-edges.
The number of "m"-face elements in a "p"-generalized "n"-cube are: formula_20. This is "p""n" vertices and "pn" facets. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39783 |
Rotation
A rotation is a circular movement of an object around a center (or point) of rotation. A three-dimensional object can always be rotated about an infinite number of imaginary lines called "rotation axis" ( ). If the axis passes through the body's center of mass, the body is said to rotate upon itself, or spin. A rotation around an external point, e.g. the planet Earth around the Sun, is called a "revolution" or "orbital revolution", typically when it is produced by gravity. The axis is called a pole.
Mathematically, a rotation is a rigid body movement which, unlike a translation, keeps a point fixed. This definition applies to rotations within both two and three dimensions (in a plane and in space, respectively.)
All rigid body movements are rotations, translations, or combinations of the two.
A rotation is simply a progressive radial orientation to a common point. That common point lies within the axis of that motion. The axis is 90 degrees perpendicular to the plane of the motion. If the axis of the rotation lies external of the body in question then the body is said to orbit. There is no fundamental difference between a “rotation” and an “orbit” and or "spin". The key distinction is simply where the axis of the rotation lies, either within or outside of a body in question. This distinction can be demonstrated for both “rigid” and “non rigid” bodies.
If a rotation around a point or axis is followed by a second rotation around the same point/axis, a third rotation results. The reverse (inverse) of a rotation is also a rotation. Thus, the rotations around a point/axis form a group. However, a rotation around a point or axis and a rotation around a different point/axis may result in something other than a rotation, e.g. a translation.
Rotations around the "x", "y" and "z" axes are called "principal rotations". Rotation around any axis can be performed by taking a rotation around the "x" axis, followed by a rotation around the "y" axis, and followed by a rotation around the "z" axis. That is to say, any spatial rotation can be decomposed into a combination of principal rotations.
In flight dynamics, the principal rotations are known as "yaw", "pitch", and "roll" (known as Tait–Bryan angles). This terminology is also used in computer graphics.
In astronomy, rotation is a commonly observed phenomenon. Stars, planets and similar bodies all spin around on their axes. The rotation rate of planets in the solar system was first measured by tracking visual features. Stellar rotation is measured through Doppler shift or by tracking active surface features.
This rotation induces a centrifugal acceleration in the reference frame of the Earth which slightly counteracts the effect of gravity the closer one is to the equator. One effect is that an object weighs slightly less at the equator. Another is that the Earth is slightly deformed into an oblate spheroid.
Another consequence of the rotation of a planet is the phenomenon of precession. Like a gyroscope, the overall effect is a slight "wobble" in the movement of the axis of a planet. Currently the tilt of the Earth's axis to its orbital plane (obliquity of the ecliptic) is 23.44 degrees, but this angle changes slowly (over thousands of years). (See also Precession of the equinoxes and Pole star.)
While revolution is often used as a synonym for rotation, in many fields, particularly astronomy and related fields, revolution, often referred to as orbital revolution for clarity, is used when one body moves around another while rotation is used to mean the movement around an axis. Moons revolve around their planet, planets revolve about their star (such as the Earth around the Sun); and stars slowly revolve about their galaxial center. The motion of the components of galaxies is complex, but it usually includes a rotation component.
Most planets in our solar system, including Earth, spin in the same direction as they orbit the Sun. The exceptions are Venus and Uranus. Uranus rotates nearly on its side relative to its orbit. Current speculation is that Uranus started off with a typical prograde orientation and was knocked on its side by a large impact early in its history. Venus may be thought of as rotating slowly backward (or being "upside down"). The dwarf planet Pluto (formerly considered a planet) is anomalous in this and other ways.
The speed of rotation is given by the angular frequency (rad/s) or frequency (turns per time), or period (seconds, days, etc.). The time-rate of change of angular frequency is angular acceleration (rad/s²), caused by torque. The ratio of the two (how heavy is it to start, stop, or otherwise change rotation) is given by the moment of inertia.
The angular velocity vector (an "axial vector") also describes the direction of the axis of rotation. Similarly the torque is an axial vector.
The physics of the rotation around a fixed axis is mathematically described with the axis–angle representation of rotations. According to the right-hand rule, the direction away from the observer is associated with clockwise rotation and the direction towards the observer with counterclockwise rotation, like a screw.
The laws of physics are currently believed to be invariant under any fixed rotation. (Although they do appear to change when viewed from a rotating viewpoint: see rotating frame of reference.)
In modern physical cosmology, the cosmological principle is the notion that the distribution of matter in the universe is homogeneous and isotropic when viewed on a large enough scale, since the forces are expected to act uniformly throughout the universe and have no preferred direction, and should, therefore, produce no observable irregularities in the large scale structuring over the course of evolution of the matter field that was initially laid down by the Big Bang.
In particular, for a system which behaves the same regardless of how it is oriented in space, its Lagrangian is rotationally invariant. According to Noether's theorem, if the action (the integral over time of its Lagrangian) of a physical system is invariant under rotation, then angular momentum is conserved.
Euler rotations provide an alternative description of a rotation. It is a composition of three rotations defined as the movement obtained by changing one of the Euler angles while leaving the other two constant. Euler rotations are never expressed in terms of the external frame, or in terms of the co-moving rotated body frame, but in a mixture. They constitute a mixed axes of rotation system, where the first angle moves the line of nodes around the external axis "z", the second rotates around the line of nodes and the third one is an intrinsic rotation around an axis fixed in the body that moves.
These rotations are called precession, nutation, and "intrinsic rotation".
In flight dynamics, the principal rotations described with Euler angles above are known as "pitch", "roll" and "yaw". The term rotation is also used in aviation to refer to the upward pitch (nose moves up) of an aircraft, particularly when starting the climb after takeoff.
Principal rotations have the advantage of modelling a number of physical systems such as gimbals, and joysticks, so are easily visualised, and are a very compact way of storing a rotation. But they are difficult to use in calculations as even simple operations like combining rotations are expensive to do, and suffer from a form of gimbal lock where the angles cannot be uniquely calculated for certain rotations.
Many amusement rides provide rotation. A Ferris wheel has a horizontal central axis, and parallel axes for each gondola, where the rotation is opposite, by gravity or mechanically. As a result, at any time the orientation of the gondola is upright (not rotated), just translated. The tip of the translation vector describes a circle. A carousel provides rotation about a vertical axis. Many rides provide a combination of rotations about several axes. In Chair-O-Planes the rotation about the vertical axis is provided mechanically, while the rotation about the horizontal axis is due to the centripetal force. In roller coaster inversions the rotation about the horizontal axis is one or more full cycles, where inertia keeps people in their seats.
Rotation of a ball or other object, usually called "spin", plays a role in many sports, including topspin and backspin in tennis, "English", "follow" and "draw" in billiards and pool, curve balls in baseball, spin bowling in cricket, flying disc sports, etc. Table tennis paddles are manufactured with different surface characteristics to allow the player to impart a greater or lesser amount of spin to the ball.
Rotation of a player one or more times around a vertical axis may be called "spin" in figure skating, "twirling" (of the baton or the performer) in baton twirling, or "360", "540", "720", etc. in snowboarding, etc. Rotation of a player or performer one or more times around a horizontal axis may be called a flip, roll, somersault, "heli", etc. in gymnastics, waterskiing, or many other sports, or a "one-and-a-half", "two-and-a-half", "gainer" (starting facing away from the water), etc. in diving, etc. A combination of vertical and horizontal rotation (back flip with 360°) is called a "möbius" in waterskiing freestyle jumping.
Rotation of a player around a vertical axis, generally between 180 and 360 degrees, may be called a "spin move" and is used as a deceptive or avoidance maneuver, or in an attempt to play, pass, or receive a ball or puck, etc., or to afford a player a view of the goal or other players. It is often seen in hockey, basketball, football of various codes, tennis, etc.
The "end result" of any sequence of rotations of any object in 3D about a fixed point is always equivalent to a rotation about an axis. However, an object may "physically" rotate in 3D about a fixed point on more than one axis simultaneously, in which case there is no single fixed axis of rotation - just the fixed point. However, these two descriptions can be reconciled - such a physical motion can always be re-described in terms of a single axis of rotation, provided the orientation of that axis relative to the object is allowed to change moment by moment.
2 dimensional rotations, unlike the 3 dimensional ones, possess no axis of rotation. This is equivalent, for linear transformations, with saying that there is no direction in the place which is kept unchanged by a 2 dimensional rotation, except, of course, the identity.
The question of the existence of such a direction is the question of existence of an eigenvector for the matrix A representing the rotation. Every 2D rotation around the origin through an angle formula_1 in counterclockwise direction can be quite simply represented by the following matrix:
A standard eigenvalue determination leads to the characteristic equation
which has
as its eigenvalues. Therefore, there is no real eigenvalue whenever formula_5, meaning that no real vector in the plane is kept unchanged by A.
Knowing that the trace is an invariant, the rotation angle formula_6 for a proper orthogonal 3x3 rotation matrix formula_7 is found by
formula_8
Using the principal arc-cosine, this formula gives a rotation angle satisfying formula_9. The corresponding rotation axis must be defined to point in a direction that limits the rotation angle to not exceed 180 degrees. (This can always be done because any rotation of more than 180 degrees about an axis formula_10 can always be written as a rotation having formula_9 if the axis is replaced with formula_12.)
Every proper rotation formula_7 in 3D space has an axis of rotation, which is defined such that any vector formula_14 that is aligned with the rotation axis will not be affected by rotation. Accordingly, formula_15, and the rotation axis therefore corresponds to an eigenvector of the rotation matrix associated with an eigenvalue of 1. As long as the rotation angle formula_6 is nonzero (i.e., the rotation is not the identity tensor), there is one and only one such direction. Because A has only real components, there is at least one real eigenvalue, and the remaining two eigenvalues must be complex conjugates of each other (see Eigenvalues and eigenvectors#Eigenvalues and the characteristic polynomial). Knowing that 1 is an eigenvalue, it follows that the remaining two eigenvalues are complex conjugates of each other, but this does not imply that they are complex—they could be real with double multiplicity. In the degenerate case of a rotation angle formula_17, the remaining two eigenvalues are both equal to -1. In the degenerate case of a zero rotation angle, the rotation matrix is the identity, and all three eigenvalues are 1 (which is the only case for which the rotation axis is arbitrary).
A spectral analysis is not required to find the rotation axis. If formula_18 denotes the unit eigenvector aligned with the rotation axis, and if formula_6 denotes the rotation angle, then it can be shown that formula_20. Consequently, the expense of an eigenvalue analysis can be avoided by simply normalizing this vector "if it has a nonzero magnitude." On the other hand, if this vector has a zero magnitude, it means that formula_21. In other words, this vector will be zero if and only if the rotation angle is 0 or 180 degrees, and the rotation axis may be assigned in this case by normalizing any column of formula_22 that has a nonzero magnitude.
This discussion applies to a proper rotation, and hence formula_23. Any improper orthogonal 3x3 matrix formula_24 may be written as formula_25, in which formula_7 is proper orthogonal. That is, any improper orthogonal 3x3 matrix may be decomposed as a proper rotation (from which an axis of rotation can be found as described above) followed by an inversion (multiplication by -1). It follows that the rotation axis of formula_7 is also the eigenvector of formula_24 corresponding to an eigenvalue of -1.
As much as every tridimensional rotation has a rotation axis, also every tridimensional rotation has a plane, which is perpendicular to the rotation axis, and which is left invariant by the rotation. The rotation, restricted to this plane, is an ordinary 2D rotation.
The proof proceeds similarly to the above discussion. First, suppose that all eigenvalues of the 3D rotation matrix A are real. This means that there is an orthogonal basis, made by the corresponding eigenvectors (which are necessarily orthogonal), over which the effect of the rotation matrix is just stretching it. If we write A in this basis, it is diagonal; but a diagonal orthogonal matrix is made of just +1's and -1's in the diagonal entries. Therefore, we don't have a proper rotation, but either the identity or the result of a sequence of reflections.
It follows, then, that a proper rotation has some complex eigenvalue. Let v be the corresponding eigenvector. Then, as we showed in the previous topic, formula_29 is also an eigenvector, and formula_30 and formula_31 are such that their scalar product vanishes:
because, since formula_33 is real, it equals its complex conjugate formula_34, and formula_35 and formula_36 are both representations of the same scalar product between formula_37 and formula_29.
This means formula_30 and formula_31 are orthogonal vectors. Also, they are both real vectors by construction. These vectors span the same subspace as formula_37 and formula_29, which is an invariant subspace under the application of A. Therefore, they span an invariant plane.
This plane is orthogonal to the invariant axis, which corresponds to the remaining eigenvector of A, with eigenvalue 1, because of the orthogonality of the eigenvectors of A. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39789 |
3-sphere
In mathematics, a 3-sphere, or glome, is a higher-dimensional analogue of a sphere. It may be embedded in 4-dimensional Euclidean space as the set of points equidistant from a fixed central point. Analogous to how the boundary of a ball in three dimensions is an ordinary sphere (or 2-sphere, a two-dimensional surface), the boundary of a ball in four dimensions is a 3-sphere (an object with three dimensions). A 3-sphere is an example of a 3-manifold and an n-sphere.
In coordinates, a 3-sphere with center and radius is the set of all points in real, 4-dimensional space () such that
The 3-sphere centered at the origin with radius 1 is called the unit 3-sphere and is usually denoted :
It is often convenient to regard as the space with 2 complex dimensions () or the quaternions (). The unit 3-sphere is then given by
or
This description as the quaternions of norm one identifies the 3-sphere with the versors in the quaternion division ring. Just as the unit circle is important for planar polar coordinates, so the 3-sphere is important in the polar view of 4-space involved in quaternion multiplication. See polar decomposition of a quaternion for details of this development of the three-sphere.
This view of the 3-sphere is the basis for the study of elliptic space as developed by Georges Lemaître.
The 3-dimensional cubic hyperarea of a 3-sphere of radius is
while the 4-dimensional quartic hypervolume (the volume of the 4-dimensional region bounded by the 3-sphere) is
Every non-empty intersection of a 3-sphere with a three-dimensional hyperplane is a 2-sphere (unless the hyperplane is tangent to the 3-sphere, in which case the intersection is a single point). As a 3-sphere moves through a given three-dimensional hyperplane, the intersection starts out as a point, then becomes a growing 2-sphere that reaches its maximal size when the hyperplane cuts right through the "equator" of the 3-sphere. Then the 2-sphere shrinks again down to a single point as the 3-sphere leaves the hyperplane.
A 3-sphere is a compact, connected, 3-dimensional manifold without boundary. It is also simply connected. What this means, in the broad sense, is that any loop, or circular path, on the 3-sphere can be continuously shrunk to a point without leaving the 3-sphere. The Poincaré conjecture, proved in 2003 by Grigori Perelman, provides that the 3-sphere is the only three-dimensional manifold (up to homeomorphism) with these properties.
The 3-sphere is homeomorphic to the one-point compactification of . In general, any topological space that is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere is called a topological 3-sphere.
The homology groups of the 3-sphere are as follows: and are both infinite cyclic, while for all other indices . Any topological space with these homology groups is known as a homology 3-sphere. Initially Poincaré conjectured that all homology 3-spheres are homeomorphic to , but then he himself constructed a non-homeomorphic one, now known as the Poincaré homology sphere. Infinitely many homology spheres are now known to exist. For example, a Dehn filling with slope on any knot in the 3-sphere gives a homology sphere; typically these are not homeomorphic to the 3-sphere.
As to the homotopy groups, we have and is infinite cyclic. The higher-homotopy groups () are all finite abelian but otherwise follow no discernible pattern. For more discussion see homotopy groups of spheres.
The 3-sphere is naturally a smooth manifold, in fact, a closed embedded submanifold of . The Euclidean metric on induces a metric on the 3-sphere giving it the structure of a Riemannian manifold. As with all spheres, the 3-sphere has constant positive sectional curvature equal to where is the radius.
Much of the interesting geometry of the 3-sphere stems from the fact that the 3-sphere has a natural Lie group structure given by quaternion multiplication (see the section below on group structure). The only other spheres with such a structure are the 0-sphere and the 1-sphere (see circle group).
Unlike the 2-sphere, the 3-sphere admits nonvanishing vector fields (sections of its tangent bundle). One can even find three linearly independent and nonvanishing vector fields. These may be taken to be any left-invariant vector fields forming a basis for the Lie algebra of the 3-sphere. This implies that the 3-sphere is parallelizable. It follows that the tangent bundle of the 3-sphere is trivial. For a general discussion of the number of linear independent vector fields on a -sphere, see the article vector fields on spheres.
There is an interesting action of the circle group on giving the 3-sphere the structure of a principal circle bundle known as the Hopf bundle. If one thinks of as a subset of , the action is given by
The orbit space of this action is homeomorphic to the two-sphere . Since is not homeomorphic to , the Hopf bundle is nontrivial.
There are several well-known constructions of the three-sphere. Here we describe gluing a pair of three-balls and then the one-point compactification.
A 3-sphere can be constructed topologically by "gluing" together the boundaries of a pair of 3-balls. The boundary of a 3-ball is a 2-sphere, and these two 2-spheres are to be identified. That is, imagine a pair of 3-balls of the same size, then superpose them so that their 2-spherical boundaries match, and let matching pairs of points on the pair of 2-spheres be identically equivalent to each other. In analogy with the case of the 2-sphere (see below), the gluing surface is called an equatorial sphere.
Note that the interiors of the 3-balls are not glued to each other. One way to think of the fourth dimension is as a continuous real-valued function of the 3-dimensional coordinates of the 3-ball, perhaps considered to be "temperature". We take the "temperature" to be zero along the gluing 2-sphere and let one of the 3-balls be "hot" and let the other 3-ball be "cold". The "hot" 3-ball could be thought of as the "upper hemisphere" and the "cold" 3-ball could be thought of as the "lower hemisphere". The temperature is highest/lowest at the centers of the two 3-balls.
This construction is analogous to a construction of a 2-sphere, performed by gluing the boundaries of a pair of disks. A disk is a 2-ball, and the boundary of a disk is a circle (a 1-sphere). Let a pair of disks be of the same diameter. Superpose them and glue corresponding points on their boundaries. Again one may think of the third dimension as temperature. Likewise, we may inflate the 2-sphere, moving the pair of disks to become the northern and southern hemispheres.
After removing a single point from the 2-sphere, what remains is homeomorphic to the Euclidean plane. In the same way, removing a single point from the 3-sphere yields three-dimensional space.
An extremely useful way to see this is via stereographic projection. We first describe the lower-dimensional version.
Rest the south pole of a unit 2-sphere on the -plane in three-space. We map a point of the sphere (minus the north pole ) to the plane by sending to the intersection of the line with the plane. Stereographic projection of a 3-sphere (again removing the north pole) maps to three-space in the same manner. (Notice that, since stereographic projection is conformal, round spheres are sent to round spheres or to planes.)
A somewhat different way to think of the one-point compactification is via the exponential map. Returning to our picture of the unit two-sphere sitting on the Euclidean plane: Consider a geodesic in the plane, based at the origin, and map this to a geodesic in the two-sphere of the same length, based at the south pole. Under this map all points of the circle of radius are sent to the north pole. Since the open unit disk is homeomorphic to the Euclidean plane, this is again a one-point compactification.
The exponential map for 3-sphere is similarly constructed; it may also be discussed using the fact that the 3-sphere is the Lie group of unit quaternions.
The four Euclidean coordinates for are redundant since they are subject to the condition that . As a 3-dimensional manifold one should be able to parameterize by three coordinates, just as one can parameterize the 2-sphere using two coordinates (such as latitude and longitude). Due to the nontrivial topology of it is impossible to find a single set of coordinates that cover the entire space. Just as on the 2-sphere, one must use "at least" two coordinate charts. Some different choices of coordinates are given below.
It is convenient to have some sort of hyperspherical coordinates on in analogy to the usual spherical coordinates on . One such choice — by no means unique — is to use , where
where and run over the range 0 to , and runs over 0 to 2. Note that, for any fixed value of , and parameterize a 2-sphere of radius , except for the degenerate cases, when equals 0 or , in which case they describe a point.
The round metric on the 3-sphere in these coordinates is given by
and the volume form by
These coordinates have an elegant description in terms of quaternions. Any unit quaternion can be written as a versor:
where is a unit imaginary quaternion; that is, a quaternion that satisfies . This is the quaternionic analogue of Euler's formula. Now the unit imaginary quaternions all lie on the unit 2-sphere in so any such can be written:
With in this form, the unit quaternion is given by
where are as above.
When is used to describe spatial rotations (cf. quaternions and spatial rotations), it describes a rotation about through an angle of .
For unit radius another choice of hyperspherical coordinates, , makes use of the embedding of in . In complex coordinates we write
This could also be expressed in as
Here runs over the range 0 to , and and can take any values between 0 and 2. These coordinates are useful in the description of the 3-sphere as the Hopf bundle
For any fixed value of between 0 and , the coordinates parameterize a 2-dimensional torus. Rings of constant and above form simple orthogonal grids on the tori. See image to right. In the degenerate cases, when equals 0 or , these coordinates describe a circle.
The round metric on the 3-sphere in these coordinates is given by
and the volume form by
To get the interlocking circles of the Hopf fibration, make a simple substitution in the equations above
In this case , and specify which circle, and specifies the position along each circle. One round trip (0 to 2) of or equates to a round trip of the torus in the 2 respective directions.
Another convenient set of coordinates can be obtained via stereographic projection of from a pole onto the corresponding equatorial hyperplane. For example, if we project from the point we can write a point in as
where is a vector in and . In the second equality above, we have identified with a unit quaternion and with a pure quaternion. (Note that the numerator and denominator commute here even though quaternionic multiplication is generally noncommutative). The inverse of this map takes in to
We could just as well have projected from the point , in which case the point is given by
where is another vector in . The inverse of this map takes to
Note that the coordinates are defined everywhere but and the coordinates everywhere but . This defines an atlas on consisting of two coordinate charts or "patches", which together cover all of . Note that the transition function between these two charts on their overlap is given by
and vice versa.
When considered as the set of unit quaternions, inherits an important structure, namely that of quaternionic multiplication. Because the set of unit quaternions is closed under multiplication, takes on the structure of a group. Moreover, since quaternionic multiplication is smooth, can be regarded as a real Lie group. It is a nonabelian, compact Lie group of dimension 3. When thought of as a Lie group is often denoted or .
It turns out that the only spheres that admit a Lie group structure are , thought of as the set of unit complex numbers, and , the set of unit quaternions. One might think that , the set of unit octonions, would form a Lie group, but this fails since octonion multiplication is nonassociative. The octonionic structure does give one important property: "parallelizability". It turns out that the only spheres that are parallelizable are , , and .
By using a matrix representation of the quaternions, , one obtains a matrix representation of . One convenient choice is given by the Pauli matrices:
This map gives an injective algebra homomorphism from to the set of 2 × 2 complex matrices. It has the property that the absolute value of a quaternion is equal to the square root of the determinant of the matrix image of .
The set of unit quaternions is then given by matrices of the above form with unit determinant. This matrix subgroup is precisely the special unitary group . Thus, as a Lie group is isomorphic to .
Using our Hopf coordinates we can then write any element of in the form
Another way to state this result is if we express the matrix representation of an element of as a linear combination of the Pauli matrices. It is seen that an arbitrary element can be written as
The condition that the determinant of is +1 implies that the coefficients are constrained to lie on a 3-sphere.
In Edwin Abbott Abbott's "Flatland", published in 1884, and in "Sphereland", a 1965 sequel to Flatland by Dionys Burger, the 3-sphere is referred to as an oversphere, and a 4-sphere is referred to as a hypersphere.
Writing in the American Journal of Physics, Mark A. Peterson describes three different ways of visualizing 3-spheres and points out language in "The Divine Comedy" that suggests Dante viewed the Universe in the same way. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39792 |
Sailor Moon (character)
, also known as , is a fictional superheroine who is the main protagonist and title character of the "Sailor Moon" manga series written by Naoko Takeuchi. She is introduced in chapter #1, "Usagi – Sailor Moon" (originally published in Japan's "Nakayoshi" magazine on December 28, 1991), as a carefree schoolgirl who can transform into Sailor Moon, the de facto leader of the Sailor Soldiers. Initially believing herself to be an ordinary girl, she is later revealed to be the reincarnated form of the Princess of the Moon Kingdom, and she subsequently discovers her original name, .
In "Sailor Moon", Usagi meets Luna, a magical talking black cat that is searching for the Moon Princess. Luna reveals that Usagi is destined to save Earth from the forces of evil and gives her a brooch to transform into Sailor Moon. She asks Usagi to form the Sailor Soldiers, find their princess and protect the "Silver Crystal". As Usagi matures, she becomes a powerful warrior and protects her adopted home planet, Earth, from villains who wish to harm it. Usagi is depicted as usually carefree and cheerful, but with cry-baby tendencies that show themselves when things don't go her way.
As the protagonist, Usagi appears in every episode, film, and television special of the anime adaptations, "Sailor Moon" and "Sailor Moon Crystal"; as well as the live action adaptation, "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon". She also cameos in the sister series "". She has been the subject of parodies and has appeared in special events. Most Western audiences were introduced to Usagi appearing in the "Sailor Moon" anime, which is an adaptation of the manga series. Usagi's critical reception has been largely positive and she is recognized as one of the most important and popular female superheroes of all time.
Usagi is first introduced as living the life of a normal teenage schoolgirl in 20th-century Tokyo. Although well-meaning, she is an underachieving, accident-prone crybaby. One day, Usagi encounters a mysterious cat, who later reveals herself to be Luna, a mentor archetype who introduces Usagi to her new heroic role. Luna gives Usagi a magical brooch and explains how to use it to transform into Sailor Moon (the Soldier of Love and Justice); she tells Usagi that she is a Sailor Soldier who must fight for peace and find the rest of the Sailor Soldiers, as well as their princess. Usagi is a reluctant heroine at first, she grows more confident and mature over time. As Sailor Moon, she sets out to fight the villains from her past life and to protect the Earth using the Silver Crystal. This provides most of the conflict in both the manga and the anime.
Usagi lives in Azabu Jūban with her mother, Ikuko Tsukino; her father, Kenji Tsukino; and her brother, Shingo Tsukino. These names reflect those of Naoko Takeuchi's real-life family members. Out of all the Sailor Soldiers, only Usagi and Minako Aino live in a conventional nuclear family, and Usagi is the only one known to have a sibling.
Usagi has a boyfriend named Mamoru Chiba (also known as Tuxedo Mask). Mamoru and Usagi's relationship is a significant part of Usagi's personal life, as well as the series as a whole. Mamoru and Usagi date for a long time in the series and the love they share helps her through many challenges. In the anime adaptation, Mamoru gives Usagi a heart-shaped promise ring just before he leaves for America. The ring represents a promise to Usagi that they will eventually marry.
Once she forms the Sailor Soldiers, Usagi learns that she comes from a race belonging to the Silver Millennium, and that her mother sent her to Earth to be reincarnated. In the second series, Usagi learns that she will give birth to a daughter (Chibiusa) by her boyfriend and future husband. She also discovers that she will become a "Sovereign of the Earth", known as Neo-Queen Serenity, by the 30th century.
Usagi loves sweet foods and they easily distract her. Cake is listed as a favorite food of hers in the manga, and her favorite subject is listed as home economics. She is said to dislike carrots, and is poor with both English and mathematics. She is afraid of dentists, ghosts and lightning, and her greatest dream is to be a bride. She is apparently a member of the Manga Drawing Club at school, though her skill level varies widely when shown in the anime. She stands 150 cm tall.
In the manga and anime, Mamoru refers to her as "odango" (a kind of rice dumpling), based on her distinctive hairstyle. At first, this is always accompanied with the suffix "atama", meaning "head", but this is gradually dropped. Usagi hates the name at first, but it develops into a sign of affection as they become close. Later in the series Haruka and Seiya, other important figures in her life, adopt the name as well. Since there is no North American equivalent to "odango", the original English adaptation almost always used the phrases "meatball head" or "moon face". In the Tokyopop Manga adaptation, Mamoru calls Usagi "buns", which is an approximation of "odango" and is short for "Bunny". In the Viz Media English adaptation, she is referred to as "bun head".
Usagi's character is inconsistent between versions the series. In the manga she starts out as a crybaby, but quickly matures and learns to make decisions for herself.
The series often portrays Usagi as lazy rather than lacking intelligence, such as when she passes her high school exams without trouble when threatened with separation from her friends.
The original anime often portrays Usagi as more childlike. She often bickers with her daughter Chibiusa, but can show just as much caring as her manga counterpart. She does evolve during the course of the series, but other than the last few episodes of each story arc, she generally lacks the maturity she has in the manga.
In the live-action series, Usagi differs slightly from her manga and anime counterparts. She is more outgoing and extroverted, and makes friends very easily. This immediately puts her personality in conflict with the other Sailor Soldiers, each of whom is solitary to some degree. She rarely uses formal grammar with those of her age (though she does with adults), and refers to everyone as ""given name"-chan" (which is very informal and a way of expressing closeness). She teases Ami when Ami continues calling her "Tsukino-san" (a formal way of speaking to classmates), saying that it is as if they are not friends. Every time a new Sailor Soldier appears, Usagi immediately tries to make friends, even though almost all of them resist. However, Usagi eventually makes the other Sailor Soldiers realize that they are stronger together than alone. Usagi also has a habit of forcing her interests on the people that she makes friends with. This is prominent in her relationship with Rei, where she repeatedly tries to get her to sing.
Being a character with a long lifetime (spanning the ancient Silver Millennium era and 30th century), as well as multiple incarnations, special powers and transformations, Usagi has various aliases such as Princess Serenity, Sailor Moon, Princess Sailor Moon, Super Sailor Moon, Eternal Sailor Moon, and Neo-Queen Serenity. In all of her incarnations (barring disguises), Usagi is always depicted with her hair up in twin buns with twin pigtails.
The series often refers to Usagi's Sailor Soldier identity, Sailor Moon, as the "Soldier of Love and Justice", and once as the "Soldier of Mystery". Throughout most of the series, Sailor Moon wears a white and blue "sailor fuku" uniform; white and reddishpink gloves and boots; and crescentmoon earrings. She also wears red hairpieces and white barrettes resembling feathers, both of which can be used for minor attacks. Her personality is no different from when she is a civilian, though her Sailor Moon form has certain powers.
The names for Sailor Moon's attacks center around the Moon, love, mystery and light. Starting out as a frightened, reluctant girl often in need of help, she gradually accepts her full identity. She eventually becomes the most powerful Sailor Soldier in the galaxy, but her capacity for caring for others is shown to be more powerful still.
Salior Moon's appearance and title change at key points when she grows stronger or gains additional powers. The first change takes place during the third major story arc – act 30 of the manga and episode 111 of the anime – when she obtains the Holy Grail and becomes "Super Sailor Moon". In this form, her costume becomes more ornate and her powers are increased. At first she is unable to take this form without the Grail, but she later gains this ability permanently. This happens when Pegasus grants both her and Sailor Chibi Moon new transformation brooches – in arc 34 of the manga and in episode 130 of the anime. However, in this "Super" version, her white back bow is shorter than in the Holy Grail version.
Sailor Moon receives her third and final form at the end of the fourth major story arc, as the combined power of the other Sailor Soldiers transforms her into "Eternal Sailor Moon", whom Diana says is the closest in power to Neo-Queen Serenity. Her uniform is radically altered, including the addition of two pairs of angelic wings on her back which replace her back bow.
The plot of "Sailor Moon" contains several examples of asynchrony, including appearances of Sailor Moon from different time periods. ChibiChibi is a young girl from the future who turns out to be a future form of Sailor Moon. She comes back to the present to aid Eternal Sailor Moon in her fight against Sailor Galaxia. Like Chibiusa, she hypnotizes Usagi's family into believing that she is part of their family. In the manga, ChibiChibi transforms into "Sailor Cosmos" which is implied to be Sailor Moon's ultimate form. However, Sailor Cosmos admits that she is a coward that ran away from her battles and could never match Eternal Sailor Moon's final show of courage and power.
In the manga, Eternal Sailor Moon uses the Silver Moon Crystal, an evolved form of the Silver Crystal, to carry out her attacks.
is a past incarnation of Sailor Moon that lived in the Moon Kingdom during the age of Silver Millennium. She was the daughter of Queen Serenity, who ruled Silver Millennium and watched over the Earth. Princess Serenity's guardians and closest friends were Sailor Mercury, Sailor Mars, Sailor Jupiter, and Sailor Venus, who were princesses of their own respective planets that sometimes lived on the Moon. On one of her visits to Earth, she met and fell in love with Endymion, the crown prince of Earth.
During the attack that caused the Moon Kingdom's downfall, Prince Endymion died protecting Serenity. In the manga she then commits suicide out of grief, while in the anime Queen Metallia killed them both. Serenity's mother, the Queen, was able to seal away the evil that had created the attack, but everyone involved was killed. Before her own death, the Queen used the Silver Crystal to give her daughter (and others) another chance at life, hoping that Serenity and Endymion would be able to find happiness together in their new lives. In the live-action series, it is Princess Serenity herself who destroys the Moon Kingdom when Endymion was killed during the war.
Serenity reincarnates as Usagi Tsukino in the 20th century. Usagi occasionally takes the form of Princess Serenity during the series, often at climactic moments when more strength is needed than Sailor Moon can usually access. Usagi discovers her identity as a princess in act 9 of the manga, episode 34 of the anime, and act 25 of the live-action series.
While Takeuchi draws Usagi with white, yellow, and even pink hair, Serenity almost always has white hair. In the anime, both characters are always blond. In the live-action series, Serenity has black hair and brown eyes, just like Usagi, and she wears her hair straight down rather than in pigtails. This makes her identity more ambiguous before the storyline reveals her to be Usagi.
At climactic moments, Serenity sometimes gains a pair of functioning angelic wings. She does this during the final battles of "SuperS", after she jumps off a tower to save Chibiusa and the two of them collide with Pegasus while falling. It also happens in "Sailor Stars" during the fight with the fully possessed Galaxia when she grabs the Sword of Sealing. It remains unclear if this power comes from her past life, if it belongs to Usagi herself, or if it came from Pegasus and the Sword of Sealing.
Princess Sailor Moon is a powerful combination of Sailor Moon and Princess Serenity that only exists in the live-action series. She is introduced when Usagi is possessed by the spirit of her former self. She originally appears after Queen Beryl takes the shitennou hostage in exchange for Mamoru. Sailor Moon transforms into Princess Sailor Moon and stops Queen Beryl using her sword.
Princess Sailor Moon is not the same person as Usagi and they have completely different personalities. Princess Sailor Moon shows no remorse for the fate of the Four Kings of Heaven and she refers to Mamoru as "Endymion" rather than his civilian name. She is always angry, and has no misgivings about causing death or destruction. In one act, Usagi's friend Naru accidentally gets too close to Princess Sailor Moon and has to be hospitalized as a result. It is also shown that Princess Serenity has full control of the upgrade. Though smiling in most promotional material for the series, Princess Sailor Moon does not smile in the series itself until the end, after reconciling with Usagi.
During a confrontation with her current self as Princess Sailor Moon, Serenity tells Usagi that she would have no qualms about destroying the earth if Endymion were taken from her again. Usagi pleads with Serenity not to overuse her powers, but Serenity refuses. Afraid that she will eventually destroy the world, Usagi tires to suppress her powers. Usagi's internal conflict forces her to undergo endurance training to keep her powers and Princess Serenity persona at bay. Usagi initially succeeds but avoiding negative thoughts. However, when she is forced to kill a possessed Mamoru, Serenity overcomes Usagi's resistance and transforms into Princess Sailor Moon. Serenity even summons her own minions to fight the other Sailor Guardians to prevent them from stopping her. Princess Sailor Moon successfully destroys the world once again, but Serenity eventually realizes the extent to which she is responsible for this and uses the Silver Crystal to undo the harm she has done.
Princess Sailor Moon has a sword that can deflect enemy attacks or unleash devastating projectiles. The sword also doubles as a harp with invisible strings that Princess Sailor Moon plays while mourning her lost prince. The harp's main power is the ability to heal people and the land. Other than the healing powers, the exact effect of playing the harp is unclear, but it often causes her Silver Crystal to feed the power of Queen Metaria, accelerating the devastation of the planet.
As with other characters unique to the live-action series, Takeuchi designed Princess Sailor Moon's outfit. Her sailor outfit is considerably more elaborate than Sailor Moon's, and included pearls on her gloves and lace on her skirt. In fact, there is a very similar design on the back cover of "Sailor Moon: Short Stories" volume 1.
During the second major story arc, it is revealed that Usagi, as Serenity, will eventually become the queen regnant of a new Silver Millennium called Crystal Tokyo, in the 30th century. She is first seen in this future form in act 16 of the manga and episode 68 of the anime. Usagi learns that she will be given the title "Sovereign of Earth", and Mamoru will become King Endymion alongside her. It is stated in the anime that she becomes Neo-Queen Serenity after warding off a second Ice Age, though the specifics of this are never discussed.
This incarnation is shown to be more mature than the present day Usagi, though she is still childish in some ways. For example, in episode 104, Chibiusa gives the Sailor Soldiers a letter from the future, in which the Queen asks them to train her, but the letter is simplistic and contains almost no kanji. In episode 146, Diana says that the King and Queen would sometimes play sick to get out of things. Letters she sends through the Door of Space-Time to Chibiusa are sometimes signed with a drawing of herself (and sometimes King Endymion) instead of a name.
In the manga, Neo-Queen Serenity tells the present-day Sailor Soldiers that after she became queen, she lost her power as a Sailor Soldier. In the second arc of the anime she does not transform (into Sailor Moon) even when the others do. However, she is seen showing great powers in a flashback when the King Endymion of the future describes the great feats of Neo-Queen Serenity during the time she brought about peace.
She wears an altered version of the dress she wore as a princess. The shoulder pieces are omitted and a large, wing-shaped bow replaces the smaller one of the princess outfit. In the manga, Neo-Queen Serenity's dress is similar to her past form's outfit. She also wears a crown and new earrings. The crescent moon is always visible on her forehead, just as it is with her princess form. Her face and facial expressions are drawn to look more mature than the 20th century Usagi, but her iconic hairstyle is retained.
This form is the one that Chibiusa considers as truly being her mother, while she sees the Usagi of the past as a sister figure.
Usagi can transform into a "Sailor Soldier" by wearing a special device (usually a brooch) and shouting a special command that activates the device. Her original transformation command is . She gains a new basic transformation sequence for each of the five major story arcs. In the fifth arc she becomes Eternal Sailor Moon with "Silver Moon Crystal Power" in the manga, or "" in the anime adaptation (and once in the manga). At first, she is required to be in her Super Sailor Moon form to become Eternal Sailor Moon, as the upgrade to her brooch is temporary. When facing off with Nehelenia for the final time, the brooch is permanently upgraded allowing her to become Eternal Sailor Moon directly.
Most of the anime adaptations' transformation sequences involve the use of shiny red or pink ribbons that fly out of her brooch and form her uniform. Feathers and wings also figure prominently in some sequences, particularly the transformation into Eternal Sailor Moon.
As the protagonist and leader, Usagi has the most special powers of any character in the series. Her physical attacks, usually one-offs and not always successful, include the occasional use of her hair pins as projectile weapons. One of her techniques is the , which involves using her red hair pieces to amplify her screams.
The is a magical crystal that only the members of the Moon dynasty can use. The first English-dubbed anime sometimes calls it the "Imperium Silver Crystal" as well as various other names.
The Crystal possesses tremendous power, capable of reviving an entire world from ruin. However, the strain of using such power often costs the user her life, as the power derives from the life force of the Moon dynasty. The anime shows this happening three times. The first time is in a flashback with Queen Serenity; the second time when Usagi defeats Queen Metaria at the end of season one; and finally in the "R" movie. It is shown as the source of Queen Serenity's power during the age of Silver Millennium, with Usagi Tsukino and Chibiusa each going on to inherit the Crystal in some form. However, it is also shown in the "S" movie that the power of all the Senshi working in unison allows Sailor Moon to use the Crystal's full strength without the result being fatal (although she was still exhausted afterwards from using it).
Both the anime, manga and second anime series commonly portray the Silver Crystal as possibly the single most powerful artifact in the universe, able to focus the energy of its wielder to perform magnificent feats. However, several artifacts rival it in strength, including the Black Crystal of the Death Phantom, and the Saffer Crystal of Sailor Galaxia. In the fifth series of the anime, the crystal also appears to double as the Star Seed of Sailor Moon, which was hinted at in the "R" movie, and the manga implies that it is her Sailor Crystal. It takes on a multitude of shapes, including round, diamond, rose, heart, star, and lotus, and it turns pink while stored within the brooches of Sailor Moon and Sailor Chibi Moon.
Because Chibiusa comes from the future – having eventually inherited the Silver Crystal from Usagi – two versions of it exist in the series. After the first and second story arcs, the owners of the crystals keep them in their respective transformation brooches and only remove them in times of urgent need.
The original anime features seven rainbow crystals that had the Seven Great Monsters (the most powerful monsters in the Dark Kingdom) sealed into them. They were sealed within seven separate shards of the Silver Crystal using Queen Serenity's power. They were then carried to Earth where they were reincarnated centuries later, with no memories of their prior existences. All seven rainbow crystals (and, as in the manga, one of Usagi's tears) are needed to recombine to form the Silver Crystal.
Usagi and "Sailor Moon" series evolved from Naoko Takeuchi's earlier one-shot series called "Codename: Sailor V". In Takeuchi's first proposal for the "Sailor Moon" series, each of the five heroines had a completely unique outfit. It was eventually decided that they would instead wear uniforms based on a single theme, whose design was closest to Sailor Moon's original costume concept. Sailor Moon's original had some small differences, including color changes, an exposed midriff, and ribbons around the gloves and boots. She also had a mask, which did appear in a few chapters of the manga before being discarded. These aspects of Sailor Moon's costume are shown in multiple pieces of early artwork, along with a gun and cloak, which were also parts of the original concept.
Takeuchi based Usagi's signature hairstyle on a "good luck charm" she had during her studies as a university student. Takeuchi would put her own hair up in "odango" before difficult classes or exams. Sailor Moon has pink hair in the initial sketches, but by the intermediate stages of development, Takeuchi planned to have the character's hair be blond in civilian form and change to silver when she transformed. Her editor, Fumio Osano, told her that silver hair would be too plain for cover art. Despite this, stylistic use of differently colored hair does sometimes appear in later artwork, and the concept of the heroines' hair changing color when transformed is used in "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon".
Of all the Sailor Soldiers, Usagi's personality is closest to Takeuchi's own personality at the time "Sailor Moon" was created.
The kanji of Usagi's surname translate as and . Her given name is in hiragana and so its meaning is not inherent, but the word means "rabbit" and this is used as a pun frequently throughout the series, including her hairstyle and possessions. Her name is structured as a pun, as the syllable "no" indicates a possessive, so her name can also be understood as "Rabbit of the Moon." This derives from a Japanese folktale about the rabbit which is said to be visible in the Moon's face, much like the Western Man in the Moon. The English-language manga – along with other localisations – gives her the nickname "Bunny" to partially preserve this pun. "Usagi" is not a common given name in Japan.
In the Japanese version of every "Sailor Moon" anime series and subsequent related media, Usagi has been voiced by Kotono Mitsuishi. For this role, Mitsuishi used a higher voice than her natural one. During recording sessions of the early episodes, Mitsuishi had to mentally prepare herself to play Usagi. While Mitsuishi was away during production of episodes 44–50, Kae Araki (who would later voice Usagi's own future daughter, Chibiusa) voiced Usagi as a stand-in. Mitsuishi would later reprise her role in "Sailor Moon Crystal", the only actress from the original cast to do so.
In DIC Entertainment's English dub of "Sailor Moon" (produced in association with Optimum Productions), Sailor Moon was voiced by Tracey Moore for the first 14 episodes (edited down to 11) after which Terri Hawkes took over as the voice for the remaining episodes of the DiC produced dub, as well as Pioneer's dub for the three films, though Moore would return to voice the character in two more episodes later on in the first season. Linda Ballantyne was the voice of Sailor Moon in Cloverway's dub of episodes 83–159 of Sailor Moon (produced in association with Optimum Productions). When Ballantyne first recorded the series, Ballantyne attempted to emulate Hawkes, but soon found it difficult to perform. She wanted the character to "have a lot more fun and just be a goofy teenager." Ballantyne cited her performance as "just more flighty... Until of course the world needed to be saved." American singer Jennifer Cihi provided the English vocals for Serena's songs in the first English adaptation.
Stephanie Sheh provides the voice in Viz Media's dub of the entire original "Sailor Moon" series (produced in association with Studiopolis), and also "Sailor Moon Crystal".
In the stage musicals, Usagi was portrayed by Anza Ohyama, Fumina Hara, Miyuki Kanbe (who played the character with a "cute and high voice"), Marina Kuroki, , Hotaru Nomoto, Sayuri Inoue, Mizuki Yamashita, Kanae Yumemiya, Natsuki Koga and Tomomi Kasai.
In the "SuperS" Musicals, Sanae Kimura, who played Sailor Uranus, provided the voice of Neo-Queen Serenity during "Over the Moon", a duet between Sailor Moon and Neo-Queen Serenity. A third, unknown person, was on stage in Serenity's costume while both Sailor Moon and Uranus were onstage. Uncredited body doubles are common in the musicals to allow the character to appear to transform instantly.
In "Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon", Usagi was portrayed by Miyū Sawai.
Sheila Rose Browning describes Sailor Moon as "one of the most popular and well-known manga characters in Japan". Usagi influenced the hairstyle and personality of Misato Katsuragi from "Neon Genesis Evangelion", and of Gruier Serenity's anime version from "Bodacious Space Pirates". Sailor Moon was ranked 9th on IGN's "Top 25 Anime Characters of All Time", being the hightest-ranking female character in the list. Rebecca Silverman, writing about the 2011 re-release of the "Sailor Moon" manga, felt that Usagi's initial hesitancy about whether she is good enough to be Sailor Moon added authenticity to her claim of being an "ordinary girl". Silverman states that along with Itazura na Kiss and Marmalade Boy, Usagi gave rise to an "unintelligent heroine" character type, but feels that even in the first volume, Usagi's determination sets her apart.
Comedian Samantha Bee portrayed Sailor Moon in a live-action production at the Canadian National Exhibition. In "Robot Chicken", Sailor Moon faces one of Queen Beryl's minions, who develops a visible erection after her transformation because her very short skirt exposes her underpants without her even having to move. Sailor Moon and Luna are grossed out.
In "The Simpsons" couch gags from the episodes, "'Tis the Fifteenth Season" and "Fraudcast News", Lisa Simpson appears dressed as Sailor Moon.
The character Mina Loveberry resembles Sailor Moon including her hair in "Star vs. the Forces of Evil"
In the fourth-season episode "Number's Up" of the BET series "Hit the Floor" during an underground Vogue battle the character Kyle Hart (Katherine Bailess) wears a costume that highly resembles Sailors Moon's signature uniform.
An challenge in early 2020 called the Sailor Moon redraw challage where scenss of her in the series are drawn in different styles or have another fictional character taking her place. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39803 |
Nature versus nurture
The nature versus nurture debate involves whether human behavior is determined by the environment, either prenatal or during a person's life, or by a person's genes. The alliterative expression "nature and nurture" in English has been in use since at least the Elizabethan period and goes back to medieval French.
The complementary combination of the two concepts is an ancient concept (Greek: ). Nature is what we think of as pre-wiring and is influenced by genetic inheritance and other biological factors. Nurture is generally taken as the influence of external factors after conception e.g. the product of exposure, experience and learning on an individual.
The phrase in its modern sense was popularized by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton, the modern founder of eugenics and behavioral genetics, discussing the influence of heredity and environment on social advancement. Galton was influenced by "On the Origin of Species" written by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin.
The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from "nurture" was termed "tabula rasa" ('blank tablet, slate') by John Locke in 1690. A "blank slate view" (sometimes termed "blank-slatism") in human developmental psychology, which assumes that human behavioral traits develop almost exclusively from environmental influences, was widely held during much of the 20th century.
The debate between "blank-slate" denial of the influence of heritability, and the view admitting both environmental and heritable traits, has often been cast in terms of nature "versus" nurture. These two conflicting approaches to human development were at the core of an ideological dispute over research agendas throughout the second half of the 20th century. As both "nature" and "nurture" factors were found to contribute substantially, often in an inextricable manner, such views were seen as naive or outdated by most scholars of human development by the 2000s.
The strong dichotomy of nature "versus" nurture has thus been claimed to have limited relevance in some fields of research. Close feedback loops have been found in which "nature" and "nurture" influence one another constantly, as seen in self-domestication. In ecology and behavioral genetics, researchers think nurture has an essential influence on nature. Similarly in other fields, the dividing line between an inherited and an acquired trait becomes unclear, as in epigenetics or fetal development.
John Locke's "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690) is often cited as the foundational document of the "blank slate" view. In the "Essay", Locke specifically criticizes René Descartes's claim of an innate idea of God that is universal to humanity. Locke's view was harshly criticized in his own time. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, complained that by denying the possibility of any innate ideas, Locke "threw all order and virtue out of the world," leading to total moral relativism. By the 19th century, the predominant perspective was contrary to that of Locke's, tending to focus on "instinct."
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby noted that William James (1842–1910) argued that humans have "more" instincts than animals, and that greater freedom of action is the result of having more psychological instincts, not fewer.
The question of "innate ideas" or "instincts" were of some importance in the discussion of free will in moral philosophy. In 18th-century philosophy, this was cast in terms of "innate ideas" establishing the presence of a universal virtue, prerequisite for objective morals. In the 20th century, this argument was in a way inverted, since some philosophers (J. L. Mackie) now argued that the evolutionary origins of human behavioral traits forces us to concede that there is no foundation for ethics, while others (Thomas Nagel) treated ethics as a field of cognitively valid statements in complete isolation from evolutionary considerations.
In the early 20th century, there was an increased interest in the role of the environment, as a reaction to the strong focus on pure heredity in the wake of the triumphal success of Darwin's theory of evolution. During this time, the social sciences developed as the project of studying the influence of culture in clean isolation from questions related to "biology. Franz Boas's "The Mind of Primitive Man" (1911) established a program that would dominate American anthropology for the next 15 years. In this study, he established that in any given population, biology, language, material, and symbolic culture, are autonomous; that each is an equally important dimension of human nature, but that no one of these dimensions is reducible to another.
John B. Watson in the 1920s and 1930s established the school of "purist behaviorism" that would become dominant over the following decades. Watson is often said to have been convinced of the complete dominance of cultural influence over anything that heredity might contribute. This is based on the following quote which is frequently repeated without context, as the last sentence is frequently omitted, leading to confusion about Watson's position:Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.During the 1940s to 1960s, Ashley Montagu was a notable proponent of this purist form of behaviorism which allowed no contribution from heredity whatsoever: Man is man because he has no instincts, because everything he is and has become he has learned, acquired, from his culture ... with the exception of the instinctoid reactions in infants to sudden withdrawals of support and to sudden loud noises, the human being is entirely instinctless. In 1951, Calvin Hall suggested that the dichotomy opposing nature to nurture is ultimately fruitless.
In "African Genesis" (1961) and "The Territorial Imperative" (1966), Robert Ardrey argues for innate attributes of human nature, especially concerning territoriality. Desmond Morris in "The Naked Ape" (1967) expresses similar views. Organised opposition to Montagu's kind of purist "blank-slatism" began to pick up in the 1970s, notably led by E. O. Wilson ("On Human Nature", 1979).
The tool of twin studies was developed as a research design intended to exclude all confounders based on inherited behavioral traits. Such studies are designed to decompose the variability of a given trait in a given population into a genetic and an environmental component. Twin studies established that there was, in many cases, a significant heritable component. These results did not, in any way, point to overwhelming contribution of heritable factors, with heritability typically ranging around 40% to 50%, so that the controversy may not be cast in terms of "purist behaviorism" vs. "purist nativism". Rather, it was "purist behaviorism" that was gradually replaced by the now-predominant view that both kinds of factors usually contribute to a given trait, anecdotally phrased by Donald Hebb as an answer to the question "which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?" by asking in response, "Which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?"
In a comparable avenue of research, anthropologist Donald Brown in the 1980s surveyed hundreds of anthropological studies from around the world and collected a set of cultural universals. He identified approximately 150 such features, coming to the conclusion there is indeed a "universal human nature", and that these features point to what that universal human nature is.
At the height of the controversy, during the 1970s to 1980s, the debate was highly ideologised. In "" (1984), Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose and Leon Kamin criticise "genetic determinism" from a Marxist framework, arguing that "Science is the ultimate legitimator of bourgeois ideology ... If biological determinism is a weapon in the struggle between classes, then the universities are weapons factories, and their teaching and research faculties are the engineers, designers, and production workers." The debate thus shifted away from whether heritable traits exist to whether it was politically or ethically permissible to admit their existence. The authors deny this, requesting that evolutionary inclinations be discarded in ethical and political discussions regardless of whether they exist or not.
Heritability studies became much easier to perform, and hence much more numerous, with the advances of genetic studies during the 1990s. By the late 1990s, an overwhelming amount of evidence had accumulated that amounts to a refutation of the extreme forms of "blank-slatism" advocated by Watson or Montagu.
This revised state of affairs was summarized in books aimed at a popular audience from the late 1990s. In "" (1998), Judith Rich Harris was heralded by Steven Pinker as a book that "will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology." However, Harris was criticized for exaggerating the point of "parental upbringing seems to matter less than previously thought" to the implication that "parents do not matter."
The situation as it presented itself by the end of the 20th century was summarized in "" (2002) by Steven Pinker. The book became a best-seller, and was instrumental in bringing to the attention of a wider public the paradigm shift away from the behaviourist purism of the 1940s to 1970s that had taken place over the preceding decades.
Pinker portrays the adherence to pure "blank-slatism" as an ideological dogma linked to two other dogmas found in the dominant view of human nature in the 20th century:
Pinker argues that all three dogmas were held onto for an extended period even in the face of evidence because they were seen as "desirable" in the sense that if any human trait is purely conditioned by culture, any undesired trait (such as crime or aggression) may be engineered away by purely cultural (political means). Pinker focuses on reasons he assumes were responsible for unduly repressing evidence to the contrary, notably the fear of (imagined or projected) political or ideological consequences.
It is important to note that the term "heritability" refers only to the degree of genetic variation between people on a trait. It does not refer to the degree to which a trait of a particular individual is due to environmental or genetic factors. The traits of an individual are always a complex interweaving of both. For an individual, even strongly genetically influenced, or "obligate" traits, such as eye color, assume the inputs of a typical environment during ontogenetic development (e.g., certain ranges of temperatures, oxygen levels, etc.).
In contrast, the "heritability index" statistically quantifies the extent to which variation "between individuals" on a trait is due to variation in the genes those individuals carry. In animals where breeding and environments can be controlled experimentally, heritability can be determined relatively easily. Such experiments would be unethical for human research. This problem can be overcome by finding existing populations of humans that reflect the experimental setting the researcher wishes to create.
One way to determine the contribution of genes and environment to a trait is to study twins. In one kind of study, identical twins reared apart are compared to randomly selected pairs of people. The twins share identical genes, but different family environments. Twins reared apart are not assigned at random to foster or adoptive parents. In another kind of twin study, identical twins reared together (who share family environment and genes) are compared to fraternal twins reared together (who also share family environment but only share half their genes). Another condition that permits the disassociation of genes and environment is adoption. In one kind of adoption study, biological siblings reared together (who share the same family environment and half their genes) are compared to adoptive siblings (who share their family environment but none of their genes).
In many cases, it has been found that genes make a substantial contribution, including psychological traits such as intelligence and personality. Yet heritability may differ in other circumstances, for instance environmental deprivation. Examples of low, medium, and high heritability traits include:
Twin and adoption studies have their methodological limits. For example, both are limited to the range of environments and genes which they sample. Almost all of these studies are conducted in Western, first-world countries, and therefore cannot be extrapolated globally to include poorer, non-western populations. Additionally, both types of studies depend on particular assumptions, such as the equal environments assumption in the case of twin studies, and the lack of pre-adoptive effects in the case of adoption studies.
Since the definition of "nature" in this context is tied to "heritability", the definition of "nurture" has necessarily become very wide, including any type of causality that is not heritable. The term has thus moved away from its original connotation of "cultural influences" to include all effects of the environment, including; indeed, a substantial source of environmental input to human nature may arise from stochastic variations in prenatal development and is thus in no sense of the term "cultural".
The interactions of genes with environment, called "gene–environment interactions", are another component of the nature–nurture debate. A classic example of gene–environment interaction is the ability of a diet low in the amino acid phenylalanine to partially suppress the genetic disease phenylketonuria. Yet another complication to the nature–nurture debate is the existence of gene–environment correlations. These correlations indicate that individuals with certain genotypes are more likely to find themselves in certain environments. Thus, it appears that genes can shape (the selection or creation of) environments. Even using experiments like those described above, it can be very difficult to determine convincingly the relative contribution of genes and environment.
Heritability refers to the origins of differences between people. Individual development, even of highly heritable traits, such as eye color, depends on a range of environmental factors, from the other genes in the organism, to physical variables such as temperature, oxygen levels etc. during its development or ontogenesis.
The variability of trait can be meaningfully spoken of as being due in certain proportions to genetic differences ("nature"), or environments ("nurture"). For highly penetrant Mendelian genetic disorders such as Huntington's disease virtually all the incidence of the disease is due to genetic differences. Huntington's animal models live much longer or shorter lives depending on how they are cared for.
At the other extreme, traits such as native language are environmentally determined: linguists have found that any child (if capable of learning a language at all) can learn any human language with equal facility. With virtually all biological and psychological traits, however, genes and environment work in concert, communicating back and forth to create the individual.
At a molecular level, genes interact with signals from other genes and from the environment. While there are many thousands of single-gene-locus traits, so-called complex traits are due to the additive effects of many (often hundreds) of small gene effects. A good example of this is height, where variance appears to be spread across many hundreds of loci.
Extreme genetic or environmental conditions can predominate in rare circumstances—if a child is born mute due to a genetic mutation, it will not learn to speak any language regardless of the environment; similarly, someone who is practically certain to eventually develop Huntington's disease according to their genotype may die in an unrelated accident (an environmental event) long before the disease will manifest itself.
Steven Pinker likewise described several examples:[C]oncrete behavioral traits that patently depend on content provided by the home or culture—which language one speaks, which religion one practices, which political party one supports—are not heritable at all. But traits that reflect the underlying talents and temperaments—how proficient with language a person is, how religious, how liberal or conservative—are partially heritable.When traits are determined by a complex interaction of genotype and environment it is possible to measure the heritability of a trait within a population. However, many non-scientists who encounter a report of a trait having a certain percentage heritability imagine non-interactional, additive contributions of genes and environment to the trait. As an analogy, some laypeople may think of the degree of a trait being made up of two "buckets," genes and environment, each able to hold a certain capacity of the trait. But even for intermediate heritabilities, a trait is always shaped by both genetic dispositions and the environments in which people develop, merely with greater and lesser plasticities associated with these heritability measures.
Heritability measures always refer to the degree of "variation between individuals in a population". That is, as these statistics cannot be applied at the level of the individual, it would be incorrect to say that while the heritability index of personality is about 0.6, 60% of one's personality is obtained from one's parents and 40% from the environment. To help to understand this, imagine that all humans were genetic clones. The heritability index for all traits would be zero (all variability between clonal individuals must be due to environmental factors). And, contrary to erroneous interpretations of the heritability index, as societies become more egalitarian (everyone has more similar experiences) the heritability index goes up (as environments become more similar, variability between individuals is due more to genetic factors).
One should also take into account the fact that the variables of heritability and environmentality are not precise and vary within a chosen population and across cultures. It would be more accurate to state that the degree of heritability and environmentality is measured in its reference to a particular phenotype in a chosen group of a population in a given period of time. The accuracy of the calculations is further hindered by the number of coefficients taken into consideration, age being one such variable. The display of the influence of heritability and environmentality differs drastically across age groups: the older the studied age is, the more noticeable the heritability factor becomes, the younger the test subjects are, the more likely it is to show signs of strong influence of the environmental factors.
A study conducted by T. J. Bouchard, Jr. showed data that has been evidence for the importance of genes when testing middle-aged twins reared together and reared apart. The results shown have been important evidence against the importance of environment when determining, happiness, for example. In the Minnesota study of twins reared apart, it was actually found that there was higher correlation for monozygotic twins reared apart (0.52) than monozygotic twins reared together (0.44). Also, highlighting the importance of genes, these correlations found much higher correlation among monozygotic than dizygotic twins that had a correlation of 0.08 when reared together and −0.02 when reared apart.
Some have pointed out that environmental inputs affect the expression of genes. This is one explanation of how environment can influence the extent to which a genetic disposition will actually manifest.
The social pre-wiring hypothesis (informally known as "wired to be social") refers to the ontogeny of social interaction. The theory questions whether there is a propensity to socially oriented action already present "before" birth. Research in the theory concludes that newborns are born into the world with a unique genetic wiring to be social.
Circumstantial evidence supporting the social pre-wiring hypothesis can be revealed when examining newborns' behavior. Newborns, not even hours after birth, have been found to display a preparedness for social interaction. This preparedness is expressed in ways such as their imitation of facial gestures. This observed behavior cannot be contributed to any current form of socialization or social construction. Rather, newborns most likely inherit to some extent social behavior and identity through genetics.
Principal evidence of this theory is uncovered by examining twin pregnancies. The main argument is, if there are social behaviors that are inherited and developed before birth, then one should expect twin foetuses to engage in some form of social interaction before they are born. Thus, ten foetuses were analyzed over a period of time using ultrasound techniques. Using kinematic analysis, the results of the experiment were that the twin foetuses would interact with each other for longer periods and more often as the pregnancies went on. Researchers were able to conclude that the performance of movements between the co-twins were not accidental but specifically aimed.
The social pre-wiring hypothesis was proven correct:The central advance of this study is the demonstration that 'social actions' are already performed in the second trimester of gestation. Starting from the 14th week of gestation twin foetuses plan and execute movements specifically aimed at the co-twin. These findings force us to predate the emergence of social behavior: when the context enables it, as in the case of twin foetuses, other-directed actions are not only possible but predominant over self-directed actions.
Traits may be considered to be adaptations (such as the umbilical cord), byproducts of adaptations (the belly button) or due to random variation (convex or concave belly button shape).
An alternative to contrasting nature and nurture focuses on "obligate vs. facultative" adaptations. Adaptations may be generally more obligate (robust in the face of typical environmental variation) or more facultative (sensitive to typical environmental variation). For example, the rewarding sweet taste of sugar and the pain of bodily injury are obligate psychological adaptations—typical environmental variability during development does not much affect their operation.
On the other hand, facultative adaptations are somewhat like "if-then" statements. An example of a facultative psychological adaptation may be adult attachment style. The attachment style of adults, (for example, a "secure attachment style," the propensity to develop close, trusting bonds with others) is proposed to be conditional on whether an individual's early childhood caregivers could be trusted to provide reliable assistance and attention. An example of a facultative physiological adaptation is tanning of skin on exposure to sunlight (to prevent skin damage). Facultative social adaptation have also been proposed. For example, whether a society is warlike or peaceful has been proposed to be conditional on how much collective threat that society is experiencing .
Quantitative studies of heritable traits throw light on the question.
Developmental genetic analysis examines the effects of genes over the course of a human lifespan. Early studies of intelligence, which mostly examined young children, found that heritability measured 40–50%. Subsequent developmental genetic analyses found that variance attributable to additive environmental effects is less apparent in older individuals, with estimated heritability of IQ increasing in adulthood.
Multivariate genetic analysis examines the genetic contribution to several traits that vary together. For example, multivariate genetic analysis has demonstrated that the genetic determinants of all specific cognitive abilities (e.g., memory, spatial reasoning, processing speed) overlap greatly, such that the genes associated with any specific cognitive ability will affect all others. Similarly, multivariate genetic analysis has found that genes that affect scholastic achievement completely overlap with the genes that affect cognitive ability.
Extremes analysis examines the link between normal and pathological traits. For example, it is hypothesized that a given behavioral disorder may represent an extreme of a continuous distribution of a normal behavior and hence an extreme of a continuous distribution of genetic and environmental variation. Depression, phobias, and reading disabilities have been examined in this context.
For a few highly heritable traits, studies have identified loci associated with variance in that trait, for instance in some individuals with schizophrenia.
Through studies of identical twins separated at birth, one-third of their creative thinking abilities come from genetics and two-thirds come from learning. Research suggests that between 37 and 42 percent of the explained variance can be attributed to genetic factors. The learning primarily comes in the form of human capital transfers of entrepreneurial skills through parental role modeling. Other findings agree that the key to innovative entrepreneurial success comes from environmental factors and working “10,000 hours” to gain mastery in entrepreneurial skills.
Evidence from behavioral genetic research suggests that family environmental factors may have an effect upon childhood IQ, accounting for up to a quarter of the variance. The American Psychological Association's report "" (1995) states that there is no doubt that normal child development requires a certain minimum level of responsible care. Here, environment is playing a role in what is believed to be fully genetic (intelligence) but it was found that severely deprived, neglectful, or abusive environments have highly negative effects on many aspects of children's intellect development. Beyond that minimum, however, the role of family experience is in serious dispute. On the other hand, by late adolescence this correlation disappears, such that adoptive siblings no longer have similar IQ scores.
Moreover, adoption studies indicate that, by adulthood, adoptive siblings are no more similar in IQ than strangers (IQ correlation near zero), while full siblings show an IQ correlation of 0.6. Twin studies reinforce this pattern: monozygotic (identical) twins raised separately are highly similar in IQ (0.74), more so than dizygotic (fraternal) twins raised together (0.6) and much more than adoptive siblings (~0.0). Recent adoption studies also found that supportive parents can have a positive effect on the development of their children.
Personality is a frequently cited example of a heritable trait that has been studied in twins and adoptees using behavioral genetic study designs. The most famous categorical organization of heritable personality traits were defined in the 1970s by two research teams led by Paul Costa & Robert R. McCrae and Warren Norman & Lewis Goldberg in which they had people rate their personalities on 1000+ dimensions they then narrowed these down into ""The Big Five"" factors of personality—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The close genetic relationship between positive personality traits and, for example, our happiness traits are the mirror images of comorbidity in psychopathology. These personality factors were consistent across cultures, and many studies have also tested the heritability of these traits.
Identical twins reared apart are far more similar in personality than randomly selected pairs of people. Likewise, identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins. Also, biological siblings are more similar in personality than adoptive siblings. Each observation suggests that personality is heritable to a certain extent. A supporting article had focused on the heritability of personality (which is estimated to be around 50% for subjective well-being) in which a study was conducted using a representative sample of 973 twin pairs to test the heritable differences in subjective well-being which were found to be fully accounted for by the genetic model of the Five-Factor Model’s personality domains. However, these same study designs allow for the examination of environment as well as genes.
Adoption studies also directly measure the strength of shared family effects. Adopted siblings share only family environment. Most adoption studies indicate that by adulthood the personalities of adopted siblings are little or no more similar than random pairs of strangers. This would mean that shared family effects on personality are zero by adulthood.
In the case of personality traits, non-shared environmental effects are often found to out-weigh shared environmental effects. That is, environmental effects that are typically thought to be life-shaping (such as family life) may have less of an impact than non-shared effects, which are harder to identify. One possible source of non-shared effects is the environment of pre-natal development. Random variations in the genetic program of development may be a substantial source of non-shared environment. These results suggest that "nurture" may not be the predominant factor in "environment". Environment and our situations, do in fact impact our lives, but not the way in which we would typically react to these environmental factors. We are preset with personality traits that are the basis for how we would react to situations. An example would be how extraverted prisoners become less happy than introverted prisoners and would react to their incarceration more negatively due to their preset extraverted personality. Behavioral genes are somewhat proven to exist when we take a look at fraternal twins. When fraternal twins are reared apart, they show the same similarities in behavior and response as if they have been reared together.
The relationship between personality and people's own well-being is influenced and mediated by genes (Weiss, Bates, & Luciano, 2008). There has been found to be a stable set point for happiness that is characteristic of the individual (largely determined by the individual's genes). Happiness fluctuates around that setpoint (again, genetically determined) based on whether good things or bad things are happening to us ("nurture"), but only fluctuates in small magnitude in a normal human. The midpoint of these fluctuations is determined by the "great genetic lottery" that people are born with, which leads them to conclude that how happy they may feel at the moment or over time is simply due to the luck of the draw, or gene. This fluctuation was also not due to educational attainment, which only accounted for less than 2% of the variance in well-being for women, and less than 1% of the variance for men.
They consider that the individualities measured together with personality tests remain steady throughout an individual’s lifespan. They further believe that human beings may refine their forms or personality but can never change them entirely. Darwin's Theory of Evolution steered naturalists such as George Williams and William Hamilton to the concept of personality evolution. They suggested that physical organs and also personality is a product of natural selection.
With the advent of genomic sequencing, it has become possible to search for and identify specific gene polymorphisms that affect traits such as IQ and personality. These techniques work by tracking the association of differences in a trait of interest with differences in specific molecular markers or functional variants. An example of a visible human trait for which the precise genetic basis of differences are relatively well known is eye color.
When discussing the significant role of genetic heritability in relation to one's level of happiness, it has been found that from 44% to 52% of the variance in one's well-being is associated with genetic variation. Based on the retest of smaller samples of twins studies after 4,5, and 10 years, it is estimated that the heritability of the genetic stable component of subjective well-being approaches 80%. Other studies that have found that genes are a large influence in the variance found in happiness measures, exactly around 35–50%.
In contrast to views developed in 1960s that gender identity is primarily learned (which led to policy-based surgical sex changed in children such as David Reimer), genomics has provided solid evidence that both sex and gender identities are primarily influenced by genes:
In their attempts to locate the genes responsible for configuring certain phenotypes, researches resort to two different techniques.
Linkage study facilitates the process of determining a specific location in which a gene of interest is located. This methodology is applied only among individuals that are related and does not serve to pinpoint specific genes. It does, however, narrow down the area of search, making it easier to locate one or several genes in the genome which constitute a specific trait.
Association studies, on the other hand, are more hypothetic and seek to verify whether a particular genetic variable really influences the phenotype of interest. In association studies it is more common to use case-control approach, comparing the subject with relatively higher or lower hereditary determinants with the control subject. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39807 |
Dub, King of Scotland
Dub mac Maíl Coluim (Modern Gaelic: "Dubh mac Mhaoil Chaluim"), sometimes anglicised as Duff MacMalcolm, called Dén, "the Vehement" and Niger, "the Black" (born c. 928 - died 967) was king of Alba. He was son of Malcolm I and succeeded to the throne when Indulf was killed in 962.
While later chroniclers such as John of Fordun supplied a great deal of information on Dub's life and reign, and Hector Boece in his 'The history and chronicles of Scotland' tell tales of witchcraft and treason, almost all of them are rejected by modern historians. There are very few sources for the reign of Dub, of which the Chronicle of the Kings of Alba and a single entry in the Annals of Ulster are the closest to contemporary.
The Chronicle records that during Dub's reign bishop Fothach, most likely bishop of St Andrews or of Dunkeld, died. The remaining report is of a battle between Dub and Cuilén, son of king Ildulb. Dub won the battle, fought "upon the ridge of Crup", in which Duchad, abbot of Dunkeld, sometimes supposed to be an ancestor of Crínán of Dunkeld, and Dubdon, the mormaer of Atholl, died.
The various accounts differ on what happened afterwards. The Chronicle claims that Dub was driven out of the kingdom. The Latin material interpolated in Andrew of Wyntoun's "Orygynale Cronykl" states that he was murdered at Forres, and links this to an eclipse of the sun which can be dated to 20 July 966. The Annals of Ulster report only: "Dub mac Maíl Coluim, king of Alba, was killed by the Scots themselves"; the usual way of reporting a death in internal strife, and place the death in 967. It has been suggested that Sueno's Stone, near Forres, may be a monument to Dub, erected by his brother Kenneth II (Cináed mac Maíl Coluim). It is presumed that Dub was killed or driven out by Cuilén, who became king after Dub's death, or by his supporters.
It is related that his body was hidden under the bridge of Kinloss, and the sun did not shine till it was found and buried. An eclipse on 10 July 967 may have originated or confirmed this story.
Dub left at least one son, Kenneth III (Cináed mac Dub). Although his descendants did not compete successfully for the kingship of Alba after Cináed was killed in 1005, they did hold the mormaerdom of Fife. The MacDuib (or MacDuff) held the mormaerdom, and later earldom, until 1371. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39816 |
William Rowan Hamilton
Sir William Rowan Hamilton MRIA (4 August 1805 – 2 September 1865)
was an Irish mathematician, Andrews Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin, and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He worked in both pure mathematics and mathematics for physics. He made important contributions to optics, classical mechanics and algebra. Although Hamilton was not a physicist–he regarded himself as a pure mathematician–his work was of major importance to physics, particularly his reformulation of Newtonian mechanics, now called Hamiltonian mechanics. This work has proven central to the modern study of classical field theories such as electromagnetism, and to the development of quantum mechanics. In pure mathematics, he is best known as the inventor of quaternions.
William Rowan Hamilton's scientific career included the study of geometrical optics, classical mechanics, adaptation of dynamic methods in optical systems, applying quaternion and vector methods to problems in mechanics and in geometry, development of theories of conjugate algebraic couple functions (in which complex numbers are constructed as ordered pairs of real numbers), solvability of polynomial equations and general quintic polynomial solvable by radicals, the analysis on Fluctuating Functions (and the ideas from Fourier analysis), linear operators on quaternions and proving a result for linear operators on the space of quaternions (which is a special case of the general theorem which today is known as the "Cayley–Hamilton theorem"). Hamilton also invented ""icosian calculus"", which he used to investigate closed edge paths on a dodecahedron that visit each vertex exactly once.
Hamilton was the fourth of nine children born to Sarah Hutton (1780–1817) and Archibald Hamilton (1778–1819), who lived in Dublin at 29 Dominick Street, later renumbered to 36. Hamilton's father, who was from Dublin, worked as a solicitor. By the age of three, Hamilton had been sent to live with his uncle James Hamilton, a graduate of Trinity College who ran a school in Talbots Castle in Trim, Co. Meath.
Hamilton is said to have shown immense talent at a very early age. Hamilton's predecessor as Royal Astronomer of Ireland and later Bishop of Cloyne Dr. John Brinkley remarked of the 18-year-old Hamilton, 'This young man, I do not say "will be", but "is", the first mathematician of his age.'
His uncle observed that Hamilton had a remarkable ability to learn languages, and from a young age, had displayed an uncanny ability to acquire them (although this is disputed by some historians, who claim he had only a very basic understanding of them). At the age of seven, he had already made very considerable progress in Hebrew, and before he was thirteen he had acquired, under the care of his uncle (a linguist), almost as many languages as he had years of age. These included the classical and modern European languages, and Persian, Arabic, Hindustani, Sanskrit, and even Marathi and Malay. He retained much of his knowledge of languages to the end of his life, often reading Persian and Arabic in his spare time, although he had long since stopped studying languages, and used them just for relaxation.
In September 1813, the American calculating prodigy Zerah Colburn was being exhibited in Dublin. Colburn was 9, a year older than Hamilton. The two were pitted against each other in a mental arithmetic contest with Colburn emerging the clear victor. In reaction to his defeat, Hamilton dedicated less time to studying languages and more time to studying mathematics.
Hamilton was part of a small but well-regarded school of mathematicians associated with Trinity College in Dublin, which he entered at age 18. The college awarded him two Optimes, or off-the-chart grades. He studied both classics and mathematics (BA in 1827, MA in 1837). While still an undergraduate he was appointed Andrews professor of Astronomy and Royal Astronomer of Ireland. He then took up residence at Dunsink Observatory where he spent the rest of his life.
While attending Trinity College, Hamilton proposed to his friend's sister, who rejected him. Hamilton, being a sensitive young man, became sick and depressed, and almost committed suicide. He was rejected again in 1831 by Ellen de Vere, a sister of the poet Aubrey Thomas de Vere (1814-1902). His proposal to Helen Marie Bayly, a country preacher's daughter, was accepted, and they married in 1833. Hamilton had three children with Bayly: William Edwin Hamilton (born 1834), Archibald Henry (born 1835), and Helen Elizabeth (born 1840). Bayly proved to be pious, shy, timid, and chronically ill, and Hamilton's married life was reportedly difficult.
Hamilton retained his faculties unimpaired to the very last, and steadily continued the task of finishing the "Elements of Quaternions" which had occupied the last six years of his life. He died on 2 September 1865, following a severe attack of gout. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.
Hamilton is recognised as one of Ireland's leading scientists and, as Ireland becomes more aware of its scientific heritage, he is increasingly celebrated. The Hamilton Institute is an applied mathematics research institute at Maynooth University and the Royal Irish Academy holds an annual public Hamilton lecture at which Murray Gell-Mann, Frank Wilczek, Andrew Wiles, and Timothy Gowers have all spoken. The year 2005 was the 200th anniversary of Hamilton's birth and the Irish government designated that the "Hamilton Year, celebrating Irish science". Trinity College Dublin marked the year by launching the Hamilton Mathematics Institute.
Two commemorative stamps were issued by Ireland in 1943 to mark the centenary of the announcement of quaternions. A 10 Euros commemorative silver Proof coin was issued by the Central Bank of Ireland in 2005 to commemorate 200 years since his birth.
The newest maintenance depot for the Dublin LUAS tram system has been named after him. It is located adjacent to the Broombridge stop on the Green Line.
In his youth Hamilton owned a telescope, and became an expert at calculating celestial phenomena, for instance the locations of the visibility of eclipses of the moon. Also having received extremely high grades for both the Classics and Science, it was not too unusual that, on 16 June 1827, only 21 years old and still an undergraduate, he was elected Royal Astronomer of Ireland and came to live at Dunsink Observatory where he remained until his death in 1865.
In his early years at Dunsink, Hamilton observed the heavens quite regularly. Observational astronomy in those days mostly consisted of measuring star positions, which was not too interesting for a mathematical mind. But the main reason for ultimately leaving the regular observing completely to his astronomy assistant Charles Thompson was that Hamilton frequently suffered from illnesses after having observed.
Nowadays Hamilton is not seen as one of the great astronomers but in his lifetime he was. His Introductory lectures in astronomy were famous; in addition to his students, they attracted many scholars and poets, and even ladies–in those days a remarkable feat. The poet Felicia Hemans wrote her poem "The Prayer of the Lonely Student" after hearing one of his lectures.
Hamilton made important contributions to optics and to classical mechanics. His first discovery was in an early paper that he communicated in 1823 to Dr. Brinkley, who presented it under the title of ""Caustics"" in 1824 to the Royal Irish Academy. It was referred as usual to a committee. While their report acknowledged its novelty and value, they recommended further development and simplification before publication. Between 1825 and 1828 the paper grew to an immense size, mostly by the additional details that the committee had suggested. But it also became more intelligible, and the features of the new method were now easily seen. Until this period Hamilton himself seems not to have fully understood either the nature or importance of optics, as later he intended to apply his method to dynamics.
In 1827, Hamilton presented a theory of a single function, now known as Hamilton's principal function, that brings together mechanics, optics, and mathematics, and which helped to establish the wave theory of light. He proposed it when he first predicted its existence in the third supplement to his ""Systems of Rays"", read in 1832. The Royal Irish Academy paper was finally entitled ""Theory of Systems of Rays"" (23 April 1827), and the first part was printed in 1828 in the "Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy". The more important contents of the second and third parts appeared in the three voluminous supplements (to the first part) which were published in the same Transactions, and in the two papers ""On a General Method in Dynamics"", which appeared in the Philosophical Transactions in 1834 and 1835. In these papers, Hamilton developed his great principle of ""Varying Action"". The most remarkable result of this work is the prediction that a single ray of light entering a biaxial crystal at a certain angle would emerge as a hollow cone of rays. This discovery is still known by its original name, ""conical refraction"".
The step from optics to dynamics in the application of the method of ""Varying Action"" was made in 1827, and communicated to the Royal Society, in whose "Philosophical Transactions" for 1834 and 1835 there are two papers on the subject, which, like the ""Systems of Rays"", display a mastery over symbols and a flow of mathematical language almost unequaled. The common thread running through all this work is Hamilton's principle of ""Varying Action"". Although it is based on the calculus of variations and may be said to belong to the general class of problems included under the principle of least action which had been studied earlier by Pierre Louis Maupertuis, Euler, Joseph Louis Lagrange, and others, Hamilton's analysis revealed much deeper mathematical structure than had been previously understood, in particular the symmetry between momentum and position. Paradoxically, the credit for discovering the quantity now called the Lagrangian and Lagrange's equations belongs to Hamilton. Hamilton's advances enlarged greatly the class of mechanical problems that could be solved, and they represent perhaps the greatest addition which dynamics had received since the work of Isaac Newton and Lagrange. Many scientists, including Liouville, Jacobi, Darboux, Poincaré, Kolmogorov, and Arnold, have extended Hamilton's work, thereby expanding our knowledge of mechanics and differential equations.
While Hamiltonian mechanics is based on the same physical principles as the mechanics of Newton and Lagrange, it provides a powerful new technique for working with the equations of motion. More importantly, both the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian approaches, which were initially developed to describe the motion of discrete systems, have proven critical to the study of continuous classical systems in physics, and even quantum mechanical systems. Indeed, the techniques find use in electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, quantum relativity theory, and quantum field theory. In the Dictionary of Irish Biography David Spearman writes:
Hamilton's mathematical studies seem to have been undertaken and carried to their full development without any assistance whatsoever, and the result is that his writings do not belong to any particular ""school"". Not only was Hamilton an expert as an arithmetic calculator, but he seems to have occasionally had fun in working out the result of some calculation to an enormous number of decimal places. At the age of eight Hamilton engaged Zerah Colburn, the American ""calculating boy"", who was then being exhibited as a curiosity in Dublin. Two years later, aged ten, Hamilton stumbled across a Latin copy of Euclid, which he eagerly devoured; and at twelve he studied Newton's "Arithmetica Universalis". This was his introduction to modern analysis. Hamilton soon began to read the "Principia", and by age sixteen he had mastered a great part of it, as well as some more modern works on analytical geometry and the differential calculus.
Around this time Hamilton was also preparing to enter Trinity College, Dublin, and therefore had to devote some time to classics. In mid-1822 he began a systematic study of Laplace's "Mécanique Céleste".
From that time Hamilton appears to have devoted himself almost wholly to mathematics, though he always kept himself well acquainted with the progress of science both in Britain and abroad. Hamilton found an important defect in one of Laplace's demonstrations, and he was induced by a friend to write out his remarks, so that they could be shown to Dr. John Brinkley, then the first Royal Astronomer of Ireland, and an accomplished mathematician. Brinkley seems to have immediately perceived Hamilton's talents, and to have encouraged him in the kindest way.
Hamilton's career at College was perhaps unexampled. Amongst a number of extraordinary competitors, he was first in every subject and at every examination. He achieved the rare distinction of obtaining an optime both for Greek and for physics. Hamilton might have attained many more such honours (he was expected to win both the gold medals at the degree examination), if his career as a student had not been cut short by an unprecedented event. This was Hamilton's appointment to the Andrews Professor of Astronomy in the University of Dublin, vacated by Dr. Brinkley in 1827. The chair was not exactly offered to him, as has been sometimes asserted, but the electors, having met and talked over the subject, authorised Hamilton's personal friend (also an elector) to urge Hamilton to become a candidate, a step which Hamilton's modesty had prevented him from taking. Thus, when barely 22, Hamilton was established at the Dunsink Observatory, near Dublin.
Hamilton was not especially suited for the post, because although he had a profound acquaintance with theoretical astronomy, he had paid little attention to the regular work of the practical astronomer. Hamilton's time was better employed in original investigations than it would have been spent in observations made even with the best of instruments. Hamilton was intended by the university authorities who elected him to the professorship of astronomy to spend his time as he best could for the advancement of science, without being tied down to any particular branch. If Hamilton had devoted himself to practical astronomy, the University of Dublin would assuredly have furnished him with instruments and an adequate staff of assistants.
He was twice awarded the Cunningham Medal of the Royal Irish Academy. The first award, in 1834, was for his work on conical refraction, for which he also received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society the following year. He was to win it again in 1848.
In 1835, being secretary to the meeting of the British Association which was held that year in Dublin, he was knighted by the lord-lieutenant. Other honours rapidly succeeded, among which his election in 1837 to the president's chair in the Royal Irish Academy, and the rare distinction of being made a corresponding member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Later, in 1864, the newly established United States National Academy of Sciences elected its first Foreign Associates, and decided to put Hamilton's name on top of their list.
The other great contribution Hamilton made to mathematical science was his discovery of quaternions in 1843. However, in 1840, Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues had already reached a result that amounted to their discovery in all but name.
Hamilton was looking for ways of extending complex numbers (which can be viewed as points on a 2-dimensional plane) to higher spatial dimensions.
He failed to find a useful 3-dimensional system (in modern terminology, he failed to find a real, three-dimensional skew-field), but in working with four dimensions he created quaternions. According to Hamilton, on 16 October he was out walking along the Royal Canal in Dublin with his wife when the solution in the form of the equation
suddenly occurred to him; Hamilton then promptly carved this equation using his penknife into the side of the nearby Broom Bridge (which Hamilton called Brougham Bridge). This event marks the discovery of the quaternion group.
A plaque under the bridge was unveiled by the Taoiseach Éamon de Valera, himself a mathematician and student of quaternions, on 13 November 1958. Since 1989, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth has organised a pilgrimage called the "Hamilton Walk", in which mathematicians take a walk from Dunsink Observatory to the bridge, where no trace of the carving remains, though a stone plaque does commemorate the discovery.
The quaternion involved abandoning commutativity, a radical step for the time. Not only this, but Hamilton also invented the cross and dot products of vector algebra, the quaternion product being the cross product minus the dot product. Hamilton also described a quaternion as an ordered four-element multiple of real numbers, and described the first element as the 'scalar' part, and the remaining three as the 'vector' part. Hamilton coined the words tensor and scalar, and was the first to use the word vector in the modern sense.
Hamilton introduced, as a method of analysis, both quaternions and biquaternions, the extension to eight dimensions by introduction of complex number coefficients. When his work was assembled in 1853, the book "Lectures on Quaternions" had "formed the subject of successive courses of lectures, delivered in 1848 and subsequent years, in the Halls of Trinity College, Dublin". Hamilton confidently declared that quaternions would be found to have a powerful influence as an instrument of research.
When he died, Hamilton was working on a definitive statement of quaternion science. His son William Edwin Hamilton brought the "Elements of Quaternions", a hefty volume of 762 pages, to publication in 1866. As copies ran short, a second edition was prepared by Charles Jasper Joly, when the book was split into two volumes, the first appearing 1899 and the second in 1901. The subject index and footnotes in this second edition improved the "Elements" accessibility.
One of the features of Hamilton's quaternion system was the differential operator del which could be used to express the gradient of a vector field or to express the curl. These operations were applied by Clerk Maxwell to the electrical and magnetic studies of Michael Faraday in Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873). Though the del operator continues to be used, the real quaternions fall short as a representation of spacetime. On the other hand, the biquaternion algebra, in the hands of Arthur W. Conway and Ludwik Silberstein, provided representational tools for Minkowski space and the Lorentz group early in the twentieth century.
Today, the quaternions are used in computer graphics, control theory, signal processing, and orbital mechanics, mainly for representing rotations/orientations. For example, it is common for spacecraft attitude-control systems to be commanded in terms of quaternions, which are also used to telemeter their current attitude. The rationale is that combining quaternion transformations is more numerically stable than combining many matrix transformations. In control and modelling applications, quaternions do not have a computational singularity (undefined division by zero) that can occur for quarter-turn rotations (90 degrees) that are achievable by many Air, Sea and Space vehicles. In pure mathematics, quaternions show up significantly as one of the four finite-dimensional normed division algebras over the real numbers, with applications throughout algebra and geometry.
It is believed by some modern mathematicians that Hamilton's work on quaternions was satirized by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Alice in Wonderland. In particular, the Mad Hatter's tea party was meant to represent the folly of quaternions and the need to revert to Euclidean geometry.
Hamilton originally matured his ideas before putting pen to paper. The discoveries, papers, and treatises previously mentioned might well have formed the whole work of a long and laborious life. But not to speak of his enormous collection of books, full to overflowing with new and original matter, which have been handed over to Trinity College, Dublin, the previous mentioned works barely form the greater portion of what Hamilton has published. Hamilton developed the variational principle, which was reformulated later by Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. He also introduced the icosian game or "Hamilton's puzzle" which can be solved using the concept of a Hamiltonian path.
Hamilton's extraordinary investigations connected with the solution of algebraic equations of the fifth degree, and his examination of the results arrived at by N. H. Abel, G. B. Jerrard, and others in their researches on this subject, form another contribution to science. There is next Hamilton's paper on fluctuating functions, a subject which, since the time of Joseph Fourier, has been of immense and ever increasing value in physical applications of mathematics. There is also the extremely ingenious invention of the hodograph. Of his extensive investigations into the solutions (especially by numerical approximation) of certain classes of physical differential equations, only a few items have been published, at intervals, in the "Philosophical Magazine".
Besides all this, Hamilton was a voluminous correspondent. Often a single letter of Hamilton's occupied from fifty to a hundred or more closely written pages, all devoted to the minute consideration of every feature of some particular problem; for it was one of the peculiar characteristics of Hamilton's mind never to be satisfied with a general understanding of a question; Hamilton pursued the problem until he knew it in all its details. Hamilton was ever courteous and kind in answering applications for assistance in the study of his works, even when his compliance must have cost him much time. He was excessively precise and hard to please with reference to the final polish of his own works for publication; and it was probably for this reason that he published so little compared with the extent of his investigations. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39817 |
Sigismund II Augustus
Sigismund II Augustus (, ; 1 August 1520 – 7 July 1572) was King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, the son of Sigismund I the Old, whom Sigismund II succeeded in 1548. He was the first ruler of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the last male monarch from the Jagiellonian dynasty.
Sigismund was the only son of Italian-born Bona Sforza and Sigismund the Old. From the beginning he was groomed and extensively educated as a successor. In 1529 he was crowned "vivente rege" while his father was still alive. Sigismund Augustus continued a tolerance policy towards minorities and maintained peaceful relations with neighbouring countries, with the exception of the Northern Seven Years' War which aimed to secure Baltic trade. Under his patronage the culture flourished in Poland; he was a collector of tapestries from the Low Countries and collected military memorabilia as well as swords, armours and jewellery. Sigismund Augustus' rule is widely considered as the apex of the Polish Golden Age; he established the first regular Polish navy and the first regular postal service in Poland, known today as Poczta Polska. In 1569 he oversaw the signing of the Union of Lublin between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which formed the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and introduced an elective monarchy.
Sigismund Augustus married three times; his first wife, Elizabeth of Austria, died in 1545 at just eighteen. He was then involved in several relationships with mistresses, the most famous being Barbara Radziwiłł, who became Sigismund's second wife and Queen of Poland in spite of his mother's disapproval. The marriage was deemed scandalous and was fiercely opposed by the royal court and the nobility. Barbara died five months after her coronation, presumably due to ill health, however, rumours circulated that she was poisoned. Sigismund finally wedded Catherine of Austria, but remained childless throughout his life.
Sigismund Augustus was last male member of the Jagiellons. Following the death of his sister Anna in 1596 the Jagiellonian dynasty came to an end.
Sigismund Augustus was born in Kraków on 1 August 1520 to Sigismund I the Old and his wife, Bona Sforza of Milan. His paternal grandparents were Casimir IV Jagiellon, King of Poland, and Elizabeth of Austria. Sigismund's maternal grandparents, Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabella of Aragon, daughter of King Alfonso II of Naples, both ruled the Duchy of Milan until Sforza's suspicious death in 1494.
Throughout his youth, Sigismund Augustus was under the careful watch of his mother, Bona. Being the only legitimate male heir to the Polish throne throughout his father's reign, he was well educated and taught by the most renowned scholars in the country. It was also his mother's wish to name her only son Augustus, after the first Roman Emperor Gaius Octavius Augustus. However, this decision was met with Sigismund the Old's strong disapproval, who hoped for a lineage of Sigismunds on the Polish throne. Consequently, it was established that the child will bear two names to settle the conflict. The tradition of adopting Augustus as a second or middle name was also observed during the coronation of Stanisław Antoni Poniatowski who became King Stanisław II Augustus in 1764.
In 1530, the ten-year-old Sigismund Augustus was crowned by Primate Jan Łaski as co-ruler alongside his father, in accordance with the "vivente rege" law. Sigismund the Old hoped to secure his son's succession to the throne and maintain the Jagiellonian dynasty's position in Poland. The move was crucial to silence the members of nobility who were against the Jagiellons and viewed the action as a step towards absolutism. The law was officially abolished by the Henrician Articles, or the new constitution adopted between nobles and the newly elected king Henry of Valois in 1573.
When Sigismund Augustus was co-crowned, Chancellor Krzysztof Szydłowiecki organized a preliminary marriage treaty between the young king and Elizabeth of Austria, daughter of Emperor Ferdinand I. The marriage was signed on 10–11 November 1530 in Poznań, however, the arrangement was delayed by Queen Bona Sforza, who detested the new bride. The treaty was renewed on 16 June 1538 in Wrocław by Johannes Dantiscus and the betrothal ceremony took place on 17 July 1538 in Innsbruck. Bona continued to lobby against the marriage and instead proposed Margaret of France to potentially form an alliance with the French against the Habsburgs.
On 5 May 1543, Elizabeth's escorted convoy entered Kraków and was greeted with enthusiasm by both the nobles and the townsfolk. The same day 16-year-old Elizabeth married 22-year-old Sigismund Augustus, whom she met for the first time shortly before marriage vows. The ceremony was performed at the Wawel Cathedral and the wedding continued for two weeks. Bona began to plot against the new queen. As a result, the newly wedded couple decided to reside in Vilnius, far from the royal court.
Despite the initial euphoria demonstrated by royal subjects, the marriage was unsuccessful from the very beginning. Sigismund Augustus did not find Elizabeth attractive and continued to have extramarital affairs with several mistresses, the most famous being Barbara Radziwiłł. Elizabeth was also known to be timid, meek and apprehensive due to strict upbringing. The young and garrulous king was also repulsed by Elizabeth's newly diagnosed epilepsy and subsequent seizures. Only Sigismund the Old and some nobles showed compassion towards the new Queen, who was disregarded by her husband and scorned by Bona. Sigismund Augustus was indifferent to her health condition; when the seizures continued to intensify he abandoned Elizabeth and returned to Kraków to collect her dowry. He also sent for Ferdinand's doctors to travel the long distance from Vienna knowing that Elizabeth was ailing and deteriorating fast. She eventually died unattended and exhausted from the epileptic attacks on 15 June 1545 at the age of 18.
From the outset of his reign, Sigismund Augustus came into collision with the country's privileged nobility, who had already begun curtailing the power of the great families. The ostensible cause of the nobility's animosity to the King was his second marriage, secretly contracted before his accession to the throne, with the Lithuanian, Calvinist and former mistress, Barbara Radziwiłł, the daughter of Hetman Jerzy Radziwiłł. The marriage was announced by the king himself on 2 February 1548 in Piotrków Trybunalski.
The young and beautiful Barbara was despised by Queen Bona, who attempted to annul the marriage at any cost. The agitation was also abundant at Sigismund's first Sejm (parliament) sitting on 31 October 1548 where the deputies threatened to renounce their allegiance unless the new king repudiated Barbara. The nobles portrayed Barbara as an opportunistic prostitute that charmed the king for her own benefit. That perception was shared with Bona Sforza, who decisively eliminated all her rivals by any means to stay in power. The young monarch even considered abdicating. By 1550, when Sigismund summoned his second Sejm, the nobles had begun to be in his favor; the nobility was rebuked by Marshal Piotr Kmita Sobieński, who accused them of attempting to unduly diminish the legislative prerogatives of the Polish Crown. Furthermore, Bona was removed from Wawel and sent to Mazovia where she established her own small courtly entourage.
Unlike her predecessor, Barbara was disliked by the royal court and led a more secluded life with Sigismund Augustus, who was deeply in love with her. On the other hand, she was ambitious, intelligent, perceptive and had an exemplar taste in fashion. She always wore precious pearl necklaces when sitting for portraits. The mutual admiration between Sigismund and Barbara made the relationship "one of the greatest love affairs in Polish history". While still married to Elizabeth, Sigismund Augustus ordered the construction of a secret passage connecting the Royal Castle in Vilnius with the nearby Radziwiłł Palace so that the couple could meet frequently and discreetly.
Due to her unpopularity in Poland, Barbara often expressed her wish to reside permanently in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. To ease the situation, Sigismund Augustus provided a luxurious lifestyle and expensive gifts for his wife at Wawel Castle since her arrival in Kraków on 13 February 1549. The monarch also granted Barbara several provinces to administer and provide income. Although ambitious and bright, she showed lack of interest in political life, but had some influence over decisions made by Sigismund. This also caused an uproar among the nobility. To avoid an armed rebellion, Sigismund was forced to form an alliance with his former father-in-law, Emperor Ferdinand I. This allowed for Barbara's coronation as Queen of Poland on 7 December 1550 by Primate Mikołaj Dzierzgowski. Queen Bona eventually succumbed to her son's demand and accepted the marriage.
Since the day Sigismund and Barbara met, she complained of poor health, particularly stomach and abdominal pain. After the coronation her condition deteriorated rapidly. She was tormented by strong fever, diarrhea, nausea and lack of appetite. After careful observation by hired medics, a lump was discovered on her stomach filled with pus. Sigismund Augustus gravely despaired and sent for doctors and even folk healers from the entire country. He personally tended to his sick wife despite her foul smell and dedicated himself when necessary; the king hoped to take Barbara to the hunting castle at Niepołomice and ordered to demolish the small city gate so her carriage could pass freely. However, Barbara died on 8 May 1551 in Kraków after continuous pain and agony. It was her dying wish that she'd be buried in Lithuania, her homeland. The body was transported to Vilnius Cathedral, where she was finally buried on 23 June next to Elizabeth of Austria. Her death was a major blow to Sigismund; he often attended her coffin on foot while being transported to Vilnius in hot weather. Sigismund also became more serious and reserved; he avoided balls, temporarily renounced his mistresses and dressed black until death.
The cause of Barbara's death is debatable. Her opponents and family members suggested sexually transmitted diseases due to a number of affairs she had before marrying Sigismund. There were also persistent rumors that she was poisoned by Queen Bona Sforza, who had a long history of eliminating her rivals or enemies quickly and efficiently. However, contemporary historians and experts agree on cervical or ovarian cancer.
The death of Queen Barbara Radziwiłł, five months after her coronation and under distressing circumstances, compelled Sigismund to contract a third, purely political union with his first cousin, the Austrian archduchess Catherine, to avoid an Austro-Russian alliance. She was also the sister of his first wife, Elizabeth, who had died within a year of her marriage to him, before his accession. Catherine, unlike previous queens, was considered dull and obese. Sigismund Augustus found her immensely unattractive despite accepting the marriage and organizing a pompous wedding ceremony on 30 July 1553. On the other hand, Catherine showed resentment towards Sigismund because of how he treated her sister and first wife, Queen Elizabeth. She accused him of negligence and indifference during her sudden illness, which caused premature death. The correspondence between the two remained purely formal and political for the remainder of their lives.
Since her coronation, Catherine acted as Austria's puppet at the Polish court; she was tasked with espionage and obtaining important information for the benefit of the Habsburgs. Sigismund Augustus was aware of the scheme, but, by marrying Catherine, Austria promised to stay neutral and abandon plans with Russia. This neutrality was undermined by Catherine's actions, who followed her father's policy and objected the return of John Sigismund Zápolya and Isabella Jagiellon (Sigismund's sister) to Hungary. She would conspire with the Habsburg envoys prior to an audience with the king. She would also dictate what and how the envoys should express their views. When Sigismund Augustus found out of Catherine's intrigues, he sent her to Radom and excluded from political life.
As Sigismund lost all hope of children by his third bride; he was the last male Jagiellon in the direct line so the dynasty was threatened with extinction. He sought to remedy this by adultery with two of the most beautiful of his countrywomen, Barbara Giza and Anna Zajączkowska but was unable to impregnate either of them. The Sejm was willing to legitimize, and acknowledge as Sigismund's successor, any male heir who might be born to him; however, the King remained childless.
The King's marriage was a matter of great political import to Protestants and Catholics alike. The Polish Protestants hoped that he would divorce and remarry and thus bring about a breach with Rome at the very crisis of the religious struggle in Poland. He was not free to remarry until Queen Catherine's death on 28 February 1572, but he followed her to the grave less than six months later.
Unlike his father, Sigismund Augustus was more frail and sickly. Shortly before turning 50, his health rapidly declined. Being involved in many affairs and holding a large number of mistresses, historians agree that the king had venereal disease which caused him to be infertile. At 16, he also contracted malaria which further contributed to his inability of producing any offspring. By 1558 Sigismund had gout and since 1568 he also suffered from kidney stones, which triggered immense pain. He employed numerous medics, healers or even quack doctors and imported expensive ointments from Italy. By the end of his life, the king was losing teeth and vigour, possibly due to tuberculosis. Antonio Maria Graziani recalls that Sigismund was unable to keep standing without a cane when greeting Cardinal Giovanni Francesco Commendone.
During spring of 1572, Sigismund Augustus became feverish. Untreated tuberculosis made him feeble and impotent, but he was able to travel to his private retreat in Knyszyn. While at Knyszyn, he corresponded with his diplomats and nobles, highlighting that he was feeling well and hoped to recover. Great Marshal Jan Firlej denied these claims and reported that the king was bleeding severely due to consumption and was troubled by pain in the chest and lumbar.
Sigismund died in Knyszyn on 7 July 1572 at 6 in the afternoon, surrounded by a group of senators and envoys. The official cause of death given by the medics was consumption. His body placed on a catafalque and remained at the nearby Tykocin Castle until 10 September 1573 when it was transported back to Kraków through Warsaw. He was laid to rest at the Wawel Cathedral on 10 February 1574. The stately funeral ceremony, attended by his sister Anna Jagiellon, was the last spectacle of its kind in the Kingdom of Poland. No other Polish monarch was buried with such pomp and splendour. His death introduced an elective monarchy in Poland which lasted until the final partition at the end of the 18th century.
Sigismund Augustus was the last male member of the Jagiellonian dynasty. The death of his childless sister, Anna, in 1596 marked the end of the dynasty.
In addition to his family connections, Sigismund II Augustus was allied to the Habsburgs as member of the Order of the Golden Fleece.
Sigismund's reign was marked by a period of temporary stability and external expansion. He witnessed the bloodless introduction of the Protestant Reformation into Poland and Lithuania, and the "peero-cratic" upheaval that placed most political power in the hands of the Polish nobility; he saw the collapse of the Knights of the Sword in the north, which led to the Commonwealth's acquisition of Livonia as a Lutheran duchy and the consolidation of Turkey's power in the southeast. A less imposing figure than his father, the elegant and refined Sigismund II Augustus was nevertheless an even more effective statesman than the stern and majestic Sigismund I the Old.
Sigismund II possessed to a high degree the tenacity and patience that seem to have characterized all the Jagiellons, and he added to these qualities a dexterity and diplomatic finesse. No other Polish king seems to have so thoroughly understood the nature of the Polish Sejm and national assembly. Both the Austrian ambassadors and the papal legates testify to the care with which he controlled his nation. According to diplomats, everything went as Sigismund wished and he seemed to know everything in advance. He managed to obtain more funds from the Sejm than his father ever could, and at one of the parliament sittings he won the hearts of the assembled envoys by unexpectedly appearing in a simple grey coat of a Mazovian lord. Like his father, a pro-Austrian by conviction, he contrived even in this respect to carry with him the nation, often distrustful of the Germans. He also avoided serious complications and skirmishes with the powerful Turks.
During Sigismund Augustus' reign, Livonia was in political turmoil. His father, Sigismund I, permitted Albert of Prussia to introduce the Protestant Reformation and secularize the southern part of the Teutonic Order State. Albert then established Europe's first Protestant state in the Duchy of Prussia in 1525, but under Polish suzerainty. However, his efforts to introduce Protestantism to the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in the northernmost part of the region was met with fierce resistance and divided the Livonian Confederation. When Albert's brother Wilhelm and Archbishop of Riga attempted to implement a Lutheran church order in his diocese, the Catholic estates rebelled and arrested both Wilhelm and his bishop coadjutor, Duke Christopher of Mecklenburg.
As Prussia was a tributary state of the Polish Crown, Sigismund Augustus, a Catholic, was forced to intervene in favour of Protestant Albert and his brother Wilhelm. In July 1557 the Polish forces left for Livonia. The armed intervention proved to be successful; the Catholic Livonians surrendered and signed the Treaty of Pozvol on 14 September 1557. The agreement placed most Livonian territories under Polish protection and "de facto" became part of Poland. Gotthard Kettler, the last Master of the Order, was granted the newly established Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. Wilhelm was restored to his former position as archbishop on Sigismund's demand, with the Lutheran church order being enacted.
The incorporation of Courland into the Polish sphere of influence created an alliance which threatened Russia's plans on expanding into the Baltic coast. Sigismund directed the alliance against Ivan the Terrible to protect lucrative trade routes in Livonia, thus creating a new valid "casus belli" against the Russian Tsardom. On 22 January 1558, Ivan invaded the Baltic states and started the Livonian War, which lasted 25 years until 1583. Russia's eventual defeat in the war legally partitioned Livonia between Poland (Latvia, southern Estonia) and Sweden (central-northern Estonia). The Polish sector became subsequently known as Polish Livonia or "Inflanty"; it was settled with colonists from Poland proper resulting in systematic polonisation of these lands.
When the Kalmar Union between Sweden and Denmark was disbanded in 1523 due to Swedish resentment of Danish tyranny, Baltic trade became threatened. The port city of Gdańsk (Danzig), Poland's wealthiest city, faced difficulties due to ongoing conflict on the sea and piracy. The capital, Kraków, was also affected as the trade route from the Baltic ran through Gdańsk and along the Vistula River to the southern province of Lesser Poland. Gdańsk, which was privileged with its own army and government, resisted against Sigismund's order of sending privateers and creating the first Polish Admiralty in their city. Most of the deputies in the city council were merchants and tradesmen of German descent or Protestants who were either politically leaning towards Sweden or fighting for the status of an independent 'city state'. 11 Polish privateers sent by Sigismund were eventually executed, which greatly angered the king. Poland then joined Denmark against Sweden for Baltic domination.
The war ended as "status quo ante bellum" in 1570 with the Treaty of Stettin, which was signed by Bishop Martin Kromer on behalf of Sigismund. However, the ineffective conflict did have its input in establishing Poland's first registered naval fleet (Naval Commission) in 1568.
Sigismund's most striking legacy may have been the Union of Lublin, which united Poland and Lithuania into one state, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, jointly with German-speaking Royal Prussia and Prussian cities. This achievement might well have been impossible without the monarch's personal approach to politics and ability to mediate.
At first, the treaty was perceived as a threat to Lithuanian sovereignty. Lithuanian magnates were afraid of losing their powers, since the proposed union would lower their rank and status to an equivalent with petty nobility rather than wealthier Polish aristocracy. On the other hand, the unification would provide a strong alliance against Russian (Muscovite) attack from the east. Lithuania was ravaged by the Muscovite-Lithuanian Wars which endured for over 150 years. During the Second War, Lithuania lost of its territory to Russia, and the final defeat in the Livonian War would result in the country's incorporation into the Russian Tsardom. Furthermore, the Poles were reluctant to aid Lithuania without a "quid pro quo". The most vocal opponent of the union was Sigismund's brother-in-law, Mikołaj "the Red" Radziwiłł (), who viewed the agreement as "peaceful annexation of Lithuania" by Poland. He also resisted polonisation policies which forced ethnic Lithuanians to change their names and native language to Polish or Latin.
As another war with Russia loomed, Sigismund Augustus pressed the members of parliament (Sejm) for the union, gradually gaining more followers due to his persuasive abilities and auspicious diplomacy. The potential union agreement would lead to the eviction of Lithuanian landowners who opposed the transition of territory from multi-ethnic Lithuania to Poland. Such terms were causing an outrage among the most renowned members of Lithuanian upper classes, but Sigismund was decisive and ruthless in this matter. Moreover, the personal union between the two countries created by the marriage of Jadwiga with Jogaila in 1385 was not entirely constitutional. Being the last male member of the Jagiellons, childless Sigismund sought to preserve his dynasty's legacy. The newly proposed constitutional union would create one large Commonwealth state, with one elected monarch who would simultaneously reign over both domains.
The initial Sejm negotiations on unity in January 1569, near the Polish city of Lublin, were futile. The right of Poles to settle and own land in the Grand Duchy was questioned by Lithuanian envoys. Following Mikołaj Radziwiłł's departure from Lublin on 1 March 1569, Sigismund announced the incorporation of then-Lithuanian Podlachia, Volhynia, Podolia and Kiev provinces into Poland, with strong approval from the local Ruthenian (Ukrainian) gentry. Those historic regions, which once belonged to the Kievan Rus', were disputed between Lithuania and Russia. However, the Ruthenian nobles were eager to capitalise on the political or economic potential offered by the Polish sphere and agreed to the terms. Previously, the Kingdom of Ruthenia or "Ukraine" was abolished in 1349, after Poland and Lithuania split modern-day Ukraine in the aftermath of the Galicia–Volhynia Wars. Now, under the Union of Lublin, all Ukrainian and Ruthenian territories which were alien in culture, customs, religion and language to the Polish people would be annexed by Catholic Poland. Strong westernisation and polonisation would follow, including the clandestine suppression of the Ukrainian Eastern Orthodox Church by future king Sigismund III. Ruthenia remained under Polish rule until the Cossack uprisings against Polish domination and the Partitions of Poland, when Ukraine was annexed by the Russian Empire.
The Lithuanians were compelled to return to the Sejm negotiations under Jan Hieronim Chodkiewicz and continue negotiations. The Polish nobility once again pressed for the full incorporation of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into Poland, however, the Lithuanians disapproved. The parties eventually agreed on a federal state on 28 June 1569 and on 1 July 1569 the Union of Lublin was signed at Lublin Castle, thus establishing the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Sigismund Augustus ratified the unification act on 4 July, and henceforth governed one of the largest and multicultural countries of 16th-century Europe.
In comparison to his staunchly Catholic father, Sigismund Augustus paid little attention to the matters of faith and religion. Having a large number of mistresses before, during and after being married, he was viewed by the clergy as an adulterer and libertine. Sigismund was also reasonably tolerant towards minorities and supported nobles of different faith and nationality to be part of the national assembly, the Sejm. He continued his father's policies, but was more accepting of the Protestant Reformation in Poland (only to the status of a minority religion). Several magnates converted to Calvinism or Lutheranism during the Reformation started by Martin Luther and John Calvin, most notably Stanisław Zamoyski, Jan Zamoyski, Mikołaj Rej, Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, Johannes a Lasco (Jan Łaski) and Mikołaj "the Black" Radziwiłł.
Throughout the 16th century, Frycz Modrzewski advocated for renouncing Rome's authority and establishing a separate and independent Polish Church. His initiative was chiefly inspired by the creation of the Anglican Church by Henry VIII in 1534. Sigismund Augustus was lenient towards the idea, particularly due to the sudden spread of Protestantism among courtiers, advisors, nobles and peasants. Calvinism became especially popular among the upper classes as it promoted democratic freedoms and called for rebellion against absolutism, which the privileged Polish nobility favoured. During the 1555 Sejm session in Piotrków, the nobles intensively discussed the rights of priests in the newly proposed Polish Church and demanded the abolition of celibacy. Some Catholic bishops were supportive of the concepts and acknowledged the need for uniting Poland, Lithuania, Prussia and their vassals under a common religion. Sigismund agreed to the postulates, however, under the condition that Pope Paul IV will be in favour. Instead, Paul IV was enraged that such a proposition emerged for him to accept; he declined and refused to grant consent. Facing potential excommunication, the assembly were forced to abandon their plans. Nevertheless, Protestantism continued to flourish and spread. In 1565, the Polish Brethren came into existence as a Nontrinitarian sect of Calvinism.
One year after Sigismund's death the Warsaw Confederation was adopted as the first European act granting religious freedoms. Despite this, Protestantism in Poland ultimately declined during the fierce Counter-Reformation measures under the despotic and arch-Catholic Sigismund III Vasa, who ruled for nearly 45 years. For instance, the Polish Brethren were banned, hunted down and its leaders executed.
Sigismund died at his beloved Knyszyn on 6 July 1572, aged 51. After a brief interrex, Henry de Valois of France was elected in the first royal elections as monarch of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1573. However, he soon fled to France after the death of his brother Charles IX of France to inherit the French throne. He was deposed by the Sejm on 12 May 1575 after not returning to Poland. Shortly thereafter, Sigismund's sister, Anna, was crowned Queen on 15 December. She later married Stefan Batory who ruled Poland "jure uxoris" since 1 May 1576.
Sigismund Augustus carried on with the development of several royal residencies including Wawel, Vilnius Castle, Niepołomice and the Royal Castle in Warsaw. In the 1560s he acquired the Tykocin Castle and rebuilt it in Renaissance style. During the reign of Sigismund Augustus the structure served as a royal residence with an impressive treasury and library as well as the main arsenal of the crown.
Sigismund Augustus was a passionate collector of jewels and gemstones. According to nuncio Bernardo Bongiovanni's relation, his collection was cached in 16 chests. Among the precious items in his possession was Charles V's ruby of 80,000 scudos' worth, as well as the Emperor's diamond medal with Habsburgs Eagle on one side and two columns with a sign "Plus Ultra" on the other side. In 1571, after the death of his nephew John Sigismund Zápolya, he inherited the "Hungarian Crown" used by some Hungarian monarchs. A "Swedish Crown" was also made for him. The Polish king treated those crowns as a family keepsake, and kept them in a private vault in the Tykocin Castle. He had also a sultan's sword of 16,000 ducats' worth, 30 precious horse trappings and 20 different private-use armours. The king's possession included a rich collection of tapestries (360 pieces), commissioned by him in Brussels in the years 1550–1560.
The king enjoyed reading, especially short stories, poems and satires. Under the influence of bishop Piotr Myszkowski, Poland's then greatest writer and poet Jan Kochanowski joined the royal court in 1563. It is uncertain whether Sigismund and Kochanowski were friends, however, Kochanowski's correspondence clearly highlights that the two had close contact and he assisted the monarch at most important occasions, including military maneuvers in Lithuania in 1567. Kochanowski was also present during the signing of Lublin Union in 1569.
Sigismund was fond of foreign craft-makers and employed Italian goldsmiths, jewellers and medalists, very much like his father. One of the more renowned figures brought to Poland was Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio. In Italy, Caraglio was one of the first reproductive printmakers. In Poland, Sigismund tasked him with the production of cameos, medallions, coins and jewellery. Numerous medals and roundels from this period feature the last members of the Jagiellonian dynasty. When Sigismund's mother Bona died in 1557, Sigismund had to collect his inheritance from the Italian estates. On 18 October 1558, the king granted the right to arrange the first regular Polish postal service operating from Kraków to Venice, thus establishing Poczta Polska (Polish Post). All maintenance costs were borne by the Crown and the post was mostly managed by Italians or Germans. Additional couriers travelled between Kraków, Warsaw and Vilnius. Since 1562, the postal route also encompassed Vienna and cities in the Holy Roman Empire, which enabled continuous correspondence with the Habsburgs.
In 1573, the first permanent bridge over the Vistula River in Warsaw and also the longest wooden bridge in Europe at the time was named in Sigismund's honour. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39824 |
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory for plasma physics and nuclear fusion science. Its primary mission is research into and development of fusion as an energy source.
PPPL grew out of the top secret Cold War project to control thermonuclear reactions, called Project Matterhorn. In 1961, after declassification, Project Matterhorn was renamed the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
PPPL is located on Princeton University's Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro Township, New Jersey. This is some distance from the main Princeton campus, but the lab has a Princeton address.
In 1950, John Wheeler was setting up a secret H-bomb research lab at Princeton University. Lyman Spitzer, Jr., an avid mountaineer, was aware of this program and suggested the name "Project Matterhorn".
Spitzer, a professor of Astronomy, had for many years been involved in the study of very hot rarefied gases in interstellar space. While leaving for a ski trip to Aspen in February 1951, his father called and told him to read the front page of the "New York Times". The paper had a story about claims released the day before in Argentina that a relatively unknown German scientist named Ronald Richter had achieved nuclear fusion in his Huemul Project. Spitzer ultimately dismissed these claims, and they were later proven erroneous, but the story got him thinking about fusion. While riding the chairlift at Aspen, he struck upon a new concept to confine a plasma for long periods so it could be heated to fusion temperatures. He called this concept the stellarator.
Later that year he took this design to the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington. As a result of this meeting and a review of the invention by scientists throughout the nation, the stellarator proposal was funded in 1951. As the device would produce high-energy neutrons, which could be used for breeding weapon fuel, the program was classified and carried out as part of Project Matterhorn. Matterhorn ultimately ended its involvement in the bomb field in 1954, becoming entirely devoted to the fusion power field.
In 1958, this magnetic fusion research was declassified following the 1955 United Nations International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. This generated an influx of graduate students eager to learn the "new" physics, which in turn influenced the lab to concentrate more on basic research.
The early figure-8 stellarators included : Model-A, Model-B, Model-B2, Model-B3. Model-B64 was a square with round corners, and Model-B65 was a racetrack configuration. The last and most powerful stellarator at this time was the 'racetrack' Model C (operating from 1961 to 1969). The Model C was reconfigured as a tokamak in 1969, becoming the Symmetric Tokamak (ST).
In the 1970s research at the PPPL refocused on the Russian tokamak design when it became evident that it was a more satisfactory containment design than the stellarator. In May 1972 the Adiabatic Toroidal Compressor (ATC) began operation. The Princeton Large Torus, a tokamak, operated from 1975.
By 1982, the PPPL under the direction of Harold Furth had the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) online, which operated until 1997. Beginning in 1993, TFTR was the first in the world to use 50/50 mixtures of deuterium-tritium. In 1994 it yielded an unprecedented 10.7 megawatts of fusion power.
In 1999, the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), based on the spherical tokamak concept, came online at the PPPL. Laboratory scientists are collaborating with researchers on fusion science and technology at other facilities, both domestic and foreign. Staff are applying knowledge gained in fusion research to a number of theoretical and experimental areas including materials science, solar physics, chemistry, and manufacturing.
Odd-parity heating was demonstrated in the 4 cm radius PFRC-1 experiment in 2006. PFRC-2 has a plasma radius of 8 cm. Studies of electron heating in PFRC-2 reached 500 eV with pulse lengths of 300 ms.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) completed the National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade (NSTX-U) that makes it the most powerful experimental fusion facility, or tokamak, of its type in the world. Experiments will test the ability of the upgraded spherical facility to maintain a high-performance plasma under conditions of extreme heat and power. Results could strongly influence the design of future fusion reactors.
In 2017, the group received a Phase II NIAC grant along with two NASA STTRs funding the RF subsystem and superconducting coil subsystem.
In 1961 Gottlieb became the first director of the renamed Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39825 |
Battering ram
A battering ram is a siege engine that originated in ancient times and was designed to break open the masonry walls of fortifications or splinter their wooden gates. In its simplest form, a battering ram is just a large, heavy log carried by several people and propelled with force against an obstacle; the ram would be sufficient to damage the target if the log were massive enough and/or it were moved quickly enough (that is, if it had enough momentum). Later rams encased the log in an arrow-proof, fire-resistant canopy mounted on wheels. Inside the canopy, the log was swung from suspensory chains or ropes.
Rams proved effective weapons of war because old fashioned wall-building materials such as stone and brick were weak in tension, and therefore prone to cracking when impacted with force. With repeated blows, the cracks would grow steadily until a hole was created. Eventually, a breach would appear in the fabric of the wall—enabling armed attackers to force their way through the gap and engage the inhabitants of the citadel.
The introduction in the later Middle Ages of siege cannons, which harnessed the explosive power of gunpowder to propel weighty stone or iron balls against fortified obstacles, spelled the end of battering rams and other traditional siege weapons. Smaller, hand-held versions of battering rams are still used today by law enforcement officers and military personnel to break open locked doors.
The earliest depiction of a possible battering ram is from the tomb of the 11th Dynasty noble Khety, where a pair of soldiers advance towards a fortress under the protection of a mobile roofed structure, carrying a long pole that may represent a simple battering ram.
During the Iron Age, in the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean,
the battering ram's log was slung from a wheeled frame by ropes or chains so that it could be made more massive and be more easily bashed against its target. Frequently, the ram's point would be reinforced with a metal head or cap while vulnerable parts of the shaft were bound with strengthening metal bands. Vitruvius details in his text "On Architecture" that Ceras the Carthaginian was the first to make a ram with a wooden base with wheels and a wooden superstructure. Within this the ram was hung so that it could be used against the wall. This structure moved so slowly, however, that he called it the testudo (the Latin word for "tortoise").
Another type of ram was one that maintained the normal shape and structure, but the support beams were instead made of saplings that were lashed together. The frame was then covered in hides as normal to defend from fire. The only solid beam present was the actual ram that was hung from the frame. The frame itself was so light that it could be carried on the shoulders of the men transporting the ram, and the same men could beat the ram against the wall when they reached it.
Many battering rams possessed curved or slanted wooden roofs and side-screens covered in protective materials, usually fresh wet hides, presumably skinned from animals eaten by the besiegers. These hide canopies stopped the ram from being set on fire. They also safeguarded the operators of the ram against arrow and spear volleys launched from above.
A well-known image of an Assyrian battering ram depicts how sophisticated attacking and defensive practices had become by the 9th century BC. The defenders of a town wall are trying to set the ram alight with torches and have also put a chain under it. The attackers are trying to pull on the chain to free the ram, while the aforementioned wet hides on the canopy provide protection against the flames.
The first confirmed employment of rams in the Occident happened from 503 to 502 BC when Opiter Verginius became consul of the Romans during the fight against Aurunci people:
Second appeared in 427 BC, when the Spartans besieged Plataea. The first use of rams within the actual Mediterranean Basin, featuring in this case the simultaneous employment of siege towers to shelter the rammers from attack, occurred on the island of Sicily in 409 BC, at the Selinus siege.
Defenders manning castles, forts or bastions would sometimes try to foil battering rams by dropping obstacles in front of the ram, such as a large sack of sawdust, just before the ram's head struck a wall or gate, or by using grappling hooks to immobilize the ram's log. Alternatively, the ram could be set ablaze, doused in fire-heated sand, pounded by boulders dropped from battlements or invested by a rapid sally of troops.
Some battering rams were not slung from ropes or chains, but were instead supported by rollers. This allowed the ram to achieve a greater speed before striking its target, making it more destructive. Such a ram, as used by Alexander the Great, is described by the writer Vitruvius.
Alternatives to the battering ram included the drill, the sapper's mouse, the pick, the siege hook, and the hunting ram. These devices were smaller than a ram and could be used in confined spaces.
Battering rams had an important effect on the evolution of defensive walls, which were constructed ever more ingeniously in a bid to nullify the effects of siege engines. Historical instances of the usage of battering rams in sieges of major cities include:
There is a popular myth in Gloucester that the famous children's rhyme, Humpty Dumpty, is about a battering ram used in the siege of Gloucester in 1643, during the English Civil War. However, the story is almost certainly untrue; during the siege, which lasted only one month, no battering rams were used, although many cannons were. The idea seems to have originated in a spoof history essay by Professor David Daube written for "The Oxford Magazine" in 1956, which was widely believed despite obvious improbabilities (e.g., planning to cross River Severn by running the ram down a hill at speed, although the river is about 30 m (100 feet) wide at this point).
A capped ram is a battering ram that has an accessory at the head (usually made of iron or steel and sometimes punningly shaped into the head and horns of an ovine ram) to do more damage to a building. It was much more effective at destroying enemy walls and buildings than an uncapped ram but was heavier to carry.
Pliny the Elder in his "Naturalis Historia" describes a battering ram used in mining, where hard rock needed to be broken down to release the ore. The pole possessed a metal tip weighing 150 pounds, so the whole device will have weighed at least twice as much in order to preserve its balance. Whether or not it was supported by being suspended with ropes from a frame remains unknown, but very likely given its total weight. Such devices were used during coal mining in the 19th century in Great Britain before the widespread use of explosives, which were expensive and dangerous to use in practice.
Battering rams still have a use in modern times. SWAT teams and other police forces often employ small, one-man or two-man metal rams for forcing open locked portals or effecting a door breaching. Modern battering rams sometimes incorporate a cylinder, along the length of which a piston fires automatically upon striking a hard object, thus enhancing the momentum of the impact significantly.
In the "Game of Thrones" episode "Blackwater" (Season 2, Episode 9), Stannis Baratheon's men attack the Mud Gate at King's Landing with a battering ram featuring a stag's head carving.
In the "Game of Thrones" episode “The Watchers on the Wall” (Season 4, Episode 9), giants wielded a battering ram to breach the gate at the Wall.
In "The Lord of the Rings", an enchanted battering ram named Grond was used to assault the Great Gate of Minas Tirith. It was 150 feet long and capped with an iron wolf's head. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39831 |
Charles I of Anjou
Charles I (early 1226/12277 January 1285), commonly called Charles of Anjou, was a member of the royal Capetian dynasty and the founder of the second House of Anjou. He was Count of Provence (1246–85) and Forcalquier (1246–48, 1256–85) in the Holy Roman Empire, Count of Anjou and Maine (1246–85) in France; he was also King of Sicily (1266–85) and Prince of Achaea (1278–85). In 1272, he was proclaimed King of Albania; and in 1277 he purchased a claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The youngest son of Louis VIII of France and Blanche of Castile, Charles was destined for a Church career until the early 1240s. He acquired Provence and Forcalquier through his marriage to their heiress, Beatrice. His attempts to secure comital rights brought him into conflict with his mother-in-law, Beatrice of Savoy, and the nobility. He received Anjou and Maine from his brother, Louis IX of France, in appanage. He accompanied Louis during the Seventh Crusade to Egypt. Shortly after he returned to Provence in 1250, Charles forced three wealthy autonomous citiesMarseilles, Arles and Avignonto acknowledge his suzerainty.
Charles supported Margaret II, Countess of Flanders and Hainaut, against her eldest son, John, in exchange for Hainaut in 1253. Two years later Louis IX persuaded him to renounce the county, but compensated him by instructing Margaret to pay him 160,000 marks. Charles forced the rebellious Provençal nobles and towns into submission and expanded his suzerainty over a dozen towns and lordships in the Kingdom of Arles. In 1263, after years of negotiations, he accepted the offer of the Holy See to seize the Kingdom of Sicily from the Hohenstaufens. This kingdom included, in addition to the island of Sicily, southern Italy to well north of Naples and was known as the "Regno". Pope Urban IV declared a crusade against the incumbent Manfred of Sicily and assisted Charles to raise funds for the military campaign.
Charles was crowned king in Rome on 5 January 1266. He annihilated Manfred's army and occupied the "Regno" almost without resistance. His victory over Manfred's young nephew, Conradin, at the Battle of Tagliacozzo in 1268 strengthened his rule. In 1270 he took part in the Eighth Crusade (which had been organized by Louis IX) and forced the Hafsid caliph of Tunis to pay a yearly tribute to him. Charles' victories secured his undisputed leadership among the popes' Italian partisans (known as Guelphs), but his influence on papal elections and his strong military presence in Italy disturbed the popes. They tried to channel his ambitions towards other territories and assisted him in acquiring claims to Achaea, Jerusalem and Arles through treaties. In 1281 Pope Martin IV authorised Charles to launch a crusade against the Byzantine Empire. Charles' ships were gathering at Messina, ready to begin the campaign when a riotknown as the Sicilian Vespersbroke out on 30March 1282. It put an end to Charles' rule on the island of Sicily, but he was able to defend the mainland territories (or the Kingdom of Naples) with the support of France and the Holy See.
Charles was the youngest child of Louis VIII of France and Blanche of Castile. The date of his birth was not recorded, but he was probably a posthumous son, born in early 1227. Charles was Louis's only surviving son to be "born in the purple" (after his father's coronation), a fact he often emphasised in his youth, according to Matthew Paris. He was the first Capet to be named for Charlemagne.
Louis willed that his youngest sons were to be prepared for a career in the Roman Catholic Church. The details of Charles' tuition are unknown, but he received a good education. He understood the principal Catholic doctrines and could identify errors in Latin texts. His passion for poetry, medical sciences and law is well documented.
Charles said that their mother had a strong impact on her children's education. In reality, Blanche was fully engaged in state administration, and could likely spare little time for her youngest children. Charles lived at the court of a brother, Robert I, Count of Artois, from 1237. About four years later he was put into the care of his youngest brother, Alphonse, Count of Poitiers. His participation in his brothers' military campaign against Hugh X of Lusignan, Count of La Marche, in 1242 showed that he was no longer destined for a Church career.
Raymond Berengar V of Provence died in August 1245, bequeathing Provence and Forcalquier to his youngest daughter, Beatrice, allegedly because he had given generous dowries to her three sisters. The dowries were actually not fully discharged, causing two of her sisters, Margaret (Louis IX's wife) and Eleanor (the wife of Henry III of England), to believe that they had been unlawfully disinherited. Their mother, Beatrice of Savoy, claimed that Raymond Berengar had willed the usufruct of Provence to her.
Emperor Frederick II, Count Raymond VII of Toulouse and other neighbouring rulers proposed themselves or their sons as husbands for the young countess. Her mother put her under the protection of the Holy See. Louis IX and Margaret suggested that Beatrice should be given in marriage to Charles. To secure the support of France against Frederick II, Pope Innocent IV accepted their proposal. Charles hurried to Aix-en-Provence at the head of an army to prevent other suitors from attacking. He married Beatrice on 31January 1246. Provence was a part of the Kingdom of Arles and so of the Holy Roman Empire, but Charles never swore fealty to the emperor. He ordered a survey of the counts' rights and revenues, outraging both his subjects and his mother-in-law, who regarded this action as an attack against her rights.
Being a younger child, destined for a church career, Charles had not received an appanage (a hereditary county or duchy) from his father. Louis VIII had willed that his fourth son, John, should receive Anjou and Maine upon reaching the age of majority, but John died in 1232. Louis IX knighted Charles at Melun in May 1246 and three months later bestowed Anjou and Maine on him. Charles rarely visited his two counties and appointed baillies (or regents) to administer them.
While Charles was absent from Provence, Marseilles, Arles and Avignonthree wealthy cities, directly subject to the emperorformed a league and appointed a Provençal nobleman, Barral of Baux, as the commander of their combined armies. Charles' mother-in-law put the disobedient Provençals under her protection. Charles could not deal with the rebels as he was about to join his brother's crusade. To pacify his mother-in-law he acknowledged her right to rule Forcalquier and granted a third of his revenues from Provence to her.
In December 1244 Louis IX took a vow to lead a crusade. Ignoring their mother's strong opposition his three brothersRobert, Alphonse and Charlesalso took the cross. Preparations for the crusade lasted for years, with the crusaders embarking at Aigues-Mortes on 25August 1248. After spending several months in Cyprus they invaded Egypt on 5June 1249. They captured Damietta and decided to attack Cairo in November. During their advance Jean de Joinville noted Charles' personal courage which saved dozens of crusaders' lives. They were unable to reach Cairo because Egyptian troops surrounded them on 6April 1250. Charles was captured along with his brothers. They were released in exchange of 800,000 bezants and the surrender of Damietta on 6May.
During their voyage to Acre, Charles outraged Louis by gambling while the king was mourning the recent death of their brother, Robert of Artois. Louis remained in the Holy Land, but Charles returned to France in October 1250.
During Charles' absence rebellions had broken out in Provence. He applied both diplomacy and military force to deal with them. The Archbishop of Arles and the Bishop of Digne ceded their secular rights in the two towns to Charles in 1250. He received military assistance from his brother, Alphonse. Arles was the first town to surrender to them in April 1251. In May they forced Avignon to acknowledge their joint rule. A month later Barral of Baux also capitulated. Marseilles was the only town to resist for several months, but it also sought peace in July 1252. Its burghers acknowledged Charles as their lord, but retained their self-governing bodies.
Charles' officials continued to ascertain his rights, visiting each town and holding public enquiries to obtain information about all claims. The count's salt monopoly (or "gabelle") was introduced in the whole county. Income from the salt trade made up about 50% of comital revenues by the late 1250s. Charles abolished local tolls and promoted shipbuilding and the cereal trade. He ordered the issue of new coins, called , to enable the use of the local currency in smaller transactions.
Emperor Frederick II, who was also the ruler of Sicily, died in 1250. The Kingdom of Sicily, also known as the "Regno", included the island of Sicily and southern Italy nearly as far as Rome. Pope Innocent IV claimed that the "Regno" had reverted to the Holy See. The pope first offered the "Regno" to Richard of Cornwall, but Richard did not want to fight against Frederick's son, Conrad IV of Germany. Then the pope proposed to enfeoff Charles with the kingdom. Charles sought instructions from Louis IX who forbade him to accept the offer, because he regarded Conrad as the lawful ruler. After Charles informed the Holy See on 30October 1253 that he would not accept the "Regno", the pope offered it to Edmund of Lancaster.
Queen Blanche, who had administered France during Louis' crusade, died on 1December 1252. Louis made Alphonse and Charles co-regents, so that he could remain in the Holy Land. Margaret II, Countess of Flanders and Hainaut had come into conflict with her son by her first marriage, John of Avesnes. After her sons by her second marriage were captured in July 1253, she needed foreign assistance to secure their release. Ignoring Louis IX's 1246 ruling that Hainaut should pass to John, she promised the county to Charles. He accepted the offer and invaded Hainaut, forcing most local noblemen to swear fealty to him. After his return to France, Louis IX insisted that his ruling was to be respected. In November 1255 he ordered Charles to restore Hainaut to Margaret, but her sons were obliged to swear fealty to Charles. Louis also ruled that she was to pay 160,000 marks to Charles during the following 13 years.
Charles returned to Provence, which had become restive again. His mother-in-law continued to support the rebellious Boniface of Castellane and his allies, but Louis IX persuaded her to return Forcalquier to Charles and relinquish her claims for a lump sum payment from Charles and a pension from Louis in November 1256. A coup by Charles' supporters in Marseilles resulted in the surrender of all political powers there to his officials. Charles spent the next years expanding his power along the borders of Provence. He received territories in the Lower Alps from the Dauphin of Vienne. Raymond I of Baux, Count of Orange, ceded the title of regent of the Kingdom of Arles to him. The burghers of Cuneoa town strategically located on the routes to Lombardysought Charles' protection against Asti in July 1259. Alba, Cherasco, Savigliano and other nearby towns acknowledged his rule. The rulers of Mondovì, Ceva, Biandrate and Saluzzo did homage to him in 1260.
Emperor Frederick II's illegitimate son, Manfred, had been crowned king of Sicily in 1258. After the English barons had announced that they opposed a war against Manfred, Pope Alexander IV annulled the 1253 grant of Sicily to Edmund of Lancaster. Alexander's successor, Pope Urban IV, was determined to put an end to the Emperor's rule in Italy. He sent his notary, Albert of Parma, to Paris to negotiate with Louis IX for Charles to be placed on the Sicilian throne. Charles met with the Pope's envoy in early 1262.
Taking advantage of Charles' absence, Castellane stirred up a new revolt in Provence. The burghers of Marseilles expelled Charles' officials, but Barral of Baux stopped the spread of the rebellion before Charles' return. Charles renounced Ventimiglia in favour of Genoa to secure the neutrality of the republic. He defeated the rebels and forced Castellane into exile. The mediation of James I of Aragon brought about a settlement with Marseilles: its fortifications were dismantled and the townspeople surrendered their arms, but the town retained its autonomy.
Louis IX decided to support Charles' military campaign in Italy in May 1263. Pope Urban IV promised to proclaim a crusade against Manfred, while Charles pledged that he would not accept any offices in the Italian towns. Manfred staged a coup in Rome, but the Guelphs elected Charles senator (or the head of the civil government of Rome). He accepted the office, at which a group of cardinals requested that the Pope revoke the agreement with him, but the Pope, being otherwise defenceless against Manfred, could not break with Charles.
In the spring of 1264 Cardinals Simon of Brie and Guy Foulquois were sent to France to reach a compromise and start raising support for the crusade. Charles sent troops to Rome to protect the Pope against Manfred's allies. At Foulquois' request, Charles' sister-in-law Margaret (who had not abandoned her claims to her dowry) pledged that she would not take actions against Charles during his absence. Foulquois also persuaded the French and Provençal prelates to offer financial support for the crusade. Pope Urban died before the final agreement was concluded. Charles made arrangements for his campaign against Sicily during the interregnum; he concluded agreements to secure his army's route across Lombardy and had the leaders of the Provençal rebels executed.
Foulquois was elected pope in February 1265; he soon confirmed Charles' senatorship and urged him to come to Rome. Charles agreed that he would hold the Kingdom of Sicily as the popes' vassal for an annual tribute of 8,000 ounces of gold. He also promised that he would never seek the imperial title. He embarked at Marseilles on 10May and landed at Ostia ten days later. He was installed as senator on 21June and four cardinals invested him with the "Regno" a week later. To finance further military actions he borrowed money from Italian bankers with the Pope's assistance, who had authorised him to pledge Church property. Five cardinals crowned him king of Sicily on 5January 1266. The crusaders from France and Provencereportedly 6,000 fully equipped mounted warriors, 600 mounted bowmen and 20,000 foot soldiersarrived in Rome ten days later.
Charles decided to invade the "Regno" without delay, because he was unable to finance a lengthy campaign. He left Rome on 20January 1266. He marched towards Naples, but changed his strategy after learning of a muster of Manfred's forces near Capua. He led his troops across the Apennines towards Benevento. Manfred also hurried to the town and reached it before Charles. Worried that further delays might endanger his subjects' loyalty, Manfred attacked Charles' army, then in disarray from the crossing of the hills, on 26February 1266. In the ensuing battle, Manfred's army was defeated and he was killed.
Resistance throughout the "Regno" collapsed. All towns surrendered even before Charles' troops reached them. The Saracens of Luceraa Muslim colony established during Frederick II's reignpaid homage to him. His commander, Philip of Montfort, took control of the island of Sicily. Manfred's widow, Helena of Epirus, and their children were captured. Charles laid claim to her dowrythe island of Corfu and the region of Durazzo (now Durrës in Albania)by right of conquest. His troops seized Corfu before the end of the year.
Charles was lenient with Manfred's supporters, but they did not believe that this conciliatory policy could last. They knew that he had promised to return estates to the Guelph lords expelled from the "Regno". Neither could Charles gain the commoners' loyalty, partly because he continued enforcing the "subventio generalis" despite the popes declaring it an illegal charge. He introduced a ban on the use of foreign currency in large transactions and made a profit of the compulsory exchange of foreign coinage for locally minted currency. He also traded in grain, spices and sugar, through a joint venture with Pisan merchants.
Pope Clement censured Charles for his methods of state administration, describing him as an arrogant and obstinate monarch. The consolidation of Charles' power in northern Italy also alarmed Clement. To appease the pope, Charles resigned his senatorship in May 1267. His successors, Conrad Monaldeschi and Luca Savelli, soon demanded the re-payment of the money that Charles and the Pope had borrowed from the Romans.
Victories by the Ghibellines, the imperial family's supporters, forced the Pope to ask Charles to send his troops to Tuscany. Charles' troops ousted the Ghibellines from Florence in April 1267. After being elected the Podestà (ruler) of Florence and Lucca for seven years, Charles hurried to Tuscany. The Pope summoned him to Viterbo, forcing him to promise that he would abandon all claims to Tuscany in three years.
The Pope wanted to change the direction of Charles' ambitions. He persuaded Charles to conclude agreements with William of Villehardouin, Prince of Achaea, and the Latin Emperor Baldwin II in late May. According to the first treaty, Villehardouin acknowledged Charles' suzerainty and made Charles' younger son, Philip, his heir, also stipulating that Charles would inherit Achaea if Philip died childless. Baldwin confirmed the first agreement and renounced his claims to suzerainty over his vassals in favour of Charles. Charles pledged that he would assist Baldwin in recapturing Constantinople from the Byzantine emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, in exchange for one third of the conquered lands.
Charles returned to Tuscany and laid siege to the fortress of Poggibonsi, but it did not fall until the end of November. Manfred's staunchest supporters had meanwhile fled to Bavaria to attempt to persuade Conrad IV's 15-year-old son Conradin to assert his hereditary right to the "Regno". After Conradin accepted their proposal, Manfred's former vicar in Sicily, Conrad Capece, returned to the island and stirred up a revolt. At Capece's request Muhammad I al-Mustansir, the Hafsid caliph of Tunis, allowed Manfred's former ally, Frederick of Castile, to invade Sicily from North Africa. Frederick's brother, Henrywho had been elected senator of Romealso offered support to Conradin. Henry had been Charles' friend, but Charles had failed to repay a loan to him.
Conradin left Bavaria in September 1267. His supporters' revolt was spreading from Sicily to Calabria; the Saracens of Lucera also rose up. Pope Clement urged Charles to return to the "Regno", but he continued his campaign in Tuscany until March 1268, when he met with the Pope. In April, the Pope made Charles imperial vicar of Tuscany "during the vacancy of the empire", a move of dubious legality. Charles marched to southern Italy and laid siege to Lucera, but he then had to hurry north to prevent Conradin's invasion of Abruzzo in late August. At the Battle of Tagliacozzo, on 23August 1268, it appeared that Conradin had won the day, but a sudden charge by Charles' reserve routed Conradin's army.
The burghers of Potenza, Aversa and other towns in Basilicata and Apulia massacred their fellows who had agitated on Conradin's behalf, but the Sicilians and the Saracens of Lucera did not surrender. Charles marched to Rome where he was again elected senator in September. He appointed new officials to administer justice and collect state revenues. New coins bearing his name were struck. During the following decade, Rome was ruled by Charles' vicars, each appointed for one year.
Conradin was captured at Torre Astura. Most of his retainers were summarily executed, but Conradin and his friend, Frederick I, Margrave of Baden, were brought to trial for robbery and treason in Naples. They were sentenced to death and beheaded on 29October. Conrad of Antioch was Conradin's only partisan to be released, but only after his wife threatened to execute the Guelph lords she held captive in her castle. The Ghibelline noblemen of the "Regno" fled to the court of Peter III of Aragon, who had married Manfred's daughter, Constance.
Charles wife, Beatrice of Provence, had died in July 1267. The widowed Charles married Margaret of Nevers in November 1268. She was co-heiress to her father, Odo, the eldest son of Hugh IV, Duke of Burgundy. Pope Clement died on 29November 1268. The vacancy lasted for three years, which strengthened Charles' authority in Italy, but it also deprived him of the ecclesiastic support that only a pope could provide.
Charles returned to Lucera to personally direct its siege in April 1269. The Saracens and the Ghibellines who had escaped to the town resisted until starvation forced them to surrender in August 1269. Charles sent Philip and Guy of Montfort to Sicily to force the rebels there into submission, but they could only capture Augusta. Charles made William l'Estandart the commander of the army in Sicily in August 1269. L'Estandart captured Agrigento, forcing Frederick of Castile and Frederick Lancia to seek refuge in Tunis. After L'Estandart's subsequent victory at Sciacca, only Capece resisted, but he also had to surrender in early 1270.
Charles' troops forced Siena and Pisathe last towns to resist him in Tuscanyto sue for peace in August 1270. He granted privileges to the Tuscan merchants and bankers which strengthened their position in the "Regno". His influence was declining in Lombardy, because the Lombard towns no longer feared an invasion from Germany. In May 1269 Charles sent Walter of La Roche to represent him in the province, but this failed to strengthen his authority. In October Charles' officials convoked an assembly at Cremona, and invited the Lombard towns to attend. The Lombard towns accepted the invitation, but some townsMilan, Bologna, Alessandria and Tortonaonly confirmed their alliance with Charles, without acknowledging his rule.
Louis IX never abandoned the idea of the liberation of Jerusalem, but he decided to begin his new crusade with a military campaign against Tunis. According to his confessor, Geoffrey of Beaulieu, Louis was convinced that al-Mustansir of Tunis was ready to convert to Christianity. The 13th-century historian Saba Malaspina stated that Charles persuaded Louis to attack Tunis, because he wanted to secure the payment of the tribute that the rulers of Tunis had paid to the former Sicilian monarchs.
The French crusaders embarked at Aigues-Mortes on 2July 1270; Charles departed from Naples six days later. He spent more than a month in Sicily, waiting for his fleet. By the time he landed at Tunis on 25August, dysentery and typhoid fever had decimated the French army. Louis died on the day of Charles' arrival.
The crusaders twice defeated Al-Mustansir's army, forcing him to sue for peace. According to the peace treaty, signed on 1November, Al-Mustansir agreed to fully compensate Louis' son and successor, Philip III of France, and Charles for the expenses of the military campaign and to release his Christian prisoners. He also promised to pay a yearly tribute to Charles and to expel Charles' opponents from Tunis. The gold from Tunis, along with silver from the newly opened mine at Longobucco, enabled Charles to mint new coins, known as "carlini", in the "Regno".
Charles and Philip departed Tunis on 10November. A storm dispersed their fleet at Trapani and most of Charles' galleys were lost or damaged. Genoese ships returning from the crusade were also sunk or forced to land in Sicily. Charles seized the damaged ships and their cargo, ignoring all protests from the Ghibelline authorities of Genoa. Before leaving Sicily he granted temporary tax concessions to the Sicilians, because he realised that the conquest of the island had caused much destruction.
Charles accompanied Philip III as far as Viterbo in March 1271. Here they failed to convince the cardinals to elect a new pope. Charles' brother, Alphonse of Poitiers, fell ill. Charles sent his best doctors to cure him, but Alphonse died. He claimed the major part of Alphonse inheritance, including the Marquisate of Provence and the County of Poitiers, because he was Alphonse's nearest kin. After Philip III objected, he took the case to the Parlement of Paris. In 1284 the court ruled that appanages escheated to the French crown if their rulers died without descendants.
An earthquake destroyed the walls of Durazzo in the late 1260s or early 1270s. Charles' troops took possession of the town with the assistance of the leaders of the nearby Albanian communities. Charles concluded an agreement with the Albanian chiefs, promising to protect them and their ancient liberties in February 1272. He adopted the title of King of Albania and appointed Gazzo Chinardo as his vicar-general. He also sent his fleet to Achaea to defend the principality against Byzantine attacks.
Charles hurried to Rome to attend the enthronement of Pope Gregory X on 27March 1272. The new pope was determined to put an end to the conflicts between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. While in Rome Charles met with the Guelph leaders who had been exiled from Genoa. After they offered him the office of captain of the people, Charles promised military assistance to them. In November 1272 Charles commanded his officials to take prisoner all Genoese within his territories, except for the Guelphs, and to seize their property. His fleet occupied Ajaccio in Corsica. Pope Gregory condemned his aggressive policy, but proposed that the Genoese should elect Guelph officials. Ignoring the pope's proposal, the Genoese made alliance with Alfonso X of Castille, William VII of Montferrat and the Ghibelline towns of Lombardy in October 1273.
The conflict with Genoa prevented Charles from invading the Byzantine Empire, but he continued to forge alliances in the Balkan Peninsula. The Bulgarian ruler, Konstantin Tih, was the first to conclude a treaty with him in 1272 or 1273. John I Doukas of Thessaly and Stefan Uroš I, King of Serbia, joined the coalition in 1273. However, Pope Gregory forbade Charles to attack, because he hoped to unify the Orthodox and Catholic churches with the assistance of Emperor Michael VIII.
The renowned theologian Thomas Aquinas died unexpectedly near Naples on 7March 1274, before departing to attend the Second Council of Lyon. According to a popular legend, immortalised by Dante, Charles had him poisoned, because he feared that Aquinas would make complaint against him. Historian Steven Runciman emphasises that "there is no evidence for supposing that the great doctor's death was not natural". Southern Italian churchmen at the council accused Charles of tyrannical acts. Their report reinforced the Pope's attempt to reach a compromise with Rudolf of Habsburg, who had been elected king by the prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire. In June, the Pope acknowledged Rudolf as the lawful ruler of both Germany and Italy. Charles' sisters-in-law, Margaret and Eleanor, approached Rudolf, claiming that they had been unlawfully disinherited in favour of Charles' late wife.
Michael VIII's personal envoy announced at the Council of Lyon on 6July that he had accepted the Catholic creed and papal primacy. About three weeks later, Pope Gregory again prohibited Charles from launching military actions against the Byzantine Empire. The Pope also tried to mediate a truce between Charles and Michael, but the latter choose to attack the smaller states of the Balkans, including Charles' vassals. The Byzantine fleet took control of the maritime routes between Albania and southern Italy in the late 1270s. Gregory only allowed Charles to send reinforcements to Achaea. The organisation of a new crusade to the Holy Land remained the Pope's principal object. He persuaded Charles to start negotiations with Maria of Antioch about purchasing her claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The High Court of Jerusalem had already rejected her in favour of Hugh III of Cyprus, but the Pope had a low opinion of Hugh.
The war with Genoa and the Lombard towns increasingly occupied Charles' attention. He appointed his nephew Robert II of Artois as his deputy in Piedmont in October 1274, but Artois could not prevent Vercelli and Alessandria from joining the Ghibelline League. The following summer, a Genoese fleet plundered Trapani and the island of Gozo. Convinced that only Rudolf I could achieve a compromise between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Pope urged the Lombard towns to send envoys to him. He also urged Charles to renounce Tuscany. In the autumn of 1275 the Ghibellines offered to make peace with Charles, but he did not accept their terms. Early the next year the Ghibellines defeated his troops at Col de Tende, forcing them to withdraw to Provence.
Pope Gregory X died on 10January 1276. After the hostility he experienced during Gregory's pontificate, Charles was determined to secure the election of a pope willing to support his plans. Gregory's successor, Pope Innocent V, had always been Charles' partisan and he rapidly confirmed Charles' ranks of senator of Rome and imperial vicar of Tuscany. He also mediated a peace treaty between Charles and Genoa, which was signed in Rome on 22June 1276. Charles restored the privileges of the Genoese merchants and renounced his conquests, and the Genoese acknowledged his rule in Ventimiglia.
Pope Innocent died on 30June 1276. After the cardinals assembled in the Lateran Palace, Charles' troops surrounded it, enabling only his allies to communicate with other cardinals and with outsiders. On 11July the cardinals elected Charles' old friend, Ottobuono de' Fieschi, pope, but he died on 18August. The cardinals met again, this time at Viterbo. Although Charles was staying in the nearby Vetralla, he could not directly influence the election. Pope John XXI, who was elected on 20September, excommunicated Charles' opponents in Piedmont and prohibited Rudolf from coming to Lombardy, but did not forbid the Lombardian Guelph leaders swearing fealty to Rudolf. The Pope also confirmed the treaty concluded by Charles and Maria of Antioch on 18March which transferred her claims to Jerusalem to Charles for 1,000 "bezants" and a pension of 4,000 "livres tournois".
Charles appointed Roger of San Severino to administer the Kingdom of Jerusalem as his bailiff. San Severino landed at Acre on 7June 1277. Hugh III's bailiff, Balian of Arsuf, surrendered the town without resistance. Although only the Knights Hospitaller and the Venetians acknowledged Charles as the lawful ruler, the barons of the realm also paid homage to San Severino in January 1278, after he had threatened to confiscate their estates. The Mamluks of Egypt had already confined the kingdom to a coastal strip covering and Charles had ordered San Severino to avoid conflicts with Egypt.
Pope John died on 20May 1277. Charles was ill and could not prevent the election of the head of the anti-French cardinals, Giovanni Gaetano Orsini (Pope Nicholas III), on 25November. The Pope soon declared that no foreign prince could rule in Rome and reminded Charles that he had been elected senator for ten years. Charles swore fealty to the new pope on 24May 1278 after lengthy negotiations. He had to pledge that he would renounce both the senatorship of Rome and the vicariate of Tuscany in four months. On the other hand, Nicholas III confirmed the excommunication of Charles' enemies in Piedmont and started negotiations with Rudolf to prevent him from making an alliance against Charles with Margaret of Provence and her nephew Edward I of England. The negotiations with Rudolf lay behind Nicholas' refusal to renew Charles' vicariate in Tuscany, to which Rudolf had appointed his own vicar.
Charles announced his resignation from the senatorship and the vicariate on 30August 1278. He was succeeded by the Pope's brother, Matteo Orsini, in Rome, and by the Pope's nephew, Cardinal Latino Malabranca, in Tuscany. To ensure that Charles fully abandoned his ambitions in central Italy the Pope started negotiations with Rudolf about the restoration of the Kingdom of Arles for Charles' grandson, Charles Martel. Margaret of Provence sharply opposed the plan, but Philip III of France did not stand by his mother. After lengthy negotiations, in the summer of 1279 Rudolf recognised Charles as the lawful ruler of Provence without demanding his oath of fealty. An agreement about Charles Martel's rule in Arles and his marriage to Rudolf's daughter, Clemence, was signed in May 1280. The plan disturbed the rulers of the lands along the Upper Rhone, especially Duke Robert II and Count Otto IV of Burgundy.
Charles had meanwhile inherited the Principality of Achaea from William II of Villehardouin, who had died on 1May 1278. He appointed the unpopular of Sicily, Galeran of Ivry, as his baillif in Achaea. Galeran could not pay his troops who started to pillage the peasants' homes. John I de la Roche, Duke of Athens, had to lend money to him to finance their salaries. Nicephoros I of Epirus acknowledged Charles' suzerainty on 14March 1279 to secure his assistance against the Byzantines. Nicephoros also ceded three townsButrinto, Sopotos and Panormosto Charles.
Pope Nicholas died on 22August 1280. Charles sent agents to Viterbo to promote the election of one of his supporters, taking advantage of the rift between the late pope's relatives and other Italian cardinals. When a riot broke out in Viterbo, after the cardinals had not reached a decision for months, Charles' troops took control of the town. On 22February 1281 his staunchest supporter, Simon of Brie, was elected pope. Pope Martin IV dismissed his predecessor's relatives and made Charles the senator of Rome again. Guido I da Montefeltro rose up against the pope, but Charles' troops under Jean d'Eppe stopped the spread of the rebellion at Forlì. Charles also sent an army to Piedmont, but Thomas I, Marquess of Saluzzo, annihilated it at Borgo San Dalmazzo in May.
Pope Martin excommunicated Emperor Michael VIII on 10April 1281 because the emperor had not imposed the Church union in his empire. The Pope soon authorised Charles to invade the empire. Charles' vicar in Albania, Hugh of Sully, had already laid siege to the Byzantine fortress of Berat. A Byzantine army of relief under Michael Tarchaneiotes and John Synadenos arrived in March 1281. Sully was ambushed and captured, his army put to flight and the interior of Albania was lost to the Byzantines. On 3July 1281 Charles and his son-in-law, Philip of Courtenay, the titular Latin emperor, made an alliance with Venice "for the restoration of the Roman Empire". They decided to start a full-scale campaign early the next year.
Margaret of Provence called Robert and Otto of Burgundy and other lords who held fiefs in the Kingdom of Arles to a meeting at Troyes in the autumn of 1281. They were willing to unite their troops to prevent Charles' army from taking possession of the kingdom, but Philip III of France strongly opposed his mother's plan and Edward I of England would not promise any assistance to them. Charles acknowledged that his wife held the County of Tonnerre and her other inherited estates as a Burgundian fief, which appeased Robert of Burgundy. Charles' ships started to assemble at Marseilles to sail up the Rhone in the spring of 1282. Another fleet was gathering at Messina to start the crusade against the Byzantine Empire.
Always in need of funds, Charles could not cancel the "subventio generalis", although it was the most unpopular tax in the "Regno". Instead he granted exemptions to individuals and communities, especially to the French and Provençal colonists, which increased the burden on those who did not enjoy such privileges. The yearly, or occasionally more frequent, obligatory exchange of the "deniers"the coins almost exclusively used in local transactionswas also an important, and unpopular, source of revenue for the royal treasury. Charles took out enforced loans whenever he needed "immediately a large sum of money for certain arduous and pressing business", as he explained in one of his decrees.
Purveyances, the requisitioning of goods, increased the unpopularity of Charles' government in the "Regno". His subjects were forced to guard prisoners or lodge soldiers in their homes. The restoration of old fortresses, bridges and aqueducts and the building of new castles required the employment of craftsmen, although most of them were unwilling to participate in such lengthy projects. Thousands of people were forced to serve in the army in foreign lands, especially after 1279. Trading in salt was declared a royal monopoly. In December 1281, Charles again ordered the collection of the "subventio generalis", requiring the payment of 150% of the customary amount.
Charles did not pay attention to the island of Sicily, although it had been the centre of resistance against him in 1268. He transferred the capital from Palermo to Naples. He did not visit the island after 1271, preventing Sicilians from directly informing him of their grievances. Sicilian noblemen were seldom employed as royal officials, although he often appointed their southern Italian peers to represent him in his other realms. Furthermore, having seized large estates on the island in the late 1260s Charles almost exclusively employed French and Provençal clerics to administer the royal demesne.
Popular stories credited John of ProcidaManfred of Sicily's former chancellorwith staging an international plot against Charles. Legend says that he visited Constantinople, Sicily and Viterbo in disguise in 1279 and 1280 to convince Michael VIII, the Sicilian barons and Pope Nicholas III to support a revolt. On the other hand, Michael VIII would later claim that he "was God's instrument in bringing freedom to the Sicilians" in his memoirs. The emperor's wealth enabled him to send money to the discontented Sicilian barons. Peter III of Aragon decided to lay claim to the "Regno" in late 1280: he did not hide his disdain when he met with Charles' son, Charles, Duke of Salerno, in Toulouse in December 1280. He began to assemble a fleet, ostensibly for another crusade to Tunis.
Rioting broke out in Sicily after a burgher of Palermo killed a drunken French soldier who had insulted his wife before the Church of the Holy Spirit on Easter Monday (30March) of 1282. When the soldier's comrades attacked the murderer, the mob turned against them and started to massacre all the French in the town. The riot, known since the 16th century as the Sicilian Vespers, developed into an uprising and most of Charles' officials were killed or forced to flee the island. Charles ordered the transfer of soldiers and ships from Achaea to Sicily, but could not stop the spread of the revolt to Calabria. San Severino also had to return to Italy, accompanied by the major part of the garrison at Acre. Odo Poilechien, who succeeded him in Acre, had limited authority.
The burghers of the major Sicilian towns established communes which sent delegates to Pope Martin, asking him to take them under the protection of the Holy See. Instead of accepting their offer, the pope excommunicated the rebels on 7May. Charles issued an edict on 10June, accusing his officials of having ignored his instructions on good administration, but he failed to promise fundamental changes. In July he sailed to Sicily and laid siege to Messina.
Peter III of Aragon's envoy, William of Castelnou, started negotiations with the rebels' leaders in Palermo. Realizing that they could not resist without foreign support, they acknowledged Peter and Constance as their king and queen. They appointed envoys to accompany Castelnou to Collo where the Aragonese fleet was assembling. After a short hesitation, Peter decided to intervene on the rebels' behalf and sailed to Sicily. He was declared king of Sicily at Palermo on 4September. Thereafter two realms, each ruled by a monarch styled king (or queen) of Sicily, coexisted for more than a century, with Charles and his successors ruling in southern Italy (known as the Kingdom of Naples) while Peter and his descendants ruled the island of Sicily.
In the face of the Aragonese landing, Charles was compelled to withdraw from the island, but the Aragonese moved swiftly and destroyed part of his army and most of his baggage. Peter took control of the whole island and sent troops to Calabria, but they could not prevent Charles of Salerno from leading an army of 600 French knights to join his father at Reggio Calabria. Further French troops arrived under the command of Charles' nephews, Robert II of Artois and Peter of Alençon, in November. In the same month, the pope excommunicated Peter.
Neither Peter nor Charles could afford to wage a lengthy war. Charles made an astonishing proposal in late December 1282, challenging Peter for a judicial duel. Peter insisted that the war should be continued, but agreed that a battle between the two kings, each accompanied by 100 knights, should decide the possession of Sicily. They agreed that the duel should take place at Bordeaux on 1June 1283, but they did not fix the hour. Charles appointed Charles of Salerno to administer the "Regno" during his absence. To secure the loyalty of the local lords in Achaea, he made one of their peers, Guy of Dramelay, baillif. Pope Martin declared the war against the Sicilians a crusade on 13January 1283. Charles met with the Pope in Viterbo on 9 March, but he ignored the Pope's ban on his duel with Peter of Aragon. After visiting Provence and Paris in April, he left for Bordeaux to meet with Peter. The duel turned into a farce; the two kings each arriving at different times on the same day, declaring a victory over their absent opponent, and departing.
Skirmishes and raids continued to occur in southern Italy. Aragonese guerillas attacked Catona and killed Peter of Alençon in January 1283; the Aragonese seized Reggio Calabria in February; and the Sicilian admiral, Roger of Lauria, annihilated a newly raised Provençal fleet at Malta in April. However, tensions arose between the Aragonese and the Sicilians and in May 1283 one of the leaders of the anti-Angevin rebellion, Walter of Caltagirone, was executed for his secret correspondence with Charles' agents. Pope Martin declared the war against Aragon a crusade and conferred the kingdom upon Philip III of France's son, Charles of Valois, on 2February 1284.
Charles started to raise new troops and a fleet in Provence, and instructed his son, Charles of Salerno, to maintain a defensive posture until his return. Roger of Lauria based a small squadron on the island of Nisida to blockade Naples in May 1284. Charles of Salerno attempted to destroy the squadron, but most of his fleet was captured, and he himself was taken prisoner after a short, sharp fight on 5June. News of the reverse caused a riot in Naples, but the papal legate, Gerard of Parma, crushed it with the assistance of local noblemen. Charles learnt of the disaster when he landed at Gaeta on 6June. He was furious at Charles of Salerno and his disobedience. He allegedly stated that "Who loses a fool loses nothing", referring to his son's capture.
Charles left Naples for Calabria on 24June 1284. A huge armyreportedly 10,000 mounted warriors and 40,000 foot-soldiersaccompanied him as far as Reggio Calabria. He laid siege to the town by sea and land in late July. He tried to land in Sicily, but his forces were forced to withdraw. After Lauria landed troops near Reggio Calabria, Charles had to lift the siege and retreat from Calabria on 3August.
Charles went to Brindisi and made preparations for a campaign against Sicily in the new year. He dispatched orders to his officials for the collection of the "subventio generalis". However, he fell seriously ill before moving to Foggia on 30December. He made his last will on 6January 1285, appointing Robert II of Artois regent for his grandson, Charles Martel, who was to rule his realms until Charles of Salerno was released. He died in the morning of 7January. He was buried in a marble sepulchre in Naples, but his heart was placed at the Couvent Saint-Jacques in Paris. His corpse was moved to a chapel of the newly built Naples Cathedral in 1296.
All records show that Charles was a faithful husband and a caring father. His first wife, Beatrice of Provence, gave birth to at least six children. According to contemporaneous gossips, she persuaded Charles to claim the "Regno", because she wanted to wear a crown like his sisters. Before she died in July 1267, she had willed the usufruct of Provence to Charles.
The widowed Charles first proposed himself to Margaret of Hungary. However, Margaret, who had been brought up in a Dominican nunnery, did not want to marry. According to legends, she disfigured herself to prevent the marriage. Charles and his second wife, Margaret of Nevers, had children who did not survive to adulthood.
The works of Bartholomaeus of Neocastro and Saba Malaspina strongly influenced modern views about Charles, although they were biased. The former described Charles as a tyrant to justify the Sicilian Vespers, the latter argued for the cancellation of the crusade against Aragon in 1285. Charles had continued his imperial predecessors' policies in several fields, including coinage, taxation, and the employment of unpopular officials from Amalfi. Nevertheless, the monarchy underwent a "Frenchification" or "Provençalistion" during his reign. He donated estates in the "Regno" to about 700 noblemen from France or Provence. He did not adopt the rich ceremonial robes, inspired by Byzantine and Islamic art, of earlier Sicilian kings, but dressed like other western European monarchs, or as "a simple knight", as it was observed by Thomas Tuscus in 1267.
Around 1310, Giovanni Villani stated that Charles had been the most powerful Christian monarch in the late 1270s. Luchetto Gattilusio compared Charles directly with Charlemagne. Both reports demonstrate that Charles was regarded almost as an emperor. Among modern historians, Runciman says that Charles tried to build an empire in the eastern Mediterraneum; Gérard Sivéry writes that he wanted to dominate the west; and Jean Dunbabin argues that his "agglomeration of lands was in the process of forming an empire".
Historian Hiroshi Takayama concludes that Charles' dominion "was too large to control". Nevertheless, economic links among his realms strengthened during his reign. Provençal salt was transported to his other lands, grain from the "Regno" was sold in Achaea, Albania, Acre and Tuscany, and Tuscan merchants settled in Anjou, Maine, Sicily and Naples. His highest-ranking officials were transferred from their homelands to represent him in other territories: his senechals in Provence were from Anjou; French and Provençal noblemen held the highest offices in the "Regno"; and he chose his vicars in Rome from among southern Italian and Provençal nobles. Although his empire collapsed before his death, his son retained southern Italy and Provence.
Charles always emphasised his royal rank, but did not adopt "imperial rhetoric". His renowned justiciar, Marino de Caramanico, developed a new political theory, which denied the emperors' monopoly on law-making and emphasised Charles' full competence to issue decrees. To promote legal education Charles paid high salaries20–50 ounces of gold in a yearto masters of law at the University of Naples. Masters of medicine received similar remunerations, and the university became a principal centre of medical science. Charles' personal interest in medicine grew during his life and he borrowed Arabic medical texts from the rulers of Tunis to have them translated. He employed at least one Jewish scholar, Moses of Palermo, who could translate texts from Arabic to Latin. Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi's medical encyclopaedia, known as "Kitab al-Hawi", was one of the books translated at his order.
Charles was also a poet, which distinguished him from his Capetian relatives. He composed lovesongs and a "partimen" (the latter with Pierre d'Angicourt). He was requested to judge at two poetic competitions in his youth, but modern scholars do not esteem his poetry. The Provençal troubadours were mostly critical when writing of Charles, but French poets were willing to praise him. Bertran d'Alamanon wrote a poem against the salt tax and Raimon de Tors de Marseilha rebuked Charles for invading the "Regno". Adam de la Halle dedicated an unfinished epic poem to Charles and Jean de Meun glorified his victories. Dante described Charles"who bears a manly nose"singing peacefully together with his one-time rival, Peter III of Aragon, in Purgatory.
Charles also showed interest in architecture. He designed a tower in Brindisi, but it soon collapsed. He ordered the erection of the Castel Nuovo in Naples, of which only the palatine chapel survives. He is also credited with the introduction of French-style glassed windows in southern Italy. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39833 |
Correlation does not imply causation
In statistics, the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" refers to the inability to legitimately deduce a cause-and-effect relationship between two variables solely on the basis of an observed association or correlation between them. The idea that "correlation implies causation" is an example of a questionable-cause logical fallacy, in which two events occurring together are taken to have established a cause-and-effect relationship. This fallacy is also known by the Latin phrase cum hoc ergo propter hoc ("with this, therefore because of this"). This differs from the fallacy known as "post hoc ergo propter hoc" ("after this, therefore because of this"), in which an event following another is seen as a necessary consequence of the former event.
As with any logical fallacy, identifying that the reasoning behind an argument is flawed does not necessarily imply that the resulting conclusion is false. Methods have been proposed that use correlation as the basis for hypothesis tests for causality, including the Granger causality test and convergent cross mapping.
In logic, the technical use of the word "implies" means "is a "Sufficient condition" for". This is the meaning intended by statisticians when they say causation is not certain. Indeed, "p implies q" has the technical meaning of the material conditional: "if p then q" symbolized as "p → q". That is "if circumstance "p" is true, then "q" follows." In this sense, it is always correct to say "Correlation does not "imply" causation." In casual use, the word "implies" loosely means "suggests" rather than "requires".
Where there is causation, there is correlation, but also a sequence in time from cause to effect, a plausible mechanism, and sometimes common and intermediate causes. While correlation is often used when inferring causation because it is a necessary condition, it is not a sufficient condition.
In a widely studied example of the difficulties this possibility of this statistical fallacy poses in deciding cause, numerous epidemiological studies showed that women taking combined hormone replacement therapy (HRT) also had a lower-than-average incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), leading doctors to propose that HRT was protective against CHD. But later randomized controlled trials showed that use of HRT led to a small but statistically significant "increase" in the risk of CHD. Reanalysis of the data from the epidemiological studies showed that women undertaking HRT were more likely to be from higher socioeconomic groups (ABC1), with better-than-average diet and exercise regimens. Thus the use of HRT and decreased incidence of coronary heart disease were coincident effects of a common cause (i.e., the benefits associated with a higher socioeconomic status), rather than one being a direct cause of the other, as had been supposed. The widely held (but mistaken) belief that RCTs provide stronger causal evidence than observational studies, the latter continued to consistently show benefits and subsequent analyses and follow-up studies have demonstrated a significant benefit for CHD risk in healthy women initiating oestrogen therapy soon after the onset of menopause.
Causal analysis is the field of experimental design and statistics pertaining to establishing cause and effect. For any two correlated events, A and B, their possible relationships include:
Thus there can be no conclusion made regarding the "existence" or the "direction" of a cause-and-effect relationship only from the fact that A and B are correlated. Determining whether there is an actual cause-and-effect relationship requires further investigation, even when the relationship between "A" and "B" is statistically significant, a large effect size is observed, or a large part of the variance is explained.
The nature of causality is systematically investigated in several academic disciplines, including philosophy and physics.
In academia, there are a significant number of theories on causality; "The Oxford Handbook of Causation" encompasses 770 pages. Among the more influential theories within philosophy are Aristotle's Four causes and Al-Ghazali's occasionalism. David Hume argued that beliefs about causality are based on experience, and experience similarly based on the assumption that the future models the past, which in turn can only be based on experience – leading to circular logic. In conclusion, he asserted that causality is not based on actual reasoning: only correlation can actually be perceived. Immanuel Kant, according to , held that "a causal principle according to which every event has a cause, or follows according to a causal law, cannot be established through induction as a purely empirical claim, since it would then lack strict universality, or necessity".
Outside the field of philosophy, theories of causation can be identified in classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, spacetime theories, biology, social sciences, and law. To establish a correlation as causal within physics, it is normally understood that the cause and the effect must connect through a local mechanism (cf. for instance the concept of impact) or a nonlocal mechanism (cf. the concept of field), in accordance with known laws of nature.
From the point of view of thermodynamics, universal properties of causes as compared to effects have been identified through the Second law of thermodynamics, confirming the ancient, medieval and Cartesian view that "the cause is greater than the effect" for the particular case of thermodynamic free energy. This, in turn, is challenged by popular interpretations of the concepts of nonlinear systems and the butterfly effect, in which small events cause large effects due to, respectively, unpredictability and an unlikely triggering of large amounts of potential energy.
Intuitively, causation seems to require not just a correlation, but a counterfactual dependence. Suppose that a student performed poorly on a test and guesses that the cause was his not studying. To prove this, one thinks of the counterfactual – the same student writing the same test under the same circumstances but having studied the night before. If one could rewind history, and change only one small thing (making the student study for the exam), then causation could be observed (by comparing version 1 to version 2). Because one cannot rewind history and replay events after making small controlled changes, causation can only be inferred, never exactly known. This is referred to as the Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference – it is impossible to directly observe causal effects.
A major goal of scientific experiments and statistical methods is to approximate as best possible the counterfactual state of the world. For example, one could run an experiment on identical twins who were known to consistently get the same grades on their tests. One twin is sent to study for six hours while the other is sent to the amusement park. If their test scores suddenly diverged by a large degree, this would be strong evidence that studying (or going to the amusement park) had a causal effect on test scores. In this case, correlation between studying and test scores would almost certainly imply causation.
Well-designed experimental studies replace equality of individuals as in the previous example by equality of groups. The objective is to construct two groups that are similar except for the treatment that the groups receive. This is achieved by selecting subjects from a single population and randomly assigning them to two or more groups. The likelihood of the groups behaving similarly to one another (on average) rises with the number of subjects in each group. If the groups are essentially equivalent except for the treatment they receive, and a difference in the outcome for the groups is observed, then this constitutes evidence that the treatment is responsible for the outcome, or in other words the treatment causes the observed effect. However, an observed effect could also be caused "by chance", for example as a result of random perturbations in the population. Statistical tests exist to quantify the likelihood of erroneously concluding that an observed difference exists when in fact it does not (for example see P-value).
When experimental studies are impossible and only pre-existing data are available, as is usually the case for example in economics, regression analysis can be used. Factors other than the potential causative variable of interest are controlled for by including them as regressors in addition to the regressor representing the variable of interest. False inferences of causation due to reverse causation (or wrong estimates of the magnitude of causation due the presence of bidirectional causation) can be avoided by using explanators (regressors) that are necessarily exogenous, such as physical explanators like rainfall amount (as a determinant of, say, futures prices), lagged variables whose values were determined before the dependent variable's value was determined, instrumental variables for the explanators (chosen based on their known exogeneity), etc. See Causality#Statistics and economics. Spurious correlation due to mutual influence from a third, common, causative variable, is harder to avoid: the model must be specified such that there is a theoretical reason to believe that no such underlying causative variable has been omitted from the model.
Reverse causation or reverse causality or wrong direction is an informal fallacy of questionable cause where cause and effect are reversed. The cause is said to be the effect and vice versa.
In this example, the correlation (simultaneity) between windmill activity and wind velocity does not imply that wind is caused by windmills. It is rather the other way around, as suggested by the fact that wind doesn't need windmills to exist, while windmills need wind to rotate. Wind can be observed in places where there are no windmills or non-rotating windmills—and there are good reasons to believe that wind existed before the invention of windmills.
In other cases it may simply be unclear which is the cause and which is the effect. For example:
This could easily be the other way round; that is, violent children like watching more TV than less violent ones.
A correlation between recreational drug use and psychiatric disorders might be either way around: perhaps the drugs cause the disorders, or perhaps people use drugs to self medicate for preexisting conditions. Gateway drug theory may argue that marijuana usage leads to usage of harder drugs, but hard drug usage may lead to marijuana usage (see also "confusion of the inverse"). Indeed, in the social sciences where controlled experiments often cannot be used to discern the direction of causation, this fallacy can fuel long-standing scientific arguments. One such example can be found in education economics, between the screening/signaling and human capital models: it could either be that having innate ability enables one to complete an education, or that completing an education builds one's ability.
A historical example of this is that Europeans in the Middle Ages believed that lice were beneficial to your health, since there would rarely be any lice on sick people. The reasoning was that the people got sick because the lice left. The real reason however is that lice are extremely sensitive to body temperature. A small increase of body temperature, such as in a fever, will make the lice look for another host. The medical thermometer had not yet been invented, so this increase in temperature was rarely noticed. Noticeable symptoms came later, giving the impression that the lice left before the person got sick.
In other cases, two phenomena can each be a partial cause of the other; consider poverty and lack of education, or procrastination and poor self-esteem. One making an argument based on these two phenomena must however be careful to avoid the fallacy of circular cause and consequence. Poverty is "a" cause of lack of education, but it is not the "sole" cause, and vice versa.
The third-cause fallacy (also known as "ignoring a common cause" or "questionable cause") is a logical fallacy where a spurious relationship is confused for causation. It asserts that X causes Y when, in reality, X and Y are both caused by Z. It is a variation on the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy and a member of the questionable cause group of fallacies.
All of these examples deal with a lurking variable, which is simply a hidden third variable that affects both causes of the correlation. A difficulty often also arises where the third factor, though fundamentally different from A and B, is so closely related to A and/or B as to be confused with them or very difficult to scientifically disentangle from them (see Example 4).
The above example commits the correlation-implies-causation fallacy, as it prematurely concludes that sleeping with one's shoes on causes headache. A more plausible explanation is that both are caused by a third factor, in this case going to bed drunk, which thereby gives rise to a correlation. So the conclusion is false.
This is a scientific example that resulted from a study at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. Published in the May 13, 1999 issue of "Nature", the study received much coverage at the time in the popular press. However, a later study at Ohio State University did not find that infants sleeping with the light on caused the development of myopia. It did find a strong link between parental myopia and the development of child myopia, also noting that myopic parents were more likely to leave a light on in their children's bedroom. In this case, the cause of both conditions is parental myopia, and the above-stated conclusion is false.
This example fails to recognize the importance of time of year and temperature to ice cream sales. Ice cream is sold during the hot summer months at a much greater rate than during colder times, and it is during these hot summer months that people are more likely to engage in activities involving water, such as swimming. The increased drowning deaths are simply caused by more exposure to water-based activities, not ice cream. The stated conclusion is false.
However, as encountered in many psychological studies, another variable, a "self-consciousness score", is discovered that has a sharper correlation (+.73) with shyness. This suggests a possible "third variable" problem, however, when three such closely related measures are found, it further suggests that each may have bidirectional tendencies (see "bidirectional variable", above), being a cluster of correlated values each influencing one another to some extent. Therefore, the simple conclusion above may be false.
Richer populations tend to eat more food and produce more CO2.
Further research has called this conclusion into question. Instead, it may be that other underlying factors, like genes, diet and exercise, affect both HDL levels and the likelihood of having a heart attack; it is possible that medicines may affect the directly measurable factor, HDL levels, without affecting the chance of heart attack.
Causality is not necessarily one-way; in a predator-prey relationship, predator numbers affect prey numbers, but prey numbers, i.e. food supply, also affect predator numbers. Another well-known example is that cyclists have a lower Body Mass Index than people who do not cycle. This is often explained by assuming that cycling increases physical activity levels and therefore decreases BMI. Because results from prospective studies on people who increase their bicycle use show a smaller effect on BMI than cross-sectional studies, there may be some reverse causality as well (i.e. people with a lower BMI are more likely to cycle).
The two variables aren't related at all, but correlate by chance. The more things are examined, the more likely it is that two unrelated variables will appear to be related. For example:
Much of scientific evidence is based upon a correlation of variables – they are observed to occur together. Scientists are careful to point out that correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The assumption that A causes B simply because A correlates with B is often not accepted as a legitimate form of argument.
However, sometimes people commit the opposite fallacy – dismissing correlation entirely. This would dismiss a large swath of important scientific evidence. Since it may be difficult or ethically impossible to run controlled double-blind studies, correlational evidence from several different angles may be useful for "prediction" despite failing to provide evidence for "causation". For example, social workers might be interested in knowing how child abuse relates to academic performance. Although it would be unethical to perform an experiment in which children are randomly assigned to receive or not receive abuse, researchers can look at existing groups using a non-experimental correlational design. If in fact a negative correlation exists between abuse and academic performance, researchers could potentially use this knowledge of a statistical correlation to make predictions about children outside the study who experience abuse, even though the study failed to provide causal evidence that abuse decreases academic performance. The combination of limited available methodologies with the dismissing correlation fallacy has on occasion been used to counter a scientific finding. For example, the tobacco industry has historically relied on a dismissal of correlational evidence to reject a link between tobacco and lung cancer, as did biologist and statistician Ronald Fisher.
Correlation is a valuable type of scientific evidence in fields such as medicine, psychology, and sociology. But first correlations must be confirmed as real, and then every possible causative relationship must be systematically explored. In the end correlation alone cannot be used as evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship between a treatment and benefit, a risk factor and a disease, or a social or economic factor and various outcomes. It is one of the most abused types of evidence, because it is easy and even tempting to come to premature conclusions based upon the preliminary appearance of a correlation. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39834 |
Jan Bos
Jan Bos (born 29 March 1975) is a Dutch speedskater and sprint cyclist. In the late 1990s he was world champion in speed skating and he competed in the 1998 and 2002 Winter Olympics.
In 1998 Bos both became the world champion sprint and won the silver medal that year in the 1000 meter sprint during the Winter Olympics in Nagano. He won the silver medal on that same distance in Salt Lake City.
He competed at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens in the team sprint track cycling event, together with his brother Theo Bos, who won the silver at the individual sprint, and Teun Mulder. The Dutch finished sixth after being knocked out by Japan.
Bos ended his career as a competitive speed skater in 2011.
In 2012 Bos (in cooperation with the Human Power Team from Delft) tried to become the fastest cyclist in the world during the World Human Powered Speed Challenge in Battle Mountain, Nevada. At the time, the International Human Powered Vehicle Association record was 133 km/h, held by the Canadian Sam Whittingham. Bos used a recumbent bicycle specially developed for the occasion by students of the Delft University of Technology and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, but only managed a maximum speed of 126.5 km/h. In September 2013, his teammate Sebastiaan Bowier did manage to break the record, reaching a speed of 133.78 kilometres per hour (83.13 mph)
Bos specialized in the sprint events but does have a Adelsalender score of 156.494
Source: www.sskating.com & SpeedskatingResults.com
Source: SpeedSkatingStats.com
Source: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39838 |
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motion pictures. The Academy's corporate management and general policies are overseen by a board of governors, which includes representatives from each of the craft branches.
As of April 2020, the organization was estimated to consist of around 9,921 motion picture professionals. The Academy is an international organization and membership is open to qualified filmmakers around the world.
The Academy is known around the world for its annual Academy Awards, now officially and popularly known as "The Oscars".
In addition, the Academy holds the Governors Awards annually for lifetime achievement in film; presents Scientific and Technical Awards annually; gives Student Academy Awards annually to filmmakers at the undergraduate and graduate level; awards up to five Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting annually; and operates the Margaret Herrick Library (at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study) in Beverly Hills, California, and the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Hollywood, Los Angeles. The Academy plans to open the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles in 2021.
The notion of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) began with Louis B. Mayer, head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). He said he wanted to create an organization that would mediate labor disputes without unions and improve the industry's image. He met with actor Conrad Nagel, director Fred Niblo, and the head of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, Fred Beetson to discuss these matters. The idea of this elite club having an annual banquet was discussed, but no mention of awards at that time. They also established that membership into the organization would only be open to people involved in one of the five branches of the industry: actors, directors, writers, technicians, and producers.
After their brief meeting, Mayer gathered up a group of thirty-six people involved in the film industry and invited them to a formal banquet at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on January 11, 1927. That evening Mayer presented to those guests what he called the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Everyone in the room that evening became a founder of the Academy. Between that evening and when the official Articles of Incorporation for the organization were filed on May 4, 1927, the "International" was dropped from the name, becoming the "Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences".
Several organizational meetings were held prior to the first official meeting held on May 6, 1927. Their first organizational meeting was held on May 11 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel. At that meeting Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. was elected as the first president of the Academy, while Fred Niblo was the first vice-president, and their first roster, composed of 230 members, was printed. That night, the Academy also bestowed its first honorary membership, to Thomas Edison. Initially, the Academy was broken down into five main groups, or branches, although this number of branches has grown over the years. The original five were: Producers, Actors, Directors, Writers and Technicians.
The initial concerns of the group had to do with labor." However, as time went on, the organization moved "further away from involvement in labor-management arbitrations and negotiations." One of several committees formed in those initial days was for "Awards of Merit," but it was not until May 1928 that the committee began to have serious discussions about the structure of the awards and the presentation ceremony. By July 1928 the board of directors had approved a list of 12 awards to be presented. During July the voting system for the Awards was established, and the nomination and selection process began. This "award of merit for distinctive achievement" is what we know now as the Academy Awards.
The initial location of the organization was 6912 Hollywood Boulevard. In November 1927, the Academy moved to the Roosevelt Hotel at 7010 Hollywood Boulevard, which was also the month the Academy's library began compiling a complete collection of books and periodicals dealing with the industry from around the world. In May 1928, the Academy authorized the construction of a state of the art screening room, to be located in the Club lounge of the hotel. The screening room was not completed until April 1929.
With the publication of "Report on Incandescent Illumination" in 1928, the Academy began a long history of publishing books to assist its members. Another early initiative concerned training Army Signal Corps officers.
In 1929, Academy members in a joint venture with the University of Southern California created America's first film school to further the art and science of moving pictures. The school's founding faculty included Fairbanks (President of the Academy), D. W. Griffith, William C. deMille, Ernst Lubitsch, Irving Thalberg, and Darryl F. Zanuck.
1930 saw another move, to 7046 Hollywood Boulevard, in order to accommodate the enlarging staff, and by December of that year the library was acknowledged as "having one of the most complete collections of information on the motion picture industry anywhere in existence." They remained at that location until 1935 when further growth caused them to move once again. This time, the administrative offices moved to one location, to the Taft Building at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, while the library moved to 1455 North Gordon Street.
In 1934, the Academy began publication of the "Screen Achievement Records Bulletin", which today is known as the "Motion Picture Credits Database". This is a list of film credits up for an Academy Award, as well as other films released in Los Angeles County, using research materials from the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library. Another publication of the 1930s was the first annual "Academy Players Directory" in 1937. The Directory was published by the Academy until 2006 when it was sold to a private concern. The Academy had been involved in the technical aspects of film making since its founding in 1927, and by 1938, the Science and Technology Council consisted of 36 technical committees addressing technical issues related to sound recording and reproduction, projection, lighting, film preservation, and cinematography.
In 2009, the inaugural Governors Awards were held, at which the Academy awards the Academy Honorary Award, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.
In 2016, the Academy became the target of criticism for its failure to recognize the achievements of minority professionals. For the second year in a row, all 20 nominees in the major acting categories were white. The president of the Academy Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the first African American and third woman to lead the Academy, denied in 2015 that there was a problem. When asked if the Academy had difficulty with recognizing diversity, she replied "Not at all. Not at all." When the nominations for acting were all white for a second year in a row Gil Robertson IV, president of the African American Film Critics Association called it "offensive." The actors' branch is "overwhelmingly white" and the question is raised whether conscious or unconscious racial biases played a role.
Spike Lee, interviewed shortly after the all-white nominee list was published, pointed to Hollywood leadership as the root problem, "We may win an Oscar now and then, but an Oscar is not going to fundamentally change how Hollywood does business. I'm not talking about Hollywood stars. I'm talking about executives. We're not in the room." Boone Isaacs also released a statement, in which she said "I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation, and it's time for big changes." After Boone Isaac's statement, prominent African-Americans such as director Spike Lee, actors Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, and activist Rev. Al Sharpton called for a boycott of the 2016 Oscars for failing to recognize minority achievements, the board voted to make "historic" changes to its membership. The Academy stated that by 2020 it would double its number of women and minority members. While the Academy has addressed a higher profile for African-Americans, it has yet to raise the profile of its Asian-American artists, in front of and behind the camera.
Casting director David Rubin was elected President of the Academy in August, 2019.
In 2020, "Parasite" became the first non-English language film to win Best Picture.
The Academy's numerous and diverse operations are housed in three facilities in the Los Angeles area: the headquarters building in Beverly Hills, which was constructed specifically for the Academy, and two Centers for Motion Picture Study – one in Beverly Hills, the other in Hollywood – which were existing structures restored and transformed to contain the Academy's Library, Film Archive and other departments and programs.
The Academy Headquarters Building in Beverly Hills once housed two galleries that were open free to the public. The Grand Lobby Gallery and the Fourth Floor Gallery offered changing exhibits related to films, film-making and film personalities. These galleries have since been closed in preparation for the opening of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in 2020.
The building includes the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, which seats 1,012, and was designed to present films at maximum technical accuracy, with state-of-the-art projection equipment and sound system. The theater is busy year-round with the Academy's public programming, members-only screenings, movie premieres and other special activities (including the live television broadcast of the Academy Awards nominations announcement every January). The building once housed the Academy Little Theater, is a 67-seat screening facility, but this was converted to additional office space in a building remodel.
The Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, located in central Hollywood and named for legendary actress and Academy founder Mary Pickford, houses several Academy departments, including the Academy Film Archive, the Science and Technology Council, Student Academy Awards and Grants, and the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. The building, originally dedicated on August 18, 1948, is the oldest surviving structure in Hollywood that was designed specifically with television in mind. Additionally, it is the location of the Linwood Dunn Theater, which seats 286 people.
The Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study is located at 333 S. La Cienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills. It is home to the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library, a world-renowned, non-circulating reference and research collection devoted to the history and development of the motion picture as an art form and an industry. Established in 1928, the library is open to the public and used year-round by students, scholars, historians and industry professionals. The library is named for Margaret Herrick, the Academy's first librarian who also played a major role in the Academy's first televised broadcast, helping to turn the Oscar ceremony into a major annual televised event.
The building itself was built in 1928, where it was originally built to be a water treatment plant for Beverly Hills. Its "bell tower" held water-purifying hardware.
The Academy also has a New York City-based East Coast showcase theater, the Academy Theater at Lighthouse International. The 220-seat venue was redesigned in 2011 by renowned theater designer Theo Kalomirakis, including an extensive installation of new audio and visual equipment. The theater is in the East 59th Street headquarters of the non-profit vision loss organization, Lighthouse International. In July 2015, it was announced that the Academy was forced to move out, due to Lighthouse International selling the property the theater was in.
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a Los Angeles museum currently under construction, will be the newest facility associated with the Academy. It is scheduled to open on December 14, 2020 and will contain over of state-of-the-art galleries, exhibition spaces, movie theaters, educational areas, and special event spaces. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures will be the world's premier museum devoted to exploring and curating the history and future of the moving image.
Membership in the Academy is by invitation only. Invitation comes from the Board of Governors. Membership eligibility may be achieved by earning a competitive Oscar nomination, or by the sponsorship of two current Academy members from the same branch to which the candidate seeks admission.
New membership proposals are considered annually in the spring. Press releases announce the names of those who have recently been invited to join. Membership in the Academy does not expire, even if a member struggles later in his or her career.
Academy membership is divided into 17 branches, representing different disciplines in motion pictures. Members may not belong to more than one branch. Members whose work does not fall within one of the branches may belong to a group known as "Members at Large". Members at Large have all the privileges of branch membership except for representation on the Board. Associate members are those closely allied to the industry but not actively engaged in motion picture production. They are not represented on the Board and do not vote on Academy Awards.
According to a February 2012 study conducted by the "Los Angeles Times" (sampling over 5,000 of its 5,765 members), the Academy at that time was 94% white, 77% male, 86% age 50 or older, and had a median age of 62. A third of members were previous winners or nominees of Academy Awards themselves. Of the Academy's 54-member Board of Governors, 25 are female.
June 29, 2016, saw a paradigm shift in the Academy's selection process, resulting in a new class comprising 46% women, and 41% people of color. The effort to diversify the Academy was led by social activist, and Broadway Black managing-editor, April Reign. Reign created the Twitter hashtag #OscarsSoWhite as a means of criticizing the dearth of non-white nominees for the 2015 Academy Awards. Though the hashtag drew widespread media attention, the Academy remained obstinate on the matter of adopting a resolution that would make demonstrable its efforts to increase diversity. With the 2016 Academy Awards, many, including April Reign, were dismayed by the Academy's indifference about representation and inclusion, as the 2016 nominees were once again entirely white. April Reign revived #OscarsSoWhite, and renewed her campaign efforts, including multiple media appearances and interviews with reputable news outlets. As a result of Reign's campaign, the discourse surrounding representation and recognition in film spread beyond the United States of America and became a global discussion. Faced with mounting pressure to expand the Academy membership, the Academy capitulated and instituted all new policies to ensure that future Academy membership invitations would better represent the demographics of modern film-going audiences. The A2020 initiative was announced in January 2016 to double the number of women and people of color in membership by 2020.
Members are able to see many new films for free at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater within two weeks of their debut, and sometimes before release; in addition, some of the screeners are available through iTunes to its members.
Four people are known to have been expelled from the Academy. Academy officials acknowledge that other members have been expelled in the past, most for selling their Oscar tickets, but no numbers are available.
The 17 branches of the Academy are:
, the Board of Governors consists of 54 governors: three governors from each of the 17 Academy branches and three governors-at-large. The Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Branch, created in 2006, had only one governor until July 2013. The Casting Directors Branch, created in 2013, elected its first three governors in Fall 2013.
The Board of Governors is responsible for corporate management, control, and general policies. The Board of Governors also appoints a CEO and a COO to supervise the administrative activities of the Academy.
From the original formal banquet which was hosted by Louis B. Mayer in 1927, everyone invited became a founder of the Academy:
Presidents are elected for one-year terms and may not be elected for more than four consecutive terms.
Source: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39842 |
Roman villa
A Roman villa was typically a country house for wealthy people built in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.
Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) distinguished two kinds of villas near Rome: the "villa urbana", a country seat that could easily be reached from Rome (or another city) for a night or two; and the "villa rustica", the farmhouse estate permanently occupied by the servants who generally had charge of the estate. The Roman Empire contained many kinds of villas, not all of them lavishly appointed with mosaic floors and frescoes. In the provinces, any country house with some decorative features in the Roman style may be called a "villa" by modern scholars. Some were pleasure houses, like Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, that were sited in the cool hills within easy reach of Rome or, like the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, on picturesque sites overlooking the Bay of Naples. Some villas were more like the country houses of England, the visible seat of power of a local magnate, such as the famous palace rediscovered at Fishbourne in Sussex.
Suburban villas on the edge of cities also occurred, such as the Middle and Late Republican villas that encroached on the Campus Martius, at that time on the edge of Rome, and which can be also seen outside the city walls of Pompeii. These early suburban villas, such as the one at Rome's Parco della Musica or at Grottarossa in Rome, demonstrate the antiquity and heritage of the "villa suburbana" in Central Italy. It is possible that these early, suburban villas were also in fact the seats of power of regional strongmen or heads of important families ("gentes"). A third type of villa provided the organisational centre of the large holdings called "latifundia", which produced and exported agricultural produce; such villas might lack luxuries. By the 4th century, "villa" could simply connote an agricultural holding: Jerome translated in the Gospel of Mark (xiv, 32) "chorion", describing the olive grove of Gethsemane, with villa, without an inference that there were any dwellings there at all.
Under the Empire, a concentration of imperial villas grew up near the Bay of Naples, especially on the isle of Capri, at Monte Circeo on the coast and at Antium (Anzio). Wealthy Romans escaped the summer heat in the hills around Rome, especially around Frascati ("cf." Hadrian's Villa). Cicero allegedly possessed no fewer than seven villas, the oldest of them, which he inherited, near Arpinum in Latium. Pliny the Younger had three or four, of which the example near Laurentium is the best known from his descriptions.
By the first century BC, the "classic" villa took many architectural forms, with many examples employing atrium or peristyle, for enclosed spaces open to light and air. Upper class, wealthy Roman citizens in the countryside around Rome and throughout the Empire lived in villa complexes, the accommodation for rural farms. The villa-complex consisted of three parts:
Villas were often furnished with plumbed bathing facilities and many would have had an under-floor central heating known as the hypocaust.
A villa might be quite palatial, such as the villas of the imperial period, built on seaside slopes overlooking the Gulf of Naples at Baiae; others were preserved at Stabiae and Herculaneum by the ashfall and mudslide from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79, which also preserved the Villa of the Papyri and its library. Smaller in the countryside, even non-commercial villas operated as largely self-supporting units, with associated farms, olive groves, and vineyards. Roman writers refer with satisfaction to the self-sufficiency of their villas, where they drank their own wine and pressed their own oil, a commonly used literary "topos". An ideal Roman citizen was the independent farmer tilling his own land, and the agricultural writers wanted to give their readers a chance to link themselves with their ancestors through this image of self-sufficient villas. The truth was not too far from the image, either, while even the profit-oriented "latifundia", large slave-run villas, probably grew enough of all the basic foodstuffs to provide for their own consumption.
The late Roman Republic witnessed an explosion of villa construction in Italy, especially in the years following the dictatorship of Sulla (81 BC). In Etruria, the villa at Settefinestre was the centre of one of the "latifundia" that were involved in large-scale agricultural production. At Settefinestre and elsewhere, the central housing of such villas was not richly appointed. Other villas in the hinterland of Rome are interpreted in light of the agrarian treatises written by the elder Cato, Columella and Varro, all of whom sought to define the suitable lifestyle of conservative Romans, at least in idealistic terms.
Large villas dominated the rural economy of the Po Valley, Campania, and Sicily, and also operated in Gaul. Villas were centers of a variety of economic activity such as mining, pottery factories, or horse raising such as those found in northwestern Gaul. Villas specializing in the seagoing export of olive oil to Roman legions in Germany became a feature of the southern Iberian province of Hispania Baetica. Some luxurious villas have been excavated in North Africa in the provinces of Africa and Numidia.
Certain areas within easy reach of Rome offered cool lodgings in the heat of summer. Gaius Maecenas asked what kind of house could possibly be suitable at all seasons. The emperor Hadrian had a villa at Tibur (Tivoli), in an area that was popular with Romans of rank. Hadrian's Villa, dated to 123, was more like a palace, as Nero's palace, the Domus Aurea on the Palatine Hill in Rome, was disposed in groupings in a planned rustic landscape, more like a villa. Cicero had several villas. Pliny the Younger described his villas in his letters. The Romans invented the seaside villa: a vignette in a frescoed wall at the in Pompeii still shows a row of seafront pleasure houses, all with porticos along the front, some rising up in porticoed tiers to an "altana" at the top that would catch a breeze on the most stifling evenings.
Some late Roman villae had luxuries like hypocaust-heated rooms with mosaic floors; mosaics are known even from Roman Britain. As the Roman Empire collapsed, villas in Britain were abandoned. In other areas some at least survived; large working villas were donated by aristocrats and territorial magnates to individual monks, often to become the nucleus of famous monasteries. In this way, the villa system of late Antiquity was preserved into the Early Middle Ages. Benedict of Nursia established his influential monastery of Monte Cassino in the ruins of a villa at Subiaco that had belonged to Nero. Around 590, Saint Eligius was born in a highly placed Gallo-Roman family at the 'villa' of Chaptelat near Limoges, in Aquitaine. The abbey at Stavelot was founded ca 650 on the domain of a former villa near Liège and the abbey of Vézelay had a similar founding. As late as 698, Willibrord established an abbey at a Roman villa of Echternach, in Luxembourg near Trier, which Irmina of Oeren, daughter of Dagobert II, king of the Franks, presented to him.
As the empire expanded, villas spread into the Western provinces, including Gaul and Roman Britain. This was despite the fact that writers of the period could never quite decide on what was meant by villa, it is clear from the treatise of Palladius that the villa had an agricultural and political role. In Roman Gaul the term "villa" was applied to many different buildings. The villas in Roman Gaul were also subject to regional differences, for example in northern and central Gaul colonnaded facades and pavillions were the fashion, whereas Southern Gaul were in peristyle. The villas style, locations, room numbers and proximity to a lake or ocean were manners of displaying the owners wealth.
Villas were also centres of production, and Gallo-Roman villa appear to have been closely associated with vineries and wine production. The owners were probably a combination of local Gallic elites who became quickly romanised after the conquest, as well as Romans and Italiens who wished to exploit rich local resources. The villas would have been the centre of complex relationships with the local area. Much work would have been undertaken by slave labour or by local "coloni" ("tenant farmers"). There would have also have been a steward in addition to the inhabiting family. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39845 |
Outboard motor
An outboard motor is a propulsion system for boats, consisting of a self-contained unit that includes engine, gearbox and propeller or jet drive, designed to be affixed to the outside of the transom. They are the most common motorized method of propelling small watercraft. As well as providing propulsion, outboards provide steering control, as they are designed to pivot over their mountings and thus control the direction of thrust. The skeg also acts as a rudder when the engine is not running. Unlike inboard motors, outboard motors can be easily removed for storage or repairs.
In order to eliminate the chances of hitting bottom with an outboard motor, the motor can be tilted up to an elevated position either electronically or manually. This helps when traveling through shallow waters where there may be debris that could potentially damage the motor as well as the propeller. If the electric motor required to move the pistons which raise or lower the engine is malfunctioning, every outboard motor is equipped with a manual piston release which will allow the operator to drop the motor down to its lowest setting.
Large outboards affixed to the transom using clamps and are either tiller steer up to approx 100hp. Generally 100hp plus is linked to controls at the helm. These range from 2-, 3-, and 4-cylinder models generating 15 to 135 horsepower suitable for hulls up to in length to powerful V6 and V8 cylinder blocks rated up to ., with sufficient power to be used on boats of or longer.
Small outboard motors, up to 15 horsepower or so are easily portable. They are affixed to the boat via clamps and thus easily moved from boat to boat. These motors typically use a manual start system, with throttle and gearshift controls mounted on the body of the motor, and a tiller for steering. The smallest of these weigh as little as , have integral fuel tanks, and provide sufficient power to move a small dinghy at around
This type of motor is typically used:
Electric outboard motors are self-contained propulsory units for boats, first invented in 1973 by Morton Ray of Ray Electric Outboards. These are not to be confused with trolling motors, which are not designed as a primary source of power. Most electric outboard motors have 0.5 to 4 kW direct current (DC) electric motors, operated at 12 to 60 volts DC. Recently developed outboard motors are powered with an alternating current (AC) or DC electric motor in the power head like a conventional petrol engine. With this setup, a motor can produce 10 kW output or more and is able to replace a petrol engine of 15 HP or more. The advantage of the induction or asynchronous motor is the power transfer to the rotor by means of electromagnetic induction. As these engines do not use permanent magnets, they require less maintenance and develop more torque at lower RPM.
Pump-jet propulsion is available as an option on most outboard motors. Although less efficient than an open propeller, they are particularly useful in applications where the ability to operate in very shallow water is important. They also eliminate the laceration dangers of an open propeller.
Propane outboard motors are available from several manufacturers. These products have several advantages such as lower emissions, absence of ethanol-related issues, and no need for choke once the system is pressurized. Lehr is regarded as the first manufacturer to have brought a propane-powered outboard motor to market by "Popular Mechanics" and other boating publications.
The first known outboard motor was a small 5 kilogram (11 lb) electric unit designed around 1870 by Gustave Trouvé, and patented in May 1880 (Patent N° 136,560). Later about 25 petrol powered outboards may have been produced in 1896 by American Motors Co—but neither of these two pioneering efforts appear to have had much impact.
The Waterman outboard engine appears to be the first gasoline-powered outboard offered for sale in significant numbers. Developed by Cameron Waterman, a young Yale Engineering student, it was developed from 1903, with a patent application filed in 1905 Starting in 1906, the company went on to make thousands of his "Porto-Motor" units, claiming 25,000 sales by 1914. The inboard boat motor firm of Caille Motor Company of Detroit were instrumental in making the cylinder and engines.
The most successful early outboard motor, was created by Norwegian-American inventor Ole Evinrude in 1909. Between 1909 and 1912, Evinrude made thousands of his outboards and the three-horsepower units were sold around the world. His Evinrude Outboard Co. was spun off to other owners, and he went on to success after starting the ELTO company to produce a two-cylinder motor - ELTO stood for Evinrude Light Twin Outboard. The 1920s were the first high-water mark for the outboard with Evinrude, Johnson, ELTO, Atwater Lockwood and dozens of other makers in the field.
Historically, a majority of outboards have been two-stroke powerheads fitted with a carburetor due to the design's inherent simplicity, reliability, low cost and light weight. Drawbacks include increased pollution, due to the high volume of unburned gasoline and oil in their exhaust, and louder noise.
Although four stroke outboards have been sold since the late 1920s, particularly Roness and Sharland, in 1962 Homelite introduced a commercially viable four cycle outboard a 55-horsepower motor, based on the 4 cylinder Crosley automobile engine. This was called the Bearcat and was later purchased by Fischer-Pierce, the makers of Boston Whaler, for use in their boats because of their advantages over two strokes. In 1964, Honda Motor Co. introduced its first four-stroke powerhead. In 1984, Yamaha introduced their first four-stroke powerhead. These motors were only available in the smaller horsepower range. In 1990 Honda released 35 hp and 45 hp four-stroke models. They continued to lead in the development of four-stroke engines throughout the 1990s as US and European exhaust emissions regulations such as CARB (California Air Resources Board) led to the proliferation of four-stroke outboards. At first, North American manufacturers such as Mercury and OMC used engine technology from Japanese manufacturers such as Yamaha and Suzuki until they were able to develop their own four-stroke engine. The inherent advantages of four-stroke motors included: lower pollution (especially oil in the water), noise reduction, increase fuel economy, and increased low rpm torque.
Honda Marine Group, Mercury Marine, Mercury Racing, Nissan Marine, Suzuki Marine, Tohatsu Outboards, Yamaha Marine, and China Oshen-Hyfong marine have all developed new four-stroke engines. Some are carburetted, usually the smaller engines. The balance are electronically fuel-injected. Depending on the manufacturer, newer engines benefit from advanced technology such as multiple valves per cylinder, variable camshaft timing (Honda's VTEC), boosted low end torque (Honda's BLAST), 3-way cooling systems, and closed loop fuel injection. Mercury Verado four-strokes are unique in that they are supercharged.
Mercury Marine, Mercury Racing, Tohatsu, Yamaha Marine, Nissan and Evinrude each developed computer-controlled direct-injected two-stroke engines. Each brand boasts a different method of DI.
Fuel economy on both direct injected and four-stroke outboards measures from a 10 percent to 80 percent improvement, compared with conventional two-strokes. Depending on rpm and load at cruising speeds, figure on about a 30 percent mileage improvement.
However, the gap between two-stroke and four-stroke outboard fuel economy is beginning to narrow. Two-stroke outboard motor manufacturers have recently introduced new technologies that help to improve two-stroke fuel economy.
In 2012, Lehr inc. introduced some small (<5hp) outboards based on modified Chinese petrol engines to run on propane gas. Tohatsu currently also produces propane powered models, all rated 5hp. Conversion of larger outboards to run on Liquified petroleum gas is considered unusual and exotic although some hobbyists continue to experiment.
It is important to select a motor that is a good match for the hull in terms of power and shaft length.
Overpowering is a dangerous condition that can lead to the transom accelerating past the rest of the vessel and underpowering often results in a boat that is incapable of performing in the role for which it was designed. Boats built in the US have a "Coast Guard Rating Plate", which specifies the maximum recommended horsepower for the hull. A motor with less than 75% of the maximum will most likely result in unsatisfactory performance.
Outboard motor shaft lengths are standardized to fit 15-inch, 20-inch and 25-inch transoms. If the shaft is too long it will extend farther into the water than necessary creating drag, which will impair performance and fuel economy. If the shaft is too short, the motor will be prone to ventilation. Even worse, if the water intake ports on the lower unit are not sufficiently submerged, engine overheating is likely, which can result in severe damage.
Different outboard engine brands require different transom dimensions and sizes, that affects performance and trim.
Motor height on the transom is an important factor in achieving optimal performance. The motor should be as high as possible without ventilating or loss of water pressure. This minimizes the effect of hydrodynamic drag while underway, allowing for greater speed. Generally, the antiventilation plate should be about the same height as, or up to two inches higher than, the keel, with the motor in neutral trim.
Trim is the angle of the motor in relation to the hull, as illustrated below. The ideal trim angle is the one in which the boat rides level, with most of the hull on the surface instead of plowing through the water.
If the motor is trimmed out too far, the bow will ride too high in the water. With too little trim, the bow rides too low. The optimal trim setting will vary depending on many factors including speed, hull design, weight and balance, and conditions on the water (wind and waves). Many large outboards are equipped with "power trim", an electric motor on the mounting bracket, with a switch at the helm that enables the operator to adjust the trim angle on the fly. In this case, the motor should be trimmed fully in to start, and trimmed out (with an eye on the tachometer) as the boat gains momentum, until it reaches the point just before ventilation begins or further trim adjustment results in an RPM increase with no increase in speed. Motors not equipped with power trim are manually adjustable using a pin called a topper tilt lock.
Ventilation is a phenomenon that occurs when surface air or exhaust gas (in the case of motors equipped with through-hub exhaust) is drawn into the spinning propeller blades. With the propeller pushing mostly air instead of water, the load on the engine is greatly reduced, causing the engine to race and the propeller to spin fast enough to result in cavitation, at which point little thrust is generated at all. The condition continues until the prop slows enough for the air bubbles to rise to the surface. The primary causes of ventilation are: motor mounted too high, motor trimmed out excessively, damage to the antiventilation plate, damage to propeller, foreign object lodged in the diffuser ring.
If the helmsman goes overboard, the boat may continue under power but uncontrolled, risking serious or fatal injuries to the helmsman and others in the water. A safety measure is a "kill cord" attached to the boat and helmsman, which cuts the motor if the helmsman falls overboard.
The most common type of cooling used on outboards of all eras use a rubber impeller to pump water from below the waterline up into the engine. This design has remained the standard due mainly to the efficiency and simplicity of its design. One disadvantage to this system is that if the impeller is run dry for a length of time (such as leaving the engine running when pulling the boat out of the water or in some cases tilting the engine out of the water while running), the impeller is likely to be ruined in the process.
Air cooled outboard engines are currently produced by some manufacturers, these tend to be small engines of less than 5 horsepower. Outboard engines made by Briggs & Stratton are air-cooled
Outboards manufactured by Seven Marine use a closed-loop cooling system with heat exchanger. This means saltwater is not pumped through the engine block as is the case with most outboards but still has to be pumped through the heat exchanger
In Vietnam and other parts of southeast Asia a long-tailed motor design is used. In Vietnam these they are called "May Duoi Tom"(Shrimp Tail Motor). The outboard motors, which can be smallish air-cooled or water-cooled gasoline, diesel or even modified automotive engines, are bolted to a welded steel tube frame, with another long steel tube up to 3 m long to hold the drive shaft, driving a conventional looking propeller. The frame that holds the motor has a short, swiveling steel pin/tube approximately 15 cm long underneath, to be inserted into a corresponding hole on the transom, or a solid block or wood purposely built-in thereof.,
This drop-in arrangement enables extremely quick transfer of the motor to another boat or for storage - all that is needed is to lift it out. The pivoting design allows the outboard motor to be swiveled by the operator in almost all directions: Sideways for direction, up and down to change the thrust line according to speed or bow lift, elevate completely out of water for easy starting, placing the drive shaft and the propeller forward along the side of the boat for reverse, or put them inside the boat for propeller replacement, which can be a regular occurrence to the cheap cast aluminum propellers on the often debris-prone inland waterways. This design is utilized to propel long-tail boats. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=39846 |
Ion Antonescu
Ion Antonescu (; ; – June 1, 1946) was a Romanian soldier and authoritarian politician who presided over two successive wartime dictatorships as the Prime Minister and "Conducător" during most of World War II. After the war, he was convicted of war crimes and executed.
A Romanian Army career officer who made his name during the 1907 peasants' revolt and the World War I Romanian Campaign, the antisemitic Antonescu sympathized with the far right and fascist National Christian and Iron Guard groups for much of the interwar period. He was a military attaché to France and later Chief of the General Staff, briefly serving as Defense Minister in the National Christian cabinet of Octavian Goga as well as the subsequent First Cristea cabinet, in which he also served as Air and Marine Minister. During the late 1930s, his political stance brought him into conflict with King Carol II and led to his detainment. Antonescu nevertheless rose to political prominence during the political crisis of 1940, and established the National Legionary State, an uneasy partnership with the Iron Guard's leader Horia Sima. After entering Romania into an alliance with Nazi Germany and the Axis and ensuring Adolf Hitler's confidence, he eliminated the Guard during the Legionary Rebellion of 1941. In addition to being Prime Minister, he served as his own Foreign Minister and Defense Minister. Soon after Romania joined the Axis in Operation Barbarossa, recovering Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Antonescu also became Marshal of Romania.
An atypical figure among Holocaust perpetrators, Antonescu enforced policies independently responsible for the deaths of as many as 400,000 people, most of them Bessarabian, Ukrainian and Romanian Jews, as well as Romanian Romani. The regime's complicity in the Holocaust combined pogroms and mass murders such as the Odessa massacre with ethnic cleansing, systematic deportations to occupied Transnistria and widespread criminal negligence. The system in place was nevertheless characterized by singular inconsistencies, prioritizing plunder over killing, showing leniency toward most Jews in the Old Kingdom, and ultimately refusing to adopt the Final Solution as applied throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. This was made possible by the fact that Romania, as a junior ally of Nazi Germany, was able to avoid being occupied by Hitler and preserve a degree of political autonomy.
Aerial attacks on Romania by the Allies occurred in 1944 and Romanian troops suffered heavy casualties on the Eastern Front, prompting Antonescu to open peace negotiations with the Allies, ending with inconclusive results. On August 23, 1944, Michael I led a coup d'état against Antonescu, who was arrested; after a brief detention in the Soviet Union, the deposed "Conducător" was sent back to Romania, where he was convicted of war crimes by a People's Tribunal, sentenced to death and executed in June 1946. This was part of a series of trials that also passed sentences on his various associates as well as his wife Maria. The judicial procedures earned much criticism for responding to the Romanian Communist Party's ideological priorities, a matter that fuelled nationalist and far-right attempts to have Antonescu posthumously exonerated. While these groups elevated Antonescu to the status of a national hero, his involvement in the Holocaust was officially reasserted and condemned following the 2003 Wiesel Commission report.
Born in the town of Pitești, north-west of the capital Bucharest, Antonescu was the scion of an upper-middle class Romanian Orthodox family with some military tradition. He was especially close to his mother, Lița Baranga, who survived his death. His father, an army officer, wanted Ion to follow in his footsteps and thus sent him to attend the Infantry and Cavalry School in Craiova. During his childhood, his father divorced his mother to marry a woman who was a Jewish convert to Orthodoxy. The breakup of his parents' marriage was a traumatic event for the young Antonescu, and he made no secret of his dislike of his stepmother, whom he always depicted as a "femme fatale" who destroyed what he saw as his parents' happy marriage.
According to one account, Ion Antonescu was briefly a classmate of Wilhelm Filderman, the future Romanian Jewish community activist whose interventions with "Conducător" Antonescu helped save a number of his coreligionists. After graduation, in 1904, Antonescu joined the Romanian Army with the rank of Second Lieutenant. He spent the following two years attending courses at the Special Cavalry Section in Târgoviște. Reportedly, Antonescu was a zealous and goal-setting student, upset by the slow pace of promotions, and compensated for his diminutive stature through toughness. In time, the reputation of being a tough and ruthless commander, together with his reddish hair, earned him the nickname "Câinele Roșu" ("The Red Dog"). Antonescu also developed a reputation for questioning his commanders and for appealing over their heads whenever he felt they were wrong.
During the repression of the 1907 peasants' revolt, he headed a cavalry unit in Covurlui County. Opinions on his role in the events diverge: while some historians believe Antonescu was a particularly violent participant in quelling the revolt, others equate his participation with that of regular officers or view it as outstandingly tactful. In addition to restricting peasant protests, Antonescu's unit subdued socialist activities in Galați port. His handling of the situation earned him praise from King Carol I, who sent Crown Prince (future monarch) Ferdinand to congratulate him in front of the whole garrison. The following year, Antonescu was promoted to Lieutenant, and, between 1911 and 1913, he attended the Advanced War School, receiving the rank of Captain upon graduation. In 1913, during the Second Balkan War against Bulgaria, Antonescu served as a staff officer in the First Cavalry Division in Dobruja.
After 1916, when the Kingdom of Romania entered World War I on the Entente side, Ion Antonescu acted as chief of staff for General Constantin Prezan. In August 1916, upon the start of the Romanian campaign, Romanian troops crossed the Carpathian Mountains and marched into the Austro-Hungarian-ruled region of Transylvania, but their effort was halted when the Central Powers opened new fronts. Bulgarian and Imperial German armies decisively defeated their ill-equipped and poorly defended Romanian adversaries in the Battle of Turtucaia on and advanced into Dobruja. When enemy troops crossed the mountains from Transylvania into Wallachia, Antonescu was ordered to design a defense plan for Bucharest.
The Romanian royal court, army, and administration were subsequently forced to retreat into Moldavia, the last portion of territory still under Romanian control. Henceforth, Antonescu took part in an important decision involving defensive efforts, an unusual promotion which probably stoked his ambitions. In December, as Prezan became the Chief of the General Staff, Antonescu, who was by now a major, was named the head of operations, being involved in the defence of Moldavia. He contributed to the tactics used during the Battle of Mărășești (July–August 1917), when Romanians under General Eremia Grigorescu managed to stop the advance of German forces under the command of Field Marshal August von Mackensen. Being described as "a talented if prickly individual", Antonescu lived in Prezan's proximity for the remainder of the war and influenced his decisions. Such was the influence of Antonescu on General Prezan that General Alexandru Averescu used the formula "Prezan (Antonescu)" in his memoirs to denote Prezan's plans and actions.
That autumn, the October Revolution removed Romania's main ally, the Russian Provisional Government, from the conflict. Its successor, Bolshevik Russia, made peace with the Central Powers under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, leaving Romania the only enemy of the Central Powers on the Eastern Front. In these conditions, the Romanian government signed, and the Parliament ratified, Romania's own peace treaty with the Central Powers. Romania broke the treaty later in the year, on the grounds that King Ferdinand I had not signed it. During the interval, Antonescu, who viewed the separate peace as "the most rational solution," was assigned command over a cavalry regiment. The renewed offensive played a part in ensuring the union of Transylvania with Romania. After the war, Antonescu's merits as an operations officer were noticed by, among others, politician Ion G. Duca, who wrote that "his [Antonescu's] intelligence, skill and activity, brought credit on himself and invaluable service to the country." Another event occurring late in the war is also credited with having played a major part in Antonescu's life: in 1918, Crown Prince Carol (the future King Carol II) eloped and, technically, deserted his army posting to marry the commoner Zizi Lambrino. This outraged Antonescu, who developed enduring contempt for the future king.
Lieutenant Colonel Ion Antonescu retained his visibility in the public eye during the interwar period. He participated in the political campaign to earn recognition at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 for Romania's gains in Transylvania. His nationalist argument about a future state of the Romanians was published as the essay "Românii. Origina, trecutul, sacrificiile și drepturile lor" ("The Romanians. Their Origin, Their Past, Their Sacrifices and Their Rights"). The booklet advocated extension of Romanian rule beyond the confines of Greater Romania, and recommended, at the risk of war with the emerging Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the annexation of all Banat areas and the Timok Valley. In March 1920, Antonescu was one of three people nominated by the new Averescu executive to be a military attaché of Romania in France, but a report issued by the French military observer in Romania, General Victor Pétin, was negative enough to make the French side choose a certain Colonel Șuțu instead (The text referred to Antonescu as "extremely vain," "chauvinistic" and "xenophobic," while acknowledging his "great military worth."). Antonescu was known for his frequent and erratic changes of mood, going from being extremely angry to being calm to angry again to being calm again within minutes, behaviour that often disoriented those who had to work with him. The Israeli historian Jean Ancel wrote that Antonescu's frequent changes of mood were due to the syphilis he contracted as a young man, a condition he suffered from for the rest of his life.
Nevertheless, Șuțu had to leave Paris in 1922, and when the Romanian government nominated Antonescu again, the French government felt obliged to accept his nomination, despite renewed criticism from Pétin. At the moment of his reassignment, Antonescu was handling military instruction in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu, where his rebellious attitude was causing irritation among his commanders. From 1923, Antonescu was also the Romanian attaché in the United Kingdom and Belgium. After embarking on his mission, he negotiated a credit worth 100 million French francs for Romania to purchase French weaponry and worked together with Romanian League of Nations diplomat Nicolae Titulescu; the two became personal friends. According to one account, he was also in contact with the Romanian-born conservative aristocrat and writer Marthe Bibesco, who is reported to have introduced Antonescu to the ideas of Gustave Le Bon, a researcher of crowd psychology who had an influence on fascist leaders. The same story has it that Bibesco saw the Romanian officer as a new version of 19th century nationalist rebel Georges Boulanger, introducing him as such to Le Bon. In 1923, he made the acquaintance of lawyer Mihai Antonescu, who was to become his close friend, legal representative and political associate.
After returning to Romania in 1926, Antonescu resumed his teaching in Sibiu, and, in the autumn of 1928, became Secretary-General of the Defense Ministry in the Vintilă Brătianu cabinet. He married Maria Niculescu, for long a resident of France, who had been married twice before: first to a Romanian Police officer, with whom she had a son, Gheorghe (died 1944), and then to a Frenchman of Jewish origin. After a period as Deputy Chief of the General Staff, he was appointed its Chief (1933–1934). These assignments coincided with the rule of Carol's underage son Michael I and his regents, and with Carol's seizure of power in 1930. During this period Antonescu first grew interested in the Iron Guard, an antisemitic and fascist-related movement headed by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. In his capacity as Deputy Chief of Staff, he ordered the Army's intelligence unit to compile a report on the faction, and made a series of critical notes on Codreanu's various statements.
As Chief of Staff, Antonescu reportedly had his first confrontation with the political class and the monarch. His projects for weapon modernization were questioned by Defense Minister Paul Angelescu, leading Antonescu to present his resignation. According to another account, he completed an official report on the embezzlement of Army funds which indirectly implicated Carol and his "camarilla" ("see Škoda Affair"). The king consequently ordered him out of office, provoking indignation among sections of the political mainstream. On Carol's orders, Antonescu was placed under surveillance by the "Siguranța Statului" intelligence service, and closely monitored by the Interior Ministry Undersecretary Armand Călinescu. The officer's political credentials were on the rise, as he was able to establish and maintain contacts with people on all sides of the political spectrum, while support for Carol plummeted. Among these were contacts with the two main democratic groups, the National Liberal and the National Peasants', parties known respectively as PNL and PNȚ. He was also engaged in discussions with the rising far right, antisemitic and fascist movements; although in competition with each other, both the National Christian Party (PNC) of Octavian Goga and the Iron Guard sought to attract Antonescu to their side. In 1936, to the authorities' alarm, Army General and Iron Guard member Gheorghe Cantacuzino-Grănicerul arranged a meeting between Ion Antonescu and the movement's leader, Corneliu Codreanu. Antonescu is reported to have found Codreanu arrogant, but to have welcomed his revolutionizing approach to politics.
In late 1937, after the December general election came to an inconclusive result, Carol appointed Goga Prime Minister over a far right cabinet that was the first executive to impose racial discrimination in its treatment of the Jewish community. Goga's appointment was meant to curb the rise of the more popular and even more radical Codreanu. Initially given the Communications portfolio by his rival, Interior Minister Armand Călinescu, Antonescu repeatedly demanded the office of Defense Minister, which he was eventually granted. His mandate coincided with a troubled period, and saw Romania having to choose between its traditional alliance with France, Britain, the crumbling Little Entente and the League of Nations or moving closer to Nazi Germany and its Anti-Comintern Pact. Antonescu's own contribution is disputed by historians, who variously see him as either a supporter of the Anglo-French alliance or, like the PNC itself, more favourable to cooperation with Adolf Hitler's Germany. At the time, Antonescu viewed Romania's alliance with the Entente as insurance against Hungarian and Soviet revanchism, but, as an anti-communist, he was suspicious of the Franco-Soviet rapprochement. Particularly concerned about Hungarian demands in Transylvania, he ordered the General Staff to prepare for a western attack. However, his major contribution in office was in relation to an internal crisis: as a response to violent clashes between the Iron Guard and the PNC's own fascist militia, the "Lăncieri", Antonescu extended the already imposed martial law.
The Goga cabinet ended when the tentative rapprochement between Goga and Codreanu prompted Carol to overthrow the democratic system and proclaim his own authoritarian regime ("see 1938 Constitution of Romania, National Renaissance Front"). The deposed Premier died in 1938, while Antonescu remained a close friend of his widow, Veturia Goga. By that time, revising his earlier stance, Antonescu had also built a close relationship with Codreanu, and was even said to have become his confidant. On Carol's request, he had earlier asked the Guard's leader to consider an alliance with the king, which Codreanu promptly refused in favour of negotiations with Goga, coupled with claims that he was not interested in political battles, an attitude supposedly induced by Antonescu himself.
Soon afterward, Călinescu, acting on indications from the monarch, arrested Codreanu and prosecuted him in two successive trials. Antonescu, whose mandate of Defense Minister had been prolonged under the premiership of Miron Cristea, resigned in protest of Codreanu's arrest. Antonescu's mandate ended on March 30, 1938. He also served as Air and Marine Minister between February 2 and his resignation on March 30. He was a celebrity defense witness at the latter's first and second trials. During the latter, which resulted in Codreanu's conviction for treason, Antonescu vouched for his friend's honesty while shaking his hand in front of the jury. Upon the conclusion of the trial, the king ordered his former minister interned at Predeal, before assigning him to command the Third Army in the remote eastern region of Bessarabia (and later removing him after Antonescu expressed sympathy for Guardists imprisoned in Chișinău). Attempting to discredit his rival, Carol also ordered Antonescu's wife to be tried for bigamy, based on a false claim that her divorce had not been finalized. Defended by Mihai Antonescu, the officer was able to prove his detractors wrong. Codreanu himself was taken into custody and discreetly killed by the Gendarmes acting on Carol's orders (November 1938).
Carol's regime slowly dissolved into crisis, a dissolution accelerated after the start of World War II, when the military success of the core Axis Powers and the non-aggression pact signed by Germany and the Soviet Union saw Romania isolated and threatened ("see Romania during World War II"). In 1940, two of Romania's regions, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, were lost to a Soviet occupation consented to by the king. This came as Romania, exposed by the Fall of France, was seeking to align its policies with those of Germany. Ion Antonescu himself had come to value a pro-Axis alternative after the 1938 Munich Agreement, when Germany imposed demands on Czechoslovakia with the acquiescence of France and the United Kingdom, leaving locals to fear that, unless reoriented, Romania would follow. Angered by the territorial losses of 1940, General Antonescu sent Carol a general note of protest, and, as a result, was arrested and interned at Bistrița Monastery. While there, he commissioned Mihai Antonescu to establish contacts with Nazi German officials, promising to advance German economic interest, particularly in respect to the local oil industry, in exchange for endorsement. Commenting on Ion Antonescu's ambivalent stance, Hitler's minister to Romania, Wilhelm Fabricius, wrote to his superiors: "I am not convinced that he is a safe man."
Romania's elite had been intensely Francophile ever since Romania had won its independence in the 19th century, indeed so Francophile that the defeat of France in June 1940 had the effect of discrediting the entire elite. Antonescu's internment ended in August, during which interval, under Axis pressure, Romania had ceded Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria ("see Treaty of Craiova") and Northern Transylvania to Hungary ("see Second Vienna Award"). The latter grant caused consternation among large sections of Romania's population, causing Carol's popularity to fall to a record low and provoking large-scale protests in Bucharest, the capital. These movements were organized competitively by the pro-Allied PNȚ, headed by Iuliu Maniu, and the pro-Nazi Iron Guard. The latter group had been revived under the leadership of Horia Sima, and was organizing a "coup d'état". In this troubled context, Antonescu simply left his assigned residence. He may have been secretly helped in this by German intercession, but was more directly aided to escape by socialite Alice Sturdza, who was acting on Maniu's request. Antonescu subsequently met with Maniu in Ploiești, where they discussed how best to manage the political situation. While these negotiations were carried out, the monarch himself was being advised by his entourage to recover legitimacy by governing in tandem with the increasingly popular Antonescu, while creating a new political majority from the existing forces. On 2 September 1940, Valer Pop, a courtier and an important member of the "camarilla", first advised Carol to appoint Antonescu as Prime Minister as the solution to the crisis. Pop's reasons for advising Carol to appoint Antonescu as Prime Minister were partly because Antonescu, who was known to be friendly with the Iron Guard and who had been imprisoned under Carol, was believed to have enough of an oppositional background to Carol's regime to appease the public and partly because Pop knew that Antonescu, for all his Legionary sympathies, was a member of the elite and believed he would never turn against it. When Carol proved reluctant to make Antonescu Prime Minister, Pop visited the German legation to meet with Fabricius on the night of 4 September 1940 to ask that the German minister phone Carol to tell him that the "Reich" wanted Antonescu as Prime Minister, and Fabricius's promptly did just that. Carol and Antonescu accepted the proposal, Antonescu being ordered to approach political party leaders Maniu of the PNȚ and Dinu Brătianu of the PNL. They all called for Carol's abdication as a preliminary measure, while Sima, another leader sought after for negotiations, could not be found in time to express his opinion. Antonescu partly complied with the request but also asked Carol to bestow upon him the reserve powers for Romanian heads of state. Carol yielded and, on September 5, 1940, the general became Prime Minister, and Carol transferred most of his dictatorial powers to him. The latter's first measure was to curtail potential resistance within the Army by relieving Bucharest Garrison chief Gheorghe Argeșanu of his position and replacing him with Dumitru Coroamă. Shortly afterward, Antonescu heard rumours that two of Carol's loyalist generals, Gheorghe Mihail and Paul Teodorescu, were planning to have him killed. In reaction, he forced Carol to abdicate, while General Coroamă was refusing to carry out the royal order of shooting down Iron Guardist protesters.
Michael ascended the throne for the second time, while Antonescu's dictatorial powers were confirmed and extended. On September 6, the day Michael formally assumed the throne, he issued a royal decree declaring Antonescu "Conducător" (leader) of the state. The same decree relegated the monarch to a ceremonial role. Among Antonescu's subsequent measures was ensuring the safe departure into self-exile of Carol and his mistress Elena Lupescu, granting protection to the royal train when it was attacked by armed members of the Iron Guard. The regime of King Carol had been notorious for been the most corrupt regime in Europe during the 1930s, and when Carol fled Romania, he took with him the better part of the Romanian treasury, leaving the new government with enormous financial problems. Antonescu had expected, perhaps naïvely, that Carol would take with him enough money to provide for a comfortable exile, and was surprised that Carol had cleared out almost the entire national treasury. For the next four years, a major concern of Antonescu's government was attempting to have the Swiss banks where Carol had deposited the assets return the money to Romania; this effort did not meet with success. Horia Sima's subsequent cooperation with Antonescu was endorsed by high-ranking Nazi German officials, many of whom feared the Iron Guard was too weak to rule on its own. Antonescu therefore received the approval of Ambassador Fabricius. Despite early promises, Antonescu abandoned projects for the creation of a national government, and opted instead for a coalition between a military dictatorship lobby and the Iron Guard. He later justified his choice by stating that the Iron Guard "represented the political base of the country at the time." Right from the outset, Antonescu clashed with Sima over economic questions, with Antonescu's main concern being to get the economy growing so as to provide taxes for a treasury looted by Carol, while Sima favored populist economic measures that Antonescu insisted there was no money for.
The resulting regime, deemed the "National Legionary State", was officially proclaimed on September 14. On that date, the Iron Guard was remodelled into the only legally permitted party in Romania. Antonescu continued as Premier and "Conducător", and was named as the Guard's honorary commander. Sima became Deputy Premier and leader of the Guard. Antonescu subsequently ordered the Guardists imprisoned by Carol to be set free. On October 6, he presided over the Iron Guard's mass rally in Bucharest, one in a series of major celebratory and commemorative events organized by the movement during the late months of 1940. However, he tolerated the PNȚ and PNL's informal existence, allowing them to preserve much of their political support.
There followed a short-lived and always uneasy partnership between Antonescu and Sima. In late September, the new regime denounced all pacts, accords and diplomatic agreements signed under Carol, bringing the country into Germany's orbit while subverting its relationship with a former Balkan ally, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Germans troops entered the country in stages, in order to defend the local oil industry and help instruct their Romanian counterparts on "Blitzkrieg" tactics. On November 23, Antonescu was in Berlin, where his signature sealed Romania's commitment to the main Axis instrument, the Tripartite Pact. Two days later, the country also adhered to the Nazi-led Anti-Comintern Pact. Other than these generic commitments, Romania had no treaty binding it to Germany, and the Romanian-German alliance functioned informally. Speaking in 1946, Antonescu claimed to have followed the pro-German path in continuation of earlier policies, and for fear of a Nazi protectorate in Romania.
During the National Legionary State period, earlier antisemitic legislation was upheld and strengthened, while the "Romanianization" of Jewish-owned enterprises became standard official practice. Immediately after coming into office, Antonescu himself expanded the anti-Jewish and Nuremberg law-inspired legislation passed by his predecessors Goga and Ion Gigurtu, while tens of new anti-Jewish regulations were passed in 1941–1942. This was done despite his formal pledge to Wilhelm Filderman and the Jewish Communities Federation that, unless engaged in "sabotage," "the Jewish population will not suffer." Antonescu did not reject the application of Legionary policies, but was offended by Sima's advocacy of paramilitarism and the Guard's frequent recourse to street violence. He drew much hostility from his partners by extending some protection to former dignitaries whom the Iron Guard had arrested. One early incident opposed Antonescu to the Guard's magazine "Buna Vestire", which accused him of leniency and was subsequently forced to change its editorial board. By then, the Legionary press was routinely claiming that he was obstructing revolution and aiming to take control of the Iron Guard, and that he had been transformed into a tool of Freemasonry ("see Anti-Masonry"). The political conflict coincided with major social challenges, including the influx of refugees from areas lost earlier in the year and a large-scale earthquake affecting Bucharest.
Disorder peaked in the last days of November 1940, when, after uncovering the circumstances of Codreanu's death, the fascist movement ordered retaliations against political figures previously associated with Carol, carrying out the Jilava Massacre, the assassinations of Nicolae Iorga and Virgil Madgearu, and several other acts of violence. As retaliation for this insubordination, Antonescu ordered the Army to resume control of the streets, unsuccessfully pressured Sima to have the assassins detained, ousted the Iron Guardist prefect of Bucharest Police Ștefan Zăvoianu, and ordered Legionary ministers to swear an oath to the "Conducător". His condemnation of the killings was nevertheless limited and discreet, and, the same month, he joined Sima at a burial ceremony for Codreanu's newly discovered remains. The widening gap between the dictator and Sima's party resonated in Berlin. When, in December, Legionary Foreign Minister Mihail R. Sturdza obtained the replacement of Fabricius with Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, perceived as more sympathetic to the Iron Guard, Antonescu promptly took over leadership of the ministry, with the compliant diplomat Constantin Greceanu as his right hand. In Germany, such leaders of the Nazi Party as Heinrich Himmler, Baldur von Schirach and Joseph Goebbels threw their support behind the Legionaries, whereas Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Wehrmacht stood by Antonescu. The latter group was concerned that any internal conflict would threaten Romania's oil industry, vital to the German war effort. The German leadership was by then secretly organizing "Operation Barbarossa", the attack on the Soviet Union.
Antonescu's plan to act against his coalition partners in the event of further disorder hinged on Hitler's approval, a vague signal of which had been given during ceremonies confirming Romania's adherence to the Tripartite Pact. A decisive turn occurred when Hitler invited Antonescu and Sima both over for discussions: whereas Antonescu agreed, Sima stayed behind in Romania, probably plotting a "coup d'état". While Hitler did not produce a clear endorsement for clamping down on Sima's party, he made remarks interpreted by their recipient as oblique blessings. On 14 January 1941 during a German-Romanian summit, Hitler informed Antonescu of his plans to invade the Soviet Union later that year and asked Romania to participate. By this time, Hitler had come to the conclusion that while Sima was ideologically closer to him, Antonescu was the more competent leader capable of ensuring stability in Romania while being committed to aligning his country with the Axis.
The Antonescu-Sima dispute erupted into violence in January 1941, when the Iron Guard instigated a series of attacks on public institutions and a pogrom, incidents collectively known as the "Legionary Rebellion." This came after the mysterious assassination of Major Döring, a German agent in Bucharest, which was used by the Iron Guard as a pretext to accuse the "Conducător" of having a secret anti-German agenda, and made Antonescu oust the Legionary Interior Minister, Constantin Petrovicescu, while closing down all of the Legionary-controlled "Romanianization" offices. Various other clashes prompted him to demand the resignation of all Police commanders who sympathized with the movement. After two days of widespread violence, during which Guardists killed some 120 Bucharest Jews, Antonescu sent in the Army, under the command of General Constantin Sănătescu. German officials acting on Hitler's orders, including the new Ambassador Manfred Freiherr von Killinger, helped Antonescu eliminate the Iron Guardists, but several of their lower-level colleagues actively aided Sima's subordinates. Goebbels was especially upset by the decision to support Antonescu, believing it to have been advantageous to "the Freemasons."
After the purge of the Iron Guard, Hitler kept his options open by granting political asylum to Sima—whom Antonescu's courts sentenced to death—and to other Legionaries in similar situations. The Guardists were detained in special conditions at Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. In parallel, Antonescu publicly obtained the cooperation of "Codreanists", members of an Iron Guardist wing which had virulently opposed Sima, and whose leader was Codreanu's father Ion Zelea Codreanu. Antonescu again sought backing from the PNȚ and PNL to form a national cabinet, but his rejection of parliamentarism made the two groups refuse him.
Antonescu traveled to Germany and met Hitler on eight more occasions between June 1941 and August 1944. Such close contacts helped cement an enduring relationship between the two dictators, and Hitler reportedly came to see Antonescu as the only trustworthy person in Romania, and the only foreigner to consult on military matters. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that Hitler after first meeting Antonescu "...was greatly impressed by him; no other leader Hitler met other than Mussolini ever received such consistently favourable comments from the German dictator. Hitler even mustered the patience to listen to Antonescu's lengthy disquisitions on the glorious history of Romania and the perfidy of the Hungarians—a curious reversal for a man who was more accustomed to regaling visitors with tirades of his own." In later statements, Hitler offered praise to Antonescu's "breadth of vision" and "real personality." A remarkable aspect of the Hitler-Antonescu friendship was neither could speak others' language. Hitler only knew German while the only foreign language Antonescu knew was French, in which he was completely fluent. During their meetings, Antonescu spoke in French which was then translated into German by Hitler's translator Paul Schmidt and vice versa since Schmidt did not speak Romanian either. The German military presence increased significantly in early 1941, when, using Romania as a base, Hitler invaded the rebellious Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the Kingdom of Greece ("see Balkans Campaign"). In parallel, Romania's relationship with the United Kingdom, at the time the only major adversary of Nazi Germany, erupted into conflict: on February 10, 1941, British Premier Winston Churchill recalled His Majesty's Ambassador Reginald Hoare, and approved the blockade of Romanian ships in British-controlled ports. On 12 June 1941, during another summit with Hitler, Antonescu first learned of the "special" nature of Operation Barbarossa, namely, that the war against the Soviet Union was to be an ideological war to "annihilate" the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism," a "war of extermination" to be fought without any mercy; Hitler even showed Antonescu a copy of the "Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia" he had issued to his forces about the "special treatment" to be handed out to Soviet Jews. Antonescu completely accepted Hitler's ideas about Operation Barbarossa as a "race war" between the Aryans, represented by the Nordic Germans and Latin Romanians on the Axis side vs. the Slavs and Asians, commanded by the Jews on the Soviet side. Besides anti-Semitism, there was an extremely strong current of anti-Slavic and anti-Asian racism to Antonescu's remarks about the "Asiatic hordes" of the Red Army. The Asians Antonescu referred were the various Asian peoples of the Soviet Union, such as the Kazakhs, Kalmyks, Mongols, Uzbeks, Buryats, etc. During his summit with Hitler in June 1941, Antonescu told the "Führer" that he believed it was necessary to "once and for all" eliminate Russia as a power because the Russians was the most powerful Slavic nation and that as a Latin people, the Romanians had an inborn hatred of all Slavs and Jews. Antonescu went on to tell Hitler: "Because of its racial qualities, Romania can continue to play its role as an anti-Slavic buffer for the benefit of Germany." Ancel wrote that Romanian anti-Slavic racism differed from the German variety in that the Romanians had traditionally feared the Slavic peoples whereas the Germans had traditionally held the Slavic peoples in contempt. In Antonescu's mind, the Romanians as a Latin people had attained a level of civilization that the Slavs were nowhere close to, but theoretically the Slavic Russians and Ukrainians might be able to reach under Romanian auspices, through Antonescu's remarks to Hitler that "We must fight this race (i.e. the Slavs) resolutely" together, with the need for "colonization" of Transnistria, suggested that he did think this would happen in his own lifetime. Subsequently, the Romanians assigned to Barbarossa were to learn that as a Latin people, the Germans considered them to be their inferiors, albeit not as inferior as the Slavs, Asians and Jews who were viewed as "untermenschen" ("sub-humans"). Hitler's promise to Antonescu that after the war, the Germanic and Latin races would rule the world in a partnership turned out to be meaningless.
In June of that year, Romania joined the attack on the Soviet Union, led by Germany in coalition with Hungary, Finland, the State of Slovakia, the Kingdom of Italy and the Independent State of Croatia. Antonescu had been made aware of the plan by German envoys, and supported it enthusiastically even before Hitler extended Romania an offer to participate. On 18 June 1941, Antonescu gave orders to his generals about "cleansing the ground" of Jews when Romanian forces entered Bessarabia and Bukovina. Right from the start, Antonescu proclaimed the war against the Soviet Union to be a "holy war", a "crusade" in the name of Eastern Orthodox faith and the Romanian race against the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism". The propaganda of the Antonescu regime demonized everything Jewish as Antonescu believed that Communism was invented by the Jews, and all of the Soviet leaders were really Jews. Reflecting Antonescu's anti-Slavic feelings, despite the fact that the war was billed as a "crusade" in defence of Orthodoxy against "Judeo-Bolshevism", the war was not presented as a struggle to liberate the Orthodox Russians and Ukrainians from Communism; instead rule by "Judeo-Bolshevism" was portrayed as something brought about the innate moral inferiority of the Slavs, who thus needed to be ruled by the Germans and the Romanians. The Romanian force engaged formed a "General Antonescu Army Group" under the effective command of German general Eugen Ritter von Schobert. Romania's campaign on the Eastern Front began without a formal declaration of war, and was consecrated by Antonescu's statement: "Soldiers, I order you, cross the Prut River" (in reference to the Bessarabian border between Romania and post-1940 Soviet territory). A few days after this, a large-scale pogrom was carried out in Iași with Antonescu's agreement; thousands of Jews were killed in the bloody Iași pogrom. Antonescu had followed a generation of younger right-wing Romanian intellectuals led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu who in the 1920s-30s had rejected the traditional Francophila of the Romanian elites and their adherence to Western notions of universal democratic values and human rights. Antonescu made it clear that his regime rejected the moral principles of the "demo-liberal world" and he saw the war as an ideological struggle between his spiritually pure "national-totalitarian regime" vs. "Jewish morality". Antonescu believed that the liberal humanist-democratic-capitalist values of the West and Communism were both invented by the Jews to destroy Romania. In a lengthy speech just before the war, Antonescu attacked democracy in the most violent terms as it allowed Jews equal rights and thus to undercut the Romanian "national idea". As such, Antonescu stated what was needed was a "new man" who would be "tough", "virile" and willing to fight for an ethnically and religiously "pure" Romania. Despite his quarrel with Sima, much of Antonescu's speech clearly reflected the influence of the ideas of the Iron Guard that Antonescu had absorbed in the 1930s. Antonescu's anti-Semitism and sexism went so far that he tacitly condoned the rape of Jewish women and girls in Bessarabia and northern Bukovinia by his forces under the grounds that he was going take away all of the property that the Jews had "stolen" from the Romanians, and as far he was concerned, Jewish females were just another piece of property. Since the Jewish women were going to exterminated anyway, Antonescu felt there was nothing wrong about letting his soldiers and gendarmes have "some fun" before shooting them.
After becoming the first Romanian to be granted the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, which he received from Hitler at their August 6 meeting in the Ukrainian city of Berdychiv, Ion Antonescu was promoted to Marshal of Romania by royal decree on August 22, in recognition for his role in restoring the eastern frontiers of Greater Romania. In a report to Berlin, a German diplomat wrote that Marshal Antonescu had syphilis and that "among [Romanian] cavalry officers this disease is as widespread as a common cold is among German officers. The Marshal suffers from severe attacks of it every several months." Antonescu took one of his most debated decisions when, with Bessarabia's conquest almost complete, he committed Romania to Hitler's war effort beyond the Dniester—that is, beyond territory that had been part of Romania between the wars—and thrust deeper into Soviet territory, thus waging a war of aggression. On August 30, Romania occupied a territory it deemed "Transnistria", formerly a part of the Ukrainian SSR (including the entire Moldavian ASSR and further territories). Like the decision to continue the war beyond Bessarabia, this earned Antonescu much criticism from the semi-clandestine PNL and PNȚ. Insofar as the war against the Soviet Union was a war to recover Bessarabia and northern Bukovina - both regions that been a part of Romania until June 1940 and that had Romanian majorities - the conflict had been very popular with the Romanian public opinion. But the idea of conquering Transnistria was not as that region had never been part of Romania, and a minority of the people were ethnic Romanian. Soon after the takeover, the area was assigned to a civil administration apparatus headed by Gheorghe Alexianu and became the site for the main component of the Holocaust in Romania: a mass deportation of the Bessarabian and Ukrainian Jews, followed later by transports of Romani Romanians and Jews from Moldavia proper (that is, the portions of Moldavia west of the Prut).
The accord over Transnistria's administration, signed in Tighina, also placed areas between the Dniester and the Dnieper under Romanian military occupation, while granting control over all resources to Germany. In September 1941, Antonescu ordered Romanian forces to take Odessa, a prize he badly wanted for reasons of prestige. Russians had traditionally been seen in Romania as brutal aggressors, and for Romanian forces to take a major Soviet city and one of the largest Black Sea ports like Odessa would be a sign of how far Romania had been "regenerated" under Antonescu's leadership. Much to Antonescu's intense fury, the Red Army were able to halt the Romanian offensive on Odessa and 24 September 1941 Antonescu had to reluctantly ask for the help of the Wehrmacht with the drive on Odessa. On 16 October 1941 Odessa fell to the German-Romanian forces. The Romanian losses had been so heavy that the area around Odessa was known to the Romanian Army as the Vale of Tears. Antonescu's anti-Semitism was sharpened by the Odessa fighting as he was convinced that the only reason why the Red Army had fought so fiercely around Odessa was that the average Russian soldier had been terrorized by bloodthirsty Jewish commissars into fighting hard. When Wilhelm Filderman wrote a letter to Antonescu complaining about the murder of Jews in Odessa, Antonescu wrote back: "Your Jews, who have become Soviet commissars, are driving Soviet soldiers in the Odessa region into a futile bloodbath, through horrendous terror techniques as the Russian prisoners themselves have admitted, simply to cause us heavy losses". Antonescu ended his letter with the claim that Russian Jewish commissars had savagely tortured Romanian POWs and that the entire Jewish community of Romania, Filderman included were morally responsible for all of the losses and sufferings of the Romanians around Odessa. In the fall of 1941, Antonescu planned to deport all of the Jews of the "Regat", southern Bukovina and southern Transylvania into Transnistria as the prelude to killing them, but this operation was vetoed by Germany, who complained that Antonescu had not finished killing the Jews of Transnistria yet. This veto was largely motivated by bureaucratic politics, namely if Antonescu exterminated all of the Jews of Romania himself, there would be nothing for the SS and the "Auswärtiges Amt" to do. Killinger informed Antonescu that Germany would reduce its supplies of arms if Antonescu went ahead with his plans to deport the Jews of the "Regat" into Transnistria and told him he would be better off deporting the Jews to the death camps in Poland that the Germans were already busy building. Since Romania had almost no arms industry of its own and was almost entirely dependent upon weapons from Germany to fight the war, Antonescu had little choice, but to comply with Killinger's request.
The Romanian Army's inferior arms, insufficient armour and lack of training had been major concerns for the German commanders since before the start of the operation. One of the earliest major obstacles Antonescu encountered on the Eastern Front was the resistance of Odessa, a Soviet port on the Black Sea. Refusing any German assistance, he ordered the Romanian Army to maintain a two-month siege on heavily fortified and well-defended positions. The ill-equipped 4th Army suffered losses of some 100,000 men. Antonescu's popularity again rose in October, when the fall of Odessa was celebrated triumphantly with a parade through Bucharest's "Arcul de Triumf", and when many Romanians reportedly believed the war was as good as won. In Odessa itself, the aftermath included a large-scale massacre of the Jewish population, ordered by the Marshal as retaliation for a bombing which killed a number of Romanian officers and soldiers (General Ioan Glogojeanu among them). The city subsequently became the administrative capital of Transnistria. According to one account, the Romanian administration planned to change Odessa's name to "Antonescu". Antonescu's planned that once the war against the Soviet Union was won to invade Hungary to take back Transylvania and Bulgaria to take back the Dobruja with Antonescu being especially keen on the former. Antonescu planned on attacking Hungary to recover Transylvania at the first opportunity and regarded Romanian involvement on the Eastern Front in part as a way of proving to Hitler that Romania was a better German ally than Hungary, and thus deserving of German support when the planned Romanian-Hungarian war began.
As the Soviet Union recovered from the initial shock and slowed down the Axis offensive at the Battle of Moscow (October 1941 – January 1942), Romania was asked by its allies to contribute a larger number of troops. A decisive factor in Antonescu's compliance with the request appears to have been a special visit to Bucharest by Wehrmacht chief of staff Wilhelm Keitel, who introduced the "Conducător" to Hitler's plan for attacking the Caucasus ("see Battle of the Caucasus"). The Romanian force engaged in the war reportedly exceeded German demands. It came to around 500,000 troops and thirty actively involved divisions. As a sign of his satisfaction, Hitler presented his Romanian counterpart with a luxury car. On December 7, 1941, after reflecting on the possibility for Romania, Hungary and Finland to change their stance, the British government responded to repeated Soviet requests and declared war on all three countries. Following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and in compliance with its Axis commitment, Romania declared war on the United States within five days. These developments contrasted with Antonescu's own statement of December 7: "I am an ally of the [German] Reich against [the Soviet Union], I am neutral in the conflict between Great Britain and Germany. I am for America against the Japanese."
A crucial change in the war came with the Battle of Stalingrad in June 1942 – February 1943, a major defeat for the Axis. Romania's armies alone lost some 150,000 men (either dead, wounded or captured) and more than half of the country's divisions were wiped out.
The loss of two entire Romanian armies who all either killed or captured by the Soviets produced a major crisis in German-Romanian relations in the winter of 1943 with many people in the Romanian government for the first time questioning the wisdom of fighting on the side of the Axis. Outside of the elites, by 1943 the continuing heavy losses on the Eastern Front, anger at the contempt which the Wehrmacht treated their Romanian allies and declining living standards within Romania made the war unpopular with the Romanian people, and consequently the "Conducător" himself. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that: "The string of broken German promises of equipment and support, the disregard of warnings about Soviet offensive preparations, the unfriendly treatment of retreating Romanian units by German officers and soldiers and the general German tendency to blame their own miscalculations and disasters on their allies all combined to produce a real crisis in German-Romanian relations." For part of that interval, the Marshal had withdrawn from public life, owing to an unknown affliction, which is variously rumoured to have been a mental breakdown, a foodborne illness or a symptom of the syphilis he had contracted earlier in life. He is known to have been suffering from digestive problems, treating himself with food prepared by Marlene von Exner, an Austrian-born dietitian who moved into Hitler's service after 1943.
Upon his return, Antonescu blamed the Romanian losses on German overseer Arthur Hauffe, whom Hitler agreed to replace. In parallel with the military losses, Romania was confronted with large-scale economic problems. Romania's oil was the "Reich"'s only source of natural oil after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 to August 1944 (Germany also had synthetic oil plants operating from 1942 onwards), and as such for economic reasons, Romania was always treated as a major ally by Hitler. While Germany monopolized Romania's exports, it defaulted on most of its payments. Like all countries whose exports to Germany, particularly in oil, exceeded imports from that country, Romania's economy suffered from Nazi control of the exchange rate ("see Economy of Nazi Germany"). On the German side, those directly involved in harnessing Romania's economic output for German goals were economic planners Hermann Göring and Walther Funk, together with Hermann Neubacher, the Special Representative for Economic Problems. A recurring problem for Antonescu was attempting to obtain payments for all of the oil he shipped to Germany while resisting German demands for increased oil production. The situation was further aggravated in 1942, as USAAF and RAF were able to bomb the oil fields in Prahova County ("see Bombing of Romania in World War II, Operation Tidal Wave"). Official sources from the following period amalgamate military and civilian losses of all kinds, which produces a total of 554,000 victims of the war.
In this context, the Romanian leader acknowledged that Germany was losing the war, and he therefore authorized his Deputy Premier and new Foreign Minister Mihai Antonescu to set up contacts with the Allies. In early 1943, Antonescu authorized his diplomats to contact British and American diplomats in Portugal and Switzerland to see if were possible for Romania to sign an armistice with the Western powers. The Romanian diplomats were informed that no armistice was possible until an armistice was signed with the Soviet Union, a condition Antonescu rejected. In parallel, he allowed the PNȚ and the PNL to engage in parallel talks with the Allies at various locations in neutral countries. The discussions were strained by the Western Allies' call for an unconditional surrender, over which the Romanian envoys bargained with Allied diplomats in Sweden and Egypt (among them the Soviet representatives Nikolai Vasilevich Novikov and Alexandra Kollontai). Antonescu was also alarmed by the possibility of war being carried on Romanian territory, as had happened in Italy after Operation Avalanche. The events also prompted hostile negotiations aimed at toppling Antonescu, and involving the two political parties, the young monarch, diplomats and soldiers. A major clash between Michael and Antonescu took place during the first days of 1943, when the 21-year-old monarch used his New Year's address on national radio to part with the Axis war effort.
In March 1944, the Soviet Red Army broke the Southern Bug and Dniester fronts, advancing on Bessarabia. This came just as Henry Maitland Wilson, Allied commander of the Mediterranean theatre, presented Antonescu with an ultimatum. After a new visit to Germany and a meeting with Hitler, Antonescu opted to continue fighting alongside the remaining Axis states, a decision which he later claimed was motivated by Hitler's promise to allow Romania possession of Northern Transylvania in the event of an Axis victory. Upon his return, the "Conducător" oversaw a counteroffensive which stabilized the front on a line between Iași and Chișinău to the north and the lower Dniester to the east. This normalized his relations with Nazi German officials, whose alarm over the possible loss of an ally had resulted in the "Margarethe II" plan, an adapted version of the Nazi takeover in Hungary.
However, Antonescu's non-compliance with the terms of Wilson's ultimatum also had drastic effects on Romania's ability to exit the war. By then, Antonescu was conceiving of a separate peace with the Western Allies, while maintaining contacts with the Soviets. In parallel, the mainstream opposition movement came to establish contacts with the Romanian Communist Party (PCR), which, although minor numerically, gained importance for being the only political group to be favored by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. On the PCR side, the discussions involved Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu and later Emil Bodnăraș. Another participating group at this stage was the old Romanian Social Democratic Party.
Large-scale Allied bombings of Bucharest took place in spring 1944, while the Soviet Red Army approached Romanian borders. The Battle for Romania began in late summer: while German commanders Johannes Frießner and Otto Wöhler of the Army Group South Ukraine attempted to hold Bukovina, Soviet Steppe Front leader Rodion Malinovsky stormed into the areas of Moldavia defended by Petre Dumitrescu's troops. In reaction, Antonescu attempted to stabilize the front on a line between Focșani, Nămoloasa and Brăila, deep inside Romanian territory. On August 5, he visited Hitler one final time in Kętrzyn. On this occasion, the German leader reportedly explained that his people had betrayed the Nazi cause, and asked him if Romania would go on fighting (to which Antonescu reportedly answered in vague terms). After Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov more than once stated that the Soviet Union was not going to require Romanian subservience, the factions opposing Antonescu agreed that the moment had come to overthrow him, by carrying out the Royal Coup of August 23. On that day, the sovereign asked Antonescu to meet him in the royal palace building, where he presented him with a request to take Romania out of its Axis alliance. The "Conducător" refused, and was promptly arrested by soldiers of the guard, being replaced as Premier with General Constantin Sănătescu, who presided over a national government.
The new Romanian authorities declared peace with the Allies and advised the population to greet Soviet troops. On August 25, as Bucharest was successfully defending itself against German retaliations, Romania declared war on Nazi Germany. The events disrupted German domination in the Balkans, putting a stop to the "Maibaum" offensive against Yugoslav Partisans. The coup was nevertheless a unilateral move, and, until the signature of an armistice on September 12, the country was still perceived as an enemy by the Soviets, who continued to take Romanian soldiers as prisoners of war. In parallel, Hitler reactivated the Iron Guardist exile, creating a Sima-led government in exile that did not survive the war's end in Europe.
Placed in the custody of PCR militants, Ion Antonescu spent the interval at a house in Bucharest's Vatra Luminoasă quarter. He was afterward handed to the Soviet occupation forces, who transported him to Moscow, together with his deputy Mihai Antonescu, Governor of Transnistria Gheorghe Alexianu, Defense Minister Constantin Pantazi, Gendarmerie commander Constantin Vasiliu and Bucharest Police chief Mircea Elefterescu. They were subsequently kept in luxurious detention at a mansion nearby the city, and guarded by SMERSH, a special counter-intelligence body answering directly to Stalin. Shortly after Germany surrendered in May 1945, the group was moved to Lubyanka prison. There, Antonescu was interrogated and reputedly pressured by SMERSH operatives, among them Viktor Semyonovich Abakumov, but transcripts of their conversations were never sent back to Romania by the Soviet authorities. Later research noted that the main issues discussed were the German-Romanian alliance, the war on the Soviet Union, the economic toll on both countries, and Romania's participation in the Holocaust (defined specifically as crimes against "peaceful Soviet citizens"). At some point during this period, Antonescu attempted suicide in his quarters. He was returned to Bucharest in spring 1946 and held in Jilava prison. He was subsequently interrogated by prosecutor Avram Bunaciu, to whom he complained about the conditions of his detainment, contrasting them with those in Moscow, while explaining that he was a vegetarian and demanding a special diet.
In May 1946, Ion Antonescu was prosecuted at the first in a series of People's Tribunals, on charges of war crimes, crimes against the peace and treason. The tribunals had first been proposed by the PNȚ, and was compatible with the Nuremberg Trials in Allied-occupied Germany. The Romanian legislative framework was drafted by coup participant Pătrășcanu, a PCR member who had been granted leadership of the Justice Ministry. Despite the idea having earned support from several sides of the political spectrum, the procedures were politicized in a sense favourable to the PCR and the Soviet Union, and posed a legal problem for being based on "ex post facto" decisions. The first such local trial took place in 1945, resulting in the sentencing of Iosif Iacobici, Nicolae Macici, Constantin Trestioreanu and other military commanders directly involved in planning or carrying out the Odessa massacre.
Antonescu was represented by Constantin Paraschivescu-Bălăceanu and Titus Stoica, two public defenders whom he had first consulted with a day before the procedures were initiated. The prosecution team, led by Vasile Stoican, and the panel of judges, presided over by Alexandru Voitinovici, were infiltrated by PCR supporters. Both consistently failed to admit that Antonescu's foreign policies were overall dictated by Romania's positioning between Germany and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, and although references to the mass murders formed just 23% of the indictment and corpus of evidence (ranking below charges of anti-Soviet aggression), the procedures also included Antonescu's admission of and self-exculpating take on war crimes, including the deportations to Transnistria. They also evidence his awareness of the Odessa massacre, accompanied by his claim that few of the deaths were his direct responsibility. One notable event at the trial was a testimony by PNȚ leader Iuliu Maniu. Reacting against the aggressive tone of other accusers, Maniu went on record saying: "We [Maniu and Antonescu] were political adversaries, not cannibals." Upon leaving the bench, Maniu walked toward Antonescu and shook his hand.
Ion Antonescu was found guilty of the charges. This verdict was followed by two sets of appeals, which claimed that the restored and amended 1923 Constitution did not offer a framework for the People's Tribunals and prevented capital punishment during peacetime, while noting that, contrary to the armistice agreement, only one power represented within the Allied Commission had supervised the tribunal. They were both rejected within six days, in compliance with a legal deadline on the completion of trials by the People's Tribunals. King Michael subsequently received pleas for clemency from Antonescu's lawyer and his mother, and reputedly considered asking the Allies to reassess the case as part of the actual Nuremberg Trials, taking Romanian war criminals into foreign custody. Subjected to pressures by the new Soviet-backed Petru Groza executive, he issued a decree in favour of execution. Together with his co-defendants Mihai Antonescu, Alexianu and Vasiliu, the former "Conducător" was executed by a military firing squad on June 1, 1946. Ion Antonescu's supporters circulated false rumours that regular soldiers had refused to fire at their commander, and that the squad was mostly composed of Jewish policemen. Another apologetic claim insists that he himself ordered the squad to shoot, but footage of the event has proven it false. However, he did refuse a blindfold and raised his hat in salute once the order was given. The execution site, some distance away from the locality of Jilava and the prison fort, was known as "Valea Piersicilor" ("Valley of the Peach Trees"). His final written statement was a letter to his wife, urging her to withdraw into a convent, while stating the belief that posterity would reconsider his deeds and accusing Romanians of being "ungrateful".
Antonescu's policies were motivated, in large part, by ethnic nationalism. A firm believer in the restoration of Greater Romania as the union of lands inhabited by ethnic Romanians, he never reconciled himself to Hungary's incorporation of Northern Transylvania. Although Hungary and Romania were technically allied through the Axis system, their relationship was always tense, and marked by serious diplomatic incidents. The Romanian leader kept contacts with representatives of ethnic Romanian communities directly affected by the Second Vienna Award, including Transylvanian Greek-Catholic clergy. Another aspect of Antonescu's nationalist policies was evidenced after the Balkans Campaign. Antonescu's Romania did not partake in the military action, but laid a claim to the territories in eastern Vojvodina (western Banat) and the Timok Valley, home to a sizeable Romanian community. Reportedly, Germany's initial designs of granting Vojvodina to Hungary enhanced the tensions between Antonescu and Miklós Horthy to the point where war between the two countries became a possibility. Such incidents made Germany indefinitely prolong its occupation of the region. The Romanian authorities issued projects for an independent Macedonia with autonomy for its Aromanian communities, while an official memorandum on the Timok region, approved by Antonescu, made mention of "Romanian" areas "from Timok [...] to Salonika". The "Conducător" also maintained contacts with Aromanian fascists in Axis-occupied Greece, awarding refuge to Alcibiades Diamandi and Nicola Matussi of the Vlach "Roman Legion", whose pro-Romanian policies had brought them into conflict with other Aromanian factions.
"Conducător" Antonescu thought Hitler willing to revise his stance on Northern Transylvania, and claimed to have obtained the German leader's agreement, using it to justify participation on the Eastern Front after the recovery of Bessarabia. However, transcripts of the Hitler-Antonescu conversations do not validate his interpretation. Another version has it that Hitler sent Antonescu a letter informing him that Bessarabia's political status still ultimately depended on German decisions. In one of his letters to Hitler, Antonescu himself stated his anti-communist ideological motivation: "I confirm that I will pursue operations in the east to the end against that great enemy of civilization, of Europe, and of my country: Russian Bolshevism [...] I will not be swayed by anyone not to extend this military cooperation into new territory." Antonescu's ideological perspective blended national sentiment with generically Christian and particularly Romanian Orthodox traits. British historian Arnold D. Harvey writes that while this ideology seems a poor match with Nazi doctrine, especially its anti-religious elements, "It seems that Hitler was not even perturbed by the militant Christian orientation of the Antonescu regime".
It is also possible that, contrary to Antonescu's own will, Hitler viewed the transfer of Transnistria as compensation for the Transylvanian areas, and that he therefore considered the matter closed. According to the Romanian representative in Berlin, Raoul Bossy, various German and Hungarian officials recommended the extension of permanent Romanian rule into Transnistria, as well as into Podolia, Galicia and Pokuttya, in exchange for delivering the whole of Transylvania to Hungary (and relocating its ethnic Romanian majority to the new provinces). American political scientist Charles King writes: "There was never any attempt to annex the occupied territory [of Transnistria], for it was generally considered by the Romanian government to be a temporary buffer zone between Greater Romania and the Soviet front line." At his 1946 trial, Antonescu claimed that Transnistria had been occupied to prevent Romania being caught in a "pincer" between Germany's "Drang nach Osten" and the "Volksdeutsch" communities to the east, while denying charges of having exploited the region for Romania's benefit.
Romanian historian Lucian Boia believes that Ion Antonescu may have nevertheless had expansionist goals to the east, and that he implicitly understood Operation Barbarossa as a tool for containing Slavic peoples. Similar verdicts are provided by other researchers. Another Romanian historian, Ottmar Trașcă, argues that Antonescu did not wish to annex the region "at least until the end of the war", but notes that Antonescu's own statements make reference to its incorporation in the event of a victory. In addition to early annexation plans to the Southern Bug (reportedly confessed to Bossy in June 1941), the "Conducător" is known to have presented his ministers with designs for the region's colonization. The motivation he cited was alleged malnutrition among Romanian peasants, to which he added: "I'll take this population, I'll lead it into Transnistria, where I shall give it all the land it requires". Several nationalists sympathetic to Antonescu acclaimed the extension of Romanian rule into Transnistria, which they understood as permanent.
A recurring element in Antonescu's doctrines is racism, and in particular antisemitism. This was linked to his sympathy for ethnocratic ideals, and complemented by his statements in favor of "integral nationalism" and "Romanianism". Like other far right Romanians, he saw a Jewish presence behind liberal democracy, and believed in the existence of Judeo-Masonry. His earliest thoughts on Codreanu's ideology criticize the Legionary leader for advocating "brutal measures" in dealing with the "invasion of Jews", and instead propose "the organization of Romanian classes" as a method for reaching the same objective. Politician Aureliu Weiss, who met General Antonescu during that interval, recalled that, although antisemitic "to the core", he was capable of restraint in public. According to historian Mihail Ionescu, the "Conducător" was not averse to the Iron Guard's "Legionary principles", but wanted antisemitism to be "applied in an orderly fashion", as opposed to Horia Sima's revolutionary ways. Historian Ioan Scurtu believes that, during the Legionary Rebellion, Antonescu deliberately waited before stepping in, in order for the Guard to be "profoundly discredited" and for himself to be perceived as a "savior". In April 1941, he let his ministers know that he was considering letting "the mob" deal with the Jews, "and after the slaughter, I will restore order." Lucian Boia notes that the Romanian leader was indeed motivated by antisemitic beliefs, but that these need to be contextualized in order to understand what separates Antonescu from Hitler in terms of radicalism. However, various other researchers assess that, by aligning himself with Hitler before and during Operation Barbarossa, Antonescu implicitly agreed with his thoughts on the "Jewish Question", choosing racial over religious antisemitism. According to Harvey, the Iași pogrom made the Germans "evidently willing to accept that organized Christianity in Romania was very different from what it was in Germany".
Antonescu was a firm believer in the conspiracy theory of "Jewish Bolshevism", according to which all Jews were supporters of communism and the Soviet Union. His arguments on the matter involved a spurious claim that, during the 1940 retreat from Bessarabia, the Jews had organized themselves and attacked Romanian soldiers. In part, this notion exaggerated unilateral reports of enthusiasm among the marginalized Jews upon the arrival of Red Army troops. In a summer 1941 address to his ministers, Antonescu stated: "The Satan is the Jew. [Ours] is a battle of life and death. Either we win and the world will be purified, either they win and we will become their slaves." At around the same time, he envisaged the ethnic cleansing ("cleaning out") of Jews from the eastern Romanian-held territories. However, as early as February 1941, Antonescu was also contemplating the ghettoization of all Jewish Romanians, as an early step toward their expulsion. In this context, Antonescu frequently depicted Jews as a disease or a poison. After the Battle of Stalingrad, he encouraged the army commanders to resist the counteroffensive, as otherwise the Soviets "will bring Bolshevism to the country, wipe out the entire leadership stratum, impose the Jews on us, and deport masses of our people."
Ion Antonescu's antiziganism manifested itself as the claim that some or all Romani people, specifically nomadic ones, were given to criminal behavior. The regime did not act consistently on this belief: in various cases, those deported had close relatives drafted into the Romanian Army. Although racist slogans targeting Romani people had been popularized by the Iron Guard, it was only under Antonescu's unchallenged rule that solving the "Gypsy problem" became official policy and antiziganist measures were enforced. After a February 1941 inspection, Antonescu singled out Bucharest's Romani community for alleged offences committed during the blackout, and called on his ministers to present him with solutions. Initially, he contemplated sending all Romani people he considered undesirable to the inhospitable Bărăgan Plain, to join the ranks of a local community of manual labourers. In 1942, he commissioned the Romanian Central Institute for Statistics to compile a report on Romani demography, which, in its edited form, provided scientifically racist conclusions, warning the "Conducător" about alleged Romani-Romanian miscegenation in rural Romania. In doing so, Antonescu offered some credit to a marginal and pseudoscientific trend in Romanian sociology, which, basing itself on eugenic theories, recommended the marginalization, deportation or compulsory sterilization of the Romani people, whose numeric presence it usually exaggerated. Among those who signed the report was demographer Sabin Manuilă, who saw the Romani presence as a major racial problem. The exact effect of the report's claims on Antonescu is uncertain.
There is a historiographic dispute about whether Ion Antonescu's regime was fascist or more generically right-wing authoritarian, itself integrated within a larger debate about the aspects and limits of fascism. Israeli historian of fascism Zeev Sternhell describes Antonescu, alongside his European counterparts Pierre-Étienne Flandin, Francisco Franco, Miklós Horthy, François de La Rocque, Philippe Pétain and Italian King Victor Emmanuel III, as a "conservative", noting that all of them "were not deceived by a [fascist] propaganda trying to place them in the same category [as the fascist movements]." A similar verdict is provided by German historian of Europe Hagen Schulze, who views Horthy, Franco and the Romanian leader alongside Portugal's "Estado Novo" theorist António de Oliveira Salazar and Second Polish Republic founder Józef Piłsudski, as rulers of "either purely military dictatorships, or else authoritarian governments run by civilian politicians", and thus a category apart from the leaders of "Fascist states." For Schulze, the defining elements of such governments is the presence of a "conservative establishment" which ensured "social stability" by extending the control of a "traditional state" (thus effectively blocking "revolutionary suggestions" from the far left and the far right alike). The term "conservative autocrat" is used in relation to the "Conducător" by British political theorist Roger Griffin, who attributes to the Iron Guard the position of a subservient fascist movement, while others identify Antonescu's post-1941 rule as a military rather than a fascist dictatorship. Several other scholars prefer "conservative" as a defining term for Antonescu's policies. Antonescu described himself as "by fate a dictator", and explained that his policies were "militaristic" or, on one occasion, "national-totalitarian".
Nevertheless, other historians theorize a synthesis of fascist and conservative elements, performed by Antonescu and other European leaders of his day. Routledge's 2002 "Companion to Fascism and the Far Right" uses the terms "para-fascist" to define Antonescu, adding: "generally regarded as an authoritarian conservative [Antonescu] incorporated fascism into his regime, in the shape of the Iron Guard, rather than embodying fascism himself." "Para-fascist" is also used by Griffin, to denote both Antonescu and Carol II. American historian of fascism Robert Paxton notes that, like Salazar, Romania's dictator crushed a competing fascist movement, "after copying some of [its] techniques of popular mobilization." Political scientists John Gledhill and Charles King discuss the Iron Guard as Romania's "indigenous fascist movement", remark that Antonescu "adopted much of the ideology of the Guardists", and conclude that the regime he led was "openly fascist". References to the fascist traits of Antonescu's dictatorship are also made by other researchers.
The synthetic aspect of Antonescu's rule is discussed in detail by various authors. British historian Dennis Deletant, who notes that the fascist label relies on both Antonescu's adoption of some fascist "trappings" and the "dichotomy of wartime and postwar evaluation" of his regime, also notes that post-1960 interpretations "do more to explain his behaviour than the preceding orthodoxy." Deletant contrasts the lack of "mass political party or ideology" with the type of rule associated with Nazism or Italian fascism. British-born sociologist and political analyst Michael Mann writes: "The authoritarian regimes of Antonescu [...] and Franco [...] purported to be 'traditional', but actually their fascist-derived corporatism was a new immanent ideology of the right." Another distinct view is held by Romanian-born historian of ideas Juliana Geran Pilon, who describes Romania's "military fascist regime" as a successor to Iron Guardist "mystical nationalism", while mentioning that Antonescu's "national ideology was rather more traditionally militaristic and conservative."
In theory, Antonescu's policies had at least one revolutionary aspect. The leader himself claimed: "I want to introduce a patriotic, heroic, military-typed education, because economic education and all the others follow from it." According to Boia, his arrival in power was explicitly meant to "regenerate" Romania, and his popularity hinged on his being perceived as a "totalitarian model" and a "saviour" figure, like Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Carol II before him. The "providential" and "saviour" themes are also emphasized by historian Adrian Majuru, who notes that Antonescu both adopted such ideals and criticized Carol for failing to live up to them. Seeing his rule as legitimized by the national interest, the general is also known to have referred to political pluralism as "poltronerie" ("poltroonishness"). Accordingly, Antonescu formally outlawed all political forces in February 1941, codifying penal labor as punishment for most public forms of political expression. In Deletant's assessment, his regenerative program was more declarative than factual, and contradicted by Antonescu's own decision to allow the informal existence of some opposition forces. At the same time, some historians believe his monopolizing of power in the name of a German alliance turned Romania into either a "puppet state" of Hitler or one of Germany's "satellite" governments. However, Deletant notes: "Romania retained her sovereignty throughout the period of the alliance [with Nazi Germany]. [...] Antonescu had, of course, his own country's interests uppermost in his mind, but in following Hitler, he served the Nazi cause." He describes Romania's contribution to the war as that of "a principal ally of Germany", as opposed to a "minor Axis satellite."
Although he assigned an unimportant role to King Michael, Antonescu took steps to increase the monarchy's prestige, personally inviting Carol's estranged wife, Queen Mother Helen, to return home. However, his preferred military structures functioned in cooperation with a bureaucracy inherited from the National Renaissance Front. According to historian of fascism Philip Morgan: "Antonescu probably wanted to create, or perpetuate, something like Carol's front organization." Much of his permanent support base comprised former National Christian Party members, to the point where he was seen as successor to Octavian Goga. While maintaining a decorative replacement for Parliament—known as "Adunarea Obștească Plebiscitară a Națiunii Române" ("The General Plebiscitary Assembly of the Romanian Nation") and convoked only twice— he took charge of hierarchical appointments, and personally drafted new administrative projects. In 1941, he disestablished participative government in localities and counties, replacing it with a corporatist structure appointed by prefects whom he named. In stages between August and October 1941, he instituted civilian administration of Transnistria under Governor Gheorghe Alexianu, whose status he made equivalent to that of a cabinet minister. Similar measures were taken in Bukovina and Bessarabia (under Governors Corneliu Calotescu and Gheorghe Voiculescu, respectively). Antonescu strictly relied on the chain of command, and his direct orders to the Army overrode civilian hierarchies. This system allowed room for endemic political corruption and administrative confusion. The Romanian leader also tolerated a gradual loss of authority over the German communities in Romania, in particular the Transylvanian Saxon and Banat Swabian groups, in agreement with Hitler's views on the "Volksdeutsche". This trend was initiated by Saxon Nazi activist Andreas Schmidt in cooperation with the "Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle", resulting in "de facto" self-governance under a Nazi system which was also replicated among the 130,000 Black Sea Germans of Transnistria. Many young German Romanian men opted to join the "Schutzstaffel" as early as 1940 and, in 1943, an accord between Antonescu and Hitler automatically sent ethnic Germans of recruitable age into the Wehrmacht.
The regime was characterized by the leader's attempts to regulate even remote aspects of public life, including relations between the sexes. He imposed drastic penalties for misdemeanors, and the legal use of capital punishment was extended to an unprecedented level. He personally set standards for nightclub programs, for the length of skirts and for women's use of bicycles, while forcing all men to wear coats in public. His wife Maria was a patron of state-approved charitable organizations, initially designed to compete with successful Iron Guardist ventures such as "Ajutorul Legionar". According to Romanian-born gender studies academic Maria Bucur, although the regime allowed women "to participate in the war effort on the front in a more regularized, if still marginal, fashion", the general tone was sexist.
The administrative apparatus included official press and propaganda sectors, which moved rapidly from constructing Carol's personality cult to doing the same for the new military leader: journals "Universul" and "Timpul", as well as Camil Petrescu's "România" magazine, were particularly active in this process. Some other such venues were "Porunca Vremii", Nichifor Crainic's "Sfarmă-Piatră", as well as all the seemingly independent newspapers and some ten new periodicals the government founded for this purpose. Among the individual journalists involved in propaganda were Crainic, Petrescu, Stelian Popescu, and "Curentul" editor Pamfil Șeicaru (the "Conducător" purposefully ignored support from Carol's former adviser, corporatist economist and newspaperman Mihail Manoilescu, whom he reportedly despised). Much of the propaganda produced during the Antonescu era supported the antisemitic theses put forth by the "Conducător". Antisemitism was notable and virulent at the level of Romanian Army units addressing former Soviet citizens in occupied lands, and reflected the regime's preference for the ethnic slur "jidani" (akin to "kikes" or "Yids" in English). The religious aspect of anti-communism surfaced in such venues, which frequently equated Operation Barbarossa with a holy war or a crusade. Romania's other enemies were generally treated differently: Antonescu himself issued objections to the anti-British propaganda of explicitly pro-Nazi papers such as "Porunca Vremii". A special segment of Antonescu's post-1941 propaganda was "Codrenist": it revisited the Iron Guard's history to minimize Sima's contributions and to depict him as radically different from Codreanu.
Three weeks after gaining power and inaugurating the National Legionary regime, Ion Antonescu declared to Italian interviewers at "La Stampa" that solving the "Jewish Question" was his pressing concern, and that he considered himself "haunted" by the large Jewish presence in Moldavian towns. Antonescu's crimes against the Jewish population were inaugurated by new racial discrimination laws: urban Jewish property was expropriated, Jews were banned from performing a wide range of occupations and forced to provide community work for the state ("muncă de interes obștesc") instead of the inaccessible military service, mixed Romanian-Jewish marriages were forbidden and many Jews, primarily those from strategic areas such as Ploiești, were confined to internment camps. The expulsion of Jewish professionals from all walks of life was also carried out in the National Legionary period, and enforced after the Legionary Rebellion. After a post-Legionary hiatus, "Romanianization" commissions resumed their work under the supervision of a National Center, and their scope was extended.
Often discussed as a prelude to the Holocaust in Romania and in connection with Antonescu's views on "Jewish Bolshevism", the Iași pogrom occurred just days after the start of Operation Barbarossa, and was partly instigated, partly tolerated by the authorities in Bucharest. For a while before the massacre, these issued propaganda claiming that the Jews in Iași, whose numbers had been increased by forced evictions from smaller localities, were actively helping Soviet bombers find their targets through the blackout and plotting against the authorities, with Antonescu himself ordering that the entire community be expelled from the city on such grounds. The discourse appealed to local antisemites, whose murderous rampage, carried out with the officials' complicity, resulted in several thousand deaths among Jewish men, women and children.
In the aftermath of the pogrom, thousands of survivors were loaded into the so-called "death trains". These overcrowded and sealed Romanian Railways stock cars circled the countryside in the extreme heat of the summer, and periodically stopped to unload the dead. At least 4,000 people died during the initial massacre and the subsequent transports. Varied estimates of the Iași massacre and related killings place the total number of Jews killed at 8,000, 10,000, 12,000 or 14,000. Some assistance in their murder was provided by units of the German XXXth Army Corps, a matter which later allowed the authorities to shift blame from themselves and from Antonescu—who was nonetheless implicated by the special orders he had released. The complicity of the Special Intelligence Service and its director Eugen Cristescu was also advanced as a possibility. The subsequent attempts at a cover-up included omissive explanations given by the central authorities to foreign diplomats and rewriting official records.
Right upon setting up camp in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Romanian troops joined the Wehrmacht and the Schutzstaffel-organized "Einsatzgruppen" in mass shootings of Bessarabian and Ukrainian Jews, resulting in the deaths of 10,000 to 20,000 people. Scholar Christopher R. Browning compares these killings with similar atrocities perpetrated by locals in "Reichskommissariat Ukraine", Lithuania and Latvia ("see Holocaust in Latvia, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust in Ukraine"). From then on, as the fighting troops progressed over the Dniester, the local administration deported large numbers of Jews into the fighting zone, in hopes that they would be exterminated by the Germans. Antonescu himself stated: "I am in favor of expelling the Jews from Bessarabia and [Northern] Bukovina to the other side of the border [...]. There is nothing for them to do here and I don't mind if we appear in history as barbarians [...]. There has never been a time more suitable in our history to get rid of the Jews, and if necessary, you are to make use of machine guns against them." He also explained that his aim was: "the policy of purification of the Romanian race, and I will not give way before any obstacle in achieving this historical goal of our nation. If we do not take advantage of the situation which presents itself today [...] we shall miss the last chance that history offers to us. And I do not wish to miss it, because if I do so further generations will blame me." He made a contradictory statement about the murder of Jews in Chișinău, claiming that their perpetrators were "bastards" who "stained" his regime's reputation. Antonescu saw the "war" against the Jews as being just as important as the war against the Soviet Union, and regularly demanded reports from his officers in Bessarabia and Transnistria about their measures against the Jews. In late August 1941, in Tighina, Antonescu called a secret conference attended by himself, the governors of Bessarabia and Bukovina and the governor-designate of Transnistria to discuss his plans regarding the Jews in those regions.
Many deaths followed, as the direct results of starvation and exhaustion, while the local German troops carried out selective shootings. The survivors were sent back over the river, and the German commanders expressed irritation over the methods applied by their counterparts. Romanian authorities subsequently introduced ghettos or transit camps. After the annexation of Transnistria, there ensued a systematic deportation of Jews from Bessarabia, with additional transports of Jews from the Old Kingdom (especially Moldavia-proper). Based on an assignment Antonescu handed down to General Ioan Topor, the decision involved specific quotas, and the transports, most of which were carried out by foot, involved random murders. In conjunction with Antonescu's expansionist ambitions, it is possible that the ultimate destination for the survivors, once circumstances permitted it, was further east than the Southern Bug. On 11 October 1941, the chief of the Federation of Jewish Communities, Wilhelm Filderman issued a public letter to Antonescu asking him to stop the deportations, writing: "This is death, death for no reason except that they are Jews." Antonescu replied to Filderman in a long letter explaining that because the entire Jewish community of Bessarabia had allegedly collaborated with the Soviets during the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia, his policies were a justified act of revenge. On 11 November 1941, Antonescu sent Filderman a second letter stating no Jews would be allowed to live in the "liberated territories" and as for the Jews of the "Regat":
We decided to defend our Romanian rights because our all-too-tolerant past was taken advantage of by the Jews and facilitated the abuse of our rights by foreigners, particularly the Jews...We are determined to put an end to this situation. We cannot afford to put in jeopardy the existence of our nation because of several hundred thousand Jews, or in order to salvage some principle of humane democracy that has not been understood properly."
The deportees' remaining property was nationalized, confiscated or left available for plunder. With its own Jewish population confined and subjected to extermination, Transnistria became infamous in short time, especially so for its three main concentration camps: Peciora, Akhmechetka, Bogdanovka, Domanovka and Obodovka. Manned by Romanian Gendarmes and local Ukrainian auxiliaries who acted with the consent of central authorities, Transnistrian localities became the sites of mass executions, particularly after the administrators became worried about the spread of typhus from the camps and into the surrounding region. At a Cabinet meeting on 16 December 1941 to discuss the fate of the Jews of Transnistria, Antonescu stated:
The question of the Yids is being discussed in Berlin. The Germans want to bring the Yids from Europe to Russia and settle them in certain areas, but there is still time before this plan is carried out. Meanwhile, what should we do? Shall we wait for a decision in Berlin? Shall we wait for a decision that concerns us? Shall we ensure their safety? Pack them into catacombs! Throw them into the Black Sea! As far I am concerned, 100 may die, 1,000 may die, all of them may die"
Between 21-24 and 28–31 December 1941, Romanian gendarmes and Ukrainian auxiliaries killed about 70,000 Jews at the Bogdanovca camp; the massacre was Antonescu's way of dealing with a typhus epidemic that had broken out among the Jews of Transistria owing to the poor living conditions that had been forced to endure. The last wave of Jewish deportations, occurring in June 1942, came mainly from the Cernăuți area in Northern Bukovina.
Also in the summer of 1942, Ion Antonescu became a perpetrator of the "Porajmos", or Holocaust-related crimes against the Romani people, when he ordered the Transnistrian deportation of Romanian Romani from the Old Kingdom, transited through camps and resettled in inhumane conditions near the Southern Bug. They were joined there by 2,000 conscientious objectors of the Inochentist church, a millennialist denomination. As Antonescu admitted during his trial, he personally supervised these operations, giving special orders to the Gendarmerie commanders. In theory, the measures taken against Romani people were supposed to affect only nomads and those with a criminal record created or updated recently, but arbitrary exceptions were immediately made to this rule, in particular by using the vague notion of "undesirable" to define some members of sedentary communities. The central authorities noted differences in the criteria applied locally, and intervened to prevent or sanction under-deportation and, in some cases, over-deportation. Antonescu and Constantin Vasiliu had been made aware of the problems Transnistria faced in feeding its own population, but ignored them when deciding in favour of expulsion. With most of their property confiscated, the Romani men, women and children were only allowed to carry hand luggage, on which they were supposed to survive winter. Famine and disease ensued from criminal negligence, Romani survival being largely dependent on occasional government handouts, the locals' charity, stealing and an underground economy. Once caught, escapees who made their way back into Romania were returned by the central authorities, even as local authorities were objecting.
The Odessa massacre, an act of collective punishment carried out by the Romanian Army and Gendarmes, took the lives of a minimum of between 15,000 and 25,000 to as many as 40,000 or even more than 50,000 Jewish people of all ages. The measure came as the enforcement of Antonescu's own orders, as retaliation for an explosion that killed 67 people at Romanian headquarters on that city. Antonescu believed that the original explosion was a terrorist act, rejecting the possibility of the building in question having been fitted with land mines by the retreating Soviets. In addition, Antonescu blamed the Jews, specifically "Jewish commissars" in the Red Army, for the losses suffered by his 4th Army throughout the siege, although both an inquiry he had ordered and German assessments pointed to the ill-preparedness of Romanian soldiers. While the local command took the initiative for the first executions, Antonescu's personal intervention amplified the number of victims required, and included specific quotas (200 civilians for every dead officer, 100 for every dead soldier). By the time of the explosion, the Jewish population was already rounded up into makeshift ghettos, being made subject to violence and selective murders.
Purportedly the largest single massacre of Jews in the war's history, it involved mass shootings, hangings, acts of immolation and a mass detonation. Antonescu is quoted saying that the Romanian Army's criminal acts were "reprisals, not massacres". Survivors were deported to the nearby settlement of Slobidka, and kept in inhumane conditions. Alexianu himself intervened with Antonescu for a solution to their problems, but the Romanian leader decided he wanted them out of the Odessa area, citing the nearby resistance of Soviet troops in the Siege of Sevastopol as a ferment for similar Jewish activities. His order to Alexianu specified: "Pack them into the catacombs, throw them into the Black Sea, but get them out of Odessa. I don't want to know. A hundred can die, a thousand can die, all of them can die, but I don't want a single Romanian official or officer to die." Defining the presence of Jews in occupied Odessa as "a crime", Antonescu added: "I don't want to stain my activity with such lack of foresight." As a result of this, around 35,000–40,000 Jewish people were deported out of Odessa area and into other sectors of Transnistria. Several thousands were purposefully driven into Berezivka and other areas inhabited by the Black Sea Germans, where "Selbstschutz" organizations massacred them.
A common assessment ranks Antonescu's Romania as second only to Nazi Germany in its antisemitic extermination policies. According to separate works by historians Dennis Deletant and Adrian Cioroianu, the flaws of Antonescu's 1946 trial notwithstanding, his responsibility for war crimes was such that he would have been equally likely to be found guilty and executed in a Western Allied jurisdiction. The often singular brutality of Romanian-organized massacres was a special topic of reflection for Jewish Holocaust escapee and American political theorist Hannah Arendt, as discussed in her 1963 work "Eichmann in Jerusalem". Official Romanian estimates made in 2003 by the Wiesel Commission mention that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were killed by Romanian authorities under Antonescu's rule. The Transnistria deportations account for 150,000 to 170,000 individual expulsions of Jews from Romania proper, of whom some 90,000–120,000 never returned. According to Romanian-born Israeli historian Jean Ancel, the Transnistria deportations from other areas account for around 145,000 deaths, while the number of local Transnistrian Jews killed could be as high as 280,000. More conservative estimates for the latter number mention some 130,000–180,000 victims. Other overall estimates speak of 200,000 to over 300,000 Jews purposefully killed as a result of Romania's action. According to historians Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic: "none of these massacres was carried out by the Germans, although [the latter] certainly encouraged such actions and, in some cases, may have coordinated them." The Romani deportations affected some 25,000 people, at least 11,000 of whom died in Transnistria.
The Jewish population in the Old Kingdom, numbering between 300,000 and 400,000 people, survived the Holocaust almost intact. Reflecting on this fact, Lucian Boia noted that Antonescu could not "decently" be viewed as a rescuer of Jews, but that there still is a fundamental difference between the effects of his rule and those of Hitler's, concluding that the overall picture is not "completely dark." For Dennis Deletant, this situation is a "major paradox" of Antonescu's time in power: "more Jews survived under [Antonescu's] rule than in any other country within Axis Europe." American historian of Romania William O. Oldson views Antonescu's policies as characterized by "violence, inconsistency and inanity", but places them in the wider context of local antisemitism, noting some ideological exceptions from their respective European counterparts. These traits, he argues, became "providential" for the more assimilated Jewish communities of the Old Romanian Kingdom, while exposing Jews perceived as foreign. Discussing Antonescu's policy of ethnic cleansing, Polonksy and Mihlic note: "[it] raises important questions about the thin line between the desire to expel an unwanted minority and a small-scale genocidal project under sanctioned conditions." American military historian Gerhard L. Weinberg made reference to the Antonescu regime's "slaughter of large number of Jews in the areas ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940 when those areas were retaken in 1941 as well as in [...] Transnistria", but commented: "the government of Marshal Ion Antonescu preferred to rob and persecute Jews [from Romania]; the government would not turn them over to the Germans for killing."
Alongside the noticeable change in fortunes on the Eastern Front, a main motivator for all post-1943 changes, noted by various historians, was the manifold financial opportunity of Jewish survival. Wealthier Jews were financially extorted in order to avoid community work and deportation, and the work of some professionals was harnessed by the public sector, and even by the Army. From the beginning, the regime had excepted from deportations some Jews who were experts in fields such as forestry and chemistry, and some others were even allowed to return despite antisemitic protests in their home provinces. Economic exploitation was institutionalized in late 1941-early 1942, with the creation of a Central Jewish Office. Supervised by Commissioner Radu Lecca and formally led by the Jewish intellectuals Nandor Gingold and Henric Streitman, it collected funds which were in part redirected toward Maria Antonescu's charities. Small numbers of Romanian Jews left independently for the Palestine as early as 1941, but British opposition to Zionist plans made their transfer perilous (one notorious example of this being the MV "Struma"). On a personal level, Antonescu's encouragement of crimes alternated with periods when he gave in to the pleas of Jewish community leader Wilhelm Filderman. In one such instance, he reversed his own 1942 decision to impose the wearing of yellow badges, which nevertheless remained in use everywhere outside the Old Kingdom and, in theory, to any Romanian Jews elsewhere in Axis-controlled Europe. Assessing these contradictions, commentators also mention the effect of Allied promises to prosecute those responsible for genocide throughout Europe. In the late stages of the war, Antonescu was attempting to shift all blame for crimes from his regime while accusing Jews of "bring[ing] destruction upon themselves".
The regime permitted non-deported Romanian Jews and American charities to send humanitarian aid into Transnistrian camps, a measure it took an interest in enforcing in late 1942. Deportations of Jews ceased altogether in October of the same year. A common explanation historians propose for this reassessment of policies is the change in Germany's fortunes on the Eastern Front, with mention that Antonescu was considering using the Jewish population as an asset in his dealings with the Western Allies. It nevertheless took the regime more than a year to allow more selective Jewish returns from Transnistria, including some 2,000 orphans. After Transnistria's 1944 evacuation, Antonescu himself advocated the creation of new camps in Bessarabia. In conversations with his cabinet, the "Conducător" angrily maintained that surviving Jews were better off than Romanian soldiers.
The policies applied in respect to the Romani population were ambivalent: while ordering the deportation of those he considered criminals, Ion Antonescu was taking some interest in improving the lives of Romani laborers of the Bărăgan Plain. According to Romanian historian Viorel Achim, although it had claimed the existence of a "Gypsy problem", the Antonescu regime "did not count it among its priorities." By 1943, Antonescu was gradually allowing those deported to return home. Initially, Constantin Vasiliu allowed the families of soldiers to appeal their deportation on a selective basis. Romanian authorities also appear to have been influenced by the objections of Nazi administrators in the "Reichskommissariat Ukraine", who feared that the newly arrived population would outnumber local Germans. By January 1944, the central authorities ordered local ones not to send back apprehended fugitives, instructed them to provide these with some food and clothing, and suggested corporal punishment for Romani people who did not adhere to a behavioural code. As the Romanian administrators abandoned Transnistria, most survivors from the group returned on their own in summer 1944.
Ion Antonescu and his subordinates were for long divided on the issue of the Final Solution, as applied in territories under direct Nazi control from 1941. At an early stage, German attempts to impose the RSHA's direct control over Old Kingdom Jews drew some objections from Mihai Antonescu, but the two sides agreed to a common policy with reference to Soviet Jews. In various of his early 1940s statements, Ion Antonescu favorably mentions the Axis goal of eliminating the Jewish presence in the event of victory. The unrestrained character of some Romanian actions toward Jews alarmed Nazi officials, who demanded a methodical form of extermination. When confronted with German decisions to push back Jews he had expelled before the occupation of Transnistria, Antonescu protested, arguing that he had conformed with Hitler's decisions regarding "eastern Jews". In August 1941, in preparation for the Final Solution's universal application, Hitler remarked: "As for the Jewish question, today in any case one could say that a man like Antonescu, for example, proceeds much more radically in this manner than we have done until now. But I will not rest or be idle until we too have gone all the way with the Jews."
By summer 1942, German representatives in Romania obtained Antonescu's approval to deport the remaining Jewish population to extermination camps in occupied Poland. Among those involved on the German side were mass murderer Adolf Eichmann and his aide Gustav Richter, while the Romanian side was represented by Jewish Affairs Commissioner Lecca (reporting to Antonescu himself). Richter directed Lecca in setting up the Central Jewish Office, which he assumed would function as a "Judenrat" to streamline extermination policies. According to such plans, only some 17,000 Jews, labeled useful to Romania's economy, were to be exempt. The transports had already been announced to the Romanian Railways by autumn 1942, but the government eventually decided to postpone these measures indefinitely as was done with most other deportations to Transnistria. Antonescu's new orders on the matter were brought up in his conversations with Hitler at Schloss Klessheim, where both leaders show themselves aware of the fate awaiting Jewish deportees to Poland. By then, German authorities charged with applying the Final Solution in Eastern Europe completely abandoned their plans with respect to Romania. In August 1942, Antonescu had worked out plans with the SS for deporting all of the Jews of the "Regat" or the "Old Kingdom" to the German-run death camps in Poland, but then cancelled the deportation. The principal reasons for his change of mind were signs of disapproval from court circles, a warning from the American government passed on by the Swiss ambassador that he would prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity after the Allies had won if the deportation went ahead, and most importantly because Hitler would not undo the Second Vienna Award and return northern Transylvania to Romania. Antonescu saw the deportation of the Jews of the "Regat" as the "pro quid quo" for the return of Transylvania and unable to obtain satisfactory promises from the German Ambassador Baron Manfred von Killinger that Romania would be rewarded with the return of Transylvania in exchange for handing over its Jews, Antonescu cancelled the deportation until the Germans would make him a better offer.
According to Oldson, by the final stage of the war Romania rejected "all extreme measures against Jews who could not be proven to be communists." The planned transports to Palestine, the prospect of which irritated Nazi German observers, implied a hope that the Allies' focus would shift away from the regime's previous guilt and, at the same time, looked forward to payments to be made in exchange for each person saved. The contrary implications of Romanian nationalism, manifested as reluctance to obey German commands and discomfort with drastic change in general, are occasionally offered as further explanations of the phenomenon. While reflecting upon the issue of emigration to Palestine, Antonescu also yielded to pleas of Jewish community leaders, and allowed safe passage through Romania for various Northern Transylvanian Jews fleeing the Holocaust in Hungary. He was doing the same for certain Northern Transylvanian Romani communities who had escaped southwards. In that context, Nazi German ideologues began objecting to Antonescu's supposed leniency. Antonescu nevertheless alternated tolerance of illegal immigration with drastic measures. In early 1944, he issued an order to shoot illegal immigrants, which was probably never enforced by the Border Police (who occasionally turned in Jewish refugees to the German authorities). The Antonescu regime allowed the extermination of the Romanian Jewish diaspora in other parts of Europe, formally opposing their deportation in some cases where it appeared Germany was impinging upon Romania's sovereignty.
The circumstances of wartime accounted for cautious and ambivalent approaches to Antonescu's rule from among the Romanian political mainstream, which grouped advocates of liberal democracy and anti-fascism. According to Gledhill and King: "Romanian liberals had been critical of their government's warm relationship with Hitler, which had been developing throughout the 1930s, but the [1940] Soviet attack on Romanian territory left them with little chance but to support Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union." Other authors also cite the Greater Romanian agenda of the Antonescu executive as a reason behind the widespread acquiescence. The tendency was illustrated by Dinu Brătianu, who, in late January 1941, told his National Liberal colleagues that the new "government of generals" was "the best solution possible to the current crisis", urging the group to provide Antonescu with "all the support we can give him." An early point of contention between Antonescu and the National Peasants' Party came in spring 1941, when Antonescu's support for the Balkans Campaign and Romania's claim to parts of Vojvodina were met with a letter of protest from Iuliu Maniu, which Antonescu dismissed. Maniu and Brătianu also issued several condemnations of Antonescu's decision to continue the war beyond the Dniester. One such letter, signed by both, claimed that, while earlier steps had been "legitimized by the entire soul of the nation, the Romanian people will never consent to the continuation of the struggle beyond our national borders." Maniu specifically mentioned the possibility of Allied victory, accused Antonescu of diverting attention from the goal of Greater Romania (Northern Transylvania included), and stressed that Romania's ongoing participation in the Axis was "troubling enough".
Antonescu is known to have publicly admonished opposition leaders for their disobedience, which he equated with obstruction, and to have monitored their activities through the Special Intelligence Service. However, some early communiqués he addressed to Brătianu also feature offers of resignation, which their recipient reluctantly rejected. The Germans objected to such ambiguities, and Hitler once advised Antonescu to have Maniu killed, an option which the "Conducător" rejected because of the PNȚ leader's popularity with the peasants. While tolerating contacts between Maniu and the Allies, Antonescu arrested the clandestine British envoys to Romania, thus putting a stop to the 1943 "Operation Autonomous". In parallel, his relationship with Queen Mother Helen and Michael rapidly deteriorated after he began advising the royal family on how to conduct its affairs. Dissent from Antonescu's policies sometimes came from inside his own camp. Both the officer corps and the General Staff were divided on the issue of war beyond the Dniester, although it is possible that the majority agreed it would bring Northern Transylvania back to Romania. A prominent case was that of Iosif Iacobici, the Chief of the Romanian General Staff, whose objection to the massive transfer of Romanian troops to the Eastern Front resulted in his demotion and replacement with Ilie Șteflea (January 1942). Șteflea issued similar calls, and Antonescu's eventually agreed to preserve a home army just before the Battle of Stalingrad. Various other military men extended their protection to persecuted Jews. Overall, Antonescu met significant challenges in exercising control over the politicized sectors in the armed forces.
Antonescu's racial discrimination laws and Romania's participation in the Holocaust earned significant objections from various individuals and groups in Romanian society. One noted opponent was Queen Mother Helen, who actively intervened to save Jews from being deported. The Mayor of Cernăuți, Traian Popovici, publicly objected to the deportation of Jews, as did Gherman Pântea, his counterpart in Odessa. The appeals of Queen Helen, King Michael, the Orthodox Metropolitan of Transylvania Nicolae Bălan, Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo and Swiss Ambassador René de Weck are credited with having helped avert the full application of the Final Solution in Antonescu's Romania. Cassulo and Bălan together pleaded for the fate of certain Jews, including all who had converted to Christianity, and the former publicly protested against deportations. While Romania and the United States were still at peace, American Minister Plenipotentiary Franklin Mott Gunther repeatedly attempted to make his superiors aware of Romanian actions against the Jews, and Turkish diplomats unsuccessfully sought American approval for transferring Romanian Jews to safe passage through Anatolia and into Palestine. Dinu Brătianu also condemned antisemitic measures, prompting Antonescu to accuse him of being an ally of "the Yid in London". Together with Maniu and Ion Mihalache, Brătianu signed statements condemning the isolation, persecution and expulsion of Jews, which prompted Antonescu to threaten to clamp down on them. However, both parties were occasionally ambiguous on racial issues, and themselves produced antisemitic messages. Brătianu is also known for publicly defending the cause of Romani people, opposing their deportation on grounds that it would "turn back the clock on several centuries of history", a stance which drew support from his civilian peers. In parallel, some regular Romanians such as nurse Viorica Agarici intervened to save Jewish lives, while, from inside the Jewish community, Chief Rabbi Alexandru Șafran and activist Mișu Benvenisti rallied with Wilhelm Filderman in public protests against Antonescu's decisions, being occasionally joined by A. L. Zissu. In 1943, Filderman himself was deported to Mohyliv-Podilskyi, but eventually allowed to return.
Organized resistance movements in Antonescu's Romania were comparatively small-scale and marginal. In addition to a Zionist underground which aided Jews to pass through or flee the country, the regime was confronted with local political movements of contrasting shades. One of them comprised far left and left-wing elements, which Antonescu's rise to power had caught in an unusual position. The minor Romanian Communist Party, outlawed since the rule of Ferdinand I for its Cominternist national policies, had been rendered virtually inactive by the German-Soviet non-aggression pact. Once reanimated by Operation Barbarossa, the PCR was unable to create an actual armed resistance movement, although it was able to coordinate the policies of several other small leftist groups. Speaking shortly before the invasion of the Soviet Union, and adopting the "Jewish Bolshevism" position, Antonescu ordered authorities to compile lists comprising "the names of all Jewish and communist agents", who were to be kept under close surveillance. Among people arrested on suspicion of communism, Jews were sent to Transnistrian sites such as Vapniarka and Rîbnița, while others were interned in regular facilities such as those in Caransebeș and Târgu Jiu. In all, some 2,000 Jewish Romanian deportees to the region had been accused of political crimes (the category also included those who had tried to escape forced labor). According to one estimate, people held on charges of being communists accounted for just under 2,000 people, of whom some 1,200 were jailed in Romania proper. Capital punishment was used against various partisan-like activists, while the vast majority of communist prisoners in Rîbnița were massacred in March 1944. At the other end of the political spectrum, after the Legionary Rebellion and the Iron Guard's decapitation, many Legionaries who opposed the regime, and whom Antonescu himself believed were "communists in [Legionary] green shirts", were killed or imprisoned. An Iron Guardist underground was nevertheless formed locally, and probably numbered in thousands. Some of Antonescu's political prisoners from both camps were given a chance to redeem themselves by joining units on the Eastern Front.
Although repressed, divided and weak, the PCR capitalized on the Soviet victories, being integrated into the mainstream opposition. At the same time, a "prison faction" emerged around Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, opposing both the formal leadership and the so-called "Muscovite" communists who had taken refuge in the Soviet Union before the war. While maneuvering for control within the PCR during and after 1944, "prison" communists destroyed a third group, formed around the PCR's nominal leader Ștefan Foriș (whom they kidnapped and eventually killed). The PCR leadership was still suffering from a crisis of legitimacy after beginning talks with the larger parties. The Soviets and "Muscovite" communists campaigned among Romanian prisoners of war in order to have them switch sides in the war, and eventually managed to set up the Tudor Vladimirescu Division.
Measures enforced by the Ion Antonescu regime had contradictory effects on the Romanian cultural scene. According to Romanian literary historians Letiția Guran and Alexandru Ștefan, "the Antonescu regime [...] did not affect negatively cultural modernity. The Romanian cultural elite regarded Antonescu's policies for the most part with sympathy." Nevertheless, other researchers record the dissent of several cultural environments: the classic liberalism and cosmopolitanism of aging literary theorist Eugen Lovinescu, the "Lovinescian" Sibiu Literary Circle, and the rebellious counterculture of young avant-garde writers (Ion Caraion, Geo Dumitrescu, Dimitrie Stelaru, Constant Tonegaru). Prominent left-wing writers Tudor Arghezi, Victor Eftimiu and Zaharia Stancu were political prisoners during the Antonescu years. Author George Călinescu also stood out against the official guidelines, and, in 1941, took a risk by publishing a synthesis of Romanian literature which emphasized Jewish contributions, while composer George Enescu pleaded with Antonescu personally for the fate of Romani musicians. Similar acts of solidarity were performed by various prominent intellectuals and artists. In August 1942, King Michael received a manifesto endorsed by intellectuals from various fields, deploring the murders in Transnistria, and calling for a realignment of policies. Another such document of April 1944 called for an immediate peace with the Soviet Union. On a more intimate level, a diary kept by philosopher and art critic Alice Voinescu expresses her indignation over the antisemitic measures and massacres.
A special aspect of political repression and cultural hegemony was Antonescu's persecution of Evangelical or Restorationist Christian denominations, first outlawed under the National Legionary regime. Several thousand adherents of the Pentecostal Union and the Baptist Union were reportedly jailed in compliance with his orders. Persecution targeted groups of religiously motivated conscientious objectors. In addition to the Inochentist movement, these groups included the Pentecostal Union, the Seventh-day Adventist Conference and the Jehovah's Witnesses Association. Antonescu himself recounted having contemplated using the death penalty against "sects" who would not allow military service, and ultimately deciding in favor of deporting "recalcitrant" ones.
The period following Antonescu's fall returned Romania to a democratic regime and the 1923 Constitution, as well as its participation in the war alongside the Allies. However, it also saw the early stages of a communist takeover—which culminated with King Michael's forced abdication on December 30, 1947 and the subsequent establishment of Communist Romania. The Antonescu trial thus fit into a long series of similar procedures and political purges on charges of collaborationism, instrumented by the Romanian People's Tribunals and various other institutions. During the rigged general election of 1946 and for years after Ion Antonescu's execution, the Romanian Communist Party and its allies began using the implications of his trial as an abusive means of compromising some of their political opponents. One such early example was Iuliu Maniu, by then one of the country's prominent anti-communists, who was accused of being a fascist and an Antonescu sympathizer, mainly for having shaken his hand during the trial. The enlistment of ethnic Germans into Nazi German units, as approved by Antonescu, was used as a pretext for a Soviet-led expulsion of Germans from Romania. On similar grounds, the Soviet occupation forces organized the capture of certain Romanian citizens, as well as the return of war refugees from Romania proper into Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Both the arrestees and the returnees were often deported deeper into the Soviet Union. As part of its deteriorating relationship with Romanian Roman Catholics, and urged on by the Soviets, the communist cabinet of Petru Groza also deemed Apostolic Nuncio Andrea Cassulo a collaborator of Antonescu and a "persona non grata", based on transcripts of the Cassulo-Antonescu conversations. It also used such allegations to pressure several Greek-Catholic clergymen into accepting union with the Romanian Orthodox Church.
Nevertheless, Romanian-born Holocaust historian Radu Ioanid notes, few Romanians involved in organizing the Holocaust were prosecuted, and, of those, none were executed after the Antonescu trial. He attributes this to nationalist resistance within the administrative and judicial apparatus, to communist fears of alienating a too large number of people, to the emigration of Zionist survivors, and to the open hostility of some communists toward liberal Jewish community leaders. Jews also faced conflict with the new authorities and with the majority population, as described by other researchers. There were, nonetheless, sporadic trials for Holocaust-related crimes, including one of Maria Antonescu. Arrested in September 1944 and held 1945–1946 in Soviet custody, she was re-arrested at home in 1950, tried and ultimately found guilty of economic crimes for her collaboration with the Central Jewish Office. Five years later, she was sent into internal exile, and died of heart problems in 1964. After 1950, a large number of convicted war criminals, even some sentenced to life imprisonment, were deemed fit for "social cohabitation" (that is, fit to live amongst the general population) and released, while some suspects were never prosecuted.
Although the Marxist analytical works of the increasingly marginalized communist figure Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu make isolated mentions of the Holocaust, the heavily politicized official discourse inspired by Soviet historiography interpreted Romania's wartime evolution exclusively based on the Marxist-Leninist idea of class conflict. In this context, the main effort to document and expose the Antonescu-era massacres came from Jewish Romanians. This began in 1945, when Jewish journalists Marius Mircu and Maier Rudrich contributed first-hand testimonies. In 1946–1948, the Jewish community leader Matatias Carp published "Cartea neagră" ("The Black Book"), a voluminous and detailed account of all stages of the Holocaust. After forming a secondary element in Antonescu's indictment, the deportation of Romani people was largely ignored in official discourse.
The communist regime overemphasized the part played by the PCR in King Michael's Coup, while commemorating its August 23 date as a national holiday. The Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej faction emerged as the winner of the interior PCR struggles and incorporated nationalist discourse. That faction claimed a decisive role in toppling Antonescu, even though a majority of its members had been jailed for most of the period. In accordance with Stalinist principles, censorship produced historical revisionism that excluded focus on such negative aspects of Romanian behavior during the war as antisemitism and the Holocaust, and obscured Romania's participation on the Eastern Front. Beginning in the mid-1960s, when Nicolae Ceaușescu took power and embarked on a national communist course, the celebration of August 23 as the inception of the communist regime was accompanied by a contradictory tendency, which implied a gradual rehabilitation of Antonescu and his regime. Historians who focused on this period believe that the revival of nationalist tenets and the relative distance taken from Soviet policies contributed to the rehabilitation process. After a period of liberalization, the increasingly authoritarian Ceaușescu regime revived the established patterns of personalized rule, and even made informal use of the title "Conducător". Beginning in the early 1970s, when the new policies were consecrated by the "July Theses", Ceaușescu tolerated a nationalist, antisemitic and Holocaust denialist intellectual faction, illustrated foremost by "Săptămîna" and "Luceafărul" magazines of Eugen Barbu and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, by poet Adrian Păunescu and his "Flacăra" journal, and by novelist Ion Lăncrănjan. The regime also came to cultivate a relationship with exiled tycoon Iosif Constantin Drăgan, a former Iron Guard member who had come to endorse both Antonescu's rehabilitation and the national communist version of Protochronism. In contrast, much of dissident culture and the Romanian diaspora embraced the image of Michael I as its counterpart to the increasingly official Antonescu myth. Lucian Boia described this as "the spectacular confrontation between the two contradictory myths [transposing] into historical and mythological terms a fundamental fissure which divides the Romanian society of today."
Topics relating to the Holocaust in Romania were distorted during the communist era. Ceaușescu himself mentioned the number of survivors of the deportations (some 50,000 people) as a total number of victims, failed to mention the victims' ethnic background, and presented most of them as "communists and antifascists." The regime also placed emphasis on the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania (where the Final Solution had been applied by the Germans and the local Arrow Cross Party). Vladimir Tismăneanu has said Antonescu has a "pseudo-sacred aura" and many Romanians consider the attempts to diminsh this to be an affront to their national dignity: "In post-Communist societies, fantasies of persecution offer immense gratification to large strata of frustrated individuals". These national views are based on propaganda advanced during the Ceaușescu regime.
Earlier accounts of the massacres, which had already been placed under restricted use, were completely removed from public libraries. While a special politicized literature dealt with the Holocaust in Hungary, the entire Ceaușescu period produced only one work entirely dedicated to Romania's participation. Centred on the Iași pogrom, it shifted the blame from Romanian authorities and advanced a drastically reduced death toll. In its preface, official historian Nicolae Minei claimed that Romania was not responsible for any deaths among Jews. Other official texts made more radical claims, openly denying that Antonescu's regime was antisemitic, and that all those killed were victims of Germany or of circumstance.
Romanians' image of Antonescu shifted several times after the 1989 Revolution toppled communism. Polls carried out in the 1990s show the "Conducător" was well liked by portions of the general public. This tendency, Lucian Boia argues, was similar to a parallel trend favoring Wallachia's 15th century Prince Vlad III the Impaler, indicating a preference for "authoritarian solutions" and reflecting "a pantheon that was largely set in place in the 'Ceaușescu era' ". It was also popular at the time to see the 1944 Coup exclusively as the onset of communization in Romania, while certain sections of the public opinion revived the notion of "Jewish Bolshevism", accusing Jews of having brought communism to Romania. British historian Tony Judt connected such reflexes to growing anti-Russian sentiment and Holocaust denial in various countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and termed them collectively "mis-memory of anti-communism". Vladimir Tismăneanu, a prominent Romanian-born political scientist, referred to Antonescu's "pseudo-sacred" image with the post-1989 public, and to the phenomenon as "fantasies of persecution." The wartime dictator's image appealed to many politicians of the post-1989 period, and sporadic calls for his rehabilitation were issued at the highest levels of authority. Far right groups issued calls for his canonization by the Romanian Orthodox Church (together with a similar request to canonize Corneliu Zelea Codreanu). Certain neofascist groups claim to represent a legacy of "Codrenism" from which Sima was a deviationist, and these have also become Antonescu apologists.
A particular case in this process was that of forces gathered around the Greater Romania Party, a group often characterized as merging xenophobic or neofascist messages and the legacy of Ceaușescu's national communism. Founded by party leader and former "Săptămîna" contributor Corneliu Vadim Tudor, "România Mare" magazine is known to have equated Antonescu and Ceaușescu, presenting them both as "apostles of the Romanian people". In his bid for the office of President during the 1996 election, Vadim Tudor vowed to be a new Antonescu. Boia remarks that this meeting of extremes offers an "extraordinary paradox". Drăgan also openly resumed his activities in Romania, often in collaboration with Vadim Tudor's group, founding three organizations tasked with campaigning for Antonescu's rehabilitation: the media outlet Europa Nova, the Ion Antonescu Foundation and the Ion Antonescu League. His colleague Radu Theodoru endorsed such projects while accusing Jews of being "a long-term noxious factor" and claiming that it was actually ethnic Romanians who were victims of a communist Holocaust. Ion Coja and Paul Goma notably produced radical claims relying on fabricated evidence and deflecting blame for the crimes onto the Jews themselves. Several journals edited by Ion Cristoiu repeatedly argued in favor of Antonescu's rehabilitation, also making xenophobic claims; similar views were sporadically present in national dailies of various hues, such as "Ziua", "România Liberă" and "Adevărul".
Various researchers argue that the overall tendency to exculpate Antonescu was endorsed by the ruling National Salvation Front (FSN) and its successor group, later known as Social Democratic Party, who complemented an emerging pro-authoritarian lobby while depicting their common opponent King Michael and his supporters as traitors. Similar attempts to deny the role of Antonescu in the Holocaust were also made by the main opposition parties, the Christian Democratic National Peasants' Party and the National Liberal Party, with Radu Câmpeanu, the latter party's president, publicly describing the wartime leader as a "great Romanian" who tried to defend the Jews. Sections of both governing and opposition groups contemplated the idea of rehabilitating the wartime leader, and, in May 1991, Parliament observed a moment of silence in his memory. The perceived governmental tolerance of Antonescu's rehabilitation raised international concern and protests. While the FSN-supported Romanian President Ion Iliescu publicly opposed attempts to rehabilitate Antonescu and acknowledged the "crimes he committed against the Jews", it was his successor, Emil Constantinescu, a representative of the Democratic Convention, who in 1997 became the first Romanian officeholder to recognize the collective responsibility of Romanian authorities. Nevertheless, during the same period, Attorney General Sorin Moisescu followed a since-deprecated special appeal procedure to overturn sentences passed against Antonescu and other 1946 defendants, which he eventually withdrew.
To a certain degree, such pro-Antonescu sentiments were also present in post-1989 historiography. Reflecting back on this phenomenon in 2004, Maria Bucur wrote: "the perverse image of Antonescu is not the product of a propaganda campaign led by right-wing extremists, but a pervasive myth fed by historical debates and political contests, and which the public seems indifferent to or accepts unproblematically." After the Revolution, archival sources concerning Antonescu, including those in the National Archives of Romania, were made more available to researchers, but documents confiscated or compiled by Soviet officials, kept in Russia, remained largely inaccessible. Although confronted with more evidence from the newly opened archives, several historians, including some employed by official institutions, continued to deny the Holocaust in Romania, and attributed the death toll exclusively to German units. In parallel, some continued an exclusive focus on Northern Transylvanian massacres. Local authors who have actively promoted Antonescu's image as a hero and wrote apologetic accounts of his politics include historians Gheorghe Buzatu and Mihai Pelin, and researcher Alex Mihai Stoenescu. Larry L. Watts published a similarly controversial monograph in the United States. Although criticized for denying the uniqueness of the Holocaust and downplaying Antonescu's complicity, Dinu C. Giurescu was recognized as the first post-communist Romanian historian to openly acknowledge his country's participation, while his colleagues Șerban Papacostea and Andrei Pippidi were noted as early critics of attempts to exculpate Antonescu. The matter of crimes in Transnistria and elsewhere was first included within the Romanian curriculum with a 1999 state-approved alternative textbook edited by Sorin Mitu.
In 2003, after a period in which his own equivocal stance on the matter had drawn controversy, Constantinescu's successor Ion Iliescu established the Wiesel Commission, an international group of expert historians whose mission was the study of the Holocaust in Romania, later succeeded by the Elie Wiesel National Institute. The "Final Report" compiled by the Commission brought the official recognition of Ion Antonescu's participation in the Holocaust. After that moment, public displays of support for Antonescu became illegal. Antonescu's SMERSH interrogations were recovered from the Russian archives and published in 2006. Despite the renewed condemnation and exposure, Antonescu remained a popular figure: as a result of the 2006 "Mari Români" series of polls conducted by the national station TVR 1, viewers nominated Antonescu as the 6th greatest Romanian ever. The vote's knockout phase included televised profiles of the ten most popular figures, and saw historian Adrian Cioroianu using the portion dedicated to Antonescu to expose and condemn him, giving voters reasons not to see the dictator as a great Romanian. The approach resulted in notable controversy after "Ziua" newspaper criticized Cioroianu, who defended himself by stating he had an obligation to tell the truth.
The same year, on December 5, the Bucharest Court of Appeals overturned Antonescu's conviction for certain crimes against peace, on the grounds that the objective conditions of 1940 justified a preventive war against the Soviet Union, which would make Article 3 of the 1933 Convention for the Definition of Aggression inapplicable in his case (as well as in those of Alexianu, Constantin Pantazi, Constantin Vasiliu, Sima and various Iron Guard politicians). This act raised official protests in Moldova, the independent state formed in Bessarabia upon the breakup of the Soviet Union, and in Russia, the Soviet successor state, as well as criticism by historians of the Holocaust. The Court of Appeals decision was overturned by the Romanian Supreme Court in May 2008. The same year, Maria Antonescu's collateral inheritors advanced a claim on a Predeal villa belonging to the couple, but a Brașov tribunal rejected their request, citing laws which confiscated the property of war criminals.
Beyond their propaganda and censorship efforts, Antonescu and his regime had a sizable impact on Romanian culture, art and literature. Owing to austere guidelines on culture and to the circumstances of wartime, this period's direct imprint is less than that of other periods in the country's history. Few large heroes' memorials were built during the war years. Memorials produced at the time were mainly roadside triptychs ("troițe"). The Heroes' Cult organization received expropriation rights to Bucharest's Jewish cemetery in 1942, and proposed to replace it with a major monument of this category, but that plan was eventually abandoned. Antonescu and his wife preferred donating to Orthodox churches, and were "ktitors" of churches in three separate Bucharest areas: Mărgeanului Church in Rahova, one in Dămăroaia, and the Saints Constantine and Helena Church in Muncii, where both the Marshal and his wife are depicted in a mural. After floods took a toll on his native Argeș County, the Marshal himself established "Antonești", a model village in Corbeni (partly built by Ukrainian prisoners of war, and later passed into state property), while ordering hydroelectric exploitation of the Argeș River. He also had sporadic contacts with the artistic and literary environment, including an interview he awarded to his supporter, writer Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voinești. His 1946 trial was notably attended and documented by George Călinescu in a series of articles for "Națiunea" journal. Political humor of the 1940s preserved distinct images of the Romanian leader. Romanian jokes circulated under Antonescu's rule ridiculed his adoption of the title "Marshal of Romania", viewing it as a self-promotion and dubbing him the "Auto-Marshal". During the war, Soviet agitprop portrayed Antonescu and the other secondary Axis leaders as villains and servile dog-like creatures, representations notably present in musical theater and puppetry shows, as well as in press cartoons.
Marin Preda's 1975 novel "Delirul" displays the Ceaușescu regime's ambiguous relationship with Antonescu. Critics John Neubauer and Marcel Cornis-Pope remark that the novel is "admittedly not [Preda's] best work", and discuss his "complex representation" of Antonescu as "an essentially flawed but active leader who tried to negotiate some maneuvering room between the demands of Germany and the threats of the Soviet Union [and whose failure] led to the dismantling of Romania's fragile democratic system." The book sought Antonescu's rehabilitation for his attitudes on the Bessarabia-Northern Bukovina issue, but did not include any mention of his antisemitic policies, of which Preda himself may have been ignorant. An international scandal followed, once negative comments on the book were published by the Soviet magazine "Literaturnaya Gazeta". Although an outspoken nationalist, Eugen Barbu produced a satirical image of Antonescu in his own 1975 novel, "Incognito", which was described by Deletant as "character assassination".
During the 1990s, monuments to Antonescu were raised and streets were named after him in Bucharest and several other cities. Among those directly involved in this process were Iosif Constantin Drăgan, the nationalist Mayor of Cluj-Napoca, Gheorghe Funar, and General Mircea Chelaru, whose resignation from the Army was subsequently requested and obtained. Also during that interval, in 1993, filmmaker and Social Democratic politician Sergiu Nicolaescu produced "Oglinda", which depicts Antonescu (played by Ion Siminie) apologetically. The rehabilitation trend was also represented at an October 1994 commemorative exhibit at the National Military Museum. The same year, a denialist documentary film, "Destinul mareșalului" ("The Marshal's Destiny"), was distributed by state-owned companies, a matter which raised concern. After the Wiesel Commission presented its findings and such public endorsement was outlawed, statues in Antonescu's likeness were torn down or otherwise made unavailable for public viewing. An unusual case is that of his Saints Constantine and Helena Church, where, after lengthy debates, his bust was sealed inside a metal box. Outside of this context, the publicized display of Antonescu's portraits and racist slogans by football hooligans during Liga I's 2005–2006 season prompted UEFA intervention ("see Racism Breaks the Game"). As of 2019, Romania has nine streets named after Antonescu; locations include Constanța, Râmnicu Sărat and Bechet.
Antonescu received a number of awards and decorations throughout his military career, most notable being the Order of Michael the Brave, which was personally awarded to him by King Ferdinand I during the Hungarian–Romanian War of 1919. He also received several decorations from foreign countries. He was the first Romanian to receive the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, being awarded it by Hitler himself. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37261 |
Jørn Utzon
Jørn Oberg Utzon, , Hon. FAIA (; 9 April 191829 November 2008) was a Danish architect. He was most notable for designing the Sydney Opera House in Australia, completed in 1973. When it was declared a World Heritage Site on 28 June 2007, Utzon became only the second person to have received such recognition for one of his works during his lifetime, after Oscar Niemeyer. Other noteworthy works include Bagsværd Church near Copenhagen and the National Assembly Building in Kuwait. He also made important contributions to housing design, especially with his Kingo Houses near Helsingør.
Utzon attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1937–42) and was influenced early on by Gunnar Asplund and Alvar Aalto.
Utzon was born in Copenhagen, the son of a naval architect, and grew up in Aalborg, Denmark, where he became interested in ships and a possible naval career. As a result of his family's interest in art, from 1937 he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts where he studied under Kay Fisker and Steen Eiler Rasmussen. Following his graduation in 1942, he joined Gunnar Asplund in Stockholm where he worked together with Arne Jacobsen and Poul Henningsen. He took a particular interest in the works of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
After the end of World War II and the German Occupation of Denmark, he returned to Copenhagen.
In 1946 he visited Alvar Aalto in Helsinki. In 1947–48 he travelled in Europe, in 1948 he went to Morocco where he was taken by the tall clay buildings. In 1949, he travelled to the United States and Mexico, where the pyramids provided further inspiration. Fascinated by the way the Mayans built towards the sky to get closer to God, he commented that his time in Mexico was "One of the greatest architectural experiences in my life."
In America, he visited Frank Lloyd Wright's home, Taliesin West, in the Arizona desert and met Charles and Ray Eames. In 1950 he established his own studio in Copenhagen and, in 1952, built an open-plan house for himself, the first of its kind in Denmark. In 1957, he travelled first to China (where he was particularly interested in the Chinese desire for harmony), Japan (where he learnt much about the interaction between interiors and exteriors) and India, before arriving in Australia in 1957 where he stayed until 1966. All this contributed to Utzon's understanding of factors which contribute to successful architectural design.
Utzon had a Nordic sense of concern for nature which, in his design, emphasized the synthesis of form, material and function for social values. His fascination with the architectural legacies of the ancient Mayas, the Islamic world, China, and Japan also informed his practice . This developed into what Utzon later referred to as Additive Architecture, comparing his approach to the growth patterns of nature.
A design can grow like a tree, he explained: "If it grows naturally, the architecture will look after itself."
In 1957, Utzon unexpectedly won the competition to design the Sydney Opera House. His submission was one of 233 designs from 32 countries, many of them from the most famous architects of the time. Although he had won six other architectural competitions previously, the Opera House was his first non-domestic project. One of the judges, Eero Saarinen, described it as "genius" and declared he could not endorse any other choice.
The designs Utzon submitted were little more than preliminary drawings. Concerned that delays would lead to lack of public support, the Cahill government of New South Wales nonetheless gave the go-ahead for work to begin in 1958. The British engineering consultancy Ove Arup and Partners put out tenders without adequate working drawings and construction work began on 2 March 1959. As a result, the podium columns were not strong enough to support the roof and had to be rebuilt. The situation was complicated by Cahill's death in October 1959.
The extraordinary structure of the shells themselves represented a puzzle for the engineers. This was not resolved until 1961, when Utzon himself finally came up with the solution. He replaced the original elliptical shells with a design based on complex sections of a sphere. Utzon says his design was inspired by the simple act of peeling an orange: the 14 shells of the building, if combined, would form a perfect sphere.
Although Utzon had spectacular, innovative plans for the interior of these halls, he was unable to realise this part of his design. In mid-1965, the New South Wales Liberal government of Robert Askin was elected. Askin had been a 'vocal critic of the project prior to gaining office.' His new Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes, was even less sympathetic. Elizabeth Farrelly, Australian architecture critic has written that
Utzon soon found himself in conflict with the new Minister. Attempting to rein in the escalating cost of the project, Hughes began questioning Utzon's capability, his designs, schedules and cost estimates, refusing to pay running costs. In 1966, after a final request from Utzon that plywood manufacturer Ralph Symonds should be one of the suppliers for the roof structure was refused, he resigned from the job, closed his Sydney office and vowed never to return to Australia. When Utzon left, the shells were almost complete, and costs amounted to only $22.9 million. Following major changes to the original plans for the interiors, costs finally rose to $103 million.
The Opera House was finally completed, and opened in 1973 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia. The architect was not invited to the ceremony, nor was his name even mentioned during any of the speeches. He was, however, to be recognised later when he was asked to design updates to the interior of the opera house. The Utzon Room, overlooking Sydney Harbour, was officially dedicated in October 2004. In a statement at the time Utzon wrote: "The fact that I'm mentioned in such a marvellous way, it gives me the greatest pleasure and satisfaction. I don't think you can give me more joy as the architect. It supersedes any medal of any kind that I could get and have got." Furthermore, Frank Gehry, one of the Pritzker Prize judges, commented: "Utzon made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology, and he persevered through extraordinarily malicious publicity and negative criticism to build a building that changed the image of an entire country."
While some of Utzon's most notable works are spread around the globe, he was most prolific in his native Denmark, whose landscape inspired him more than any other. Bagsværd Church, just north of Copenhagen, is considered to be a masterpiece of contemporary church architecture, thanks to its bright, naturally illuminated interior and its concrete ceiling straddled with softly-rounded vaulting inspired by clouds. Designed in 1968, the church was completed in 1976. The Kingo Houses in Helsingør (1958) consist of 63 L-shaped homes based on the design of traditional Danish farmhouses with central courtyards. Built in rows following the undulations of the site, each of the houses not only has a view of its own but enjoys the best possible conditions for sunlight and shelter from the wind. Utzon described the arrangement as "flowers on the branch of a cherry tree, each turning towards the sun." In general, Utzon's houses display sophisticated and varied relationships to the path of the sun.
A few years later, he went on to design the Fredensborg Houses (1963) for Danish pensioners who had worked for long periods abroad. Utzon helped select the site, and planned a complex consists of 47 courtyard homes and 30 terraced houses as well as a central building with a restaurant, meeting rooms and nine guest rooms. His design was inspired by housing in Beijing's Forbidden City. The homes are located around a square in groups of three, designed to maximize privacy, natural lighting, and views of the surrounding countryside. When he was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2003, Utzon was specifically lauded for his working designing housing projects that, the jury said, were "designed with people in mind."
His Paustian Furniture Store (1988) on Copenhagen's waterfront stands on a multitude of columns inspired by a beech forest. A temple-like finish is achieved by 11 columns with fan-shaped capitals overlooking the harbour. Similar columns are also present inside the spacious interior, stretching up to the skylight dominating the roof.
In 2005, in close collaboration with his son Kim Utzon, he helped to plan the Utzon Center in Aalborg (completed 2008) designed to inspire young students of architecture. Located on the waterfront, its high sculptured roofs rise over an auditorium, a boathall and a library while the lower roofs of its exhibition rooms and workshops surround a central courtyard, sheltered from the wind.
Kuwait's National Assembly Building, completed in 1982, stands on the sea front with (in Utzon's words) "haze and white light and an untidy town behind." Benefiting from an understanding of Islamic architecture, Utzon designed a building consisting of a covered square, a parliamentary chamber, a conference hall, and a mosque. Its waving roof conveys the impression of moving fabric. Its columns are reminiscent of the Karnak temples.
The Melli Bank building in Tehran, slightly set back from the lines of the busy street where it stands, has a reinforced concrete frame faced with natural stone. The ground-level banking hall, naturally illuminated by skylight vaults, is connected to the upper floor by a central spiral staircase, providing maximum flexibility of space.
On his return from Australia in 1966, Utzon made a stop on Mallorca. Fascinated by the island, he decided to build a summer house there on the top of a cliff near the fishing village of Portopetro. Named Can Lis after his wife, the house was based on the home he had intended to build in Australia but was inspired by local materials and climate, setting standards for contemporary Mediterranean architecture. The house consists of five loosely linked blocks with a colonnaded outdoor area, a living room and two bedrooms, each with its own courtyard.
Although Utzon and his wife spent an increasing amount of time on Mallorca, they became disturbed by all the tourists who came to see their home. They decided to move to a more remote area in the mountains where they built a second house known as Can Feliz, consisting of three blocks for dining, living and sleeping, separated by courtyards. The upper part of the grand theatrical living space is furnished for working with heavy timber bookcases and a large table. A huge window provides magnificent views of the pine forests and the sea beyond.
The Utzon Center in Aalborg, designed together with his son Kim, was the architect's last assignment. In 2005 he commented, "From the bottom of my heart, I hope that the Utzon Center will be a place where positive thoughts converge and where students from the School of Architecture gather when they want to get together to discuss their ideas. It is intended to be a power centre for the architects and people of the future."
Utzon died in Copenhagen on 29 November 2008, aged 90, of a heart attack in his sleep after a series of operations. He had never returned to Australia to see the completed opera house. On 2 December 2008 the Parliament of New South Wales passed a special motion of condolence to honour Utzon's life and work. He was survived by his wife, Lis, his sons Jan and Kim, his daughter Lin, and several grandchildren. His sons are trained architects and his daughter is a designer, muralist and artist who was at one time married to the Australian architect Alex Popov.
On 17 May 1985, Utzon was made an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia (AC). He was given the Keys to the City of Sydney in 1998. He was involved in redesigning the Opera House, and in particular, the Reception Hall, beginning in 1999. In 2003, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Sydney; his son accepted the award on his behalf. In 2003, he received the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honor.
In March 2006, Queen Elizabeth II opened the western colonnade addition to the building designed by Utzon who had not returned to Australia since 1966. His son, Jan, took his place at the opening ceremony instead, saying his father was "too old by now to take the long flight to Australia. But he lives and breathes the Opera House, and as its creator he just has to close his eyes to see it."
On 28 June 2007, the Sydney Opera House was declared a World Heritage Site.
Following Utzon's death in 2008, on 25 March 2009, a state memorial and reconciliation concert was held in the Concert Hall at Sydney Opera House.
According to Kenneth Frampton, Utzon's architectural influence is manifest on three levels: the emphasis given to the roof element, the importance given to the grounding of the building, and the commitment to "the cultural validity of organic growth". Kim Dirkinck-Holmfeld, writing in "Dansk Arkitektur: 1960–1995", comments: Utzon did not obtain many commissions in his mother country but his importance was considerable in terms of direct imitation or inspiration. And he was the only Danish architect who made a significant contribution to the global development of Modernism. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37262 |
Ferdinand I of Romania
Ferdinand (Ferdinand Viktor Albert Meinrad; 24 August 1865 – 20 July 1927), nicknamed "Întregitorul" ("the Unifier"), was King of Romania from 1914 until 1927. Although a member of the Swabian branch of Germany's ruling House of Hohenzollern, Ferdinand sided against the Central Powers in World War I. Thus, at the war’s end, Romania emerged as a much-enlarged kingdom, including Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transylvania, and Ferdinand was crowned king of "Greater Romania" in a grand ceremony in 1922. He died from cancer in 1927, succeeded by his grandson Michael under a regency.
Prince Ferdinand Viktor Albert Meinrad of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen was born in Sigmaringen in southwestern Germany. The name was later shortened simply to Hohenzollern after the extinction of the Hohenzollern-Hechingen branch in 1869. The princes of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen had ruled the principality until 1850, when it was annexed to Prussia.
Ferdinand I was the son of Leopold, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, and Infanta Antónia of Portugal (1845–1913), daughter of Queen Maria II of Portugal and Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, heir to the Slovakian-originated Hungarian magnates of Kohary on his mother's side.
Following the renunciations, first of his father in 1880 and then of his elder brother Prince Wilhelm of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen in 1886, young Ferdinand became the heir-presumptive to the throne of his childless uncle, King Carol I of Romania, who would reign until his death in October 1914. In 1889, the Romanian parliament recognized Ferdinand as a prince of Romania. The Romanian government did not require his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy from Catholicism, as was the common practice prior to this date, thus allowing him to continue with his born creed, but it was required that his children be raised Orthodox, the state religion of Romania. For agreeing to this, Ferdinand was excommunicated from the Catholic Church, although this was later lifted.
Ferdinand's mother's first cousin Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria sat on the throne of the neighbouring Bulgaria beginning in 1887, and was to become the greatest opponent of the kingdom of his Romanian cousins. The neighboring Emperor Francis Joseph, monarch of Austria-Hungary and as such, ruler of Transylvania, was Ferdinand's grandmother's first cousin.
Ferdinand, a complete stranger in his new home, started to get close to one of Queen Elisabeth's ladies in waiting, Elena Văcărescu. Elisabeth, the Queen consort of Romania, very close to Elena herself, encouraged the romance, although she was perfectly aware of the fact that a marriage between the two was forbidden by the Romanian constitution (according to the 1866 Constitution of Romania, the heir-presumptive to the throne was not allowed to marry a Romanian).
The affair caused a sort of dynastic crisis in 1891. The result of this was the exile of both Elisabeth (in Neuwied) and Elena (in Paris), as well as a trip by Ferdinand through Europe in search of a suitable bride, whom he eventually found in Queen Victoria's granddaughter, Princess Marie of Edinburgh.
In Sigmaringen on 10 January 1893, Prince Ferdinand of Romania married his distant cousin, the Lutheran Princess Marie of Edinburgh, daughter of Anglican Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and the Orthodox Grand Duchess Marie Alexandrovna of Russia. Marie and Ferdinand were third cousins in descent from Franz Frederick Anton, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. Marie's paternal grandparents were Victoria of the United Kingdom and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Her maternal grandparents were Alexander II of Russia and Marie of Hesse and by Rhine. The reigning Emperor of the neighbouring Russia, at the time of the marriage was Marie's uncle, Tsar Alexander III, who would be succeeded by his eldest son, Marie's cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, the following year.
The marriage produced three sons: Carol, Nicholas and Mircea (the latter of whom died in infancy) and three daughters: Elisabeta, Maria (Mignon) and Ileana. The marriage was unhappy and the couple's two youngest children, Ileana and Mircea, are widely reputed to have been sired by Marie's long-time lover, Barbu Știrbey.
On 10 October 1914, Ferdinand's uncle, Carol I, died without surviving issue. Ferdinand succeeded him as King of Romania, reigning until his own death on 20 July 1927.
Ferdinand was appointed as the 1,174th Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece in Austria in 1909 and as the 868th Knight of the Order of the Garter in 1924.
Though a member of a cadet branch of Germany's ruling Hohenzollern imperial family, Ferdinand presided over his country's entry into World War I on the side of the Triple Entente powers against the Central Powers on 27 August 1916. Thus he gained the nickname "the Loyal", respecting his oath when sworn in before the Romanian Parliament in 1914: "I will reign as a good Romanian."
As a consequence of this "betrayal" toward his German roots, Kaiser Wilhelm II had Ferdinand's name erased from the Hohenzollern House register.
Despite the setbacks after the entry into war, when Dobruja and Wallachia were occupied by the Central Powers, Romania fought in 1917 and stopped the German advance into Moldavia. When the Bolsheviks sued for peace in 1918, Romania was surrounded by the Central Powers and forced to conclude the Treaty of Bucharest, 1918. However, Ferdinand refused to sign the treaty. When the Allied forces advanced on the Thessaloniki front, they knocked Bulgaria out of the war, and Ferdinand ordered the re-mobilization of the Romanian Army. Romania re-entered the war on the side of the Triple Entente.
The outcome of Romania's war effort was the union of Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania in 1918. Ferdinand became the ruler of a greatly enlarged Romanian state in 1918–1920 following the Entente's victory over the Central Powers, a war between the Kingdom of Romania and the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and the civil war in Russia. He was crowned as king of "Greater Romania" in a spectacular ceremony on 15 October 1922 at the courtyard of the newly opened "Coronation Cathedral" in the historic princely seat of Alba Iulia in Transylvania.
A new period of Romanian history began on the day of the Union of Transylvania with Romania (Great Union Day, "Marea Unire"). This period would eventually come to an end with the international treaties that led up to World War II. These ceded parts of Romania to its neighbors. As such, they are widely seen as an attempt to provoke the country into taking sides and joining the war.
Domestic political life during his reign was dominated by the conservative National Liberal Party, which was led by the brothers Ion and Vintilă Brătianu. The acquisition of Transylvania had the unintended effect of enlarging the electoral base of the opposition, whose principal parties united in January 1925 – October 1926 to form the National Peasant Party.
Ferdinand died from cancer in Sinaia in 1927, and was succeeded by his grandson Crown Prince Michael under a regency (Michael's father having renounced his rights to the throne in December 1925). The regency had three members, one of whom was Ferdinand's second son, Prince Nicholas.
He received the following honours: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37266 |
Cephalic index
The cephalic index or cranial index is the ratio of the maximum width (biparietal diameter or BPD, side to side) of the head of an organism (human or animal) multiplied by 100 divided by its maximum length (occipitofrontal diameter or OFD, front to back). The index is also used to categorize animals, especially dogs and cats.
The cephalic index was widely used by anthropologists in the early 20th century to categorize human populations. It is now mainly used to describe individuals' appearances and for estimating the age of fetuses for legal and obstetrical reasons.
The cephalic index was defined by Swedish professor of anatomy Anders Retzius (1796–1860) and first used in physical anthropology to classify ancient human remains found in Europe. The theory became closely associated with the development of racial anthropology in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when prehistorians attempted to use ancient remains to model population movements in terms of racial categories. Carleton S. Coon also used the index in the 1960s.
Humans are characterized by having either a dolichocephalic (long headed), mesaticephalic (moderate headed), or brachycephalic (short headed) cephalic index or cranial index.
Cephalic indices are grouped as in the following table:
Technically, the measured factors are defined as the maximum width of the bones that surround the head above the supramastoid crest (behind the cheekbones), and the maximum length from the most easily noticed part of the glabella (between the eyebrows) to the most easily noticed point on the back part of the head.
The usefulness of the cephalic index was questioned by Giuseppe Sergi, who argued that cranial morphology provided a better means to model racial ancestry. Also, Franz Boas studied the children of immigrants to the United States in 1910 to 1912, noting that the children's cephalic index differed significantly from their parents', implying that local environmental conditions had a significant impact on the development of head shape.
Boas argued that if craniofacial features were so malleable in a single generation, then the cephalic index was of little use for defining race and mapping ancestral populations. Scholars such as Earnest A. Hooton continued to argue that both environment and heredity were involved. Boas did not himself claim it was totally plastic.
In 2002, a paper by Sparks and Jantz re-evaluated some of Boas' original data using new statistical techniques and concluded that there was a "relatively high genetic component" of head shape. Ralph Holloway of Columbia University argues that the new research raises questions about whether the variations in skull shape have "adaptive meaning and whether, in fact, normalizing selection might be at work on the trait, where both extremes, hyperdolichocephaly and hyperbrachycephaly, are at a slight selective disadvantage."
In 2003, anthropologists Clarence C. Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William R. Leonard reanalyzed Boas' data and concluded that most of Boas' original findings were correct. Moreover, they applied new statistical, computer-assisted methods to Boas' data and discovered more evidence for cranial plasticity. In a later publication, Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard reviewed Sparks' and Jantz' analysis. They argue that Sparks and Jantz misrepresented Boas' claims, and that Sparks' and Jantz' data actually support Boas. For example, they point out that Sparks and Jantz look at changes in cranial size in relation to how long an individual has been in the United States in order to test the influence of the environment. Boas, however, looked at changes in cranial size in relation to how long the mother had been in the United States. They argue that Boas' method is more useful, because the prenatal environment is a crucial developmental factor.
Jantz and Sparks responded to Gravlee et al., reiterating that Boas' findings lacked biological meaning, and that the interpretation of Boas' results common in the literature was biologically inaccurate. In a later study, the same authors concluded that the effects Boas observed were likely the result of population-specific environmental effects such as changes in cultural practices for cradling infants, rather than the effects of a general "American environment" which caused populations in America to converge to a common cranial type, as Boas had suggested.
The cephalic index is used in the categorisation of animals, especially breeds of dogs and cats.
A brachycephalic skull is relatively broad and short (typically with the breadth at least 80% of the length). Dog breeds such as the pug are sometimes classified as "Extreme Brachycephalic".
A mesaticephalic skull is of intermediate length and width. Mesaticephalic skulls are not markedly brachycephalic or dolichocephalic.
When dealing with animals, especially dogs, the more appropriate and commonly used term is not "mesocephalic", but rather "mesaticephalic", which is a ratio of head to nasal cavity. The breeds below exemplify this category.
Note: Almost all Felines are mesaticephalic
Note: Most cat landraces and species are mesaticephalic.
A dolichocephalic skull is relatively long skull (typically with the breadth less than 80% or 75% of the length). | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37268 |
Wall Street
Wall Street is an eight-block-long street in the Financial District of New York City. It runs crosstown between Broadway on the west to South Street, at the East River, on the east. The term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry, or New York–based financial interests.
New York City has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world. It is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange, located on Wall Street, and NASDAQ. Several other major exchanges have or had headquarters in the Wall Street area, including the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Board of Trade, and the former American Stock Exchange.
There are varying accounts about how the Dutch-named "de Waalstraat"(literally: Walloon Street) got its name. Two conflicting explanations can be considered.
The first being that Wall Street was named after "Walloons"—the Dutch name for a "Walloon" is "Waal". Among the first settlers that embarked on the ship "Nieu Nederlandt" in 1624 were 30 Walloon families. Peter Minuit, the person who bought Manhattan for the Dutch, was a Walloon.
The other is that the name of the street was derived from a wall (actually a wooden palisade) on the northern boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement, built to protect against Native Americans, pirates, and the British.
While the Dutch word "wal" can be translated as "rampart", it only appeared as "De Wal Straat" on some English maps of New Amsterdam, whereas other English maps show the name as "De Waal Straat".
According to one version of the story:
In the 1640s, basic picket and plank fences denoted plots and residences in the colony. Later, on behalf of the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant, using both enslaved Africans and white colonists, collaborated with the city government in the construction of a more substantial fortification, a strengthened wall. In 1685, surveyors laid out Wall Street along the lines of the original stockade. The wall started at Pearl Street, which was the shoreline at that time, crossing the Indian path Broadway and ending at the other shoreline (today's Trinity Place), where it took a turn south and ran along the shore until it ended at the old fort. In these early days, local merchants and traders would gather at disparate spots to buy and sell shares and bonds, and over time divided themselves into two classes—auctioneers and dealers. Wall Street was also the marketplace where owners could hire out their slaves by the day or week. The rampart was removed in 1699 and a new City Hall built at Wall and Nassau in 1700.
Slavery was introduced to Manhattan in 1626, but it was not until December 13, 1711, that the New York City Common Council made Wall Street the city's first official slave market for the sale and rental of enslaved Africans and Indians. The slave market operated from 1711 to 1762 at the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets. It was a wooden structure with a roof and open sides, although walls may have been added over the years and could hold approximately 50 men. The city directly benefited from the sale of slaves by implementing taxes on every person who was bought and sold there.
In the late 18th century, there was a buttonwood tree at the foot of Wall Street under which traders and speculators would gather to trade securities. The benefit was being in proximity to each other.
In 1792, traders formalized their association with the Buttonwood Agreement which was the origin of the New York Stock Exchange. The idea of the agreement was to make the market more "structured" and "without the manipulative auctions", with a commission structure. Persons signing the agreement agreed to charge each other a standard commission rate; persons not signing could still participate but would be charged a higher commission for dealing.
In 1789, Wall Street was the scene of the United States' first presidential inauguration when George Washington took the oath of office on the balcony of Federal Hall on April 30, 1789. This was also the location of the passing of the Bill Of Rights. Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Treasury secretary and "architect of the early United States financial system", is buried in the cemetery of Trinity Church, as is Robert Fulton famed for his steamboats.
In the first few decades, both residences and businesses occupied the area, but increasingly business predominated. "There are old stories of people's houses being surrounded by the clamor of business and trade and the owners complaining that they can't get anything done," according to a historian named Burrows. The opening of the Erie Canal in the early 19th century meant a huge boom in business for New York City, since it was the only major eastern seaport which had direct access by inland waterways to ports on the Great Lakes. Wall Street became the "money capital of America".
Historian Charles R. Geisst suggested that there has constantly been a "tug-of-war" between business interests on Wall Street and authorities in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States by then. Generally during the 19th century Wall Street developed its own "unique personality and institutions" with little outside interference.
In the 1840s and 1850s, most residents moved further uptown to Midtown Manhattan because of the increased business use at the lower tip of the island. The Civil War had the effect of causing the northern economy to boom, bringing greater prosperity to cities like New York which "came into its own as the nation's banking center" connecting "Old World capital and New World ambition", according to one account. J. P. Morgan created giant trusts; John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil moved to New York. Between 1860 and 1920, the economy changed from "agricultural to industrial to financial" and New York maintained its leadership position despite these changes, according to historian Thomas Kessner. New York was second only to London as the world's financial capital.
In 1884, Charles Dow began tracking stocks, initially beginning with 11 stocks, mostly railroads, and looked at average prices for these eleven. When the average "peaks and troughs" went up consistently, he deemed it a bull market condition; if averages dropped, it was a bear market. He added up prices, and divided by the number of stocks to get his Dow Jones average. Dow's numbers were a "convenient benchmark" for analyzing the market and became an accepted way to look at the entire stock market. In 1889 the original stock report, "Customers' Afternoon Letter", became "The Wall Street Journal". Named in reference to the actual street, it became an influential international daily business newspaper published in New York City. After October 7, 1896, it began publishing Dow's expanded list of stocks. A century later, there were 30 stocks in the average.
Business writer John Brooks in his book "Once in Golconda" considered the start of the 20th century period to have been Wall Street's heyday. The address of 23 Wall Street, the headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company, known as "The Corner", was "the precise center, geographical as well as metaphorical, of financial America and even of the financial world".
Wall Street has had changing relationships with government authorities. In 1913, for example, when authorities proposed a $4 stock transfer tax, stock clerks protested. At other times, city and state officials have taken steps through tax incentives to encourage financial firms to continue to do business in the city.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the corporate culture of New York was a primary center for the construction of skyscrapers, and was rivaled only by Chicago on the American continent. There were also residential sections, such as the Bowling Green section between Broadway and the Hudson River, and between Vesey Street and the Battery. The Bowling Green area was described as "Wall Street's back yard" with poor people, high infant mortality rates, and the "worst housing conditions in the city". As a result of the construction, looking at New York City from the east, one can see two distinct clumps of tall buildings—the financial district on the left, and the taller midtown district on the right. The geology of Manhattan is well-suited for tall buildings, with a solid mass of bedrock underneath Manhattan providing a firm foundation for tall buildings. Skyscrapers are expensive to build, but when there is a "short supply of land" in a "desirable location", then building upwards makes sound financial sense. A post office was built at 60 Wall Street in 1905. During the World War I years, occasionally there were fund-raising efforts for projects such as the National Guard.
On September 16, 1920, close to the corner of Wall and Broad Street, the busiest corner of the financial district and across the offices of the Morgan Bank, a powerful bomb exploded. It killed 38 and seriously injured 143 people. The perpetrators were never identified or apprehended. The explosion did, however, help fuel the Red Scare that was underway at the time. A report from "The New York Times":
The area was subjected to numerous threats; one bomb threat in 1921 led to detectives sealing off the area to "prevent a repetition of the Wall Street bomb explosion".
September 1929 was the peak of the stock market. October 3, 1929 was when the market started to slip, and it continued throughout the week of October 14.
In October 1929, renowned Yale economist Irving Fisher reassured worried investors that their "money was safe" on Wall Street. A few days later, on October 24, stock values plummeted. The stock market crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression, in which a quarter of working people were unemployed, with soup kitchens, mass foreclosures of farms, and falling prices. During this era, development of the financial district stagnated, and Wall Street "paid a heavy price" and "became something of a backwater in American life".
During the New Deal years, as well as the 1940s, there was much less focus on Wall Street and finance. The government clamped down on the practice of buying equities based only on credit, but these policies began to ease. From 1946 to 1947, stocks could not be purchased "on margin", meaning that an investor had to pay 100% of a stock's cost without taking on any loans. However, this margin requirement was reduced four times before 1960, each time stimulating a mini-rally and boosting volume, and when the Federal Reserve reduced the margin requirements from 90% to 70%. These changes made it somewhat easier for investors to buy stocks on credit. The growing national economy and prosperity led to a recovery during the 1960s, with some down years during the early 1970s in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Trading volumes climbed; in 1967, according to "Time Magazine", volume hit 7.5 million shares a day which caused a "traffic jam" of paper with "batteries of clerks" working overtime to "clear transactions and update customer accounts".
In 1973, the financial community posted a collective loss of $245 million, which spurred temporary help from the government. Reforms were instituted; the SEC eliminated fixed commissions, which forced "brokers to compete freely with one another for investors' business". In 1975, the Securities & Exchange Commission threw out the NYSE's "Rule 394" which had required that "most stock transactions take place on the Big Board's floor", in effect freeing up trading for electronic methods. In 1976, banks were allowed to buy and sell stocks, which provided more competition for stockbrokers. Reforms had the effect of lowering prices overall, making it easier for more people to participate in the stock market. Broker commissions for each stock sale lessened, but volume increased.
The Reagan years were marked by a renewed push for capitalism and business, with national efforts to de-regulate industries such as telecommunications and aviation. The economy resumed upward growth after a period in the early 1980s of languishing. A report in "The New York Times" described that the flushness of money and growth during these years had spawned a drug culture of sorts, with a rampant acceptance of cocaine use although the overall percent of actual users was most likely small. A reporter wrote:
In 1987, the stock market plunged and, in the relatively brief recession following, lower Manhattan lost 100,000 jobs according to one estimate. Since telecommunications costs were coming down, banks and brokerage firms could move away from Wall Street to more affordable locations. The recession of 1990–91 was marked by office vacancy rates downtown which were "persistently high" and with some buildings "standing empty". The day of the stock market drop, October 20, was marked by "stony-faced traders whose sense of humor had abandoned them and in the exhaustion of stock exchange employees struggling to maintain orderly trading". Coincidentally, it was the same year that Oliver Stone's movie "Wall Street" appeared. In 1995, city authorities offered the "Lower Manhattan Revitalization Plan" which offered incentives to convert commercial properties to residential use.
Construction of the World Trade Center began in 1966, but had trouble attracting tenants when completed. Nonetheless, some substantial firms purchased space there. Its impressive height helped make it a visual landmark for drivers and pedestrians. In some respects, the nexus of the financial district moved from the "street" of Wall Street to the Trade Center complex. Real estate growth during the latter part of the 1990s was significant, with deals and new projects happening in the financial district and elsewhere in Manhattan; one firm invested more than $24 billion in various projects, many in the Wall Street area. In 1998, the NYSE and the city struck a $900 million deal which kept the NYSE from moving across the river to Jersey City; the deal was described as the "largest in city history to prevent a corporation from leaving town". A competitor to the NYSE, NASDAQ, moved its headquarters from Washington to New York.
In 2001, the "Big Board", as some termed the NYSE, was described as the world's "largest and most prestigious stock market". But when the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001, it left an architectural void as new developments since the 1970s had played off the complex aesthetically. The attacks "crippled" the communications network. One estimate was that 45% of Wall Street's "best office space" had been lost. The physical destruction was immense:
Still, the NYSE was determined to re-open on September 17, almost a week after the attack. During this time Rockefeller Group Business Center opened additional offices at 48 Wall Street. The attack hastened a trend towards financial firms moving to midtown and contributed to the loss of business on Wall Street, due to temporary-to-permanent relocation to New Jersey and further decentralization with establishments transferred to cities like Chicago, Denver, and Boston.
After September 11, the financial services industry went through a downturn with a sizable drop in year-end bonuses of $6.5 billion, according to one estimate from a state comptroller's office. Many brokers are paid mostly through commission, and get a token annual salary which is dwarfed by the year-end bonus.
To guard against a vehicular bombing in the area, authorities built concrete barriers, and found ways over time to make them more aesthetically appealing by spending $5000 to $8000 apiece on bollards:
Wall Street itself and the Financial District as a whole are crowded with highrises. Further, the loss of the World Trade Center has spurred development on a scale that had not been seen in decades. In 2006, Goldman Sachs began building a tower near the former Trade Center site. Tax incentives provided by federal, state and local governments encouraged development. A new World Trade Center complex centered on Daniel Libeskind's Memory Foundations and was under development after the 9/11 attacks. The centerpiece, which is now a tall structure, opened in 2014 as the One World Trade Center. New residential buildings are sprouting up, and buildings that were previously office space are being converted to residential units, also benefiting from tax incentives. A new Fulton Center, which was planned to improve access to the area, opened in 2014. In 2007, the Maharishi Global Financial Capital of New York opened headquarters at 70 Broad Street near the NYSE, in an effort to seek investors.
"The Guardian" reporter Andrew Clark described the years of 2006 to 2010 as "tumultuous", in which the heartland of America was "mired in gloom" with high unemployment around 9.6%, with average house prices falling from $230,000 in 2006 to $183,000, and foreboding increases in the national debt to $13.4 trillion, but that despite the setbacks, the American economy was once more "bouncing back". What had happened during these heady years? Clark wrote:
The first months of 2008 was a particularly troublesome period which caused Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to "work holidays and weekends" and which did an "extraordinary series of moves". It bolstered U.S. banks and allowed Wall Street firms to borrow "directly from the Fed". These efforts were highly controversial at the time, but from the perspective of 2010, it appeared the Federal exertions had been the right decisions. By 2010, Wall Street firms, in Clark's view, were "getting back to their old selves as engine rooms of wealth, prosperity and excess". A report by Michael Stoler in "The New York Sun" described a "phoenix-like resurrection" of the area, with residential, commercial, retail and hotels booming in the "third largest business district in the country". At the same time, the investment community was worried about proposed legal reforms, including the "Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act" which dealt with matters such as credit card rates and lending requirements. The NYSE closed two of its trading floors in a move towards transforming itself into an electronic exchange. Beginning in September 2011, demonstrators disenchanted with the financial system protested in parks and plazas around Wall Street.
In 2012, Wall Street investment banking fees totaled approximately $40 billion, while senior bank officers managing risk and compliance functions earned as much as $324,000 annually in New York City in 2013.
On October 29, 2012, Wall Street was disrupted when New York and New Jersey were inundated by Hurricane Sandy. Its 14-foot-high storm surge, a local record, caused massive street flooding in many parts of Lower Manhattan. Power to the area was knocked out by a transformer explosion at a Con Edison plant. With mass transit in New York City already suspended as a precaution even before the storm hit, the New York Stock Exchange and other financial exchanges were closed for two days, re-opening on October 31. It was the first weather-related closing for the NYSE since Hurricane Gloria in September 1985 and the first two-day weather-related shutdown since the Blizzard of 1888.
Wall Street's architecture is generally rooted in the Gilded Age. The older skyscrapers often were built with elaborate facades, which have not been common in corporate architecture for decades. There are numerous landmarks on Wall Street, some of which were erected as the headquarters of banks. These include:
Another key anchor for the area is the New York Stock Exchange Building at the corner of Broad Street. It houses the New York Stock Exchange, which is by far the world's largest stock exchange per market capitalization of its listed companies, at US$23.1 trillion as of April 2018. City authorities realize its importance, and believed that it has "outgrown its neoclassical temple at the corner of Wall and Broad streets", and in 1998, offered substantial tax incentives to try to keep it in the Financial District. Plans to rebuild it were delayed by the September 11 attacks. The exchange still occupies the same site. The exchange is the locus for a large amount of technology and data. For example, to accommodate the three thousand people who work directly on the exchange floor requires 3,500 kilowatts of electricity, along with 8,000 phone circuits on the trading floor alone, and 200 miles of fiber-optic cable below ground.
Finance professor Charles R. Geisst wrote that the exchange has become "inextricably intertwined into New York's economy". Wall Street pay, in terms of salaries and bonuses and taxes, is an important part of the economy of New York City, the tri-state metropolitan area, and the United States. In 2008, after a downturn in the stock market, the decline meant $18 billion less in taxable income, with less money available for "apartments, furniture, cars, clothing and services". A falloff in Wall Street's economy could have "wrenching effects on the local and regional economies".
Estimates vary about the number and quality of financial jobs in the city. One estimate was that Wall Street firms employed close to 200,000 persons in 2008. Another estimate was that in 2007, the financial services industry which had a $70 billion profit became 22 percent of the city's revenue. Another estimate (in 2006) was that the financial services industry makes up 9% of the city's work force and 31% of the tax base. An additional estimate from 2007 by Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute was that the securities industry accounts for 4.7 percent of the jobs in New York City but 20.7 percent of its wages, and he estimated there were 175,000 securities-industries jobs in New York (both Wall Street area and midtown) paying an average of $350,000 annually. Between 1995 and 2005, the sector grew at an annual rate of about 6.6% annually, a respectable rate, but that other financial centers were growing faster. Another estimate, made in 2008, was that Wall Street provided a fourth of all personal income earned in the city, and 10% of New York City's tax revenue. The city's securities industry, enumerating 163,400 jobs in August 2013, continues to form the largest segment of the city's financial sector and an important economic engine, accounting in 2012 for 5 percent of private sector jobs in New York City, 8.5 percent (US$3.8 billion) of the city's tax revenue, and 22 percent of the city's total wages, including an average salary of US$360,700.
The seven largest Wall Street firms in the 2000s were Bear Stearns, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. During the recession of 2008–10, many of these firms, including Lehman, went out of business or were bought up at firesale prices by other financial firms. In 2008, Lehman filed for bankruptcy, Bear Stearns was bought by JPMorgan Chase forced by the U.S. government, and Merrill Lynch was bought by Bank of America in a similar shot-gun wedding. These failures marked a catastrophic downsizing of Wall Street as the financial industry goes through restructuring and change. Since New York's financial industry provides almost one-fourth of all income produced in the city, and accounts for 10% of the city's tax revenues and 20% of the state's, the downturn has had huge repercussions for government treasuries. New York's mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly over a four-year period dangled over $100 million in tax incentives to persuade Goldman Sachs to build a 43-story headquarters in the financial district near the destroyed World Trade Center site. In 2009, things looked somewhat gloomy, with one analysis by the Boston Consulting Group suggesting that 65,000 jobs had been permanently lost because of the downturn. But there were signs that Manhattan property prices were rebounding with price rises of 9% annually in 2010, and bonuses were being paid once more, with average bonuses over $124,000 in 2010.
A requirement of the New York Stock Exchange was that brokerage firms had to have offices "clustered around Wall Street" so clerks could deliver physical paper copies of stock certificates each week. There were some indications that midtown had been becoming the locus of financial services dealings even by 1911. But as technology progressed, in the middle and later decades of the 20th century, computers and telecommunications replaced paper notifications, meaning that the close proximity requirement could be bypassed in more situations. Many financial firms found that they could move to midtown Manhattan four miles away or elsewhere and still operate effectively. For example, the former investment firm of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette was described as a "Wall Street firm" but had its headquarters on Park Avenue in midtown. A report described the migration from Wall Street:
Nevertheless, a key magnet for the Wall Street remains the New York Stock Exchange. Some "old guard" firms such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch (bought by Bank of America in 2009), have remained "fiercely loyal to the financial district" location, and new ones such as Deutsche Bank have chosen office space in the district. So-called "face-to-face" trading between buyers and sellers remains a "cornerstone" of the NYSE, with a benefit of having all of a deal's players close at hand, including investment bankers, lawyers, and accountants.
In 2011, the Manhattan Financial District is one of the largest business districts in the United States, and second in New York City only to Midtown in terms of dollar volume of business transacted.
After Wall Street firms started to expand westward in the 1980s to New Jersey, the direct economic impacts of Wall Street activities have gone beyond New York City. The employment in the financial services industry mostly in the "back office" roles has become an important part of New Jersey economy. In 2009, the Wall Street employment wages were paid in the amount of almost $18.5 billion in the state. The industry contributed $39.4 billion or 8.4 percent to the New Jersey's gross domestic product in the same year.
The most significant area with Wall Street employment is in Jersey City. In 2008, the "Wall Street West" employment contributed to one third of the private sector jobs in Jersey City. Within the Financial Service cluster, there were three major sectors: more than 60 percent were in the securities industry; 20 percent were in banking; and 8 percent in insurance.
Additionally, New Jersey has become the main technology infrastructure to support the Wall Street operations. A substantial amount of securities traded in the United States are executed in New Jersey as the data centers of electronic trading in the U.S. equity market for all major stock exchanges are located in North and Central Jersey. A significant amount of securities clearing and settlement workforce is also in the state. This includes the majority of the workforce of Depository Trust Company, the primary U.S. securities depository; and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the parent company of National Securities Clearing Corporation, the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation and Emerging Markets Clearing Corporation.
Having a direct tie to Wall Street employment is problematic for New Jersey, however. The state lost 7.9 percent of its employment base from 2007 to 2010 in the financial services sector in the fallout of the subprime mortgage crisis.
Of the street's importance as a financial center, "New York Times" analyst Daniel Gross wrote:
An example is the alternative trading platform known as BATS, based in Kansas City, which came "out of nowhere to gain a 9 percent share in the market for trading United States stocks". The firm has computers in the U.S. state of New Jersey, two salespersons in New York City, but the remaining 33 employees work in a center in Kansas.
Wall Street in a conceptual sense represents financial and economic power. To Americans, it can sometimes represent elitism and power politics, and its role has been a source of controversy throughout the nation's history, particularly beginning around the Gilded Age period in the late 19th century. Wall Street became the symbol of a country and economic system that many Americans see as having developed through trade, capitalism, and innovation.
Wall Street has become synonymous with financial interests, often used negatively. During the subprime mortgage crisis from 2007–10, Wall Street financing was blamed as one of the causes, although most commentators blame an interplay of factors. The U.S. government with the Troubled Asset Relief Program bailed out the banks and financial backers with billions of taxpayer dollars, but the bailout was often criticized as politically motivated, and was criticized by journalists as well as the public. Analyst Robert Kuttner in the "Huffington Post" criticized the bailout as helping large Wall Street firms such as Citigroup while neglecting to help smaller community development banks such as Chicago's ShoreBank. One writer in the "Huffington Post" looked at FBI statistics on robbery, fraud, and crime and concluded that Wall Street was the "most dangerous neighborhood in the United States" if one factored in the $50 billion fraud perpetrated by Bernie Madoff.
When large firms such as Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing were found guilty of fraud, Wall Street was often blamed, even though these firms had headquarters around the nation and not in Wall Street. Many complained that the resulting Sarbanes-Oxley legislation dampened the business climate with regulations that were "overly burdensome". Interest groups seeking favor with Washington lawmakers, such as car dealers, have often sought to portray their interests as allied with "Main Street" rather than "Wall Street", although analyst Peter Overby on "National Public Radio" suggested that car dealers have written over $250 billion in consumer loans and have real ties with "Wall Street".
When the United States Treasury bailed out large financial firms, to ostensibly halt a downward spiral in the nation's economy, there was tremendous negative political fallout, particularly when reports came out that monies supposed to be used to ease credit restrictions were being used to pay bonuses to highly paid employees. Analyst William D. Cohan argued that it was "obscene" how Wall Street reaped "massive profits and bonuses in 2009" after being saved by "trillions of dollars of American taxpayers' treasure" despite Wall Street's "greed and irresponsible risk-taking". "Washington Post" reporter Suzanne McGee called for Wall Street to make a sort of public apology to the nation, and expressed dismay that people such as Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein hadn't expressed contrition despite being sued by the SEC in 2009. McGee wrote that "Bankers aren't the sole culprits, but their too-glib denials of responsibility and the occasional vague and waffling expression of regret don't go far enough to deflect anger."
But chief banking analyst at Goldman Sachs, Richard Ramsden, is "unapologetic" and sees "banks as the dynamos that power the rest of the economy". Ramsden believes "risk-taking is vital" and said in 2010:
Others in the financial industry believe they've been unfairly castigated by the public and by politicians. For example, Anthony Scaramucci reportedly told President Barack Obama in 2010 that he felt like a piñata, "whacked with a stick" by "hostile politicians".
The financial misdeeds of various figures throughout American history sometimes casts a dark shadow on financial investing as a whole, and include names such as William Duer, Jim Fisk and Jay Gould (the latter two believed to have been involved with an effort to collapse the U.S. gold market in 1869) as well as modern figures such as Bernard Madoff who "bilked billions from investors".
In addition, images of Wall Street and its figures have loomed large. The 1987 Oliver Stone film "Wall Street" created the iconic figure of Gordon Gekko who used the phrase "greed is good", which caught on in the cultural parlance. In 2009, Stone commented how the film had had an unexpected cultural influence, not causing them to turn away from corporate greed, but causing many young people to choose Wall Street careers because of the film. A reporter repeated other lines from the film: "I'm talking about liquid. Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars, Buddy. A player."
Wall Street firms have, however, also contributed to projects such as Habitat for Humanity, as well as done food programs in Haiti, trauma centers in Sudan, and rescue boats during floods in Bangladesh.
Many people associated with Wall Street have become famous; although in most cases their reputations are limited to members of the stock brokerage and banking communities, others have gained national and international fame. For some, their fame is due to skillful investment strategies, financing, reporting, legal or regulatory activities, while others are remembered for their notable failures or scandal.
The following buildings on Wall Street have one or more official landmark designations:
With Wall Street being historically a commuter destination, a plethora of transportation infrastructure has been developed to serve it. Pier 11 near Wall Street's eastern end is a busy terminal for New York Waterway, NYC Ferry, New York Water Taxi, and SeaStreak. The Downtown Manhattan Heliport also serves Wall Street.
There are three New York City Subway stations under Wall Street: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37274 |
Denise Richards
Denise Lee Richards (born February 17, 1971) is an American actress, former fashion model, and television personality. Her most recognized roles are Carmen Ibanez in "Starship Troopers" (1997), Kelly Van Ryan in "Wild Things" (1998) and Bond girl Christmas Jones in "The World Is Not Enough" (1999). She has also appeared in films "Drop Dead Gorgeous" (1999), "Valentine" (2001), "Undercover Brother" (2002), "Scary Movie 3" (2003) and "Madea's Witness Protection" (2012). Her television roles include Paramount Network's sitcom "Blue Mountain State" (2010–11), ABC Family's mystery-thriller series "Twisted" (2013–14) and CBS' soap opera "The Bold and the Beautiful" (2019–present).
Richards starred on the E! reality show "" (2008–09). She currently stars on the Bravo reality television series "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills" (2019–present). In 2011, Richards published a memoir "The Real Girl Next Door", which became a New York Times Best Seller.
Denise Lee Richards was born in Downers Grove, Illinois, to Joni, a coffee shop owner, and Irv Richards, a telephone engineer, whose father's surname was Reichert. Her Croatian mother died of cancer in November 2007. Her ancestry is German, French-Canadian, Croatian, Irish, English, Welsh, and distant Dutch. She has a younger sister, Michelle. Richards grew up in both Downers Grove and Mokena, Illinois. As a child, she was the "only girl on the baseball team".
When Richards was 15 years old, her family moved to Oceanside, California. In 1989, she graduated from El Camino High School. She was voted best looking in her high school yearbook. Richards was raised Roman Catholic. After her high school graduation, she began working as a model and traveled to cities such as Paris, New York, and Tokyo to do photo shoots and commercials.
In the 1990s, Richards appeared in several films and television shows such as "Loaded Weapon 1" (1993), "Tammy and the T-Rex" (1994), "Lookin' Italian" (1994), and guest starring in episodes of "Saved by the Bell", "Married... with Children" and "Doogie Howser, M.D." In 1993, she portrayed Ben Affleck's character's girlfriend named Jodi Collins, in the short-lived drama series "Against the Grain." Richards made guest appearances in several television shows, including "Beverly Hills, 90210" (1992), "Seinfeld" (1993), "Lois and Clark" (1994) and a guest-arc in "Melrose Place" (1996).
Her first starring role in a wide theatrical release was "Starship Troopers" in 1997 for which Richards was nominated for the Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favorite Female Newcomer. The film grossed a total of $121.2 million worldwide. In 2012, "Slant Magazine" ranked the film at number 20 on its list of the 100 Best Films of the 1990s. She followed this with a role in the erotic thriller film "Wild Things" (1998) alongside Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon and Neve Campbell. "Variety" praised Richards' transition from good-girl-type roles to manipulative villainess and the review continued to include her as part of "an ensemble that appears to be enjoying the challenge of offbeat roles and unusual material. There's not a wrong note struck by the game group of players." In 2016, "Glamour" praised the film's female characters by describing Richards and Neve Campbell as "two of the most well-rounded, fascinating, and exciting characters to ever grace the screen."
Richards was cast as the nuclear physicist Christmas Jones in the James Bond film "The World Is Not Enough" (1999). Though she considered her role "brainy", "athletic", and having depth of character, she was criticized as not credible in the role. Her outfit, which often comprised a low-cut tank top and tight shorts, elicited unfavorable comments. Richards stated that a lot of viewers "made fun of" the character's attire but that "These Bond girls are so outrageous and if I did really look like a scientist, the Bond fans would have been disappointed." Richards was nominated for the Blockbuster Entertainment Award for Favourite Actress – Action, for the film. Later that year, Richards starred alongside Kirsten Dunst in the beauty pageant satire, "Drop Dead Gorgeous". The film has gained new fans with time and is regarded as a cult film. Richards, playing a spoiled princess, was praised for her performance by "Los Angeles Times" for being "as rightly nasty as she is pretty".
In 2001, she guest-starred in "Friends" as Ross and Monica Geller's cousin, Cassie Geller in the episode "The One with Ross and Monica's Cousin". Later that year she appeared in four episodes of "Spin City" as Jennifer Duncan, a love interest of Charlie Sheen's character. She starred as Sheen's character's ex-girlfriend two years later in two episodes of "Two and a Half Men". Richards appeared in numerous films such as "Valentine" (2001), "Good Advice" (2001), "Undercover Brother" (2002), "The Third Wheel" (2002) and "You Stupid Man" (2002). She played Annie Logan in the horror comedy film "Scary Movie 3" (2003), which was a commercial success and grossed $220 million worldwide. The film's plot significantly parodies the films "The Ring", "Signs", "The Matrix Reloaded" and "8 Mile." Richards made a brief appearance in the British romantic comedy "Love Actually" (2003)"." In 2004, she appeared in two films, "Whore" and "Elvis Has Left the Building".
In 2005, Richards had a lead role as publicist Jolene in the short-lived UPN soap opera "Sex, Love & Secrets". The series focused on rich young adults living in Silver Lake, Los Angeles and their secrets involving sex and love. The series was developed as a vehicle and television debut for Richards. She starred in the ensemble drama film "Edmond" (2005) alongside William H. Macy and Mena Suvari. In 2008, she reunited with her "Wild Things" on-screen mother Theresa Russell in the drama film "Jolene" (2008)"." Her reality show "" debuted on E! on May 26, 2008. The series followed the daily lives of Richards, her daughters Sam and Lola, and her married younger sister Michelle and father Irv. "Entertainment Weekly" published a review and wrote that ""It’s Complicated" is one of those ”celebs, they’re just like us!” shows in which we’re expected to enjoy watching a famous pampered person doing things we don't want to do either." The series concluded after two seasons on July 26, 2009.
Richards appeared on the 8th season of dance competition television series "Dancing with the Stars", paired with Maksim Chmerkovskiy. She was the second contestant eliminated on March 24, 2009. She landed the role of Autumn Bliss in the romantic comedy film "Deep in the Valley" (2009) alongside Kim Kardashian and Chris Pratt. In 2010, she joined Paramount Network's sitcom "Blue Mountain State" as Debra Simon"." The series is about a fictional university, Blue Mountain State, and its football team, the "Mountain Goats". It portrays certain aspects of American university life, including American football, sex, drinking, and partying. In February 2012, it was reported that "Blue Mountain State" would not be renewed for a fourth season. Over the years, due in large part to being streamable on Netflix, the series has developed a cult following. In July 2011, Richards published a memoir "The Real Girl Next Door", a New York Times Best Seller. Richards decided to write a book because she "wanted to do something inspirational for other people going through challenging times," she told "HuffPost" in 2011. In September 2011, Richards reportedly turned down $100,000 to appear as an ex-girlfriend at Charlie Sheen's funeral in "Two and a Half Men". A month later, she began filming a guest spot for an episode for the sixth season of NBC comedy series "30 Rock". Richards was part of TV Guide Network's show, "Hollywood Moms' Club", which aired in November 2011.
Richards played Kate Needleman in the comedy film "Madea's Witness Protection" (2012), which grossed $67 million at the box office. "Madea's Witness Protection" was filmed in Atlanta in early 2012 and was released through 34th Street Films and Lionsgate. In 2012, Richards joined the cast of ABC Family's mystery-thriller television series "Twisted". In 2015, she appeared in two films, "Operation: Neighborhood Watch!" and "Christmas Trade". In 2016, she made a guest appearance as herself in The CW's "Jane the Virgin", in the episode "Chapter Fifty-One." She portrayed Kat Faust in the musical thriller film "American Satan" (2017), for which Richards was nominated for the Festival Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Feature Film at the Northeast Film Festival. Later that year, Richards portrayed Temple Hampton in an episode of Bravo's comedy-drama series "Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce". She starred in the supernatural horror film "The Toybox" (2018) opposite Mischa Barton. The film is about a family who go on a summer road trip in a used RV and get stranded in the desert by a supernatural force that is slowly killing them off. She portrayed Karen in the faith-based film "The Prayer Box" (2018), released on October 20, 2018.
In August 2018, Richards announced that she will be joining the Bravo reality series, "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills", for the show's ninth season, which premiered on February 12, 2019. "Vanity Fair" described her addition to the series by saying: "She might be one of the most famous people to join the "Housewives" franchise, someone who was a legitimate household name before becoming a reality star. Now, that doesn’t always translate to on-screen gold, but it is a nice little coup for Bravo." "The New York Times" wrote that Richards "brought a refreshing and occasionally disarming dose of reality" to the series. On May 31, 2019, "The Daily Beast" wrote that "Richards’ appearance on the show is the best kind of surprise, one that reveals that a celebrity is not who we may have assumed them to be. She’s an extremely warm, loving parent, without a hint of narcissism or vapidity about her." In 2019, she joined the cast of CBS’ soap opera "The Bold and the Beautiful" as Shauna Fulton. “Shauna is a fun-loving, hard-working single mother from Las Vegas who aspires to live life to its absolute fullest,” executive producer and headwriter Bradley Bell told "People" magazine. In July 2019, it was announced that Richards had joined the cast of Fox's comedy-drama television series "BH90210" in a guest role, playing a fictionalized version of herself.
She portrayed overly-ambitious mother Candice in Lifetime television film "The Secret Lives of Cheerleaders", released on September 2, 2019. "I think the story’s about this girl that’s trying to fit in and makes some bad choices and then, knowing right from wrong, decided to make a better choice," Richards told "Parade". On November 4, 2019, Richards appeared as a guest model on the game show "The Price Is Right". Richards played Valerie in the Christmas film "My Adventures with Santa" (2019) opposite Patrick Muldoon. The film was released in limited theaters on November 15, 2019. Richards returned for "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills"' tenth season, which premiered on April 15, 2020. "Fox News" called her "an instant fan favorite" when she joined the show in 2019.
Richards has graced the covers of numerous magazines, including "Cosmopolitan" (Poland, Greece, US and Germany), "Redbook", "Details", "Esquire", "Self," "Shape", "GQ", "Bella" and "Empire." In December 2004, she posed for a nude pictorial in "Playboy" magazine, five months after giving birth. Richards posed semi-nude for the July 2006 issue of "Jane" magazine to raise money for the Clothes Off Our Back Foundation. She has appeared in television commercials for Pepsi, Head & Shoulders, Secret, J.C. Penney and Librero. Richards walked the runway at the "Max Factor Salutes Hollywood" fashion show on March 14, 2007 in Hollywood. She has previously appeared in Max Factor's Premiere 2K advertising campaign. In 2010, Richards walked the runway for Ali Landry and Annie Kate Pons' fashion line, Belle Parish's fashion show. In September 2019, she walked the runway for Kyle Richards' and Shahida Clayton's new clothing brand at New York Fashion Week.
Richards launched her self-titled fragrance in spring 2012. In 2012, Richards appeared in an infomercial for abdominal muscle toner "The Flex Belt" alongside Adrianne Curry, Lisa Rinna and Janet Evans. In 2013, she became the brand ambassador for Oro Gold Cosmetics. She has appeared in print ads for Bonne Bell cosmetics. In 2017, she appeared in furniture brand Urban Home's commercials and advertising campaigns. She has appeared in rock band Blues Traveler's music video for the song "Canadian Rose" and rapper Snoop Dogg's music video for "Undercova Funk".
In November 2019, Richards announced that she has developed a skincare line with CBme Beauty.
Richards' appearance has often been the subject of media attention. In 1999, she was ranked #9 in "Maxim"'s 50 Sexiest Women. In 2001, she was voted #2 in "FHM"'s 100 Sexiest Women, #5 in "FHM"'s 100 Sexiest Women and #19 in AskMen.com's 50 Most Beautiful Women. She was named one of the "100 Hottest Women of All-Time" by "Men's Health". In 2002, Richards was ranked at number 21 in "Stuff" magazine's "102 Sexiest Women in the World." In 2011, "Men's Health" ranked her at number 61 on their list of "100 Hottest Women of All Time." "Shape" magazine ranked her at number 7 on their list of "10 of Our Fave Bond Girls: Then and Now."
Richards is popular on social media and endorses products such as personalized cards, beauty products and wellness and skincare solutions on Instagram. She has entered into partnerships with FabFitFun beauty subscription box, Teami Blends teas and Simply to Impress cards.
Richards became engaged to actor Charlie Sheen on December 26, 2001, and married him on June 15, 2002, at the estate of "Spin City" creator Gary David Goldberg. They have two daughters together. In March 2005, while pregnant with their second daughter, Richards filed for divorce from Sheen. She sought a restraining order against Sheen, alleging death threats against her. On April 19, 2006, Richards filed formal legal papers seeking a divorce from Sheen under the laws of the state of California. The divorce was finalized on November 30, 2006; Sheen was ordered to stay 300 feet away from his ex-wife and their daughters, except during supervised visits. In May 2010, Sheen gave up custody of their daughters to Richards. They previously had joint legal custody of the girls and Richards wanted sole custody, given Sheen's "marital turmoil, sobriety issues, and criminal problems".
By mid-2012, Richards and Sheen were on good terms, often spending time together with their children. In 2012, he made a cameo appearance in her movie "Madea's Witness Protection" and she appeared in Sheen's television series, "Anger Management", on the FX network. In a move supported by Sheen, in May 2013, Richards was awarded temporary custody of the twin sons born in 2009 to Sheen and his wife Brooke Mueller, after the children were removed from Mueller's home by child protective services due to concerns over drug use.
In June 2011, Richards adopted a third daughter, Eloise Joni Richards, as a single parent. Her middle name is that of Richards' mother, who died from cancer in December 2007. Richards adopted her at birth, following a two-year adoption process. Eloise has a rare chromosomal disorder, Chromosome 8, Monsomy 8p, which affects her speech.
In December 2017, Richards began dating Aaron Phypers. On September 8, 2018, Richards and Phypers got married in Malibu, California. In May 2019, Richards announced that Phypers is adopting her youngest daughter, Eloise.
Outside of work, Richards dedicates much of her time to philanthropy. She has supported numerous charities, including Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Feeding America, Much Love Animal Rescue, Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes, Best Friends Animal Society and Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Richards has also appeared in the NOH8 Campaign and has spoken in support of gay marriage.
Richards has worked with Best Friends Animal Society on several projects, including its Pup My Ride program, which transports small dogs from high-kill animal shelters to other parts of the US where there is a greater demand for small dogs. She promoted Best Friends Animal Society's Save Them All campaign in 2014. "I’ve been involved with Best Friends Animal Society since 2009 and I’ve seen firsthand the differences they’ve made and the countless lives they’ve saved," Richards said. She has regularly appeared on "Access Hollywood"'s monthly pet segment showcasing shelter dogs rescued by Best Friends and available for adoption. While assisting with relief efforts in New York following Hurricane Sandy, she worked together with North Shore Animal League, and adopted a puppy from a Long Island shelter.
She has walked the runway for charity fashion shows, such as Susan G. Komen's 8th Annual Fashion For The Cure, Clothes Off Your Back Benefit and The Heart Truth's Red Dress Fall 2011 Collections. In January 2012, she launched her first collaboration with fashion subscription service ShoeDazzle to design the "Eloise" heel and raised over $15,000 for the Kidney Cancer Association. In December 2012, she designed two shoes for ShoeDazzle as part of their Celebrity Shoe Design Program for Charity. Profits from the shoe sales went to the Kidney Cancer Association. After Richards lost her mother to kidney cancer, she dedicated her time to raising awareness and helping the Kidney Cancer Association. In November 2015, Richards and her daughters spent Thanksgiving volunteering and serving food for homeless families.
In June 2018, she joined The Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation's summer theatrical PSA campaign to benefit Brave Beginnings, which funds vital neonatal equipment to U.S. hospitals. Richards filmed a public service announcement that was played at movie theaters nationwide. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37275 |
Rubidium–strontium dating
The rubidium-strontium dating method is a radiometric dating technique used by scientists to determine the age of rocks and minerals from the quantities they contain of specific isotopes of rubidium (87Rb) and strontium (87Sr, 86Sr).
Development of this process was aided by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, who later went on to discover nuclear fission in December 1938.
The utility of the rubidium–strontium isotope system results from the fact that 87Rb (one of two naturally occurring isotopes of rubidium) decays to 87Sr with a half-life of 49.23 billion years. In addition, Rb is a highly incompatible element that, during partial melting of the mantle, prefers to join the magmatic melt rather than remain in mantle minerals. As a result, Rb is enriched in crustal rocks. The radiogenic daughter, 87Sr, is produced in this decay process and was produced in rounds of stellar nucleosynthesis predating the creation of the Solar System.
Different minerals in a given geologic setting can acquire distinctly different ratios of radiogenic strontium-87 to naturally occurring strontium-86 (87Sr/86Sr) through time; and their age can be calculated by measuring the 87Sr/86Sr in a mass spectrometer, knowing the amount of 87Sr present when the rock or mineral formed, and calculating the amount of 87Rb from a measurement of the Rb present and knowledge of the 85Rb/87Rb weight ratio.
If these minerals crystallized from the same silicic melt, each mineral had the same initial 87Sr/86Sr as the parent melt. However, because Rb substitutes for K in minerals and these minerals have different K/Ca ratios, the minerals will have had different Rb/Sr ratios.
During fractional crystallization, Sr tends to become concentrated in plagioclase, leaving Rb in the liquid phase. Hence, the Rb/Sr ratio in residual magma may increase over time, resulting in rocks with increasing Rb/Sr ratios with increasing differentiation.
Highest ratios (10 or higher) occur in pegmatites.
Typically, Rb/Sr increases in the order plagioclase, hornblende, K-feldspar, biotite, muscovite. Therefore, given sufficient time for significant production (ingrowth) of radiogenic 87Sr, measured 87Sr/86Sr values will be different in the minerals, increasing in the same order.
For example, consider the case of an igneous rock such as a granite that contains several major Sr-bearing minerals including plagioclase feldspar, K-feldspar, hornblende, biotite, and muscovite. Each of these minerals has a different initial rubidium/strontium ratio dependent on their potassium content, the concentration of Rb and K in the melt and the temperature at which the minerals formed. Rubidium substitutes for potassium within the lattice of minerals at a rate proportional to its concentration within the melt.
The ideal scenario according to Bowen's reaction series would see a granite melt begin crystallizing a cumulate assemblage of plagioclase and hornblende (i.e.; tonalite or diorite), which is low in K (and hence Rb) but high in Sr (as this substitutes for Ca), which proportionally enriches the melt in K and Rb. This then causes orthoclase and biotite, both K rich minerals into which Rb can substitute, to precipitate. The resulting Rb-Sr ratios and Rb and Sr abundances of both the whole rocks and their component minerals will be markedly different. This, thus, allows a different rate of radiogenic Sr to evolve in the separate rocks and their component minerals as time progresses.
The age of a sample is determined by analysing several minerals within multiple subsamples from different parts of the original sample. The 87Sr/86Sr ratio for each subsample is plotted against its 87Rb/86Sr ratio on a graph called an . If these form a straight line then the subsamples are consistent, and the age probably reliable. The slope of the line dictates the age of the sample.
Indeed, given the universal law of radioactive decay and the following rubidium beta decay : ^{87}_{37}Rb ->[{\beta -}][{}]~^{87}_{38}Sr ~+e^{-}~+~\bar{\nu_e} we obtain the expression whom describes the growth of Strontium 87 in the rubidium mineral : ^{87}_{38}Sr(t)~=^{87}_{38}Sr(0)~+~^{87}_{37}Rb(e^{\lambda t}-1), \lambda being the decay constant of rubidium. Furthermore, we could consider the number of ^{86}_{38}Sr as a constant, for two reasons; firstly this isotope is stable, and secondly the half-time for ^{86}_{37}Rb (whom produced the ^{86}_{38}Sr radiogenic nucleide) is negligible compared to ^{87}_{37}Rb half-time.
Hence, \frac{^{87}Sr}{^{86}Sr}= (\frac{^{87}Sr}{^{86}Sr} )_0~+\frac{^{87}Rb}{^{86}Sr}(e^{\lambda t}-1) the isochron equation. After measurements of Rubidum and Strontium concentration in the mineral we can easily determine the age, the t value, of the sample.
Rb-Sr dating relies on correctly measuring the Rb-Sr ratio of a mineral or whole rock sample, plus deriving an accurate 87Sr/86Sr ratio for the mineral or whole rock sample.
Several preconditions must be satisfied before a Rb-Sr date can be considered as representing the time of emplacement or formation of a rock.
One of the major drawbacks (and, conversely, the most important use) of utilizing Rb and Sr to derive a radiometric date is their relative mobility, especially in hydrothermal fluids. Rb and Sr are relatively mobile alkaline elements and as such are relatively easily moved around by the hot, often carbonated hydrothermal fluids present during metamorphism or magmatism.
Conversely, these fluids may metasomatically alter a rock, introducing new Rb and Sr into the rock (generally during potassic alteration or calcic (albitisation) alteration. Rb-Sr can then be used on the altered mineralogy to date the time of this alteration, but not the date at which the rock formed.
Thus, assigning "age significance" to a result requires studying the metasomatic and thermal history of the rock, any metamorphic events, and any evidence of fluid movement. A Rb-Sr date which is at variance with other geochronometers may not be useless, it may be providing data on an event which is not representing the age of formation of the rock.
The Rb-Sr dating method has been used extensively in dating terrestrial and lunar rocks, and meteorites. If the initial amount of Sr is known or can be extrapolated, the age can be determined by measurement of the Rb and Sr concentrations and the 87Sr/86Sr ratio. The dates indicate the true age of the minerals only if the rocks have not been subsequently altered.
The important concept in isotopic tracing is that Sr derived from any mineral through weathering reactions will have the same 87Sr/86Sr as the mineral. Although this is a potential source of error for terrestrial rocks, it is irrelevant for lunar rocks and meteorites, as there are no chemical weathering reactions in those environments.
Initial 87Sr/86Sr ratios are a useful tool in archaeology, forensics and paleontology because the 87Sr/86Sr of a skeleton, sea shell or indeed a clay artefact is directly comparable to the source rocks upon which it was formed or upon which the organism lived. Thus, by measuring the current-day 87Sr/86Sr ratio (and often the 143Nd-144Nd ratios as well) the geological fingerprint of an object or skeleton can be measured, allowing migration patterns to be determined.
Strontium isotope stratigraphy relies on recognised variations in the 87Sr/86Sr ratio of seawater over time. The application of Sr isotope stratigraphy is generally limited to carbonate samples for which the Sr seawater curve is well defined. This is well known for the Cenozoic time-scale but, due to poorer preservation of carbonate sequences in the Mesozoic and earlier, it is not completely understood for older sequences.
In older sequences diagenetic alteration combined with greater uncertainties in estimating absolute ages due to lack of overlap between other geochronometers (for example U–Th) leads to greater uncertainties in the exact shape of the Sr isotope seawater curve. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37277 |
Galago
Galagos , also known as bush babies, or nagapies (meaning "night monkeys" in Afrikaans), are small nocturnal primates native to continental, sub-Sahara Africa, and make up the family Galagidae (also sometimes called Galagonidae). They are considered a sister group of the Lorisidae.
According to some accounts, the name "bush baby" comes from either the animal's cries or its appearance. The Ghanaian name "aposor" is given to them because of their firm grip on branches.
In both variety and abundance, the bush babies are the most successful strepsirrhine primates in Africa, according to the African Wildlife Foundation.
Galagos have large eyes that give them good night vision in addition to other characteristics, like strong hind limbs, acute hearing, and long tails that help them balance. Their ears are bat-like and allow them to track insects in the dark. They catch insects on the ground or snatch them out of the air. They are fast, agile creatures. As they bound through the thick bushes, they fold their delicate ears back to protect them. They also fold them during rest. They have nails on most of their digits, except for the second toe of the hind foot, which bears a grooming claw. Their diet is a mixture of insects and other small animals, fruit, and tree gums. They have pectinate (comb-like) incisors called toothcombs, and the dental formula: They are active at night.
After a gestation period of 110–133 days, young galagos are born with half-closed eyes and are initially unable to move about independently. After a few (6–8) days, the mother carries the infant in her mouth, and places it on branches while feeding. Females may have singles, twins, or triplets, and may become very aggressive. Each newborn weighs less than half an ounce. For the first three days, the infant is kept in constant contact with the mother. The young are fed by the mother for six weeks and can feed themselves at two months. The young grow rapidly, often causing the mother to walk awkwardly as she transports them.
Females maintain a territory, but share them with their offspring. Males leave their mothers' territories after puberty, but females remain, forming social groups consisting of closely related females and their young. Adult males maintain separate territories, which overlap with those of the female social groups; generally, one adult male mates with all the females in an area. Males that have not established such territories sometimes form small bachelor groups.
While keeping them as pets is not advised (like many other nonhuman primates, they are considered likely sources of diseases that can cross species barriers), it is certainly done. Equally, they are highly likely to attract attention from customs officials on importation into many countries. Reports from veterinary and zoological sources indicate captive lifetimes of 12.0 to 16.5 years, suggesting a natural lifetime over a decade.
Galagos communicate both by calling to each other, and by marking their paths with urine. By following the scent of urine, they can land on exactly the same branch every time. All species of galago produce species-specific 'loud calls' or 'advertisement calls'. These calls have multiple different functions. One function is long-distance identification and differentiation of individual species, and scientists are now able to recognize all known galago species by their 'loud calls'. At the end of the night, group members use a special rallying call and gather to sleep in a nest made of leaves, a group of branches, or a hole in a tree.
Galagos have remarkable jumping abilities. The highest reliably reported jump for a galago is 2.25 m. According to a study published by the Royal Society, given the body mass of each animal and the fact that the leg muscles amount to about 25% of this, galago's jumping muscles should perform six to nine times better than those of a frog. This is thought to be due to elastic energy storage in tendons of the lower leg, allowing far greater jumps than would otherwise be possible for an animal of their size. In mid-flight, they tuck their arms and legs close to the body; they are then brought out at the last second to grab the branch. In a series of leaps, a galago can cover ten yards in mere seconds. The tail, which is longer than the length of the head and body combined, assists the powerful leg muscles in powering the jumps. They may also hop like a kangaroo or simply run/walk on four legs. Such strong, complicated, and coordinated movements are due to the rostral half of the posterior parietal cortex that is linked to the motor, premotor, and visuomotor areas of the frontal cortex.
The bush baby also refers to a myth that is used to scare children to stay indoors at night. Most likely arising from the baby-like cry, the unusual nature evolved into a myth about a powerful animal that can kidnap humans. It is also said that wild bush babies/galagos in Nigeria can never be found dead on plain ground. Rather, they always make a nest out of sticks/leaves/branches and die on it. Endangerment of the species, however, in sub-Saharan Africa has made this claim difficult to verify.
Generally, the social structure of the galago has components of both social life and solitary life. This can be seen in their play. They swing off branches or climb high and throw things. Social play includes play fights, play grooming, and following-play. During following-play, two galagos jump sporadically and chase each other through the trees. The older galagos in a group prefer to rest alone, while younger ones are in constant contact with one another. This is observed in the "Galago garnetti" species. Mothers often leave infants alone for long periods of time and do not attempt to stop infants from leaving them. On the other hand, the offspring attempts to stay close to, and initiate social interactions with the mother.
Grooming is a very important part of galago daily life. They often autogroom before, during, and after rest. Social grooming is performed more often by males in the group. Females often reject the attempts made by the males to groom them.
Galagos are currently grouped into six genera. "Euoticus" is a basal sister taxon to all the other galagids. The 'dwarf' galagids recently grouped under the genus "Galagoides" have been found, based on genetic data, and supported by analysis of vocalisations and morphology, to actually consist of two clades, which are not sister taxa, in eastern and western/central Africa (separated by the rift valley). The latter are basal to all the other non-"Euoticus" galagids. The former group is sister to "Galago" and has been elevated to full genus status as "Paragalago". The genera "Otolemur" and "Sciurocheirus" are also sisters.
Family Galagidae - galagos, or bushbabies
The phylogeny of Galagidae accoding to Masters "et al.", 2017 is as follows:
A low-coverage genomic sequence of the northern greater galago, "O. garnettii", is in progress. As it is a 'primitive' primate, the sequence will be particularly useful in bridging the sequences of higher primates (macaque, chimpanzee, human) to close non-primates, such as rodents. The two-time planned coverage will not be sufficient to create a full genome assembly, but will provide comparative data across most of the human assembly. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37278 |
Peg solitaire
Peg solitaire (or Solo Noble) is a board game for one player involving movement of pegs on a board with holes. Some sets use marbles in a board with indentations. The game is known simply as Solitaire in the United Kingdom where the card games are called Patience. It is also referred to as Brainvita (especially in India).
The first evidence of the game can be traced back to the court of Louis XIV, and the specific date of 1687, with an engraving made ten years later by Claude Auguste Berey of Anne de Rohan-Chabot, Princess of Soubise, with the puzzle by her side. The August 1687 edition of the French literary magazine "Mercure galant" contains a description of the board, rules and sample problems. This is the first known reference to the game in print.
The standard game fills the entire board with pegs except for the central hole. The objective is, making valid moves, to empty the entire board except for a solitary peg in the central hole.
There are two traditional boards ('.' as an initial peg, 'o' as an initial hole):
A valid move is to jump a peg orthogonally over an adjacent peg into a hole two positions away and then to remove the jumped peg.
In the diagrams which follow, · indicates a peg in a hole, * emboldened indicates the peg to be moved, and o indicates an empty hole. A blue is the hole the current peg moved from; a red is the final position of that peg, a red is the hole of the peg that was jumped and removed.
Thus valid moves in each of the four orthogonal directions are:
On an English board, the first three moves might be:
There are many different solutions to the standard problem, and one notation used to describe them assigns letters to the holes:
This mirror image notation is used, amongst other reasons, since on the European board, one set of alternative games is to start with a hole at some position and to end with a single peg in its mirrored position. On the English board the equivalent alternative games are to start with a hole and end with a peg at the same position.
There is no solution to the European board with the initial hole centrally located, if only orthogonal moves are permitted. This is easily seen as follows, by an argument from Hans Zantema. Divide the positions of the board into A, B and C positions as follows:
Initially with only the central position free, the number of covered A positions is 12, the number of covered B positions is 12, and also the number of covered C positions is 12. After every move the number of covered A positions increases or decreases by one, and the same for the number of covered B positions and the number of covered C positions. Hence after an even number of moves all these three numbers are even, and after an odd number of moves all these three numbers are odd. Hence a final position with only one peg cannot be reached, since that would require that one of these numbers is one (the position of the peg, one is odd), while the other two numbers are zero, hence even.
There are, however, several other configurations where a single initial hole can be reduced to a single peg.
A tactic that can be used is to divide the board into packages of three and to purge (remove) them entirely using one extra peg, the catalyst, that "jumps out" and then "jumps back again". In the example below, the * is the catalyst.:
This technique can be used with a line of 3, a block of 2·3 and a 6-peg L shape with a base of length 3 and upright of length 4.
Other alternate games include starting with two empty holes and finishing with two pegs in those holes. Also starting with one hole "here" and ending with one peg "there". On an English board, the hole can be anywhere and the final peg can only end up where multiples of three permit. Thus a hole at a can only leave a single peg at a, p, O or C.
A thorough analysis of the game is known. This analysis introduced a notion called pagoda function which is a strong tool to show the infeasibility of a given, generalized, peg solitaire, problem.
A solution for finding a pagoda function, which demonstrates the infeasibility of a given problem, is formulated as a linear programming problem and solvable in polynomial time.
A paper in 1990 dealt with the generalized Hi-Q problems which are equivalent to the peg solitaire problems and showed their NP-completeness.
A 1996 paper formulated a peg solitaire problem as a combinatorial optimization problem and discussed the properties of the feasible region called 'a solitaire cone'.
In 1999 peg solitaire was completely solved on a computer using an exhaustive search through all possible variants. It was achieved making use of the symmetries, efficient storage of board constellations and hashing.
In 2001 an efficient method for solving peg solitaire problems was developed.
An unpublished study from 1989 on a generalized version of the game on the English board showed that each possible problem in the generalized game has 29 possible distinct solutions, excluding symmetries, as the English board contains 9 distinct 3×3 sub-squares. One consequence of this analysis is to put a lower bound on the size of possible "inverted position" problems, in which the cells initially occupied are left empty and vice versa. Any solution to such a problem must contain a minimum of 11 moves, irrespective of the exact details of the problem.
It can be proved using abstract algebra that there are only 5 fixed board positions where the game can successfully end with one peg.
The shortest solution to the standard English game involves 18 moves, counting multiple jumps as single moves:
This solution was found in 1912 by Ernest Bergholt and proven to be the shortest possible by John Beasley in 1964.
This solution can also be seen on a page that also introduces the Wolstenholme notation, which is designed to make memorizing the solution easier.
Other solutions include the following list. In these, the notation used is
The only place it is possible to end up with a solitary peg is the centre, or the middle of one of the edges; on the last jump, there will always be an option of choosing whether to end in the centre or the edge.
Following is a table over the number (Possible Board Positions) of possible board positions after n jumps, and the possibility of the same pawn moved to make a further jump (No Further Jumps).
NOTE: If one board position can be rotated and/or flipped into another board position, the board positions are counted as identical.
Since there can only be 31 jumps, modern computers can easily examine all game positions in a reasonable time.
The above sequence "PBP" has been entered as in OEIS. Note that the total number of reachable board positions (sum of the sequence) is 23,475,688, while the total number of possible board positions is 8.589.934.590 (33bit-1) (2^33) , So only about 2.2% of all possible board positions can be reached starting with the center vacant.
It is also possible to generate all board positions. The results below have been obtained using
the mcrl2 toolset (see the peg_solitaire example in the distribution).
In the results below It is generate all board positions really reached starting with the center vacant and finish in central hole.
There are 3 initial non-congruent positions that have solutions. These are:
1)
Possible solution: [2:2-0:2, 2:0-2:2, 1:4-1:2, 3:4-1:4, 3:2-3:4, 2:3-2:1, 5:3-3:3, 3:0-3:2, 5:1-3:1, 4:5-4:3, 5:5-5:3, 0:4-2:4, 2:1-4:1, 2:4-4:4, 5:2-5:4, 3:6-3:4, 1:1-1:3, 2:6-2:4, 0:3-2:3, 3:2-5:2, 3:4-3:2, 6:2-4:2, 3:2-5:2, 4:0-4:2, 4:3-4:1, 6:4-6:2, 6:2-4:2, 4:1-4:3, 4:3-4:5, 4:6-4:4, 5:4-3:4, 3:4-1:4, 1:5-1:3, 2:3-0:3, 0:2-0:4]
2)
Possible solution: [1:1-1:3, 3:2-1:2, 3:4-3:2, 1:4-3:4, 5:3-3:3, 4:1-4:3, 2:1-4:1, 2:6-2:4, 4:4-4:2, 3:4-1:4, 3:2-3:4, 5:1-3:1, 4:6-2:6, 3:0-3:2, 4:5-2:5, 0:2-2:2, 2:6-2:4, 6:4-4:4, 3:4-5:4, 2:3-2:1, 2:0-2:2, 1:4-3:4, 5:5-5:3, 6:3-4:3, 4:3-4:1, 6:2-4:2, 3:2-5:2, 4:0-4:2, 5:2-3:2, 3:2-1:2, 1:2-1:4, 0:4-2:4, 3:4-1:4, 1:5-1:3, 0:3-2:3]
and
3)
Possible solution: [2:1-2:3, 0:2-2:2, 4:1-2:1, 4:3-4:1, 2:3-4:3, 1:4-1:2, 2:1-2:3, 0:4-0:2, 4:4-4:2, 3:4-1:4, 6:3-4:3, 1:1-1:3, 4:6-4:4, 5:1-3:1, 2:6-2:4, 1:4-1:2, 0:2-2:2, 3:6-3:4, 4:3-4:1, 6:2-4:2, 2:3-2:1, 4:1-4:3, 5:5-5:3, 2:0-2:2, 2:2-4:2, 3:4-5:4, 4:3-4:1, 3:0-3:2, 6:4-4:4, 4:0-4:2, 3:2-5:2, 5:2-5:4, 5:4-3:4, 3:4-1:4, 1:5-1:3]
Peg solitaire has been played on other size boards, although the two given above are the most popular. It has also been played on a triangular board, with jumps allowed in all 3 directions. As long as the variant has the proper "parity" and is large enough, it will probably be solvable.
A common triangular variant has five pegs on a side. A solution where the final peg arrives at the initial empty hole is not possible for a hole in one of the three central positions. An empty corner-hole setup can be solved in ten moves, and an empty midside-hole setup in nine (Bell 2008):
On June 26th, 1992, a video game based on peg solitaire was released for the Game Boy. Titled simply "Solitaire", the game was developed by Hect. In North America, DTMC released the game as "Lazlos' Leap". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37281 |
Klondike (solitaire)
Klondike is a solitaire card game. In the U.S. and Canada, Klondike is the best-known solitaire card game, to the point that the term "solitaire", in the absence of additional qualifiers, typically refers to Klondike. Equally in the UK, it is often just known as "patience". Elsewhere the game is known as American Patience.
Klondike solitaire is also traditionally known as "Canfield", though in the US "Canfield" refers to a particular (and much more difficult) solitaire card game devised by Richard Canfield (and which, confusingly, Canfield himself called "Klondike").
The game rose to fame in the late 19th century, being named "Klondike" after the Canadian region where a gold rush happened. It is rumored that the game was either created or popularized by the prospectors in Klondike. The game is also called Fascination, Triangle or Demon Patience.
Klondike is played with a standard 52-card deck, without Jokers. After shuffling, a tableau of seven fanned piles of cards are laid from left to right. From left to right, each pile contains one more card than the last. The first and left-most pile contains a single upturned card, the second pile contains two cards (one downturned, one upturned), the third contains three (two downturned, one upturned), and so on, until the seventh pile which contains seven cards (six downturned, one upturned). The topmost card of each pile is turned face up. The remaining cards form the stock and are placed facedown at the upper left of the layout.
The four foundations (light rectangles in the upper right of the figure) are built up by suit from Ace (low in this game) to King, and the tableau piles can be built down by alternate colors. Every face-up card in a partial pile, or a complete pile, can be moved, as a unit, to another tableau pile on the basis of their highest card. Any empty piles can be filled with a King, or a pile of cards with a King. The aim of the game is to build up four stacks of cards starting with Ace and ending with King, all of the same suit, on one of the four foundations, at which time the player would have won.
There are different ways of dealing the remainder of the deck from the stock to the waste, including the following:
If the player can no longer make any meaningful moves, the game is considered lost. At this point, winning is impossible.
The probability of being able to win a game of Klondike with best-possible play is not known. The inability of theoreticians to precisely calculate these odds has been referred to by mathematician Persi Diaconis as "one of the embarrassments of applied probability".
The best information about the winnability of Klondike concerns a modified version of the game called "Thoughtful Solitaire" or "Thoughtful Klondike", in which the location of all 52 cards is known.
The probability of winning Thoughtful Klondike (with draw three rules) has been calculated as being approximately 82%, more precisely as having a confidence interval of 81.956% ± 0.096% . Thoughtful Klondike is not quite the same as simply playing with all cards face up, as this would allow an impossible movement of a pile if the top downturned card happened to be in sequence with the upturned card underneath it. Using physical cards, Thoughtful Klondike can be played by peeking at the face-down cards, while with electronic programs Thoughtful Klondike can be played by allowing unlimited use of undos to return to the start if a choice turns out to be unfavourable.
Because the only difference between the two games (regular and thoughtful) is the knowledge of card location, all thoughtful games with solutions will also have solutions in Klondike. Since any winnable Klondike game must necessarily be winnable when played thoughtfully, the results on Thoughtful Klondike tells us that 82% is an upper bound on the winnability of regular Klondike when we don't know the location of all cards. The true probability with best play might be much smaller, because the difference between a right and wrong move cannot be known in advance whenever more than one move is possible and some cards are still hidden. Ultimately, very little is known about the winnability of regular Klondike. The number of games a skilled player can probabilistically expect to win has been estimated as at least 43%, but this gives a massive gap of almost 40% between that number and 82%.
Standard scoring in the Windows Solitaire game is determined as follows:
Moving cards directly from the Waste stack to a Foundation awards 10 points. However, if the card is first moved to a Tableau, and then to a Foundation, then an extra 5 points are received for a total of 15. Thus in order to receive a maximum score, no cards should be moved directly from the Waste to Foundation.
Time can also play a factor in Windows Solitaire, if the Timed game option is selected. For every 10 seconds of play, 2 points are taken away. Bonus points are calculated with the formula of (20,000 / (seconds to finish)) * 35 (where / is integer division), if the game takes at least 30 seconds. If the game takes less than 30 seconds, no bonus points are awarded.
Below are some variations of the game of Klondike:
The game can be played with a Tarot-style 78-card deck (such as a Tarot Nouveau). There are two ways of doing this. Each has nine increasing tableau stacks. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37282 |
Brain tumor
A brain tumor occurs when abnormal cells form within the brain. There are two main types of tumors: cancerous (malignant) tumors and benign (non-cancerous) tumors. Cancerous tumors can be divided into primary tumors, which start within the brain, and secondary tumors, which have spread from elsewhere, known as brain metastasis tumors. All types of brain tumors may produce symptoms that vary depending on the part of the brain involved. These symptoms may include headaches, seizures, problems with vision, vomiting and mental changes. The headache is classically worse in the morning and goes away with vomiting. Other symptoms may include difficulty walking, speaking or with sensations. As the disease progresses, unconsciousness may occur.
The cause of most brain tumors is unknown. Uncommon risk factors include exposure to vinyl chloride, Epstein–Barr virus, ionizing radiation, and inherited syndromes such as neurofibromatosis, tuberous sclerosis, and von Hippel-Lindau Disease. Studies on mobile phone exposure have not shown a clear risk. The most common types of primary tumors in adults are meningiomas (usually benign) and astrocytomas such as glioblastomas. In children, the most common type is a malignant medulloblastoma. Diagnosis is usually by medical examination along with computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The result is then often confirmed by a biopsy. Based on the findings, the tumors are divided into different grades of severity.
Treatment may include some combination of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy. If seizures occur, anticonvulsant medication may be needed. Dexamethasone and furosemide are medications that may be used to decrease swelling around the tumor. Some tumors grow gradually, requiring only monitoring and possibly needing no further intervention. Treatments that use a person's immune system are being studied. Outcome varies considerably depending on the type of tumor and how far it has spread at diagnosis. Although benign tumors only grow in one area, they may still be life-threatening due to their location. Glioblastomas usually have very poor outcomes, while meningiomas usually have good outcomes. The average five-year survival rate for all brain cancers in the United States is 33%.
Secondary, or metastatic, brain tumors are about four times as common as primary brain tumors, with about half of metastases coming from lung cancer. Primary brain tumors occur in around 250,000 people a year globally, making up less than 2% of cancers. In children younger than 15, brain tumors are second only to acute lymphoblastic leukemia as the most common form of cancer. In Australia, the average lifetime economic cost of a case of brain cancer is $1.9 million, the greatest of any type of cancer.
The signs and symptoms of brain tumors are broad. People may experience symptoms regardless of whether the tumor is benign (not cancerous) or cancerous. Primary and secondary brain tumors present with similar symptoms, depending on the location, size, and rate of growth of the tumor. For example, larger tumors in the frontal lobe can cause changes in the ability to think. However, a smaller tumor in an area such as Wernicke's area (small area responsible for language comprehension) can result in a greater loss of function.
Headaches as a result of raised intracranial pressure can be an early symptom of brain cancer. However, isolated headache without other symptoms is rare, and other symptoms often occur before headaches become common. Certain warning signs for headache exist which make the headache more likely to be associated with brain cancer. These are, as defined by the American Academy of Neurology: "abnormal neurological examination, headache worsened by Valsalva maneuver, headache causing awakening from sleep, new headache in the older population, progressively worsening headache, atypical headache features, or patients who do not fulfill the strict definition of migraine".
The brain is divided into lobes and each lobe or area has its own function. A tumor in any of these lobes may affect the area's performance. The symptoms experienced are often linked to the location of the tumor, but each person may experience something different.
A person's personality may be altered due to the tumor damaging lobes of the brain. Since the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes control inhibition, emotions, mood, judgement, reasoning, and behavior, a tumor in those regions can cause inappropriate social behavior, temper tantrums, laughing at things which merit no laughter, and even psychological symptoms such as depression and anxiety. More research is needed into the effectiveness and safety of medication for depression in people with brain tumours.
Personality changes can have damaging effects such as unemployment, unstable relationships, and a lack of control.
Epidemiological studies are required to determine risk factors. Aside from exposure to vinyl chloride or ionizing radiation, there are no known environmental factors associated with brain tumors. Mutations and deletions of tumor suppressor genes, such as P53, are thought to be the cause of some forms of brain tumor. Inherited conditions, such as Von Hippel–Lindau disease, tuberous sclerosis, multiple endocrine neoplasia, and neurofibromatosis type 2 carry a high risk for the development of brain tumors. People with celiac disease have a slightly increased risk of developing brain tumors. Smoking has been suggested to increase the risk but evidence remains unclear.
Although studies have not shown any link between cell phone or mobile phone radiation and the occurrence of brain tumors, the World Health Organization has classified mobile phone radiation on the IARC scale into Group 2B – possibly carcinogenic. The claim that cell phone usage may cause brain cancer is likely based on epidemiological studies which observed a slight increase in glioma risk among heavy users of wireless and cordless phones. When those studies were conducted, GSM (2G) phones were in use. Modern, third-generation (3G) phones emit, on average, about 1% of the energy emitted by those GSM (2G) phones, and therefore the finding of an association between cell phone usage and increased risk of brain cancer is not based upon current phone usage.
Human brains are surrounded by a system of connective tissue membranes called meninges that separate the brain from the skull. This three-layered covering is composed of (from the outside in) the dura mater, arachnoid mater, and pia mater. The arachnoid and pia are physically connected and thus often considered as a single layer, the "leptomeninges". Between the arachnoid mater and the pia mater is the subarachnoid space which contains cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). This fluid circulates in the narrow spaces between cells and through the cavities in the brain called ventricles, to support and protect the brain tissue. Blood vessels enter the central nervous system through the perivascular space above the pia mater. The cells in the blood vessel walls are joined tightly, forming the blood–brain barrier which protects the brain from toxins that might enter through the blood.
Tumors of the meninges are meningiomas and are often benign. Though not technically a tumor of brain tissue, they are often considered brain tumors since they protrude into the space where the brain is, causing symptoms. Since they are usually slow-growing tumors, meningiomas can be quite large by the time symptoms appear.
The brains of humans and other vertebrates are composed of very soft tissue and have a gelatin-like texture. Living brain tissue has a pink tint in color on the outside (gray matter), and nearly complete white on the inside (white matter), with subtle variations in color. The three largest divisions of the brain are:
These areas are composed of two broad classes of cells: neurons and glia. These two types are equally numerous in the brain as a whole, although glial cells outnumber neurons roughly 4 to 1 in the cerebral cortex. Glia come in several types, which perform a number of critical functions, including structural support, metabolic support, insulation, and guidance of development. Primary tumors of the glial cells are called gliomas and often are malignant by the time they are diagnosed.
The thalamus and hypothalamus are major divisions of the diencephalon, with the pituitary gland and pineal gland attached at the bottom; tumors of the pituitary and pineal gland are often benign.
The brainstem lies between the large cerebral cortex and the spinal cord. It is divided into the midbrain, pons, and medulla oblongata.
The spinal cord is considered a part of the central nervous system. It is made up of the same cells as the brain: neurons and glial cells.
Although there is no specific or singular symptom or sign, the presence of a combination of symptoms and the lack of corresponding indications of other causes can be an indicator for investigation towards the possibility of a brain tumor. Brain tumors have similar characteristics and obstacles when it comes to diagnosis and therapy with tumors located elsewhere in the body. However, they create specific issues that follow closely to the properties of the organ they are in.
The diagnosis will often start by taking a medical history noting medical antecedents, and current symptoms. Clinical and laboratory investigations will serve to exclude infections as the cause of the symptoms. Examinations in this stage may include the eyes, otolaryngological (or ENT) and electrophysiological exams. The use of electroencephalography (EEG) often plays a role in the diagnosis of brain tumors.
Brain tumors, when compared to tumors in other areas of the body, pose a challenge for diagnosis. Commonly, radioactive tracers are uptaken in large volumes in tumors due to the high activity of tumor cells, allowing for radioactive imaging of the tumor. However, most of the brain is separated from the blood by the blood-brain barrier (BBB), a membrane which exerts a strict control over what substances are allowed to pass into the brain. Therefore, many tracers that may reach tumors in other areas of the body easily would be unable to reach brain tumors until there was a disruption of the BBB by the tumor. Disruption of the BBB is well imaged via MRI or CT scan, and is therefore regarded as the main diagnostic indicator for malignant gliomas, meningiomas, and brain metastases.
Swelling or obstruction of the passage of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from the brain may cause (early) signs of increased intracranial pressure which translates clinically into headaches, vomiting, or an altered state of consciousness, and in children changes to the diameter of the skull and bulging of the fontanelles. More complex symptoms such as endocrine dysfunctions should alarm doctors not to exclude brain tumors.
A bilateral temporal visual field defect (due to compression of the optic chiasm) or dilation of the pupil, and the occurrence of either slowly evolving or the sudden onset of focal neurologic symptoms, such as cognitive and behavioral impairment (including impaired judgment, memory loss, lack of recognition, spatial orientation disorders), or emotional changes, hemiparesis, hypoesthesia, aphasia, ataxia, visual field impairment, impaired sense of smell, impaired hearing, facial paralysis, double vision, or more severe symptoms such as tremors, paralysis on one side of the body hemiplegia, or (epileptic) seizures in a patient with a negative history for epilepsy, should raise the possibility of a brain tumor.
Medical imaging plays a central role in the diagnosis of brain tumors. Early imaging methods – invasive and sometimes dangerous – such as pneumoencephalography and cerebral angiography have been abandoned in favor of non-invasive, high-resolution techniques, especially magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans, though MRI is typically the reference standard used. Neoplasms will often show as differently colored masses (also referred to as processes) in CT or MRI results.
This is because these tumors disrupt the normal functioning of the BBB and lead to an increase in its permeability. More recently, advancements have been made to increase the utility of MRI in providing physiological data that can help to inform diagnosis and prognosis. Perfusion Weighted Imaging (PWI) and Diffusion Weighted Imaging (DWI) are two MRI techniques that reviews have been shown to be useful in classifying tumors by grade, which was not previously viable using only structural imaging. However, these techniques cannot alone diagnose high- versus low-grade gliomas, and thus the definitive diagnosis of brain tumor should only be confirmed by histological examination of tumor tissue samples obtained either by means of brain biopsy or open surgery. The histological examination is essential for determining the appropriate treatment and the correct prognosis. This examination, performed by a pathologist, typically has three stages: interoperative examination of fresh tissue, preliminary microscopic examination of prepared tissues, and follow-up examination of prepared tissues after immunohistochemical staining or genetic analysis.
Tumors have characteristics that allow determination of malignancy and how they will evolve, and determining these characteristics will allow the medical team to determine the management plan.
Anaplasia or dedifferentiation: loss of differentiation of cells and of their orientation to one another and blood vessels, a characteristic of anaplastic tumor tissue. Anaplastic cells have lost total control of their normal functions and many have deteriorated cell structures. Anaplastic cells often have abnormally high nuclear-to-cytoplasmic ratios, and many are multinucleated. Additionally, the nucleus of anaplastic cells are usually unnaturally shaped or oversized. Cells can become anaplastic in two ways: neoplastic tumor cells can dedifferentiate to become anaplasias (the dedifferentiation causes the cells to lose all of their normal structure/function), or cancer stem cells can increase their capacity to multiply (i.e., uncontrollable growth due to failure of differentiation).
Atypia: an indication of abnormality of a cell (which may be indicative for malignancy). Significance of the abnormality is highly dependent on context.
Neoplasia: the (uncontrolled) division of cells. As such, neoplasia is not problematic but its consequences are: the uncontrolled division of cells means that the mass of a neoplasm increases in size, and in a confined space such as the intracranial cavity this quickly becomes problematic because the mass invades the space of the brain pushing it aside, leading to compression of the brain tissue and increased intracranial pressure and destruction of brain parenchyma. Increased intracranial pressure (ICP) may be attributable to the direct mass effect of the tumor, increased blood volume, or increased cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) volume, which may, in turn, have secondary symptoms.
Necrosis: the (premature) death of cells, caused by external factors such as infection, toxin or trauma. Necrotic cells send the wrong chemical signals which prevent phagocytes from disposing of the dead cells, leading to a buildup of dead tissue, cell debris and toxins at or near the site of the necrotic cells
Arterial and venous hypoxia, or the deprivation of adequate oxygen supply to certain areas of the brain, occurs when a tumor makes use of nearby blood vessels for its supply of blood and the neoplasm enters into competition for nutrients with the surrounding brain tissue.
More generally a neoplasm may cause release of metabolic end products (e.g., free radicals, altered electrolytes, neurotransmitters), and release and recruitment of cellular mediators (e.g., cytokines) that disrupt normal parenchymal function.
Tumors can be benign or malignant, can occur in different parts of the brain, and may be classified as primary or secondary. A primary tumor is one that has started in the brain, as opposed to a metastatic tumor, which is one that has spread to the brain from another area of the body. The incidence of metastatic tumors is approximately four times greater than primary tumors. Tumors may or may not be symptomatic: some tumors are discovered because the patient has symptoms, others show up incidentally on an imaging scan, or at an autopsy.
Grading of the tumors of the central nervous system commonly occurs on a 4-point scale (I-IV) created by the World Health Organization in 1993. Grade I tumors are the least severe and commonly associated with long term survival, with severity and prognosis worsening as the grade increases. Low grade tumors are often benign, while higher grades are aggressively malignant and/or metastatic. Other grading scales do exist, many based upon the same criteria as the WHO scale and graded from I-IV.
The most common primary brain tumors are:
These common tumors can also be organized according to tissue of origin as shown below:
Secondary tumors of the brain are metastatic and have invaded the brain from cancers originating in other organs. This means that a cancerous neoplasm has developed in another organ elsewhere in the body and that cancer cells have leaked from that primary tumor and then entered the lymphatic system and blood vessels. They then circulate through the bloodstream, and are deposited in the brain. There, these cells continue growing and dividing, becoming another invasive neoplasm of the primary cancer's tissue. Secondary tumors of the brain are very common in the terminal phases of patients with an incurable metastasized cancer; the most common types of cancers that bring about secondary tumors of the brain are lung cancer, breast cancer, malignant melanoma, kidney cancer, and colon cancer (in decreasing order of frequency).
Secondary brain tumors are more common than primary ones; in the United States there are about 170,000 new cases every year. Secondary brain tumors are the most common cause of tumors in the intracranial cavity. The skull bone structure can also be subject to a neoplasm that by its very nature reduces the volume of the intracranial cavity, and can damage the brain.
Brain tumors or intracranial neoplasms can be cancerous (malignant) or non-cancerous (benign). However, the definitions of malignant or benign neoplasms differ from those commonly used in other types of cancerous or non-cancerous neoplasms in the body.
In cancers elsewhere in the body, three malignant properties differentiate benign tumors from malignant forms of cancer: benign tumors are self-limited and do not invade or metastasize. Characteristics of malignant tumors include:
Of the above malignant characteristics, some elements do not apply to primary neoplasms of the brain:
In 2016, the WHO restructured their classifications of some categories of gliomas to include distinct genetic mutations that have been useful in differentiating tumor types, prognoses, and treatment responses. Genetic mutations are typically detected via immunohistochemistry, a technique that visualizes the presence or absence of a targeted protein via staining.
Anaplastic astrocytoma, Anaplastic oligodendroglioma, Astrocytoma, Central neurocytoma, Choroid plexus carcinoma, Choroid plexus papilloma, Choroid plexus tumor, Colloid cyst, Dysembryoplastic neuroepithelial tumour, Ependymal tumor, Fibrillary astrocytoma, Giant-cell glioblastoma, Glioblastoma multiforme, Gliomatosis cerebri, Gliosarcoma, Hemangiopericytoma, Medulloblastoma, Medulloepithelioma, Meningeal carcinomatosis, Neuroblastoma, Neurocytoma, Oligoastrocytoma, Oligodendroglioma, Optic nerve sheath meningioma, Pediatric ependymoma, Pilocytic astrocytoma, Pinealoblastoma, Pineocytoma, Pleomorphic anaplastic neuroblastoma, Pleomorphic xanthoastrocytoma, Primary central nervous system lymphoma, Sphenoid wing meningioma, Subependymal giant cell astrocytoma, Subependymoma, Trilateral retinoblastoma.
A medical team generally assesses the treatment options and presents them to the person affected and their family. Various types of treatment are available depending on tumor type and location, and may be combined to produce the best chances of survival:
Survival rates in primary brain tumors depend on the type of tumor, age, functional status of the patient, the extent of surgical removal and other factors specific to each case.
Standard care for anaplastic oligodendrogliomas and anaplastic oligoastrocytomas is surgery followed by radiotherapy. One study found a survival benefit for the addition of chemotherapy to radiotherapy after surgery, compared with radiotherapy alone.
The primary and most desired course of action described in medical literature is surgical removal (resection) via craniotomy. Minimally invasive techniques are becoming the dominant trend in neurosurgical oncology. The main objective of surgery is to remove as many tumor cells as possible, with complete removal being the best outcome and cytoreduction ("debulking") of the tumor otherwise. In some cases access to the tumor is impossible and impedes or prohibits surgery.
Many meningiomas, with the exception of some tumors located at the skull base, can be successfully removed surgically.
Most pituitary adenomas can be removed surgically, often using a minimally invasive approach through the nasal cavity and skull base (trans-nasal, trans-sphenoidal approach). Large pituitary adenomas require a craniotomy (opening of the skull) for their removal. Radiotherapy, including stereotactic approaches, is reserved for inoperable cases.
Several current research studies aim to improve the surgical removal of brain tumors by labeling tumor cells with 5-aminolevulinic acid that causes them to fluoresce. Postoperative radiotherapy and chemotherapy are integral parts of the therapeutic standard for malignant tumors. Radiotherapy may also be administered in cases of "low-grade" gliomas when a significant tumor reduction could not be achieved surgically.
Multiple metastatic tumors are generally treated with radiotherapy and chemotherapy rather than surgery and the prognosis in such cases is determined by the primary tumor, and is generally poor.
The goal of radiation therapy is to kill tumor cells while leaving normal brain tissue unharmed. In standard external beam radiation therapy, multiple treatments of standard-dose "fractions" of radiation are applied to the brain. This process is repeated for a total of 10 to 30 treatments, depending on the type of tumor. This additional treatment provides some patients with improved outcomes and longer survival rates.
Radiosurgery is a treatment method that uses computerized calculations to focus radiation at the site of the tumor while minimizing the radiation dose to the surrounding brain. Radiosurgery may be an adjunct to other treatments, or it may represent the primary treatment technique for some tumors. Forms used include stereotactic radiosurgery, such as Gamma knife, Cyberknife or Novalis Tx radiosurgery.
Radiotherapy is the most common treatment for secondary brain tumors. The amount of radiotherapy depends on the size of the area of the brain affected by cancer. Conventional external beam "whole-brain radiotherapy treatment" (WBRT) or "whole-brain irradiation" may be suggested if there is a risk that other secondary tumors will develop in the future. Stereotactic radiotherapy is usually recommended in cases involving fewer than three small secondary brain tumors. Radiotherapy may be used following, or in some cases in place of, resection of the tumor. Forms of radiotherapy used for brain cancer include external beam radiation therapy, the most common, and brachytherapy and proton therapy, the last especially used for children.
People who receive stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) and whole-brain radiation therapy (WBRT) for the treatment of metastatic brain tumors have more than twice the risk of developing learning and memory problems than those treated with SRS alone.
Postoperative conventional daily radiotherapy improves survival for adults with good functional well-being and high grade glioma compared to no postoperative radiotherapy. Hypofractionated radiation therapy has similar efficacy for survival as compared to conventional radiotherapy, particularly for individuals aged 60 and older with glioblastoma.
Patients undergoing chemotherapy are administered drugs designed to kill tumor cells. Although chemotherapy may improve overall survival in patients with the most malignant primary brain tumors, it does so in only about 20 percent of patients. Chemotherapy is often used in young children instead of radiation, as radiation may have negative effects on the developing brain. The decision to prescribe this treatment is based on a patient's overall health, type of tumor, and extent of the cancer. The toxicity and many side effects of the drugs, and the uncertain outcome of chemotherapy in brain tumors puts this treatment further down the line of treatment options with surgery and radiation therapy preferred.
UCLA Neuro-Oncology publishes real-time survival data for patients with a diagnosis of glioblastoma multiforme. They are the only institution in the United States that displays how brain tumor patients are performing on current therapies. They also show a listing of chemotherapy agents used to treat high-grade glioma tumors.
Genetic mutations have significant effects on the effectiveness of chemotherapy. Gliomas with IDH1 or IDH2 mutations respond better to chemotherapy than those without the mutation. Loss of chromosome arms 1p and 19q also indicate better response to chemoradiation.
A shunt may be used to relieve symptoms caused by intracranial pressure, by reducing the build-up of fluid (hydrocephalus) caused by the blockage of the free flow of cerebrospinal fluid.
The prognosis of brain cancer depends on the type of cancer diagnosed. Medulloblastoma has a good prognosis with chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgical resection while glioblastoma multiforme has a median survival of only 12 months even with aggressive chemoradiotherapy and surgery. Brainstem gliomas have the poorest prognosis of any form of brain cancer, with most patients dying within one year, even with therapy that typically consists of radiation to the tumor along with corticosteroids. However, one type, focal brainstem gliomas in children, seems open to exceptional prognosis and long-term survival has frequently been reported.
Prognosis is also affected by presentation of genetic mutations. Certain mutations provide better prognosis than others. IDH1 and IDH2 mutations in gliomas, as well as deletion of chromosome arms 1p and 19q, generally indicate better prognosis. TP53, ATRX, EGFR, PTEN, and TERT mutations are also useful in determining prognosis.
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most aggressive (grade IV) and most common form of a malignant brain tumor. Even when aggressive multimodality therapy consisting of radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and surgical excision is used, median survival is only 12–17 months. Standard therapy for glioblastoma multiforme consists of maximal surgical resection of the tumor, followed by radiotherapy between two and four weeks after the surgical procedure to remove the cancer, then by chemotherapy, such as temozolomide. Most patients with glioblastoma take a corticosteroid, typically dexamethasone, during their illness to relieve symptoms. Experimental treatments include targeted therapy, gamma knife radiosurgery, boron neutron capture therapy and gene therapy.
Oligodendrogliomas are incurable but slowly progressive malignant brain tumors. They can be treated with surgical resection, chemotherapy, radiotherapy or a combination. For some suspected low-grade (grade II) tumors, only a course of watchful waiting and symptomatic therapy is opted for. These tumors show a high frequency of co-deletions of the p and q arms of chromosome 1 and chromosome 19 respectively (1p19q co-deletion) and have been found to be especially chemosensitive with one report claiming them to be one of the most chemosensitive tumors. A median survival of up to 16.7 years has been reported for grade II oligodendrogliomas.
Acoustic neuromas are non-cancerous tumors. They can be treated with surgery, radiation therapy, or observation. Early intervention with surgery or radiation is recommended to prevent progressive hearing loss.
Figures for incidences of cancers of the brain show a significant difference between more- and less-developed countries (the less-developed countries have lower incidences of tumors of the brain). This could be explained by undiagnosed tumor-related deaths (patients in extremely poor situations do not get diagnosed, simply because they do not have access to the modern diagnostic facilities required to diagnose a brain tumor) and by deaths caused by other poverty-related causes that preempt a patient's life before tumors develop or tumors become life-threatening. Nevertheless, statistics suggest that certain forms of primary brain tumors are more common among certain populations.
The incidence of low-grade astrocytoma has not been shown to vary significantly with nationality. However, studies examining the incidence of malignant central nervous system (CNS) tumors have shown some variation with national origin. Since some high-grade lesions arise from low-grade tumors, these trends are worth mentioning. Specifically, the incidence of CNS tumors in the United States, Israel, and the Nordic countries is relatively high, while Japan and Asian countries have a lower incidence. These differences probably reflect some biological differences as well as differences in pathologic diagnosis and reporting.
Worldwide data on incidence of cancer can be found at the WHO (World Health Organisation) and is handled by the IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) located in France.
In the United States in 2015, approximately 166,039 people were living with brain or other central nervous system tumors. Over 2018, it was projected that there would be 23,880 new cases of brain tumors and 16,830 deaths in 2018 as a result, accounting for 1.4 percent of all cancers and 2.8 percent of all cancer deaths. Median age of diagnosis was 58 years old, while median age of death was 65. Diagnosis was slightly more common in males, at approximately 7.5 cases per 100 000 people, while females saw 2 fewer at 5.4. Deaths as a result of brain cancer were 5.3 per 100 000 for males, and 3.6 per 100 000 for females, making brain cancer the 10th leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Overall lifetime risk of developing brain cancer is approximated at 0.6 percent for men and women.
Brain, other CNS or intracranial tumors are the ninth most common cancer in the UK (around 10,600 people were diagnosed in 2013), and it is the eighth most common cause of cancer death (around 5,200 people died in 2012).
In the United States more than 28,000 people under 20 are estimated to have a brain tumor. About 3,720 new cases of brain tumors are expected to be diagnosed in those under 15 in 2019. Higher rates were reported in 1985–1994 than in 1975–1983. There is some debate as to the reasons; one theory is that the trend is the result of improved diagnosis and reporting, since the jump occurred at the same time that MRIs became available widely, and there was no coincident jump in mortality. Central nervous system tumors make up 20–25 percent of cancers in children.
The average survival rate for all primary brain cancers in children is 74%. Brain cancers are the most common cancer in children under 19, are result in more death in this group than leukemia. Younger people do less well.
The most common brain tumor types in children (0-14) are: pilocytic astrocytoma, malignant glioma, medulloblastoma, neuronal and mixed neuronal-glial tumors, and ependymoma.
In children under 2, about 70% of brain tumors are medulloblastomas, ependymomas, and low-grade gliomas. Less commonly, and seen usually in infants, are teratomas and atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumors. Germ cell tumors, including teratomas, make up just 3% of pediatric primary brain tumors, but the worldwide incidence varies significantly.
In the UK, 429 children aged 14 and under are diagnosed with a brain tumour on average each year, and 563 children and young people under the age of 19 are diagnosed.
Cancer immunotherapy is being actively studied. For malignant gliomas no therapy has been shown to improve life expectancy as of 2015.
In 2000, researchers used the vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV, to infect and kill cancer cells without affecting healthy cells.
Led by Prof. Nori Kasahara, researchers from USC, who are now at UCLA, reported in 2001 the first successful example of applying the use of retroviral replicating vectors towards transducing cell lines derived from solid tumors. Building on this initial work, the researchers applied the technology to "in vivo" models of cancer and in 2005 reported a long-term survival benefit in an experimental brain tumor animal model. Subsequently, in preparation for human clinical trials, this technology was further developed by Tocagen (a pharmaceutical company primarily focused on brain cancer treatments) as a combination treatment (Toca 511 & Toca FC). This has been under investigation since 2010 in a Phase I/II clinical trial for the potential treatment of recurrent high-grade glioma including glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) and anaplastic astrocytoma. No results have yet been published.
Efforts to detect signs of brain tumors in the blood are in the early stages of development as of 2019. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37284 |
Batch processing
Computerized batch processing is the running of "jobs that can run without end user interaction, or can be scheduled to run as resources permit."
The term "batch processing" originates in the traditional classification of methods of production as job production (one-off production), batch production (production of a "batch" of multiple items at once, one stage at a time), and flow production (mass production, all stages in process at once).
Early computers were capable of running only one program at a time. Each user had sole control of the machine for a scheduled period of time. They would arrive at the computer with program and data, often on punched paper cards and magnetic or paper tape, and would load their program, run and debug it, and carry off their output when done.
As computers became faster the setup and takedown time became a larger percentage of available computer time. Programs called "monitors", the forerunners of operating systems, were developed which could process a series, or "batch", of programs, often from magnetic tape prepared offline. The monitor would be loaded into the computer and run the first job of the batch. At the end of the job it would regain control and load and run the next until the batch was complete. Often the output of the batch would be written to magnetic tape and printed or punched offline. Examples of monitors were IBM's "Fortran Monitor System", SOS (Share Operating System),
and finally IBSYS for IBM's 709x systems in 1960.
Third-generation computers capable of multiprogramming began to appear in the 1960s. Instead of running one batch job at a time, these systems can have multiple batch programs running at the same time in order to keep the system as busy as possible. One or more programs might be awaiting input, one actively running on the CPU, and others generating output. Instead of offline input and output, programs called spoolers read jobs from cards, disk, or remote terminals and place them in a job queue to be run. In order to prevent deadlocks the job scheduler needs to know each job's resource requirements—memory, magnetic tapes, mountable disks, etc., so various scripting languages were developed to supply this information in a structured way. Probably the most well-known is IBM's "Job Control Language" (JCL). Job schedulers select jobs to run according to a variety of criteria, including priority, memory size, etc. Remote batch is a procedure for submitting batch jobs from remote terminals, often equipped with a punch card reader and a line printer. Sometimes asymmetric multiprocessing is used to spool batch input and output for one or more large computers using an attached smaller and less-expensive system, as in the IBM System/360 Attached Support Processor.
From the late 1960s onwards, interactive computing such as via text-based computer terminal interfaces (as in Unix shells or read-eval-print loops), and later graphical user interfaces became common. Non-interactive computation, both one-off jobs such as compilation, and processing of multiple items in batches, became retrospectively referred to as "batch processing", and the term "batch job" (in early use often "batch "of" jobs") became common. Early use is
particularly found at the University of Michigan, around the Michigan Terminal System (MTS).
Although timesharing did exist, its use was not robust enough for corporate data processing; none of this was related to the earlier unit record equipment, which was human-operated.
Non-interactive computation remains pervasive in computing, both for general data processing and for system "housekeeping" tasks (using system software). A high-level program (executing multiple programs, with some additional "glue" logic) is today most often called a "script", and written in scripting languages, particularly shell scripts for system tasks; in IBM PC DOS and MS-DOS this is instead known as a batch file. That includes UNIX-based computers, Microsoft Windows, macOS (whose foundation is the BSD Unix kernel), and even smartphones. A running script, particularly one executed from an interactive login session, is often known as a job, but that term is used very ambiguously.
"There is no direct counterpart to z/OS® batch processing in PC or UNIX® systems. Batch jobs are typically executed at a scheduled time or on an as-needed basis. Perhaps the closest comparison is with processes run by an AT® or CRON command in UNIX, although the differences are significant."
Batch applications are still critical in most organizations in large part because many common business processes are amenable to batch processing. While online systems can also function when manual intervention is not desired, they are not typically optimized to perform high-volume, repetitive tasks. Therefore, even new systems usually contain one or more batch applications for updating information at the end of the day, generating reports, printing documents, and other non-interactive tasks that must complete reliably within certain business deadlines.
Some applications are amenable to flow processing, namely those that only need data from a single input at once (not totals, for instance): start the next step for each input as it completes the previous step. In this case flow processing lowers latency for individual inputs, allowing them to be completed without waiting for the entire batch to finish. However, many applications require data from all records, notably computations such as totals. In this case the entire batch must be completed before one has a usable result: partial results are not usable.
Modern batch applications make use of modern batch frameworks such as Jem The Bee, Spring Batch or implementations of JSR 352 written for Java, and other frameworks for other programming languages, to provide the fault tolerance and scalability required for high-volume processing. In order to ensure high-speed processing, batch applications are often integrated with grid computing solutions to partition a batch job over a large number of processors, although there are significant programming challenges in doing so. High volume batch processing places particularly heavy demands on system and application architectures as well. Architectures that feature strong input/output performance and vertical scalability, including modern mainframe computers, tend to provide better batch performance than alternatives.
Scripting languages became popular as they evolved along with batch processing.
A "batch window" is "a period of less-intensive online activity", when the computer system is able to run batch jobs without interference from, or with, interactive online systems.
A bank's "end-of-day (EOD)" jobs require the concept of "cutover", where transaction and data are cut off for a particular day's batch activity ("deposits after 3 PM will be processed the next day").
As requirements for online systems uptime expanded to support globalization, the Internet, and other business needs, the batch window shrank and increasing emphasis was placed on techniques that would require online data to be available for a maximum amount of time.
The "batch size" refers to the number of work units to be processed within one batch operation. Some examples are:
The IBM mainframe z/OS operating system or platform has arguably the most highly refined and evolved set of batch processing facilities owing to its origins, long history, and continuing evolution. Today such systems commonly support hundreds or even thousands of concurrent online and batch tasks within a single operating system image. Technologies that aid concurrent batch and online processing include Job Control Language (JCL), scripting languages such as REXX, Job Entry Subsystem (JES2 and JES3), Workload Manager (WLM), Automatic Restart Manager (ARM), Resource Recovery Services (RRS), DB2 data sharing, Parallel Sysplex, unique performance optimizations such as HiperDispatch, I/O channel architecture, and several others.
The Unix programs codice_1, codice_2, and codice_3 (today codice_3 is a variant of codice_2) allow for complex scheduling of jobs. Windows has a job scheduler. Most high-performance computing clusters use batch processing to maximize cluster usage. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37285 |
Scooby-Doo
Scooby-Doo is an American animated franchise comprising many animated television series produced from 1969 to the present, as well as its derivative media. Writers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears created the original series "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" for Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1969. This Saturday-morning cartoon series featured teenagers Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, and Norville "Shaggy" Rogers and their talking brown Great Dane named Scooby-Doo who solve mysteries involving supposedly supernatural creatures through a series of antics and mis-steps.
Following the success of the original series, Hanna-Barbera and its successor Warner Bros. Animation have produced numerous follow-up and spin-off animated series and several related works, including television specials and made-for-TV movies, a line of direct-to-video films, and two Warner Bros.–produced theatrical feature films. Some versions of "Scooby-Doo" feature variations on the show's supernatural theme and include characters such as Scooby's cousin Scooby-Dum and nephew Scrappy-Doo in addition to some of the original characters.
"Scooby-Doo" was originally broadcast on CBS from 1969 to 1976, when it moved to ABC. ABC aired variations of the show until canceling it in 1985, and presented a spin-off featuring the characters as children called "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo" from 1988 until 1991. Two "Scooby-Doo" reboots aired as part of Kids' WB on The WB and its successor The CW from 2002 until 2008. Further reboots were produced for Cartoon Network beginning in 2010 and continuing through 2018. Repeats of the various "Scooby-Doo" series are frequently broadcast on Cartoon Network's sister channel Boomerang in the United States as well as other countries. The newest series "Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?" premiered on June 27, 2019 on Boomerang.
In 2013, "TV Guide" ranked "Scooby-Doo" the fifth greatest TV cartoon.
In 1968, parent-run organizations, particularly Action for Children's Television (ACT), began protesting what they perceived as excessive violence in Saturday-morning cartoons. Most of these shows were Hanna-Barbera action cartoons such as "Space Ghost", "The Herculoids", and "Birdman and the Galaxy Trio", and virtually all of them were canceled by 1969 because of pressure from the parent groups. Members of these watchgroups served as advisers to Hanna-Barbera and other animation studios to ensure that new programs would be safe for children.
Fred Silverman, executive for daytime programming at CBS, was then looking for a show that would both revitalize his Saturday-morning line and please the watch groups. The result was "The Archie Show", based on Bob Montana's teenage humor comic book "Archie". Also successful were the musical numbers The Archies performed during each program (one of which, "Sugar, Sugar", was the most successful "Billboard" number-one hit of 1969). Eager to build upon this success, Silverman contacted producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera about creating another show based on a teenage rock group, this time featuring teens who solved mysteries between gigs. Silverman envisioned the show as a cross between the popular "I Love a Mystery" radio serials of the 1940s and either the Archie characters or the popular early 1960s television series "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis".
After attempting to develop his own version of the show, called "House of Mystery", Barbera, who developed and sold Hanna-Barbera shows while Hanna produced them, passed the task along to storywriters Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, as well as artist/character designer Iwao Takamoto. Their treatment, based in part on "The Archie Show", was titled "Mysteries Five" and featured five teenagers: Geoff, Mike, Kelly, Linda, and Linda's brother W.W., along with their bongo-playing dog, Too Much, who collectively formed the band Mysteries Five. When The Mysteries Five were not performing at gigs, they were out solving spooky mysteries involving ghosts, zombies, and other supernatural creatures. Ruby and Spears were unable to decide whether Too Much would be a large cowardly dog or a small feisty one. When the former was chosen, Ruby and Spears wrote Too Much as a Great Dane but revised the dog character to a large sheepdog (similar to the Archies' sheepdog, Hot Dog) just before their presentation to Silverman, as Ruby feared the character would be too similar to the comic strip character Marmaduke. Silverman rejected their initial pitch, and after consulting with Barbera on next steps, got Barbera's permission to go ahead with Too Much being a Great Dane instead of a sheepdog.
During the design phase, lead character designer Takamoto consulted a studio colleague who was a breeder of Great Danes. After learning the characteristics of a prize-winning Great Dane from her, Takamoto proceeded to break most of the rules and designed Too Much with overly bowed legs, a double chin, and a sloped back, among other abnormalities.
Ruby and Spears' second pass at the show used "Dobie Gillis" as the template for the teenagers rather than "Archie". The treatment retained the dog Too Much, while reducing the number of teenagers to four, removing the Mike character and retaining Geoff, Kelly, Linda, and W.W. As their personalities were modified, so were the characters' names: Geoff became "Ronnie" – later renamed "Fred" (at Silverman's behest), Kelly became "Daphne", Linda "Velma", and W.W. "Shaggy". The teens were now based on four teenage characters from "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis": Dobie Gillis, Thalia Menninger, Zelda Gilroy and Maynard G. Krebs, respectively.
The revised show was re-pitched to Silverman, who liked the material but, disliking the title "Mysteries Five", decided to call the show "Who's S-S-Scared?" Silverman presented "Who's S-S-Scared?" to the CBS executives as the centerpiece for the upcoming 1969–70 season's Saturday morning cartoon block. CBS president Frank Stanton felt that the presentation artwork was too scary for young viewers and, thinking the show would be the same, decided to pass on it.
Now without a centerpiece for the upcoming season's programming, Silverman had Ruby, Spears, and the Hanna-Barbera staff revise the treatments and presentation materials to tone down the show and better reflect its comedy elements. The rock band element was dropped, and more attention was focused upon Shaggy and Too Much. According to Ruby and Spears, Silverman was inspired by Frank Sinatra's scat "doo-be-doo-be-doo" at the end of his recording of "Strangers in the Night" on a red-eye flight to one of the development meetings, and decided to rename the dog "Scooby-Doo" and retitled the show "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" The revised show was re-presented to CBS executives, who approved it for production.
The first episode of "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" "What a Night for a Knight" debuted on the CBS network Saturday, September 13, 1969. The original voice cast featured Don Messick as Scooby-Doo, Casey Kasem as Shaggy, Frank Welker as Fred, actress Nicole Jaffe as Velma, and Indira Stefanianna as Daphne. Scooby's speech patterns closely resembled an earlier cartoon dog, Astro from "The Jetsons" (1962–63), also voiced by Messick. Seventeen episodes of "Scooby-Doo Where are You!" were produced in 1969–70. The series theme song was written by David Mook and Ben Raleigh, and performed by Larry Marks.
Each of these episodes features Scooby and the four teenage members of Mystery, Inc.—Fred, Shaggy, Daphne and Velma—arriving at a location in the Mystery Machine, a van painted with psychedelic colors and flower power imagery. Encountering a ghost, monster, or other ostensibly supernatural creature terrorizing the local populace, they decide to investigate. The kids split up to look for clues and suspects while being chased at turns by the monster. Eventually, the kids come to realize the ghost and other paranormal activity is actually an elaborate hoax, and—often with the help of a Rube Goldberg-like trap designed by Fred—they capture the villain and unmask him. Revealed as a flesh and blood crook trying to cover up crimes by using the ghost story and costume, the criminal is arrested and taken to jail, often with the catchphrase "if it weren't for those pesky kids".
Scheduled opposite another teenage mystery-solving show, ABC's "The Hardy Boys", "Scooby-Doo" became a ratings success, with Nielsen ratings reporting that as many as 65% of Saturday morning audiences were tuned in to CBS when "Scooby-Doo" was being broadcast. The show was renewed for a second season in 1970, for which eight episodes were produced. Seven of the second-season episodes featured chase sequences set to bubblegum pop songs recorded by Austin Roberts, who also re-recorded the theme song for this season. With Stefanianna Christopherson having married and retired from voice acting, Heather North assumed the role of Daphne, and she continued to voice the character until 1997.
The TV influences of "I Love a Mystery" and "Dobie Gillis" were apparent in the first episodes. Of the similarities between the "Scooby-Doo" teens and the "Dobie Gillis" teens, the similarities between Shaggy and Maynard are the most noticeable; both characters share the same beatnik-style goatee, similar hairstyles, and demeanors. The core premise of "Scooby-Doo, Where are You!" was also similar to Enid Blyton's "Famous Five" books. Both series featured four youths with a dog, and the Famous Five stories often revolved around a mystery which invariably turned out not to be supernaturally based, but simply a ruse to disguise the villain's true intent.
The role of each character was strongly defined in the series: Fred is the leader and the determined detective, Velma is the intelligent analyst, Daphne is danger-prone, Shaggy is a coward more motivated by hunger than any desire to solve mysteries, and Scooby is similar to Shaggy, save for a Bob Hope-inspired tendency towards temporary bravery. Later versions of the show made slight changes to the characters' established roles, such as showing the Daphne in 1990s and 2000s "Scooby-Doo" productions as knowing many forms of karate and having the ability to defend herself, and reducing her tendency towards being kidnapped.
"Scooby-Doo" itself influenced many other Saturday morning cartoons of the 1970s. During that decade, Hanna-Barbera and its rivals produced several animated programs also featuring teenage detectives solving mysteries with a pet or mascot of some sort, including "Josie and the Pussycats" (1970–71), "The Funky Phantom" (1971–72), "The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan" (1972–73), "Speed Buggy" (1973–74), "Goober and the Ghost Chasers" (1973–74), "Jabberjaw" (1976–78), "Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels" (1977–80), among others.
In 1972, new one-hour episodes under the title "The New Scooby-Doo Movies" were created; each episode featuring a real or fictitious guest star helping the gang solve mysteries, including characters from other Hanna-Barbera series such as "Harlem Globetrotters", "Josie and the Pussycats" and "Speed Buggy", the comic book characters Batman and Robin (later adapted into their own Hanna-Barbera series, "Super Friends", a year later), and celebrities such as Sandy Duncan, The Addams Family, Cass Elliot, Phyllis Diller, Don Knotts and The Three Stooges. Hanna-Barbera musical director Hoyt Curtin composed a new theme song for this series, and Curtin's theme remained in use for much of "Scooby-Doo's" original broadcast run. After two seasons and 24 episodes of the "New Movies" format from 1972 to 1973, CBS began airing reruns of the original "Scooby-Doo, Where are You!" series until its option on the series expired in 1976.
Now president of ABC, Fred Silverman made a deal with Hanna-Barbera to bring new episodes of "Scooby-Doo" to the ABC Saturday morning lineup, where the show went through almost yearly lineup changes. For their 1976–77 season, 16 new episodes of Scooby-Doo were joined with a new Hanna-Barbera show, "Dynomutt, Dog Wonder", to create "The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour" (the show became "The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Show" when a bonus "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" rerun was added to the package in November 1976). Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, now working for Silverman as supervisors of the ABC Saturday morning programs, returned the program to its original "Scooby-Doo, Where are You!" format, with the addition of Scooby's dim-witted country cousin Scooby-Dum, voiced by Daws Butler, as a recurring character. The voice cast was held over from "The New Scooby-Doo Movies" save for Nicole Jaffe, who retired from acting in 1973. Pat Stevens took over her role as the voice of Velma.
For the 1977–78 season, "The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Show" became the two-hour programming block "Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics" (1977–78) with the addition of "Laff-a-Lympics" and "Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels". In addition to eight new episodes of "Scooby-Doo" and reruns of the 1969 show, Scooby-Doo also appeared during the "All-Star" block's "Laff-a-Lympics" series, which featured 45 Hanna-Barbera characters competing in "Battle of the Network Stars"-esque parodies of Olympic sporting events. Scooby was seen as the team captain of the "Laff-a-Lympics" "Scooby Doobies" team, which also featured Shaggy and Scooby-Dum among its members.
"Scooby's All-Star Laff-a-Lympics" was retitled "Scooby's All Stars" for the 1978–79 season, reduced to 90 minutes when "Dynomutt" was spun off into its own half-hour and the 1969 reruns were dropped. "Scooby's All-Stars" continued broadcasting reruns of "Scooby-Doo" from 1976 and 1977, while new episodes of "Scooby-Doo" aired during a separate half-hour under the "Scooby-Doo, Where are You!" banner. After nine weeks, the separate "Where are You!" broadcast was cancelled, and the remainder of the 16 new 1978 episodes debuted during the "Scooby's All-Stars" block. The 40 total "Scooby-Doo" episodes produced from 1976 to 1978 were later packaged together for syndication as "The Scooby-Doo Show", under which title they continue to air.
The "Scooby-Doo" characters first appeared outside of their regular Saturday morning format in "Scooby Goes Hollywood", an hour-long ABC television special aired in prime time on December 13, 1979. The special revolved around Shaggy and Scooby attempting to convince the network to move Scooby out of Saturday morning and into a prime-time series, and featured spoofs of then-current television series and films such as "Happy Days", "Superman: The Movie", "Laverne & Shirley" and "Charlie's Angels".
In 1979, Scooby's tiny nephew Scrappy-Doo was added to both the series and the billing, in an attempt to boost "Scooby-Doo"s slipping ratings. The 1979–80 episodes, aired under the new title "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo" as an independent half-hour show, succeeded in regenerating interest in the show. Lennie Weinrib voiced Scrappy in the 1979–80 episodes, with Don Messick assuming the role thereafter. Marla Frumkin replaced Pat Stevens as the voice of Velma mid-season.
As a result of "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo's" success, the entire show was overhauled in 1980 to focus more upon Scrappy-Doo. At this time, Scooby-Doo started to walk and run anthropomorphically on two feet more often, rather than on four like a normal dog as he did previously. Fred, Daphne, and Velma were dropped from the series, and the new "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo" format now consisted of three seven-minute comedic adventures starring Scooby, Scrappy, and Shaggy instead of one half-hour mystery. Most of the supernatural villains in the seven-minute "Scooby and Scrappy" cartoons, who in previous "Scooby" series had been revealed to be human criminals in costume, were now real within the context of the series.
This version of "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo" first aired from 1980 to 1982 as part of "The Richie Rich/Scooby-Doo Show", an hour-long program also featuring episodes of Hanna-Barbera's new "Richie Rich" cartoon, adapted from the Harvey Comics character. From 1982 to 1983, "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo" were part of "The Scooby-Doo/Scrappy-Doo/Puppy Hour", a co-production with Ruby-Spears Productions which featured two "Scooby and Scrappy" shorts, a "Scrappy and Yabba-Doo" short featuring Scrappy-Doo and his Western deputy uncle Yabba-Doo, and "The Puppy's New Adventures", based on characters from a 1977 Ruby-Spears TV special.
Beginning in 1980, a half-hour of reruns from previous incarnations of "Scooby-Doo" were broadcast on ABC Saturday mornings in addition to first-run episodes. Airing under the titles "Scooby-Doo Classics", "Scary Scooby Funnies", "The Best of Scooby-Doo", and "Scooby's Mystery Funhouse", the rerun package remained on the air until the end of the 1986 season.
"Scooby-Doo" was restored to a standalone half-hour in 1983 with "The New Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Show" in 1983, which comprised two 11-minute mysteries per episode in a format reminiscent of the original "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" mysteries. Heather North returned to the voice cast as Daphne, who in this incarnation solved mysteries with Shaggy, Scooby, and Scrappy while working undercover as a reporter for a teen magazine.
This version of the show lasted for two seasons, with the second season airing under the title "The New Scooby-Doo Mysteries". The 1984–85 season episodes featured semi-regular appearances from Fred and Velma, with Frank Welker and Marla Frumkin resuming their respective roles for these episodes.
1985 saw the debut of "The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo", which featured Daphne, Shaggy, Scooby, Scrappy, and new characters Flim-Flam (voiced by Susan Blu) and Vincent Van Ghoul (based upon and voiced by Vincent Price) traveling the globe to capture "thirteen of the most terrifying ghosts upon the face of the earth." The final first-run episode of "The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo" aired in December 1985, and after its reruns were removed from the ABC lineup the following March, no new "Scooby" series aired on the network for the next two years.
Hanna-Barbera reincarnated the original "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" cast as elementary school students (a common trope in 1980s children's TV) for a new series titled "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo", which debuted on ABC in 1988. "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo" was an irreverent re-imagining of the series, heavily inspired by the classic cartoons of Tex Avery and Bob Clampett, and eschewed the realistic aesthetic of the original "Scooby" series for a more "Looney Tunes"-like style, including an episode where Scooby-Doo's parents show up and reveal his real name to be "Scoobert". At the same time, the series returned to its original formula in that the group unmasked human villains in costume, as opposed to the supernatural monsters of the early to mid-1980s. The series also established "Coolsville" as the name of the gang's hometown; this setting was retained for several of the later "Scooby" productions. The retooled show was a success, remaining in production for four seasons and on ABC's lineup until 1991.
"A Pup Named Scooby-Doo" was developed and produced by Tom Ruegger, who had been the head story editor on "Scooby-Doo" since 1983. Following the first season of "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo", Ruegger and much of his unit defected from Hanna-Barbera to Warner Bros. Animation to develop "Steven Spielberg Presents Tiny Toon Adventures" and later "Animaniacs", "Pinky and the Brain", and "Freakazoid!".
From 1987 to 1988, Hanna-Barbera Productions produced "Hanna-Barbera Superstars 10", a series of syndicated TV movies featuring their most popular characters, including Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones and The Jetsons. Scooby-Doo, Scrappy-Doo and Shaggy starred in three of these movies: "Scooby-Doo Meets the Boo Brothers" (1987), "Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School" (1988), and "Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf" (1988). These three films took their tone from the early-1980s "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo" entries, and featured the characters encountering actual monsters and ghosts rather than masqueraded people. Scooby-Doo and Shaggy later appeared as the narrators of the made-for-TV movie "Arabian Nights", originally broadcast by TBS in 1994, Don Messick's final outing as the original voice of Scooby-Doo.
Reruns of "Scooby-Doo" have been in syndication since 1980, and have also been shown on cable television networks such as TBS Superstation (until 1989) and USA Network (as part of the USA Cartoon Express from 1990 to 1994). In 1993, "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo", having just recently ended its network run on ABC, began reruns on the Cartoon Network. With Turner Broadcasting purchasing Hanna-Barbera in 1991, in 1994 the "Scooby-Doo" franchise became exclusive to the Turner networks: Cartoon Network, TBS Superstation, and TNT. Canadian network Teletoon began airing "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" in 1997, with the other "Scooby" series soon following. When TBS and TNT ended their broadcasts of H-B cartoons in 1998, "Scooby-Doo" became the exclusive property of both Cartoon Network and sister station Boomerang.
With "Scooby-Doo's" restored popularity in reruns on Cartoon Network, Warner Bros. Animation and Hanna-Barbera (by then a subsidiary of Warner Bros. following the merger of Time Warner and Turner Entertainment in 1996) began producing one new "Scooby-Doo" direct-to-video movie a year beginning in 1998. These movies featured a slightly older version of the original five-character cast from the "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" days. The first four DTV entries were "Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island" (1998), "Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost" (1999), "Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders" (2000), and "Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase" (2001). Frank Welker was the only original voice cast member to return for these productions. Don Messick had died in 1997 and Casey Kasem, a strict vegetarian, relinquished the role of Shaggy after having to provide the voice for a 1995 Burger King commercial. Therefore, Scott Innes took over as both Scooby-Doo and Shaggy (Billy West voiced Shaggy in "Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island"). B.J. Ward took over as Velma, and Mary Kay Bergman voiced Daphne until her death in November 1999, and was replaced by Grey DeLisle.
These first four direct-to-video films differed from the original series format by placing the characters in plots with a darker tone and pitting them against actual supernatural forces. "Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island", featured the original 1969 gang, reunited after years of being apart, fighting voodoo-worshiping cat creatures in the Louisiana bayou. "Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost" featured an author (voice of Tim Curry) returning to his hometown with the gang, to find out that an event is being haunted by the author's dead ancestor Sarah, who was an actual witch. "The Witch's Ghost" introduced a goth rock band known as The Hex Girls, who became recurring characters in the "Scooby-Doo" franchise.
"Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase" was the final production made by the Hanna-Barbera studio, which was absorbed into parent company Warner Bros. Animation following William Hanna's death in 2001. Warner Animation continued production of the direct-to-video series while also producing new "Scooby-Doo" series for television.
The direct-to-video productions continued to be produced concurrently with at least one entry per year. Two of these entries, "Scooby-Doo! and the Legend of the Vampire" and "Scooby-Doo! and the Monster of Mexico" (both 2003) were produced in a retro-style reminiscent of the original series, and featured Heather North and Nicole Jaffe as the voices of Daphne and Velma, respectively. Later entries produced between 2004 and 2009 were done in the style of "What's New, Scooby-Doo", using that show's voice cast. Entries from 2010 on use the original 1969 designs and feature Matthew Lillard as the voice of Shaggy, the character Lillard portrayed in the live-action theatrical "Scooby-Doo" films. Two Scooby-Doo! movies were released in 2016, named "Lego Scooby-Doo! Haunted Hollywood" and "".
In addition, a live-action TV movie, "Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins", was released on DVD and simultaneously aired on Cartoon Network on September 13, 2009, the 40th anniversary of the series' debut. The film starred Nick Palatas as Shaggy, Robbie Amell as Fred, Kate Melton as Daphne, Hayley Kiyoko as Velma, and Frank Welker as the voice of Scooby-Doo. A second live-action TV movie, "Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster", retained the same cast and aired on October 16, 2010 and a direct-to-video spin-off "Daphne & Velma" in 2018. The three films serve as prequels taking place before the events of the 2002 film.
A feature-length live-action film version of "Scooby-Doo" was released by Warner Bros. Pictures on June 14, 2002. Directed by Raja Gosnell, the film starred Freddie Prinze Jr. as Fred, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne, Matthew Lillard as Shaggy, and Linda Cardellini as Velma. Scooby-Doo, voiced by Neil Fanning, was created on-screen by computer-generated special effects. "Scooby-Doo" was a financially successful release, with a domestic box office gross of over US$130 million.
A sequel, "", followed in March 2004 with the same cast and director. "Scooby-Doo 2" earned US$84 (€55,98) million at the U.S. box office. A third film was planned, but later scrapped following Warner Bros.' disappointment at the returns from "Scooby-Doo 2".
As of 2013, Warner Bros. Pictures was developing a fully animated Scooby-Doo feature film with Atlas Entertainment. Charles Roven and Richard Suckle, who produced the first two live-action films, were producing the animated film, and Matt Lieberman was writing the film. In 2014, Warner Bros. was restarting the film series with Randall Green writing a new movie. As of 2015, Warner Bros. had Tony Cervone directing an animated film, with Allison Abbate as producer and Dan Povenmire as executive producer. Originally planned for a September 21, 2018 release, it was later pushed back to May 15, 2020, with Dax Shepard co-directing and co-writing. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Frank Welker will be reprising his voice role as Scooby, and that he will be joined by Will Forte and Gina Rodriguez voicing Shaggy and Velma, while Tracy Morgan will be voicing Captain Caveman, from the Hanna-Barbera series "Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels" and Deadline reported that Zac Efron and Amanda Seyfried will voice Fred and Daphne. In addition, Ken Jeong will be voicing Dynomutt, Dog Wonder from Hanna-Barbera series of the same name and Kiersey Clemons will voice Dee Dee Sykes, a character from Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels. Dick Dastardly, from Hanna-Barbera's "Wacky Races", will be the film's main antagonist. In March 2020, the film's theatrical release was delayed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. On April 22, 2020, Warner Bros. announced that the theatrical release for "Scoob!" had been cancelled, with the film released instead on video on demand on May 15, 2020.
In 2002, following the successes of the Cartoon Network reruns, the direct to video franchise, and the first feature film, "Scooby-Doo" returned to Saturday morning for the first time in 17 years with "What's New, Scooby-Doo?", which aired on Kids' WB from 2002 until 2006. Produced by Warner Bros. Animation, the show follows the format of the original series but places it in the 21st century, featuring a heavy promotion of modern technology (computers, DVD, the Internet, cell phones) and culture.
Beginning with this series, Frank Welker took over as Scooby's voice actor, while continuing to provide the voice of Fred as well. Casey Kasem returned as Shaggy, on the condition that the character be depicted as a vegetarian like Kasem himself. Grey DeLisle continued to voice Daphne, and former "Facts of Life" star Mindy Cohn voiced Velma. The series was produced by Chuck Sheetz, who had worked on "The Simpsons".
After three seasons, "What's New, Scooby-Doo" was replaced in September 2006 with "Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!", a major revamping of the series which debuted on The CW's Kids' WB Saturday morning programming block. In the new premise, Shaggy inherits money and a mansion from an uncle, an inventor who has gone into hiding from villains trying to steal his secret invention. The villains, led by "Dr. Phibes" (based primarily upon Dr. Evil from the "Austin Powers "series, and named after Vincent Price's character from "The Abominable Dr. Phibes"), then use different schemes to try to get the invention from Shaggy and Scooby, who handle the plots alone. Fred, Daphne, and Velma are normally absent, but do make appearances at times to help. The characters were redesigned and the art style revised for the new series. Scott Menville voiced Shaggy in the series, with Casey Kasem appearing as the voice of Shaggy's Uncle Albert. "Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get a Clue!" ran for two seasons on The CW.
The next "Scooby" series, "Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated", premiered on Cartoon Network on April 5, 2010. The first "Scooby" series produced for cable television, "Mystery Incorporated" is a reboot of the franchise, re-establishing the characters' relationships, personalities, and locations, and expanding their world to feature their parents, high school, and neighbors. The series also borrowed pieces from many parts of "Scooby-Doo's" long history, as well as characters and elements of other Hanna-Barbera shows to form its back story and the bases of some of its episodes. Matthew Lillard was brought over from the direct-to-video series as the new voice of Shaggy, while Welker, Cohn, and DeLisle continued in their respective roles. Patrick Warburton, Linda Cardellini, Lewis Black, Vivica A. Fox, Gary Cole, Udo Kier, Tim Matheson, Tia Carrere, and Kate Higgins were added as new semi-regular cast members. Casey Kasem appeared in a recurring role as Shaggy's father, one of his last roles before retiring due to declining health.
The series, while still following the basic mystery-solving format of its predecessors, was broadcast as a 52-chapter animated televised novel and included elements similar to live-action mystery/adventure shows such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Lost." An overarching mystery surrounding the gang's hometown of Crystal Cove, California became the series' main story arc, with pieces to the mystery unfolding episode by episode. Also featured were romantic entanglements and interpersonal conflict between the lead characters. The series ran for 52 episodes over two seasons, with a three-part finale airing across April 4 and 5, 2013 – exactly three years from the debut.
On March 10, 2014, Cartoon Network announced several new series based on classic cartoons, including a new Scooby-Doo animated series titled "Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!". The show features the gang "living it up" the summer after the gang's senior year of high school. Along the way, they run into monsters and mayhem. The series premiered October 5, 2015 on Cartoon Network and concluded on March 18, 2018.
On May 23, 2018, Boomerang announced that a new Scooby-Doo series titled "Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?" would be released sometime in 2019. The series is currently airing on the Boomerang streaming service and app since it was premiered on June 27, 2019. The series features the Mystery Inc. gang teaming up with a variety of guest stars to solve mysteries. Confirmed guest stars include Halsey, Sia, Bill Nye, Mark Hamill, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ricky Gervais, Kenan Thompson and Chris Paul. The series will also include fictional guest stars, including Jaleel White as Steve Urkel, Kevin Conroy as Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and Sherlock Holmes.
Beginning in 2012, Warner Bros. Animation began producing direct-to-video special episodes in the style of the concurrently produced films for inclusion on "Scooby-Doo" compilation DVD sets otherwise including episodes from previous Scooby series. These include "Scooby-Doo! Spooky Games", included on the July 2012 release "Scooby-Doo! Laff-A-Lympics: Spooky Games", "Scooby-Doo! Haunted Holidays", from the October 2012 release "Scooby-Doo! 13 Spooky Tales: Holiday Chills and Thrills", and "Scooby-Doo! and the Spooky Scarecrow" and "Scooby-Doo! Mecha Mutt Menace", from the September 2013 DVD releases "Scooby-Doo! 13 Spooky Tales: Run for Your 'Rife!" and "Scooby-Doo! 13 Spooky Tales: Ruh-Roh Robot!". On May 13, 2014, another episode, "Scooby-Doo! Ghastly Goals" was released on the "Scooby-Doo! 13 Spooky Tales: Field of Screams" DVD. On May 5, 2015, "Scooby-Doo! and the Beach Beastie", the sixth direct-to-video special, was released on the "Scooby-Doo! 13 Spooky Tales: Surf's Up Scooby-Doo" DVD.
Gold Key Comics began publication of "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" comic books in December 1969. The comics initially contained adaptations of episodes of the television show drawn by Phil DeLara, Jack Manning and Warren Tufts. The comic books later moved to all-original stories until ending with issue #30 in 1974. Several of these issues were written by Mark Evanier and drawn by Dan Spiegle. Charlton published "Scooby" comics, many drawn by Bill Williams, for 11 issues in 1975. From 1977 to 1979, Marvel Comics published nine issues of "Scooby-Doo", all written by Evanier and drawn by Spiegel. Harvey Comics published reprints of the Charlton comics, as well as a handful of special issues, between 1993 and 1994.
In 1995, Archie Comics began publishing a monthly "Scooby-Doo" comic book, the first year of which featured Scrappy-Doo among its cast. Evanier and Spiegel worked on three issues of the series, which ended after 21 issues in 1997 when Warner Bros.' DC Comics acquired the rights to publish comics based on Hanna-Barbera characters. DC's "Scooby-Doo" series continues publication to this day. In 2013, DC began a digital bi-monthly comic book titled "Scooby-Doo Team-Up", crossing over Mystery Inc. with other DC and Hanna-Barbera characters. Since then, the series has become a monthly comic book available in print.
In 2004, a limited series of a 100 comic books called "Scooby-Doo! World of Mystery" was released. In each issue, Mystery Inc. go from country to country solving mysteries. Each issue came with a pack of exclusive cards, with 350 in total able to be collected.
In 2016, DC launched a new monthly comic book entitled "Scooby Apocalypse", with the characters being reinvented in a story set in a post-apocalyptic world, where monsters roam the streets and Scooby and the gang must find a way to survive at all costs, while also trying to find a way to reverse the apocalypse.
Early "Scooby-Doo" merchandise included a 1973 Milton Bradley board game, decorated lunch boxes, iron-on transfers, coloring books, story books, records, underwear, and other such goods. When Scrappy-Doo was introduced to the series in 1979, he, Scooby, and Shaggy became the foci of much of the merchandising, including a 1983 Milton-Bradley "Scooby-Doo and Scrappy-Doo" board game. The first "Scooby-Doo" video game appeared in arcades in 1986, and has been followed by a number of games for both home consoles and personal computers. "Scooby-Doo "multivitamins also debuted at this time, and have been manufactured by Bayer since 2001.
"Scooby-Doo" merchandising tapered off during the late 1980s and early 1990s, but increased after the series' revival on Cartoon Network in 1995. Today, all manner of "Scooby-Doo"-branded products are available for purchase, including "Scooby-Doo" breakfast cereal, plush toys, action figures, car decorations, and much more. Real "Scooby Snacks" dog treats are produced by Del Monte Pet Products. Hasbro has created a number of "Scooby" board games, including a "Scooby"-themed edition of the popular mystery board game "Clue". In 2007, the Pressman Toy Corporation released the board game "Scooby-Doo! Haunted House". Beginning in 2001, a "Scooby-Doo" children's book series was authorized and published by Scholastic. These books, written by Suzanne Weyn, include original stories and adaptations of "Scooby" theatrical and direct-to-video features.
From 1990 to 2002, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo appeared as characters in the "Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera" simulator ride at Universal Studios Florida. The ride was replaced in the early 2000s with a "Jimmy Neutron" attraction, and "The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera" instead became an attraction at several properties operated by Paramount Parks. Shaggy and Scooby-Doo are currently costumed characters at Universal Studios Florida, and can be seen driving the Mystery Machine around the park.
In 2001, "Scooby-Doo in Stagefright", a live stage play based upon the series, began touring across the world. A follow-up, "Scooby-Doo and the Pirate Ghost", followed in 2009.
The Mystery Machine has been used as the basis for many die-cast models and toys, such as from hotwheels.
By 2004, the various "Scooby-Doo" merchandise had generated over in profit for Warner Bros. Licensed merchandise also sold in 2015, in 2016, and in 2017.
During its five-decade broadcast history, "Scooby-Doo" has received two Emmy nominations: a 1989 Daytime Emmy nomination for "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo", and a 2003 Daytime Emmy nomination for "What's New, Scooby-Doo"s Mindy Cohn in the "Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program" category. Science advocate Carl Sagan favorably compared the predominantly skeptic oriented formula to that of most television dealing with paranormal themes, and considered that an adult analogue to "Scooby-Doo" would be a great public service.
"Scooby-Doo" has maintained a significant fan base, which has grown steadily since the 1990s due to the show's popularity among both young children and nostalgic adults who grew up with the series. Several television critics have stated that the show's mix of the comedy-adventure and horror genres was the reason for its widespread success. As Fred Silverman and the Hanna-Barbera staff had planned when they first began producing the series, "Scooby-Doo"s ghosts, monsters and spooky locales tend more towards humor than horror, making them easily accessible to younger children. "Overall, ["Scooby-Doo" is] just not a show that is going to overstimulate kids' emotions and tensions," offered American Center for Children and Media executive director David Kleeman in a 2002 interview. "It creates just enough fun to make it fun without getting them worried or giving them nightmares.
Older teenagers and adults have admitted to enjoying "Scooby-Doo" because of presumed subversive themes which involve theories of drug use and sexuality, in particular that Shaggy is assumed to be a user of cannabis and Velma is assumed to be a lesbian. Such themes were pervasive enough in popular culture to find their way into Warner Bros.' initial "Scooby-Doo" feature film in 2002, though several of the scenes were edited before release to secure a family-friendly "PG" rating. Series creators Joe Ruby and Ken Spears reported that they "took umbrage" to the inclusion of such themes in the "Scooby-Doo" feature and other places, and denied intending their characters to be drug users in any way.
Like many Hanna-Barbera shows, the early "Scooby-Doo" series have been criticized at times for their production values and storytelling. In 2002, Jamie Malanowski of the "New York Times" commented that "["Scooby-Doo"s] mysteries are not very mysterious, and the humor is hardly humorous. As for the animation—well, the drawings on your refrigerator may give it competition."
By the 2000s, "Scooby-Doo" had received recognition for its popularity by placing in a number of top cartoon or top cartoon character polls. The August 3, 2002, issue of "TV Guide" featured its list of the 50 Greatest Cartoon Characters of All Time, in which Scooby-Doo placed twenty-second. Scooby also ranked thirteenth in Animal Planet's list of the 50 Greatest TV Animals. For one year from 2004 to 2005, "Scooby-Doo" held the Guinness World Record for having the most episodes of any animated television series ever produced, a record previously held by and later returned to "The Simpsons". "Scooby-Doo" was published as holding this record in the 2006 edition of the "Guinness Book of Records".
In January 2009, entertainment website IGN named "Scooby-Doo" #24 on its list of the Top 100 Best Animated TV Shows.
As with most popular franchises, "Scooby-Doo" has been parodied and has done parodies. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37287 |
Spectrum of a ring
In algebra and algebraic geometry, the spectrum of a commutative ring "R", denoted by formula_1, is the set of all prime ideals of "R". It is commonly augmented with the Zariski topology and with a structure sheaf, turning it into a locally ringed space. A locally ringed space of this form is called an affine scheme.
For any ideal "I" of "R", define formula_2 to be the set of prime ideals containing "I". We can put a topology on formula_1 by defining the collection of closed sets to be
This topology is called the Zariski topology.
A basis for the Zariski topology can be constructed as follows. For "f" ∈ "R", define "D""f" to be the set of prime ideals of "R" not containing "f". Then each "D""f" is an open subset of formula_1, and formula_6 is a basis for the Zariski topology.
formula_1 is a compact space, but almost never Hausdorff: in fact, the maximal ideals in "R" are precisely the closed points in this topology. By the same reasoning, it is not, in general, a T1 space. However, formula_1 is always a Kolmogorov space (satisfies the T0 axiom); it is also a spectral space.
Given the space formula_9 with the Zariski topology, the structure sheaf "O""X" is defined on the distinguished open subsets "D""f" by setting Γ("D""f", "O""X") = "R""f", the localization of "R" by the powers of "f". It can be shown that this defines a B-sheaf and therefore that it defines a sheaf. In more detail, the distinguished open subsets are a basis of the Zariski topology, so for an arbitrary open set "U", written as the union of {"D""fi"}"i"∈"I", we set Γ("U","O""X") = lim"i"∈"I" "R""fi". One may check that this presheaf is a sheaf, so formula_1 is a ringed space. Any ringed space isomorphic to one of this form is called an affine scheme. General schemes are obtained by gluing affine schemes together.
Similarly, for a module "M" over the ring "R", we may define a sheaf formula_11 on formula_1. On the distinguished open subsets set Γ("D""f", formula_11) = "M""f", using the localization of a module. As above, this construction extends to a presheaf on all open subsets of formula_1 and satisfies gluing axioms. A sheaf of this form is called a quasicoherent sheaf.
If "P" is a point in formula_1, that is, a prime ideal, then the stalk of the structure sheaf at "P" equals the localization of "R" at the ideal "P", and this is a local ring. Consequently, formula_1 is a locally ringed space.
If "R" is an integral domain, with field of fractions "K", then we can describe the ring Γ("U","O""X") more concretely as follows. We say that an element "f" in "K" is regular at a point "P" in "X" if it can be represented as a fraction "f" = "a"/"b" with "b" not in "P". Note that this agrees with the notion of a regular function in algebraic geometry. Using this definition, we can describe Γ("U","O""X") as precisely the set of elements of "K" which are regular at every point "P" in "U".
It is useful to use the language of category theory and observe that formula_17 is a functor. Every ring homomorphism formula_18 induces a continuous map formula_19 (since the preimage of any prime ideal in formula_20 is a prime ideal in formula_21). In this way, formula_17 can be seen as a contravariant functor from the category of commutative rings to the category of topological spaces. Moreover, for every prime formula_23 the homomorphism formula_24 descends to homomorphisms
of local rings. Thus formula_17 even defines a contravariant functor from the category of commutative rings to the category of locally ringed spaces. In fact it is the universal such functor hence can be used to define the functor formula_17 up to natural isomorphism.
The functor formula_17 yields a contravariant equivalence between the category of commutative rings and the category of affine schemes; each of these categories is often thought of as the opposite category of the other.
Following on from the example, in algebraic geometry one studies "algebraic sets", i.e. subsets of "K""n" (where "K" is an algebraically closed field) that are defined as the common zeros of a set of polynomials in "n" variables. If "A" is such an algebraic set, one considers the commutative ring "R" of all polynomial functions "A" → "K". The "maximal ideals" of "R" correspond to the points of "A" (because "K" is algebraically closed), and the "prime ideals" of "R" correspond to the "subvarieties" of "A" (an algebraic set is called irreducible or a variety if it cannot be written as the union of two proper algebraic subsets).
The spectrum of "R" therefore consists of the points of "A" together with elements for all subvarieties of "A". The points of "A" are closed in the spectrum, while the elements corresponding to subvarieties have a closure consisting of all their points and subvarieties. If one only considers the points of "A", i.e. the maximal ideals in "R", then the Zariski topology defined above coincides with the Zariski topology defined on algebraic sets (which has precisely the algebraic subsets as closed sets). Specifically, the maximal ideals in "R", i.e. formula_29, together with the Zariski topology, is homeomorphic to "A" also with the Zariski topology.
One can thus view the topological space formula_1 as an "enrichment" of the topological space "A" (with Zariski topology): for every subvariety of "A", one additional non-closed point has been introduced, and this point "keeps track" of the corresponding subvariety. One thinks of this point as the generic point for the subvariety. Furthermore, the sheaf on formula_1 and the sheaf of polynomial functions on "A" are essentially identical. By studying spectra of polynomial rings instead of algebraic sets with Zariski topology, one can generalize the concepts of algebraic geometry to non-algebraically closed fields and beyond, eventually arriving at the language of schemes.
Here are some examples of schemes that are not affine schemes. They are constructed from gluing affine schemes together.
Some authors (notably M. Hochster) consider topologies on prime spectra other than Zariski topology.
First, there is the notion of constructible topology: given a ring "A", the subsets of formula_60 of the form formula_61 satisfy the axioms for closed sets in a topological space. This topology on formula_60 is called the constructible topology.
In , Hochster considers what he calls the patch topology on a prime spectrum. By definition, the patch topology is the smallest topology in which the sets of the forms formula_63 and formula_64 are closed.
There is a relative version of the functor formula_17 called global formula_17, or relative formula_17. If formula_20 is a scheme, then relative formula_17 is denoted by formula_70 or formula_71. If formula_20 is clear from the context, then relative Spec may be denoted by formula_73 or formula_74. For a scheme formula_20 and a quasi-coherent sheaf of formula_76-algebras formula_77, there is a scheme formula_78 and a morphism formula_79 such that for every open affine formula_80, there is an isomorphism formula_81, and such that for open affines formula_82, the inclusion formula_83 is induced by the restriction map formula_84. That is, as ring homomorphisms induce opposite maps of spectra, the restriction maps of a sheaf of algebras induce the inclusion maps of the spectra that make up the Spec of the sheaf.
Global Spec has a universal property similar to the universal property for ordinary Spec. More precisely, just as Spec and the global section functor are contravariant right adjoints between the category of commutative rings and schemes, global Spec and the direct image functor for the structure map are contravariant right adjoints between the category of commutative formula_76-algebras and schemes over formula_20. In formulas,
where formula_88 is a morphism of schemes.
The relative spec is the correct tool for parameterizing the family of lines through the origin of formula_89 over formula_90 Consider the sheaf of algebras formula_91 and let formula_92 be a sheaf of ideals of formula_93 Then the relative spec formula_94 parameterizes the desired family. In fact, the fiber over formula_95 is the line through the origin of formula_96 containing the point formula_97 Assuming formula_98 the fiber can be computed by looking at the composition of pullback diagrams
where the composition of the bottom arrows
gives the line containing the point formula_101 and the origin. This example can be generalized to parameterize the family of lines through the origin of formula_102 over formula_103 by letting formula_104 and formula_105
From the perspective of representation theory, a prime ideal "I" corresponds to a module "R"/"I", and the spectrum of a ring corresponds to irreducible cyclic representations of "R," while more general subvarieties correspond to possibly reducible representations that need not be cyclic. Recall that abstractly, the representation theory of a group is the study of modules over its group algebra.
The connection to representation theory is clearer if one considers the polynomial ring formula_106 or, without a basis, formula_107 As the latter formulation makes clear, a polynomial ring is the group algebra over a vector space, and writing in terms of formula_108 corresponds to choosing a basis for the vector space. Then an ideal "I," or equivalently a module formula_109 is a cyclic representation of "R" (cyclic meaning generated by 1 element as an "R"-module; this generalizes 1-dimensional representations).
In the case that the field is algebraically closed (say, the complex numbers), every maximal ideal corresponds to a point in "n"-space, by the nullstellensatz (the maximal ideal generated by formula_110 corresponds to the point formula_111). These representations of formula_112 are then parametrized by the dual space formula_113 the covector being given by sending each formula_108 to the corresponding formula_115. Thus a representation of formula_116 ("K"-linear maps formula_117) is given by a set of "n" numbers, or equivalently a covector formula_118
Thus, points in "n"-space, thought of as the max spec of formula_119 correspond precisely to 1-dimensional representations of "R," while finite sets of points correspond to finite-dimensional representations (which are reducible, corresponding geometrically to being a union, and algebraically to not being a prime ideal). The non-maximal ideals then correspond to "infinite"-dimensional representations.
The term "spectrum" comes from the use in operator theory.
Given a linear operator "T" on a finite-dimensional vector space "V", one can consider the vector space with operator as a module over the polynomial ring in one variable "R"="K"["T"], as in the structure theorem for finitely generated modules over a principal ideal domain. Then the spectrum of "K"["T"] (as a ring) equals the spectrum of "T" (as an operator).
Further, the geometric structure of the spectrum of the ring (equivalently, the algebraic structure of the module) captures the behavior of the spectrum of the operator, such as algebraic multiplicity and geometric multiplicity. For instance, for the 2×2 identity matrix has corresponding module:
the 2×2 zero matrix has module
showing geometric multiplicity 2 for the zero eigenvalue,
while a non-trivial 2×2 nilpotent matrix has module
showing algebraic multiplicity 2 but geometric multiplicity 1.
In more detail:
The spectrum can be generalized from rings to C*-algebras in operator theory, yielding the notion of the spectrum of a C*-algebra. Notably, for a Hausdorff space, the algebra of scalars (the bounded continuous functions on the space, being analogous to regular functions) are a "commutative" C*-algebra, with the space being recovered as a topological space from formula_123 of the algebra of scalars, indeed functorially so; this is the content of the Banach–Stone theorem. Indeed, any commutative C*-algebra can be realized as the algebra of scalars of a Hausdorff space in this way, yielding the same correspondence as between a ring and its spectrum. Generalizing to "non"-commutative C*-algebras yields noncommutative topology. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37291 |
List of Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists
A number of notable people have considered themselves Unitarians, Universalists, and following the merger of these denominations in the United States and Canada in 1961, Unitarian Universalists. Additionally, there are persons who, because of their writings or reputation, are considered to have held Unitarian or Universalist beliefs. Individuals who held unitarian (nontrinitarian) beliefs but were not affiliated with Unitarian organizations are often referred to as "small 'u'" unitarians. The same principle can be applied to those who believed in universal salvation but were not members of Universalist organizations. This article, therefore, makes the distinction between capitalized "Unitarians" and "Universalists" and lowercase "unitarians" and "universalists".
The Unitarians and Universalists are groups that existed long before the creation of Unitarian Universalism.
Early Unitarians did not hold Universalist beliefs, and early Universalists did not hold Unitarian beliefs. But beginning in the nineteenth century the theologies of the two groups started becoming more similar.
Additionally, their eventual merger as the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) did not eliminate divergent Unitarian and Universalist congregations, especially outside the US. Even within the US, some congregations still keep only one of the two names, "Unitarian" or "Universalist". However, with only a few exceptions, all belong to the UUA—even those that maintain dual affiliation (e.g., Unitarian and Quaker). Transcendentalism was a movement that diverged from contemporary American Unitarianism but has been embraced by later Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists.
In Northern Ireland, Unitarian churches are officially called "Non-Subscribing Presbyterian", but are informally known as "Unitarian" and are affiliated with the Unitarian churches of the rest of the world.
(Elie Wiesel) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37292 |
Criminal procedure
Criminal procedure is the adjudication process of the criminal law. While criminal procedure differs dramatically by jurisdiction, the process generally begins with a formal criminal charge with the person on trial either being free on bail or incarcerated, and results in the conviction or acquittal of the defendant. Criminal procedure can be either in form of inquisitorial or adversarial criminal procedure.
Currently, in many countries with a democratic system and the rule of law, criminal procedure puts the burden of proof on the prosecution – that is, it is up to the prosecution to prove that the defendant is guilty beyond any reasonable doubt, as opposed to having the defense prove that they are innocent, and any doubt is resolved in favor of the defendant. This provision, known as the presumption of innocence, is required, for example, in the 46 countries that are members of the Council of Europe, under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and it is included in other human rights documents. However, in practice it operates somewhat differently in different countries. Such basic rights also include the right for the defendant to know what offence he or she has been arrested for or is being charged with, and the right to appear before a judicial official within a certain time of being arrested. Many jurisdictions also allow the defendant the right to legal counsel and provide any defendant who cannot afford their own lawyer with a lawyer paid for at the public expense.
Most countries make a rather clear distinction between civil and criminal procedures. For example, an English criminal court may force a defendant to pay a fine as punishment for his crime, and he may sometimes have to pay the legal costs of the prosecution. But the victim of the crime pursues his claim for compensation in a civil, not a criminal, action. In France, Italy, and many countries besides, the victim of a crime (known as the "injured party") may be awarded damages by a criminal court judge.
The standards of proof are higher in a criminal action than in a civil one since the loser risks not only financial penalties but also being sent to prison (or, in some countries, execution). In English law the prosecution must prove the guilt of a criminal “beyond reasonable doubt”; but the plaintiff in a civil action is required to prove his case “on the balance of probabilities”. "Beyond reasonable doubt" is not defined for the jury which decides the verdict, but it has been said by appeal courts that proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt requires the prosecution to exclude any reasonable hypothesis consistent with innocence: "Plomp v. R". In a civil case, however, the court simply weighs the evidence and decides what is most probable.
Criminal and civil procedure are different. Although some systems, including the English, allow a private citizen to bring a criminal prosecution against another citizen, criminal actions are nearly always started by the state. Civil actions, on the other hand, are usually started by individuals.
In Anglo-American law, the party bringing a criminal action (that is, in most cases, the state) is called the prosecution, but the party bringing a civil action is the plaintiff. In both kinds of action the other party is known as the defendant. A criminal case in the United States against a person named Ms. Sanchez would be entitled "United States v." (short for "versus", or against) "Sanchez" if initiated by the federal government; if brought by a state, the case would typically be called "State v. Sanchez" or "People v. Sanchez." In the United Kingdom, the criminal case would be styled "R." (short for Rex or Regina, that is, the King or Queen) "v. Sanchez." In both the United States and the United Kingdom, a civil action between Ms. Sanchez and a Mr. Smith would be "Sanchez v. Smith" if started by Sanchez and "Smith v. Sanchez" if begun by Smith.
Evidence given at a criminal trial is not necessarily admissible in a civil action about the same matter, just as evidence given in a civil cause is not necessarily admissible on a criminal trial. For example, the victim of a road accident does not directly benefit if the driver who injured him is found guilty of the crime of careless driving. He still has to prove his case in a civil action. In fact he may be able to prove his civil case even when the driver is found not guilty in the criminal trial. If the accused has given evidence on his trial he may be cross-examined on those statements in a subsequent civil action regardless of the criminal verdict.
Once the plaintiff has shown that the defendant is liable, the main argument in a civil court is about the amount of money, or damages, which the defendant should pay to the plaintiff.
Proponents of either system tend to consider that their system defends best the rights of the innocent. There is a tendency in common law countries to believe that civil law / inquisitorial systems do not have the so-called "presumption of innocence", and do not provide the defence with adequate rights. Conversely, there is a tendency in countries with an inquisitorial system to believe that accusatorial proceedings unduly favour rich defendants who can afford large legal teams, and are very harsh on poorer defendants. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37297 |
Malayalam
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India spoken by nearly 2.88% of Indians. Malayalam has official language status in the state of Kerala and in the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (Mahé) and is spoken by 45 million people worldwide. Malayalam is also spoken by linguistic minorities in the neighbouring states; with significant number of speakers in the Nilgiris, Kanyakumari, and Coimbatore, Tenkasi, Theni districts of Tamil Nadu and Kodagu and Dakshina Kannada districts of Karnataka. Due to Malayali expatriates in the Persian Gulf, the language is also widely spoken in Gulf countries.
The origin of Malayalam remains a matter of dispute among scholars. One view holds that Malayalam and modern Tamil are offshoots of Middle Tamil and separated from it sometime after the AD. A second view argues for the development of the two languages out of "Proto-Dravidian" or "Proto-Tamil-Malayalam" in the prehistoric era. Designated a "Classical Language in India" in 2013, it developed into the current form mainly by the influence of the poet Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan in the 16th century. The oldest documents written purely in Malayalam and still surviving are the Vazhappalli Copper plates from 832 AD and Tharisapalli Copper plates from 849 AD.
The earliest script used to write Malayalam was the Vatteluttu alphabet, and later the Kolezhuttu, which derived from it. The current Malayalam script is based on the Vatteluttu script, which was extended with Grantha script letters to adopt Indo-Aryan loanwords. The oldest literary work in Malayalam, distinct from the Tamil tradition, is dated from between the 9th and 11th centuries. The first travelogue in any Indian language is the Malayalam "Varthamanappusthakam", written by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar in 1785.
The word "Malayalam" originated from the words "mala", meaning "mountain", and "alam", meaning "region" or "-ship" (as in "township"); "Malayalam" thus translates directly as "the mountain region." The term originally referred to the land of the Chera dynasty , and only later became the name of its language. The language Malayalam is alternatively called "Alealum", "Malayalani", "Malayali", "Malean", "Maliyad", and "Mallealle".
The earliest extant literary works in the regional language of present-day Kerala probably date back to as early as the 12th century. However, the named identity of this language appears to have come into existence only around the 16th century, when it was known as "Malayayma" or "Malayanma"; the words were also used to refer to the script and the region. The word "Malayalam" was coined in the later period, and the local people referred to their language as both "Tamil" and "Malayalam" until the colonial period.
The generally held view is that Malayalam was the western coastal dialect of Medieval Tamil and separated from Tamil sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries. Some scholars however believe that both Tamil and Malayalam developed during the prehistoric period from a common ancestor, 'Proto-Tamil-Dravidian', and that the notion of Malayalam being a 'daughter' of Tamil is misplaced. This is based on the fact that Malayalam and several Dravidian languages on the western coast have common features which are not found even in the oldest historical forms of Tamil.
Robert Caldwell, in his 1856 book ""A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages"", opined that Malayalam branched from "Classical Tamil" and over time gained a large amount of Sanskrit vocabulary and lost the personal terminations of verbs. As the language of scholarship and administration, Old-Tamil, which was written in Tamil-Brahmi and the Vatteluttu alphabet later, greatly influenced the early development of Malayalam. The Malayalam script began to diverge from the Tamil-Brahmi script in the 8th and 9th centuries. And by the end of the 13th century a written form of the language emerged which was unique from the Tamil-Brahmi script that was used to write Tamil.
Malayalam is similar to some Sri Lankan Tamil dialects, and the two are often mistaken by native Indian Tamil speakers.
Variations in intonation patterns, vocabulary, and distribution of grammatical and phonological elements are observable along the parameters of region, religion, community, occupation, social stratum, style and register.
Dialects of Malayalam are distinguishable at regional and social levels, including occupational and also communal differences. The salient features of many varieties of tribal speech (e.g., the speech of Muthuvans, Malayarayas, Malai Ulladas, Kanikkars, Kadars, Paliyars, Kurumas, and Vedas) and those of the various dialects Namboothiris, Nairs, Ezhavas, Syrian Christians (Nasrani), Muslims, fishermen and many of the occupational terms common to different sections of Malayalees have been identified.
According to the Dravidian Encyclopedia, the regional dialects of Malayalam can be divided into thirteen dialect areas. They are as follows:
According to Ethnologue, the dialects are: Malabar, Nagari-Malayalam, South Kerala, Central Kerala, North Kerala, Kayavar, Namboodiri, Nair, Moplah (Mapilla), Pulaya, Nasrani, and Kasargod. The community dialects are: Namboodiri, Nair, Moplah (Mapilla), Pulaya, and Nasrani. Whereas both the Namboothiri and Nair dialects have a common nature, the Mapilla dialect is among the most divergent of dialects, differing considerably from literary Malayalam.Jeseri is a dialect of Malayalam spoken mainly in the Union territory of Lakshadweep which is nearer to Kerala.
As regards the geographical dialects of Malayalam, surveys conducted so far by the Department of Linguistics, University of Kerala restricted the focus of attention during a given study on one specific caste so as to avoid mixing up of more than one variable such as communal and geographical factors. Thus for examples, the survey of the Ezhava dialect of Malayalam, results of which have been published by the Department in 1974, has brought to light the existence of twelve major dialect areas for Malayalam, although the isoglosses are found to crisscross in many instances. Sub-dialect regions, which could be marked off, were found to be thirty. This number is reported to tally approximately with the number of principalities that existed during the pre-British period in Kerala. In a few instances at least, as in the case of Venad, Karappuram, Nileswaram and Kumbala, the known boundaries of old principalities are found to coincide with those of certain dialects or sub-dialects that retain their individuality even today. This seems to reveal the significance of political divisions in Kerala in bringing about dialect difference.
Divergence among dialects of Malayalam embrace almost all aspects of language such as phonetics, phonology, grammar and vocabulary. Differences between any two given dialects can be quantified in terms of the presence or absence of specific units at each level of the language. To cite a single example of language variation along the geographical parameter, it may be noted that there are as many as seventy seven different expressions employed by the Ezhavas and spread over various geographical points just to refer to a single item, namely, the flower bunch of coconut. 'Kola' is the expression attested in most of the panchayats in the Palakkad, Ernakulam and Thiruvananthapuram districts of Kerala, whereas 'kolachil' occurs most predominantly in Kannur and Kochi and 'klannil' in Alappuzha and Kollam. 'Kozhinnul' and 'kulannilu' are the forms most common in Trissur Idukki and Kottayam respectively. In addition to these forms most widely spread among the areas specified above, there are dozens of other forms such as 'kotumpu' (Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram), 'katirpu' (Kottayam), krali (Pathanamthitta), pattachi, gnannil (Kollam), 'pochata' (Palakkad) etc. referring to the same item.
It may be noted at this point that labels such as "Brahmin Dialect" and "Syrian Caste Dialect" refer to overall patterns constituted by the sub-dialects spoken by the subcastes or sub-groups of each such caste. The most outstanding features of the major communal dialects of Malayalam are summarized below:
Malayalam has incorporated many elements from other languages over the years, the most notable of these being Sanskrit and later, English. According to Sooranad Kunjan Pillai who compiled the authoritative Malayalam lexicon, the other principal languages whose vocabulary was incorporated over the ages were Pali, Prakrit, Urdu, Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, Syriac, Dutch, and Portuguese.
Many medieval liturgical texts were written in an admixture of Sanskrit and early Malayalam, called Manipravalam. The influence of Sanskrit was very prominent in formal Malayalam used in literature. Malayalam has a substantially high amount of Sanskrit loanwords but these are seldom used. Loanwords and influences also from Hebrew, Syriac, and Ladino abound in the Jewish Malayalam dialects, as well as English, Portuguese, Syriac, and Greek in the Christian dialects, while Arabic and Persian elements predominate in the Muslim dialects. The Muslim dialect known as Mappila Malayalam is used in the Malabar region of Kerala. Another Muslim dialect called Beary bashe is used in the extreme northern part of Kerala and the southern part of Karnataka.
For a comprehensive list of loan words, see Loan words in Malayalam.
Malayalam is a language spoken by the native people of southwestern India (from Talapady to Kanyakumari). According to the Indian census of 2011, there were 32,299,239 speakers of Malayalam in Kerala, making up 93.2% of the total number of Malayalam speakers in India, and 96.74% of the total population of the state. There were a further 701,673 (2.1% of the total number) in Karnataka, 957,705 (2.7%) in Tamil Nadu, and 406,358 (1.2%) in Maharashtra. The number of Malayalam speakers in Lakshadweep is 51,100, which is only 0.15% of the total number, but is as much as about 84% of the population of Lakshadweep. In all, Malayalis made up 3.22% of the total Indian population in 2011. Of the total 34,713,130 Malayalam speakers in India in 2011, 33,015,420 spoke the standard dialects, 19,643 spoke the "Yerava" dialect and 31,329 spoke non-standard regional variations like "Eranadan". As per the 1991 census data, 28.85% of all Malayalam speakers in India spoke a second language and 19.64% of the total knew three or more languages.
Large numbers of Malayalis have settled in Chennai, Bengaluru, Mangaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai , Pune, Mysuru and Delhi. Many Malayalis have also emigrated to the Middle East, the United States, and Europe. There were 179,860 speakers of Malayalam in the United States, according to the 2000 census, with the highest concentrations in Bergen County, New Jersey and Rockland County, New York. There are 344,000 of Malayalam speakers in Malaysia. There were 11,687 Malayalam speakers in Australia in 2016.The 2001 Canadian census reported 7,070 people who listed Malayalam as their mother tongue, mainly in Toronto. The 2006 New Zealand census reported 2,139 speakers. 134 Malayalam speaking households were reported in 1956 in Fiji. There is also a considerable Malayali population in the Persian Gulf regions, especially in Dubai and Doha. The faster growth of languages spoken in the southern parts of India, like Malayalam, compared to those spoken in the north of the country, like Hindi, shows exactly which regions Indian immigrants to the US are coming from. Malayalam is 8th in the list of top ten fastest-growing foreign first languages spoken in English schools in UK, according to a report.
For the consonants and vowels, the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbol is given, followed by the Malayalam character and the ISO 15919 transliteration.
Malayalam has also borrowed the Sanskrit diphthongs of (represented in Malayalam as , au) and (represented in Malayalam as , ai), although these mostly occur only in Sanskrit loanwords. Traditionally (as in Sanskrit), four vocalic consonants (usually pronounced in Malayalam as consonants followed by the "saṁvr̥tōkāram", which is not officially a vowel, and not as actual vocalic consonants) have been classified as vowels: vocalic r (, , r̥), long vocalic r (, , r̥̄), vocalic l (, , l̥) and long vocalic l (, , l̥̄). Except for the first, the other three have been omitted from the current script used in Kerala as there are no words in current Malayalam that use them.
Malayalam numbers and fractions are written as follows. These are archaic and no longer commonly used. Note that there is a confusion about the glyph of Malayalam digit zero. The correct form is oval-shaped, but occasionally the glyph for () is erroneously shown as the glyph for 0.
Malayalam has a canonical word order of SOV (subject–object–verb), as do other Dravidian languages. A rare OSV word order occurs in interrogative clauses when the interrogative word is the subject. Both adjectives and possessive adjectives precede the nouns they modify. Malayalam has 6 or 7 grammatical cases. Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood and aspect, but not for person, gender nor number except in archaic or poetic language.
The declensional paradigms for some common nouns and pronouns are given below. As Malayalam is an agglutinative language, it is difficult to delineate the cases strictly and determine how many there are, although seven or eight is the generally accepted number. Alveolar plosives and nasals (although the modern Malayalam script does not distinguish the latter from the dental nasal) are underlined for clarity, following the convention of the National Library at Kolkata romanization.
Vocative forms are given in parentheses after the nominative, as the only pronominal vocatives that are used are the third person ones, which only occur in compounds.
The following are examples of some of the most common declension patterns.
When words are adopted from Sanskrit, their endings are usually changed to conform to Malayalam norms:
Historically, several scripts were used to write Malayalam. Among these were the Vatteluttu, Kolezhuthu and Malayanma scripts. But it was the Grantha script, another Southern Brahmi variation, which gave rise to the modern Malayalam script. It is syllabic in the sense that the sequence of graphic elements means that syllables have to be read as units, though in this system the elements representing individual vowels and consonants are for the most part readily identifiable. In the 1960s Malayalam dispensed with many special letters representing less frequent conjunct consonants and combinations of the vowel /u/ with different consonants.
Malayalam script consists of a total of 578 characters. The script contains 52 letters including 16 vowels and 36 consonants, which forms 576 syllabic characters, and contains two additional diacritic characters named anusvāra and visarga. The earlier style of writing has been superseded by a new style as of 1981. This new script reduces the different letters for typesetting from 900 to fewer than 90. This was mainly done to include Malayalam in the keyboards of typewriters and computers.
In 1999 a group named "Rachana Akshara Vedi" produced a set of free fonts containing the entire character repertoire of more than 900 glyphs. This was announced and released along with a text editor in the same year at Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala. In 2004, the fonts were released under the GNU GPL license by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation at the Cochin University of Science and Technology in Kochi, Kerala.
Malayalam has been written in other scripts like Roman, Syriac and Arabic. Suriyani Malayalam was used by Saint Thomas Christians (also known as Nasranis) until the 19th century. Arabic scripts particularly were taught in madrasahs in Kerala and the Lakshadweep Islands.
The earliest Malayalam inscription discovered until now is the Edakal-5 inscription (ca. late 4th century – early 5th century).
The early literature of Malayalam comprised three types of composition:
Malayalam Nada, Tamil Nada and Sanskrit Nada.
Malayalam poetry to the late 20th century betrays varying degrees of the fusion of the three different strands. The oldest examples of Pattu and Manipravalam, respectively, are "Ramacharitam" and "Vaishikatantram", both from the 12th century.
The earliest extant prose work in the language is a commentary in simple Malayalam, "Bhashakautalyam" (12th century) on Chanakya's "Arthashastra". Adhyatmaramayanam by Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan (known as the father of modern Malayalam literature) who was born in Tirur, one of the most important works in Malayalam literature. Unnunili Sandesam written in the 14th century is amongst the oldest literary works in Malayalam language.
By the end of the 18th century some of the Christian missionaries from Kerala started writing in Malayalam but mostly travelogues, dictionaries and religious books. Varthamanappusthakam (1778), written by Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar is considered to be the first travelogue in an Indian language.
The earliest known poem in Malayalam, "Ramacharitam", dated to the 12th to 14th century, was completed before the introduction of the Sanskrit alphabet. It shows the same phase of the language as in Jewish and Nasrani "Sasanas" (dated to mid‑8th century). But the period of the earliest available literary document cannot be the sole criterion used to determine the antiquity of a language. In its early literature, Malayalam has songs, "Pattu", for various subjects and occasions, such as harvesting, love songs, heroes, gods, etc. A form of writing called "Campu" emerged from the 14th century onwards. It mixed poetry with prose and used a vocabulary strongly influenced by Sanskrit, with themes from epics and "Puranas"."Rama-charitam", which was composed in the 14th century A.D., may be said to have inaugurated Malayalam literature just as Naniah's Mahabharatam did for Telugu. The fact is that dialectical and local peculiarities had already developed and stamped themselves in local songs and ballads. But these linguistic variations were at last gathered together and made to give a coloring to a sustained literary work, the "Rama-charitam", thereby giving the new language a justification and a new lease on life.
The Malayalam language, with the introduction of a new type of devotional literature, underwent a metamorphosis, both in form and content, and it is generally held that modernity in Malayalam language and literature commenced at this period. This change was brought about by Thunchathu Ezhuthachan (16th century) who is known as the father of modern Malayalam literature. Till this time Malayalam indicated two different courses of development depending on its relationship with either Sanskrit or Tamil–Kannada languages.
The earliest literary work in Malayalam now available is a prose commentary on Chanakya's Arthashastra, ascribed to the 13th century. The poetical works called "Vaisikatantram" are also believed to belong to the early 14th century. These works come under a special category known as Manipravalam, literally the combination of two languages, the language of Kerala and Sanskrit. A grammar and rhetoric in this hybrid style was written sometime in the 14th century in Sanskrit and the work, called the "Lilatikalam", is the main source of information for a student of literary and linguistic history.
According to this book, the Manipravalam and Pattu styles of literary compositions were in vogue during this period. "Pattu" means "song" and more or less represents the pure Malayalam school of poetry. From the definition of the Pattu style given in the "Lilatikalam", it can be surmised that the language of Kerala during this period was more or less in line with Tamil, but this has misled many people to believe incorrectly that Malayalam was itself Tamil during this period and before.
The latest research shows that Malayalam as a separate spoken language in Kerala began showing independent lines of development from its parental tongue Proto-Tamil-Malayalam (which is not modern Tamil), preserving the features of the earliest Dravidian tongue, which only in due course gave birth to the literary form of Tamil, namely Sen Tamil and Malayalam, the spoken form of which is prevalent in Kerala. However, till the 13th century there is no hard evidence to show that the language of Kerala had a literary tradition except in folk songs.
The literary tradition consisted of three early Manipravalam Champus, a few Sandesa Kavyas and innumerable amorous compositions on the courtesans of Kerala, which throb with literary beauty and poetical fancies, combined with a relishing touch of realism about them with regard to the then social conditions. Many prose works in the form of commentaries upon Puranic episodes form the bulk of the classical works in Malayalam.
The Pattu (a sutra devoted to define this pattern is termed a "pattu") school also has major works like the Ramacharitam (12th century), and the Bhagavad Gita (14th century) by a set of poets belonging to one family called the Kannassas. Some of them like Ramacharitam have a close resemblance to the Tamil language during this period. This is to be attributed to the influence of Tamil works on native poets belonging to areas that lie close to the Tamil country.
It was during the 16th and 17th centuries that later Champu kavyas were written. Their specialty was that they contained both Sanskritic and indigenous elements of poetry to an equal degree, and in that manner were unique.
Unnayi Varyar, whose Nalacharitan Attakkatha is popular even today, was the most prominent poet of the 18th century among not only the Kathakali writers, but also among the classical poets of Kerala. He is often referred to as the Kalidasa of Kerala. Although Kathakali is a dance drama and its literary form should more or less be modeled after the drama, there is nothing more in common between an Attakkatha and Sanskrit drama.
That is to say, the principles of dramaturgy to be observed in writing a particular type of Sanskrit drama are completely ignored by an author of Attakkatha. Delineation of a particular "rasa" is an inevitable feature with Sanskrit drama, whereas in an Attakkatha all the predominant "rasas" are given full treatment, and consequently the theme of an Attakkatha often loses its integrity and artistic unity when viewed as a literary work.
Any Attakkatha fulfills its objective if it affords a variety of scenes depicting different types of characters, and each scene would have its own hero with the "rasa" associated with that character. When that hero is portrayed he is given utmost importance, to the utter neglect of the main sentiment ("rasa") of the theme in general. However, the purpose of Attakkatha is not to present a theme with a well-knit emotional plot as its central point, but to present all approved types of characters already set to suit the technique of the art of Kathakali.
The major literary output of the century was in the form of local plays composed for the art of kathakali, the dance dramas of Kerala also known as Attakkatha. It seems the "Gitagovinda" of Jayadeva provided a model for this type of literary composition. The verses in Sanskrit narrate the story and the dialogue is composed in imitation of songs in the "Gitagovinda", set to music in appropriate "ragas" in the classical Karnataka style.
Besides the Raja of Kottarakkara and Unnayi Varyar referred to above, nearly a hundred plays were composed during this century by poets belonging to all categories and subscribing to all standards, such as Irayimman Tampi and Ashvati Raja, to mention just two.
Devotional literature in Malayalam found its heyday during the early phase of this period. Ezhuthachan referred to above gave emphasis to the "Bhakti" cult. The "Jnanappana" by Puntanam Nambudiri is a unique work in the branch of philosophical poetry. Written in simple language, it is a sincere approach to the advaita philosophy of Vedanta.
It took nearly two centuries for a salutary blending of the scholarly Sanskrit and popular styles to bring Malayalam prose to its present form, enriched in its vocabulary by Sanskrit but at the same time flexible, pliable and effective as to popular parlance.
As regards literature, the leading figures were Irayimman Thampi and Vidwan Koithampuran, both poets of the royal court. Their works abound in a beautiful and happy blending of music and poetry. The former is surely the most musical poet of Kerala and his beautiful lullaby commencing with the line "Omana Thinkalkidavo" has earned him an everlasting name. But the prime reason why he is held in such high esteem in Malayalam is the contribution he has made to Kathakali literature by his three works, namely the "Dakshayagam", the "Kichakavadham" and the "Uttara-svayamvaram". The latter's Kathakali work "Ravana Vijayam" has made him immortal in literature.
The first printed book in Kerala was "Doctrina Christam", written by Henrique Henriques in Lingua Malabar Tamul. It was transliterated and translated into Malayalam, and printed by the Portuguese in 1578. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Thunchaththu Ramanujan Ezhuthachan was the first to substitute Grantha-Malayalam script for the Tamil Vatteluttu alphabet. Ezhuthachan, regarded as the father of the modern Malayalam literature, undertook an elaborate translation of the ancient Indian epics "Ramayana" and "Mahabharata" into Malayalam. His "Adhyatma Ramayana" and "Mahabharata" are still read with religious reverence by the Malayalam-speaking Hindu community. Kunchan Nambiar, the founder of "Tullal", was a prolific literary figure of the 18th century.
The British printed Malabar English Dictionary by Graham Shaw in 1779 was still in the form of a Tamil-English Dictionary. The Syrian Christians of Kerala started to learn the Tulu-Grantha Bhasha of Nambudiris under the British Tutelage. Paremmakkal Thoma Kathanar wrote the first Malayalam travelogue called "Varthamanappusthakam" in 1789.
The educational activities of the missionaries belonging to the Basel Mission deserve special mention. Hermann Gundert, (1814–1893), a German missionary and scholar of exceptional linguistic talents, played a distinguishable role in the development of Malayalam literature. His major works are Keralolpathi (1843), Pazhancholmala (1845), Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam (1851), "Paathamala (1860) the first Malayalam school text book", Kerala pazhama (1868), "the first Malayalam dictionary (1872)", Malayalarajyam (1879) – Geography of Kerala, "Rajya Samacharam (1847 June) the first Malayalam news paper", Paschimodayam (1879) – Magazine. He lived in Thalassery for around 20 years. He learned the language from well established local teachers Ooracheri Gurukkanmar from Chokli, a village near Thalassery and consulted them in works. He also translated the Bible into Malayalam.
In 1821, the Church Mission Society (CMS) at Kottayam in association with the Syriac Orthodox Church started a seminary at Kottayam in 1819 and started printing books in Malayalam when Benjamin Bailey, an Anglican priest, made the first Malayalam types. In addition, he contributed to standardizing the prose. Hermann Gundert from Stuttgart, Germany, started the first Malayalam newspaper, "Rajya Samacaram" in 1847 at Talasseri. It was printed at Basel Mission. Malayalam and Sanskrit were increasingly studied by Christians of Kottayam and Pathanamthitta. By the end of the 19th century Malayalam replaced Syriac as language of Liturgy in the Syrian Christian churches.
Thanks to the efforts of kings like Swathi Thirunal and to the assistance given by him to the Church Mission and London Mission Societies, a number of schools were started.
The establishment of the Madras University in 1857 marks an important event in the cultural history of Kerala. It is from here that a generation of scholars well versed in Western literature and with the capacity to enrich their own language by adopting Western literary trends came into being. Prose was the first branch to receive an impetus by its contact with English. Though there was no shortage of prose in Malayalam, it was not along Western lines. It was left to the farsighted policy of the Maharaja of Travancore (1861 to 1880) to start a scheme for the preparation of textbooks for use by schools in the state. Kerala Varma V, a scholar in Sanskrit, Malayalam and English was appointed Chairman of the Committee formed to prepare textbooks. He wrote several books suited for various standards.
The growth of journalism, too, helped in the development of prose. Initiated by missionaries for the purpose of religious propaganda, journalism was taken up by local scholars who started newspapers and journals for literary and political activities.
Vengayil Kunhiraman Nayanar, (1861–1914) from Thalassery was the author of first Malayalam short story, Vasanavikriti. After him innumerable world class literature works by was born in Malayalam.
With his work "Kundalatha" in 1887, Appu Nedungadi marks the origin of prose fiction in Malayalam. Other talented writers were Chandu Menon, the author of "Indulekha", a great social novel, in 1889 and another called "Sarada". Also there was C V Raman Pillai, who wrote the historical novel "Marthandavarma" in 1890 as well as works like Dharmaraja, and Ramaraja Bahadur.
In poetry there were two main trends, one represented by Venmani Nampoodiris (venmani Poets) and the other by Kerala Varma. The latter's poetry was modeled on the old Manipravalam style abounding in Sanskrit words and terms, but it had a charm of its own when adapted to express new ideas in that masterly way characteristic of himself. His translation of Kalidasa's "Abhijnanasakuntalam" in 1882 marks an important event in the history of Malayalam drama and poetry. Also Kerala Varma's "Mayura-sandesam" is a "Sandesakavya" (messenger poem) written after the manner of Kalidasa's "Meghadutam". Though it cannot be compared with the original, it was still one of the most popularly acclaimed poems in Malayalam.
One of the notable features of the early decades of the 20th century was the great interest taken by writers in translating works from Sanskrit and English into Malayalam. Kalidasa's "Meghaduta" and "Kumarasambhava" by A. R. Raja Raja Varma and the "Raghuvamsa" by K. N. Menon must be mentioned. One of the most successful of the later translators was C. S. Subramaniam Potti who set a good model by his translation of the "Durgesanandini" of Bankim Chandra from an English version of it.
The early decades of the 20th century saw the beginning of a period of rapid development of all branches of Malayalam literature. A good number of authors familiar with the latest trends in English literature came forward to contribute to the enrichment of their mother tongue. Their efforts were directed more to the development of prose than poetry.
Several Bengali novels were translated during this period. C. S. S. Potti, mentioned above, also brought out the "Lake of Palms" of R. C. Dutt under the title "Thala Pushkarani", "Kapalakundala" by V. K. Thampi and "Visha Vruksham" by T. C. Kalyani Amma were also translations of novels by Bankimochandra Chatterji.
Among the original novels written at that time only a few are worth mentioning, such as "Bhootha Rayar" by Appan Thampuran, "Keraleswaran" by Raman Nambeesan and "Cheraman Perumal" by K. K. Menon. Although many social novels were produced during this period, only a few are remembered, such as "Snehalatha" by Kannan Menon, "Hemalatha" by T. K. Velu Pillai and "Kambola-balika" by N. K. Krishna Pillai. But by far the most inspiring work of that time was "Aphante Makal" by M. B. Namboodiri, who directed his literary talents towards the abolition of old worn-out customs and manners which had for years been the bane of the community.
Short stories came into being. With the advent of E. V. Krishna Pillai, certain marks of novelty became noticeable in the short story. His "Keleesoudham" proved his capacity to write with considerable emotional appeal.
C. V. Raman Pillai was a pioneer in prose dramas. He had a particular knack for writing dramas in a lighter vein. His "Kurupillakalari" of 1909 marks the appearance of the first original Malayalam prose drama. It is a satirical drama intended to ridicule the Malayali official classes who started imitating Western fashion and etiquette. There were other authors, less well-known, who wrote in this vein.
Under the guidance of A. Balakrishna Pillai, a progressive school of authors appeared in almost all branches of literature, such as the novel, the short story, the drama, and criticism.
Kumaran Asan's celebrated poem, "Veena Poovu" ("The Fallen Flower") depicts in a symbolic manner the tragedy of human life in a moving and thought-provoking manner. Vallathol's "Bandhanasthanaya Aniruddhan", which demonstrates an exceptionally brilliant power of imagination and deep emotional faculties, depicts a situation from the Puranic story of Usha and Aniruddha. Ulloor S. P. Iyer was another veteran who joined the new school. He wrote a series of poems like "Oru Mazhathulli" in which he excelled as a romantic poet.
The three more or less contemporary poets Kumaran Asan, Vallathol Narayana Menon
and Ulloor S. Parameswara Iyer considerably enriched Malayalam poetry. Some of their works reflect social and political movements of that time. Asan wrote about untouchability in Kerala; Ullor's writings reflect his deep devotion and admiration for the great moral and spiritual values, which he believed were the real assets of ancient social life of India. They were known as the trio of Malayalam poetry. After them there were others like K. K. Nair and K. M. Panikkar who contributed to the growth of poetry.
Govindankutty, A. "From Proto-Tamil-Malayalam to West Coast Dialects," 1972. Indo-Iranian Journal, Vol. XIV, Nr. 1/2, pp. 52 - 60. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37299 |
Stevie Case
Stevana "Stevie" Case (born September 7, 1976) is an American businesswoman and executive, former video game designer and former competitive "Quake" player. Under the in-game name KillCreek, she was known as one of the first well-known female esports players, gaining recognition for beating "Quake" designer John Romero in a "Quake" deathmatch. She was the first professional gamer signed to the Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL).
Case was hired at Ion Storm, working on quality assurance and level design. She left the company to manage Monkeystone Games with former Ion Storm employees Romero and Tom Hall. After a stint at Warner Bros. managing the production of mobile games, she began working at various companies in business development and sales.
Case, whose parents were a science teacher and a social worker, grew up in Olathe, Kansas. As a child, she enjoyed playing computer games. Her first experience in gaming was when her father brought home an Apple IIe computer in second grade, where she got to play "Lode Runner" and "Joust".
Case had attended Olathe East High School from 1991 to 1994. When she was still a student at Olathe East, and as the student government president, Case was one of the plaintiffs in the 1995 court case "Case v. Unified School District No. 233". During the trial, students and parents in Olathe successfully challenged the school district's decision to ban "Annie on my Mind" from the school library. She later attended the University of Kansas in hopes of getting into law school.
While at the University of Kansas as a freshman studying political science, Case enjoyed playing "Doom" and "Doom II" with her circle of friends. She became interested in playing "Quake" competitively through her then-boyfriend Tom "Entropy" Kimzey, joining his competitive team, Impulse 9, and competing as KillCreek. According to Case in a live-chat with "Playboy", her in-game name was inspired by the Lawrence, Kansas band of the same name. Impulse 9 competed in the "Quake" competitive league Clanring, and won the T1 competition in 1996.
After a few months of competing and making a name for herself, Case went to Dallas on a pilgrimage to meet some of the developers of her favorite first-person-shooter computer games. During her trip, she got the chance to play a "Quake" deathmatch against the game's designer, John Romero, but was beaten by him in a close game. After Romero put up a web page jokingly insulting her skill at the game, Case publicly demanded a rematch with him. While Case initially struggled in the best-of-three rematch, she rallied back to win the first round 25-19, and went on to ultimately defeat Romero. As punishment, Romero agreed to set up a web page praising Case.
Case was twenty years old at the time she won the rematch in 1997, and beating one of the co-creators of "Quake" at his own game brought her a lot of publicity. She gained a sponsor in computer mouse manufacturer SpaceTec IMC that year, and her victory against Romero received coverage in "Rolling Stone". Angel Munoz, the founder of Cyberathlete Professional League, convinced Case to join his league in July 1997, becoming its first signed professional gamer. She eventually became one of the league's original founders. Case competed in the first all-female "Quake" tournament that year, coming in second behind Kornelia Takacs. Case moved to Texas in the middle of 1997. Describing her move, she said that while she had a passion for political science, she "was not excited about the day-to-day aspects of politics or practicing law."
While playing professionally, Case began looking at game design as a potential career, stating, "I love games, and I love competition -- but having no choice but to play the same game day-in and day-out with all sorts of pressure attached just didn't suit my nature." According to Case, she did freelance game design work from her Dallas home for two years after university, using free design tools that she downloaded. One of the first game levels she designed was for 1999's "". Setting up a small studio called Primitive Earthling Games, she and some friends created a "Quake II" add-on called "Vengeance" and submitted it to WizardWorks. However, it never became available for purchase due to publishing delays. Between 1998 and 2000, Case authored three strategy guide books for Prima Games on the games "Jazz Jackrabbit 2" (1998), "Buck Bumble" (1998), and "Daikatana" (2000). She also contributed to Prima Games' strategy guide on "Quake II".
After applying for the position, Case was hired at Ion Storm in the summer of 1997 as a video game tester. In November 1998, Romero offered her a job in level design when that position became available, which she accepted. Case helped work on the levels of "Daikatana" (2000), as well as "Anachronox". It was during this time period that Case began to date Romero. According to David Kushner's "Masters of Doom", Case "radically reinvented herself" by losing weight, bleaching her hair, and undergoing breast augmentation surgery. Case received further press coverage, appearing on the March 2000 cover of "PC Accelerator", and being featured as one of the "Next Game Gods" in the November 2000 issue of "PC Gamer". She was approached by "Playboy" to appear in a nude pictorial, based on an interview she did in the "Los Angeles Times". The pictorial was released online in May 2000. When asked about how she changed after moving to Dallas and making video games a career, Case responded:Making the leap to games helped me to realize that the only way to be truly happy is to live by your own rules, not limited by outside expectations. I love my job, found a wonderful boyfriend and truly found myself through games.Case was still involved in the Cyberathlete Professional League in some capacity. She eventually transitioned into being CPL's "Master of Ceremonies", and in 1999, Case joined the CPL's board of directors.
Case left Ion Storm in January 2001 to join Romero at his new company, Monkeystone Games, which was created in August 2001. Monkeystone was formed out of a desire to move away from creating PC games due to their budget and lengthy development cycles, allowing Romero to explore the concept of mobile games that had first interested him in 1999. Case worked as a producer for Monkeystone's first game, "Hyperspace Delivery Boy!", and also created the music and sound effects. She also was credited on titles like Monkeystone's "Red Faction" port for the N-Gage. After leaving Monkeystone Games, Case became a senior project manager for Warner Bros. Online's mobile group.
According to Case, she decided at this point to slowly transition out of working in the game development industry, stating in an interview: There was a ton of harassment and hate and sexism and abuse. People would send me hate email all the time. ... The benefit of connecting with people was so drowned out by how bad it felt to be in the spotlight. Case recalled receiving the opportunity to leave game development when one of her contacts approached her about a potential junior sales position at his workplace. After leaving Warner Bros., Case was employed at Tira Wireless in sales and business development. Afterwards, she held a position with Spleak Media Network, where she was a director of product management.
In September 2008, she was vice president of business development and sales for fatfoogoo, an online commerce company. Case also served as Senior Director of Business Development at Live Gamer, and joined PlaySpan in 2010 as vice president of sales. PlaySpan was acquired by Visa in 2011.
On March 1, 2010, NewWorld, the former parent company of the CPL, announced that it had signed a two-year agreement with Stevie Case for the production of a new podcast show called "Stevie FTW". According to the website's RSS feed, the last podcast was uploaded on March 11, 2011, and the last social media update was on the same date.
After working as the vice president of growth at San Francisco-based startup Layer, according to her LinkedIn profile, she is now currently Head of Enterprise West Sales at Twilio. She is also listed as a participant in SheEO, a nonprofit supporting the funding of female entrepreneurs, as well as the female investor group 37 Angels.
Case dated "Quake" player Tom "Entropy" Kimzey, who was also a University of Kansas student and a member of Impulse 9. According to the June 1997 issue of "Spin", they were involved romantically until the spring of 1997. Case had also dated game developer Tom Mustaine.
Soon after defeating "Quake" designer John Romero in a "Quake" deathmatch, she and Romero started dating. Case and Romero moved in together in 1999. Their relationship ended in the spring of 2003; Case went on to marry a director of product development at THQ, and had a child with him. In a 2016 interview, Case stated that she had been a single parent with full custody of her child for eight years. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37301 |
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition of philosophy. He is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism.
In "Being and Time" (1927), Heidegger addresses the meaning of "being" by considering the question, "what is common to all entities that makes them entities?" Heidegger approaches this question through an analysis of "Dasein", his term for the specific type of being that humans possess, and which he associates closely with his concept of "being-in-the-world" ("In-der-Welt-sein"). This conception of the human is in contrast with that of Rationalist thinkers like René Descartes, who had understood human existence most basically as thinking, as in "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am").
Heidegger's later work includes criticism of the view, common in the Western tradition, that all of nature is a "standing reserve" on call for human purposes.
Heidegger was a member and supporter of the Nazi Party. There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism.
Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, Baden-Württemberg, the son of Johanna (Kempf) and Friedrich Heidegger. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of the village church that adhered to the First Vatican Council of 1870, which was observed mainly by the poorer class of Meßkirch. His family could not afford to send him to university, so he entered a Jesuit seminary, though he was turned away within weeks because of the health requirement and what the director and doctor of the seminary described as a psychosomatic heart condition. Heidegger was short and sinewy, with dark piercing eyes. He enjoyed outdoor pursuits, being especially proficient at skiing.
Studying theology at the University of Freiburg while supported by the church, later he switched his field of study to philosophy. Heidegger completed his doctoral thesis on psychologism in 1914, influenced by Neo-Thomism and Neo-Kantianism, directed by Arthur Schneider. In 1916, he finished his "venia legendi" with a habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus directed by Heinrich Rickert and influenced by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology.
In the two years following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I; serving "the last ten months of the war" with "the last three of those in a meteorological unit on the western front".
In 1923, Heidegger was elected to an extraordinary Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Nicolai Hartmann, and Paul Natorp. Heidegger's students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Günther Anders, and Hans Jonas. Following on from Aristotle, he began to develop in his lectures the main theme of his philosophy: the question of the sense of being. He extended the concept of subject to the dimension of history and concrete existence, which he found prefigured in such Christian thinkers as Saint Paul, Augustine of Hippo, Luther, and Kierkegaard. He also read the works of Wilhelm Dilthey, Husserl, Max Scheler, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
In 1927, Heidegger published his main work "Sein und Zeit" ("Being and Time"). When Husserl retired as Professor of Philosophy in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at Freiburg im Breisgau for the rest of his life, declining a number of later offers, including one from Humboldt University of Berlin. His students at Freiburg included Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Charles Malik, Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Nolte, and Karl Rahner. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928, as did Jan Patočka in 1933; Patočka in particular was deeply influenced by him.
Heidegger was elected rector of the University on 21 April 1933, and joined the National Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party on 1 May. During his time as rector of Freiburg, Heidegger was not only a member of the Nazi Party, but an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis. There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism. He wanted to position himself as the philosopher of the Party, but the highly abstract nature of his work and the opposition of Alfred Rosenberg, who himself aspired to act in that position, limited Heidegger's role. His resignation from the rectorate owed more to his frustration as an administrator than to any principled opposition to the Nazis, according to historians. In his inaugural address as rector on 27 May he expressed his support of a German revolution, and in an article and a speech to the students from the same year he also supported Adolf Hitler. In November 1933, Heidegger signed the "Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State".
Heidegger resigned the rectorate in April 1934, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until 1945 even though (as Julian Young asserts) the Nazis eventually prevented him from publishing. In the autumn of 1944, Heidegger was drafted into the "Volkssturm", assigned to dig anti-tank ditches along the Rhine.
Heidegger's "Black Notebooks", written between 1931 and 1941 and first published in 2014, contain several expressions of anti-semitic sentiments, which have led to a re-evaluation of Heidegger's relation to Nazism. Having analysed the Black Notebooks, Donatella di Cesare asserts in her book "Heidegger and the Jews" that "metaphysical anti-Semitism" and antipathy toward Jews were central to Heidegger's philosophical work. Heidegger, according to di Cesare, considered Jewish people to be agents of modernity disfiguring the spirit of Western civilization; he held the Holocaust to be the logical result of the Jewish acceleration of technology, and thus blamed the Jewish genocide on its victims themselves.
In late 1946, as France engaged in "épuration légale" in its Occupation zone, the French military authorities determined that Heidegger should be blocked from teaching or participating in any university activities because of his association with the Nazi Party. The denazification procedures against Heidegger continued until March 1949 when he was finally pronounced a "Mitläufer" (the second lowest of five categories of "incrimination" by association with the Nazi regime). No punitive measures against him were proposed. This opened the way for his readmission to teaching at Freiburg University in the winter semester of 1950–51. He was granted emeritus status and then taught regularly from 1951 until 1958, and by invitation until 1967.
Heidegger married Elfride Petri on 21 March 1917, in a Catholic ceremony officiated by his friend , and a week later in a Protestant ceremony in the presence of her parents. Their first son, Jörg, was born in 1919. Elfride then gave birth to in August 1920. Heidegger knew that he was not Hermann's biological father but raised him as his son. Hermann's biological father, who became godfather to his son, was family friend and doctor Friedel Caesar. Hermann was told of this at the age of 14; Hermann became a historian and would later serve as the executor of Heidegger's will. Hermann Heidegger died on 13 January 2020.
Heidegger had a long romantic relationship with Hannah Arendt and an affair (over many decades) with Elisabeth Blochmann, both students of his. Arendt was Jewish, and Blochmann had one Jewish parent, making them subject to severe persecution by the Nazi authorities. He helped Blochmann emigrate from Germany before the start of World War II and resumed contact with both of them after the war. Heidegger's letters to his wife contain information about several other affairs of his.
Heidegger spent much time at his vacation home at Todtnauberg, on the edge of the Black Forest. He considered the seclusion provided by the forest to be the best environment in which to engage in philosophical thought.
A few months before his death, he met with Bernhard Welte, a Catholic priest, Freiburg University professor and earlier correspondent. The exact nature of their conversation is not known, but what is known is that it included talk of Heidegger's relationship to the Catholic Church and subsequent Christian burial at which the priest officiated. Heidegger died on 26 May 1976, and was buried in the Meßkirch cemetery.
Heidegger thought the presence of things for us is not their being, but in their utility. For instance, when a hammer is used to knock in a nail, we do not attend to the hammer in itself but are aware of it only as a "ready-to-hand" extension of ourselves to achieve a future result: the knocking in of the nail. The past (the existing or "given" hammer) is reduced to a future usefulness (the driven nail). "Zuhanden" (readiness-to-hand), in which the distinction between subject and object is blurred, is one of three modes of Being that Heidegger identified – the others being "Vorhanden" (presence-at-hand), for things that are there but that we don't interact with, and "Dasein" (human existence).
Heidegger claimed philosophy and science since ancient Greece had reduced things to their presence, which was a superficial way of understanding them. One crucial source of this insight was Heidegger's reading of Franz Brentano's treatise on Aristotle's manifold uses of the word "being", a work which provoked Heidegger to ask what kind of unity underlies this multiplicity of uses. Heidegger opens his magnum opus, "Being and Time", with a citation from Plato's "Sophist" indicating that Western philosophy has neglected Being because it was considered too obvious to question. Heidegger's intuition about the question of Being is thus a historical argument, which in his later work becomes his concern with the "history of Being", that is, the history of the forgetting of Being, which according to Heidegger requires that philosophy retrace its footsteps through a productive destruction of the history of philosophy.
The second intuition animating Heidegger's philosophy derives from the influence of Husserl, a philosopher largely uninterested in questions of philosophical history. Rather, Husserl argued that all that philosophy could and should be is a description of experience (hence the phenomenological slogan, "to the things themselves"). But for Heidegger, this meant understanding that experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being. Thus Husserl's understanding that all consciousness is "intentional" (in the sense that it is always intended "toward" something, and is always "about" something) is transformed in Heidegger's philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in Sorge, which means the anxiety or worrifulness arising out of concern about the future—referring to the inner state of being as well as external causality of that being. Heidegger also employs two cognates of Sorge: Besorgen, the provision of something for oneself or someone else; and Fursorge, the solicitude or caring for another in need of help. This thicket of meaning around care/concern (Sorge) is the basis of Heidegger's "existential analytic", as he develops it in "Being and Time". Heidegger argues that describing experience properly entails finding the being for whom such a description might matter. Heidegger thus conducts his description of experience with reference to ""Dasein"", the being for whom Being is a question. In everyday German, ""Dasein"" means "existence." It is composed of ""Da"" (here/there) and ""Sein"" (being). "Dasein" is transformed in Heidegger's usage from its everyday meaning to refer, rather, to that being that is "there" in its world, that is, the being for whom being matters. In later publications Heidegger writes the term in hyphenated form as "Da-sein", thus emphasizing the distance from the word's ordinary usage.
In "Being and Time", Heidegger criticized the abstract and metaphysical character of traditional ways of grasping human existence as rational animal, person, man, soul, spirit, or subject. "Dasein", then, is not intended as a way of conducting a philosophical anthropology, but is rather understood by Heidegger to be the condition of possibility for anything "like" a philosophical anthropology. "Dasein", according to Heidegger, "is" care. The world confronts "Dasein" with possibilities. It is not completely deterministic; "Dasein" has choices. But "Dasein" cannot choose not to face the possibilities presented by the world, including the inevitability of its own mortality. Heidegger in his existential analytic refers to this condition as being "thrown into the world", or "thrownness" ("Geworfenheit"). The need for "Dasein" to assume these possibilities, that is, the need to be responsible for one's own existence, is the basis of Heidegger's notions of authenticity and resoluteness—that is, of those specific possibilities for "Dasein" which depend on escaping the "vulgar" temporality of calculation and of public life.
The marriage of these two observations depends on the fact that each of them is essentially concerned with time. That "Dasein" is thrown into an already existing world and thus into its mortal possibilities does not only mean that "Dasein" is an essentially temporal being; it also implies that the description of "Dasein" can only be carried out in terms inherited from the Western tradition itself. For Heidegger, unlike for Husserl, philosophical terminology could not be divorced from the history of the use of that terminology, and thus genuine philosophy could not avoid confronting questions of language and meaning. The existential analytic of "Being and Time" was thus always only a first step in Heidegger's philosophy, to be followed by the "dismantling" ("Destruktion") of the history of philosophy, that is, a transformation of its language and meaning, that would have made of the existential analytic only a kind of "limit case" (in the sense in which special relativity is a limit case of general relativity).
That Heidegger did not write this second part of "Being and Time", and that the existential analytic was left behind in the course of Heidegger's subsequent writings on the history of being, might be interpreted as a failure to conjugate his account of "individual" experience with his account of the vicissitudes of the "collective" human adventure that he understands the Western philosophical tradition to be. And this would in turn raise the question of whether this failure is due to a flaw in Heidegger's account of temporality, that is, of whether Heidegger was correct to oppose vulgar and authentic time. There are also recent critiques in this regard that were directed at Heidegger's focus on time instead of primarily thinking about being in relation to place and space, and to the notion of dwelling, with connections too to architectural theory as impacted by phenomenology.
Heidegger's first academic book, "Being and Time" (German title: "Sein und Zeit"), was published in 1927. He had been under pressure to publish in order to qualify for Husserl's chair at the University of Freiburg; he dedicated the book to Husserl and the success of the work ensured his appointment to the post.
In "Being and Time", Heidegger investigates the question of being by asking about the being for whom being is a question. Heidegger names this being "Dasein" (see above), and he pursues his investigation through themes such as mortality, care, anxiety, temporality, and historicity. It was Heidegger's original intention to write a second half of the book, consisting of a ""Destruktion"" of the history of philosophy—that is, the transformation of philosophy by re-tracing its history—but he never completed this project.
Heidegger's later works, beginning by 1930 and largely established by the early 1940s, seem to many commentators (e.g. William J. Richardson) at least to reflect a shift of focus, if not indeed a major change in his philosophical outlook, which is known as "the turn" ("die Kehre"). One way this has been understood is as a shift from "dwelling" in the world ("Wohnen") to a fixation on more superficial activities ("doing"), typified by a "will to power" kind of dominion over the world as a mere object. This ontological "turn" can be seen as a shift in priority from "Being and Time" to "Time and Being"—namely, from dwelling (being) in the world to doing (time) in the world. (This aspect had a particular influence on architectural theorists in their focus on place and space in thinking about dwelling. Such is the case with the work of Christian Norberg-Schulz and the philosopher-architect Nader El-Bizri.) However, others feel that this is to overstate the difference. For example, in 2011 Mark Wrathall argued that Heidegger pursued and refined the central notion of unconcealment throughout his life as a philosopher. Its importance and continuity in his thinking, Wrathall states, shows that he did not have a "turn". A reviewer of Wrathall's book stated: "An ontology of unconcealment [...] means a description and analysis of the broad contexts in which entities show up as meaningful to us, as well as the conditions under which such contexts, or worlds, emerge and fade."
Heidegger focuses less on the way in which the structures of being are revealed in everyday behavior, and more on the way in which behavior itself depends on a prior "openness to being." The essence of being human is the maintenance of this openness. This ‘openness to being' can be seen as a basic ability of humans. We experience the world of beings as containing things in which we have an interest or concern. Heidegger contrasts this openness to the "will to power" of the modern human subject, which is one way of forgetting this originary openness.
Heidegger understands the commencement of the history of Western philosophy as a brief period of authentic openness to being, during the time of the pre-Socratics, especially Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. This was followed, according to Heidegger, by a long period increasingly dominated by the forgetting of this initial openness, a period which commences with Plato, and which occurs in different ways throughout Western history.
Two recurring themes of Heidegger's later writings are poetry and technology. Heidegger sees poetry and technology as two contrasting ways of "revealing." Poetry reveals being in the way in which, if it is genuine poetry, it commences something new. Technology, on the other hand, when it gets going, inaugurates the world of the dichotomous subject and object, which modern philosophy commencing with Descartes also reveals. But with "modern" technology a new stage of revealing is reached, in which the subject-object distinction is overcome even in the "material" world of technology. The essence of modern technology is the conversion of the whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated "standing reserve" ("Bestand") of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put it. Heidegger described the essence of modern technology as "Gestell", or "enframing." He does not unequivocally condemn technology: while he acknowledges that modern technology contains grave dangers, Heidegger nevertheless also argues that it may constitute a chance for human beings to enter a new epoch in their relation to being. Despite this, some commentators have insisted that an agrarian nostalgia permeates his later work.
In a 1950 lecture he formulated the famous saying "Language speaks", later published in the 1959 essays collection "Unterwegs zur Sprache", and collected in the 1971 English book "Poetry, Language, Thought".
Heidegger's later works include "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit" ("On the Essence of Truth", 1930), "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" ("The Origin of the Work of Art", 1935), "Einführung in die Metaphysik" ("Introduction to Metaphysics", 1935), "Bauen Wohnen Denken" ("Building Dwelling Thinking", 1951), and "Die Frage nach der Technik" ("The Question Concerning Technology", 1954) and "Was heisst Denken?" ("What Is Called Thinking?" 1954). Also "Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)" ("Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)"), composed in the years 1936–38 but not published until 1989, on the centennial of Heidegger's birth.
It has been postulated that Heidegger believed the Western world to be on a trajectory headed for total war, and on the brink of profound nihilism (the rejection of all religious and moral principles), which would be the purest and highest revelation of Being itself, offering a horrifying crossroads of either salvation or the end of metaphysics and modernity; rendering the West a wasteland populated by tool-using brutes, characterized by an unprecedented ignorance and barbarism in which everything is permitted.
He thought the latter possibility would degenerate mankind generally into scientists, workers and brutes, living under the last mantle of one of three ideologies, Americanism, Marxism or Nazism (which he deemed metaphysically identical, as avatars of subjectivity and institutionalized nihilism), and an unfettered totalitarian world technology.
Supposedly, this epoch would be ironically celebrated, as the most enlightened and glorious in human history.
He envisaged this abyss to be the greatest event in the West's history because it would enable Humanity to comprehend Being more profoundly and primordially than the Pre-Socratics.
Recent scholarship has shown that Heidegger was substantially influenced by St. Augustine of Hippo and that "Being and Time" would not have been possible without the influence of Augustine's thought. Augustine's "Confessions" was particularly influential in shaping Heidegger's thought.
Augustine viewed time as relative and subjective, and that being and time were bound up together. Heidegger adopted similar views, e.g. that time was the horizon of Being: ' ...time temporalizes itself only as long as there are human beings.'
Heidegger was influenced at an early age by Aristotle, mediated through Catholic theology, medieval philosophy and Franz Brentano. Aristotle's ethical, logical, and metaphysical works were crucial to the development of his thought in the crucial period of the 1920s. Although he later worked less on Aristotle, Heidegger recommended postponing reading Nietzsche, and to "first study Aristotle for ten to fifteen years". In reading Aristotle, Heidegger increasingly contested the traditional Latin translation and scholastic interpretation of his thought. Particularly important (not least for its influence upon others, both in their interpretation of Aristotle and in rehabilitating a neo-Aristotelian "practical philosophy") was his radical reinterpretation of Book Six of Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" and several books of the "Metaphysics". Both informed the argument of "Being and Time". Heidegger's thought is original in being an authentic retrieval of the past, a repetition of the possibilities handed down by the tradition.
The idea of asking about being may be traced back via Aristotle to Parmenides. Heidegger claimed to have revived the question of being, the question having been largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Descartes, a forgetfulness extending to the Age of Enlightenment and then to modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval of this question, Heidegger spent considerable time reflecting on ancient Greek thought, in particular on Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander, as well as on the tragic playwright Sophocles.
Heidegger's very early project of developing a "hermeneutics of factical life" and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology was influenced in part by his reading of the works of Wilhelm Dilthey.
Of the influence of Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes the following: "As far as Dilthey is concerned, we all know today what I have known for a long time: namely that it is a mistake to conclude on the basis of the citation in "Being and Time" that Dilthey was especially influential in the development of Heidegger's thinking in the mid-1920s. This dating of the influence is much too late." He adds that by the fall of 1923 it was plain that Heidegger felt "the clear superiority of Count Yorck over the famous scholar, Dilthey." Gadamer nevertheless makes clear that Dilthey's influence was important in helping the youthful Heidegger "in distancing himself from the systematic ideal of Neo-Kantianism, as Heidegger acknowledges in "Being and Time"." Based on Heidegger's earliest lecture courses, in which Heidegger already engages Dilthey's thought prior to the period Gadamer mentions as "too late", scholars as diverse as Theodore Kisiel and David Farrell Krell have argued for the importance of Diltheyan concepts and strategies in the formation of Heidegger's thought.
Even though Gadamer's interpretation of Heidegger has been questioned, there is little doubt that Heidegger seized upon Dilthey's concept of hermeneutics. Heidegger's novel ideas about ontology required a "gestalt" formation, not merely a series of logical arguments, in order to demonstrate his fundamentally new paradigm of thinking, and the hermeneutic circle offered a new and powerful tool for the articulation and realization of these ideas.
There is disagreement over the degree of influence that Edmund Husserl had on Heidegger's philosophical development, just as there is disagreement about the degree to which Heidegger's philosophy is grounded in phenomenology. These disagreements centre upon how much of Husserlian phenomenology is contested by Heidegger, and how much this phenomenology in fact informs Heidegger's own understanding.
On the relation between the two figures, Gadamer wrote: "When asked about phenomenology, Husserl was quite right to answer as he used to in the period directly after World War I: 'Phenomenology, that is me and Heidegger'." Nevertheless, Gadamer noted that Heidegger was no patient collaborator with Husserl, and that Heidegger's "rash ascent to the top, the incomparable fascination he aroused, and his stormy temperament surely must have made Husserl, the patient one, as suspicious of Heidegger as he always had been of Max Scheler's volcanic fire."
Robert J. Dostal understood the importance of Husserl to be profound:
Heidegger himself, who is supposed to have broken with Husserl, bases his hermeneutics on an account of time that not only parallels Husserl's account in many ways but seems to have been arrived at through the same phenomenological method as was used by Husserl... The differences between Husserl and Heidegger are significant, but if we do not see how much it is the case that Husserlian phenomenology provides the framework for Heidegger's approach, we will not be able to appreciate the exact nature of Heidegger's project in "Being and Time" or why he left it unfinished.
Daniel O. Dahlstrom saw Heidegger's presentation of his work as a departure from Husserl as unfairly misrepresenting Husserl's own work. Dahlstrom concluded his consideration of the relation between Heidegger and Husserl as follows:
Heidegger's silence about the stark similarities between his account of temporality and Husserl's investigation of internal time-consciousness contributes to a "misrepresentation" of Husserl's account of intentionality. Contrary to the criticisms Heidegger advances in his lectures, intentionality (and, by implication, the meaning of 'to be') in the final analysis is not construed by Husserl as sheer presence (be it the presence of a fact or object, act or event). Yet for all its "dangerous closeness" to what Heidegger understands by temporality, Husserl's account of internal time-consciousness does differ fundamentally. In Husserl's account the structure of protentions is accorded neither the finitude nor the primacy that Heidegger claims are central to the original future of ecstatic-horizonal temporality.
Heideggerians regarded Søren Kierkegaard as, by far, the greatest philosophical contributor to Heidegger's own existentialist concepts. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety ("Angst") and mortality draw on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which the latter lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world.
Patricia J. Huntington claims that Heidegger's book "Being and Time" continued Kierkegaard's existential goal. Nevertheless, she argues that Heidegger began to distance himself from any existentialist thought.
Calvin Shrag argues Heidegger's early relationship with Kierkegaard as:
Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Nietzsche were both important influences on Heidegger, and many of his lecture courses were devoted to one or the other, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published under the title "The Will to Power", rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger read "The Will to Power" as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.
The fundamental differences between the philosophical delineations of Heidegger and Adorno can be found in their contrasting views of Hölderlin's poetical works and to a lesser extent in their divergent views on German romanticism in general. For Heidegger, Hölderlin expressed the intuitive necessity of metaphysical concepts as a guide for ethical paradigms, devoid of reflection. Adorno, on the other hand, pointed to the dialectic reflection of historical situations, the sociological interpretations of future outcomes, and therefore opposed the liberating principles of intuitive concepts because they negatively surpassed the perception of societal realities. Nevertheless, it was Heidegger's rationalization and later work on Hölderlin's poems as well as on Parmenides ("For to be aware and to be are the same," DK B 3) and his consistent understanding of Nietzsche's thought that formed the foundation of postmodern existentialism.
This is also the case for the lecture courses devoted to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, which became an increasingly central focus of Heidegger's work and thought. Heidegger grants to Hölderlin a singular place within the history of being and the history of Germany, as a herald whose thought is yet to be "heard" in Germany or the West. Many of Heidegger's works from the 1930s onwards include meditations on lines from Hölderlin's poetry, and several of the lecture courses are devoted to the reading of a single poem (see, for example, "Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"").
Some writers on Heidegger's work see possibilities within it for dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy, particularly East Asian thinking. Despite perceived differences between Eastern and Western philosophy, some of Heidegger's later work, particularly "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer", does show an interest in initiating such a dialogue. Heidegger himself had contact with a number of leading Japanese intellectuals, including members of the Kyoto School, notably Hajime Tanabe and Kuki Shūzō. Reinhard May refers to Chang Chung-Yuan who stated "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands Tao, but has intuitively experienced the essence of it as well." May sees great influence of Taoism and Japanese scholars in Heidegger's work, although this influence is not acknowledged by the author. He asserts: "The investigation concludes that Heidegger’s work was significantly influenced by East Asian sources. It can be shown, moreover, that in particular instances Heidegger even appropriated wholesale and almost verbatim major ideas from the German translations of Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics. This clandestine textual appropriation of non-Western spirituality, the extent of which has gone undiscovered for so long, seems quite unparalleled, with far-reaching implications for our future interpretation of Heidegger’s work."
Heidegger has been influential in research on the relationship between Western philosophy and the history of ideas in Islam, particularly for some scholars interested in Arabic philosophical medieval sources. These include the Lebanese philosopher and architectural theorist Nader El-Bizri, who, as well as focusing on the critique of the history of metaphysics (as an 'Arab Heideggerian'), also moves towards rethinking the notion of "dwelling" in the epoch of the modern unfolding of the essence of technology and "Gestell", and realizing what can be described as a "confluence of Western and Eastern thought" as well. El-Bizri has also taken a new direction in his engagement in 'Heidegger Studies' by way of probing the Arab/Levantine Anglophone reception of "Sein und Zeit" in 1937 as set in the Harvard doctoral thesis of the 20th century Lebanese thinker and diplomat Charles Malik.
It is also claimed that the works of counter-enlightenment philosophers such as Heidegger, along with Friedrich Nietzsche and Joseph de Maistre, influenced Iran's Shia Islamist scholars, notably Ali Shariati. A clearer impact of Heidegger in Iran is associated with thinkers such as Reza Davari Ardakani, Ahmad Fardid, and Fardid's student Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, who have been closely associated with the unfolding of philosophical thinking in a Muslim modern theological legacy in Iran. This included the construction of the ideological foundations of the Iranian Revolution and modern political Islam in its connections with theology.
Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg on April 21, 1933, and assumed the position the following day. On May 1, he joined the Nazi Party.
On 27 May 1933, Heidegger delivered his inaugural address, the "Rektoratsrede" ("The Self-assertion of the German University"), in a hall decorated with swastikas, with members of the Sturmabteilung and prominent Nazi Party officials present.
His tenure as rector was fraught with difficulties from the outset. Some Nazi education officials viewed him as a rival, while others saw his efforts as comical. Some of Heidegger's fellow Nazis also ridiculed his philosophical writings as gibberish. He finally offered his resignation as rector on 23 April 1934, and it was accepted on 27 April. Heidegger remained a member of both the academic faculty and of the Nazi Party until the end of the war.
Philosophical historian Hans Sluga wrote:
Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism.
In 1945, Heidegger wrote of his term as rector, giving the writing to his son Hermann; it was published in 1983:
The rectorate was an attempt to see something in the movement that had come to power, beyond all its failings and crudeness, that was much more far-reaching and that could perhaps one day bring a concentration on the Germans' Western historical essence. It will in no way be denied that at the time I believed in such possibilities and for that reason renounced the actual vocation of thinking in favor of being effective in an official capacity. In no way will what was caused by my own inadequacy in office be played down. But these points of view do not capture what is essential and what moved me to accept the rectorate.
Beginning in 1917, German-Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl championed Heidegger's work, and helped him secure the retiring Husserl's chair in Philosophy at the University of Freiburg.
On 6 April 1933, the Reichskommissar of Baden Province, Robert Wagner, suspended all Jewish government employees, including present and retired faculty at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger's predecessor as Rector formally notified Husserl of his "enforced leave of absence" on 14 April 1933.
Heidegger became Rector of the University of Freiburg on 22 April 1933. The following week the national Reich law of 28 April 1933 replaced Reichskommissar Wagner's decree. The Reich law required the firing of Jewish professors from German universities, including those, such as Husserl, who had converted to Christianity. The termination of the retired professor Husserl's academic privileges thus did not involve any specific action on Heidegger's part.
Heidegger had by then broken off contact with Husserl, other than through intermediaries. Heidegger later claimed that his relationship with Husserl had already become strained after Husserl publicly "settled accounts" with Heidegger and Max Scheler in the early 1930s.
Heidegger did not attend his former mentor's cremation in 1938. In 1941, under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, Heidegger agreed to remove the dedication to Husserl from "Being and Time" (restored in post-war editions).
Heidegger's behavior towards Husserl has evoked controversy. Arendt initially suggested that Heidegger's behavior precipitated Husserl's death. She called Heidegger a "potential murderer." However, she later recanted her accusation.
In 1939, only a year after Husserl's death, Heidegger wrote in his "Black Notebooks": "The more original and inceptive the coming decisions and questions become, the more inaccessible will they remain to this [Jewish] 'race'. Thus, Husserl’s step toward phenomenological observation, and his rejection of psychological explanations and historiological reckoning of opinions, are of enduring importance—yet it never reaches into the domains of essential decisions", seeming to imply that Husserl's philosophy was limited purely because he was Jewish.
After the failure of Heidegger's rectorship, he withdrew from most political activity, but remained a member of the Nazi Party.
In a 1935 lecture, later published in 1953 as part of the book "Introduction to Metaphysics", Heidegger refers to the "inner truth and greatness" of the National Socialist movement ("die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegung"), but he then adds a qualifying statement in parentheses: "namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity" ("nämlich die Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen"). However, it subsequently transpired that this qualification had not been made during the original lecture, although Heidegger claimed that it had been. This has led scholars to argue that Heidegger still supported the Nazi party in 1935 but that he did not want to admit this after the war, and so he attempted to silently correct his earlier statement.
In private notes written in 1939, Heidegger took a strongly critical view of Hitler's ideology; however, in public lectures, he seems to have continued to make ambiguous comments which, if they expressed criticism of the regime, did so only in the context of praising its ideals. For instance, in a 1942 lecture, published posthumously, Heidegger said of recent German classics scholarship:
In the majority of "research results," the Greeks appear as pure National Socialists. This overenthusiasm on the part of academics seems not even to notice that with such "results" it does National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not that it needs this anyhow.
An important witness to Heidegger's continued allegiance to National Socialism during the post-rectorship period is his former student Karl Löwith, who met Heidegger in 1936 while Heidegger was visiting Rome. In an account set down in 1940 (though not intended for publication), Löwith recalled that Heidegger wore a swastika pin to their meeting, though Heidegger knew that Löwith was Jewish. Löwith also recalled that Heidegger "left no doubt about his faith in Hitler", and stated that his support for National Socialism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy.
Heidegger rejected the "biologically grounded racism" of the Nazis, replacing it with linguistic-historical heritage.
After the end of World War II, Heidegger was summoned to appear at a denazification hearing. Heidegger's former lover Arendt spoke on his behalf at this hearing, while Jaspers spoke against him. He was charged on four counts, dismissed from the university and declared a "follower" ("Mitläufer") of Nazism. Heidegger was forbidden to teach between 1945 and 1951. One consequence of this teaching ban was that Heidegger began to engage far more in the French philosophical scene.
In his postwar thinking, Heidegger distanced himself from Nazism, but his critical comments about Nazism seem "scandalous" to some since they tend to equate the Nazi war atrocities with other inhumane practices related to rationalisation and industrialisation, including the treatment of animals by factory farming. For instance in a lecture delivered at Bremen in 1949, Heidegger said: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."
In 1967 Heidegger met with the Jewish poet Paul Celan, a concentration camp survivor. Celan visited Heidegger at his country retreat and wrote an enigmatic poem about the meeting, which some interpret as Celan's wish for Heidegger to apologize for his behavior during the Nazi era.
On 23 September 1966, Heidegger was interviewed by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff for "Der Spiegel" magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously. (It was published five days after his death, on 31 May 1976.) In the interview, Heidegger defended his entanglement with National Socialism in two ways: first, he argued that there was no alternative, saying that he was trying to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and thus had to compromise with the Nazi administration. Second, he admitted that he saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch") which might help to find a "new national and social approach," but said that he changed his mind about this in 1934, largely prompted by the violence of the Night of the Long Knives.
In his interview Heidegger defended as double-speak his 1935 lecture describing the "inner truth and greatness of this movement." He affirmed that Nazi informants who observed his lectures would understand that by "movement" he meant National Socialism. However, Heidegger asserted that his dedicated students would know this statement was no eulogy for the Nazi Party. Rather, he meant it as he expressed it in the parenthetical clarification later added to "Introduction to Metaphysics" (1953), namely, "the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity."
The eyewitness account of Löwith from 1940 contradicts the account given in the "Der Spiegel" interview in two ways: that he did not make any decisive break with National Socialism in 1934, and that Heidegger was willing to entertain more profound relations between his philosophy and political involvement. The "Der Spiegel" interviewers did not bring up Heidegger's 1949 quotation comparing the industrialization of agriculture to the extermination camps. In fact, the interviewers were not in possession of much of the evidence now known for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies. "Der Spiegel" journalist Georg Wolff had been an SS-Hauptsturmführer with the Sicherheitsdienst, stationed in Oslo during World War II, and had been writing articles with antisemitic and racist overtones in "Der Spiegel" since war's end.
Heidegger is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century while remaining one of the most controversial." His ideas have penetrated into many areas, but in France there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting his work which in itself resulted in deepening the impact of his thought in Continental Philosophy. He influenced Jean Beaufret, , Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Luc Marion, and others.
Heidegger's influence on French philosophy began in the 1930s, when "Being and Time", "What is Metaphysics?" and other Heideggerian texts were read by Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists, as well as by thinkers such as Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas. Because Heidegger's discussion of ontology (the study of being) is rooted in an analysis of the mode of existence of individual human beings ("Da-sein", or there-being), his work has often been associated with existentialism. The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" (1943) is marked, but Heidegger felt that Sartre had misread his work, as he argued in later texts such as the "Letter on Humanism". In that text, intended for a French audience, Heidegger explained this misreading in the following terms:
Sartre's key proposition about the priority of "existentia" over "essentia" [that is, Sartre's statement that "existence precedes essence"] does, however, justify using the name "existentialism" as an appropriate title for a philosophy of this sort. But the basic tenet of "existentialism" has nothing at all in common with the statement from "Being and Time" [that "the 'essence' of Dasein lies in its existence"]—apart from the fact that in "Being and Time" no statement about the relation of "essentia" and "existentia" can yet be expressed, since there it is still a question of preparing something precursory.
"Letter on 'Humanism'" is often seen as a direct response to Sartre's 1945 lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism". Aside from merely disputing readings of his own work, however, in the "Letter on Humanism" Heidegger asserts that "Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one." Heidegger's largest issue with Sartre's existential humanism is that, while it does make a humanistic 'move' in privileging existence over essence, "the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement." From this point onward in his thought, Heidegger attempted to think beyond metaphysics to a place where the articulation of the fundamental questions of ontology were fundamentally possible: only from this point can we restore (that is, re-give [redonner]) any possible meaning to the word "humanism".
After the war, Heidegger was banned from university teaching for a period on account of his support of Nazism while serving as Rector of Freiburg University. He developed a number of contacts in France, where his work continued to be taught, and a number of French students visited him at Todtnauberg (see, for example, Jean-François Lyotard's brief account in "Heidegger and "the Jews"", which discusses a Franco-German conference held in Freiburg in 1947, one step toward bringing together French and German students). Heidegger subsequently made several visits to France, and made efforts to keep abreast of developments in French philosophy by way of correspondence with Jean Beaufret, an early French translator of Heidegger, and with Lucien Braun.
Deconstruction came to Heidegger's attention in 1967 by way of Lucien Braun's recommendation of Jacques Derrida's work (Hans-Georg Gadamer was present at an initial discussion and indicated to Heidegger that Derrida's work came to his attention by way of an assistant). Heidegger expressed interest in meeting Derrida personally after the latter sent him some of his work. There was discussion of a meeting in 1972, but this failed to take place. Heidegger's interest in Derrida is said by Braun to have been considerable (as is evident in two letters, of September 29, 1967 and May 16, 1972, from Heidegger to Braun). Braun also brought to Heidegger's attention the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's relation to Heidegger is a matter of considerable difficulty; Foucault acknowledged Heidegger as a philosopher whom he read but never wrote about. (For more on this see "Penser à Strasbourg," Jacques Derrida, et al., which includes reproductions of both letters and an account by Braun, "À mi-chemin entre Heidegger et Derrida").
Derrida attempted to displace the understanding of Heidegger's work that had been prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounted to an almost wholesale rejection of the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a term coined to translate Heidegger's use of the words "Destruktion"—literally "destruction"—and "Abbau"—more literally "de-building"). According to Derrida, Sartre's interpretation of Dasein and other key Heideggerian concerns is overly psychologistic, anthropocentric, and misses the historicality central to "Dasein" in "Being and Time".
Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others, all engaged in debate and disagreement about the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazi politics. These debates included the question of whether it was possible to do without Heidegger's philosophy, a position which Derrida in particular rejected. Forums where these debates took place include the proceedings of the first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980", Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", and the studies on Paul Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.
When in 1987 Víctor Farías published his book "Heidegger et le nazisme", this debate was taken up by many others, some of whom were inclined to disparage so-called "deconstructionists" for their association with Heidegger's philosophy. Derrida and others not only continued to defend the importance of reading Heidegger, but attacked Farías on the grounds of poor scholarship and for what they saw as the sensationalism of his approach. Not all scholars agreed with this negative assessment: Richard Rorty, for example, declared that "[Farías'] book includes more concrete information relevant to Heidegger's relations with the Nazis than anything else available, and it is an excellent antidote to the evasive apologetics that are still being published."
More recently, Heidegger's thought has influenced the work of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. This is evident even from the title of Stiegler's multi-volume "magnum opus", "La technique et le temps" (volume one translated into English as "Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus"). Stiegler offers an original reading of Heidegger, arguing that there can be no access to "originary temporality" other than via material, that is, technical, supports, and that Heidegger recognised this in the form of his account of world historicality, yet in the end suppressed that fact. Stiegler understands the existential analytic of "Being and Time" as an account of psychic individuation, and his later "history of being" as an account of collective individuation. He understands many of the problems of Heidegger's philosophy and politics as the consequence of Heidegger's inability to integrate the two.
Heidegger has been very influential on the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben attended seminars in France led by Heidegger in the late 1960s.
Heidegger's influence upon 20th century continental philosophy is unquestioned and has produced a variety of critical responses.
According to Husserl, "Being and Time" claimed to deal with ontology but only did so in the first few pages of the book. Having nothing further to contribute to an ontology independent of human existence, Heidegger changed the topic to "Dasein". Whereas Heidegger argued that the question of human existence is central to the pursuit of the question of being, Husserl criticized this as reducing phenomenology to "philosophical anthropology" and offering an abstract and incorrect portrait of the human being.
The Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger engaged in an influential debate located in Davos in 1929, concerning the significance of Kantian notions of freedom and rationality (see Cassirer–Heidegger debate). Whereas Cassirer defended the role of rationality in Kant, Heidegger argued for the priority of the imagination.
Dilthey's student Georg Misch wrote the first extended critical appropriation of Heidegger in "Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie. Eine Auseinandersetzung der Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl", Leipzig 1930 (3rd ed. Stuttgart 1964).
Hegel-influenced Marxist thinkers, especially György Lukács and the Frankfurt School, associated the style and content of Heidegger's thought with German irrationalism and criticized its political implications.
Initially members of the Frankfurt School were positively disposed to Heidegger, becoming more critical at the beginning of the 1930s. Heidegger's student Herbert Marcuse became associated with the Frankfurt School. Initially striving for a synthesis between Hegelian Marxism and Heidegger's phenomenology, Marcuse later rejected Heidegger's thought for its "false concreteness" and "revolutionary conservativism." Theodor Adorno wrote an extended critique of the ideological character of Heidegger's early and later use of language in the "Jargon of Authenticity". Contemporary social theorists associated with the Frankfurt School have remained largely critical of Heidegger's works and influence. In particular, Jürgen Habermas admonishes the influence of Heidegger on recent French philosophy in his polemic against "postmodernism" in "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" (1985). However, work by philosopher and critical theorist Nikolas Kompridis tries to show that Heidegger's insights into world disclosure are badly misunderstood and mishandled by Habermas, and are of vital importance for critical theory, offering an important way of renewing that tradition.
Criticism of Heidegger's philosophy has also come from analytic philosophy, beginning with logical positivism. In "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" (1932), Rudolf Carnap accused Heidegger of offering an "illusory" ontology, criticizing him for committing the fallacy of reification and for wrongly dismissing the logical treatment of language which, according to Carnap, can only lead to writing "nonsensical pseudo-propositions."
The British logical positivist A. J. Ayer was strongly critical of Heidegger's philosophy. In Ayer's view, Heidegger proposed vast, overarching theories regarding existence, which are completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis. For Ayer, this sort of philosophy was a poisonous strain in modern thought. He considered Heidegger to be the worst example of such philosophy, which Ayer believed to be entirely useless.
Bertrand Russell considered Heidegger an obscurantist, writing,
Highly eccentric in its terminology, his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive. As with much else in Existentialism, this is a psychological observation made to pass for logic.
This quote expresses the sentiments of many 20th-century analytic philosophers concerning Heidegger.
Roger Scruton stated that: "His major work "Being and Time" is formidably difficult—unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it".
The analytic tradition values clarity of expression. Heidegger, however, has on occasion appeared to take an opposing view, stating for example:
those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can "never" be confirmed by "facts," i.e., by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize "facts" never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce "their" nearness.
Apart from the charge of obscurantism, other analytic philosophers considered the actual content of Heidegger's work to be either faulty and meaningless, vapid or uninteresting. However, not all analytic philosophers have been as hostile. Gilbert Ryle wrote a critical yet positive review of "Being and Time". Ludwig Wittgenstein made a remark recorded by Friedrich Waismann: "To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by being and anxiety" which has been construed by some commentators as sympathetic to Heidegger's philosophical approach. These positive and negative analytic evaluations have been collected in Michael Murray (ed.), "Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays" (Yale University Press, 1978). Heidegger's reputation within English-language philosophy has slightly improved in philosophical terms in some part through the efforts of Hubert Dreyfus, Richard Rorty, and a recent generation of analytically oriented phenomenology scholars. Pragmatist Rorty claimed that Heidegger's approach to philosophy in the first half of his career has much in common with that of the latter-day Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nevertheless, Rorty asserted that what Heidegger had constructed in his writings was a myth of being rather than an account of it.
Although Heidegger is considered by many observers to be one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, aspects of his work have been criticised by those who nevertheless acknowledge this influence, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida. Some questions raised about Heidegger's philosophy include the priority of ontology, the status of animals, the nature of the religious, Heidegger's supposed neglect of ethics (Levinas), the body (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), sexual difference (Luce Irigaray), or space (Peter Sloterdijk).
Levinas was deeply influenced by Heidegger, and yet became one of his fiercest critics, contrasting the infinity of the good beyond being with the immanence and totality of ontology. Levinas also condemned Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism, stating: "One can forgive many Germans, but there are some Germans it is difficult to forgive. It is difficult to forgive Heidegger."
Heidegger's defenders, notably Arendt, see his support for Nazism as arguably a personal " 'error' " (a word which Arendt placed in quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics). Defenders think this error was irrelevant to Heidegger's philosophy. Critics such as Levinas, Karl Löwith, and Theodor Adorno claim that Heidegger's support for National Socialism revealed flaws inherent in his thought.
W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz states in the "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy" that Heidegger's writing is "notoriously difficult", possibly because his thinking was "original" and focused on obscure and innovative topics. He concludes that "Being and Time" "remains his most influential work."
Heidegger's collected works are published by Vittorio Klostermann. The "Gesamtausgabe" was begun during Heidegger's lifetime. He defined the order of publication and dictated that the principle of editing should be "ways not works." Publication has not yet been completed.
The contents are listed here: "Heidegger Gesamtausgabe". | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37304 |
Political prisoner
A political prisoner is someone imprisoned because they have opposed or criticized the government responsible for their imprisonment.
The term is used by persons or groups challenging the legitimacy of the detention of a prisoner. Supporters of the term define a political prisoner as someone who is imprisoned for his or her participation in political activity. If a political offense was not the official reason for the prisoner's detention, the term would imply that the detention was motivated by the prisoner's politics.
Some understand the term political prisoner narrowly, equating it with the term prisoner of conscience (POC).
Amnesty International campaigns for the release of prisoners of conscience, which include both political prisoners as well as those imprisoned for their religious or philosophical beliefs. To reduce controversy, and as a matter of principle, the organization's policy applies only to prisoners who have not committed or advocated violence. Thus, there are political prisoners who do not fit the narrower criteria for POCs. The organisation defines the differences as follows:
AI uses the term "political prisoner" broadly. It does not use it, as some others do, to imply that all such prisoners have a special status or should be released. It uses the term only to define a category of prisoners for whom AI demands a fair and prompt trial.
In AI's usage, the term includes any prisoner whose case has a significant political element: whether the motivation of the prisoner's acts, the acts in themselves, or the motivation of the authorities.
"Political" is used by AI to refer to aspects of human relations related to "politics": the mechanisms of society and civil order, the principles, organization, or conduct of government or public affairs, and the relation of all these to questions of language, ethnic origin, sex or religion, status or influence (among other factors).
The category of political prisoners embraces the category of prisoners of conscience, the only prisoners who AI demands should be immediately and unconditionally released, as well as people who resort to criminal violence for a political motive.
In AI's use of the term, here are some examples of political prisoners:
Governments often say they have no political prisoners, only prisoners held under the normal criminal law. AI however describes cases like the examples given above as "political" and uses the terms "political trial" and "political imprisonment" when referring to them. But by doing so AI does not oppose the imprisonment, except where it further maintains that the prisoner is a prisoner of conscience, or condemn the trial, except where it concludes that it was unfair.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has a much tighter definition:
A person deprived of his or her personal liberty is to be regarded as a 'political prisoner':
In the parlance of many political movements that utilize armed resistance, guerrilla warfare, and other forms of political violence, a political prisoner includes people who are imprisoned because they are awaiting trial for, or have been convicted of, actions which states they oppose describe as (accurately or otherwise) terrorism. These movements may consider the actions of political prisoners morally justified against some system of governance, may claim innocence, or have varying understandings of what types of violence are morally and ethically justified. For instance, French anarchist groups typically call the former members of Action Directe held in France political prisoners. While the French government deemed Action Directe illegal, the group fashioned itself as an urban guerilla movement, claiming a legitimate armed struggle. In this sense, "political prisoner" can be used to describe any politically active prisoner who is held in custody for a violent action which supporters deem ethically justified.
Some libertarians (such as those who agree with the arguments of Lysander Spooner) also include all convicted for treason and some convicted of espionage in the category of political prisoners. Currently, there is still much controversy and debate around how to define this term and which cases to include or exclude.
Political prisoners can also be imprisoned with no legal veneer by extrajudicial processes. Some political prisoners need not be imprisoned at all. Supporters of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima in the 11th Panchen Lama controversy have called him a "political prisoner", despite the fact that he is not accused of a political offense. He is held under secluded house arrest.
Political prisoners are also arrested and tried with a veneer of legality where false criminal charges, manufactured evidence, and unfair trials (kangaroo courts, show trials) are used to disguise the fact that an individual is a political prisoner. This is common in situations which may otherwise be decried nationally and internationally as a human rights violation or suppression of a political dissident. A political prisoner can also be someone that has been denied bail unfairly, denied parole when it would reasonably have been given to a prisoner charged with a comparable crime, or special powers may be invoked by the judiciary. Particularly in this latter situation, whether an individual is regarded as a political prisoner may depend upon subjective political perspective or interpretation of the evidence. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=37307 |
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