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Genetic engineering
Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification or genetic manipulation, is the direct manipulation of an organism's genes using biotechnology. It is a set of technologies used to change the genetic makeup of cells, including the transfer of genes within and across species boundaries to produce improved or novel organisms. New DNA is obtained by either isolating and copying the genetic material of interest using recombinant DNA methods or by artificially synthesising the DNA. A construct is usually created and used to insert this DNA into the host organism. The first recombinant DNA molecule was made by Paul Berg in 1972 by combining DNA from the monkey virus SV40 with the lambda virus. As well as inserting genes, the process can be used to remove, or "knock out", genes. The new DNA can be inserted randomly, or targeted to a specific part of the genome.
An organism that is generated through genetic engineering is considered to be genetically modified (GM) and the resulting entity is a genetically modified organism (GMO). The first GMO was a bacterium generated by Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen in 1973. Rudolf Jaenisch created the first GM animal when he inserted foreign DNA into a mouse in 1974. The first company to focus on genetic engineering, Genentech, was founded in 1976 and started the production of human proteins. Genetically engineered human insulin was produced in 1978 and insulin-producing bacteria were commercialised in 1982. Genetically modified food has been sold since 1994, with the release of the Flavr Savr tomato. The Flavr Savr was engineered to have a longer shelf life, but most current GM crops are modified to increase resistance to insects and herbicides. GloFish, the first GMO designed as a pet, was sold in the United States in December 2003. In 2016 salmon modified with a growth hormone were sold.
Genetic engineering has been applied in numerous fields including research, medicine, industrial biotechnology and agriculture. In research GMOs are used to study gene function and expression through loss of function, gain of function, tracking and expression experiments. By knocking out genes responsible for certain conditions it is possible to create animal model organisms of human diseases. As well as producing hormones, vaccines and other drugs genetic engineering has the potential to cure genetic diseases through gene therapy. The same techniques that are used to produce drugs can also have industrial applications such as producing enzymes for laundry detergent, cheeses and other products.
The rise of commercialised genetically modified crops has provided economic benefit to farmers in many different countries, but has also been the source of most of the controversy surrounding the technology. This has been present since its early use; the first field trials were destroyed by anti-GM activists. Although there is a scientific consensus that currently available food derived from GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food, GM food safety is a leading concern with critics. Gene flow, impact on non-target organisms, control of the food supply and intellectual property rights have also been raised as potential issues. These concerns have led to the development of a regulatory framework, which started in 1975. It has led to an international treaty, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, that was adopted in 2000. Individual countries have developed their own regulatory systems regarding GMOs, with the most marked differences occurring between the US and Europe.
Genetic engineering is a process that alters the genetic structure of an organism by either removing or introducing DNA. Unlike traditional animal and plant breeding, which involves doing multiple crosses and then selecting for the organism with the desired phenotype, genetic engineering takes the gene directly from one organism and delivers it to the other. This is much faster, can be used to insert any genes from any organism (even ones from different domains) and prevents other undesirable genes from also being added.
Genetic engineering could potentially fix severe genetic disorders in humans by replacing the defective gene with a functioning one. It is an important tool in research that allows the function of specific genes to be studied. Drugs, vaccines and other products have been harvested from organisms engineered to produce them. Crops have been developed that aid food security by increasing yield, nutritional value and tolerance to environmental stresses.
The DNA can be introduced directly into the host organism or into a cell that is then fused or hybridised with the host. This relies on recombinant nucleic acid techniques to form new combinations of heritable genetic material followed by the incorporation of that material either indirectly through a vector system or directly through micro-injection, macro-injection or micro-encapsulation.
Genetic engineering does not normally include traditional breeding, in vitro fertilisation, induction of polyploidy, mutagenesis and cell fusion techniques that do not use recombinant nucleic acids or a genetically modified organism in the process. However, some broad definitions of genetic engineering include selective breeding. Cloning and stem cell research, although not considered genetic engineering, are closely related and genetic engineering can be used within them. Synthetic biology is an emerging discipline that takes genetic engineering a step further by introducing artificially synthesised material into an organism. Such synthetic DNA as Artificially Expanded Genetic Information System and Hachimoji DNA is made in this new field.
Plants, animals or microorganisms that have been changed through genetic engineering are termed genetically modified organisms or GMOs. If genetic material from another species is added to the host, the resulting organism is called transgenic. If genetic material from the same species or a species that can naturally breed with the host is used the resulting organism is called cisgenic. If genetic engineering is used to remove genetic material from the target organism the resulting organism is termed a knockout organism. In Europe genetic modification is synonymous with genetic engineering while within the United States of America and Canada genetic modification can also be used to refer to more conventional breeding methods.
Humans have altered the genomes of species for thousands of years through selective breeding, or artificial selection as contrasted with natural selection. More recently, mutation breeding has used exposure to chemicals or radiation to produce a high frequency of random mutations, for selective breeding purposes. Genetic engineering as the direct manipulation of DNA by humans outside breeding and mutations has only existed since the 1970s. The term "genetic engineering" was first coined by Jack Williamson in his science fiction novel "Dragon's Island", published in 1951 – one year before DNA's role in heredity was confirmed by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase, and two years before James Watson and Francis Crick showed that the DNA molecule has a double-helix structure – though the general concept of direct genetic manipulation was explored in rudimentary form in Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1936 science fiction story "Proteus Island".
In 1972, Paul Berg created the first recombinant DNA molecules by combining DNA from the monkey virus SV40 with that of the lambda virus. In 1973 Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen created the first transgenic organism by inserting antibiotic resistance genes into the plasmid of an "Escherichia coli" bacterium. A year later Rudolf Jaenisch created a transgenic mouse by introducing foreign DNA into its embryo, making it the world's first transgenic animal These achievements led to concerns in the scientific community about potential risks from genetic engineering, which were first discussed in depth at the Asilomar Conference in 1975. One of the main recommendations from this meeting was that government oversight of recombinant DNA research should be established until the technology was deemed safe.
In 1976 Genentech, the first genetic engineering company, was founded by Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson and a year later the company produced a human protein (somatostatin) in "E.coli". Genentech announced the production of genetically engineered human insulin in 1978. In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court in the "Diamond v. Chakrabarty" case ruled that genetically altered life could be patented. The insulin produced by bacteria was approved for release by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1982.
In 1983, a biotech company, Advanced Genetic Sciences (AGS) applied for U.S. government authorisation to perform field tests with the ice-minus strain of "Pseudomonas syringae" to protect crops from frost, but environmental groups and protestors delayed the field tests for four years with legal challenges. In 1987, the ice-minus strain of "P. syringae" became the first genetically modified organism (GMO) to be released into the environment when a strawberry field and a potato field in California were sprayed with it. Both test fields were attacked by activist groups the night before the tests occurred: "The world's first trial site attracted the world's first field trasher".
The first field trials of genetically engineered plants occurred in France and the US in 1986, tobacco plants were engineered to be resistant to herbicides. The People's Republic of China was the first country to commercialise transgenic plants, introducing a virus-resistant tobacco in 1992. In 1994 Calgene attained approval to commercially release the first genetically modified food, the Flavr Savr, a tomato engineered to have a longer shelf life. In 1994, the European Union approved tobacco engineered to be resistant to the herbicide bromoxynil, making it the first genetically engineered crop commercialised in Europe. In 1995, Bt Potato was approved safe by the Environmental Protection Agency, after having been approved by the FDA, making it the first pesticide producing crop to be approved in the US. In 2009 11 transgenic crops were grown commercially in 25 countries, the largest of which by area grown were the US, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, China, Paraguay and South Africa.
In 2010, scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute created the first synthetic genome and inserted it into an empty bacterial cell. The resulting bacterium, named Mycoplasma laboratorium, could replicate and produce proteins. Four years later this was taken a step further when a bacterium was developed that replicated a plasmid containing a unique base pair, creating the first organism engineered to use an expanded genetic alphabet. In 2012, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier collaborated to develop the CRISPR/Cas9 system, a technique which can be used to easily and specifically alter the genome of almost any organism.
Creating a GMO is a multi-step process. Genetic engineers must first choose what gene they wish to insert into the organism. This is driven by what the aim is for the resultant organism and is built on earlier research. Genetic screens can be carried out to determine potential genes and further tests then used to identify the best candidates. The development of microarrays, transcriptomics and genome sequencing has made it much easier to find suitable genes. Luck also plays its part; the round-up ready gene was discovered after scientists noticed a bacterium thriving in the presence of the herbicide.
The next step is to isolate the candidate gene. The cell containing the gene is opened and the DNA is purified. The gene is separated by using restriction enzymes to cut the DNA into fragments or polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify up the gene segment. These segments can then be extracted through gel electrophoresis. If the chosen gene or the donor organism's genome has been well studied it may already be accessible from a genetic library. If the DNA sequence is known, but no copies of the gene are available, it can also be artificially synthesised. Once isolated the gene is ligated into a plasmid that is then inserted into a bacterium. The plasmid is replicated when the bacteria divide, ensuring unlimited copies of the gene are available.
Before the gene is inserted into the target organism it must be combined with other genetic elements. These include a promoter and terminator region, which initiate and end transcription. A selectable marker gene is added, which in most cases confers antibiotic resistance, so researchers can easily determine which cells have been successfully transformed. The gene can also be modified at this stage for better expression or effectiveness. These manipulations are carried out using recombinant DNA techniques, such as restriction digests, ligations and molecular cloning.
There are a number of techniques used to insert genetic material into the host genome. Some bacteria can naturally take up foreign DNA. This ability can be induced in other bacteria via stress (e.g. thermal or electric shock), which increases the cell membrane's permeability to DNA; up-taken DNA can either integrate with the genome or exist as extrachromosomal DNA. DNA is generally inserted into animal cells using microinjection, where it can be injected through the cell's nuclear envelope directly into the nucleus, or through the use of viral vectors.
In plants the DNA is often inserted using "Agrobacterium"-mediated recombination, taking advantage of the "Agrobacterium"s T-DNA sequence that allows natural insertion of genetic material into plant cells. Other methods include biolistics, where particles of gold or tungsten are coated with DNA and then shot into young plant cells, and electroporation, which involves using an electric shock to make the cell membrane permeable to plasmid DNA.
As only a single cell is transformed with genetic material, the organism must be regenerated from that single cell. In plants this is accomplished through the use of tissue culture. In animals it is necessary to ensure that the inserted DNA is present in the embryonic stem cells. Bacteria consist of a single cell and reproduce clonally so regeneration is not necessary. Selectable markers are used to easily differentiate transformed from untransformed cells. These markers are usually present in the transgenic organism, although a number of strategies have been developed that can remove the selectable marker from the mature transgenic plant.
Further testing using PCR, Southern hybridization, and DNA sequencing is conducted to confirm that an organism contains the new gene. These tests can also confirm the chromosomal location and copy number of the inserted gene. The presence of the gene does not guarantee it will be expressed at appropriate levels in the target tissue so methods that look for and measure the gene products (RNA and protein) are also used. These include northern hybridisation, quantitative RT-PCR, Western blot, immunofluorescence, ELISA and phenotypic analysis.
The new genetic material can be inserted randomly within the host genome or targeted to a specific location. The technique of gene targeting uses homologous recombination to make desired changes to a specific endogenous gene. This tends to occur at a relatively low frequency in plants and animals and generally requires the use of selectable markers. The frequency of gene targeting can be greatly enhanced through genome editing. Genome editing uses artificially engineered nucleases that create specific double-stranded breaks at desired locations in the genome, and use the cell's endogenous mechanisms to repair the induced break by the natural processes of homologous recombination and nonhomologous end-joining. There are four families of engineered nucleases: meganucleases, zinc finger nucleases, transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and the Cas9-guideRNA system (adapted from CRISPR). TALEN and CRISPR are the two most commonly used and each has its own advantages. TALENs have greater target specificity, while CRISPR is easier to design and more efficient. In addition to enhancing gene targeting, engineered nucleases can be used to introduce mutations at endogenous genes that generate a gene knockout.
Genetic engineering has applications in medicine, research, industry and agriculture and can be used on a wide range of plants, animals and microorganisms. Bacteria, the first organisms to be genetically modified, can have plasmid DNA inserted containing new genes that code for medicines or enzymes that process food and other substrates. Plants have been modified for insect protection, herbicide resistance, virus resistance, enhanced nutrition, tolerance to environmental pressures and the production of edible vaccines. Most commercialised GMOs are insect resistant or herbicide tolerant crop plants. Genetically modified animals have been used for research, model animals and the production of agricultural or pharmaceutical products. The genetically modified animals include animals with genes knocked out, increased susceptibility to disease, hormones for extra growth and the ability to express proteins in their milk.
Genetic engineering has many applications to medicine that include the manufacturing of drugs, creation of model animals that mimic human conditions and gene therapy. One of the earliest uses of genetic engineering was to mass-produce human insulin in bacteria. This application has now been applied to, human growth hormones, follicle stimulating hormones (for treating infertility), human albumin, monoclonal antibodies, antihemophilic factors, vaccines and many other drugs. Mouse hybridomas, cells fused together to create monoclonal antibodies, have been adapted through genetic engineering to create human monoclonal antibodies. In 2017, genetic engineering of chimeric antigen receptors on a patient's own T-cells was approved by the U.S. FDA as a treatment for the cancer acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Genetically engineered viruses are being developed that can still confer immunity, but lack the infectious sequences.
Genetic engineering is also used to create animal models of human diseases. Genetically modified mice are the most common genetically engineered animal model. They have been used to study and model cancer (the oncomouse), obesity, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, substance abuse, anxiety, aging and Parkinson disease. Potential cures can be tested against these mouse models. Also genetically modified pigs have been bred with the aim of increasing the success of pig to human organ transplantation.
Gene therapy is the genetic engineering of humans, generally by replacing defective genes with effective ones. Clinical research using somatic gene therapy has been conducted with several diseases, including X-linked SCID, chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and Parkinson's disease. In 2012, Alipogene tiparvovec became the first gene therapy treatment to be approved for clinical use. In 2015 a virus was used to insert a healthy gene into the skin cells of a boy suffering from a rare skin disease, epidermolysis bullosa, in order to grow, and then graft healthy skin onto 80 percent of the boy's body which was affected by the illness.
Germline gene therapy would result in any change being inheritable, which has raised concerns within the scientific community. In 2015, CRISPR was used to edit the DNA of non-viable human embryos, leading scientists of major world academies to call for a moratorium on inheritable human genome edits. There are also concerns that the technology could be used not just for treatment, but for enhancement, modification or alteration of a human beings' appearance, adaptability, intelligence, character or behavior. The distinction between cure and enhancement can also be difficult to establish. In November 2018, He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genomes of two human embryos, to attempt to disable the "CCR5" gene, which codes for a receptor that HIV uses to enter cells. He said that twin girls, Lulu and Nana, had been born a few weeks earlier. He said that the girls still carried functional copies of CCR5 along with disabled CCR5 (mosaicism) and were still vulnerable to HIV. The work was widely condemned as unethical, dangerous, and premature.
Researchers are altering the genome of pigs to induce the growth of human organs to be used in transplants. Scientists are creating "gene drives", changing the genomes of mosquitoes to make them immune to malaria, and then looking to spread the genetically altered mosquitoes throughout the mosquito population in the hopes of eliminating the disease.
Genetic engineering is an important tool for natural scientists, with the creation of transgenic organisms one of the most important tools for analysis of gene function. Genes and other genetic information from a wide range of organisms can be inserted into bacteria for storage and modification, creating genetically modified bacteria in the process. Bacteria are cheap, easy to grow, clonal, multiply quickly, relatively easy to transform and can be stored at -80 °C almost indefinitely. Once a gene is isolated it can be stored inside the bacteria providing an unlimited supply for research.
Organisms are genetically engineered to discover the functions of certain genes. This could be the effect on the phenotype of the organism, where the gene is expressed or what other genes it interacts with. These experiments generally involve loss of function, gain of function, tracking and expression.
Organisms can have their cells transformed with a gene coding for a useful protein, such as an enzyme, so that they will overexpress the desired protein. Mass quantities of the protein can then be manufactured by growing the transformed organism in bioreactor equipment using industrial fermentation, and then purifying the protein. Some genes do not work well in bacteria, so yeast, insect cells or mammalians cells can also be used. These techniques are used to produce medicines such as insulin, human growth hormone, and vaccines, supplements such as tryptophan, aid in the production of food (chymosin in cheese making) and fuels. Other applications with genetically engineered bacteria could involve making them perform tasks outside their natural cycle, such as making biofuels, cleaning up oil spills, carbon and other toxic waste and detecting arsenic in drinking water. Certain genetically modified microbes can also be used in biomining and bioremediation, due to their ability to extract heavy metals from their environment and incorporate them into compounds that are more easily recoverable.
In materials science, a genetically modified virus has been used in a research laboratory as a scaffold for assembling a more environmentally friendly lithium-ion battery. Bacteria have also been engineered to function as sensors by expressing a fluorescent protein under certain environmental conditions.
One of the best-known and controversial applications of genetic engineering is the creation and use of genetically modified crops or genetically modified livestock to produce genetically modified food. Crops have been developed to increase production, increase tolerance to abiotic stresses, alter the composition of the food, or to produce novel products.
The first crops to be released commercially on a large scale provided protection from insect pests or tolerance to herbicides. Fungal and virus resistant crops have also been developed or are in development. This makes the insect and weed management of crops easier and can indirectly increase crop yield. GM crops that directly improve yield by accelerating growth or making the plant more hardy (by improving salt, cold or drought tolerance) are also under development. In 2016 Salmon have been genetically modified with growth hormones to reach normal adult size much faster.
GMOs have been developed that modify the quality of produce by increasing the nutritional value or providing more industrially useful qualities or quantities. The Amflora potato produces a more industrially useful blend of starches. Soybeans and canola have been genetically modified to produce more healthy oils. The first commercialised GM food was a tomato that had delayed ripening, increasing its shelf life.
Plants and animals have been engineered to produce materials they do not normally make. Pharming uses crops and animals as bioreactors to produce vaccines, drug intermediates, or the drugs themselves; the useful product is purified from the harvest and then used in the standard pharmaceutical production process. Cows and goats have been engineered to express drugs and other proteins in their milk, and in 2009 the FDA approved a drug produced in goat milk.
Genetic engineering has potential applications in conservation and natural area management. Gene transfer through viral vectors has been proposed as a means of controlling invasive species as well as vaccinating threatened fauna from disease. Transgenic trees have been suggested as a way to confer resistance to pathogens in wild populations. With the increasing risks of maladaptation in organisms as a result of climate change and other perturbations, facilitated adaptation through gene tweaking could be one solution to reducing extinction risks. Applications of genetic engineering in conservation are thus far mostly theoretical and have yet to be put into practice.
Genetic engineering is also being used to create microbial art. Some bacteria have been genetically engineered to create black and white photographs. Novelty items such as lavender-colored carnations, blue roses, and glowing fish have also been produced through genetic engineering.
The regulation of genetic engineering concerns the approaches taken by governments to assess and manage the risks associated with the development and release of GMOs. The development of a regulatory framework began in 1975, at Asilomar, California. The Asilomar meeting recommended a set of voluntary guidelines regarding the use of recombinant technology. As the technology improved the US established a committee at the Office of Science and Technology, which assigned regulatory approval of GM food to the USDA, FDA and EPA. The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an international treaty that governs the transfer, handling, and use of GMOs, was adopted on 29 January 2000. One hundred and fifty-seven countries are members of the Protocol and many use it as a reference point for their own regulations.
The legal and regulatory status of GM foods varies by country, with some nations banning or restricting them, and others permitting them with widely differing degrees of regulation. Some countries allow the import of GM food with authorisation, but either do not allow its cultivation (Russia, Norway, Israel) or have provisions for cultivation even though no GM products are yet produced (Japan, South Korea). Most countries that do not allow GMO cultivation do permit research. Some of the most marked differences occurring between the US and Europe. The US policy focuses on the product (not the process), only looks at verifiable scientific risks and uses the concept of substantial equivalence. The European Union by contrast has possibly the most stringent GMO regulations in the world. All GMOs, along with irradiated food, are considered "new food" and subject to extensive, case-by-case, science-based food evaluation by the European Food Safety Authority. The criteria for authorisation fall in four broad categories: "safety," "freedom of choice," "labelling," and "traceability." The level of regulation in other countries that cultivate GMOs lie in between Europe and the United States.
One of the key issues concerning regulators is whether GM products should be labeled. The European Commission says that mandatory labeling and traceability are needed to allow for informed choice, avoid potential false advertising and facilitate the withdrawal of products if adverse effects on health or the environment are discovered. The American Medical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science say that absent scientific evidence of harm even voluntary labeling is misleading and will falsely alarm consumers. Labeling of GMO products in the marketplace is required in 64 countries. Labeling can be mandatory up to a threshold GM content level (which varies between countries) or voluntary. In Canada and the US labeling of GM food is voluntary, while in Europe all food (including processed food) or feed which contains greater than 0.9% of approved GMOs must be labelled.
Critics have objected to the use of genetic engineering on several grounds, including ethical, ecological and economic concerns. Many of these concerns involve GM crops and whether food produced from them is safe and what impact growing them will have on the environment. These controversies have led to litigation, international trade disputes, and protests, and to restrictive regulation of commercial products in some countries.
Accusations that scientists are "playing God" and other religious issues have been ascribed to the technology from the beginning. Other ethical issues raised include the patenting of life, the use of intellectual property rights, the level of labeling on products, control of the food supply and the objectivity of the regulatory process. Although doubts have been raised, economically most studies have found growing GM crops to be beneficial to farmers.
Gene flow between GM crops and compatible plants, along with increased use of selective herbicides, can increase the risk of "superweeds" developing. Other environmental concerns involve potential impacts on non-target organisms, including soil microbes, and an increase in secondary and resistant insect pests. Many of the environmental impacts regarding GM crops may take many years to be understood and are also evident in conventional agriculture practices. With the commercialisation of genetically modified fish there are concerns over what the environmental consequences will be if they escape.
There are three main concerns over the safety of genetically modified food: whether they may provoke an allergic reaction; whether the genes could transfer from the food into human cells; and whether the genes not approved for human consumption could outcross to other crops. There is a scientific consensus that currently available food derived from GM crops poses no greater risk to human health than conventional food, but that each GM food needs to be tested on a case-by-case basis before introduction. Nonetheless, members of the public are less likely than scientists to perceive GM foods as safe.
Genetic engineering features in many science fiction stories. Frank Herbert's novel "The White Plague" described the deliberate use of genetic engineering to create a pathogen which specifically killed women. Another of Herbert's creations, the "Dune" series of novels, uses genetic engineering to create the powerful but despised Tleilaxu. Films such as "The Island" and "Blade Runner" bring the engineered creature to confront the person who created it or the being it was cloned from. Few films have informed audiences about genetic engineering, with the exception of the 1978 "The Boys from Brazil" and the 1993 "Jurassic Park", both of which made use of a lesson, a demonstration, and a clip of scientific film. Genetic engineering methods are weakly represented in film; Michael Clark, writing for The Wellcome Trust, calls the portrayal of genetic engineering and biotechnology "seriously distorted" in films such as "The 6th Day". In Clark's view, the biotechnology is typically "given fantastic but visually arresting forms" while the science is either relegated to the background or fictionalised to suit a young audience.
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Gettysburg Address
The Gettysburg Address is a speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. It is one of the best-known speeches in American history.
Not even the day's primary speech, Lincoln's carefully crafted address came to be seen as one of the greatest and most influential statements of American national purpose. In just 271 words, beginning with the now iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago," referring to the signing of the Declaration of Independence 87 years earlier, Lincoln described the US as a nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," and represented the Civil War as a test that would determine whether such a nation, the Union sundered by the secession crisis, could endure. He extolled the sacrifices of those who died at Gettysburg in defense of those principles, and exhorted his listeners to resolve
Despite the prominent place of the speech in the history and popular culture of the United States, its exact wording is disputed. The five known manuscripts of the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's hand differ in a number of details, and also differ from contemporary newspaper reprints of the speech. Neither is it clear where stood the platform from which Lincoln delivered the address. Modern scholarship locates the speakers' platform 40 yards (or more) away from the traditional site in Soldiers' National Cemetery at the Soldiers' National Monument, such that it stood entirely within the private, adjacent Evergreen Cemetery.
Following the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1–3, 1863, the removal of the fallen Union soldiers from the Gettysburg Battlefield graves and their reburial in graves at the National Cemetery at Gettysburg began on October 17. In inviting President Lincoln to the ceremonies, David Wills, of the committee for the November 19 Consecration of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, wrote, "It is the desire that, after the Oration, you, as Chief Executive of the nation, formally set apart these grounds to their sacred use by a few appropriate remarks."
On the train trip from Washington, D.C., to Gettysburg on November 18, Lincoln was accompanied by three members of his Cabinet, William Seward, John Usher and Montgomery Blair, several foreign officials, his secretary John Nicolay, and his assistant secretary, John Hay. During the trip Lincoln remarked to Hay that he felt weak; on the morning of November 19, Lincoln mentioned to Nicolay that he was dizzy. Hay noted that during the speech Lincoln's face had "a ghastly color" and that he was "sad, mournful, almost haggard." After the speech, when Lincoln boarded the 6:30 pm train for Washington, D.C., he was feverish and weak, with a severe headache. A protracted illness followed, which included a vesicular rash; it was diagnosed as a mild case of smallpox. It thus seems highly likely that Lincoln was in the prodromal period of smallpox when he delivered the Gettysburg address.
The program organized for that day by Wills and his committee included:
While it is Lincoln's short speech that has gone down in history as one of the finest examples of English public oratory, it was Everett's two-hour oration that was slated to be the "Gettysburg address" that day. His now seldom-read 13,607-word oration began:
Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed;—grant me, I pray you, your indulgence and your sympathy.
And ended two hours later with:
But they, I am sure, will join us in saying, as we bid farewell to the dust of these martyr-heroes, that wheresoever throughout the civilized world the accounts of this great warfare are read, and down to the latest period of recorded time, in the glorious annals of our common country, there will be no brighter page than that which relates the Battles of Gettysburg.
Lengthy dedication addresses like Everett's were common at cemeteries in this era. The tradition began in 1831 when Justice Joseph Story delivered the dedication address at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those addresses often linked cemeteries to the mission of Union.
Lincoln's address followed the oration by Edward Everett, who subsequently included a copy of the Gettysburg Address in his 1864 book about the event ("Address of the Hon. Edward Everett At the Consecration of the National Cemetery At Gettysburg, 19th November 1863, with the Dedicatory Speech of President Lincoln, and the Other Exercises of the Occasion; Accompanied by An Account of the Origin of the Undertaking and of the Arrangement of the Cemetery Grounds, and by a Map of the Battle-field and a Plan of the Cemetery").
Shortly after Everett's well-received remarks, Lincoln spoke for only a few minutes. With a "few appropriate remarks", he was able to summarize his view of the war in just ten sentences.
Despite the historical significance of Lincoln's speech, modern scholars disagree as to its exact wording, and contemporary transcriptions published in newspaper accounts of the event and even handwritten copies by Lincoln himself differ in their wording, punctuation, and structure. Of these versions, the Bliss version, written well after the speech as a favor for a friend, is viewed by many as the standard text. Its text differs, however, from the written versions prepared by Lincoln before and after his speech. It is the only version to which Lincoln affixed his signature, and the last he is known to have written.
In "Lincoln at Gettysburg", Garry Wills notes the parallels between Lincoln's speech and Pericles's Funeral Oration during the Peloponnesian War as described by Thucydides. (James McPherson notes this connection in his review of Wills's book. Gore Vidal also draws attention to this link in a BBC documentary about oration.) Pericles' speech, like Lincoln's:
In contrast, writer Adam Gopnik, in "The New Yorker", notes that while Everett's Oration was explicitly neoclassical, referring directly to Marathon and Pericles, "Lincoln's rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in any of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis."
Several theories have been advanced by Lincoln scholars to explain the provenance of Lincoln's famous phrase "government of the people, by the people, for the people". Despite many claims, there is no evidence a similar phrase appears in the Prologue to John Wycliffe's 1384 English translation of the Bible.
In a discussion "A more probable origin of a famous Lincoln phrase", in "The American Monthly Review of Reviews", Albert Shaw credits a correspondent with pointing out the writings of William Herndon, Lincoln's law partner, who wrote in the 1888 work "Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of A Great Life" that he had brought to Lincoln some of the sermons of abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, of Massachusetts, and that Lincoln was moved by Parker's use of this idea:
Craig R. Smith, in "Criticism of Political Rhetoric and Disciplinary Integrity", suggested Lincoln's view of the government as expressed in the Gettysburg Address was influenced by the noted speech of Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, the "Second Reply to Hayne", in which Webster famously thundered "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" Specifically, in this speech on January 26, 1830, before the United States Senate, Webster described the federal government as: "made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people", foreshadowing Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, for the people". Webster also noted, "This government, Sir, is the independent offspring of the popular will. It is not the creature of State legislatures; nay, more, if the whole truth must be told, the people brought it into existence, established it, and have hitherto supported it, for the very purpose, amongst others, of imposing certain salutary restraints on State sovereignties."
A source predating these others with which Lincoln was certainly familiar was Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in "McCulloch v. Maryland" (1819), a case upholding federal authority to create a national bank and to be free from the State's powers to tax. In asserting the superiority of federal power over the states, Chief Justice Marshall stated: "The government of the Union, then (whatever may be the influence of this fact on the case), is, emphatically and truly, a government of the people. In form, and in substance, it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit." Lincoln, a lawyer and President engaged in the greatest struggle of federalism, was (more eloquently) echoing the preeminent case that had solidified federal power over the States.
Wills observed Lincoln's usage of the imagery of birth, life, and death in reference to a nation "brought forth", "conceived", and that shall not "perish". Others, including Allen C. Guelzo, the director of Civil War Era studies at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, suggested that Lincoln's formulation "four score and seven" was an allusion to the King James Version of the Bible's , in which man's lifespan is given as "threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years".
Lincoln was probably influenced by Lajos Kossuth—the former governor-president of Hungary—who gave a speech before the Ohio State Legislature in February 1852: "The spirit of our age is Democracy. All for the people, and all by the people. Nothing about the people without the people—That is Democracy! […]"
Each of the five known manuscript copies of the Gettysburg Address is named for the person who received it from Lincoln. Lincoln gave copies to his private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay. Both of these drafts were written around the time of his November 19 address, while the other three copies of the address, the Everett, Bancroft, and Bliss copies, were written by Lincoln for charitable purposes well after November 19. In part because Lincoln provided a title and signed and dated the Bliss copy, it has become the standard text of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Nicolay and Hay were appointed custodians of Lincoln's papers by Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln in 1874. After appearing in facsimile in an article written by John Nicolay in 1894, the Nicolay copy was presumably among the papers passed to Hay by Nicolay's daughter Helen upon Nicolay's death in 1901. Robert Lincoln began a search for the original copy in 1908, which resulted in the discovery of a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address among the bound papers of John Hay—a copy now known as the "Hay copy" or "Hay draft".
The Hay draft differed from the version of the Gettysburg Address published by John Nicolay in 1894 in a number of significant ways: it was written on a different type of paper, had a different number of words per line and number of lines, and contained editorial revisions in Lincoln's hand.
Both the Hay and Nicolay copies of the Address are within the Library of Congress, encased in specially designed, temperature-controlled, sealed containers with argon gas in order to protect the documents from oxidation and continued deterioration.
The Nicolay copy is often called the "first draft" because it is believed to be the earliest copy that exists. Scholars disagree over whether the Nicolay copy was actually the reading copy Lincoln held at Gettysburg on November 19. In an 1894 article that included a facsimile of this copy, Nicolay, who had become the custodian of Lincoln's papers, wrote that Lincoln had brought to Gettysburg the first part of the speech written in ink on Executive Mansion stationery, and that he had written the second page in pencil on lined paper before the dedication on November 19. Matching folds are still evident on the two pages, suggesting it could be the copy that eyewitnesses say Lincoln took from his coat pocket and read at the ceremony. Others believe that the delivery text has been lost, because some of the words and phrases of the Nicolay copy do not match contemporary transcriptions of Lincoln's original speech. The words "under God", for example, are missing in this copy from the phrase "that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom ..." In order for the Nicolay draft to have been the reading copy, either the contemporary transcriptions were inaccurate, or Lincoln would have had to depart from his written text in several instances. This copy of the Gettysburg Address apparently remained in John Nicolay's possession until his death in 1901, when it passed to his friend and colleague John Hay. It used to be on display as part of the American Treasures exhibition of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
The existence of the Hay copy was first announced to the public in 1906, after the search for the "original manuscript" of the Address among the papers of John Hay brought it to light. Significantly, it differs somewhat from the manuscript of the Address described by John Nicolay in his article, and contains numerous omissions and inserts in Lincoln's own hand, including omissions critical to the basic meaning of the sentence, not simply words that would be added by Lincoln to strengthen or clarify their meaning. In this copy, as in the Nicolay copy, the words "under God" are not present.
This version has been described as "the most inexplicable" of the drafts and is sometimes referred to as the "second draft". The "Hay copy" was made either on the morning of the delivery of the Address, or shortly after Lincoln's return to Washington. Those who believe that it was completed on the morning of his address point to the fact that it contains certain phrases that are not in the first draft but are in the reports of the address as delivered and in subsequent copies made by Lincoln. It is probable, they conclude, that, as stated in the explanatory note accompanying the original copies of the first and second drafts in the Library of Congress, Lincoln held this second draft when he delivered the address. Lincoln eventually gave this copy to Hay, whose descendants donated both it and the Nicolay copy to the Library of Congress in 1916.
The Everett copy, also known as the "Everett-Keyes copy", was sent by President Lincoln to Edward Everett in early 1864, at Everett's request. Everett was collecting the speeches at the Gettysburg dedication into one bound volume to sell for the benefit of stricken soldiers at New York's Sanitary Commission Fair. The draft Lincoln sent became the third autograph copy, and is now in the possession of the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield, Illinois, where it is displayed in the Treasures Gallery of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
The Bancroft copy of the Gettysburg Address was written out by President Lincoln in February 1864 at the request of George Bancroft, the famed historian and former Secretary of the Navy, whose comprehensive ten-volume "History of the United States" later led him to be known as the "father of American History". Bancroft planned to include this copy in "Autograph Leaves of Our Country's Authors", which he planned to sell at a Soldiers' and Sailors' Sanitary Fair in Baltimore. As this fourth copy was written on both sides of the paper, it proved unusable for this purpose, and Bancroft was allowed to keep it. This manuscript is the only one accompanied both by a letter from Lincoln transmitting the manuscript and by the original envelope addressed and franked by Lincoln. This copy remained in the Bancroft family for many years, was sold to various dealers and purchased by Nicholas and Marguerite Lilly Noyes, who donated the manuscript to Cornell University in 1949. It is now held by the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections in the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell. It is the only one of the five copies to be privately owned.
Discovering that his fourth written copy could not be used, Lincoln then wrote a fifth draft, which was accepted for the purpose requested. The Bliss copy, named for Colonel Alexander Bliss, Bancroft's stepson and publisher of "Autograph Leaves", is the only draft to which Lincoln affixed his signature. Lincoln is not known to have made any further copies of the Gettysburg Address. Because of the apparent care in its preparation, and in part, because Lincoln provided a title and signed and dated this copy, it has become the standard version of the address and the source for most facsimile reproductions of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. It is the version that is inscribed on the South wall of the Lincoln Memorial.
This draft is now displayed in the Lincoln Room of the White House, a gift of Oscar B. Cintas, former Cuban Ambassador to the United States. Cintas, a wealthy collector of art and manuscripts, purchased the Bliss copy at a public auction in 1949 for $54,000 ($ as of 2020), at that time the highest price ever paid for a document at public auction. Cintas' properties were claimed by the Castro government after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, but Cintas, who died in 1957, willed the Gettysburg Address to the American people, provided it would be kept at the White House, where it was transferred in 1959.
Garry Wills concluded the Bliss copy "is stylistically preferable to others in one significant way: Lincoln removed 'here' from 'that cause for which they (here) gave ... ' The seventh 'here' is in all other versions of the speech." Wills noted the fact that Lincoln "was still making such improvements", suggesting Lincoln was more concerned with a perfected text than with an 'original' one.
From November 21, 2008, to January 1, 2009, the Albert H. Small Documents Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History hosted a limited public viewing of the Bliss copy, with the support of then-First Lady Laura Bush. The Museum also launched an online exhibition and interactive gallery to enable visitors to look more closely at the document.
Another contemporary source of the text is the Associated Press dispatch, transcribed from the shorthand notes taken by reporter Joseph L. Gilbert. It also differs from the drafted text in a number of minor ways.
Eyewitness reports vary as to their view of Lincoln's performance. In 1931, the printed recollections of 87-year-old Mrs. Sarah A. Cooke Myers, who was 19 when she attended the ceremony, suggest a dignified silence followed Lincoln's speech: "I was close to the President and heard all of the Address, but it seemed short. Then there was an impressive silence like our Menallen Friends Meeting. There was no applause when he stopped speaking." According to historian Shelby Foote, after Lincoln's presentation, the applause was delayed, scattered, and "barely polite". In contrast, Pennsylvania Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin maintained, "He pronounced that speech in a voice that all the multitude heard. The crowd was hushed into silence because the President stood before them ... It was so Impressive! It was the common remark of everybody. Such a speech, as they said it was!" Reinterment of soldiers' remains from field graves into the cemetery, which had begun within months of the battle, was less than half complete on the day of the ceremony.
In an oft-repeated legend, Lincoln is said to have turned to his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon and remarked that his speech, like a bad plow, "won't scour". According to Garry Wills, this statement has no basis in fact and largely originates from the unreliable recollections of Lamon. In Garry Wills's view, " had done what he wanted to do ".
In a letter to Lincoln written the following day, Everett praised the President for his eloquent and concise speech, saying, "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes." Lincoln replied that he was glad to know the speech was not a "total failure".
Other public reaction to the speech was divided along partisan lines. The Democratic-leaning "Chicago Times" observed, "The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States." In contrast, the Republican-leaning "The New York Times" was complimentary and printed the speech. In Massachusetts, the "Springfield Republican" also printed the entire speech, calling it "a perfect gem" that was "deep in feeling, compact in thought and expression, and tasteful and elegant in every word and comma". The "Republican" predicted that Lincoln's brief remarks would "repay further study as the model speech". On the sesquicentennial of the address, "The Patriot-News" of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, formerly the "Patriot & Union", retracted its original reaction ("silly remarks" deserving "the veil of oblivion") stating: "Seven score and ten years ago, the forefathers of this media institution brought forth to its audience a judgment so flawed, so tainted by hubris, so lacking in the perspective history would bring, that it cannot remain unaddressed in our archives. ... the "Patriot & Union" failed to recognize [the speech's] momentous importance, timeless eloquence, and lasting significance. The "Patriot-News" regrets the error."
Foreign newspapers also criticized Lincoln's remarks. "The Times" of London commented: "The ceremony [at Gettysburg] was rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln."
Congressman Joseph A. Goulden, then an eighteen-year-old school teacher, was present and heard the speech. He served in the United States Marine Corps during the war, and later had a successful career in insurance in Pennsylvania and New York City before entering Congress as a Democrat. In his later life, Goulden was often asked about the speech, since the passage of time made him one of a dwindling number of individuals who had been present for it. He commented on the event and Lincoln's speech in favorable terms, naming Lincoln's address as one of the inspirations for him to enter military service. Goulden's recollections included remarks to the House of Representatives in 1914.
William R. Rathvon is the only known eyewitness of both Lincoln's arrival at Gettysburg and the address itself to have left an audio recording of his recollections which can be found here . One year before his death in 1939, Rathvon's reminiscences were recorded on February 12, 1938, at the Boston studios of radio station WRUL, including his reading the address, itself, and a 78 RPM record was pressed. The title of the 78 record was "I Heard Lincoln That Day – William R. Rathvon, TR Productions". A copy wound up at National Public Radio (NPR) during a "Quest for Sound" project in 1999. This link depicts the story but it can no longer play it.
Like most people who came to Gettysburg, the Rathvon family was aware that Lincoln was going to make some remarks. The family went to the town square where the procession was to form to go out to the cemetery that had not been completed yet. At the head of the procession rode Lincoln on a gray horse preceded by a military band that was the first the young boy had ever seen. Rathvon describes Lincoln as so tall and with such long legs that they went almost to the ground; he also mentions the long eloquent speech given by Edward Everett of Massachusetts whom Rathvon accurately described as the "most finished orator of the day". Rathvon then goes on to describe how Lincoln stepped forward and "with a manner serious almost to sadness, gave his brief address". During the delivery, along with some other boys, young Rathvon wiggled his way forward through the crowd until he stood within 15 feet of Mr. Lincoln and looked up into what he described as Lincoln's "serious face". Rathvon recalls candidly that, although he listened "intently to every word the president uttered and heard it clearly", he explains, "boylike, I could not recall any of it afterwards". But he explains that if anyone said anything disparaging about "honest Abe", there would have been a "junior battle of Gettysburg". In the recording Rathvon speaks of Lincoln's speech allegorically "echoing through the hills".
The only known and confirmed photograph of Lincoln at Gettysburg, taken by photographer David Bachrach, was identified in the Mathew Brady collection of photographic plates in the National Archives and Records Administration in 1952. While Lincoln's speech was short and may have precluded multiple pictures of him while speaking, he and the other dignitaries sat for hours during the rest of the program. Given the length of Everett's speech and the length of time it took for 19th-century photographers to get "set up" before taking a picture, it is quite plausible that the photographers were ill-prepared for the brevity of Lincoln's remarks.
The words "under God" do not appear in the Nicolay and Hay drafts but are included in the three later copies (Everett, Bancroft, and Bliss). Accordingly, some skeptics maintain that Lincoln did not utter the words "under God" at Gettysburg. However, at least three reporters telegraphed the text of Lincoln's speech on the day the Address was given with the words "under God" included. Historian William E. Barton argues that:
The reporters present included Joseph Gilbert, from the Associated Press; Charles Hale, from the "Boston Advertiser"; John R. Young (who later became the Librarian of Congress), from the "Philadelphia Press"; and reporters from the "Cincinnati Commercial", "New York Tribune", and "The New York Times". Charles Hale "had notebook and pencil in hand, [and] took down the slow-spoken words of the President". "He took down what he declared was the exact language of Lincoln's address, and his declaration was as good as the oath of a court stenographer. His associates confirmed his testimony, which was received, as it deserved to be, at its face value." One explanation is that Lincoln deviated from his prepared text and inserted the phrase when he spoke. Ronald C. White, visiting professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles and professor of American religious history emeritus at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, wrote in this context of Lincoln's insertion and usage of "under God":
It was an uncharacteristically spontaneous revision for a speaker who did not trust extemporaneous speech. Lincoln had added impromptu words in several earlier speeches, but always offered a subsequent apology for the change. In this instance, he did not. And Lincoln included "under God" in all three copies of the address he prepared at later dates. "Under God" pointed backward and forward: back to "this nation", which drew its breath from both political and religious sources, but also forward to a "new birth". Lincoln had come to see the Civil War as a ritual of purification. The old Union had to die. The old man had to die. Death became a transition to a new Union and a new humanity.
The phrase "under God" was used frequently in works published before 1860, usually with the meaning "with God's help".
Outside the Cemetery and within sight of the crosswalk, a historical marker reads:
Nearby, Nov. 19, 1863, in dedicating the National Cemetery, Abraham Lincoln gave the address which he had written in Washington and revised after his arrival at Gettysburg the evening of November 18.
Directly inside the Taneytown Road entrance are located the Rostrum and the "Lincoln Address Memorial." Neither of these is located within 300 yards of any of the five (or more) claimed locations for the dedicatory platform.
Colonel W. Yates Selleck was a marshal in the parade on Consecration Day and was seated on the platform when Lincoln made the address. Selleck marked a map with the position of the platform and described it as "350 feet almost due north of Soldiers' National Monument, 40 feet from a point in the outer circle of lots where [the] Michigan and New York [burial sections] are separated by a path". A location which approximates this description is 39°49.243′N, 77°13.869′W.
As pointed out in 1973 by retired park historian Frederick Tilberg, the "Selleck Site" is 25 feet lower than the crest of Cemetery Hill, and only the crest presents a panoramic view of the battlefield. A spectacular view from the location of the speech was noted by many eyewitnesses, is consistent with the "Traditional Site" at the Soldiers' National Monument (and other sites on the crest) but is inconsistent with the "Selleck Site."
The "Kentucky Memorial", erected in 1975, is directly adjacent to the Soldiers' National Monument, and states, "Kentucky honors her son, Abraham Lincoln, who delivered his immortal address at the site now marked by the soldiers' monument." With its position at the center of the concentric rings of soldiers' graves and the continuing endorsement of Lincoln's native state the Soldiers' National Monument persists as a credible location for the speech.
Writing a physical description of the layout for the Gettysburg National Cemetery under construction in November 1863, the correspondent from the "Cincinnati Daily Commercial" described the dividing lines between the state grave plots as "the radii of a common center, where a flag pole is now raised, but where it is proposed to erect a national monument". With the inclusion of this quotation Tilberg inadvertently verifies a central principle of future photographic analyses—a flagpole, rather than the speakers' platform, occupied the central point of the soldiers' graves. In fact, the precision of the photo-analyses relies upon the coincidence of position between this temporary flag pole and the future monument.
Confusing to today's tourist, the "Kentucky Memorial" is contradicted by a newer marker which was erected nearby by the Gettysburg National Military Park and locates the speakers' platform inside Evergreen Cemetery. Similarly, outdated National Park Service documents which pinpoint the location at the Soldiers' National Monument have not been systematically revised since the placement of the newer marker. Miscellaneous web pages perpetuate the "Traditional Site."
Based upon photographic analysis, the Gettysburg National Military Park (G.N.M.P.) placed a marker (near ) which states, "The speakers' platform was located in Evergreen Cemetery to your left." The observer of this marker stands facing the fence which separates the two cemeteries (one public and one private).
In 1982, Senior Park Historian Kathleen Georg Harrison first analyzed photographs and proposed a location in Evergreen Cemetery but has not published her analysis. Speaking for Harrison without revealing details, two sources characterize her proposed location as "on or near [the] Brown family vault" in Evergreen Cemetery.
William A. Frassanito, a former military intelligence analyst, documented a comprehensive photographic analysis in 1995, and it associates the location of the platform with the position of specific modern headstones in Evergreen Cemetery. According to Frassanito, the extant graves of Israel Yount (died 1892)(), John Koch (died 1913)(), and George E. Kitzmiller (died 1874)() are among those which occupy the location of the 1863 speaker's stand.
The GNMP marker, Wills's interpretation of Harrison's analysis, and the Frassanito analysis concur that the platform was located in private Evergreen Cemetery, rather than public Soldiers' National Cemetery. The National Park Service's "National Cemetery Walking Tour" brochure is one NPS document which agrees:
The Soldiers' National Monument, long misidentified as the spot from which Lincoln spoke, honors the fallen soldiers. [The location of the speech] was actually on the crown of this hill, a short distance on the other side of the iron fence and inside the Evergreen Cemetery, where President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address to a crowd of some 15,000 people.
While the GNMP marker is unspecific, providing only "to your left", the locations determined by the Harrison/Wills analysis and the Frassanito analysis differ by 40 yards. Frassanito has documented 1) his own conclusion, 2) his own
methods and 3) a refutation of the Harrison site, but neither the GNMP nor Harrison has provided any documentation. Each of the three points to a location in Evergreen Cemetery, as do modern NPS publications.
Although Lincoln dedicated the Gettysburg National Cemetery, the monument at the Cemetery's center actually has nothing to do with Lincoln or his famous speech. Intended to symbolize Columbia paying tribute to her fallen sons, its appreciation has been commandeered by the thirst for a tidy home for the speech. Freeing the Cemetery and Monument to serve their original purpose, honoring of Union departed, is as unlikely as a resolution to the location controversy and the erection of a public monument to the speech in the exclusively private Evergreen Cemetery.
The importance of the Gettysburg Address in the history of the United States is underscored by its enduring presence in American culture. In addition to its prominent place carved into a stone cella on the south wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Gettysburg Address is frequently referred to in works of popular culture, with the implicit expectation that contemporary audiences will be familiar with Lincoln's words.
In the many generations that have passed since the Address, it has remained among the most famous speeches in American history, and is often taught in classes about history or civics. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is itself referenced in another of those famed orations, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, King began with a reference, by the style of his opening phrase, to President Lincoln and his enduring words: "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice."
Phrases from the Address are often used or referenced in other works. The current Constitution of France states that the principle of the French Republic is ""gouvernement du peuple, par le peuple et pour le peuple" ("government of the people, by the people, and for the people"), a literal translation of Lincoln's words. Sun Yat-Sen's "Three Principles of the People" as well as the preamble for the 1947 Constitution of Japan were also inspired from that phrase. The aircraft carrier has as its ship's motto the phrase "shall not perish".
U.S. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts wrote of the address and its enduring presence in American culture after Lincoln's assassination in April 1865: "That speech, uttered at the field of Gettysburg ... and now sanctified by the martyrdom of its author, is a monumental act. In the modesty of his nature he said 'the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; but it can never forget what they did here.' He was mistaken. The world at once noted what he said, and will never cease to remember it."
U.S. President John F. Kennedy stated in July 1963 about the battle and Lincoln's speech: "Five score years ago the ground on which we here stand shuddered under the clash of arms and was consecrated for all time by the blood of American manhood. Abraham Lincoln, in dedicating this great battlefield, has expressed, in words too eloquent for paraphrase or summary, why this sacrifice was necessary." Kennedy was himself assassinated three days after the Gettysburg Address centennial.
In 2015, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation compiled "Gettysburg Replies: The World Responds to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address". The work challenges leaders to craft 272 word responses to celebrate Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, or a related topic.
One of the replies was by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in which he made the point that one of Lincoln's greatest legacies was establishing, in the same year of the Gettysburg Address, the National Academy of Sciences, which had the longterm effect of "setting our Nation on a course of scientifically enlightened governance, without which we all may perish from this Earth".
A common American myth about the Gettysburg Address is that Lincoln quickly wrote the speech on the back of an envelope. This widely held misunderstanding may have originated with a popular book, "The Perfect Tribute", by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews (1906), which was assigned reading for generations of schoolchildren, sold 600,000 copies when published as a standalone volume, and was twice adapted for film.
Other lesser-known claims include Harriet Beecher Stowe's assertion that Lincoln had composed the address "in only a few moments," and that of industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who claimed to have personally supplied Lincoln with a pen.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12384
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Genetic code
The genetic code is the set of rules used by living cells to translate information encoded within genetic material (DNA or mRNA sequences of nucleotide triplets, or codons) into proteins. Translation is accomplished by the ribosome, which links amino acids in an order specified by messenger RNA (mRNA), using transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules to carry amino acids and to read the mRNA three nucleotides at a time. The genetic code is highly similar among all organisms and can be expressed in a simple table with 64 entries.
The code defines how codons specify which amino acid will be added next during protein synthesis. With some exceptions, a three-nucleotide codon in a nucleic acid sequence specifies a single amino acid. The vast majority of genes are encoded with a single scheme (see the RNA codon table). That scheme is often referred to as the canonical or standard genetic code, or simply "the" genetic code, though variant codes (such as in human mitochondria) exist.
While the "genetic code" is what determines a protein's amino acid sequence, other genomic regions determine when and where these proteins are produced according to various "gene regulatory codes".
Efforts to understand how proteins are encoded began after DNA's structure was discovered in 1953. George Gamow postulated that sets of three bases must be employed to encode the 20 standard amino acids used by living cells to build proteins, which would allow a maximum of 64 amino acids.
The Crick, Brenner, Barnett and Watts-Tobin experiment first demonstrated that codons consist of three DNA bases. Marshall Nirenberg and Heinrich J. Matthaei were the first to reveal the nature of a codon in 1961.
They used a cell-free system to translate a poly-uracil RNA sequence (i.e., UUUUU...) and discovered that the polypeptide that they had synthesized consisted of only the amino acid phenylalanine. They thereby deduced that the codon UUU specified the amino acid phenylalanine.
This was followed by experiments in Severo Ochoa's laboratory that demonstrated that the poly-adenine RNA sequence (AAAAA...) coded for the polypeptide poly-lysine and that the poly-cytosine RNA sequence (CCCCC...) coded for the polypeptide poly-proline. Therefore, the codon AAA specified the amino acid lysine, and the codon CCC specified the amino acid proline. Using various copolymers most of the remaining codons were then determined.
Subsequent work by Har Gobind Khorana identified the rest of the genetic code. Shortly thereafter, Robert W. Holley determined the structure of transfer RNA (tRNA), the adapter molecule that facilitates the process of translating RNA into protein. This work was based upon Ochoa's earlier studies, yielding the latter the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1959 for work on the enzymology of RNA synthesis.
Extending this work, Nirenberg and Philip Leder revealed the code's triplet nature and deciphered its codons. In these experiments, various combinations of mRNA were passed through a filter that contained ribosomes, the components of cells that translate RNA into protein. Unique triplets promoted the binding of specific tRNAs to the ribosome. Leder and Nirenberg were able to determine the sequences of 54 out of 64 codons in their experiments. Khorana, Holley and Nirenberg received the 1968 Nobel for their work.
The three stop codons were named by discoverers Richard Epstein and Charles Steinberg. "Amber" was named after their friend Harris Bernstein, whose last name means "amber" in German. The other two stop codons were named "ochre" and "opal" in order to keep the "color names" theme.
In a broad academic audience, the concept of the evolution of the genetic code from the original and ambiguous genetic code to a well-defined ("frozen") code with the repertoire of 20 (+2) canonical amino acids is widely accepted.
However, there are different opinions, concepts, approaches and ideas, which is the best way to change it experimentally. Even models are proposed that predict "entry points" for synthetic amino acid invasion of the genetic code.
Since 2001, 40 non-natural amino acids have been added into protein by creating a unique codon (recoding) and a corresponding transfer-RNA:aminoacyl – tRNA-synthetase pair to encode it with diverse physicochemical and biological properties in order to be used as a tool to exploring protein structure and function or to create novel or enhanced proteins.
H. Murakami and M. Sisido extended some codons to have four and five bases. Steven A. Benner constructed a functional 65th ("in vivo") codon.
In 2015 N. Budisa, D. Söll and co-workers reported the full substitution of all 20,899 tryptophan residues (UGG codons) with unnatural thienopyrrole-alanine in the genetic code of the bacterium "Escherichia coli".
In 2016 the first stable semisynthetic organism was created. It was a (single cell) bacterium with two synthetic bases (called X and Y). The bases survived cell division.
In 2017, researchers in South Korea reported that they had engineered a mouse with an extended genetic code that can produce proteins with unnatural amino acids.
In May 2019, researchers, in a milestone effort, reported the creation of a new synthetic (possibly artificial) form of viable life, a variant of the bacteria "Escherichia coli", by reducing the natural number of 64 codons in the bacterial genome to 59 codons instead, in order to encode 20 amino acids.
A reading frame is defined by the initial triplet of nucleotides from which translation starts. It sets the frame for a run of successive, non-overlapping codons, which is known as an "open reading frame" (ORF). For example, the string 5'-AAATGAACG-3' (see figure), if read from the first position, contains the codons AAA, TGA, and ACG ; if read from the second position, it contains the codons AAT and GAA ; and if read from the third position, it contains the codons ATG and AAC. Every sequence can, thus, be read in its 5' → 3' direction in three reading frames, each producing a possibly distinct amino acid sequence: in the given example, Lys (K)-Trp (W)-Thr (T), Asn (N)-Glu (E), or Met (M)-Asn (N), respectively (when translating with the vertebrate mitochondrial code). When DNA is double-stranded, six possible reading frames are defined, three in the forward orientation on one strand and three reverse on the opposite strand. Protein-coding frames are defined by a start codon, usually the first AUG (ATG) codon in the RNA (DNA) sequence.
In eukaryotes, ORFs in exons are often interrupted by introns.
Translation starts with a chain-initiation codon or start codon. The start codon alone is not sufficient to begin the process. Nearby sequences such as the Shine-Dalgarno sequence in "E. coli" and initiation factors are also required to start translation. The most common start codon is AUG, which is read as methionine or, in bacteria, as formylmethionine. Alternative start codons depending on the organism include "GUG" or "UUG"; these codons normally represent valine and leucine, respectively, but as start codons they are translated as methionine or formylmethionine.
The three stop codons have names: UAG is "amber", UGA is "opal" (sometimes also called "umber"), and UAA is "ochre". Stop codons are also called "termination" or "nonsense" codons. They signal release of the nascent polypeptide from the ribosome because no cognate tRNA has anticodons complementary to these stop signals, allowing a release factor to bind to the ribosome instead.
During the process of DNA replication, errors occasionally occur in the polymerization of the second strand. These errors, mutations, can affect an organism's phenotype, especially if they occur within the protein coding sequence of a gene. Error rates are typically 1 error in every 10–100 million bases—due to the "proofreading" ability of DNA polymerases.
Missense mutations and nonsense mutations are examples of point mutations that can cause genetic diseases such as sickle-cell disease and thalassemia respectively. Clinically important missense mutations generally change the properties of the coded amino acid residue among basic, acidic, polar or non-polar states, whereas nonsense mutations result in a stop codon.
Mutations that disrupt the reading frame sequence by indels (insertions or deletions) of a non-multiple of 3 nucleotide bases are known as frameshift mutations. These mutations usually result in a completely different translation from the original, and likely cause a stop codon to be read, which truncates the protein. These mutations may impair the protein's function and are thus rare in "in vivo" protein-coding sequences. One reason inheritance of frameshift mutations is rare is that, if the protein being translated is essential for growth under the selective pressures the organism faces, absence of a functional protein may cause death before the organism becomes viable. Frameshift mutations may result in severe genetic diseases such as Tay–Sachs disease.
Although most mutations that change protein sequences are harmful or neutral, some mutations have benefits. These mutations may enable the mutant organism to withstand particular environmental stresses better than wild type organisms, or reproduce more quickly. In these cases a mutation will tend to become more common in a population through natural selection. Viruses that use RNA as their genetic material have rapid mutation rates, which can be an advantage, since these viruses thereby evolve rapidly, and thus evade the immune system defensive responses. In large populations of asexually reproducing organisms, for example, "E. coli", multiple beneficial mutations may co-occur. This phenomenon is called clonal interference and causes competition among the mutations.
Degeneracy is the redundancy of the genetic code. This term was given by Bernfield and Nirenberg. The genetic code has redundancy but no ambiguity (see the codon tables below for the full correlation). For example, although codons GAA and GAG both specify glutamic acid (redundancy), neither specifies another amino acid (no ambiguity). The codons encoding one amino acid may differ in any of their three positions. For example, the amino acid leucine is specified by YUR or CUN (UUA, UUG, CUU, CUC, CUA, or CUG) codons (difference in the first or third position indicated using IUPAC notation), while the amino acid serine is specified by UCN or AGY (UCA, UCG, UCC, UCU, AGU, or AGC) codons (difference in the first, second, or third position). A practical consequence of redundancy is that errors in the third position of the triplet codon cause only a silent mutation or an error that would not affect the protein because the hydrophilicity or hydrophobicity is maintained by equivalent substitution of amino acids; for example, a codon of NUN (where N = any nucleotide) tends to code for hydrophobic amino acids. NCN yields amino acid residues that are small in size and moderate in hydropathicity; NAN encodes average size hydrophilic residues. The genetic code is so well-structured for hydropathicity that a mathematical analysis (Singular Value Decomposition) of 12 variables (4 nucleotides x 3 positions) yields a remarkable correlation (C = 0.95) for predicting the hydropathicity of the encoded amino acid directly from the triplet nucleotide sequence, "without translation." Note in the table, below, eight amino acids are not affected at all by mutations at the third position of the codon, whereas in the figure above, a mutation at the second position is likely to cause a radical change in the physicochemical properties of the encoded amino acid.
Nevertheless, changes in the first position of the codons are more important than changes in the second position on a global scale. The reason may be that charge reversal (from a positive to a negative charge or vice versa) can only occur upon mutations in the first position, but never upon changes in the second position of a codon. Such charge reversal may have dramatic consequences for the structure or function of a protein. This aspect may have been largely underestimated by previous studies.
The frequency of codons, also known as codon usage bias, can vary from species to species with functional implications for the control of translation. The following codon usage table is for the human genome.
The DNA codon table is essentially identical to that for RNA, but with U replaced by T.
In some proteins, non-standard amino acids are substituted for standard stop codons, depending on associated signal sequences in the messenger RNA. For example, UGA can code for selenocysteine and UAG can code for pyrrolysine. Selenocysteine became to be seen as the 21st amino acid, and pyrrolysine as the 22nd. Unlike selenocysteine, pyrrolysine-encoded UAG is translated with the participation of a dedicated aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase. Both selenocysteine and pyrrolysine may be present in the same organism. Although the genetic code is normally fixed in an organism, the achaeal prokaryote "Acetohalobium arabaticum" can expand its genetic code from 20 to 21 amino acids (by including pyrrolysine) under different conditions of growth.
Variations on the standard code were predicted in the 1970s.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12385
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Golden ratio
In mathematics, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. The figure on the right illustrates the geometric relationship. Expressed algebraically, for quantities "a" and "b" with "a" > "b" > 0,
where the Greek letter phi (formula_2 or formula_3) represents the golden ratio.{2}. The sum of the two solutions is one, and the product of the two solutions is negative one.}} It is an irrational number that is a solution to the quadratic equation formula_4, with a value of:
The golden ratio is also called the golden mean or golden section (Latin: "sectio aurea"). Other names include extreme and mean ratio, medial section, divine proportion (Latin: "proportio divina"), divine section (Latin: "sectio divina"), golden proportion, golden cut, and golden number.
Mathematicians since Euclid have studied the properties of the golden ratio, including its appearance in the dimensions of a regular pentagon and in a golden rectangle, which may be cut into a square and a smaller rectangle with the same aspect ratio. The golden ratio has also been used to analyze the proportions of natural objects as well as man-made systems such as financial markets, in some cases based on dubious fits to data. The golden ratio appears in some patterns in nature, including the spiral arrangement of leaves and other plant parts.
Some twentieth-century artists and architects, including Le Corbusier and Salvador Dalí, have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing.
Two quantities "a" and "b" are said to be in the "golden ratio" if
One method for finding the value of is to start with the left fraction. Through simplifying the fraction and substituting in b/a = 1/,
Therefore,
Multiplying by gives
which can be rearranged to
Using the quadratic formula, two solutions are obtained:
Because is the ratio between positive quantities, is necessarily positive:
According to Mario Livio:
Ancient Greek mathematicians first studied what we now call the golden ratio because of its frequent appearance in geometry; the division of a line into "extreme and mean ratio" (the golden section) is important in the geometry of regular pentagrams and pentagons. According to one story, 5th-century BC mathematician Hippasus discovered that the golden ratio was neither a whole number nor a fraction (an irrational number), surprising Pythagoreans. Euclid's "Elements" () provides several propositions and their proofs employing the golden ratio and contains the first known definition:
The golden ratio was studied peripherally over the next millennium. Abu Kamil (c. 850–930) employed it in his geometric calculations of pentagons and decagons; his writings influenced that of Fibonacci (Leonardo of Pisa) (c. 1170–1250), who used the ratio in related geometry problems, though never connected it to the series of numbers named after him. Luca Pacioli named his book "Divina proportione" (1509) after the ratio and explored its properties including its appearance in some of the Platonic solids. Leonardo da Vinci, who illustrated the aforementioned book, called the ratio the "sectio aurea" ('golden section'). 16th-century mathematicians such as Rafael Bombelli solved geometric problems using the ratio.
German mathematician Simon Jacob (d. 1564) noted that consecutive Fibonacci numbers converge to the golden ratio; this was rediscovered by Johannes Kepler in 1608. The first known decimal approximation of the (inverse) golden ratio was stated as "about 0.6180340" in 1597 by Michael Maestlin of the University of Tübingen in a letter to Kepler, his former student. The same year, Kepler wrote to Maestlin of the Kepler triangle, which combines the golden ratio with the Pythagorean theorem. Kepler said of these:
18th-century mathematicians Abraham de Moivre, Daniel Bernoulli, and Leonhard Euler used a golden ratio-based formula which finds the value of a Fibonacci number based on its placement in the sequence; in 1843 this was rediscovered by Jacques Philippe Marie Binet, for whom it was named "Binet's formula". Martin Ohm first used the German term "goldener Schnitt" ('golden section') to describe the ratio in 1835. James Sully used the equivalent English term in 1875.
By 1910, mathematician Mark Barr began using the Greek letter Phi (φ) as a symbol for the golden ratio. It has also been represented by tau (τ), the first letter of the ancient Greek τομή ('cut' or 'section').
Between 1973 and 1974, Roger Penrose developed Penrose tiling, a pattern related to the golden ratio both in the ratio of areas of its two rhombic tiles and in their relative frequency within the pattern. This led to Dan Shechtman's early 1980s discovery of quasicrystals, some of which exhibit icosahedral symmetry.
A 2004 geometrical analysis of earlier research into the Great Mosque of Kairouan (670) reveals an application of the golden ratio in much of the design. They found ratios close to the golden ratio in the overall layout and in the dimensions of the prayer space, the court, and the minaret. However, the areas with ratios close to the golden ratio were not part of the original plan, and were likely added in a reconstruction.
It has been speculated that the golden ratio was used by the designers of the Naqsh-e Jahan Square (1629) and the adjacent Lotfollah Mosque.
The Swiss architect Le Corbusier, famous for his contributions to the modern international style, centered his design philosophy on systems of harmony and proportion. Le Corbusier's faith in the mathematical order of the universe was closely bound to the golden ratio and the Fibonacci series, which he described as "rhythms apparent to the eye and clear in their relations with one another. And these rhythms are at the very root of human activities. They resound in man by an organic inevitability, the same fine inevitability which causes the tracing out of the Golden Section by children, old men, savages and the learned."
Le Corbusier explicitly used the golden ratio in his Modulor system for the scale of architectural proportion. He saw this system as a continuation of the long tradition of Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man", the work of Leon Battista Alberti, and others who used the proportions of the human body to improve the appearance and function of architecture. In addition to the golden ratio, Le Corbusier based the system on human measurements, Fibonacci numbers, and the double unit. He took suggestion of the golden ratio in human proportions to an extreme: he sectioned his model human body's height at the navel with the two sections in golden ratio, then subdivided those sections in golden ratio at the knees and throat; he used these golden ratio proportions in the Modulor system. Le Corbusier's 1927 Villa Stein in Garches exemplified the Modulor system's application. The villa's rectangular ground plan, elevation, and inner structure closely approximate golden rectangles.
Another Swiss architect, Mario Botta, bases many of his designs on geometric figures. Several private houses he designed in Switzerland are composed of squares and circles, cubes and cylinders. In a house he designed in Origlio, the golden ratio is the proportion between the central section and the side sections of the house.
"Divina proportione" ("Divine proportion"), a three-volume work by Luca Pacioli, was published in 1509. Pacioli, a Franciscan friar, was known mostly as a mathematician, but he was also trained and keenly interested in art. "Divina proportione" explored the mathematics of the golden ratio. Though it is often said that Pacioli advocated the golden ratio's application to yield pleasing, harmonious proportions, Livio points out that the interpretation has been traced to an error in 1799, and that Pacioli actually advocated the Vitruvian system of rational proportions. Pacioli also saw Catholic religious significance in the ratio, which led to his work's title.
Leonardo da Vinci's illustrations of polyhedra in "Divina proportione" have led some to speculate that he incorporated the golden ratio in his paintings. But the suggestion that his "Mona Lisa", for example, employs golden ratio proportions, is not supported by Leonardo's own writings. Similarly, although the "Vitruvian Man" is often shown in connection with the golden ratio, the proportions of the figure do not actually match it, and the text only mentions whole number ratios.
Salvador Dalí, influenced by the works of Matila Ghyka, explicitly used the golden ratio in his masterpiece, "The Sacrament of the Last Supper". The dimensions of the canvas are a golden rectangle. A huge dodecahedron, in perspective so that edges appear in golden ratio to one another, is suspended above and behind Jesus and dominates the composition.
A statistical study on 565 works of art of different great painters, performed in 1999, found that these artists had not used the golden ratio in the size of their canvases. The study concluded that the average ratio of the two sides of the paintings studied is 1.34, with averages for individual artists ranging from 1.04 (Goya) to 1.46 (Bellini). On the other hand, Pablo Tosto listed over 350 works by well-known artists, including more than 100 which have canvasses with golden rectangle and root-5 proportions, and others with proportions like root-2, 3, 4, and 6.
According to Jan Tschichold,
There was a time when deviations from the truly beautiful page proportions 2:3, 1:√3, and the Golden Section were rare. Many books produced between 1550 and 1770 show these proportions exactly, to within half a millimeter.
According to some sources, the golden ratio is used in everyday design, for example in the proportions of playing cards, postcards, posters, light switch plates, and widescreen televisions.
Ernő Lendvai analyzes Béla Bartók's works as being based on two opposing systems, that of the golden ratio and the acoustic scale, though other music scholars reject that analysis. French composer Erik Satie used the golden ratio in several of his pieces, including "Sonneries de la Rose+Croix". The golden ratio is also apparent in the organization of the sections in the music of Debussy's "Reflets dans l'eau (Reflections in Water)", from "Images" (1st series, 1905), in which "the sequence of keys is marked out by the intervals 34, 21, 13 and 8, and the main climax sits at the phi position".
The musicologist Roy Howat has observed that the formal boundaries of Debussy's "La Mer" correspond exactly to the golden section. Trezise finds the intrinsic evidence "remarkable", but cautions that no written or reported evidence suggests that Debussy consciously sought such proportions.
Pearl Drums positions the air vents on its Masters Premium models based on the golden ratio. The company claims that this arrangement improves bass response and has applied for a patent on this innovation.
Though Heinz Bohlen proposed the non-octave-repeating 833 cents scale based on combination tones, the tuning features relations based on the golden ratio. As a musical interval the ratio 1.618... is 833.090... cents ().
Johannes Kepler wrote that "the image of man and woman stems from the divine proportion. In my opinion, the propagation of plants and the progenitive acts of animals are in the same ratio".
The psychologist Adolf Zeising noted that the golden ratio appeared in phyllotaxis and argued from these patterns in nature that the golden ratio was a universal law. Zeising wrote in 1854 of a universal orthogenetic law of "striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art".
In 2010, the journal "Science" reported that the golden ratio is present at the atomic scale in the magnetic resonance of spins in cobalt niobate crystals.
However, some have argued that many apparent manifestations of the golden ratio in nature, especially in regard to animal dimensions, are fictitious.
The golden ratio is key to the golden-section search.
The golden ratio is an irrational number. Below are two short proofs of irrationality:
Recall that:
If we call the whole "n" and the longer part "m", then the second statement above becomes
or, algebraically
To say that the golden ratio is rational means that is a fraction "n"/"m" where "n" and "m" are integers. We may take "n"/"m" to be in lowest terms and "n" and "m" to be positive. But if "n"/"m" is in lowest terms, then the identity labeled (*) above says "m"/("n" − "m") is in still lower terms. That is a contradiction that follows from the assumption that is rational.
Another short proof—perhaps more commonly known—of the irrationality of the golden ratio makes use of the closure of rational numbers under addition and multiplication. If formula_15 is rational, then formula_16 is also rational, which is a contradiction if it is already known that the square root of a non-square natural number is irrational.
The golden ratio is also an algebraic number and even an algebraic integer. It has minimal polynomial
Having degree 2, this polynomial actually has two roots, the other being the golden ratio conjugate.
The conjugate root to the minimal polynomial x2 − x − 1 is
The absolute value of this quantity (≈ 0.618) corresponds to the length ratio taken in reverse order (shorter segment length over longer segment length, "b/a"), and is sometimes referred to as the golden ratio conjugate or silver ratio. It is denoted here by the capital Phi (formula_19):
Alternatively, formula_19 can be expressed as
This illustrates the unique property of the golden ratio among positive numbers, that
or its inverse:
This means 0.61803...:1 = 1:1.61803...
The formula = 1 + 1/ can be expanded recursively to obtain a continued fraction for the golden ratio:
and its reciprocal:
The convergents of these continued fractions (1/1, 2/1, 3/2, 5/3, 8/5, 13/8, ..., or 1/1, 1/2, 2/3, 3/5, 5/8, 8/13, ...) are ratios of successive Fibonacci numbers.
The equation 2 = 1 + likewise produces the continued square root:
An infinite series can be derived to express "φ":
Also:
These correspond to the fact that the length of the diagonal of a regular pentagon is times the length of its side, and similar relations in a pentagram.
The number turns up frequently in geometry, particularly in figures with pentagonal symmetry.
The length of a regular pentagon's diagonal is times its side.
The vertices of a regular icosahedron are those of three mutually orthogonal golden rectangles.
There is no known general algorithm to arrange a given number of nodes evenly on a sphere, for any of several definitions of even distribution (see, for example, "Thomson problem"). However, a useful approximation results from dividing the sphere into parallel bands of equal surface area and placing one node in each band at longitudes spaced by a golden section of the circle, i.e. 360°/ ≅ 222.5°. This method was used to arrange the 1500 mirrors of the student-participatory satellite Starshine-3.
Application examples you can see in the articles Pentagon with a given side length, Decagon with given circumcircle and Decagon with a given side length.
Both of the above displayed different algorithms produce geometric constructions that determine two aligned line segments where the ratio of the longer one to the shorter one is the golden ratio.
The golden triangle can be characterized as an isosceles triangle ABC with the property that bisecting the angle C produces a new triangle CXB which is a similar triangle to the original.
If angle BCX = α, then XCA = α because of the bisection, and CAB = α because of the similar triangles; ABC = 2α from the original isosceles symmetry, and BXC = 2α by similarity. The angles in a triangle add up to 180°, so 5α = 180, giving α = 36°. So the angles of the golden triangle are thus 36°-72°-72°. The angles of the remaining obtuse isosceles triangle AXC (sometimes called the golden gnomon) are 36°-36°-108°.
Suppose XB has length 1, and we call BC length . Because of the isosceles triangles XC=XA and BC=XC, so these are also length φ. Length AC = AB, therefore equals + 1. But triangle ABC is similar to triangle CXB, so AC/BC = BC/BX, AC/ = φ/1, and so AC also equals 2. Thus 2 = φ + 1, confirming that is indeed the golden ratio.
Similarly, the ratio of the area of the larger triangle AXC to the smaller CXB is equal to , while the inverse ratio is φ − 1.
In a regular pentagon the ratio of a diagonal to a side is the golden ratio, while intersecting diagonals section each other in the golden ratio.
George Odom has given a remarkably simple construction for involving an equilateral triangle: if an equilateral triangle is inscribed in a circle and the line segment joining the midpoints of two sides is produced to intersect the circle in either of two points, then these three points are in golden proportion. This result is a straightforward consequence of the intersecting chords theorem and can be used to construct a regular pentagon, a construction that attracted the attention of the noted Canadian geometer H. S. M. Coxeter who published it in Odom's name as a diagram in the "American Mathematical Monthly" accompanied by the single word "Behold!"
The golden ratio plays an important role in the geometry of pentagrams. Each intersection of edges sections other edges in the golden ratio. Also, the ratio of the length of the shorter segment to the segment bounded by the two intersecting edges (a side of the pentagon in the pentagram's center) is , as the four-color illustration shows.
The pentagram includes ten isosceles triangles: five acute and five obtuse isosceles triangles. In all of them, the ratio of the longer side to the shorter side is . The acute triangles are golden triangles. The obtuse isosceles triangles are golden gnomons.
The golden ratio properties of a regular pentagon can be confirmed by applying Ptolemy's theorem to the quadrilateral formed by removing one of its vertices. If the quadrilateral's long edge and diagonals are "b", and short edges are "a", then Ptolemy's theorem gives "b"2 = "a"2 + "ab" which yields
Consider a triangle with sides of lengths "a", "b", and "c" in decreasing order. Define the "scalenity" of the triangle to be the smaller of the two ratios "a"/"b" and "b"/"c". The scalenity is always less than and can be made as close as desired to .
If the side lengths of a triangle form a geometric progression and are in the ratio 1 : "r" : "r"2, where "r" is the common ratio, then "r" must lie in the range −1 < "r" < , which is a consequence of the triangle inequality (the sum of any two sides of a triangle must be strictly bigger than the length of the third side). If "r" = then the shorter two sides are 1 and but their sum is 2, thus "r" < . A similar calculation shows that "r" > −1. A triangle whose sides are in the ratio 1 : : is a right triangle (because 1 + = 2) known as a Kepler triangle.
A golden rhombus is a rhombus whose diagonals are in the golden ratio. The rhombic triacontahedron is a convex polytope that has a very special property: all of its faces are golden rhombi. In the rhombic triacontahedron the dihedral angle between any two adjacent rhombi is 144°, which is twice the isosceles angle of a golden triangle and four times its most acute angle.
The mathematics of the golden ratio and of the Fibonacci sequence are intimately interconnected. The Fibonacci sequence is:
A closed-form expression for the Fibonacci sequence involves the golden ratio:
The golden ratio is the limit of the ratios of successive terms of the Fibonacci sequence (or any Fibonacci-like sequence), as shown by Kepler:
In other words, if a Fibonacci number is divided by its immediate predecessor in the sequence, the quotient approximates ; e.g., 987/610 1.6180327868852. These approximations are alternately lower and higher than , and converge to as the Fibonacci numbers increase, and:
More generally:
where above, the ratios of consecutive terms of the Fibonacci sequence, is a case when formula_38
Furthermore, the successive powers of obey the Fibonacci recurrence:
This identity allows any polynomial in to be reduced to a linear expression. For example:
The reduction to a linear expression can be accomplished in one step by using the relationship
where formula_42 is the "k"th Fibonacci number.
However, this is no special property of , because polynomials in any solution "x" to a quadratic equation can be reduced in an analogous manner, by applying:
for given coefficients "a", "b" such that "x" satisfies the equation. Even more generally, any rational function (with rational coefficients) of the root of an irreducible "n"th-degree polynomial over the rationals can be reduced to a polynomial of degree Phrased in terms of field theory, if α is a root of an irreducible "n"th-degree polynomial, then formula_44 has degree "n" over formula_45, with basis formula_46
The golden ratio and inverse golden ratio formula_47 have a set of symmetries that preserve and interrelate them. They are both preserved by the fractional linear transformations formula_48 – this fact corresponds to the identity and the definition quadratic equation.
Further, they are interchanged by the three maps formula_49 – they are reciprocals, symmetric about formula_50, and (projectively) symmetric about 2.
More deeply, these maps form a subgroup of the modular group formula_51 isomorphic to the symmetric group on 3 letters, formula_52 corresponding to the stabilizer of the set formula_53 of 3 standard points on the projective line, and the symmetries correspond to the quotient map formula_54 – the subgroup formula_55 consisting of the 3-cycles and the identity formula_56 fixes the two numbers, while the 2-cycles interchange these, thus realizing the map.
The golden ratio has the simplest expression (and slowest convergence) as a continued fraction expansion of any irrational number (see "Alternate forms" above). It is, for that reason, one of the worst cases of Lagrange's approximation theorem and it is an extremal case of the Hurwitz inequality for Diophantine approximations. This may be why angles close to the golden ratio often show up in phyllotaxis (the growth of plants).
The defining quadratic polynomial and the conjugate relationship lead to decimal values that have their fractional part in common with :
The sequence of powers of contains these values 0.618..., 1.0, 1.618..., 2.618...; more generally,
any power of is equal to the sum of the two immediately preceding powers:
As a result, one can easily decompose any power of into a multiple of and a constant. The multiple and the constant are always adjacent Fibonacci numbers. This leads to another property of the positive powers of :
If formula_60, then:
When the golden ratio is used as the base of a numeral system (see Golden ratio base, sometimes dubbed "phinary" or "-nary"), every integer has a terminating representation, despite being irrational, but every fraction has a non-terminating representation.
The golden ratio is a fundamental unit of the algebraic number field formula_63 and is a Pisot–Vijayaraghavan number. In the field formula_63 we have formula_65, where formula_66 is the formula_67-th Lucas number.
The golden ratio also appears in hyperbolic geometry, as the maximum distance from a point on one side of an ideal triangle to the closer of the other two sides: this distance, the side length of the equilateral triangle formed by the points of tangency of a circle inscribed within the ideal triangle, is formula_68.
The golden ratio's decimal expansion can be calculated directly from the expression
with ≈ 2.2360679774997896964 . The square root of 5 can be calculated with the Babylonian method, starting with an initial estimate such as "x" = 2 and iterating
for "n" = 1, 2, 3, ..., until the difference between "x""n" and "x""n"−1 becomes zero, to the desired number of digits.
The Babylonian algorithm for is equivalent to Newton's method for solving the equation "x"2 − 5 = 0. In its more general form, Newton's method can be applied directly to any algebraic equation, including the equation "x"2 − x − 1 = 0 that defines the golden ratio. This gives an iteration that converges to the golden ratio itself,
for an appropriate initial estimate "x" such as "x" = 1. A slightly faster method is to rewrite the equation as "x" − 1 − 1/"x" = 0, in which case the Newton iteration becomes
These iterations all converge quadratically; that is, each step roughly doubles the number of correct digits. The golden ratio is therefore relatively easy to compute with arbitrary precision. The time needed to compute "n" digits of the golden ratio is proportional to the time needed to divide two "n"-digit numbers. This is considerably faster than known algorithms for the transcendental numbers and .
An easily programmed alternative using only integer arithmetic is to calculate two large consecutive Fibonacci numbers and divide them. The ratio of Fibonacci numbers "F" 25001 and "F" 25000, each over 5000 digits, yields over 10,000 significant digits of the golden ratio.
The decimal expansion of the golden ratio has been calculated to an accuracy of two trillion ( = 2,000,000,000,000) digits.
Both Egyptian pyramids and the regular square pyramids that resemble them can be analyzed with respect to the golden ratio and other ratios.
A pyramid in which the apothem (slant height along the bisector of a face) is equal to times the semi-base (half the base width) is sometimes called a "golden pyramid". The isosceles triangle that is the face of such a pyramid can be constructed from the two halves of a diagonally split golden rectangle (of size semi-base by apothem), joining the medium-length edges to make the apothem. The height of this pyramid is formula_73 times the semi-base (that is, the slope of the face is formula_73); the square of the height is equal to the area of a face, times the square of the semi-base.
The medial right triangle of this "golden" pyramid (see diagram), with sides formula_75 is interesting in its own right, demonstrating via the Pythagorean theorem the relationship formula_76 or formula_77. This Kepler triangle
is the only right triangle proportion with edge lengths in geometric progression, just as the 3–4–5 triangle is the only right triangle proportion with edge lengths in arithmetic progression. The angle with tangent formula_73 corresponds to the angle that the side of the pyramid makes with respect to the ground, 51.827... degrees (51° 49' 38").
A nearly similar pyramid shape, but with rational proportions, is described in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (the source of a large part of modern knowledge of ancient Egyptian mathematics), based on the 3:4:5 triangle; the face slope corresponding to the angle with tangent 4/3 is, to two decimal places, 53.13 degrees (53 degrees and 8 minutes). The slant height or apothem is 5/3 or 1.666... times the semi-base. The Rhind papyrus has another pyramid problem as well, again with rational slope (expressed as run over rise). Egyptian mathematics did not include the notion of irrational numbers, and the rational inverse slope (run/rise, multiplied by a factor of 7 to convert to their conventional units of palms per cubit) was used in the building of pyramids.
Another mathematical pyramid with proportions almost identical to the "golden" one is the one with perimeter equal to 2 times the height, or h:b = 4:. This triangle has a face angle of 51.854° (51°51'), very close to the 51.827° of the Kepler triangle. This pyramid relationship corresponds to the coincidental relationship formula_79.
Egyptian pyramids very close in proportion to these mathematical pyramids are known.
One Egyptian pyramid that is close to a "golden pyramid" is the Great Pyramid of Giza (also known as the Pyramid of Cheops or Khufu). Its slope of 51° 52' is close to the "golden" pyramid inclination of 51° 50' – and even closer to the -based pyramid inclination of 51° 51'. However, several other mathematical theories of the shape of the great pyramid, based on rational slopes, have been found to be both more accurate and more plausible explanations for the 51° 52' slope.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Friedrich Röber studied various Egyptian pyramids including those of Khafre, Menkaure, and some of the Giza, Saqqara, and Abusir groups. He did not apply the golden ratio to the Great Pyramid of Giza, but instead agreed with John Shae Perring that its side-to-height ratio is 8:5. For all the other pyramids he applied measurements related to the Kepler triangle, and claimed that either their whole or half-side lengths are related to their heights by the golden ratio.
In 1859, the pyramidologist John Taylor misinterpreted Herodotus () as indicating that the Great Pyramid's height squared equals the area of one of its face triangles. This led Taylor to claim that, in the Great Pyramid, the golden ratio is represented by the ratio of the length of the face (the slope height, inclined at an angle θ to the ground) to half the length of the side of the square base (equivalent to the secant of the angle θ). The above two lengths are about and , respectively. The ratio of these lengths is the golden ratio, accurate to more digits than either of the original measurements. Similarly, Howard Vyse reported the great pyramid height , and half-base , yielding 1.6189 for the ratio of slant height to half-base, again more accurate than the data variability.
Eric Temple Bell, mathematician and historian, claimed in 1950 that Egyptian mathematics would not have supported the ability to calculate the slant height of the pyramids, or the ratio to the height, except in the case of the 3:4:5 pyramid, since the 3:4:5 triangle was the only right triangle known to the Egyptians and they did not know the Pythagorean theorem, nor any way to reason about irrationals such as or . Example geometric problems of pyramid design in the Rhind papyrus correspond to various rational slopes.
Michael Rice asserts that principal authorities on the history of Egyptian architecture have argued that the Egyptians were well acquainted with the golden ratio and that it is part of the mathematics of the pyramids, citing Giedon (1957). Historians of science have long debated whether the Egyptians had any such knowledge, contending that its appearance in the Great Pyramid is the result of chance.
Examples of disputed observations of the golden ratio include the following:
The Parthenon's façade (c. 432 BC) as well as elements of its façade and elsewhere are said by some to be circumscribed by golden rectangles. Other scholars deny that the Greeks had any aesthetic association with golden ratio. For example, Keith Devlin says, "Certainly, the oft repeated assertion that the Parthenon in Athens is based on the golden ratio is not supported by actual measurements. In fact, the entire story about the Greeks and golden ratio seems to be without foundation." Midhat J. Gazalé affirms that "It was not until Euclid ... that the golden ratio's mathematical properties were studied."
From measurements of 15 temples, 18 monumental tombs, 8 sarcophagi, and 58 grave stelae from the fifth century BC to the second century AD, one researcher concluded that the golden ratio was totally absent from Greek architecture of the classical fifth century BC, and almost absent during the following six centuries.
Later sources like Vitruvius (first century BC) exclusively discuss proportions that can be expressed in whole numbers, i.e. commensurate as opposed to irrational proportions.
The Section d'Or ('Golden Section') was a collective of painters, sculptors, poets and critics associated with Cubism and Orphism. Active from 1911 to around 1914, they adopted the name both to highlight that Cubism represented the continuation of a grand tradition, rather than being an isolated movement, and in homage to the mathematical harmony associated with Georges Seurat. The Cubists observed in its harmonies, geometric structuring of motion and form, the primacy of idea over nature, an absolute scientific clarity of conception. However, despite this general interest in mathematical harmony, whether the paintings featured in the celebrated 1912 "Salon de la Section d'Or" exhibition used the golden ratio in any compositions is more difficult to determine. Livio, for example, claims that they did not, and Marcel Duchamp said as much in an interview. On the other hand, an analysis suggests that Juan Gris made use of the golden ratio in composing works that were likely, but not definitively, shown at the exhibition. Art historian Daniel Robbins has argued that in addition to referencing the mathematical term, the exhibition's name also refers to the earlier "Bandeaux d'Or" group, with which Albert Gleizes and other former members of the Abbaye de Créteil had been involved.
Piet Mondrian has been said to have used the golden section extensively in his geometrical paintings, though other experts (including critic Yve-Alain Bois) have discredited these claims.
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Genome
In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is the genetic material of an organism. It consists of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The genome includes both the genes (the coding regions) and the noncoding DNA, as well as mitochondrial DNA and chloroplast DNA. The study of the genome is called genomics.
The term "genome" was created in 1920 by Hans Winkler, professor of botany at the University of Hamburg, Germany. The Oxford Dictionary suggests the name is a blend of the words "gene" and "chromosome". However, see omics for a more thorough discussion. A few related "-ome" words already existed, such as "biome" and "rhizome", forming a vocabulary into which "genome" fits systematically.
A genome sequence is the complete list of the nucleotides (A, C, G, and T for DNA genomes) that make up all the chromosomes of an individual or a species. Within a species, the vast majority of nucleotides are identical between individuals, but sequencing multiple individuals is necessary to understand the genetic diversity.
In 1976, Walter Fiers at the University of Ghent (Belgium) was the first to establish the complete nucleotide sequence of a viral RNA-genome (Bacteriophage MS2). The next year, Fred Sanger completed the first DNA-genome sequence: Phage Φ-X174, of 5386 base pairs. The first complete genome sequences among all three domains of life were released within a short period during the mid-1990s: The first bacterial genome to be sequenced was that of Haemophilus influenzae, completed by a team at The Institute for Genomic Research in 1995. A few months later, the first eukaryotic genome was completed, with sequences of the 16 chromosomes of budding yeast "Saccharomyces cerevisiae" published as the result of a European-led effort begun in the mid-1980s. The first genome sequence for an archaeon, "Methanococcus jannaschii", was completed in 1996, again by The Institute for Genomic Research.
The development of new technologies has made genome sequencing dramatically cheaper and easier, and the number of complete genome sequences is growing rapidly. The US National Institutes of Health maintains one of several comprehensive databases of genomic information. Among the thousands of completed genome sequencing projects include those for rice, a mouse, the plant "Arabidopsis thaliana", the puffer fish, and the bacteria E. coli. In December 2013, scientists first sequenced the entire "genome" of a Neanderthal, an extinct species of humans. The genome was extracted from the toe bone of a 130,000-year-old Neanderthal found in a Siberian cave.
New sequencing technologies, such as massive parallel sequencing have also opened up the prospect of personal genome sequencing as a diagnostic tool, as pioneered by Manteia Predictive Medicine. A major step toward that goal was the completion in 2007 of the full genome of James D. Watson, one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA.
Whereas a genome sequence lists the order of every DNA base in a genome, a genome map identifies the landmarks. A genome map is less detailed than a genome sequence and aids in navigating around the genome. The Human Genome Project was organized to map and to sequence the human genome. A fundamental step in the project was the release of a detailed genomic map by Jean Weissenbach and his team at the Genoscope in Paris.
Reference genome sequences and maps continue to be updated, removing errors and clarifying regions of high allelic complexity. The decreasing cost of genomic mapping has permitted genealogical sites to offer it as a service, to the extent that one may submit one's genome to crowdsourced scientific endeavours such as DNA.LAND at the New York Genome Center, an example both of the economies of scale and of citizen science.
Viral genomes can be composed of either RNA or DNA. The genomes of RNA viruses can be either single-stranded or double-stranded RNA, and may contain one or more separate RNA molecules (segments: monopartit or multipartit genome). DNA viruses can have either single-stranded or double-stranded genomes. Most DNA virus genomes are composed of a single, linear molecule of DNA, but some are made up of a circular DNA molecule.
Prokaryotes and eukaryotes have DNA genomes. Archaea have a single circular chromosome. Most bacteria also have a single circular chromosome; however, some bacterial species have linear chromosomes or multiple chromosomes. If the DNA is replicated faster than the bacterial cells divide, multiple copies of the chromosome can be present in a single cell, and if the cells divide faster than the DNA can be replicated, multiple replication of the chromosome is initiated before the division occurs, allowing daughter cells to inherit complete genomes and already partially replicated chromosomes. Most prokaryotes have very little repetitive DNA in their genomes. However, some symbiotic bacteria (e.g. "Serratia symbiotica") have reduced genomes and a high fraction of pseudogenes: only ~40% of their DNA encodes proteins.
Some bacteria have auxiliary genetic material, also part of their genome, which is carried in plasmids. For this, the word "genome" should not be used as a synonym of "chromosome".
Eukaryotic genomes are composed of one or more linear DNA chromosomes. The number of chromosomes varies widely from Jack jumper ants and an asexual nemotode, which each have only one pair, to a fern species that has 720 pairs. A typical human cell has two copies of each of 22 autosomes, one inherited from each parent, plus two sex chromosomes, making it diploid. Gametes, such as ova, sperm, spores, and pollen, are haploid, meaning they carry only one copy of each chromosome.
In addition to the chromosomes in the nucleus, organelles such as the chloroplasts and mitochondria have their own DNA. Mitochondria are sometimes said to have their own genome often referred to as the "mitochondrial genome". The DNA found within the chloroplast may be referred to as the "plastome". Like the bacteria they originated from, mitochondria and chloroplasts have a circular chromosome.
Unlike prokaryotes, eukaryotes have exon-intron organization of protein coding genes and variable amounts of repetitive DNA. In mammals and plants, the majority of the genome is composed of repetitive DNA.
DNA sequences that carry the instructions to make proteins are coding sequences. The proportion of the genome occupied by coding sequences varies widely. A larger genome does not necessarily contain more genes, and the proportion of non-repetitive DNA decreases along with increasing genome size in complex eukaryotes.
Simple eukaryotes such as "C. elegans" and fruit fly, have more non-repetitive DNA than repetitive DNA, while the genomes of more complex eukaryotes tend to be composed largely of repetitive DNA. In some plants and amphibians, the proportion of repetitive DNA is more than 80%. Similarly, only 2% of the human genome codes for proteins.
Noncoding sequences include introns, sequences for non-coding RNAs, regulatory regions, and repetitive DNA. Noncoding sequences make up 98% of the human genome. There are two categories of repetitive DNA in the genome: tandem repeats and interspersed repeats.
Short, non-coding sequences that are repeated head-to-tail are called tandem repeats. Microsatellites consisting of 2-5 basepair repeats, while minisatellite repeats are 30-35 bp. Tandem repeats make up about 4% of the human genome and 9% of the fruit fly genome. Tandem repeats can be functional. For example, telomeres are composed of the tandem repeat TTAGGG in mammals, and they play an important role in protecting the ends of the chromosome.
In other cases, expansions in the number of tandem repeats in exons or introns can cause disease. For example, the human gene huntingtin typically contains 6–29 tandem repeats of the nucleotides CAG (encoding a polyglutamine tract). An expansion to over 36 repeats results in Huntington's disease, a neurodegenerative disease. Twenty human disorders are known to result from similar tandem repeat expansions in various genes. The mechanism by which proteins with expanded polygulatamine tracts cause death of neurons is not fully understood. One possibility is that the proteins fail to fold properly and avoid degradation, instead accumulating in aggregates that also sequester important transcription factors, thereby altering gene expression.
Tandem repeats are usually caused by slippage during replication, unequal crossing-over and gene conversion.
Transposable elements (TEs) are sequences of DNA with a defined structure that are able to change their location in the genome. TEs are categorized as either class I TEs, which replicate by a copy-and-paste mechanism, or class II TEs, which can be excised from the genome and inserted at a new location.
The movement of TEs is a driving force of genome evolution in eukaryotes because their insertion can disrupt gene functions, homologous recombination between TEs can produce duplications, and TE can shuffle exons and regulatory sequences to new locations.
Retrotransposons can be transcribed into RNA, which are then duplicated at another site into the genome. Retrotransposons can be divided into long terminal repeats (LTRs) and non-long terminal repeats (Non-LTRs).
Long terminal repeats (LTRs) are derived from ancient retroviral infections, so they encode proteins related to retroviral proteins including gag (structural proteins of the virus), pol (reverse transcriptase and integrase), pro (protease), and in some cases env (envelope) genes. These genes are flanked by long repeats at both 5' and 3' ends. It has been reported that LTRs consist of the largest fraction in most plant genome and might account for the huge variation in genome size.
Non-long terminal repeats (Non-LTRs) are classified as long interspersed nuclear elements (LINEs), short interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs), and Penelope-like elements (PLEs). In "Dictyostelium discoideum", there is another DIRS-like elements belong to Non-LTRs. Non-LTRs are widely spread in eukaryotic genomes.
Long interspersed elements (LINEs) encode genes for reverse transcriptase and endonuclease, making them autonomous transposable elements. The human genome has around 500,000 LINEs, taking around 17% of the genome.
Short interspersed elements (SINEs) are usually less than 500 base pairs and are non-autonomous, so they rely on the proteins encoded by LINEs for transposition. The Alu element is the most common SINE found in primates. It is about 350 base pairs and occupies about 11% of the human genome with around 1,500,000 copies.
DNA transposons encode a transposase enzyme between inverted terminal repeats. When expressed, the transposase recognizes the terminal inverted repeats that flank the transposon and catalyzes its excision and reinsertion in a new site. This cut-and-paste mechanism typically reinserts transposons near their original location (within 100kb). DNA transposons are found in bacteria and make up 3% of the human genome and 12% of the genome of the roundworm "C. elegans".
Genome size is the total number of DNA base pairs in one copy of a haploid genome. In humans, the nuclear genome comprises approximately 3.2 billion nucleotides of DNA, divided into 24 linear molecules, the shortest 50 000 000 nucleotides in length and the longest 260 000 000 nucleotides, each contained in a different chromosome. The genome size is positively correlated with the morphological complexity among prokaryotes and lower eukaryotes; however, after mollusks and all the other higher eukaryotes above, this correlation is no longer effective. This phenomenon also indicates the mighty influence coming from repetitive DNA on the genomes.
Since genomes are very complex, one research strategy is to reduce the number of genes in a genome to the bare minimum and still have the organism in question survive. There is experimental work being done on minimal genomes for single cell organisms as well as minimal genomes for multi-cellular organisms (see Developmental biology). The work is both "in vivo" and "in silico".
Here is a table of some significant or representative genomes. See #See also for lists of sequenced genomes.
All the cells of an organism originate from a single cell, so they are expected to have identical genomes; however, in some cases, differences arise. Both the process of copying DNA during cell division and exposure to environmental mutagens can result in mutations in somatic cells. In some cases, such mutations lead to cancer because they cause cells to divide more quickly and invade surrounding tissues. In certain lymphocytes in the human immune system, V(D)J recombination generates different genomic sequences such that each cell produces a unique antibody or T cell receptors.
During meiosis, diploid cells divide twice to produce haploid germ cells. During this process, recombination results in a reshuffling of the genetic material from homologous chromosomes so each gamete has a unique genome.
Genome-wide reprogramming in mouse primordial germ cells involves epigenetic imprint erasure leading to totipotency. Reprogramming is facilitated by active DNA demethylation, a process that entails the DNA base excision repair pathway. This pathway is employed in the erasure of CpG methylation (5mC) in primordial germ cells. The erasure of 5mC occurs via its conversion to 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) driven by high levels of the ten-eleven dioxygenase enzymes TET1 and TET2.
Genomes are more than the sum of an organism's genes and have traits that may be measured and studied without reference to the details of any particular genes and their products. Researchers compare traits such as karyotype (chromosome number), genome size, gene order, codon usage bias, and GC-content to determine what mechanisms could have produced the great variety of genomes that exist today (for recent overviews, see Brown 2002; Saccone and Pesole 2003; Benfey and Protopapas 2004; Gibson and Muse 2004; Reese 2004; Gregory 2005).
Duplications play a major role in shaping the genome. Duplication may range from extension of short tandem repeats, to duplication of a cluster of genes, and all the way to duplication of entire chromosomes or even entire genomes. Such duplications are probably fundamental to the creation of genetic novelty.
Horizontal gene transfer is invoked to explain how there is often an extreme similarity between small portions of the genomes of two organisms that are otherwise very distantly related. Horizontal gene transfer seems to be common among many microbes. Also, eukaryotic cells seem to have experienced a transfer of some genetic material from their chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes to their nuclear chromosomes. Recent empirical data suggest an important role of viruses and sub-viral RNA-networks to represent a main driving role to generate genetic novelty and natural genome editing.
Works of science fiction illustrate concerns about the availability of genome sequences.
Michael Crichton's 1990 novel "Jurassic Park" and the subsequent film tell the story of a billionaire who creates a theme park of cloned dinosaurs on a remote island, with disastrous outcomes. A geneticist extracts dinosaur DNA from the blood of ancient mosquitoes and fills in the gaps with DNA from modern species to create several species of dinosaurs. A chaos theorist is asked to give his expert opinion on the safety of engineering an ecosystem with the dinosaurs, and he repeatedly warns that the outcomes of the project will be unpredictable and ultimately uncontrollable. These warnings about the perils of using genomic information are a major theme of the book.
The 1997 film "Gattaca" is set in a futurist society where genomes of children are engineered to contain the most ideal combination of their parents' traits, and metrics such as risk of heart disease and predicted life expectancy are documented for each person based on their genome. People conceived outside of the eugenics program, known as "In-Valids" suffer discrimination and are relegated to menial occupations. The protagonist of the film is an In-Valid who works to defy the supposed genetic odds and achieve his dream of working as a space navigator. The film warns against a future where genomic information fuels prejudice and extreme class differences between those who can and can't afford genetically engineered children.
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Gaia philosophy
Gaia philosophy (named after Gaia, Greek goddess of the Earth) is a broadly inclusive term for related concepts that living organisms on a planet will affect the nature of their environment in order to make the environment more suitable for life. This set of theories holds that all organisms on a life-giving planet regulate the biosphere in such a way as to promote its habitability. Gaia concept draws a connection between the survivability of a species (hence its evolutionary course) and its usefulness to the survival of other species.
While there were a number of precursors to Gaia theory, the first scientific form of this idea was proposed as the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock, a UK chemist, in 1970. The Gaia hypothesis deals with the concept of biological homeostasis, and claims the resident life forms of a host planet coupled with their environment have acted and act like a single, self-regulating system. This system includes the near-surface rocks, the soil, and the atmosphere. Today many scientists consider such ideas to be unsupported by, or at odds with, the available evidence (see Gaia hypothesis criticism). These theories are however significant in green politics.
There are some mystical, scientific and religious predecessors to the Gaia philosophy, which had a Gaia-like conceptual basis. Many religious mythologies had a view of Earth as being a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts (e.g. some Native American religions and various forms of shamanism).
Lewis Thomas believed that Earth should be viewed as a single cell; he derived this view from Johannes Kepler's view of Earth as a single round organism.
Isaac Newton wrote of the earth, "Thus this Earth resembles a great animall or rather inanimate vegetable, draws in æthereall breath for its dayly refreshment & vitall ferment & transpires again with gross exhalations, And according to the condition of all other things living ought to have its times of beginning youth old age & perishing."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist and geologist, believed that evolution unfolded from cell to organism to planet to solar system and ultimately the whole universe, as we humans see it from our limited perspective. Teilhard later influenced Thomas Berry and many Catholic humanist thinkers of the 20th century.
Buckminster Fuller is generally credited with making the idea respectable in Western scientific circles in the 20th century. Building to some degree on his observations and artifacts, e.g. the Dymaxion map of the Earth he created, others began to ask if there was a way to make the Gaia theory scientifically sound.
In 1931, L.G.M. Baas Becking delivered an inaugural lecture about Gaia in the sense of life and earth.
Oberon Zell-Ravenheart in 1970 in an article in "Green Egg" Magazine, independently articulated the Gaia Thesis.
Many believe that these ideas cannot be considered scientific hypotheses; by definition a scientific hypothesis must make testable predictions. As the above claims are not currently testable, they are outside the bounds of current science. This does not mean that these ideas are not theoretically testable. As one can postulate tests that could be applied, given enough time and space, then these ideas should be seen as scientific hypotheses.
These are conjectures and perhaps can only be considered as social and maybe political philosophy; they may have implications for theology, or "thealogy" as Zell-Ravenheart and Isaac Bonewits put it.
According to James Kirchner there is a spectrum of Gaia hypotheses, ranging from the undeniable to radical. At one end is the undeniable statement that the organisms on the Earth have radically altered its composition. A stronger position is that the Earth's biosphere effectively acts as if it is a self-organizing system which works in such a way as to keep its systems in some kind of equilibrium that is conducive to life. Today many scientists consider that such a view (and any stronger views) are unlikely to be correct. An even stronger claim is that all lifeforms are part of a single planetary being, called Gaia. In this view, the atmosphere, the seas, the terrestrial crust would be the result of interventions carried out by Gaia, through the coevolving diversity of living organisms.
The most extreme form of Gaia theory is that the entire Earth is a single unified organism with a highly intelligent mind that arose as an emergent property of the whole biosphere. In this view, the Earth's biosphere is "consciously" manipulating the climate in order to make conditions more conducive to life. Scientists contend that there is no evidence at all to support this last point of view, and it has come about because many people do not understand the concept of homeostasis. Many non-scientists instinctively and incorrectly see homeostasis as a process that requires conscious control
The more speculative versions of Gaia, including versions in which it is believed that the Earth is actually conscious, sentient, and highly intelligent, are usually considered outside the bounds of what is usually considered science.
Buckminster Fuller has been credited as the first to incorporate scientific ideas into a Gaia theory, which he did with his Dymaxion map of the Earth.
The first scientifically rigorous theory was the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock, a UK chemist.
A variant of this hypothesis was developed by Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist, in 1979.
Her version is sometimes called the "Gaia Theory" (note uppercase-T). Her model is more limited in scope than the one that Lovelock proposed.
Whether this sort of system is present on Earth is still open to debate. Some relatively simple homeostatic mechanisms are generally accepted. For example, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise, plants are able to grow better and thus remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Other biological effects and feedbacks exist, but the extent to which these mechanisms have stabilized and modified the Earth's overall climate is largely not known.
The Gaia hypothesis is sometimes viewed from significantly different philosophical perspectives. Some environmentalists view it as an almost conscious process, in which the Earth's ecosystem is literally viewed as a single unified organism. Some evolutionary biologists, on the other hand, view it as an undirected emergent property of the ecosystem: as each individual species pursues its own self-interest, their combined actions tend to have counterbalancing effects on environmental change. Proponents of this view sometimes point to examples of life's actions in the past that have resulted in dramatic change rather than stable equilibrium, such as the conversion of the Earth's atmosphere from a reducing environment to an oxygen-rich one.
Depending on how strongly the case is stated, the hypothesis conflicts with mainstream neo-Darwinism. Most biologists would accept Daisyworld-style homeostasis as possible, but would certainly not accept the idea that this equates to the whole biosphere acting as one organism.
A very small number of scientists, and a much larger number of environmental activists, claim that Earth's biosphere is "consciously" manipulating the climate in order to make conditions more conducive to life. Scientists contend that there is no evidence to support this belief.
A social science view of Gaia theory is the role of humans as a keystone species who may be able to accomplish global homeostasis. Whilst a few social scientists who draw inspiration from 'organic' views of society have embraced Gaia philosophy as a way to explain the human-nature interconnections, most professional social scientists are more involved in reflecting upon the way Gaia philosophy is used and engaged with within sub-sections of society. Alan Marshall, in the Department of Social Sciences at Mahidol University, for example, reflects upon the way Gaia philosophy has been used and advocated by environmentalists, spiritualists, managers, economists, and scientists and engineers (see The Unity of Nature, 2002, Imperial College Press: London and Singapore). Social Scientists themselves in the 1960s gave up on systems ideas of society since they were interpreted as supporting conservatism and traditionalism.
Some radical political environmentalists who accept some form of the Gaia theory call themselves Gaians. They actively seek to restore the Earth's homeostasis — whenever they see it out of balance, e.g. to prevent manmade climate change, primate extinction, or rainforest loss. In effect, they seek to cooperate to become the "system consciously manipulating to make conditions more conducive to life". Such activity defines the homeostasis, but for leverage it relies on deep investigation of the homeorhetic balances, if only to find places to intervene in a system which is changing in undesirable ways.
Tony Bondhus brings up the point in his book, "Society of Conceivia", that if Gaia is alive, then societies are living things as well. This suggests that our understanding of Gaia can be used to create a better society and to design a better political system.
Other intellectuals in the environmental movement, like Edward Goldsmith, have used Gaia in the completely opposite way; to stake a claim about how Gaia's focus on natural balance and resistance and resilience, should be emulated to design a conservative political system (as explored in Alan Marshall's 2002 book "The Unity of Nature", (Imperial College Press: London).
Gaians do not passively ask "what is going on", but rather, "what to do next", e.g. in terraforming or climate engineering or even on a small scale, such as gardening. Changes can be planned, agreed upon by many people, being very deliberate, as in urban ecology and especially industrial ecology. "See arcology for more on this 'active' view."
Gaians argue that it is a human duty to act as such - committing themselves in particular to the Precautionary Principle. Such views began to influence the Green Parties, Greenpeace, and a few more radical wings of the environmental movement such as the Gaia Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front. These views dominate some such groups, e.g. the Bioneers. Some refer to this political activity as a separate and radical branch of the ecology movement, one that takes the axioms of the science of ecology in general, and Gaia theory in particular, and raises them to a kind of theory of personal conduct or moral code.
The ecologist and theologian Anne Primavesi is the author of two books dealing with the Gaia hypothesis and theology.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, the American feminist scholar and theologian, wrote a book called "Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing".
A book edited by Allan Hunt Badiner called Dharma Gaia explores the ground where Buddhism and ecology meet through writings by the Dalai Lama, Gary Snyder, Thich Nhat Hanh, Allen Ginsberg, Joanna Macy, Robert Aitken, and 25 other Buddhists and ecologists.
Many new age authors have written books which mix New Age teachings with Gaia philosophy. This is known as New Age Gaian. Often referred to as Gaianism, or the Gaian Religion, this spiritual aspect of the philosophy is very broad and inclusive, making it adaptable to other religions: Taoism, Neo-Paganism, Pantheism, Judeo-Christian Religions, and many others.
The question of "what is an organism", and at what scale is it rational to speak about organisms vs. biospheres, gives rise to a semantic debate. We are all ecologies in the sense that our (human) bodies contain gut bacteria, parasite species, etc., and to them our body is not organism but rather more of a microclimate or biome. Applying that thinking to whole planets:
The argument is that these symbiotic organisms, being unable to survive apart from each other and their climate and local conditions, form an organism in their own right, under a wider conception of the term organism than is conventionally used. It is a matter for often heated debate whether this is a valid usage of the term, but ultimately it appears to be a semantic dispute. In this sense of the word organism, it is argued under the theory that the entire biomass of the Earth is a single organism (as Johannes Kepler thought).
Unfortunately, many supporters of the various Gaia theories do not state exactly where they sit on this spectrum; this makes discussion and criticism difficult.
Much effort on behalf of those analyzing the theory currently is an attempt to clarify what these different hypotheses are, and whether they are proposals to 'test' or 'manipulate' outcomes. Both Lovelock's and Margulis's understanding of Gaia are considered scientific hypotheses, and like all scientific theories are constantly put to the test.
More speculative versions of Gaia, including all versions in which it is held that the Earth is actually conscious, are currently held to be outside the bounds of science, and are not supported by either Lovelock or Margulis.
One of the most problematic issues with referring to Gaia as an organism is its apparent failure to meet the biological criterion of being able to reproduce. Richard Dawkins has asserted that the planet is not the offspring of any parents and is unable to reproduce.
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Greenhouse effect
The greenhouse effect is the process by which radiation from a planet's atmosphere warms the planet's surface to a temperature above what it would be without this atmosphere.
Radiatively active gases (i.e., greenhouse gases) in a planet's atmosphere radiate energy in all directions. Part of this radiation is directed towards the surface, warming it. The intensity of the downward radiation – that is, the strength of the greenhouse effect – will depend on the atmosphere's temperature and on the amount of greenhouse gases that the atmosphere contains.
Earth's natural greenhouse effect is critical to supporting life, and initially was a precursor to life moving out of the ocean onto land. Human activities, however, mainly the burning of fossil fuels and clearcutting of forests, have accelerated the greenhouse effect and caused global warming.
The planet Venus experienced runaway greenhouse effect, resulting in an atmosphere which is 96% carbon dioxide, with surface atmospheric pressure roughly the same as found underwater on Earth. Venus may have had water oceans, but they would have boiled off as the mean surface temperature rose to the current .
The term "greenhouse effect" continues to see use in scientific circles and the media despite being a slight misnomer, as an atmosphere reduces radiative heat loss while a greenhouse blocks convective heat loss. The result, however, is an increase in temperature in both cases.
The existence of the greenhouse effect, while not named as such, was proposed by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The argument and the evidence were further strengthened by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838. John Tyndall was the first to measure the infrared absorption and emission of various gases and vapours. From 1859 onwards, he showed that the effect was due to a very small proportion of the atmosphere, with the main gases having no effect, and was largely due to water vapour, though small percentages of hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide had a significant effect. The effect was more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who made the first quantitative prediction of global warming due to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, the term "greenhouse" was not used to refer to this effect by any of these scientists; the term was first used in this way by Nils Gustaf Ekholm in 1901.
Earth receives energy from the Sun in the form of ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared radiation. About 26% of the incoming solar energy is reflected to space by the atmosphere and clouds, and 19% is absorbed by the atmosphere and clouds. Most of the remaining energy is absorbed at the surface of Earth. Because the Earth's surface is colder than the Sun, it radiates at wavelengths that are much longer than the wavelengths that were absorbed. Most of this thermal radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere and warms it. The atmosphere also gains heat by sensible and latent heat fluxes from the surface. The atmosphere radiates energy both upwards and downwards; the part radiated downwards is absorbed by the surface of Earth. This leads to a higher equilibrium temperature than if the atmosphere did not radiate.
An ideal thermally conductive blackbody at the same distance from the Sun as Earth would have a temperature of about . However, because Earth reflects about 30% of the incoming sunlight, this idealized planet's effective temperature (the temperature of a blackbody that would emit the same amount of radiation) would be about . The surface temperature of this hypothetical planet is below Earth's actual surface temperature of approximately . The greenhouse effect is the contribution of greenhouse gases to this difference.
The idealized greenhouse model is a simplification. In reality the atmosphere near the Earth's surface is largely opaque to thermal radiation and most heat loss from the surface is by convection. However radiative energy losses become increasingly important higher in the atmosphere, largely because of the decreasing concentration of water vapor, an important greenhouse gas. Rather than the surface itself, it is more realistic to think of the greenhouse effect as applying to a layer in the mid-troposphere, which is effectively coupled to the surface by a lapse rate. A simple picture also assumes a steady state, but in the real world, the diurnal cycle as well as the seasonal cycle and weather disturbances complicate matters. Solar heating applies only during daytime. During the night, the atmosphere cools somewhat, but not greatly, because its emissivity is low. Diurnal temperature changes decrease with height in the atmosphere.
Within the region where radiative effects are important, the description given by the idealized greenhouse model becomes realistic. Earth's surface, warmed to an "effective temperature" around , radiates long-wavelength, infrared heat in the range of 4–100 μm. At these wavelengths, greenhouse gases that were largely transparent to incoming solar radiation are more absorbent. Each layer of atmosphere with greenhouse gases absorbs some of the heat being radiated upwards from lower layers. It reradiates in all directions, both upwards and downwards; in equilibrium (by definition) the same amount as it has absorbed. This results in more warmth below. Increasing the concentration of the gases increases the amount of absorption and reradiation, and thereby further warms the layers and ultimately the surface below.
Greenhouse gases—including most diatomic gases with two different atoms (such as carbon monoxide, CO) and all gases with three or more atoms—are able to absorb and emit infrared radiation. Though more than 99% of the dry atmosphere is IR transparent (because the main constituents—, , and Ar—are not able to directly absorb or emit infrared radiation), intermolecular collisions cause the energy absorbed and emitted by the greenhouse gases to be shared with the other, non-IR-active, gases.
By their percentage contribution to the greenhouse effect on Earth the four major gases are:
It is not possible to assign a specific percentage to each gas because the absorption and emission bands of the gases overlap (hence the ranges given above). Clouds also absorb and emit infrared radiation and thus affect the radiative properties of the atmosphere.
Strengthening of the greenhouse effect through human activities is known as the enhanced (or anthropogenic) greenhouse effect. This increase in radiative forcing from human activity is attributable mainly to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. According to the 2014 Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years. Their effects, together with those of other anthropogenic drivers, have been detected throughout the climate system and are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century'".
Over the past 800,000 years, ice core data shows that carbon dioxide has varied from values as low as 180 ppm to the pre-industrial level of 270 ppm. Paleoclimatologists consider variations in carbon dioxide concentration to be a fundamental factor influencing climate variations over this time scale.
The "greenhouse effect" of the atmosphere is named by analogy to greenhouses which become warmer in sunlight. However, a greenhouse is not primarily warmed by the "greenhouse effect".
"Greenhouse effect" is actually a misnomer since heating in the usual greenhouse is due to the reduction of convection, while the "greenhouse effect" works by preventing absorbed heat from leaving the structure through radiative transfer.
A greenhouse is built of any material that passes sunlight: usually glass or plastic. The sun warms the ground and contents inside just like the outside, and these then warm the air. Outside, the warm air near the surface rises and mixes with cooler air aloft, keeping the temperature lower than inside, where the air continues to heat up because it is confined within the greenhouse. This can be demonstrated by opening a small window near the roof of a greenhouse: the temperature will drop considerably. It was demonstrated experimentally (R. W. Wood, 1909) that a (not heated) "greenhouse" with a cover of rock salt (which is transparent to infrared) heats up an enclosure similarly to one with a glass cover. Thus greenhouses work primarily by preventing convective cooling.
Heated greenhouses are yet another matter: as they have an internal source of heating, it is desirable to minimise the amount of heat leaking out by radiative cooling. This can be done through the use of adequate glazing.
The anti-greenhouse effect is a mechanism similar and symmetrical to the greenhouse effect: in the greenhouse effect, the atmosphere lets radiation in while not letting thermal radiation out, thus warming the body surface; in the anti-greenhouse effect, the atmosphere keeps radiation out while letting thermal radiation out, which lowers the equilibrium surface temperature. Such an effect has been proposed for Saturn's moon Titan.
A runaway greenhouse effect occurs if positive feedbacks lead to the evaporation of all greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. A runaway greenhouse effect involving carbon dioxide and water vapor has long ago been hypothesized to have occurred on Venus, .
The 'greenhouse effect' on Venus is particularly large for several reasons:
"Venus experienced a runaway greenhouse in the past, and we expect that Earth will in about 2 billion years as solar luminosity increases".
Titan is a body with both a greenhouse effect and an anti-greenhouse effect. The presence of N2, CH4, and H2 in the atmosphere contribute to a greenhouse effect, increasing the surface temperature by 21K over the expected temperature of the body with no atmosphere. The existence of a high-altitude haze, which absorbs wavelengths of solar radiation but is transparent to infrared, contribute to an anti-greenhouse effect of approximately 9K. The net effect of these two phenomena result is a net warming of 21K- 9K= 12K, so Titan is 12 K warmer than it would be if there were no atmosphere.
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Group homomorphism
In mathematics, given two groups, ("G", ∗) and ("H", ·), a group homomorphism from ("G", ∗) to ("H", ·) is a function "h" : "G" → "H" such that for all "u" and "v" in "G" it holds that
where the group operation on the left hand side of the equation is that of "G" and on the right hand side that of "H".
From this property, one can deduce that "h" maps the identity element "eG" of "G" to the identity element "eH" of "H",
and it also maps inverses to inverses in the sense that
Hence one can say that "h" "is compatible with the group structure".
Older notations for the homomorphism "h"("x") may be "x""h" or "x""h", though this may be confused as an index or a general subscript. A more recent trend is to write group homomorphisms on the right of their arguments, omitting brackets, so that "h"("x") becomes simply "x h". This approach is especially prevalent in areas of group theory where automata play a role, since it accords better with the convention that automata read words from left to right.
In areas of mathematics where one considers groups endowed with additional structure, a "homomorphism" sometimes means a map which respects not only the group structure (as above) but also the extra structure. For example, a homomorphism of topological groups is often required to be continuous.
The purpose of defining a group homomorphism is to create functions that preserve the algebraic structure. An equivalent definition of group homomorphism is: The function "h" : "G" → "H" is a group homomorphism if whenever
"a" ∗ "b" = "c" we have "h"("a") ⋅ "h"("b") = "h"("c").
In other words, the group "H" in some sense has a similar algebraic structure as "G" and the homomorphism "h" preserves that.
We define the "kernel of h" to be the set of elements in "G" which are mapped to the identity in "H"
and the "image of h" to be
The kernel and image of a homomorphism can be interpreted as measuring how close it is to being an isomorphism. The first isomorphism theorem states that the image of a group homomorphism, "h"("G") is isomorphic to the quotient group "G"/ker "h".
The kernel of h is a normal subgroup of "G" and the image of h is a subgroup of "H":
If and only if }, the homomorphism, "h", is a "group monomorphism"; i.e., "h" is injective (one-to-one). Injection directly gives that there is a unique element in the kernel, and a unique element in the kernel gives injection:
If and are group homomorphisms, then so is . This shows that the class of all groups, together with group homomorphisms as morphisms, forms a category.
If "G" and "H" are abelian (i.e., commutative) groups, then the set of all group homomorphisms from "G" to "H" is itself an abelian group: the sum of two homomorphisms is defined by
The commutativity of "H" is needed to prove that is again a group homomorphism.
The addition of homomorphisms is compatible with the composition of homomorphisms in the following sense: if "f" is in , "h", "k" are elements of , and "g" is in , then
Since the composition is associative, this shows that the set End("G") of all endomorphisms of an abelian group forms a ring, the "endomorphism ring" of "G". For example, the endomorphism ring of the abelian group consisting of the direct sum of "m" copies of Z/"nZ is isomorphic to the ring of "m"-by-"m" matrices with entries in Z/"nZ. The above compatibility also shows that the category of all abelian groups with group homomorphisms forms a preadditive category; the existence of direct sums and well-behaved kernels makes this category the prototypical example of an abelian category.
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Group isomorphism
In abstract algebra, a group isomorphism is a function between two groups that sets up a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of the groups in a way that respects the given group operations. If there exists an isomorphism between two groups, then the groups are called isomorphic. From the standpoint of group theory, isomorphic groups have the same properties and need not be distinguished.
Given two groups (G, ∗) and (H, formula_1), a "group isomorphism" from (G, ∗) to (H, formula_1) is a bijective group homomorphism from G to H. Spelled out, this means that a group isomorphism is a bijective function formula_3 such that for all u and v in G it holds that
The two groups (G, ∗) and (H, formula_1) are isomorphic if there exists an isomorphism from one to the other. This is written:
Often shorter and simpler notations can be used. When the relevant group operations are unambiguous they are omitted and one writes:
Sometimes one can even simply write G = H. Whether such a notation is possible without confusion or ambiguity depends on context. For example, the equals sign is not very suitable when the groups are both subgroups of the same group. See also the examples.
Conversely, given a group (G, ∗), a set H, and a bijection formula_3, we can make H a group (H, formula_1) by defining
If H = G and formula_1 = ∗ then the bijection is an automorphism ("q.v.").
Intuitively, group theorists view two isomorphic groups as follows: For every element "g" of a group "G", there exists an element "h" of "H" such that "h" 'behaves in the same way' as "g" (operates with other elements of the group in the same way as "g"). For instance, if "g" generates "G", then so does "h". This implies in particular that "G" and "H" are in bijective correspondence. Thus, the definition of an isomorphism is quite natural.
An isomorphism of groups may equivalently be defined as an invertible morphism in the category of groups, where invertible here means has a two-sided inverse.
In this section some notable examples of isomorphic groups are listed.
Some groups can be proven to be isomorphic, relying on the axiom of choice, but the proof does not indicate how to construct a concrete isomorphism. Examples:
The kernel of an isomorphism from ("G", ∗) to ("H", formula_1), is always {eG} where eG is the identity of the group ("G", ∗)
If ("G", ∗) is isomorphic to ("H",formula_1), and if "G" is abelian then so is "H".
If ("G", ∗) is a group that is isomorphic to ("H", formula_1) [where "f" is the isomorphism], then if "a" belongs to "G" and has order "n", then so does "f(a)".
If ("G", ∗) is a locally finite group that is isomorphic to ("H", formula_1), then ("H", formula_1) is also locally finite.
The number of distinct groups (when isomorphic groups are considered equal) of order formula_31 is given by sequence A000001 in OEIS. The first few numbers are 0, 1, 1, 1 and 2 meaning that 4 is the lowest order with more than one group.
All cyclic groups of a given order are isomorphic to formula_32.
Let "G" be a cyclic group and "n" be the order of "G". "G" is then the group generated by formula_33.
We will show that
Define
Then
From the definition, it follows that any isomorphism formula_3 will map the identity element of G to the identity element of H,
that it will map inverses to inverses,
and more generally, "n"th powers to "n"th powers,
for all u in G,
and that the inverse map formula_44 is also a group isomorphism.
The relation "being isomorphic" satisfies all the axioms of an equivalence relation. If f is an isomorphism between two groups G and H, then everything that is true about G that is only related to the group structure can be translated via f into a true ditto statement about H, and vice versa.
An isomorphism from a group (G, ∗) to itself is called an automorphism of this group. Thus it is a bijection formula_45 such that
An automorphism always maps the identity to itself. The image under an automorphism of a conjugacy class is always a conjugacy class (the same or another). The image of an element has the same order as that element.
The composition of two automorphisms is again an automorphism, and with this operation the set of all automorphisms of a group G, denoted by Aut(G), forms itself a group, the "automorphism group" of G.
For all abelian groups there is at least the automorphism that replaces the group elements by their inverses. However, in groups where all elements are equal to their inverse this is the trivial automorphism, e.g. in the Klein four-group. For that group all permutations of the three non-identity elements are automorphisms, so the automorphism group is isomorphic to S3 and Dih3.
In Zp for a prime number p, one non-identity element can be replaced by any other, with corresponding changes in the other elements. The automorphism group is isomorphic to . For example, for , multiplying all elements of Z7 by 3, modulo 7, is an automorphism of order 6 in the automorphism group, because , while lower powers do not give 1. Thus this automorphism generates Z6. There is one more automorphism with this property: multiplying all elements of Z7 by 5, modulo 7. Therefore, these two correspond to the elements 1 and 5 of Z6, in that order or conversely.
The automorphism group of Z6 is isomorphic to Z2, because only each of the two elements 1 and 5 generate Z6, so apart from the identity we can only interchange these.
The automorphism group of has order 168, as can be found as follows. All 7 non-identity elements play the same role, so we can choose which plays the role of (1,0,0). Any of the remaining 6 can be chosen to play the role of (0,1,0). This determines which corresponds to (1,1,0). For (0,0,1) we can choose from 4, which determines the rest. Thus we have automorphisms. They correspond to those of the Fano plane, of which the 7 points correspond to the 7 non-identity elements. The lines connecting three points correspond to the group operation: "a", "b", and "c" on one line means , , and . See also general linear group over finite fields.
For abelian groups all automorphisms except the trivial one are called outer automorphisms.
Non-abelian groups have a non-trivial inner automorphism group, and possibly also outer automorphisms.
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Geographic information system
A geographic information system (GIS) is a conceptualized framework that provides the ability to capture and analyze spatial and geographic data. "GIS applications" (or "GIS apps") are computer-based tools, that allow the user to create "interactive queries" (user-created searches), analyze spatial information output, edit datum presented within maps, and visually share the results of these operations.
Geographic information science ("or, GIScience")—the scientific study of geographic concepts, applications, and systems—is commonly initialized as "GIS", as well.
Geographic information systems are utilized in multiple technologies, processes, techniques and methods. It is attached to various operations and numerous applications, that relate to: engineering, planning, management, transport/logistics, insurance, telecommunications, and business. For this reason, "GIS" and "location intelligence applications" are at the foundation of "location-enabled services", that rely on geographic analysis and visualization.
GIS provides the capability to relate previously unrelated information, through the use of "location as the "key index variable"". Locations and extents that are found in the Earth's spacetime, are able to be recorded through the date and time of occurrence, along with x, y, and z coordinates; representing, longitude ("x"), latitude ("y"), and elevation ("z"). All Earth-based, spatial–temporal, location and extent references, should be relatable to one another, and ultimately, to a "real" physical location or extent. This key characteristic of GIS, has begun to open new avenues of scientific inquiry and studies.
The phrase, "geographic information system", was coined by Roger Tomlinson in 1968, when he published the scientific paper, "A Geographic Information System for Regional Planning". Tomlinson, acknowledged as the "father of GIS", is credited with enabling the first computerized–GIS to be created through his work on the Canada Geographic Information System in 1963. Ultimately, Tomlinson created a framework for a database that was capable of storing and analyzing huge amounts of data; leading to the Canadian government being able to implement its National Land-Use Management Program.
One of the first known instances in which spatial analysis was used, came from the field of epidemiology in the, ""Rapport sur la marche et les effets du choléra dans Paris et le département de la Seine"" (1832).French geographer and cartographer, Charles Picquet, created a map outlining the forty-eight Districts in Paris, using halftone color gradients, to provide a visual representation for the number of reported deaths due to cholera, per every 1,000 inhabitants.
In 1854, John Snow, an epidemiologist and physician, was able to determine the source of a cholera outbreak in London through the use of spatial analysis. Snow achieved this through plotting the residence of each victim on a map of the area, as well as the nearby water sources. Once these points were marked, he was able to visualize the water source within the cluster that was responsible for the outbreak. This was one of the earliest successful uses of a geographic methodology in pinpointing the source of an outbreak in epidemiology. While the basic elements of topography and theme existed previously in cartography, Snow's map was unique due to his use of cartographic methods, not only to depict, but also to analyze clusters of geographically dependent phenomena.
The early 20th century saw the development of photozincography, which allowed maps to be split into layers, for example one layer for vegetation and another for water. This was particularly used for printing contours – drawing these was a labour-intensive task but having them on a separate layer meant they could be worked on without the other layers to confuse the draughtsman. This work was originally drawn on glass plates but later plastic film was introduced, with the advantages of being lighter, using less storage space and being less brittle, among others. When all the layers were finished, they were combined into one image using a large process camera. Once color printing came in, the layers idea was also used for creating separate printing plates for each color. While the use of layers much later became one of the main typical features of a contemporary GIS, the photographic process just described is not considered to be a GIS in itself – as the maps were just images with no database to link them to.
Two additional developments are notable in the early days of GIS: Ian McHarg's publication ""Design with Nature"" and its map overlay method and the introduction of a street network into the U.S. Census Bureau's DIME (Dual Independent Map Encoding) system.
Computer hardware development spurred by nuclear weapon research led to general-purpose computer "mapping" applications by the early 1960s.
In 1960 the world's first true operational GIS was developed in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, by the federal Department of Forestry and Rural Development. Developed by Dr. Roger Tomlinson, it was called the Canada Geographic Information System (CGIS) and was used to store, analyze, and manipulate data collected for the Canada Land Inventory – an effort to determine the land capability for rural Canada by mapping information about soils, agriculture, recreation, wildlife, waterfowl, forestry and land use at a scale of 1:50,000. A rating classification factor was also added to permit analysis.
CGIS was an improvement over "computer mapping" applications as it provided capabilities for overlay, measurement, and digitizing/scanning. It supported a national coordinate system that spanned the continent, coded lines as arcs having a true embedded topology and it stored the attribute and locational information in separate files. As a result of this, Tomlinson has become known as the "father of GIS", particularly for his use of overlays in promoting the spatial analysis of convergent geographic data.
CGIS lasted into the 1990s and built a large digital land resource database in Canada. It was developed as a mainframe-based system in support of federal and provincial resource planning and management. Its strength was continent-wide analysis of complex datasets. The CGIS was never available commercially.
In 1964 Howard T. Fisher formed the Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (LCGSA 1965–1991), where a number of important theoretical concepts in spatial data handling were developed, and which by the 1970s had distributed seminal software code and systems, such as SYMAP, GRID, and ODYSSEY – that served as sources for subsequent commercial development—to universities, research centers and corporations worldwide.
By the late 1970s two public domain GIS systems (MOSS and GRASS GIS) were in development, and by the early 1980s, M&S Computing (later Intergraph) along with Bentley Systems Incorporated for the CAD platform, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), CARIS (Computer Aided Resource Information System), MapInfo Corporation and ERDAS (Earth Resource Data Analysis System) emerged as commercial vendors of GIS software, successfully incorporating many of the CGIS features, combining the first generation approach to separation of spatial and attribute information with a second generation approach to organizing attribute data into database structures.
In 1986, Mapping Display and Analysis System (MIDAS), the first desktop GIS product was released for the DOS operating system. This was renamed in 1990 to MapInfo for Windows when it was ported to the Microsoft Windows platform. This began the process of moving GIS from the research department into the business environment.
By the end of the 20th century, the rapid growth in various systems had been consolidated and standardized on relatively few platforms and users were beginning to explore viewing GIS data over the Internet, requiring data format and transfer standards. More recently, a growing number of free, open-source GIS packages run on a range of operating systems and can be customized to perform specific tasks. Increasingly geospatial data and mapping applications are being made available via the World Wide Web (see ).
Several articles on the history of GIS have been published.
Modern GIS technologies use digital information, for which various digitized data creation methods are used. The most common method of data creation is digitization, where a hard copy map or survey plan is transferred into a digital medium through the use of a CAD program, and geo-referencing capabilities. With the wide availability of ortho-rectified imagery (from satellites, aircraft, Helikites and UAVs), heads-up digitizing is becoming the main avenue through which geographic data is extracted. Heads-up digitizing involves the tracing of geographic data directly on top of the aerial imagery instead of by the traditional method of tracing the geographic form on a separate digitizing tablet (heads-down digitizing).
Geoprocessing is a GIS operation used to manipulate spatial data. A typical geoprocessing operation takes an input dataset, performs an operation on that dataset, and returns the result of the operation as an output dataset. Common geoprocessing operations include geographic feature overlay, feature selection and analysis, topology processing, raster processing, and data conversion. Geoprocessing allows for definition, management, and analysis of information used to form decisions.
GIS uses spatio-temporal (space-time) location as the key index variable for all other information. Just as a relational database containing text or numbers can relate many different tables using common key index variables, GIS can relate otherwise unrelated information by using location as the key index variable. The key is the location and/or extent in space-time.
Any variable that can be located spatially, and increasingly also temporally, can be referenced using a GIS. Locations or extents in Earth space–time may be recorded as dates/times of occurrence, and x, y, and z coordinates representing, longitude, latitude, and elevation, respectively. These GIS coordinates may represent other quantified systems of temporo-spatial reference (for example, film frame number, stream gage station, highway mile-marker, surveyor benchmark, building address, street intersection, entrance gate, water depth sounding, POS or CAD drawing origin/units). Units applied to recorded temporal-spatial data can vary widely (even when using exactly the same data, see map projections), but all Earth-based spatial–temporal location and extent references should, ideally, be relatable to one another and ultimately to a "real" physical location or extent in space–time.
Related by accurate spatial information, an incredible variety of real-world and projected past or future data can be analyzed, interpreted and represented. This key characteristic of GIS has begun to open new avenues of scientific inquiry into behaviors and patterns of real-world information that previously had not been systematically correlated.
GIS accuracy depends upon source data, and how it is encoded to be data referenced. Land surveyors have been able to provide a high level of positional accuracy utilizing the GPS-derived positions. High-resolution digital terrain and aerial imagery, powerful computers and Web technology are changing the quality, utility, and expectations of GIS to serve society on a grand scale, but nevertheless there are other source data that affect overall GIS accuracy like paper maps, though these may be of limited use in achieving the desired accuracy.
In developing a digital topographic database for a GIS, topographical maps are the main source, and aerial photography and satellite imagery are extra sources for collecting data and identifying attributes which can be mapped in layers over a location facsimile of scale. The scale of a map and geographical rendering area representation type are very important aspects since the information content depends mainly on the scale set and resulting locatability of the map's representations. In order to digitize a map, the map has to be checked within theoretical dimensions, then scanned into a raster format, and resulting raster data has to be given a theoretical dimension by a rubber sheeting/warping technology process.
A quantitative analysis of maps brings accuracy issues into focus. The electronic and other equipment used to make measurements for GIS is far more precise than the machines of conventional map analysis. All geographical data are inherently inaccurate, and these inaccuracies will propagate through GIS operations in ways that are difficult to predict.
GIS data represents real objects (such as roads, land use, elevation, trees, waterways, etc.) with digital data determining the mix. Real objects can be divided into two abstractions: discrete objects (e.g., a house) and continuous fields (such as rainfall amount, or elevations). Traditionally, there are two broad methods used to store data in a GIS for both kinds of abstractions mapping references: raster images and vector. Points, lines, and polygons are the stuff of mapped location attribute references. A new hybrid method of storing data is that of identifying point clouds, which combine three-dimensional points with RGB information at each point, returning a "3D color image". GIS thematic maps then are becoming more and more realistically visually descriptive of what they set out to show or determine.
For a list of popular GIS file formats, such as shapefiles, see .
Data capture—entering information into the system—consumes much of the time of GIS practitioners. There are a variety of methods used to enter data into a GIS where it is stored in a digital format.
Existing data printed on paper or PET film maps can be digitized or scanned to produce digital data. A digitizer produces vector data as an operator traces points, lines, and polygon boundaries from a map. Scanning a map results in raster data that could be further processed to produce vector data.
Survey data can be directly entered into a GIS from digital data collection systems on survey instruments using a technique called coordinate geometry (COGO). Positions from a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) like Global Positioning System can also be collected and then imported into a GIS. A current trend in data collection gives users the ability to utilize field computers with the ability to edit live data using wireless connections or disconnected editing sessions. This has been enhanced by the availability of low-cost mapping-grade GPS units with decimeter accuracy in real time. This eliminates the need to post process, import, and update the data in the office after fieldwork has been collected. This includes the ability to incorporate positions collected using a laser rangefinder. New technologies also allow users to create maps as well as analysis directly in the field, making projects more efficient and mapping more accurate.
Remotely sensed data also plays an important role in data collection and consist of sensors attached to a platform. Sensors include cameras, digital scanners and lidar, while platforms usually consist of aircraft and satellites. In England in the mid 1990s, hybrid kite/balloons called helikites first pioneered the use of compact airborne digital cameras as airborne geo-information systems. Aircraft measurement software, accurate to 0.4 mm was used to link the photographs and measure the ground. Helikites are inexpensive and gather more accurate data than aircraft. Helikites can be used over roads, railways and towns where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are banned.
Recently aerial data collection is becoming possible with miniature UAVs. For example, the Aeryon Scout was used to map a 50-acre area with a ground sample distance of in only 12 minutes.
The majority of digital data currently comes from photo interpretation of aerial photographs. Soft-copy workstations are used to digitize features directly from stereo pairs of digital photographs. These systems allow data to be captured in two and three dimensions, with elevations measured directly from a stereo pair using principles of photogrammetry. Analog aerial photos must be scanned before being entered into a soft-copy system, for high-quality digital cameras this step is skipped.
Satellite remote sensing provides another important source of spatial data. Here satellites use different sensor packages to passively measure the reflectance from parts of the electromagnetic spectrum or radio waves that were sent out from an active sensor such as radar. Remote sensing collects raster data that can be further processed using different bands to identify objects and classes of interest, such as land cover.
When data is captured, the user should consider if the data should be captured with either a relative accuracy or absolute accuracy, since this could not only influence how information will be interpreted but also the cost of data capture.
After entering data into a GIS, the data usually requires editing, to remove errors, or further processing. For vector data it must be made "topologically correct" before it can be used for some advanced analysis. For example, in a road network, lines must connect with nodes at an intersection. Errors such as undershoots and overshoots must also be removed. For scanned maps, blemishes on the source map may need to be removed from the resulting raster. For example, a fleck of dirt might connect two lines that should not be connected.
Data restructuring can be performed by a GIS to convert data into different formats. For example, a GIS may be used to convert a satellite image map to a vector structure by generating lines around all cells with the same classification, while determining the cell spatial relationships, such as adjacency or inclusion.
More advanced data processing can occur with image processing, a technique developed in the late 1960s by NASA and the private sector to provide contrast enhancement, false color rendering and a variety of other techniques including use of two dimensional Fourier transforms. Since digital data is collected and stored in various ways, the two data sources may not be entirely compatible. So a GIS must be able to convert geographic data from one structure to another. In so doing, the implicit assumptions behind different ontologies and classifications require analysis. Object ontologies have gained increasing prominence as a consequence of object-oriented programming and sustained work by Barry Smith and co-workers.
The earth can be represented by various models, each of which may provide a different set of coordinates (e.g., latitude, longitude, elevation) for any given point on the Earth's surface. The simplest model is to assume the earth is a perfect sphere. As more measurements of the earth have accumulated, the models of the earth have become more sophisticated and more accurate. In fact, there are models called datums that apply to different areas of the earth to provide increased accuracy, like NAD83 for U.S. measurements, and the World Geodetic System for worldwide measurements.
GIS spatial analysis is a rapidly changing field, and GIS packages are increasingly including analytical tools as standard built-in facilities, as optional toolsets, as add-ins or 'analysts'. In many instances these are provided by the original software suppliers (commercial vendors or collaborative non commercial development teams), while in other cases facilities have been developed and are provided by third parties. Furthermore, many products offer software development kits (SDKs), programming languages and language support, scripting facilities and/or special interfaces for developing one's own analytical tools or variants. The increased availability has created a new dimension to business intelligence termed "spatial intelligence" which, when openly delivered via intranet, democratizes access to geographic and social network data. Geospatial intelligence, based on GIS spatial analysis, has also become a key element for security. GIS as a whole can be described as conversion to a vectorial representation or to any other digitisation process.
Slope can be defined as the steepness or gradient of a unit of terrain, usually measured as an angle in degrees or as a percentage. Aspect can be defined as the direction in which a unit of terrain faces. Aspect is usually expressed in degrees from north. Slope, aspect, and surface curvature in terrain analysis are all derived from neighborhood operations using elevation values of a cell's adjacent neighbours. Slope is a function of resolution, and the spatial resolution used to calculate slope and aspect should always be specified. Various authors have compared techniques for calculating slope and aspect.
The following method can be used to derive slope and aspect:
The elevation at a point or unit of terrain will have perpendicular tangents (slope) passing through the point, in an east-west and north-south direction. These two tangents give two components, ∂z/∂x and ∂z/∂y, which then be used to determine the overall direction of slope, and the aspect of the slope. The gradient is defined as a vector quantity with components equal to the partial derivatives of the surface in the x and y directions.
The calculation of the overall 3×3 grid slope "S" and aspect "A" for methods that determine east-west and north-south component use the following formulas respectively:
Zhou and Liu describe another formula for calculating aspect, as follows:
It is difficult to relate wetlands maps to rainfall amounts recorded at different points such as airports, television stations, and schools. A GIS, however, can be used to depict two- and three-dimensional characteristics of the Earth's surface, subsurface, and atmosphere from information points. For example, a GIS can quickly generate a map with isopleth or contour lines that indicate differing amounts of rainfall. Such a map can be thought of as a rainfall contour map. Many sophisticated methods can estimate the characteristics of surfaces from a limited number of point measurements. A two-dimensional contour map created from the surface modeling of rainfall point measurements may be overlaid and analyzed with any other map in a GIS covering the same area. This GIS derived map can then provide additional information - such as the viability of water power potential as a renewable energy source. Similarly, GIS can be used to compare other renewable energy resources to find the best geographic potential for a region.
Additionally, from a series of three-dimensional points, or digital elevation model, isopleth lines representing elevation contours can be generated, along with slope analysis, shaded relief, and other elevation products. Watersheds can be easily defined for any given reach, by computing all of the areas contiguous and uphill from any given point of interest. Similarly, an expected thalweg of where surface water would want to travel in intermittent and permanent streams can be computed from elevation data in the GIS.
A GIS can recognize and analyze the spatial relationships that exist within digitally stored spatial data. These topological relationships allow complex spatial modelling and analysis to be performed. Topological relationships between geometric entities traditionally include adjacency (what adjoins what), containment (what encloses what), and proximity (how close something is to something else).
Geometric networks are linear networks of objects that can be used to represent interconnected features, and to perform special spatial analysis on them. A geometric network is composed of edges, which are connected at junction points, similar to graphs in mathematics and computer science. Just like graphs, networks can have weight and flow assigned to its edges, which can be used to represent various interconnected features more accurately. Geometric networks are often used to model road networks and public utility networks, such as electric, gas, and water networks. Network modeling is also commonly employed in transportation planning, hydrology modeling, and infrastructure modeling.
GIS hydrological models can provide a spatial element that other hydrological models lack, with the analysis of variables such as slope, aspect and watershed or catchment area. Terrain analysis is fundamental to hydrology, since water always flows down a slope. As basic terrain analysis of a digital elevation model (DEM) involves calculation of slope and aspect, DEMs are very useful for hydrological analysis. Slope and aspect can then be used to determine direction of surface runoff, and hence flow accumulation for the formation of streams, rivers and lakes. Areas of divergent flow can also give a clear indication of the boundaries of a catchment. Once a flow direction and accumulation matrix has been created, queries can be performed that show contributing or dispersal areas at a certain point. More detail can be added to the model, such as terrain roughness, vegetation types and soil types, which can influence infiltration and evapotranspiration rates, and hence influencing surface flow. One of the main uses of hydrological modeling is in environmental contamination research. Other applications of hydrological modeling include groundwater and surface water mapping, as well as flood risk maps.
Dana Tomlin probably coined the term "cartographic modeling" in his PhD dissertation (1983); he later used it in the title of his book, "Geographic Information Systems and Cartographic Modeling" (1990).
Cartographic modeling refers to a process where several thematic layers of the same area are produced, processed, and analyzed. Tomlin used raster layers, but the overlay method (see below) can be used more generally. Operations on map layers can be combined into algorithms, and eventually into simulation or optimization models.
The combination of several spatial datasets (points, lines, or polygons) creates a new output vector dataset, visually similar to stacking several maps of the same region. These overlays are similar to mathematical Venn diagram overlays. A union overlay combines the geographic features and attribute tables of both inputs into a single new output. An intersect overlay defines the area where both inputs overlap and retains a set of attribute fields for each. A symmetric difference overlay defines an output area that includes the total area of both inputs except for the overlapping area.
Data extraction is a GIS process similar to vector overlay, though it can be used in either vector or raster data analysis. Rather than combining the properties and features of both datasets, data extraction involves using a "clip" or "mask" to extract the features of one data set that fall within the spatial extent of another dataset.
In raster data analysis, the overlay of datasets is accomplished through a process known as "local operation on multiple rasters" or "map algebra", through a function that combines the values of each raster's matrix. This function may weigh some inputs more than others through use of an "index model" that reflects the influence of various factors upon a geographic phenomenon.
Geostatistics is a branch of statistics that deals with field data, spatial data with a continuous index. It provides methods to model spatial correlation, and predict values at arbitrary locations (interpolation).
When phenomena are measured, the observation methods dictate the accuracy of any subsequent analysis. Due to the nature of the data (e.g. traffic patterns in an urban environment; weather patterns over the Pacific Ocean), a constant or dynamic degree of precision is always lost in the measurement. This loss of precision is determined from the scale and distribution of the data collection.
To determine the statistical relevance of the analysis, an average is determined so that points (gradients) outside of any immediate measurement can be included to determine their predicted behavior. This is due to the limitations of the applied statistic and data collection methods, and interpolation is required to predict the behavior of particles, points, and locations that are not directly measurable.
Interpolation is the process by which a surface is created, usually a raster dataset, through the input of data collected at a number of sample points. There are several forms of interpolation, each which treats the data differently, depending on the properties of the data set. In comparing interpolation methods, the first consideration should be whether or not the source data will change (exact or approximate). Next is whether the method is subjective, a human interpretation, or objective. Then there is the nature of transitions between points: are they abrupt or gradual. Finally, there is whether a method is global (it uses the entire data set to form the model), or local where an algorithm is repeated for a small section of terrain.
Interpolation is a justified measurement because of a spatial autocorrelation principle that recognizes that data collected at any position will have a great similarity to, or influence of those locations within its immediate vicinity.
Digital elevation models, triangulated irregular networks, edge-finding algorithms, Thiessen polygons, Fourier analysis, (weighted) moving averages, inverse distance weighting, kriging, spline, and trend surface analysis are all mathematical methods to produce interpolative data.
Geocoding is interpolating spatial locations (X,Y coordinates) from street addresses or any other spatially referenced data such as ZIP Codes, parcel lots and address locations. A reference theme is required to geocode individual addresses, such as a road centerline file with address ranges. The individual address locations have historically been interpolated, or estimated, by examining address ranges along a road segment. These are usually provided in the form of a table or database. The software will then place a dot approximately where that address belongs along the segment of centerline. For example, an address point of 500 will be at the midpoint of a line segment that starts with address 1 and ends with address 1,000. Geocoding can also be applied against actual parcel data, typically from municipal tax maps. In this case, the result of the geocoding will be an actually positioned space as opposed to an interpolated point. This approach is being increasingly used to provide more precise location information.
Reverse geocoding is the process of returning an estimated street address number as it relates to a given coordinate. For example, a user can click on a road centerline theme (thus providing a coordinate) and have information returned that reflects the estimated house number. This house number is interpolated from a range assigned to that road segment. If the user clicks at the midpoint of a segment that starts with address 1 and ends with 100, the returned value will be somewhere near 50. Note that reverse geocoding does not return actual addresses, only estimates of what should be there based on the predetermined range.
Coupled with GIS, multi-criteria decision analysis methods support decision-makers in analysing a set of alternative spatial solutions, such as the most likely ecological habitat for restoration, against multiple criteria, such as vegetation cover or roads. MCDA uses decision rules to aggregate the criteria, which allows the alternative solutions to be ranked or prioritised. GIS MCDA may reduce costs and time involved in identifying potential restoration sites.
Cartography is the design and production of maps, or visual representations of spatial data. The vast majority of modern cartography is done with the help of computers, usually using GIS but production of quality cartography is also achieved by importing layers into a design program to refine it. Most GIS software gives the user substantial control over the appearance of the data.
Cartographic work serves two major functions:
First, it produces graphics on the screen or on paper that convey the results of analysis to the people who make decisions about resources. Wall maps and other graphics can be generated, allowing the viewer to visualize and thereby understand the results of analyses or simulations of potential events. Web Map Servers facilitate distribution of generated maps through web browsers using various implementations of web-based application programming interfaces (AJAX, Java, Flash, etc.).
Second, other database information can be generated for further analysis or use. An example would be a list of all addresses within one mile (1.6 km) of a toxic spill.
Traditional maps are abstractions of the real world, a sampling of important elements portrayed on a sheet of paper with symbols to represent physical objects. People who use maps must interpret these symbols. Topographic maps show the shape of land surface with contour lines or with shaded relief.
Today, graphic display techniques such as shading based on altitude in a GIS can make relationships among map elements visible, heightening one's ability to extract and analyze information. For example, two types of data were combined in a GIS to produce a perspective view of a portion of San Mateo County, California.
A GIS was used to register and combine the two images to render the three-dimensional perspective view looking down the San Andreas Fault, using the Thematic Mapper image pixels, but shaded using the elevation of the landforms. The GIS display depends on the viewing point of the observer and time of day of the display, to properly render the shadows created by the sun's rays at that latitude, longitude, and time of day.
An archeochrome is a new way of displaying spatial data. It is a thematic on a 3D map that is applied to a specific building or a part of a building. It is suited to the visual display of heat-loss data.
Spatial ETL tools provide the data processing functionality of traditional extract, transform, load (ETL) software, but with a primary focus on the ability to manage spatial data. They provide GIS users with the ability to translate data between different standards and proprietary formats, whilst geometrically transforming the data en route. These tools can come in the form of add-ins to existing wider-purpose software such as spreadsheets.
GIS or spatial data mining is the application of data mining methods to spatial data. Data mining, which is the partially automated search for hidden patterns in large databases, offers great potential benefits for applied GIS-based decision making. Typical applications include environmental monitoring. A characteristic of such applications is that spatial correlation between data measurements require the use of specialized algorithms for more efficient data analysis.
The implementation of a GIS is often driven by jurisdictional (such as a city), purpose, or application requirements. Generally, a GIS implementation may be custom-designed for an organization. Hence, a GIS deployment developed for an application, jurisdiction, enterprise, or purpose may not be necessarily interoperable or compatible with a GIS that has been developed for some other application, jurisdiction, enterprise, or purpose.
GIS provides, for every kind of location-based organization, a platform to update geographical data without wasting time to visit the field and update a database manually. GIS when integrated with other powerful enterprise solutions like SAP and the Wolfram Language helps creating powerful decision support system at enterprise level.
Many disciplines can benefit from GIS technology. An active GIS market has resulted in lower costs and continual improvements in the hardware and software components of GIS, and usage in the fields of science, government, business, and industry, with applications including real estate, public health, crime mapping, national defense, sustainable development, natural resources, climatology, landscape architecture, archaeology, regional and community planning, transportation and logistics. GIS is also diverging into location-based services, which allows GPS-enabled mobile devices to display their location in relation to fixed objects (nearest restaurant, gas station, fire hydrant) or mobile objects (friends, children, police car), or to relay their position back to a central server for display or other processing.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 384 companies, government agencies, universities, and individuals participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geoprocessing specifications. Open interfaces and protocols defined by OpenGIS Specifications support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT, and empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. Open Geospatial Consortium protocols include Web Map Service, and Web Feature Service.
GIS products are broken down by the OGC into two categories, based on how completely and accurately the software follows the OGC specifications.
"Compliant Products" are software products that comply to OGC's OpenGIS Specifications. When a product has been tested and certified as compliant through the OGC Testing Program, the product is automatically registered as "compliant" on this site.
"Implementing Products" are software products that implement OpenGIS Specifications but have not yet passed a compliance test. Compliance tests are not available for all specifications. Developers can register their products as implementing draft or approved specifications, though OGC reserves the right to review and verify each entry.
In recent years there has been a proliferation of free-to-use and easily accessible mapping software such as the proprietary web applications Google Maps and Bing Maps, as well as the free and open-source alternative OpenStreetMap. These services give the public access to huge amounts of geographic data; perceived by many users to be as trustworthy and usable as professional information.
Some of them, like Google Maps and OpenLayers, expose an application programming interface (API) that enable users to create custom applications. These toolkits commonly offer street maps, aerial/satellite imagery, geocoding, searches, and routing functionality. Web mapping has also uncovered the potential of crowdsourcing geodata in projects like OpenStreetMap, which is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. These mashup projects have been proven to provide a high level of value and benefit to end users outside that possible through traditional geographic information.
The condition of the Earth's surface, atmosphere, and subsurface can be examined by feeding satellite data into a GIS. GIS technology gives researchers the ability to examine the variations in Earth processes over days, months, and years. As an example, the changes in vegetation vigor through a growing season can be animated to determine when drought was most extensive in a particular region. The resulting graphic represents a rough measure of plant health. Working with two variables over time would then allow researchers to detect regional differences in the lag between a decline in rainfall and its effect on vegetation.
GIS technology and the availability of digital data on regional and global scales enable such analyses. The satellite sensor output used to generate a vegetation graphic is produced for example by the advanced very-high-resolution radiometer (AVHRR). This sensor system detects the amounts of energy reflected from the Earth's surface across various bands of the spectrum for surface areas of about 1 square kilometer. The satellite sensor produces images of a particular location on the Earth twice a day. AVHRR and more recently the moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) are only two of many sensor systems used for Earth surface analysis.
In addition to the integration of time in environmental studies, GIS is also being explored for its ability to track and model the progress of humans throughout their daily routines. A concrete example of progress in this area is the recent release of time-specific population data by the U.S. Census. In this data set, the populations of cities are shown for daytime and evening hours highlighting the pattern of concentration and dispersion generated by North American commuting patterns. The manipulation and generation of data required to produce this data would not have been possible without GIS.
Using models to project the data held by a GIS forward in time have enabled planners to test policy decisions using spatial decision support systems.
Tools and technologies emerging from the World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web are proving useful for data integration problems in information systems. Correspondingly, such technologies have been proposed as a means to facilitate interoperability and data reuse among GIS applications. and also to enable new analysis mechanisms.
Ontologies are a key component of this semantic approach as they allow a formal, machine-readable specification of the concepts and relationships in a given domain. This in turn allows a GIS to focus on the intended meaning of data rather than its syntax or structure. For example, reasoning that a land cover type classified as "deciduous needleleaf trees" in one dataset is a specialization or subset of land cover type "forest" in another more roughly classified dataset can help a GIS automatically merge the two datasets under the more general land cover classification. Tentative ontologies have been developed in areas related to GIS applications, for example the hydrology ontology developed by the Ordnance Survey in the United Kingdom and the SWEET ontologies developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Also, simpler ontologies and semantic metadata standards are being proposed by the W3C Geo Incubator Group to represent geospatial data on the web. GeoSPARQL is a standard developed by the Ordnance Survey, United States Geological Survey, Natural Resources Canada, Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and others to support ontology creation and reasoning using well-understood OGC literals (GML, WKT), topological relationships (Simple Features, RCC8, DE-9IM), RDF and the SPARQL database query protocols.
Recent research results in this area can be seen in the International Conference on Geospatial Semantics and the Terra Cognita – Directions to the Geospatial Semantic Web workshop at the International Semantic Web Conference.
With the popularization of GIS in decision making, scholars have begun to scrutinize the social and political implications of GIS. GIS can also be misused to distort reality for individual and political gain. It has been argued that the production, distribution, utilization, and representation of geographic information are largely related with the social context and has the potential to increase citizen trust in government. Other related topics include discussion on copyright, privacy, and censorship. A more optimistic social approach to GIS adoption is to use it as a tool for public participation.
At the end of the 20th century, GIS began to be recognized as tools that could be used in the classroom. The benefits of GIS in education seem focused on developing spatial thinking, but there is not enough bibliography or statistical data to show the concrete scope of the use of GIS in education around the world, although the expansion has been faster in those countries where the curriculum mentions them.
GIS seem to provide many advantages in teaching geography because they allow for analyses based on real geographic data and also help raise many research questions from teachers and students in classrooms, as well as they contribute to improvement in learning by developing spatial and geographical thinking and, in many cases, student motivation.
GIS is proven as an organization-wide, enterprise and enduring technology that continues to change how local government operates. Government agencies have adopted GIS technology as a method to better manage the following areas of government organization:
The Open Data initiative is pushing local government to take advantage of technology such as GIS technology, as it encompasses the requirements to fit the Open Data/Open Government model of transparency. With Open Data, local government organizations can implement Citizen Engagement applications and online portals, allowing citizens to see land information, report potholes and signage issues, view and sort parks by assets, view real-time crime rates and utility repairs, and much more. The push for open data within government organizations is driving the growth in local government GIS technology spending, and database management.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12398
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Graph theory
In mathematics, graph theory is the study of "graphs", which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of "vertices" (also called "nodes" or "points") which are connected by "edges" (also called "links" or "lines"). A distinction is made between undirected graphs, where edges link two vertices symmetrically, and directed graphs, where edges link two vertices asymmetrically; see Graph (discrete mathematics) for more detailed definitions and for other variations in the types of graph that are commonly considered. Graphs are one of the prime objects of study in discrete mathematics.
Refer to the glossary of graph theory for basic definitions in graph theory.
Definitions in graph theory vary. The following are some of the more basic ways of defining graphs and related mathematical structures.
In one restricted but very common sense of the term, a graph is an ordered pair comprising:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12401
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Gumby
Gumby is an American clay animation franchise, centered on the titular green clay humanoid character created and modeled by Art Clokey. The character has been the subject of two television series, a feature-length film and other media. Since the original series aired, Gumby has become a famous example of stop-motion clay animation and an influential cultural icon, spawning tributes, parodies and merchandising.
"Gumby" follows the titular character on his adventures through different environments and times in history. Gumby's primary sidekick is Pokey, a talking red pony. His nemeses are the G and J Blockheads, a pair of antagonistic red humanoid figures with cube-shaped heads, one with the letter G on the block, the other with the letter J. The blockheads were inspired by the trouble-making Katzenjammer Kids. Other characters include Prickle, a yellow dinosaur capable of breathing fire and who sometimes styles himself as a detective with pipe and deerstalker hat like Sherlock Holmes; Goo, a flying blue mermaid who spits blue goo balls and can change shape into essentially any object (including machinery) at will; Gumbo and Gumba, Gumby's parents; and Nopey, Gumby's dog whose entire vocabulary is the word "nope". The 1988 syndicated series added Gumby's sister Minga, mastodon friend Denali and chicken friend Tilly.
Gumby was created by Art Clokey in the early 1950s after he finished film school at the University of Southern California (USC).
Clokey's first animated film was a 1953 three-minute student film called "Gumbasia", a surreal montage of moving and expanding lumps of clay set to music in a parody of Disney's "Fantasia". "Gumbasia" was created in the "kinesthetic" style taught by Clokey's USC professor Slavko Vorkapić, described as "massaging of the eye cells." Much of Gumby's look and feel was inspired by this technique of camera movements and editing.
In 1955, Clokey showed "Gumbasia" to movie producer Sam Engel, who encouraged him to develop his technique by animating figures into children's stories. Clokey moved forward, producing a pilot episode featuring the character Gumby.
The name "Gumby" came from the muddy clay found at Clokey's grandparents' farm that his family called "gumbo". Gumby's appearance was inspired by a suggestion from his wife, Ruth (née Parkander), that Gumby be based on the Gingerbread Man. The color green was then chosen because Clokey saw it as both racially neutral and a symbol of life. Gumby's legs and feet were made wide for pragmatic reasons; they ensured that the character would stand up during stop-motion filming. Gumby's famous slanted head was based on the hairstyle of Clokey's father, Charles Farrington, in an old photograph.
Clokey's pilot episode was seen by NBC executive Thomas Warren Sarnoff, who asked Clokey to make another one. The second episode, "Gumby on the Moon", became a huge hit on "Howdy Doody", leading Sarnoff to order a series in 1955 entitled "The Gumby Show". In 1955 and 1956, 25 eleven-minute episodes aired on NBC. In early episodes, Gumby's voice was provided by Ruth Eggleston, wife of the show's art director Al Eggleston, until Dallas McKennon assumed her role in 1962. Gumby's best friend, an orange pony named Pokey, was introduced during the earliest episodes. Because of its variety-type format, "The Gumby Show" featured not only Clokey's puppet films, but also interviews and games. During this time, the show went through a succession of two hosts, Robert Nicholson and Pinky Lee.
In 1959, "The Gumby Show" entered syndication, and more episodes were produced in the 1960s. Production started in Hollywood and in 1960 moved to a larger studio in Glendora, California, where it remained until production ended in 1969. During this time, Gumby was primarily voiced by Norma MacMillan, and occasionally by Ginny Tyler. The cartoon shorts introduced new characters including a blue mermaid named Goo and a yellow dinosaur named Prickle.
Beginning in 1982, Gumby was parodied by Eddie Murphy on "Saturday Night Live". According to Murphy's parody, when the television cameras were turned off, the sweet Gumby reverted to his true self: an irascible, cigar-chomping celebrity who was highly demanding of the production executives. Whenever the executives refused to give in to his demands, Gumby would assert his star status by saying “I’m "Gumby", dammit!" in an exaggerated Jewish accent.
In 1987, the original Gumby shorts enjoyed a revival on home video. The following year, Gumby appeared in "The Puppetoon Movie".
This renewed interest led to a reincarnation of the series consisting of 99 new seven-minute episodes produced for television syndication in association with Lorimar-Telepictures in 1987. Dallas McKennon returned to voice Gumby in the new adventures, in which Gumby and his pals traveled beyond their toyland-type setting and established themselves as a musical band. "Gumby Adventures" also included new characters, such as Gumby's little sister Minga, a mastodon named Denali and a chicken named Tilly.
In addition to the new episodes, the 1950s and 1960s shorts were included in the series, but with new audio. The voices were re-recorded and the original music was replaced by Jerry Gerber's synthesizer score from the 1987 series. Legal issues prevented Clokey from renewing rights to the original Capitol Records production tracks.
Starting in 1992, TV channels such as Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network aired reruns of "Gumby" episodes. In 1995, Clokey's production company produced an independently released theatrical film, "", marking the character's first feature-length adventure, with John R. Dilworth, creator of "Courage the Cowardly Dog", as the film's animation consultant. In it, the villainous Blockheads replace Gumby and his band with robots and kidnap their dog, Lowbelly. The movie featured in-joke homages to science-fiction films such as "Star Wars", "The Terminator", and "". In 1998, the "Gumby" episode "Robot Rumpus" was featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000".
On March 16, 2007, YouTube announced that all Gumby episodes would appear in their full-length form on its site, digitally remastered and with their original soundtracks. This deal also extended to other video sites, including AOL. In March 2007, KQED-TV broadcast an hour-long documentary "Gumby Dharma" as part of its "Truly CA" series. In addition to detailing Clokey's life and work, the film also featured new animation of Gumby and Pokey. For these sequences, animator Stephen A. Buckley provided Gumby's voice while Clokey reprised his role as Pokey.
In 2012, Me-TV began airing "Gumby" on weekend morning, in its weekend morning animation block. The show remained part of the channel's programming until the end of the year.
Several sources say that Dick Beals voiced Gumby in the 1960s; however, Beals refuted this claim in a 2001 interview.
In 1993, "TV Guide" named "Gumby" the best cartoon series of the 1950s in its issue celebrating 40 years of television.
Beginning in 1994, the Library of Congress used Gumby as a "spokescharacter" for "Adventures into Books: Gumby's World", a traveling exhibition that promoted the Center for the Book's national reading campaign from 1997 to 2000. By the end of the 1990s, Gumby and Pokey had also appeared in various commercials for Cheerios cereal, most notably Frosted Cheerios.
"Gumby" was also parodied in a few claymation sketches on Mad TV.
In 2005, "Gumby" made a cameo in a couch gag from the 358th episode of the animated sitcom "The Simpsons".
On August 4, 2006, the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta opened "Art Clokey's Gumby: The First Fifty Years". This exhibition featured many of the original puppets and sets, along with screening of Art Clokey's films. This event was conceived by David Scheve of T.D.A. Animation and Joe Clokey of Premavision, and was one of several exhibits that opened around the country, celebrating the 50th anniversary of "The Gumby Show". The children's book "Gumby Goes to the Sun" was also published that year to commemorate the anniversary. The book was originally created in the 1980s by Clokey's daughter, Holly Harman (who voiced Gumby's sister, Minga in the 1980s incarnation).
In 2007, the "Gumby" comic book series was nominated for two Eisner Awards, Best New Series and Best Publication for a Young Audience, and won the latter.
On October 12, 2011, Google paid tribute to Art Clokey's 90th birthday with a doodle featuring clay balls transforming into characters from the show. The doodle was composed of a toy block with a "G" and five clay balls in the Google colors. Clicking each of the balls revealed the Blockheads, Prickle, Goo, Gumby and Pokey.
In a 2014 episode of Disney XD's "Gravity Falls" called "Little Gift Shop of Horrors", the character of Soos Ramirez appears in the "Clay Day" segment resembling Gumby.
Various Gumby merchandise has been produced over the years, the most prominent item being bendable figures by Lakeside Toys, headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Several single packs and multi-figure sets by Jesco (later Trendmasters), as well as a 50th anniversary collection, have been made of the Gumby characters. Also included in the Gumby merchandise catalog are plush dolls, keychains, mugs, a 1988 Colorforms set, a 1995 Trendmasters playset and a Kubricks set by Medicom. A tribute album, "Gumby: The Green Album", produced by Shepard Stern, was released in 1989 through Buena Vista Records.
In August 2005, the first video game featuring Gumby, "Gumby vs. the Astrobots", was released by Namco for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. In it, Gumby must rescue Pokey, Prickle and Goo after they are captured by the Blockheads and their cohorts, the Astrobots.
The Gumby images and toys are registered trademarks of Prema Toy Company. Premavision owned the distribution rights to the "Gumby" cartoons, having been reverted from previous distributor Warner Bros. Television in 2003, and had licensed the rights to Classic Media until September 30, 2012. At this time, Classic Media was officially acquired by DreamWorks Animation and branded as DreamWorks Classics, which became a subsidiary of NBCUniversal in 2016. As of April 2015, NCircle Entertainment owns home video and digital distribution rights to the cartoons.
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Gioachino Rossini
Gioachino Antonio Rossini (29 February 1792 – 13 November 1868) was an Italian composer who gained fame for his 39 operas, although he also wrote many songs, some chamber music and piano pieces, and some sacred music. He set new standards for both comic and serious opera before retiring from large-scale composition while still in his thirties, at the height of his popularity.
Born in Pesaro to parents who were both musicians (his father a trumpeter, his mother a singer), Rossini began to compose by the age of 12 and was educated at music school in Bologna. His first opera was performed in Venice in 1810 when he was 18 years old. In 1815 he was engaged to write operas and manage theatres in Naples. In the period 1810–1823 he wrote 34 operas for the Italian stage that were performed in Venice, Milan, Ferrara, Naples and elsewhere; this productivity necessitated an almost formulaic approach for some components (such as overtures) and a certain amount of self-borrowing. During this period he produced his most popular works including the comic operas "L'italiana in Algeri", "Il barbiere di Siviglia" (known in English as "The Barber of Seville") and "La Cenerentola", which brought to a peak the "opera buffa" tradition he inherited from masters such as Domenico Cimarosa. He also composed "opera seria" works such as "Otello", "Tancredi" and "Semiramide". All of these attracted admiration for their innovation in melody, harmonic and instrumental colour, and dramatic form. In 1824 he was contracted by the Opéra in Paris, for which he produced an opera to celebrate the coronation of Charles X, "Il viaggio a Reims" (later cannibalised for his first opera in French, "Le comte Ory"), revisions of two of his Italian operas, "Le siège de Corinthe" and "Moïse", and in 1829 his last opera, "Guillaume Tell".
Rossini's withdrawal from opera for the last 40 years of his life has never been fully explained; contributary factors may have been ill-health, the wealth his success had brought him, and the rise of spectacular grand opera under composers such as Giacomo Meyerbeer. From the early 1830s to 1855, when he left Paris and was based in Bologna, Rossini wrote relatively little. On his return to Paris in 1855 he became renowned for his musical salons on Saturdays, regularly attended by musicians and the artistic and fashionable circles of Paris, for which he wrote the entertaining pieces "Péchés de vieillesse." Guests included Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Giuseppe Verdi, Meyerbeer and Joseph Joachim. Rossini's last major composition was his "Petite messe solennelle" (1863). He died in Paris in 1868.
Rossini was born in 1792 in Pesaro, a town on the Adriatic coast of Italy that was then part of the Papal States. He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini, a trumpeter and horn player, and his wife Anna, "née" Guidarini, a seamstress by trade, daughter of a baker. Giuseppe Rossini was charming but impetuous and feckless; the burden of supporting the family and raising the child fell mainly on Anna, with some help from her mother and mother-in-law. Stendhal, who published a colourful biography of Rossini in 1824, wrote:
Giuseppe was imprisoned at least twice: first in 1790 for insubordination to local authorities in a dispute about his employment as town trumpeter; and in 1799 and 1800 for republican activism and support of the troops of Napoleon against the Pope's Austrian backers. In 1798, when Rossini was aged six, his mother began a career as a professional singer in comic opera, and for a little over a decade was a considerable success in cities including Trieste and Bologna, before her untrained voice began to fail.
In 1802 the family moved to Lugo, near Ravenna, where Rossini received a good basic education in Italian, Latin and arithmetic as well as music. He studied the horn with his father and other music with a priest, Giuseppe Malerbe, whose extensive library contained works by Haydn and Mozart, both little known in Italy at the time, but inspirational to the young Rossini. He was a quick learner, and by the age of twelve he had composed a set of six sonatas for four stringed instruments, which were performed under the aegis of a rich patron in 1804. Two years later he was admitted to the recently opened Liceo Musicale, Bologna, initially studying singing, cello and piano, and joining the composition class soon afterwards. He wrote some substantial works while a student, including a mass and a cantata, and after two years he was invited to continue his studies. He declined the offer: the strict academic regime of the Liceo had given him a solid compositional technique, but as his biographer Richard Osborne puts it, "his instinct to continue his education in the real world finally asserted itself".
While still at the Liceo, Rossini had performed in public as a singer and worked in theatres as a répétiteur and keyboard soloist. In 1810 at the request of the popular tenor Domenico Mombelli he wrote his first operatic score, a two-act operatic "dramma serio", "Demetrio e Polibio", to a libretto by Mombelli's wife. It was publicly staged in 1812, after the composer's first successes. Rossini and his parents concluded that his future lay in composing operas. The main operatic centre in north eastern Italy was Venice; under the tutelage of the composer Giovanni Morandi, a family friend, Rossini moved there in late 1810, when he was eighteen.
Rossini's first opera to be staged was "La cambiale di matrimonio", a one-act comedy, given at the small Teatro San Moisè in November 1810. The piece was a great success, and Rossini received what then seemed to him a considerable sum: "forty "scudi" – an amount I had never seen brought together". He later described the San Moisè as an ideal theatre for a young composer learning his craft – "everything tended to facilitate the début of a novice composer": it had no chorus, and a small company of principals; its main repertoire consisted of one-act comic operas ("farse"), staged with modest scenery and minimal rehearsal. Rossini followed the success of his first piece with three more "farse" for the house: "L'inganno felice" (1812), "La scala di seta" (1812), and "Il signor Bruschino" (1813).
Rossini maintained his links with Bologna, where in 1811 he had a success directing Haydn's "The Seasons", and a failure with his first full-length opera, "L'equivoco stravagante". He also worked for opera houses in Ferrara and Rome. In mid-1812 he received a commission from La Scala, Milan, where his two-act comedy "La pietra del paragone" ran for fifty-three performances, a considerable run for the time, which brought him not only financial benefits, but exemption from military service and the title of "maestro di cartello" – a composer whose name on advertising posters guaranteed a full house. The following year his first "opera seria", "Tancredi", did well at La Fenice in Venice, and even better at Ferrara, with a rewritten, tragic ending. The success of "Tancredi" made Rossini's name known internationally; productions of the opera followed in London (1820) and New York (1825). Within weeks of "Tancredi", Rossini had another box-office success with his comedy "L'italiana in Algeri", composed in great haste and premiered in May 1813.
1814 was a less remarkable year for the rising composer, neither "Il turco in Italia" or "Sigismondo" pleasing the Milanese or Venetian public, respectively. 1815 marked an important stage in Rossini's career. In May he moved to Naples, to take up the post of director of music for the royal theatres. These included the Teatro di San Carlo, the city's leading opera house; its manager Domenico Barbaia was to be an important influence on the composer's career there.
The musical establishment of Naples was not immediately welcoming to Rossini, who was seen as an intruder into its cherished operatic traditions. The city had once been the operatic capital of Europe; the memory of Cimarosa was revered and Paisiello was still living, but there were no local composers of any stature to follow them, and Rossini quickly won the public and critics round. Rossini's first work for the San Carlo, "Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra" was a dramma per musica in two acts, in which he reused substantial sections of his earlier works, unfamiliar to the local public. The Rossini scholars Philip Gossett and Patricia Brauner write, "It is as if Rossini wished to present himself to the Neapolitan public by offering a selection of the best music from operas unlikely to be revived in Naples." The new opera was received with tremendous enthusiasm, as was the Neapolitan premiere of "L'italiana in Algeri", and Rossini's position in Naples was assured.
For the first time, Rossini was able to write regularly for a resident company of first-rate singers and a fine orchestra, with adequate rehearsals, and schedules that made it unnecessary to compose in a rush to meet deadlines. Between 1815 and 1822 he composed eighteen more operas: nine for Naples and nine for opera houses in other cities. In 1816, for the Teatro Argentina in Rome, he composed the opera that was to become his best-known: "Il barbiere di Siviglia" ("The Barber of Seville"). There was already a popular opera of that title by Paisiello, and Rossini's version was originally given the same title as its hero, "Almaviva". Despite an unsuccessful opening night, with mishaps on stage and many pro-Paisiello and anti-Rossini audience members, the opera quickly became a success, and by the time of its first revival, in Bologna a few months later, it was billed by its present Italian title, and rapidly eclipsed Paisiello's setting.
Rossini's operas for the Teatro San Carlo were substantial, mainly serious pieces. His "Otello" (1816) provoked Lord Byron to write, "They have been crucifying "Othello" into an opera: music good, but lugubrious – but as for the words!" Nonetheless the piece proved generally popular, and held the stage in frequent revivals until it was overshadowed by Verdi's version, seven decades later. Among his other works for the house were "Mosè in Egitto", based on the biblical story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt (1818), and "La donna del lago", from Sir Walter Scott's poem "The Lady of the Lake" (1819). For La Scala he wrote the opera semiseria "La gazza ladra" (1817), and for Rome his version of the Cinderella story, "La Cenerentola" (1817). In 1817 came the first performance of one of his operas ("L'Italiana") at the Theâtre-Italien in Paris; its success led to others of his operas being staged there, and eventually to his contract in Paris from 1824 to 1830.
Rossini kept his personal life as private as possible, but he was known for his susceptibility to singers in the companies he worked with. Among his lovers in his early years were Ester Mombelli (Domenico's daughter) and Maria Marcolini of the Bologna company. By far the most important of these relationships – both personal and professional – was with Isabella Colbran, prima donna of the Teatro San Carlo (and former mistress of Barbaia). Rossini had heard her sing in Bologna in 1807, and when he moved to Naples he wrote a succession of important roles for her in "opere serie".
By the early 1820s Rossini was beginning to tire of Naples. The failure of his operatic tragedy "Ermione" the previous year convinced him that he and the Neapolitan audiences had had enough of each other. An insurrection in Naples against the monarchy, though quickly crushed, unsettled Rossini; when Barbaia signed a contract to take the company to Vienna, Rossini was glad to join them, but did not reveal to Barbaia that he had no intention of returning to Naples afterwards. He travelled with Colbran, in March 1822, breaking their journey at Bologna, where they were married in the presence of his parents in a small church in Castenaso a few miles from the city. The bride was thirty-seven, the groom thirty.
In Vienna, Rossini received a hero's welcome; his biographers describe it as "unprecedentedly feverish enthusiasm", "Rossini fever", and "near hysteria". The authoritarian chancellor of the Austrian Empire, Metternich, liked Rossini's music, and thought it free of all potential revolutionary or republican associations. He was therefore happy to permit the San Carlo company to perform the composer's operas. In a three-month season they played six of them, to audiences so enthusiastic that Beethoven's assistant, Anton Schindler, described it as "an idolatrous orgy".
While in Vienna Rossini heard Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony, and was so moved that he determined to meet the reclusive composer. He finally managed to do so, and later described the encounter to many people, including Eduard Hanslick and Richard Wagner. He recalled that although conversation was hampered by Beethoven's deafness and Rossini's ignorance of German, Beethoven made it plain that he thought Rossini's talents were not for serious opera, and that "above all" he should "do more "Barbiere"" "(Barbers)".
After the Vienna season Rossini returned to Castenaso to work with his librettist, Gaetano Rossi, on "Semiramide", commissioned by La Fenice. It was premiered in February 1823, his last work for the Italian theatre. Colbran starred, but it was clear to everyone that her voice was in serious decline, and "Semiramide" ended her career in Italy. The work survived that one major disadvantage, and entered the international operatic repertory, remaining popular throughout the 19th century; in Richard Osborne's words, it brought "[Rossini's] Italian career to a spectacular close."
In November 1823 Rossini and Colbran set off for London, where a lucrative contract had been offered. They stopped for four weeks "en route" in Paris. Although he was not as feverishly acclaimed by the Parisians as he had been in Vienna, he nevertheless had an exceptionally welcoming reception from the musical establishment and the public. When he attended a performance of "Il barbiere" at the Théâtre-Italien he was applauded, dragged onto the stage, and serenaded by the musicians. A banquet was given for him and his wife, attended by leading French composers and artists, and he found the cultural climate of Paris congenial.
Once in England, Rossini was received and made much of by the king, George IV, although the composer was by now unimpressed by royalty and aristocracy. Rossini and Colbran had signed contracts for an opera season at the in the Haymarket. Her vocal shortcomings were a serious liability, and she reluctantly retired from performing. Public opinion was not improved by Rossini's failure to provide a new opera, as promised. The impresario, Vincenzo Benelli, defaulted on his contract with the composer, but this was not known to the London press and public, who blamed Rossini.
In a 2003 biography of the composer, Gaia Servadio comments that Rossini and England were not made for each other. He was prostrated by the Channel crossing, and was unlikely to be enthused by the English weather or English cooking. Although his stay in London was financially rewarding – the British press reported disapprovingly that he had earned over £30,000 – he was happy to sign a contract at the French embassy in London to return to Paris, where he had felt much more at home.
Rossini's new, and highly remunerative, contract with the French government was negotiated under Louis XVIII, who died in September 1824, soon after Rossini's arrival in Paris. It had been agreed that the composer would produce one grand opera for the Académie Royale de Musique and either an "opera buffa" or an "opera semiseria" for the Théâtre-Italien. He was also to help run the latter theatre and revise one of his earlier works for revival there. The death of the king and the accession of Charles X changed Rossini's plans, and his first new work for Paris was "Il viaggio a Reims", an operatic entertainment given in June 1825 to celebrate Charles's coronation. It was Rossini's last opera with an Italian libretto. He permitted only four performances of the piece, intending to reuse the best of the music in a less ephemeral opera. About half the score of "Le comte Ory" (1828) is from the earlier work.
Colbran's enforced retirement put a strain on the Rossinis' marriage, leaving her unoccupied while he continued to be the centre of musical attention and constantly in demand. She consoled herself with what Servadio describes as "a new pleasure in shopping"; for Rossini, Paris offered continual gourmet delights, as his increasingly rotund shape began to reflect.
The first of the four operas Rossini wrote to French librettos were "Le siège de Corinthe" (1826) and "Moïse et Pharaon" (1827). Both were substantial reworkings of pieces written for Naples: "Maometto II" and "Mosè in Egitto". Rossini took great care before beginning work on the first, learning to speak French and familiarising himself with traditional French operatic ways of declaiming the language. As well as dropping some of the original music that was in an ornate style unfashionable in Paris, Rossini accommodated local preferences by adding dances, hymn-like numbers and a greater role for the chorus.
Rossini's mother, Anna, died in 1827; he had been devoted to her, and he felt her loss deeply. She and Colbran had never got on well, and Servadio suggests that after Anna died Rossini came to resent the surviving woman in his life.
In 1828 Rossini wrote "Le comte Ory", his only French-language comic opera. His determination to reuse music from "Il viaggio a Reims" caused problems for his librettists, who had to adapt their original plot and write French words to fit existing Italian numbers, but the opera was a success, and was seen in London within six months of the Paris premiere, and in New York in 1831. The following year Rossini wrote his long-awaited French grand opera, "Guillaume Tell", based on Friedrich Schiller's 1804 play which drew on the William Tell legend.
"Guillaume Tell" was well received. The orchestra and singers gathered outside Rossini's house after the premiere and performed the rousing finale to the second act in his honour. The newspaper "Le Globe" commented that a new era of music had begun. Gaetano Donizetti remarked that the first and last acts of the opera were written by Rossini, but the middle act was written by God. The work was an undoubted success, without being a smash hit; the public took some time in getting to grips with it, and some singers found it too demanding. It nonetheless was produced abroad within months of the premiere, and there was no suspicion that it would be the composer's last opera.
Jointly with "Semiramide", "Guillaume Tell" is Rossini's longest opera, at three hours and forty-five minutes, and the effort of composing it left him exhausted. Although within a year he was planning an operatic treatment of the Faust story, events and ill health overtook him. After the opening of "Guillaume Tell" the Rossinis had left Paris and were staying in Castenaso. Within a year events in Paris had Rossini hurrying back. Charles X was overthrown in a revolution in July 1830, and the new administration, headed by Louis Philippe I, announced radical cutbacks in government spending. Among the cuts was Rossini's lifetime annuity, won after hard negotiation with the previous regime. Attempting to restore the annuity was one of Rossini's reasons for returning. The other was to be with his new mistress, Olympe Pélissier. He left Colbran in Castenaso; she never returned to Paris and they never lived together again.
The reasons for Rossini's withdrawal from opera have been continually discussed during and since his lifetime. Some have supposed that aged thirty-seven and in variable health, having negotiated a sizeable annuity from the French government, and having written thirty-nine operas, he simply planned to retire and kept to that plan. In a 1934 study of the composer, the critic Francis Toye coined the phrase "The Great Renunciation", and called Rossini's retirement a "phenomenon unique in the history of music and difficult to parallel in the whole history of art":
The poet Heine compared Rossini's retirement with Shakespeare's withdrawal from writing: two geniuses recognising when they had accomplished the unsurpassable and not seeking to follow it. Others, then and later, suggested that Rossini had retired because of pique at the successes of Giacomo Meyerbeer and Fromental Halévy in the genre of grand opéra. Modern Rossini scholarship has generally discounted such theories, maintaining that Rossini had no intention of renouncing operatic composition, and that circumstances rather than personal choice made "Guillaume Tell" his last opera. Gossett and Richard Osborne suggest that illness may have been a major factor in Rossini's retirement. From about this time, Rossini had intermittent bad health, both physical and mental. He had contracted gonorrhoea in earlier years, which later led to painful side-effects, from urethritis to arthritis; he suffered from bouts of debilitating depression, which commentators have linked to several possible causes: cyclothymia, or bipolar disorder, or reaction to his mother's death.
For the next twenty-five years following "Guillaume Tell" Rossini composed little, although Gossett comments that his comparatively few compositions from the 1830s and 1840s show no falling-off in musical inspiration. They include the "Soirées musicales" (1830–1835: a set of twelve songs for solo or duet voices and piano) and his Stabat Mater (begun in 1831 and completed in 1841). After winning his fight with the government over his annuity in 1835 Rossini left Paris and settled in Bologna. His return to Paris in 1843 for medical treatment by Jean Civiale sparked hopes that he might produce a new grand opera – it was rumoured that Eugène Scribe was preparing a libretto for him about Joan of Arc. The Opéra was moved to present a French version of "Otello" in 1844 which also included material from some of the composer's earlier operas. It is unclear to what extent – if at all – Rossini was involved with this production, which was in the event poorly received. More controversial was the "pasticcio" opera of "Robert Bruce" (1846), in which Rossini, by then returned to Bologna, closely cooperated by selecting music from his past operas which had not yet been performed in Paris, notably "La donna del lago." The Opéra sought to present "Robert" as a new Rossini opera. But although "Othello" could at least claim to be genuine, canonic, Rossini, the historian Mark Everist notes that detractors argued that "Robert" was simply "fake goods, and from a bygone era at that"; he cites Théophile Gautier regretting that "the lack of unity could have been masked by a superior performance; unfortunately the tradition of Rossini's music was lost at the Opéra a long time ago."
The period after 1835 saw Rossini's formal separation from his wife, who remained at Castenaso (1837), and the death of his father at the age of eighty (1839). In 1845 Colbran became seriously ill, and in September Rossini travelled to visit her; a month later she died. The following year Rossini and Pélissier were married in Bologna. The events of the Year of Revolution in 1848 led Rossini to move away from the Bologna area, where he felt threatened by insurrection, and to make Florence his base, which it remained until 1855.
By the early 1850s Rossini's mental and physical health had deteriorated to the point where his wife and friends feared for his sanity or his life. By the middle of the decade it was clear that he needed to return to Paris for the most advanced medical care then available. In April 1855 the Rossinis set off for their final journey from Italy to France. Rossini returned to Paris aged sixty-three and made it his home for the rest of his life.
Gossett observes that although an account of Rossini's life between 1830 and 1855 makes depressing reading, it is "no exaggeration to say that, in Paris, Rossini returned to life". He recovered his health and "joie de vivre". Once settled in Paris he maintained two homes: a flat in the rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, a smart central area, and a neo-classical villa built for him in Passy, a commune now absorbed into the city, but then semi-rural. He and his wife established a salon that became internationally famous. The first of their Saturday evening gatherings – the "samedi soirs" – was held in December 1858, and the last, two months before he died in 1868.
Rossini began composing again. His music from his final decade was not generally intended for public performance, and he did not usually put dates of composition on the manuscripts. Consequently, musicologists have found it difficult to give definite dates for his late works, but the first, or among the first, was the song cycle "Musique anodine", dedicated to his wife and presented to her in April 1857. For their weekly salons he produced more than 150 pieces, including songs, solo piano pieces, and chamber works for many different combinations of instruments. He referred to them as his "Péchés de vieillesse" – "sins of old age". The salons were held both at Beau Séjour – the Passy villa – and, in the winter, at the Paris flat. Such gatherings were a regular feature of Parisian life – the writer James Penrose has observed that the well-connected could easily attend different salons almost every night of the week – but the Rossinis' "samedi soirs" quickly became the most sought after: "an invitation was the city's highest social prize." The music, carefully chosen by Rossini, was not only his own, but included works by Pergolesi, Haydn and Mozart and modern pieces by some of his guests. Among the composers who attended the salons, and sometimes performed, were Auber, Gounod, Liszt, Rubinstein, Meyerbeer and Verdi. Rossini liked to call himself a fourth-class pianist, but the many famous pianists who attended the "samedi soirs" were dazzled by his playing. Violinists such as Pablo Sarasate and Joseph Joachim, and the leading singers of the day were regular guests. In 1860, Wagner visited Rossini via an introduction from Rossini's friend Edmond Michotte who some forty-five years later wrote his account of the genial conversation between the two composers.
One of Rossini's few late works intended to be given in public was his "Petite messe solennelle", first performed in 1864. In the same year Rossini was made a grand officer of the Legion of Honour by Napoleon III.
After a short illness, and an unsuccessful operation to treat colorectal cancer, Rossini died at Passy on 13 November 1868 at the age of seventy-six. He left Olympe a life interest in his estate, which after her death, ten years later, passed to the Commune of Pesaro for the establishment of a Liceo Musicale, and funded a home for retired opera singers in Paris. After a funeral service attended by more than four thousand people at the church of Sainte-Trinité, Paris, Rossini's body was interred at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. In 1887 his remains were moved to the church of Santa Croce, Florence.
The writer Julian Budden, noting the formulas adopted early on by Rossini in his career and consistently followed by him thereafter as regards overtures, arias, structures and ensembles, has called them "the Code Rossini" in a reference to the Code Napoléon, the legal system established by the French Emperor. Rossini's overall style may indeed have been influenced more directly by the French: the historian John Rosselli suggests that French rule in Italy at the start of the 19th century meant that "music had taken on new military qualities of attack, noise and speed – to be heard in Rossini." Rossini's approach to opera was inevitably tempered by changing tastes and audience demands. The formal "classicist" libretti of Metastasio which had underpinned late 18th century "opera seria" were replaced by subjects more to the taste of the age of Romanticism, with stories demanding stronger characterisation and quicker action; a jobbing composer needed to meet these demands or fail. Rossini's strategies met this reality. A formulaic approach was logistically indispensable for Rossini's career, at least at the start: in the seven years 1812–1819, he wrote 27 operas, often at extremely short notice. For "La Cenerentola" (1817), for example, he had just over three weeks to write the music before the première.
Such pressures led to a further significant element of Rossini's compositional procedures, not included in Budden's "Code", namely, recycling. The composer often transferred a successful overture to subsequent operas: thus the overture to "La pietra del paragone" was later used for the "opera seria" "Tancredi" (1813), and (in the other direction) the overture to "Aureliano in Palmira" (1813) ended as (and is today known as) the overture to the comedy "Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville)". He also liberally re-employed arias and other sequences in later works. Spike Hughes notes that of the twenty-six numbers of "Eduardo e Cristina", produced in Venice in 1817, nineteen were lifted from previous works. "The audience ... were remarkably good-humoured ... and asked slyly why the libretto had been changed since the last performance". Rossini expressed his disgust when the publisher Giovanni Ricordi issued a complete edition of his works in the 1850s: "The same pieces will be found several times, for I thought I had the right to remove from my fiascos those pieces which seemed best, to rescue them from shipwreck ... A fiasco seemed to be good and dead, and now look they've resuscitated them all!"
Philip Gossett notes that Rossini "was from the outset a consummate composer of overtures." His basic formula for these remained constant throughout his career: Gossett characterises them as "sonata movements without development sections, usually preceded by a slow introduction" with "clear melodies, exuberant rhythms [and] simple harmonic structure" and a "crescendo" climax. Richard Taruskin also notes that the second theme is always announced in a woodwind solo, whose "catchiness" "etch[es] a distinct profile in the aural memory", and that the richness and inventiveness of his handling of the orchestra, even in these early works, marks the start of "[t]he great nineteenth-century flowering of orchestration."
Rossini's handling of arias (and duets) in "cavatina" style marked a development from the eighteenth-century commonplace of recitative and aria. In the words of Rosselli, in Rossini's hands "the aria became an engine for releasing emotion". Rossini's typical aria structure involved a lyrical introduction (""cantabile"") and a more intensive, brilliant, conclusion (""cabaletta""). This model could be adapted in various ways so as to forward the plot (as opposed to the typical eighteenth-century handling which resulted in the action coming to a halt as the requisite repeats of the "da capo aria" were undertaken). For example, they could be punctuated by comments from other characters (a convention known as ""pertichini""), or the chorus could intervene between the "cantabile" and the "cabaletta" so as to fire up the soloist. If such developments were not necessarily Rossini's own invention, he nevertheless made them his own by his expert handling of them. A landmark in this context is the "cavatina" ""Di tanti palpiti"" from "Tancredi", which both Taruskin and Gossett (amongst others) single out as transformative, "the most famous aria Rossini ever wrote", with a "melody that seems to capture the melodic beauty and innocence characteristic of Italian opera." Both writers point out the typical Rossinian touch of avoiding an "expected" cadence in the aria by a sudden shift from the home key of F to that of A flat (see example); Taruskin notes the implicit pun, as the words talk of returning, but the music moves in a new direction. The influence was lasting; Gossett notes how the Rossinian "cabaletta" style continued to inform Italian opera as late as Giuseppe Verdi's "Aida" (1871).
Such structural integration of the forms of vocal music with the dramatic development of the opera meant a sea-change from the Metastasian primacy of the aria; in Rossini's works, solo arias progressively take up a smaller proportion of the operas, in favour of duets (also typically in "cantabile-caballetta" format) and ensembles.
During the late 18th-century, creators of "opera buffa" had increasingly developed dramatic integration of the finales of each act. Finales began to "spread backwards", taking an ever larger proportion of the act, taking the structure of a musically continuous chain, accompanied throughout by orchestra, of a series of sections, each with its own characteristics of speed and style, mounting to a clamorous and vigorous final scene. In his comic operas Rossini brought this technique to its peak, and extended its range far beyond his predecessors. Of the finale to the first act of "L'italiana in Algeri", Taruskin writes that "[r]unning through almost a hundred pages of vocal score in record time, it is the most concentrated single dose of Rossini that there is."
Of greater consequence for the history of opera was Rossini's ability to progress this technique in the genre of "opera seria". Gossett in a very detailed analysis of the first-act finale of "Tancredi" identifies several the elements in Rossini's practice. These include the contrast of "kinetic" action sequences, often characterised by orchestral motifs, with "static" expressions of emotion, the final "static" section in the form of a caballetta, with all the characters joining in the final cadences. Gossett claims that it is "from the time of "Tancredi" that the caballetta ... becomes the obligatory closing section of each musical unit in the operas of Rossini and his contemporaries."
With extremely few exceptions, all Rossini's compositions before the "Péchés de vieillesse" of his retirement involve the human voice. His very first surviving work (apart from a single song) is however a set of string sonatas for two violins, cello and double-bass, written at the age of 12, when he had barely begun instruction in composition. Tuneful and engaging, they indicate how remote the talented child was from the influence of the advances in musical form evolved by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven; the accent is on cantabile melody, colour, variation and virtuosity rather than transformational development. These qualities are also evident in Rossini's early operas, especially his "farse" (one-act farces), rather than his more formal "opere serie". Gossett notes that these early works were written at a time when "[t]he deposited mantles of Cimarosa and Paisiello were unfilled" – these were Rossini's first, and increasingly appreciated, steps in trying them on. The Teatro San Moisè in Venice, where his "farse" were first performed, and the La Scala Theatre of Milan which premiered his two-act opera "La pietra del paragone" (1812), were seeking works in that tradition; Gossett notes that in these operas "Rossini's musical personality began to take shape ... many elements emerge that remain throughout his career" including "[a] love of sheer sound, of sharp and effective rhythms". The unusual effect employed in the overture of "Il signor Bruschino", (1813) deploying violin bows tapping rhythms on music stands, is an example of such witty originality.
The great success in Venice of the premieres of both "Tancredi" and the comic opera "L'italiana in Algeri" within a few weeks of each other (6 February 1813 and 22 May 1813 respectively) set the seal on Rossini's reputation as the rising opera composer of his generation. From the end of 1813 to mid-1814 he was in Milan creating two new operas for La Scala, "Aureliano in Palmira" and "Il Turco in Italia". Arsace in "Aureliano" was sung by the "castrato" Giambattista Velluti; this was the last opera role Rossini wrote for a "castrato" singer as the norm became to use contralto voices – another sign of change in operatic taste. Rumour had it that Rossini was displeased by Velluti's ornamentation of his music; but in fact throughout his Italian period, up to "Semiramide" (1823), Rossini's written vocal lines become increasingly florid, and this is more appropriately credited to the composer's own changing style.
Rossini's work in Naples contributed to this stylistic development. The city, which was the cradle of the operas of Cimarosa and Paisiello, had been slow to acknowledge the composer from Pesaro, but Domenico Barbaia invited him in 1815 on a seven-year contract to manage his theatres and compose operas. For the first time, Rossini was able to work over a long period with a company of musicians and singers, including amongst the latter Isabella Colbran, Andrea Nozzari, Giovanni David and others, who as Gossett notes "all specialized in florid singing" and "whose vocal talents left an indelible and not wholly positive mark on Rossini's style". Rossini's first operas for Naples, "Elisabetta, regina d'Inghilterra" and "La gazzetta" were both largely recycled from earlier works, but "Otello" (1816) is marked not only by its virtuoso vocal lines but by its masterfully integrated last act, with its drama underlined by melody, orchestration and tonal colour; here, in Gossett's opinion "Rossini came of age as a dramatic artist." He further comments:
By now, Rossini's career was arousing interest across Europe. Others came to Italy to study the revival of Italian opera and used its lessons to advance themselves; amongst these was the Berlin-born Giacomo Meyerbeer who arrived in Italy in 1816, a year after Rossini's establishment at Naples, and lived and worked there until following him to Paris in 1825; he used one of Rossini's librettists, Gaetano Rossi, for five of his seven Italian operas, which were produced at Turin, Venice and Milan. In a letter to his brother of September 1818, he includes a detailed critique of "Otello" from the point of view of a non-Italian informed observer. He is scathing about the self-borrowings in the first two acts, but concedes that the third act "so firmly established Rossini's reputation in Venice that even a thousand follies could not rob him of it. But this act is divinely beautiful, and what is so strange is that [its] beauties ... are blatantly un-Rossinian: outstanding, even passionate recitatives, mysterious accompaniments, lots of local colour."
Rossini's contract did not prevent him from undertaking other commissions, and before "Otello, Il barbiere di Siviglia", a grand culmination of the "opera buffa" tradition, had been premiered in Rome (February 1816). Richard Osborne catalogues its excellencies:Beyond the physical impact of ... Figaro's "Largo al factotum", there is Rossini's ear for vocal and instrumental timbres of a peculiar astringency and brilliance, his quick-witted word-setting, and his mastery of large musical forms with their often brilliant and explosive internal variations. Add to that what Verdi called the opera's "abundance of true musical ideas", and the reasons for the work's longer-term emergence as Rossini's most popular "opera buffa" are not hard to find.
Apart from "La Cenerentola" (Rome, 1817), and the "pen-and-ink sketch" "farsa" "Adina" (1818, not performed until 1826), Rossini's other works during his contract with Naples were all in the "opera seria" tradition. Amongst the most notable of these, all containing virtuoso singing roles, were "Mosè in Egitto" (1818), "La donna del lago" (1819), "Maometto II" (1820) all staged in Naples, and "Semiramide", his last opera written for Italy, staged at La Fenice in Venice in 1823. Both "Mosè" and "Maometto II" were later to undergo significant reconstruction in Paris (see below).
Already in 1818, Meyerbeer had heard rumours that Rossini was seeking a lucrative appointment at the Paris Opéra – "Should [his proposals] be accepted, he will go to the French capital, and we will perhaps experience curious things." Some six years were to pass before this prophecy came true.
In 1824 Rossini, under a contract with the French government, became director of the Théâtre-Italien in Paris, where he introduced Meyerbeer's opera "Il crociato in Egitto", and for which he wrote "Il viaggio a Reims" to celebrate the coronation of Charles X (1825). This was his last opera to an Italian libretto, and was later cannibalised to create his first French opera, "Le comte Ory" (1828). A new contract in 1826 meant he could concentrate on productions at the Opéra and to this end he substantially revised "Maometto II" as "Le siège de Corinthe" (1826) and "Mosé" as "Moïse et Pharaon" (1827). Meeting French taste, the works are extended (each by one act), the vocal lines in the revisions are less florid and the dramatic structure is enhanced, with the proportion of arias reduced. One of the most striking additions was the chorus at the end of Act III of "Moïse", with a crescendo repetition of a diatonic ascending bass line, rising first by a minor third, then by a major third, at each appearance, and a descending chromatic top line, which roused the excitement of audiences.
Rossini's government contract required him to create at least one new ""grand opėra"", and Rossini settled on the story of William Tell, working closely with the librettist Étienne de Jouy. The story in particular enabled him to indulge "an underlying interest in the related genres of folk music, pastoral and the picturesque". This becomes clear from the overture, which is explicitly programmatic in describing weather, scenery and action, and presents a version of the "ranz des vaches", the Swiss cowherd's call, which "undergoes a number of transformations during the opera" and gives it in Richard Osborne's opinion "something of the character of a leitmotif". In the opinion of the music historian Benjamin Walton, Rossini "saturate[s] the work with local colour to such a degree that there is room for little else." Thus, the role of the soloists is significantly reduced compared to other Rossini operas, the hero not even having an aria of his own, whilst the chorus of the Swiss people is consistently in the musical and dramatic foregrounds.
"Guillaume Tell" premiered in August 1829. Rossini also provided for the Opéra a shorter, three-act version, which incorporated the "pas redoublé" (quick march) final section of the overture in its finale; it was first performed in 1831 and became the basis of the Opéra's future productions. "Tell" was very successful from the start and was frequently revived – in 1868 the composer was present at its 500th performance at the Opéra. The "Globe" had reported enthusiastically at its opening that "a new epoch has opened not only for French opera, but for dramatic music elsewhere." This was an era, it transpired, in which Rossini was not to participate.
Rossini's contract required him to provide five new works for the Opéra over 10 years. After the première of "Tell" he was already considering some opera subjects, including Goethe's "Faust", but the only significant works he completed before abandoning Paris in 1836 were the Stabat Mater, written for a private commission in 1831 (later completed and published in 1841), and the collection of salon vocal music "Soirées musicales" published in 1835. Living in Bologna, he occupied himself teaching singing at the Liceo Musicale, and also created a "pasticcio" of "Tell", "Rodolfo di Sterlinga", for the benefit of the singer Nikolay Ivanov, for which Giuseppe Verdi provided some new arias. Continuing demand in Paris resulted in the productions of a "new" French version of "Otello" in 1844 (with which Rossini was not involved) and a "new" opera "Robert Bruce" for which Rossini cooperated with Louis Niedermeyer and others to recast music for "La donna del lago" and others of his works which were little-known in Paris to fit a new libretto. The success of both of these was qualified, to say the least.
Not until Rossini returned to Paris in 1855 were there signs of a revival of his musical spirits. A stream of pieces, for voices, choir, piano, and chamber ensembles, written for his soirées, the "Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of old age)" were issued in thirteen volumes from 1857 to 1868; of these volumes 4 to 8 comprise "56 semi-comical piano pieces ... dedicated to pianists of the fourth class, to which I have the honour of belonging." These include a mock funeral march, "Marche et reminiscences pour mon dernier voyage (March and reminiscences for my last journey)." Gossett writes of the "Péchés" "Their historical position remains to be assessed but it seems likely that their effect, direct or indirect, on composers like Camille Saint-Saëns and Erik Satie was significant."
The most substantial work of Rossini's last decade, the "Petite messe solennelle" (1863), was written for small forces (originally voices, two pianos and harmonium), and therefore unsuited to concert hall performance; and as it included women's voices it was unacceptable for church performances at the time. For these reasons, Richard Osborne suggests, the piece has been somewhat overlooked among Rossini's compositions. It is neither especially "petite" (little) nor entirely "solennelle" (solemn), but is notable for its grace, counterpoint and melody. At the end of the manuscript, the composer wrote Dear God, here it is finished, this poor little Mass. Is it sacred music I have written, or damned music? I was born for opera buffa, as you know well. A little technique, a little heart, that's all. Be blessed then, and grant me Paradise.
The popularity of Rossini's melodies led many contemporary virtuosi to create piano transcriptions or fantasies based on them. Examples include Sigismond Thalberg's fantasy on themes from "Moïse", the sets of variations on "Non più mesta" from "La Cenerentola" by Henri Herz, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Hünten, Anton Diabelli and Friedrich Burgmüller, and Liszt's transcriptions of the "William Tell" overture (1838) and the "Soirées musicales".
The continuing popularity of his comic operas (and the decline in staging his "opere serie"), the overthrow of the singing and staging styles of his period, and the emerging concept of the composer as "creative artist" rather than craftsman, diminished and distorted Rossini's place in music history even though the forms of Italian opera continued up to the period of verismo to be indebted to his innovations. Rossini's status amongst his contemporary Italian composers is indicated by the "Messa per Rossini", a project initiated by Verdi within a few days of Rossini's death, which he and a dozen other composers created in collaboration.
If Rossini's principal legacy to Italian opera was in vocal forms and dramatic structure for serious opera, his legacy to French opera was to provide a bridge from opera buffa to the development of "opéra comique" (and thence, via Jacques Offenbach's "opéras bouffes" to the genre of operetta). "Opéras comiques" showing a debt to Rossini's style include François-Adrien Boieldieu's "La dame blanche" (1825) and Daniel Auber's "Fra Diavolo" (1830), as well as works by Ferdinand Hérold, Adolphe Adam and Fromental Halévy. Critical of Rossini's style was Hector Berlioz, who wrote of his "melodic cynicism, his contempt for dramatic and good sense, his endless repetition of a single form of cadence, his eternal puerile crescendo and his brutal bass drum".
It was perhaps inevitable that the formidable reputation which Rossini had built in his lifetime would fade thereafter. In 1886, less than twenty years after the composer's death, Bernard Shaw wrote: "The once universal Rossini, whose "Semiramide" appeared to our greener grandfathers a Ninevesque wonder, came at last to be no longer looked upon as a serious musician." In an 1877 review of "Il barbiere", he noted that Adelina Patti sang as an encore in the lesson scene "Home, Sweet Home" but that "the opera proved so intolerably wearisome that some of her audience had already displayed their appreciation of the sentiment of the ballad in the most practical way."
In the early 20th century Rossini received tributes from both Ottorino Respighi, who had orchestrated excerpts from the "Péchés de viellesse" both in his ballet "la boutique fantasque" (1918) and in his 1925 suite "Rossiniana", and from Benjamin Britten, who adapted music by Rossini for two suites, "Soirées musicales" (Op. 9) in 1936 and "Matinées musicales" (Op. 24) in 1941. Richard Osborne singles out the three-volume biography of Rossini by Giuseppe Radiciotti (1927–1929) as an important turning-point towards positive appreciation, which may also have been assisted by the trend of neoclassicism in music. A firm re-evaluation of Rossini's significance began only later in the 20th century in the light of study, and the creation of critical editions, of his works. A prime mover in these developments was the "Fondazione G. Rossini" which was created by the city of Pesaro in 1940 using the funds which had been left to the city by the composer. Since 1980 the "Fondazione" has supported the annual Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro.
In the 21st century, the Rossini repertoire of opera houses around the world remains dominated by "Il barbiere", "La Cenerentola" being the second most popular. Several other operas are regularly produced, including "Le comte Ory", "La donna del lago", "La gazza ladra", "Guillaume Tell", "L'italiana in Algeri", "La scala di seta", "Il turco in Italia" and "Il viaggio a Reims". Other Rossini pieces in the current international repertory, given from time to time, include "Adina", "Armida", "Elisabetta regina d'Inghilterra", "Ermione", "Mosé in Egitto" and "Tancredi". The Rossini in Wildbad festival specialises in producing the rarer works. The Operabase performance-listing website records 2,319 performances of 532 productions of Rossini operas in 255 venues across the world in the three years 2017–2019. All of Rossini's operas have been recorded.
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Gibberish
Gibberish, also called jibber-jabber or gobbledygook, is speech that is (or appears to be) nonsense. It may include speech sounds that are not actual words, or language games and specialized jargon that seems nonsensical to outsiders.
"Gibberish" is also used as an imprecation to denigrate or tar ideas or opinions the user disagrees with or finds irksome, a rough equivalent of "nonsense", "folderol", or "claptrap". The implication is that the criticized expression or proposition lacks substance or congruence, as opposed to simply being a differing view.
The related word "jibber-jabber" refers to rapid talk that is difficult to understand.
The etymology of "gibberish" is uncertain. The term was first seen in English in the early 16th century. It is generally thought to be an onomatopoeia imitative of speech, similar to the words "jabber" (to talk rapidly) and "gibber" (to speak inarticulately).
It may originate from the word "jib", which is the Angloromani variant of the Romani language word meaning "language" or "tongue". To non-speakers, the Anglo-Romany dialect could sound like English mixed with nonsense words, and if those seemingly-nonsensical words are referred to as "jib" then the term "gibberish" (pronounced "jibberish") could be derived as a descriptor for nonsensical speech. Another theory is that "gibberish" came from the name of a famous 8th century Muslim Persian alchemist, Jābir ibn Hayyān, whose name was Latinized as "Geber". Thus, "gibberish" was a reference to the incomprehensible technical jargon and allegorical coded language used by Jabir and other alchemists.
A discredited alternative theory asserts that it is derived from the Irish word "gob" or "gab" ("mouth") or from the Irish phrase "Geab ar ais" ("back talk, backward chat"). The latter Irish etymology was suggested by Daniel Cassidy, whose work has been criticised by linguists and scholars. The terms "geab" and "geabaire" are certainly Irish words, but the phrase "geab ar ais" does not exist, and the word "gibberish" exists as a loan-word in Irish as "gibiris".
The term "gobbledygook" was coined by Maury Maverick, a former congressman from Texas and former mayor of San Antonio. When Maverick was chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation during World War II, he sent a memorandum that said: "Be short and use plain English. ... Stay off gobbledygook language." Maverick defined "gobbledygook" as "talk or writing which is long, pompous, vague, involved, usually with Latinized words." The allusion was to a turkey, "always gobbledygobbling and strutting with ridiculous pomposity."
The term "gobbledygook" has a long history of usage in politics. Nixon's Oval Office tape from June 14, 1971, showed H. R. Haldeman describing a situation to Nixon as "... a bunch of gobbledygook. But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing: You can't trust the government; you can't believe what they say." President Ronald Reagan explained tax law revisions in an address to the nation with the word, May 28, 1985, saying that "most didn’t improve the system; they made it more like Washington itself: Complicated, unfair, cluttered with gobbledygook and loopholes designed for those with the power and influence to hire high-priced legal and tax advisers." In 2017, US Supreme Court justice John Roberts dismissed quantitative sociological reasoning as "gobbledygook" in arguing against any numerical test for gerrymandering.
Michael Shanks, former chairman to the National Consumer Council of Great Britain, characterizes professional gobbledygook as sloppy jargon intended to confuse nonspecialists: "'Gobbledygook' may indicate a failure to think clearly, a contempt for one's clients, or more probably a mixture of both. A system that can't or won't communicate is not a safe basis for a democracy."
Using gibberish whilst acting can be used as an exercise in performance art education. Another usage of gibberish is as part of Osho's "Gibberish meditation" which has been derived from an old Sufi practice.
The terms "officialese" or "bureaucratese" refer to language used by officials or authorities. "Legalese" is a closely related concept, referring to language used by lawyers, legislators, and others involved with the law. The language used in these fields may contain complex sentences and specialized jargon or buzzwords, making it difficult for those outside the field to understand. Speakers or writers of officialese or legalese may recognize that it is confusing or even meaningless to outsiders, but view its use as appropriate within their organization or group.
Bafflegab is a synonym, a slang term referring to confusing or a generally unintelligible use of jargon.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12407
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Gnaeus Julius Agricola
Gnaeus Julius Agricola (; 13 June 40 – 23 August 93) was a Roman Italo-Gallic general responsible for much of the Roman conquest of Britain. Written by his son-in-law Tacitus, the "De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae" is the primary source for most of what is known about him, along with detailed archaeological evidence from northern Britain.
Agricola began his military career in Britain, serving under governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus. His subsequent career saw him serve in a variety of positions; he was appointed quaestor in Asia province in 64, then Plebeian Tribune in 66, and praetor in 68. He supported Vespasian during the Year of the Four Emperors (69), and was given a military command in Britain when the latter became emperor. When his command ended in 73, he was made patrician in Rome and appointed governor of Gallia Aquitania. He was made consul and governor of Britannia in 77. While there, he completed the conquest of what is now Wales and northern England, and led his army to the far north of Scotland, establishing forts across much of the Lowlands. He was recalled from Britain in 85 after an unusually lengthy service, and thereafter retired from military and public life.
Agricola was born in the "colonia" of Forum Julii, Gallia Narbonensis (now Fréjus, France). Agricola's parents were from noted political families of senatorial rank in Roman Gaul. Both of his grandfathers served as imperial governors. His father, Lucius Julius Graecinus, was a "praetor" and had become a member of the Roman Senate in the year of his birth. Graecinus had become distinguished by his interest in philosophy. Between August 40 and January 41, the Emperor Caligula ordered his death because he refused to prosecute the Emperor's second cousin Marcus Junius Silanus.
His mother was Julia Procilla. The Roman historian Tacitus describes her as "a lady of singular virtue". Tacitus states that Procilla had a fond affection for her son. Agricola was educated in Massilia (Marseille), and showed what was considered an unhealthy interest in philosophy.
He began his career in Roman public life as a military tribune, serving in Britain under Gaius Suetonius Paulinus from 58 to 62. He was probably attached to the "Legio II Augusta", but was chosen to serve on Suetonius's staff and thus almost certainly participated in the suppression of Boudica's uprising in 61.
Returning from Britain to Rome in 62, he married Domitia Decidiana, a woman of noble birth. Their first child was a son. Agricola was appointed as "quaestor" for 64, which he served in the province of Asia under the corrupt proconsul Lucius Salvius Otho Titianus. While he was there, his daughter, Julia Agricola, was born, but his son died shortly afterwards. He was tribune of the plebs in 66 and "praetor" in June 68, during which time he was ordered by the Governor of Spain Galba to take an inventory of the temple treasures.
During that same, the emperor Nero was declared a public enemy by the Senate and committed suicide, and the period of civil war known as the Year of the Four Emperors began. Galba succeeded Nero, but was murdered in early 69 by Otho, who took the throne. Agricola's mother was murdered on her estate in Liguria by Otho's marauding fleet. Hearing of Vespasian's bid for the empire, Agricola immediately gave him his support. Otho meanwhile committed suicide after being defeated by Vitellius.
After Vespasian had established himself as emperor, Agricola was appointed to the command of the "Legio XX Valeria Victrix", stationed in Britain, in place of Marcus Roscius Coelius, who had stirred up a mutiny against the governor, Marcus Vettius Bolanus. Britain had revolted during the year of civil war, and Bolanus was a mild governor. Agricola reimposed discipline on the legion and helped to consolidate Roman rule. In 71, Bolanus was replaced by a more aggressive governor, Quintus Petillius Cerialis, and Agricola was able to display his talents as a commander in campaigns against the Brigantes in northern England.
When his command ended in 73, Agricola was enrolled as a patrician and appointed to govern Gallia Aquitania. There he stayed for almost three years. In 76 or 77, he was recalled to Rome and appointed suffect consul, and betrothed his daughter to Tacitus. The following year, Tacitus and Julia married; Agricola was appointed to the College of Pontiffs, and returned to Britain for a third time, as its governor ("Legatus Augusti pro praetore").
Arriving in midsummer of 77, Agricola discovered that the Ordovices of north Wales had virtually destroyed the Roman cavalry stationed in their territory. He immediately moved against them and defeated them. He then moved north to the island of Mona (Anglesey), which Suetonius Paulinus had failed to subjugate in 60 because of the outbreak of the Boudican rebellion, and forced its inhabitants to sue for peace. He established a good reputation as an administrator, as well as a commander, by reforming the widely corrupt corn levy. He introduced Romanising measures, encouraging communities to build towns on the Roman model and educating the sons of the native nobility in the Roman manner.
Agricola also expanded Roman rule north into Caledonia (modern Scotland). In the summer of 79, he pushed his armies to the estuary of the river Taus, usually interpreted as the Firth of Tay, virtually unchallenged, and established some forts. Though their location is left unspecified, the close dating of the fort at Elginhaugh in Midlothian makes it a possible candidate.
In 81, Agricola "crossed in the first ship" and defeated peoples unknown to the Romans until then. Tacitus, in Chapter 24 of "Agricola", does not tell us what body of water he crossed, although most scholars believe it was the Clyde or Forth, and some translators even add the name of their preferred river to the text; however, the rest of the chapter exclusively concerns Ireland, so southwest Scotland is perhaps to be preferred. The text of the "Agricola" has been amended here to record the Romans "crossing into trackless wastes", referring to the wilds of the Galloway peninsula. Agricola fortified the coast facing Ireland, and Tacitus recalls that his father-in-law often claimed the island could be conquered with a single legion and auxiliaries. He had given refuge to an exiled Irish king whom he hoped he might use as the excuse for conquest. This conquest never happened, but some historians believe the crossing referred to was in fact a small-scale exploratory or punitive expedition to Ireland, though no Roman camps have been identified to confirm such a suggestion.
Irish legend provides a striking parallel. Tuathal Teachtmhar, a legendary High King, is said to have been exiled from Ireland as a boy, and to have returned from Britain at the head of an army to claim the throne. The traditional date of his return is 76–80, and archaeology has found Roman or Romano-British artefacts in several sites associated with Tuathal.
The following year, Agricola raised a fleet and encircled the tribes beyond the Forth, and the Caledonians rose in great numbers against him. They attacked the camp of the "Legio IX Hispana" at night, but Agricola sent in his cavalry and they were put to flight. The Romans responded by pushing further north. Another son was born to Agricola this year, but died before his first birthday.
In the summer of 83, Agricola faced the massed armies of the Caledonians, led by Calgacus, at the Battle of Mons Graupius. Tacitus estimates their numbers at more than 30,000. Agricola put his auxiliaries in the front line, keeping the legions in reserve, and relied on close-quarters fighting to make the Caledonians' unpointed slashing swords useless as they were unable to swing them properly or utilise thrusting attacks. Even though the Caledonians were put to rout and therefore lost this battle, two thirds of their army managed to escape and hide in the Highlands or the "trackless wilds" as Tacitus calls them. Battle casualties were estimated by Tacitus to be about 10,000 on the Caledonian side and 360 on the Roman side.
A number of authors have reckoned the battle to have occurred in the Grampian Mounth within sight of the North Sea. In particular, Roy, Surenne, Watt, Hogan and others have advanced notions that the site of the battle may have been Kempstone Hill, Megray Hill or other knolls near the Raedykes Roman camp; these points of high ground are proximate to the Elsick Mounth, an ancient trackway used by Romans and Caledonians for military manoeuvres. However, following the discovery of the Roman camp at Durno in 1975, most scholars now believe that the battle took place on the ground around Bennachie in Aberdeenshire.
Satisfied with his victory, Agricola extracted hostages from the Caledonian tribes. He may have marched his army to the northern coast of Britain, as evidenced by the probable discovery of a Roman fort at Cawdor (near Inverness).
He also instructed the prefect of the fleet to sail around the north coast, confirming (allegedly for the first time) that Britain was in fact an island.
Agricola was recalled from Britain in 85, after an unusually long tenure as governor. Tacitus claims Domitian ordered his recall because Agricola's successes outshone the Emperor's own modest victories in Germany. He re-entered Rome unobtrusively, reporting as ordered to the palace at night. The relationship between Agricola and the Emperor is unclear; on the one hand, Agricola was awarded triumphal decorations and a statue (the highest military honours apart from an actual triumph); on the other, Agricola never again held a civil or military post, in spite of his experience and renown. He was offered the governorship of the province of Africa, but declined it, whether due to ill health or (as Tacitus claims) the machinations of Domitian.
In 93, Agricola died on his family estates in Gallia Narbonensis aged fifty-three. Rumours circulated attributing the death to a poison administered by the Emperor Domitian, but no positive evidence for this was ever produced.
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Guanosine
Guanosine is a purine nucleoside comprising guanine attached to a ribose (ribofuranose) ring via a β-N9-glycosidic bond. Guanosine can be phosphorylated to become guanosine monophosphate (GMP), cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP), guanosine diphosphate (GDP), and guanosine triphosphate (GTP). These forms play important roles in various biochemical processes such as synthesis of nucleic acids and proteins, photosynthesis, muscle contraction, and intracellular signal transduction (cGMP). When guanine is attached by its N9 nitrogen to the C1 carbon of a deoxyribose ring it is known as deoxyguanosine.
Guanosine is a white, crystalline powder with no odor and mild saline taste.
It is very soluble in acetic acid, slightly soluble in water, insoluble in ethanol, diethyl ether, benzene and chloroform.
Guanosine is required for an RNA splicing reaction in mRNA, when a "self-splicing" intron removes itself from the mRNA message by cutting at both ends, re-ligating, and leaving just the exons on either side to be translated into protein.
The antiviral drug acyclovir, often used in herpes treatment, and the anti-HIV drug abacavir, are structurally similar to guanosine. Guanosine was also used to make regadenoson.
Guanosine can be found in pancreas, clover, coffee plant, and pollen of pines.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12417
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Gödel's ontological proof
Gödel's ontological proof is a formal argument by the mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) for the existence of God. The argument is in a line of development that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109). St. Anselm's ontological argument, in its most succinct form, is as follows: "God, by definition, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding. If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine Him to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, God must exist." A more elaborate version was given by Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716); this is the version that Gödel studied and attempted to clarify with his ontological argument.
Gödel left a fourteen-point outline of his philosophical beliefs in his papers. Points relevant to the ontological proof include
The first version of the ontological proof in Gödel's papers is dated "around 1941". Gödel is not known to have told anyone about his work on the proof until 1970, when he thought he was dying. In February, he allowed Dana Scott to copy out a version of the proof, which circulated privately. In August 1970, Gödel told Oskar Morgenstern that he was "satisfied" with the proof, but Morgenstern recorded in his diary entry for 29 August 1970, that Gödel would not publish because he was afraid that others might think "that he actually believes in God, whereas he is only engaged in a logical investigation (that is, in showing that such a proof with classical assumptions (completeness, etc.) correspondingly axiomatized, is possible)." Gödel died January 14, 1978. Another version, slightly different from Scott's, was found in his papers. It was finally published, together with Scott's version, in 1987.
Morgenstern's diary is an important and usually reliable source for Gödel's later years, but the implication of the August 1970 diary entry—that Gödel did not believe in God—is not consistent with the other evidence. In letters to his mother, who was not a churchgoer and had raised Kurt and his brother as freethinkers, Gödel argued at length for a belief in an afterlife. He did the same in an interview with a skeptical Hao Wang, who said: "I expressed my doubts as G spoke [...] Gödel smiled as he replied to my questions, obviously aware that his answers were not convincing me." Wang reports that Gödel's wife, Adele, two days after Gödel's death, told Wang that "Gödel, although he did not go to church, was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning." In an unmailed answer to a questionnaire, Gödel described his religion as "baptized Lutheran (but not member of any religious congregation). My belief is "theistic", not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza."
The proof uses modal logic, which distinguishes between "necessary" truths and "contingent" truths. In the most common semantics for modal logic, many "possible worlds" are considered. A truth is "necessary" if it is true in all possible worlds. By contrast, a truth is "contingent" if it just happens to be the case. For instance, "more than half of this planet is covered by water" is a contingent truth, that relies upon which planet "this planet" is. If a statement happens to be true in our world, but is false in another world, then it is a contingent truth. A statement that is true in some world (not necessarily our own) is called a "possible" truth.
Furthermore, the proof uses higher-order (modal) logic because the definition of God employs an explicit quantification over properties.
First, Gödel axiomatizes the notion of a "positive property": for each property "φ", either "φ" or its negation ¬"φ" must be positive, but not both (axiom 2). If a positive property "φ" implies a property "ψ" in each possible world, then "ψ" is positive, too (axiom 1). Gödel then argues that each positive property is "possibly exemplified", i.e. applies at least to some object in some world (theorem 1). Defining an object to be Godlike if it has all positive properties (definition 1), and requiring that property to be positive itself (axiom 3), Gödel shows that in "some" possible world a Godlike object exists (theorem 2), called "God" in the following. Gödel proceeds to prove that a Godlike object exists in "every" possible world.
To this end, he defines "essences": if "x" is an object in some world, then a property "φ" is said to be an essence of "x" if "φ"("x") is true in that world and if "φ" necessarily entails all other properties that "x" has in that world (definition 2). Requiring positive properties being positive in every possible world (axiom 4), Gödel can show that Godlikeness is an essence of a Godlike object (theorem 3). Now, "x" is said to "exist necessarily" if, for every essence "φ" of "x", there is an element "y" with property "φ" in every possible world (definition 3). Axiom 5 requires necessary existence to be a positive property.
Hence, it must follow from Godlikeness. Moreover, Godlikeness is an essence of God, since it entails all positive properties, and any non-positive property is the negation of some positive property, so God cannot have any non-positive properties. Since necessary existence is also a positive property (axiom 5), it must be a property of every Godlike object, as every Godlike object has all the positive properties (definition 1). Since any Godlike object is necessarily existent, it follows that any Godlike object in one world is a Godlike object in all worlds, by the definition of necessary existence. Given the existence of a Godlike object in one world, proven above, we may conclude that there is a Godlike object in every possible world, as required (theorem 4). Besides axiom 1-5 and definition 1-3, a few other axioms from modal logic were tacitly used in the proof.
From these hypotheses, it is also possible to prove that there is only one God in each world by Leibniz's law, the identity of indiscernibles: two or more objects are identical (the same) if they have all their properties in common, and so, there would only be one object in each world that possesses property G. Gödel did not attempt to do so however, as he purposely limited his proof to the issue of existence, rather than uniqueness.
formula_4
Most criticism of Gödel's proof is aimed at its axioms: as with any proof in any logical system, if the axioms the proof depends on are doubted, then the conclusions can be doubted. It is particularly applicable to Gödel's proof – because it rests on five axioms, some of which are questionable. A proof does not necessitate that the conclusion be correct, but rather that by accepting the axioms, the conclusion follows logically.
Many philosophers have called the axioms into question. The first layer of criticism is simply that there are no arguments presented that give reasons why the axioms are true. A second layer is that these particular axioms lead to unwelcome conclusions. This line of thought was argued by Jordan Howard Sobel, showing that if the axioms are accepted, they lead to a "modal collapse" where every statement that is true is necessarily true, i.e. the sets of necessary, of contingent, and of possible truths all coincide (provided there are accessible worlds at all). According to Robert Koons, Sobel suggested that Gödel might have welcomed modal collapse.
There are suggested amendments to the proof, presented by C. Anthony Anderson, but argued to be refutable by Anderson and Michael Gettings. Sobel's proof of modal collapse has been questioned by Koons, but a counter-defence by Sobel has been given.
Gödel's proof has also been questioned by Graham Oppy, asking whether lots of other almost-gods would also be "proven" by Gödel's axioms. This counter-argument has been questioned by Gettings, who agrees that the axioms might be questioned, but disagrees that Oppy's particular counter-example can be shown from Gödel's axioms.
Religious scholar Fr. Robert J. Spitzer accepted Gödel's proof, calling it "an improvement over the Anselmian Ontological Argument (which does not work)."
There are, however, many more criticisms, most focusing on the philosophically interesting question of whether these axioms "must" be rejected to avoid odd conclusions. The broader criticism is that even if the axioms cannot be shown to be false, that does not mean that they are true. Hilbert's famous remark about interchangeability of the primitives' names applies to those in Gödel's ontological axioms ("positive", "god-like", "essence") as well as to those in Hilbert's geometry axioms ("point", "line", "plane"). According to André Fuhrmann (2005) it remains to show that the dazzling notion prescribed by traditions and often believed to be essentially mysterious satisfies Gödel's axioms. This is not a mathematical, but merely a theological task. It is this task which decides which religion's god has been proven to exist.
Christoph Benzmüller and Bruno Woltzenlogel-Paleo formalized Gödel's proof to a level that is suitable for automated theorem proving or at least computer verification via proof assistants. The effort made headlines in German newspapers. According to the authors of this effort, they were inspired by Melvin Fitting's book.
In 2014, they computer-verified Gödel's proof (in the above version).
They also proved that this version's axioms are consistent,
but imply modal collapse, thus confirming Sobel's 1987 argument.
In the same paper, they suspected Gödel's original version of the axioms to be inconsistent, as they failed to prove their consistency.
In 2016, they gave a computer proof that this version implies formula_11, i.e. is inconsistent in every modal logic with a reflexive or symmetric accessibility relation.
Moreover, they gave an argument that this version is inconsistent in every logic at all, but failed to duplicate it by automated provers. In the same paper they suggested that modal collapse is not necessarily a flaw.
A humorous variant of Gödel's ontological proof is mentioned in Quentin Canterel's novel "The Jolly Coroner".
The proof is also mentioned in the TV series "Hand of God".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12420
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Genetic programming
In artificial intelligence, genetic programming (GP) is a technique of evolving programs, starting from a population of unfit (usually random) programs, fit for a particular task by applying operations analogous to natural genetic processes to the population of programs. It is essentially a heuristic search technique often described as 'hill climbing', i.e. searching for an optimal or at least suitable program among the space of all programs.
The operations are: selection of the fittest programs for reproduction (crossover) and mutation according to a predefined fitness measure, usually proficiency at the desired task. The crossover operation involves swapping random parts of selected pairs (parents) to produce new and different offspring that become part of the new generation of programs. Mutation involves substitution of some random part of a program with some other random part of a program. Some programs not selected for reproduction are copied from the current generation to the new generation. Then the selection and other operations are recursively applied to the new generation of programs.
Typically, members of each new generation are on average more fit than the members of the previous generation, and the best-of-generation program is often better than the best-of-generation programs from previous generations. Termination of the recursion is when some individual program reaches a predefined proficiency or fitness level.
It may and often does happen that a particular run of the algorithm results in premature convergence to some local maximum which is not a globally optimal or even good solution. Multiple runs (dozens to hundreds) are usually necessary to produce a very good result. It may also be necessary to increase the starting population size and variability of the individuals to avoid pathologies.
The first record of the proposal to evolve programs is probably that of Alan Turing in 1950. There was a gap of 25 years before the publication of John Holland's 'Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems' laid out the theoretical and empirical foundations of the science. In 1981, Richard Forsyth demonstrated the successful evolution of small programs, represented as trees, to perform classification of crime scene evidence for the UK Home Office.
Although the idea of evolving programs, initially in the computer language Lisp, was current amongst John Holland’s students, it was not until they organised the first Genetic Algorithms conference in Pittsburgh that Nichael Cramer published evolved programs in two specially designed languages, which included the first statement of modern "tree-based" Genetic Programming (that is, procedural languages organized in tree-based structures and operated on by suitably defined GA-operators) . In 1988, John Koza (also a PhD student of John Holland) patented his invention of a GA for program evolution. This was followed by publication in the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence IJCAI-89.
Koza followed this with 205 publications on “Genetic Programming” (GP), name coined by David Goldberg, also a PhD student of John Holland. However, it is the series of 4 books by Koza, starting in 1992 with accompanying videos, that really established GP. Subsequently, there was an enormous expansion of the number of publications with the Genetic Programming Bibliography, surpassing 10,000 entries. In 2010, Koza listed 77 results where Genetic Programming was human competitive.
In 1996, Koza started the annual Genetic Programming conference which was followed in 1998 by the annual EuroGP conference, and the first book in a GP series edited by Koza. 1998 also saw the first GP textbook. GP continued to flourish, leading to the first specialist GP journal and three years later (2003) the annual Genetic Programming Theory and Practice (GPTP) workshop was established by Rick Riolo. Genetic Programming papers continue to be published at a diversity of conferences and associated journals. Today there are nineteen GP books including several for students.
Early work that set the stage for current genetic programming research topics and applications is diverse, and includes software synthesis and repair, predictive modeling, data mining, financial modeling, soft sensors, design, and image processing. Applications in some areas, such as design, often make use of intermediate representations, such as Fred Gruau’s cellular encoding. Industrial uptake has been significant in several areas including finance, the chemical industry, bioinformatics and the steel industry.
GP evolves computer programs, traditionally represented in memory as tree structures. Trees can be easily evaluated in a recursive manner. Every tree node has an operator function and every terminal node has an operand, making mathematical expressions easy to evolve and evaluate. Thus traditionally GP favors the use of programming languages that naturally embody tree structures (for example, Lisp; other functional programming languages are also suitable).
Non-tree representations have been suggested and successfully implemented, such as linear genetic programming which suits the more traditional imperative languages [see, for example, Banzhaf "et al." (1998)]. The commercial GP software "Discipulus" uses automatic induction of binary machine code ("AIM") to achieve better performance. "µGP" uses directed multigraphs to generate programs that fully exploit the syntax of a given assembly language. Other program representations on which significant research and development have been conducted include programs for stack-based virtual machines, and sequences of integers that are mapped to arbitrary programming languages via grammars. Cartesian genetic programming is another form of GP, which uses a graph representation instead of the usual tree based representation to encode computer programs.
Most representations have structurally noneffective code (introns). Such non-coding genes may seem to be useless because they have no effect on the performance of any one individual. However, they alter the probabilities of generating different offspring under the variation operators, and thus alter the individual's variational properties.
Experiments seem to show faster convergence when using program representations that allow such non-coding genes, compared to program representations that do not have any non-coding genes.
Selection is a process whereby certain individuals are selected from the current generation that would serve as parents for the next generation. The individuals are selected probabilistically such that the better performing individuals have a higher chance of getting selected. The most commonly used selection method in GP is tournament selection, although other methods such as fitness proportionate selection, lexicase selection, and others have been demonstrated to perform better for many GP problems.
Elitism, which involves seeding the next generation with the best individual (or best "n" individuals) from the current generation, is a technique sometimes employed to avoid regression.
Various genetic operators (i.e., crossover and mutation) are applied to the individuals selected in the selection step described above to breed new individuals. The rate at which these operators are applied determines the diversity in the population.
Flip one or more bits from the previous offspring to generate new child or generation.
GP has been successfully used as an automatic programming tool, a machine learning tool and an automatic problem-solving engine. GP is especially useful in the domains where the exact form of the
solution is not known in advance or an approximates solution is acceptable (possibly because finding the exact solution is very difficult). Some of the applications of GP are curve fitting, data modeling, symbolic regression, feature selection, classification, etc. John R. Koza mentions 76
instances where Genetic Programming has been able to produce results that are competitive with human-produced results (called Human-competitive results). Since 2004, the annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) holds Human Competitive Awards (called Humies) competition, where cash awards are presented to human-competitive results produced by any form of genetic and evolutionary computation. GP has won many awards in this competition over the years.
Meta-genetic programming is the proposed meta learning technique of evolving a genetic programming system using genetic programming itself. It suggests that chromosomes, crossover, and mutation were themselves evolved, therefore like their real life counterparts should be allowed to change on their own rather than being determined by a human programmer. Meta-GP was formally proposed by Jürgen Schmidhuber in 1987. Doug Lenat's Eurisko is an earlier effort that may be the same technique. It is a recursive but terminating algorithm, allowing it to avoid infinite recursion. In the "autoconstructive evolution" approach to meta-genetic programming, the methods for the production and variation of offspring are encoded within the evolving programs themselves, and programs are executed to produce new programs to be added to the population.
Critics of this idea often say this approach is overly broad in scope. However, it might be possible to constrain the fitness criterion onto a general class of results, and so obtain an evolved GP that would more efficiently produce results for sub-classes. This might take the form of a meta evolved GP for producing human walking algorithms which is then used to evolve human running, jumping, etc. The fitness criterion applied to the meta GP would simply be one of efficiency.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12424
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Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other objet d'art. Klimt's primary subject was the female body, and his works are marked by a frank eroticism. In addition to his figurative works, which include allegories and portraits, he painted landscapes. Among the artists of the Vienna Secession, Klimt was the most influenced by Japanese art and its methods.
Early in his artistic career, he was a successful painter of architectural decorations in a conventional manner. As he began to develop a more personal style, his work was the subject of controversy that culminated when the paintings he completed around 1900 for the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna were criticized as pornographic. He subsequently accepted no more public commissions, but achieved a new success with the paintings of his "golden phase", many of which include gold leaf. Klimt's work was an important influence on his younger peer Egon Schiele.
Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna in Austria-Hungary, the second of seven children—three boys and four girls. His mother, Anna Klimt ("née" Finster), had an unrealized ambition to be a musical performer. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, formerly from Bohemia, was a gold engraver. All three of their sons displayed artistic talent early on. Klimt's younger brothers were Ernst Klimt and Georg Klimt.
Klimt lived in poverty while attending the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, a school of applied arts and crafts, now the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he studied architectural painting from 1876 until 1883. He revered Vienna's foremost history painter of the time, Hans Makart. Klimt readily accepted the principles of a conservative training; his early work may be classified as academic. In 1877 his brother, Ernst, who, like his father, would become an engraver, also enrolled in the school. The two brothers and their friend, Franz Matsch, began working together and by 1880 they had received numerous commissions as a team that they called the "Company of Artists". They also helped their teacher in painting murals in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Klimt began his professional career painting interior murals and ceilings in large public buildings on the Ringstraße, including a successful series of "Allegories and Emblems".
In 1888 Klimt received the Golden Order of Merit from Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria for his contributions to murals painted in the Burgtheater in Vienna. He also became an honorary member of the University of Munich and the University of Vienna. In 1892 Klimt's father and brother Ernst both died, and he had to assume financial responsibility for his father's and brother's families. The tragedies also affected his artistic vision and soon he would move towards a new personal style.
Characteristic of his style at the end of the 19th century is the inclusion of "Nuda Veritas" ("naked truth") as a symbolic figure in some of his works, including "Ancient Greece and Egypt" (1891), "Pallas Athene" (1898) and "Nuda Veritas" (1899). Historians believe that Klimt with the "nuda veritas" denounced both the policy of the Habsburgs and Austrian society, which ignored all political and social problems of that time.
In the early 1890s Klimt met Austrian fashion designer Emilie Louise Flöge (a sibling of his sister-in-law) who was to be his companion until the end of his life. His painting, "The Kiss" (1907–08), is thought to be an image of them as lovers. He designed many costumes that she produced and modeled in his works.
During this period Klimt fathered at least fourteen children.
Klimt became one of the founding members and president of the "Wiener Sezession" (Vienna Secession) in 1897 and of the group's periodical, "Ver Sacrum" ("Sacred Spring"). He remained with the Secession until 1908. The goals of the group were to provide exhibitions for unconventional young artists, to bring the works of the best foreign artists to Vienna, and to publish its own magazine to showcase the work of members. The group declared no manifesto and did not set out to encourage any particular style—Naturalists, Realists, and Symbolists all coexisted. The government supported their efforts and gave them a lease on public land to erect an exhibition hall. The group's symbol was Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of just causes, wisdom, and the arts—of whom Klimt painted his radical version in 1898.
In 1894, Klimt was commissioned to create three paintings to decorate the ceiling of the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. Not completed until the turn of the century, his three paintings, "Philosophy", "Medicine", and "Jurisprudence" were criticized for their radical themes and material, and were called "pornographic". Klimt had transformed traditional allegory and symbolism into a new language that was more overtly sexual and hence more disturbing to some. The public outcry came from all quarters—political, aesthetic and religious. As a result, the paintings "(seen in gallery below)" were not displayed on the ceiling of the Great Hall. This would be the last public commission accepted by the artist.
All three paintings were destroyed when retreating German forces burned Schloss Immendorf in May 1945.
His "Nuda Veritas" (1899) defined his bid to further "shake up" the establishment. The starkly naked red-headed woman holds the mirror of truth, while above her is a quotation by Friedrich Schiller in stylized lettering: "If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please only a few. To please many is bad."
In 1902, Klimt finished the "Beethoven Frieze" for the Fourteenth Vienna Secessionist exhibition, which was intended to be a celebration of the composer and featured a monumental polychrome sculpture by Max Klinger. Intended for the exhibition only, the frieze was painted directly on the walls with light materials. After the exhibition the painting was preserved, although it was not displayed again until 1986. The face on the Beethoven portrait resembled the composer and Vienna Court Opera director Gustav Mahler.
During this period Klimt did not confine himself to public commissions. Beginning in the late 1890s he took annual summer holidays with the Flöge family on the shores of Attersee and painted many of his landscapes there. These landscapes constitute the only genre aside from figure painting that seriously interested Klimt. In recognition of his intensity, the locals called him Waldschrat ("forest demon").
Klimt's Attersee paintings are of sufficient number and quality as to merit separate appreciation. Formally, the landscapes are characterized by the same refinement of design and emphatic patterning as the figural pieces. Deep space in the Attersee works is flattened so efficiently to a single plane that it is believed that Klimt painted them by using a telescope.
Klimt's 'Golden Phase' was marked by positive critical reaction and financial success. Many of his paintings from this period included gold leaf. Klimt had previously used gold in his "Pallas Athene" (1898) and "Judith I" (1901), although the works most popularly associated with this period are the "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I" (1907) and "The Kiss" (1907–08).
Klimt traveled little, but trips to Venice and Ravenna, both famous for their beautiful mosaics, most likely inspired his gold technique and his Byzantine imagery. In 1904, he collaborated with other artists on the lavish Palais Stoclet, the home of a wealthy Belgian industrialist that was one of the grandest monuments of the Art Nouveau age. Klimt's contributions to the dining room, including both "Fulfillment" and "Expectation", were some of his finest decorative works, and as he publicly stated, "probably the ultimate stage of my development of ornament."
1905, Klimt painted "The Three Ages of Woman", depicting the cycle of life. He created a painted portrait of Margarete Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein's sister, on the occasion of her marriage. Then, between 1907 and 1909, Klimt painted five canvases of society women wrapped in fur. His apparent love of costume is expressed in the many photographs of Flöge modeling clothing he had designed.
As he worked and relaxed in his home, Klimt normally wore sandals and a long robe with no undergarments. His simple life was somewhat cloistered, devoted to his art, family, and little else except the Secessionist Movement. He avoided café society and seldom socialized with other artists. Klimt's fame usually brought patrons to his door and he could afford to be highly selective. His painting method was very deliberate and painstaking at times and he required lengthy sittings by his subjects. Although very active sexually, he kept his affairs discreet and he avoided personal scandal.
Klimt wrote little about his vision or his methods. He wrote mostly postcards to Flöge and kept no diary. In a rare writing called "Commentary on a non-existent self-portrait", he states "I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women... There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night ... Whoever wants to know something about me ... ought to look carefully at my pictures."
In 1901 Hermann Bahr wrote, in his "Speech on Klimt": "Just as only a lover can reveal to a man what life means to him and develop its innermost significance, I feel the same about these paintings."
In 1911 his painting "Death and Life" received first prize in the world exhibitions in Rome. In 1915 Anna, his mother, died. Klimt died three years later in Vienna on February 6, 1918, having suffered a stroke and pneumonia due to the worldwide influenza epidemic of that year. He was buried at the Hietzinger Cemetery in Hietzing, Vienna. Numerous paintings by him were left unfinished.
Klimt's paintings have brought some of the highest prices recorded for individual works of art. In November 2003, Klimt's "Landhaus am Attersee" sold for $29,128,000, but that sale was soon eclipsed by prices paid for Willem de Kooning's "Woman III" and later Klimt's own "Adele Bloch-Bauer II", the latter of which sold for $150 million in 2016. More frequently than paintings, however, the artist's works on paper can be found on the art market. The art market database Artprice lists 67 auction entries for paintings, but 1564 for drawings and watercolors. The most expensive drawing sold so far was "Reclining Female Nude Facing Left", which was made between 1914 and 1915 and sold in London in 2008 for . However, the majority of the art trade traditionally takes place privately through galleries such as Wienerroither & Kohlbacher, which specialize in the trade with original works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele and regularly present these at monographic exhibitions and international art fairs.
In 2006, the 1907 portrait, "Adele Bloch-Bauer I", was purchased for the Neue Galerie New York by Ronald Lauder reportedly for US$135 million, surpassing Picasso's 1905 "Boy With a Pipe" (sold May 5, 2004 for $104 million), as the highest reported price ever paid for a painting up to that point.
On August 7, 2006, Christie's auction house announced it was handling the sale of the remaining four works by Klimt that were recovered by Maria Altmann and her co-heirs after their long legal battle against Austria (see "Republic of Austria v. Altmann"). Altmann's fight to regain her family's paintings has been the subject of a number of documentary films, including "Adele's Wish". Her struggle also became the subject of the dramatic film the "Woman in Gold", a movie inspired by "Stealing Klimt", the documentary featuring Maria Altmann herself. The portrait of "Adele Bloch-Bauer II" was sold at auction in November 2006 for $88 million, the third-highest priced piece of art at auction at the time. "The Apple Tree I" (c. 1912) sold for $33 million, "Birch Forest" (1903) sold for $40.3 million, and "Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter" (1916) sold for $31 million. Collectively, the five restituted paintings netted more than $327 million.
The painting "Litzlberg am Attersee" was auctioned for $40.4 million November 2011.
The city of Vienna, Austria had many special exhibitions commemorating the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth in 2012.
The only folio set produced in Klimt's lifetime, "Das Werk Gustav Klimts", was published initially by H. O. Miethke (of Gallerie Miethke, Klimt's exclusive gallery in Vienna) from 1908 to 1914 in an edition of 300, supervised personally by the artist. The first thirty-five editions (I-XXXV) each included an original drawing by Klimt, and the next thirty-five editions (XXXVI-LXX) each with a facsimile signature on the title page. Fifty images depicting Klimt's most important paintings (1893–1913) were reproduced using collotype lithography and mounted on a heavy, cream-colored wove paper with deckled edges. Thirty-one of the images (ten of which are multicolored) are printed on "Chine-collé". The remaining nineteen are high quality halftones prints. Each piece was marked with a unique signet—designed by Klimt—which was impressed into the wove paper in gold metallic ink. The prints were issued in groups of ten to subscribers, in unbound black paper folders embossed with Klimt's name. Because of the delicate nature of collotype lithography, as well as the necessity for multicolored prints (a feat difficult to reproduce with collotypes), and Klimt's own desire for perfection, the series that was published in mid-1908 was not completed until 1914.
Each of the fifty prints was categorized among five themes:
The monochrome collotypes as well as the halftone works were printed with a variety of colored inks ranging from sepia to blue and green. Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria was the first to purchase a folio set of "Das Werk Gustav Klimts" in 1908.
"Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen" ("Twenty-five Drawings") was released the year after Klimt's death. Many of the drawings in the collection were erotic in nature and just as polarizing as his painted works. Published in Vienna in 1919 by Gilhofer & Ranschburg, the edition of 500 features twenty-five monochrome and two-color collotype reproductions, nearly indistinguishable from the original works. While the set was released a year after Klimt's death, some art historians suspect he was involved with production planning due to the meticulous nature of the printing (Klimt had overseen the production of the plates for "Das Werk Gustav Klimts", making sure each one was to his exact specifications, a level of quality carried through similarly in "Fünfundzwanzig Handzeichnungen"). The first ten editions also each contained an original Klimt drawing.
Many of the works contained in this volume depict erotic scenes of nude women, some of whom are masturbating alone or are coupled in sapphic embraces. When a number of the original drawings were exhibited to the public, at Gallerie Miethke in 1910 and the International Exhibition of Prints and Drawings in Vienna in 1913, they were met by critics and viewers who were hostile towards Klimt's contemporary perspective. There was an audience for Klimt's erotic drawings, however, and fifteen of his drawings were selected by Viennese poet Franz Blei for his translation of Hellenistic satirist Lucian's "Dialogues of the Courteseans". The book, limited to 450 copies, provided Klimt the opportunity to show these more lurid depictions of women and avoided censorship thanks to an audience composed of a small group of (mostly male) affluent patrons.
Composed in 1931 by editor Max Eisler and printed by the Austrian State Printing Office, "Gustav Klimt An Aftermath" was intended to complete the lifetime folio "Das Werk Gustav Klimts". The folio contains thirty colored collotypes (fourteen of which are multicolored) and follows a similar format found in "Das Werk Gustav Klimts", replacing the unique Klimt-designed signets with gold-debossed plate numbers. One hundred and fifty sets were produced in English, with twenty of them (Nos. I–XX) presented as a "gala edition" bound in gilt leather. The set contains detailed images from previously released works (Hygeia from the University Mural "Medicine", 1901; a section of the third University Mural "Jurisprudence", 1903), as well as the unfinished paintings ("Adam and Eve", "Bridal Progress").
In 1963, the Albertina museum in Vienna began researching the drawings of Gustav Klimt. The research project "Gustav Klimt. Die Zeichnungen", has since been associated with intensive exhibition and publication activities.
Between 1980 and 1984 Alice Strobl published the three-volume catalogue raisonné, which records and describes all drawings by Gustav Klimt known at the time in chronological order. An additional supplementary volume was published in 1989. In the following year Alice Strobl transferred her work to the art historian and curator Marian Bisanz-Prakken, who had assisted her since 1975 in the determination and classification of the works and who continues the research project to this day. Since 1990, Marian Bisanz-Prakken has redefined, documented, and scientifically processed around 400 further drawings.
This makes the Albertina Vienna the only institution in the world that has been examining and scientifically classifying the artist's works for half a century. The research project now includes information on over 4300 works by Gustav Klimt.
According to the writer Frank Whitford: "Klimt of course, is an important artist—he's a very "popular" artist—but in terms of the history of art, he's a very unimportant artist. Although he sums up so much in his work, about the society in which he found himself—in art historical terms his effect was negligible. So he's an artist really in a cul-de-sac." Klimt's work had a strong influence on the paintings of Egon Schiele, with whom he would collaborate to found the "Kunsthalle" (Hall of Art) in 1917, to try to keep local artists from going abroad. Artists who reinterpreted Klimt's work include Slovak artist Rudolf Fila.
Several of Klimt's most famous works from his golden period inspired the title sequence for the animated adaptation of the manga series, "Elfen Lied", in which the art is recreated to fit with the series' own characters and is arranged as a montage with the song "Lilium". The opening to the anime "Sound of the Sky" also is largely inspired by Klimt's works, which was also directed by the same director as "Elfen Lied". The design of the land of Centopia on the TV series "Mia and Me" is inspired by Klimt's works. The art of the video game "Transistor" also uses patterns and embellishments inspired by Klimt.
Couturier John Galliano found inspiration for the Christian Dior Spring-Summer 2008 haute couture collection in Klimt's work.
Gustav Klimt and his work have been the subjects of many collector coins and medals, such as the 100 Euro Painting Gold Coin, issued on November 5, 2003, by the Austrian Mint. The obverse depicts Klimt in his studio with two unfinished paintings on easels.
In addition to the permanent exhibitions on display, the city of Vienna, Austria celebrated the 150th anniversary of the birth of Klimt with special exhibitions throughout the city. Guided walking tours through the city allowed people to see some of the buildings where Klimt worked.
Google commemorated Gustav Klimt with a Google doodle celebrating Klimt's painting "The Kiss" on his 150th birthday, 14 July 2012.
In 2012, the Austrian Mint began a five-coin gold series to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth. The first 50 Euro gold coin was issued on January 25, 2012 and featured a portrait of Klimt on the obverse and a portion of his painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Klimt was also mentioned in season 3 episode 5 of the Netflix original series Bojack Horseman.
In 2013, the Gustav Klimt Foundation was set up by Ursula Ucicky, widow of Klimt's illegitimate son Gustav Ucicky, with a mission to "preserve and disseminate Gustav Klimt's legacy." The managing director of the Leopold Museum, Peter Weinhäupl, was appointed as Chairman of the foundation. As a reaction, the museum's director Tobias G. Natter resigned in protest, citing Ucicky's past as a Nazi propaganda film-maker.
The paintings were sold by auction house Christie's for $325 million in 2006.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12425
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Groucho Marx
Julius Henry "Groucho" Marx (; October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977) was an American comedian, actor, writer, stage, film, radio, and television star. He is generally considered to be a master of quick wit and one of America's greatest comedians.
He made 13 feature films as a team with his siblings the Marx Brothers, of whom he was the third-born. He also had a successful solo career, primarily on radio and television, most notably as the host of the game show "You Bet Your Life".
His distinctive appearance, carried over from his days in vaudeville, included quirks such as an exaggerated stooped posture, spectacles, cigar, a thick greasepaint mustache, and eyebrows. These exaggerated features resulted in the creation of one of the most recognizable and ubiquitous novelty disguises, known as Groucho glasses: a one-piece mask consisting of horn-rimmed glasses, a large plastic nose, bushy eyebrows and mustache.
Julius Henry Marx was born on October 2, 1890, in Manhattan, New York. Marx stated that he was born in a room above a butcher's shop on East 78th Street, "Between Lexington & 3rd", as he told Dick Cavett in a 1969 television interview. The Marx children grew up in a turn-of-the-century building on East 93rd Street off Lexington Avenue in a neighborhood now known as Carnegie Hill on the Upper East Side of the borough of Manhattan. His brother Harpo, in his memoir "Harpo Speaks", called the building "the first real home they ever knew". It was populated with European immigrants, mostly artisans. Just across the street were the oldest brownstones in the area, owned by people such as the well-connected Loew Brothers and William Orth. The Marx family lived there "for about 14 years," Groucho also told Cavett.
Marx's family was Jewish. His mother was Miene "Minnie" Schoenberg, whose family came from Dornum in northern Germany when she was 16 years old. His father was Simon "Sam" Marx, who changed his name from Marrix, and was called "Frenchie" by his sons throughout his life, because he and his family came from Alsace in France. Minnie's brother was Al Schoenberg, who shortened his name to Al Shean when he went into show business as half of Gallagher and Shean, a noted vaudeville act of the early 20th century. According to Marx, when Shean visited, he would throw the local waifs a few coins so that when he knocked at the door he would be surrounded by adoring fans. Marx and his brothers respected his opinions and asked him on several occasions to write some material for them.
Minnie Marx did not have an entertainment industry career but had intense ambition for her sons to go on the stage like their uncle. While pushing her eldest son Leonard (Chico Marx) in piano lessons, she found that Julius had a pleasant soprano voice and the ability to remain on key. Julius's early career goal was to become a doctor, but the family's need for income forced him out of school at the age of twelve. By that time, young Julius had become a voracious reader, particularly fond of Horatio Alger. Marx would continue to overcome his lack of formal education by becoming well-read.
After a few stabs at entry-level office work and jobs suitable for adolescents, Julius took to the stage as a boy singer with the Gene Leroy Trio, debuting at the Ramona Theatre in Grand Rapids, MI, on July 16, 1905. Marx reputedly claimed that he was "hopelessly average" as a vaudevillian, but this was typical Marx, wisecracking in his true form. By 1909, Minnie Marx had assembled her sons into an undistinguished vaudeville singing group billed as "The Four Nightingales". The brothers Julius, Milton (Gummo Marx) and Arthur (originally Adolph, but Harpo Marx from 1911) and another boy singer, Lou Levy, traveled the U.S. vaudeville circuits to little fanfare. After exhausting their prospects in the East, the family moved to La Grange, Illinois, to play the Midwest.
After a particularly dispiriting performance in Nacogdoches, Texas, Julius, Milton, and Arthur began cracking jokes onstage for their own amusement. Much to their surprise, the audience liked them better as comedians than as singers. They modified the then-popular Gus Edwards comedy skit "School Days" and renamed it "Fun In Hi Skule". The Marx Brothers would perform variations on this routine for the next seven years.
For a time in vaudeville, all the brothers performed using ethnic accents. Leonard, the oldest, developed the Italian accent he used as Chico Marx to convince some roving bullies that he was Italian, not Jewish. Arthur, the next oldest, donned a curly red wig and became "Patsy Brannigan", a stereotypical Irish character. His discomfort when speaking on stage led to his uncle Al Shean's suggestion that he stop speaking altogether and play the role in mime. Julius Marx's character from "Fun In Hi Skule" was an ethnic German, so Julius played him with a German accent. After the sinking of the in 1915, public anti-German sentiment was widespread, and Marx's German character was booed, so he quickly dropped the accent and developed the fast-talking wise-guy character that became his trademark.
The Marx Brothers became the biggest comedic stars of the Palace Theatre in New York, which billed itself as the "Valhalla of Vaudeville". Brother Chico's deal-making skills resulted in three hit plays on Broadway. No other comedy routine had ever so infected the Broadway circuit. All of this stage work predated their Hollywood career. By the time the Marxes made their first movie, they were already major stars with sharply honed skills; and by the time Groucho was relaunched to stardom on "You Bet Your Life", he had been performing successfully for half a century.
Marx started his career in vaudeville in 1905 when he joined up with an act called The Leroy Trio. He was asked by a man named Robin Leroy to join the group as a singer, along with fellow vaudeville actor Johnny Morris. Through this act, Marx got his first taste of life as a vaudeville performer. In 1909, Marx and his brothers had become a group act, at first called The Three Nightingales and later The Four Nightingales. The brothers' mother, Minnie Marx, was the group's manager, putting them together and booking their shows. The group had a rocky start, performing in less than adequate venues and rarely, if ever, being paid for their performances. Eventually one of the brothers would leave to serve in World War I and was replaced by Herbert (Zeppo), and the group became known as the Marx Brothers. Their first successful show was "Fun In Hi Skule" (1910).
Marx made 26 movies, 13 of them with his brothers Chico and Harpo. Marx developed a routine as a wisecracking hustler with a distinctive chicken-walking lope, an exaggerated greasepaint mustache and eyebrows, and an ever-present cigar, improvising insults to stuffy dowagers (usually played by Margaret Dumont) and anyone else who stood in his way. As the Marx Brothers, he and his brothers starred in a series of popular stage shows and movies.
Their first movie was a silent film made in 1921 that was never released, and is believed to have been destroyed at the time. A decade later, the team made two of their Broadway hits—"The Cocoanuts" and "Animal Crackers"—into movies. Other successful films were "Monkey Business", "Horse Feathers", "Duck Soup", and "A Night at the Opera". One quip from Marx concerned his response to Sam Wood, the director of "A Night at the Opera". Furious with the Marx Brothers' ad-libs and antics on the set, Wood yelled in disgust: "You can't make an actor out of clay." Marx responded, "Nor a director out of Wood."
Marx also worked as a radio comedian and show host. One of his earliest stints was a short-lived series in 1932, "Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel," costarring Chico. Though most of the scripts and discs were thought to have been destroyed, all but one of the scripts were found in 1988 in the Library of Congress.
In 1947, Marx was asked to host a radio quiz program "You Bet Your Life." It was broadcast by ABC and then CBS before moving to NBC. It moved from radio to television on October 5, 1950, and ran for eleven years. Filmed before an audience, the show consisted of Marx bantering with the contestants and ad-libbing jokes before briefly quizzing them. The show was responsible for popularizing the phrases "Say the secret word and the duck will come down and give you fifty dollars," "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?" and "What color is the White House?" (asked to reward a losing contestant a consolation prize).
Throughout his career, Marx introduced a number of memorable songs in films, including "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" and "Hello, I Must Be Going", in "Animal Crackers", "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It", "Everyone Says I Love You" and "Lydia the Tattooed Lady". Frank Sinatra, who once quipped that the only thing he could do better than Marx was sing, made a film with Marx and Jane Russell in 1951 entitled "Double Dynamite".
In public and off-camera, Harpo and Chico were hard to recognize, without their wigs and costumes, and it was almost impossible for fans to recognize Groucho without his trademark eyeglasses, fake eyebrows, and mustache.
The greasepaint mustache and eyebrows originated spontaneously prior to a vaudeville performance in the early 1920s when he did not have time to apply the pasted-on mustache he had been using (or, according to his autobiography, simply did not enjoy the removal of the mustache because of the effects of tearing an adhesive bandage off the same patch of skin every night). After applying the greasepaint mustache, a quick glance in the mirror revealed his natural hair eyebrows were too undertoned and did not match the rest of his face, so Marx added the greasepaint to his eyebrows and headed for the stage. The absurdity of the greasepaint was never discussed on-screen, but in a famous scene in "Duck Soup," where both Chicolini (Chico) and Pinky (Harpo) disguise themselves as Groucho, they are briefly seen applying the greasepaint, implicitly answering any question a viewer might have had about where he got his mustache and eyebrows.
Marx was asked to apply the greasepaint mustache once more for "You Bet Your Life" when it came to television, but he refused, opting instead to grow a real one, which he wore for the rest of his life. By this time, his eyesight had weakened enough for him to actually need corrective lenses; before then, his eyeglasses had merely been a stage prop. He debuted this new, and now much-older, appearance in "Love Happy," the Marx Brothers's last film as a comedy team.
He did paint the old character mustache over his real one on a few rare occasions, including a TV sketch with Jackie Gleason on the latter's variety show in the 1960s (in which they performed a variation on the song "Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean," co-written by Marx's uncle Al Shean) and the 1968 Otto Preminger film "Skidoo". In his late 70s at the time, Marx remarked on his appearance: "I looked like I was embalmed." He played a mob boss called "God" and, according to Marx, "both my performance and the film were God-awful!"
The exaggerated walk, with one hand on the small of his back and his torso bent almost 90 degrees at the waist was a parody of a fad from the 1880s and 1890s. Fashionable young men of the upper classes would affect a walk with their right hand held fast to the base of their spines, and with a slight lean forward at the waist and a very slight twist toward the right with the left shoulder, allowing the left hand to swing free with the gait. Edmund Morris, in his biography "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt", describes a young Roosevelt, newly elected to the State Assembly, walking into the House Chamber for the first time in this trendy, affected gait, somewhat to the amusement of the older and more rural members. Marx exaggerated this fad to a marked degree, and the comedy effect was enhanced by how out of date the fashion was by the 1940s and 1950s.
Marx's three marriages ended in divorce. His first wife was chorus girl Ruth Johnson (m. 1920-42). He was 29 and she was 19 at the time of their wedding. The couple had two children, Arthur Marx and Miriam Marx. His second wife was Kay Marvis (m. 1945–51), Catherine Dittig, former wife of Leo Gorcey. Marx was 54 and Kay was 21 at the time of their marriage. They had a daughter, Melinda Marx. His third wife was actress Eden Hartford (m. 1954-69). He was 64 and she was 24 at the time of their wedding.
During the early 1950s, Marx described his perfect woman: "Someone who looks like Marilyn Monroe and talks like George S. Kaufman."
Marx was denied membership in an informal symphonietta of friends (including Harpo) organized by Ben Hecht, because he could play only the mandolin. When the group began its first rehearsal at Hecht's home, Marx rushed in and demanded silence from the "lousy amateurs". The musicians discovered him conducting the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the overture to "Tannhäuser" in Hecht's living room. Marx was allowed to join the symphonietta.
Later in life, Marx would sometimes note to talk show hosts, not entirely jokingly, that he was unable to actually insult anyone, because the target of his comment would assume that it was a Groucho-esque joke, and would laugh.
Despite his lack of formal education, he wrote many books, including his autobiography, "Groucho and Me" (1959) and "Memoirs of a Mangy Lover" (1963). He was a friend of such literary figures as Booth Tarkington, T. S. Eliot and Carl Sandburg. Much of his personal correspondence with those and other figures is featured in the book "The Groucho Letters" (1967) with an introduction and commentary on the letters written by Marx, who donated his letters to the Library of Congress. His daughter Miriam published a collection of his letters to her in 1992 titled "Love, Groucho."
Marx made serious efforts to learn to play the guitar. In the 1932 film "Horse Feathers", he performs the film's love theme "Everyone Says I Love You" for costar Thelma Todd on a Gibson L-5.
In July 1937, an America vs England pro-celebrity tennis doubles match was organized, featuring Marx and Ellsworth Vines playing against Charlie Chaplin and Fred Perry, to open the new clubhouse at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. Marx appeared on court with 12 rackets and a suitcase, leaving Chaplin – who took tennis seriously – bemused, before he asked what was in it. Marx asked Chaplin what was in his, with Chaplin responding he didn't have one. Marx replied, "What kind of tennis player are you?" After playing only a few games, Marx sat on the court and unpacked an elaborate picnic lunch from his suitcase.
Irving Berlin quipped, "The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl". In his book "The Groucho Phile", Marx says "I've been a liberal Democrat all my life", and "I frankly find Democrats a better, more sympathetic crowd... I'll continue to believe that Democrats have a greater regard for the common man than Republicans do". However, just like some of the other Democrats of the time, Marx also said in a television interview that he disliked the women's liberation movement. On the July 7, 1967, "Firing Line" TV show, Marx said, "The whole political left is the Garden of Eden of incompetence."
Marx's radio career was not as successful as his work on stage and in film, though historians such as Gerald Nachman and Michael Barson suggest that, in the case of the single-season "Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel" (1932), the failure may have been a combination of a poor time slot and the Marx Brothers' returning to Hollywood to make another film.
In the mid-1940s, during a depressing lull in his career (his radio show "Blue Ribbon Town" had failed, he failed to sell his proposed sitcom "The Flotsam Family" only to see it become a huge hit as "The Life of Riley" with William Bendix in the title role, and the Marx Brothers as film performers were well past their prime), Marx was scheduled to appear on a radio show with Bob Hope. Annoyed that he was made to wait in the green room for 40 minutes, he went on the air in a foul mood.
Hope started by saying "Why, Groucho Marx! Groucho, what are you doing out here in the desert?" Marx retorted, "Huh, desert, I've been sitting in the dressing room for forty minutes! Some desert alright..." Marx continued to ignore the script, ad-libbing at length and took it well beyond its allotted time slot.
Listening in on the show was producer John Guedel, who had a brainstorm. He approached Marx about doing a quiz show, to which Marx derisively retorted, "A quiz show? Only actors who are completely washed up resort to a quiz show!" Undeterred, Guedel proposed that the quiz would be only a backdrop for Marx's interviews of people, and the storm of ad-libbing that they would elicit. Marx replied, "Well, I've had no success in radio, and I can't hold on to a sponsor. At this point, I'll try anything!"
"You Bet Your Life" debuted in October 1947 on ABC radio (which aired it from 1947 to 1949), sponsored by costume jewelry manufacturer Allen Gellman; and then on CBS (1949–50), and finally NBC. The show was on radio only from 1947 to 1950; on both radio and television from 1950 to 1960; and on television only, from 1960 to 1961. The show proved a huge hit, being one of the most popular on television by the mid-1950s. With George Fenneman as his announcer and straight man, Marx entertained his audiences with improvised conversation with his guests. Since "You Bet Your Life" was mostly ad-libbed and unscripted—although writers did pre-interview the guests and feed Marx ready-made lines in advance—the producers insisted that the network prerecord it instead of it being broadcast live. There were two reasons for this: prerecording provided Marx with time to fish around for funny exchanges and any intervening dead spots to be edited out; and secondly to protect the network, since Marx was a notorious loose cannon and known to say almost anything. The television show ran for 11 seasons until it was canceled in 1961. Automobile "marque" DeSoto was a longtime major sponsor. For the DeSoto ads, Marx would sometimes say: "Tell 'em Groucho sent you", or "Try a DeSoto before you decide".
The program's theme music was an instrumental version of "Hooray for Captain Spaulding", which became increasingly identified as Marx's personal theme song. A recording of the song with Marx and the Ken Lane singers with an orchestra directed by Victor Young was released in 1952. Another recording made by Marx during this period was "The Funniest Song in the World", released on the Young People's Records label in 1949. It was a series of five original children's songs with a connecting narrative about a monkey and his fellow zoo creatures.
An apocryphal story relates Marx interviewing Charlotte Story, who had borne 20 children. When Marx asked why she had chosen to raise such a large family, Mrs. Story is said to have replied, "I love my husband"; to which Marx responded, "I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while." The remark was judged too risqué to be aired, according to the anecdote, and was edited out before broadcast. Charlotte Story and her husband Marion, indeed parents of 20 children, were real people who appeared on the program in 1950. Audio recordings of the interview exist, and a reference to cigars is made ("With each new kid, do you go around passing out cigars?"), but there is no evidence of the claimed remark. Marx and Fenneman both denied that the incident took place. "I get credit all the time for things I never said," Marx told Roger Ebert in 1972. "You know that line in "You Bet Your Life"? The guy says he has seventeen kids and I say, 'I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally'? I never said that." Marx's 1976 memoir recounts the episode as fact, but co-writer Hector Arce relied mostly on sources other than Marx himself—who was by then in his mid eighties, in ill health and mentally compromised—and was probably unaware that Marx had specifically denied making the observation.
Another anecdote that may or may not be apocryphal recounts how Warner Brothers threatened to sue Groucho when they learned that the next Marx Brothers film was to be called "A Night in Casablanca", contending that that title was too similar to their own film Casablanca. Groucho is reported to have replied: "I'll sue you for using the word Brothers."
By the time "You Bet Your Life" debuted on TV on October 5, 1950, Marx had grown a real mustache (which he had already sported earlier in the films "Copacabana" and "Love Happy").
During a tour of Germany in 1958, accompanied by then-wife Eden, daughter Melinda, Robert Dwan and Dwan's daughter Judith, he climbed a pile of rubble that marked the site of Adolf Hitler's bunker, the site of Hitler's death, and performed a two-minute Charleston. He later remarked to Richard J. Anobile in "The Marx Brothers Scrapbook," "Not much satisfaction after he killed six million Jews!"
In 1960, Marx, a lifelong devotee of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, appeared as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, in a televised production of "The Mikado" on NBC's "Bell Telephone Hour". A clip of this is in rotation on Classic Arts Showcase.
Another TV show, "Tell It To Groucho", premiered January 11, 1962, on CBS, but only lasted five months. On October 1, 1962, Marx, after acting as occasional guest host of "The Tonight Show" during the six-month interval between Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, introduced Carson as the new host.
In 1964, Marx starred in the "Time for Elizabeth" episode of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre", a truncated version of a play that he and Norman Krasna wrote in 1948.
In 1965, Marx starred in a weekly show for British TV titled "Groucho", broadcast on ITV. The program was along similar lines to "You Bet Your Life", with Keith Fordyce taking on the Fenneman role. However, it was poorly received and lasted only 11 weeks.
Marx appeared as a gangster named God in the movie "Skidoo" (1968), directed by Otto Preminger, and costarring Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing. It was released by the studio where the Marx Brothers began their film career, Paramount Pictures. The film received almost universally negative reviews. As a side note, writer Paul Krassner published a story in the February 1981 issue of "High Times", relating how Marx prepared for the LSD-themed movie by taking a dose of the drug in Krassner's company, and had a moving, largely pleasant experience.
Marx developed friendships with rock star Alice Cooper—the two were photographed together for "Rolling Stone" magazine—and television host Dick Cavett, becoming a frequent guest on Cavett's late-night talk show, even appearing in a one-man, 90-minute interview. He befriended Elton John when the British singer was staying in California in 1972, insisting on calling him "John Elton." According to writer Philip Norman, when Marx jokingly pointed his index fingers as if holding a pair of six-shooters, Elton John put up his hands and said, "Don't shoot me, I'm only the piano player," thereby naming the album he had just completed. A film poster for the Marx Bros. movie "Go West" is visible on the album cover photograph as an homage to Marx. Elton John accompanied Marx to a performance of "Jesus Christ Superstar". As the lights went down, Marx called out, "Does it have a happy ending?" And during the Crucifixion scene, he declared, "This is sure to offend the Jews."
Marx's previous work regained popularity; new books of transcribed conversations were published by Richard J. Anobile and Charlotte Chandler. In a BBC interview in 1975, Marx called his greatest achievement having a book selected for cultural preservation in the Library of Congress. In a Cavett interview in 1971, Marx said being published in The New Yorker under his own name, Julius Henry Marx, meant more than all the plays he appeared in. As a man who never had formal schooling, to have his writings declared culturally important was a point of great satisfaction. As he passed his 81st birthday in 1971, however, Marx became increasingly frail, physically and mentally, as a result of a succession of minor strokes and other health issues.
In 1972, largely at the behest of his companion Erin Fleming, Marx staged a live one-man show at Carnegie Hall that was later released as a double album, "An Evening with Groucho", on A&M Records. He also made an appearance in 1973 on a short-lived variety show hosted by Bill Cosby. Fleming's influence on Marx was controversial. Some close to Marx believed that she did much to revive his popularity, and the relationship with a younger woman boosted his ego and vitality. Others described her as a Svengali, exploiting an increasingly senile Marx in pursuit of her own stardom. Marx's children, particularly Arthur, felt strongly that Fleming was pushing their weak father beyond his physical and mental limits. Writer Mark Evanier concurred.
On the 1974 Academy Awards telecast, Marx's final major public appearance, Jack Lemmon presented him with an honorary Academy Award to a standing ovation. The award honored Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo as well: "in recognition of his brilliant creativity and for the unequalled achievements of the Marx Brothers in the art of motion picture comedy." Noticeably frail, Marx took a bow for his deceased brothers. "I wish that Harpo and Chico could be here to share with me this great honor," he said, naming the two deceased brothers (Zeppo, still alive, was in the audience). He also praised the late Margaret Dumont as a great straight woman who never understood any of his jokes. Marx's final appearance was a brief sketch with George Burns in the Bob Hope television special "Joys" (a parody of the 1975 movie "Jaws") in March 1976. His health continued to decline the following year; when his younger brother Gummo died at age 83 on April 21, 1977, Marx was never told for fear of eliciting still further deterioration of his health.
Marx maintained his irrepressible sense of humor to the very end, however. George Fenneman, his radio and TV announcer, good-natured foil, and lifelong friend, often related a story of one of his final visits to Marx's home: When the time came to end the visit, Fenneman lifted Marx from his wheelchair, put his arms around his torso, and began to "walk" the frail comedian backwards across the room towards his bed. As he did, he heard a weak voice in his ear: "Fenneman," whispered Marx, "you always were a lousy dancer." When a nurse approached him with a thermometer during his final hospitalization, explaining that she wanted to see if he had a temperature, he responded, "Don't be silly — everybody has a temperature." Actor Elliott Gould recalled a similar incident: "I recall the last time I saw Groucho, he was in the hospital, and he had tubes in his nose and what have you," he said. "And when he saw me, he was weak, but he was there; and he put his fingers on the tubes and played them like it was a clarinet. Groucho played the tubes for me, which brings me to tears."
Marx was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with pneumonia on June 22, 1977, and died there nearly two months later at the age of 86 on August 19, four months after Gummo's death.
Marx was cremated and the ashes are interred in the Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. He was survived by his three children and younger brother Zeppo, who outlived him by two years. His gravestone bears no epitaph, but in one of his last interviews he suggested one: "Excuse me, I can't stand up."
Litigation over his estate lasted into the 1980s. Eventually, Arthur Marx and his sisters were awarded the bulk of the estate, and Erin Fleming was ordered to repay $472,000.
Groucho Marx was considered the most recognizable of the Marx Brothers. Groucho-like characters and references have appeared in popular culture both during and after his life, some aimed at audiences who may never have seen a Marx Brothers movie. Marx's trademark eyeglasses, nose, mustache, and cigar have become icons of comedy—glasses with fake noses and mustaches (referred to as "Groucho glasses", "nose-glasses," and other names) are sold by novelty and costume shops around the world.
The cover of The Firesign Theatre's 1969 album, "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All", subtitled "All Hail Marx and Lennon" feature images of Groucho Marx and John Lennon.
Nat Perrin, close friend of Groucho Marx and writer of several Marx Brothers films, inspired John Astin's portrayal of Gomez Addams on the 1960s TV series "The Addams Family" with similarly thick mustache, eyebrows, sardonic remarks, backward logic, and ever-present cigar (pulled from his breast pocket already lit).
In 1972, at Cannes, he was made a Commander in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. An honour he was very proud of.
A meeting with Elton John led to a press photo of Marx pointing both of his index fingers and thumbs at Elton like revolvers. John's spontaneous response of holding up his hands and replying, "Don't shoot me! I'm only the piano player!" was so amusing that Elton John reused it as the title of a 1973 album. An added Marx homage was that a poster for the Marx Brothers' movie "Go West" was included on the cover art.
Two albums by British rock band Queen, "A Night at the Opera" (1975) and "A Day at the Races" (1976), are named after Marx Brothers films. In March 1977, Marx invited Queen to visit him in his Los Angeles home; there they performed "'39" a cappella.
A long-running ad campaign for Vlasic Pickles features an animated stork that imitates Marx's mannerisms and voice. On the famous Hollywood Sign in California, one of the "O"s is dedicated to Marx. Alice Cooper contributed over $27,000 to remodel the sign, in memory of his friend.
Actor Frank Ferrante has performed as Groucho Marx on stage since 1986. He continues to tour under rights granted by the Marx family in a show entitled "An Evening with Groucho" in theaters throughout the United States and Canada with supporting actors and piano accompanist Jim Furmston. In the late 1980s, Ferrante starred as Marx in the off-Broadway and London show "" penned by Marx's son Arthur. Ferrante portrayed the comedian from age 15 to 85. The show was later filmed for PBS in 2001. In 1982, Gabe Kaplan filmed a version of the same show, entitled "Groucho".
In the Hungarian dubbed version of Woody Allen's film "Annie Hall", a famous quotation told by Alvy Singer (Allen) at the beginning of the film is not attributed to Groucho Marx as in the original, but to Buster Keaton. The reason was that in communist Hungary, the name 'Marx' was associated with Karl Marx and it was not allowed to use it in such a light, humorous context.
Woody Allen's 1996 musical "Everyone Says I Love You", in addition to being named for one of Marx's signature songs, ends with a Groucho-themed New Year's Eve party in Paris, which some of the stars, including Allen and Goldie Hawn, attend in full Groucho costume. The highlight of the scene is an ensemble song-and-dance performance of "Hooray for Captain Spaulding"—done entirely in French.
On June 25, 2019, "The New York Times Magazine" listed Marx among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.
Groucho, a supporting character in the Italian horror comics series "Dylan Dog", is a Groucho Marx impersonator whose character became his permanent personality, and he works with Dylan Dog as his professional sidekick. In the English-language version, to avoid legal complications regarding Groucho Marx's estate, the art was altered so that Groucho no longer sports the Marx brother's signature moustache, and was renamed "Felix".
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Game Boy Advance
The (GBA) is a 32-bit handheld game console developed, manufactured and marketed by Nintendo as the successor to the Game Boy Color. It was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, in North America on June 11, 2001, in Australia and Europe on June 22, 2001, and in mainland China on June 8, 2004 as iQue Game Boy Advance. The GBA is part of the sixth generation of video game consoles. The original model does not have an illuminated screen; Nintendo addressed that with the release of a redesigned model with a frontlit screen, the Game Boy Advance SP, in 2003. A newer revision of the redesign was released in 2005, with a backlit screen. The final redesign, the Game Boy Micro, was released in 2005.
As of June 30, 2010, the Game Boy Advance series has sold 81.51 million units worldwide. Its successor, the Nintendo DS, was released in November 2004 and is also compatible with Game Boy Advance software.
Contrary to the previous Game Boy models, which have the "portrait" form factor of the original Game Boy (designed by Gunpei Yokoi), the Game Boy Advance was designed in a "landscape" form factor, putting the buttons to the sides of the device instead of below the screen. The Game Boy Advance was designed by the French designer Gwénaël Nicolas and his Tokyo-based design studio Curiosity Inc.
News of a successor to the Game Boy Color (GBC) first emerged at the Nintendo Space World trade show in late August 1999, where it was reported that two new handheld systems were in development. An improved version of the GBC with wireless online connectivity was codenamed the Advanced Game Boy (AGB), and a brand-new 32-bit system was not set for release until the following year. On September 1, 1999, Nintendo officially announced the Game Boy Advance, revealing details about the system's specifications including online connectivity through a cellular device and an improved model of the Game Boy Camera. Nintendo teased that the handheld would first be released in Japan in August 2000, with the North American and European launch dates slated for the end of the same year. Simultaneously, Nintendo announced a partnership with Konami to form Mobile 21, a development studio that would focus on creating technology for the GBA to interact with the GameCube, Nintendo's home console which was also in development at the time under the name "Dolphin". On August 21, 2000, IGN showed off images of a GBA development kit running a demonstrational port of "Yoshi Story", and on August 22, pre-production images of the GBA were revealed in an issue of "Famitsu" magazine in Japan. On August 24, Nintendo officially revealed the console to the public in a presentation, revealing the Japanese and North American launch dates, in addition to revealing that 10 games would be available as launch titles for the system. The GBA was then featured at Nintendo Space World 2000 from August 24 to 26 alongside several peripherals for the system, including the GBA Link cable, the GameCube - Game Boy Advance link cable, a rechargable battery pack for the system, and an infrared communications adaptor which would allow systems to exchange data with each other. In March 2001, Nintendo revealed details about the system's North American launch, including the suggested price of $99.99 and the 15 launch games. Nintendo estimated that around 60 games would be made available for the system by the end of 2001.
In 1996, magazines including "Electronic Gaming Monthly", "Next Generation", issues 53 and 54 of "Total!" and the July 1996 issue of "Game Informer" featured reports of a new Game Boy, codenamed Project Atlantis. Although Nintendo's expectations of releasing the system in at least one territory by the end of 1996 would make that machine seem to be the Game Boy Color, it was described as having a 32-bit RISC processor, a 3-by-2-inch color LCD screen, and a link port—a description that more closely matches the Game Boy Advance. It also may have referred to the unnamed, unreleased Game Boy Color successor prototype that was revealed at 2009's Game Developers Conference. It was announced that Nintendo of Japan was working on a game for the system called "Mario's Castle", ultimately unreleased. Nintendo suspended the project in 1997, since the original Game Boy's 80% of the handheld market share was too high to merit the release of a successor.
The technical specifications of the original Game Boy Advance are, as provided by Nintendo:
Backward compatibility for Game Boy and Game Boy Color games is provided by a custom 4.194/8.388 MHz 8080-based coprocessor (Game Boy Advance software can use the audio tone generators to supplement the primary sound system), while a link port at the top of the unit allows it to be connected to other devices using a Game Link cable or GameCube link cable. When playing Game Boy or Game Boy Color games on the Game Boy Advance, the L and R buttons can be used to toggle between a stretched widescreen format and the original screen ratio of the Game Boy . Game Boy games can be played using the same selectable color palettes as on the Game Boy Color.
Every Nintendo handheld system following the release of the Game Boy Advance SP has included a built-in light and rechargeable battery.
The Game Boy Advance 2D graphics hardware has scaling and rotation for traditional tiled backgrounds in its modes 1 and 2 and scaling and rotation for bitmaps in modes 3 through 5 (used less often on the GBA because of technical limitations). On each machine supporting this effect, it is possible to change the scaling and rotation values during the horizontal blanking period of each scanline to draw a flat plane in a perspective projection. More complex effects such as fuzz are possible by using other equations for the position, scaling, and rotation of each line. The "character mode" supports up to 4 tile map background layers per frame, with each tile being 8x8 pixels in size and having 16 or 256 colors. The "character mode" also supports up to 128 hardware sprites per frame, with any sprite size from 8x8 to 64x64 pixels and with 16 or 256 colors per sprite.
The Game Boy Advance has been available in numerous colors and limited editions throughout its production. It was initially available in Arctic, Black, Orange, Fuchsia (translucent pink), Glacier (translucent blue/purple) and Indigo. Later in the system's availability, additional colors and special editions were released, including: Red, Clear Orange/Black, Platinum, White, Gold, Hello Kitty edition (pink with Hello Kitty and logo on bezel), "The King of Fighters" edition (black with images on bezel and buttons), "Chobits" edition (translucent light blue, with images on bezel and buttons), "Battle Network Rockman EXE 2" (light blue with images on bezel), "Mario Bros." edition (Glacier with Mario and Luigi on bezel) and Yomiuri Giants edition (Glacier with images on bezel).
A number of "Pokémon"-themed limited-edition systems were made available in Pokémon Center stores in Japan. These editions include: Gold Pokémon edition (Gold with Pikachu and Pichu on bezel), Suicune edition (blue/grey with greyscale Pikachu and Pichu on bezel, and a Pokémon Center sticker on the back), Celebi edition (olive green with Celebi images on bezel), and Latias/Latios edition (pink/red and purple, with images of Latias and Latios on bezel).
With hardware performance comparable to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Game Boy Advance represents progress for sprite-based technology. The system's library includes platformers, SNES-like role-playing video games, and games ported from various 8-bit and 16-bit systems of the previous generations. This includes the "Super Mario Advance" series, as well as the system's backward compatibility with all earlier Game Boy titles. While most GBA games employ 2D graphics, developers have ambitiously designed some 3D GBA games that push the limits of the hardware, including first-person shooters like a port of "Doom" and racing games like "GT Advance Championship Racing".
In Japan, the final game to have been released on the system is "Final Fantasy VI Advance" on November 30, 2006, which is also the final game published by Nintendo on the system. In North America, the last game for the system is "Samurai Deeper Kyo", released on February 12, 2008. Lastly, in Europe, "2 Games in 1: Columns Crown & ChuChu Rocket!" is the last game for the system (and also the last one released on the system overall), released on November 28, 2008. The Japan-only "Rhythm Tengoku", the first game in what would eventually become known outside Japan as the "Rhythm Heaven"/"Rhythm Paradise" series, is the final first-party-developed game for the system, released on August 3, 2006.
An accessory for the GameCube, known as the Game Boy Player, was released in 2003 as the successor to the Super Game Boy peripheral for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. The accessory allows Game Boy Advance games, as well as Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, to be played on the GameCube. However, some games may have compatibility issues due to certain features requiring extra hardware. For example, games with built-in motion sensors (such as "Yoshi's Topsy-Turvy") would require players to manipulate the console itself.
The GBA is the last of the three Nintendo handheld systems to bear the Game Boy name, games developed for it are incompatible with older Game Boy systems, and each game's box carries a label indicating that the game is "not compatible with other Game Boy systems". However, games designed for older Game Boy systems are conversely compatible with the Game Boy Advance, with options to play such games on either their standard aspect ratios or a stretched fullscreen.
Game Boy Advance games are compatible with Nintendo DS models that support them with a dedicated GBA cartridge slot beneath the touch screen, (specifically the original model and the Nintendo DS Lite), although they cannot support multiplayer or features involving the use of GBA accessories because they do not have the GBA's external peripheral port that these features require to function. The Nintendo DSi and Nintendo DSi XL do not have backwards compatibility with the GBA.
As part of an Ambassador Program for early adopters of the Nintendo 3DS system, ten Game Boy Advance games were made available free for players who bought a system before August 2011. Unlike other Virtual Console games for the system, features such as the Home menu or save states are missing, since the games are running natively instead of in emulation. 3DS systems that have custom firmware installed can also install the ten available games available to Ambassador Program members. Many other Game Boy Advance games can also be played via custom firmware by injecting a different game into one of the released Game Boy Advance games. Satoru Iwata stated Game Boy Advance games will be available on the Wii U Virtual Console sometime during April 2014. On April 3, 2014, the first of the announced GBA games, "Advance Wars", "Metroid Fusion", and "", were released for the Wii U Virtual Console. A Virtual Console library of Game Boy Advance games was launched for the Wii U console. All of the Virtual Console releases are single player only, as they do not emulate multiplayer features enabled by Game Link cables.
Nintendo released various addons for the Game Boy Advance, which include:
Other accessories for the Game Boy Advance include:
In early 2003, Nintendo introduced a new form-factor for the handheld, known as the Game Boy Advance SP (model AGS-001). The redesigned unit resembles a pocket-size laptop computer, including a folding case approximately one-half the size of the original unit. It also supports a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, a significantly brighter LCD screen, and an internal front-light that can be toggled on and off. The redesign was intended to address some common complaints about the original Game Boy Advance, which had been criticized for being somewhat uncomfortable to use, especially due to an overly dark screen.
Around the same time as the release of the Game Boy Micro, Nintendo released a new backlit version of the SP (model AGS-101). The switch that controls the light now toggles between "normal" (which itself is already brighter than the original Game Boy Advance SP's screen), and "bright", an intense brightness level similar to an LCD television.
In September 2005, Nintendo released a second redesign of the Game Boy Advance. This model, dubbed the Game Boy Micro, is similar in style to the original Game Boy Advance's horizontal orientation, but is much smaller and sleeker. The Game Boy Micro also allows the user to switch between several colored faceplates to allow customization, a feature which Nintendo advertised heavily around the Game Boy Micro's launch. Nintendo also hoped that this "fashion" feature would help target audiences outside of typical video game players. Unlike the previous Game Boy Advance models, the Game Boy Micro is unable to support Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles. The Game Boy Micro did not make much of an impact in the video game market as it was overshadowed by Nintendo's other portable, the Nintendo DS, which also played Game Boy Advance cartridges.
Upon its North American release, IGN praised the Game Boy Advance's graphical capabilities and battery life, but criticized the system's shoulder button placement and noted the system's high price tag which "may be a tad bit too high to swallow," ultimately scoring the system with in "8.0" out of 10. They also pointed out the system's lack of a backlight which occasionally got in the way of playing games.
ABC News praised the Game Boy Advance's graphics, grip and larger screen, stating that "You've never had as much fun playing old games."
Reviewing for CNET, Darren Gladstone scored the system with a 7.0 out of 10, praising its graphical performance and backwards compatibility, but being considerably critical of the system's lack of a backlit screen, noting that it makes it "nearly impossible" to play in normal lighting conditions. Gladstone ultimately suggested the sleeker and backlit Game Boy Advance SP over the system despite noting that its cheaper price may "appeal to gamers on a lower budget."
Nintendo hoped to sell 1.1 million Game Boy Advance units by the end of March with the system's Japanese debut, and anticipated sales of 24 million units before the end of 2001; many marketing analysts believed for this to be a realistic goal due to the company's lack of major competition in the handheld video game market. Within the first week of its North American launch in June, the Game Boy Advance sold 500,000 units, making it the fastest-selling video game console in the United States at the time. In response to strong sales, Nintendo ordered 100,000 units to ship to retail stores, hoping to ship another half million of them by the end of June. The Game Boy Advance also became the fastest-selling system in the United Kingdom, selling 81,000 units in its first week of release and beating the PlayStation 2's previous record of 20,000 units. In 2004, the system's sales in the United Kingdom surpassed one million units.
On December 1, 2006, Nintendo of America released launch-to-date information indicating that the company had sold 33.6 million units of the Game Boy Advance series in the United States. In a Kotaku article published on January 18, 2008, Nintendo revealed that the Game Boy Advance series had sold 36.2 million units in the United States, as of January 1, 2008. As of December 31, 2009, the Game Boy Advance series has sold 81.51 million units worldwide, 43.57 million of which are Game Boy Advance SP units and 2.42 million of which are Game Boy Micro units.
After the Game Boy Advance's support lessened, the most popular software became mostly games oriented to younger gamers.
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Google Search
Google Search, also referred to as Google Web Search or simply Google, is a web search engine developed by Google. It is the most used search engine on the World Wide Web across all platforms, with 92.62% market share as of June 2019, handling more than 5.4 billion searches each day.
The order of search results returned by Google is based, in part, on a priority rank system called "PageRank". Google Search also provides many different options for customized search, using symbols to include, exclude, specify or require certain search behavior, and offers specialized interactive experiences, such as flight status and package tracking, weather forecasts, currency, unit and time conversions, word definitions, and more.
The main purpose of Google Search is to search for text in publicly accessible documents offered by web servers, as opposed to other data, such as images or data contained in databases. It was originally developed in 1997 by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Scott Hassan. In June 2011, Google introduced "Google Voice Search" to search for spoken, rather than typed, words. In May 2012, Google introduced a Knowledge Graph semantic search feature in the U.S.
Analysis of the frequency of search terms may indicate economic, social and health trends. Data about the frequency of use of search terms on Google can be openly inquired via Google Trends and have been shown to correlate with flu outbreaks and unemployment levels, and provide the information faster than traditional reporting methods and surveys. As of mid-2016, Google's search engine has begun to rely on deep neural networks.
Competitors of Google include Baidu and Soso.com in China; Naver.com and Daum.net in South Korea; Yandex in Russia; Seznam.cz in the Czech Republic; Qwant in France; Yahoo in Japan, Taiwan and the US, as well as Bing and DuckDuckGo. Some smaller search engines offer facilities not available with Google, e.g. not storing any private or tracking information.
Within the U.S., as of July 2018, Bing handled 24.2 percent of all search queries. During the same period of time, Oath (formerly known as Yahoo) had a search market share of 11.5 percent. Market leader Google generated 63.2 percent of all core search queries in the U.S.
Google indexes hundreds of terabytes of information from web pages. For websites that are currently down or otherwise not available, Google provides links to cached versions of the site, formed by the search engine's latest indexing of that page. Additionally, Google indexes some file types, being able to show users PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, certain Flash multimedia content, and plain text files. Users can also activate "SafeSearch", a filtering technology aimed at preventing explicit and pornographic content from appearing in search results.
Despite Google search's immense index, sources generally assume that Google is only indexing less than 5% of the total Internet, with the rest belonging to the deep web, inaccessible through its search tools.
In 2012, Google changed its search indexing tools to demote sites that had been accused of piracy. In October 2016, Gary Illyes, a webmaster trends analyst with Google, announced that the search engine would be making a separate, primary web index dedicated for mobile devices, with a secondary, less up-to-date index for desktop use. The change was a response to the continued growth in mobile usage, and a push for web developers to adopt a mobile-friendly version of their websites. In December 2017, Google began rolling out the change, having already done so for multiple websites.
In August 2009, Google invited web developers to test a new search architecture, codenamed "Caffeine", and give their feedback. The new architecture provided no visual differences in the user interface, but added significant speed improvements and a new "under-the-hood" indexing infrastructure. The move was interpreted in some quarters as a response to Microsoft's recent release of an upgraded version of its own search service, renamed Bing, as well as the launch of Wolfram Alpha, a new search engine based on "computational knowledge". Google announced completion of "Caffeine" on June 8, 2010, claiming 50% fresher results due to continuous updating of its index.
With "Caffeine", Google moved its back-end indexing system away from MapReduce and onto Bigtable, the company's distributed database platform.
In August 2018, Danny Sullivan from Google announced a broad core algorithm update. As per current analysis done by the industry leaders Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Land, the update was to drop down the medical and health related websites that were not user friendly and were not providing good user experience. This is why the industry experts named it "Medic".
Google reserves very high standards for YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) pages. This is because misinformation can affect users financially, physically or emotionally. Therefore, the update targeted particularly those YMYL pages that have low-quality content and misinformation. This resulted in the algorithm targeting health and medical related websites more than others. However, many other websites from other industries were also negatively affected.
Google Search consists of a series of localized websites. The largest of those, the google.com site, is the top most-visited website in the world. Some of its features include a definition link for most searches including dictionary words, the number of results you got on your search, links to other searches (e.g. for words that Google believes to be misspelled, it provides a link to the search results using its proposed spelling), and many more.
Google search accepts queries as normal text, as well as individual keywords. It automatically corrects misspelled words, and yields the same results regardless of capitalization. For more customized results, one can use a wide variety of operators, including, but not limited to:
Google applies query expansion to submitted search queries, using techniques to deliver results that it considers "smarter" than the query users actually submitted. This technique involves several steps, including:
In 2008, Google started to give users autocompleted search suggestions in a list below the search bar while typing.
Google's homepage includes a button labeled "I'm Feeling Lucky". This feature originally allowed users to type in their search query, click the button and be taken directly to the first result, bypassing the search results page. With the 2010 announcement of Google Instant, an automatic feature that immediately displays relevant results as users are typing in their query, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button disappears, requiring that users opt-out of Instant results through search settings in order to keep using the "I'm Feeling Lucky" functionality. In 2012, "I'm Feeling Lucky" was changed to serve as an advertisement for Google services; users hover their computer mouse over the button, it spins and shows an emotion ("I'm Feeling Puzzled" or "I'm Feeling Trendy", for instance), and, when clicked, takes users to a Google service related to that emotion.
Tom Chavez of "Rapt", a firm helping to determine a website's advertising worth, estimated in 2007 that Google lost $110 million in revenue per year due to use of the button, which bypasses the advertisements found on the search results page.
Besides the main text-based search-engine features of Google search, it also offers multiple quick, interactive experiences. These include, but are not limited to:
During Google's developer conference, Google I/O, in May 2013, the company announced that, on Google Chrome and Chrome OS, users would be able to say "OK Google", with the browser initiating an audio-based search, with no button presses required. After having the answer presented, users can follow up with additional, contextual questions; an example include initially asking "OK Google, will it be sunny in Santa Cruz this weekend?", hearing a spoken answer, and reply with "how far is it from here?" An update to the Chrome browser with voice-search functionality rolled out a week later, though it required a button press on a microphone icon rather than "OK Google" voice activation. Google released a browser extension for the Chrome browser, named with a "beta" tag for unfinished development, shortly thereafter. In May 2014, the company officially added "OK Google" into the browser itself; they removed it in October 2015, citing low usage, though the microphone icon for activation remained available. In May 2016, 20% of search queries on mobile devices were done through voice.
"Universal search" was launched by Google on May 16, 2007 as an idea that merged the results from different kinds of search types into one. Prior to Universal search, a standard Google search would consist of links only to websites. Universal search, however, incorporates a wide variety of sources, including websites, news, pictures, maps, blogs, videos, and more, all shown on the same search results page. Marissa Mayer, then-vice president of search products and user experience, described the goal of Universal search as "we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results.
In June 2017, Google expanded its search results to cover available job listings. The data is aggregated from various major job boards and collected by analyzing company homepages. Initially only available in English, the feature aims to simplify finding jobs suitable for each user.
In May 2009, Google announced that they would be parsing website microformats in order to populate search result pages with "Rich snippets". Such snippets include additional details about results, such as displaying reviews for restaurants and social media accounts for individuals.
In May 2016, Google expanded on the "Rich snippets" format to offer "Rich cards", which, similarly to snippets, display more information about results, but shows them at the top of the mobile website in a swipeable carousel-like format. Originally limited to movie and recipe websites in the United States only, the feature expanded to all countries globally in 2017.
Now the web publishers can have greater control over the rich snippets. Preview settings from these meta tags will become effective in mid-to-late October 2019 and may take about a week for the global rollout to complete.
The Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base used by Google to enhance its search engine's results with information gathered from a variety of sources. This information is presented to users in a box to the right of search results. Knowledge Graph boxes were added to Google's search engine in May 2012, starting in the United States, with international expansion by the end of the year. The information covered by the Knowledge Graph grew significantly after launch, tripling its original size within seven months, and being able to answer "roughly one-third" of the 100 billion monthly searches Google processed in May 2016. The information is often used as a spoken answer in Google Assistant and Google Home searches. The Knowledge Graph has been criticized for providing answers without source attribution.
Google Search has been accused of using using so called zero-click search to prevent large part of the traffic leaving its page to third-party publishers. As result 71% searches end on the Google search page. In case of one specific query out of 890'000 searches on Google, only 30'000 resulted in the user clicking on the results website.
In May 2017, Google enabled a new "Personal" tab in Google Search, letting users search for content in their Google accounts' various services, including email messages from Gmail and photos from Google Photos.
The Google feed is a personalized stream of articles, videos, and other news-related content. The feed contains a "mix of cards" which show topics of interest based on users' interactions with Google, or topics they choose to follow directly. Cards include, "links to news stories, YouTube videos, sports scores, recipes, and other content based on what [Google] determined you're most likely to be interested in at that particular moment." Users can also tell Google they're not interested in certain topics to avoid seeing future updates.
The Google feed launched in December 2016 and received a major update in July 2017. As of May 2018, the Google feed can be found on the Google app and by swiping left on the home screen of certain Android devices. As of 2019, Google will not allow political campaigns worldwide to target their advertisement to people to make them vote.
Google's rise was largely due to a patented algorithm called PageRank which helps rank web pages that match a given search string. When Google was a Stanford research project, it was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a site's importance. Other keyword-based methods to rank search results, used by many search engines that were once more popular than Google, would check how often the search terms occurred in a page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within each resulting page. The PageRank algorithm instead analyzes human-generated links assuming that web pages linked from many important pages are also important. The algorithm computes a recursive score for pages, based on the weighted sum of other pages linking to them. PageRank is thought to correlate well with human concepts of importance. In addition to PageRank, Google, over the years, has added many other secret criteria for determining the ranking of resulting pages. This is reported to comprise over 250 different indicators, the specifics of which are kept secret to avoid difficulties created by scammers and help Google maintain an edge over its competitors globally.
PageRank was influenced by a similar page-ranking and site-scoring algorithm earlier used for RankDex, developed by Robin Li in 1996. Larry Page's patent for PageRank filed in 1998 includes a citation to Li's earlier patent. Li later went on to create the Chinese search engine Baidu in 2000.
In a potential hint of Google's future direction of their Search algorithm, Google's then chief executive Eric Schmidt, said in a 2007 interview with the "Financial Times": "The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?'". Schmidt reaffirmed this during a 2010 interview with the Wall Street Journal: "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
In 2013 the European Commission found that Google Search favored Google's own products, instead of the best result for consumers' needs. In February 2015 Google announced a major change to its mobile search algorithm which would favor mobile friendly over other websites. Nearly 60% of Google searches come from mobile phones. Google says it wants users to have access to premium quality websites. Those websites which lack a mobile friendly interface would be ranked lower and it is expected that this update will cause a shake-up of ranks. Businesses who fail to update their websites accordingly could see a dip in their regular websites traffic.
Because Google is the most popular search engine, many webmasters attempt to influence their website's Google rankings. An industry of consultants has arisen to help websites increase their rankings on Google and on other search engines. This field, called search engine optimization, attempts to discern patterns in search engine listings, and then develop a methodology for improving rankings to draw more searchers to their clients' sites. Search engine optimization encompasses both "on page" factors (like body copy, title elements, H1 heading elements and image alt attribute values) and Off Page Optimization factors (like anchor text and PageRank). The general idea is to affect Google's relevance algorithm by incorporating the keywords being targeted in various places "on page", in particular the title element and the body copy (note: the higher up in the page, presumably the better its keyword prominence and thus the ranking). Too many occurrences of the keyword, however, cause the page to look suspect to Google's spam checking algorithms. Google has published guidelines for website owners who would like to raise their rankings when using legitimate optimization consultants. It has been hypothesized, and, allegedly, is the opinion of the owner of one business about which there have been numerous complaints, that negative publicity, for example, numerous consumer complaints, may serve as well to elevate page rank on Google Search as favorable comments. The particular problem addressed in "The New York Times" article, which involved DecorMyEyes, was addressed shortly thereafter by an undisclosed fix in the Google algorithm. According to Google, it was not the frequently published consumer complaints about DecorMyEyes which resulted in the high ranking but mentions on news websites of events which affected the firm such as legal actions against it. Google Search Console helps to check for websites that use duplicate or copyright content.
In 2013, Google significantly upgraded its search algorithm with "Hummingbird". Its name was derived from the speed and accuracy of the hummingbird. The change was announced on September 26, 2013, having already been in use for a month. "Hummingbird" places greater emphasis on natural language queries, considering context and meaning over individual keywords. It also looks deeper at content on individual pages of a website, with improved ability to lead users directly to the most appropriate page rather than just a website's homepage. The upgrade marked the most significant change to Google search in years, with more "human" search interactions and a much heavier focus on conversation and meaning. Thus, web developers and writers were encouraged to optimize their sites with natural writing rather than forced keywords, and make effective use of technical web development for on-site navigation.
On certain occasions, the logo on Google's webpage will change to a special version, known as a "Google Doodle". This is a picture, drawing, animation or interactive game that includes the logo. It is usually done for a special event or day although not all of them are well known. Clicking on the Doodle links to a string of Google search results about the topic. The first was a reference to the Burning Man Festival in 1998, and others have been produced for the birthdays of notable people like Albert Einstein, historical events like the interlocking Lego block's 50th anniversary and holidays like Valentine's Day. Some Google Doodles have interactivity beyond a simple search, such as the famous "Google Pacman" version that appeared on May 21, 2010.
Google offers a "Google Search" mobile app for Android and iOS devices. The mobile apps exclusively feature a "feed", a news feed-style page of continually-updated developments on news and topics of interest to individual users. Android devices were introduced to a preview of the feed in December 2016, while it was made official on both Android and iOS in July 2017.
In April 2016, Google updated its Search app on Android to feature "Trends"; search queries gaining popularity appeared in the autocomplete box along with normal query autocompletion. The update received significant backlash, due to encouraging search queries unrelated to users' interests or intentions, prompting the company to issue an update with an opt-out option. In September 2017, the Google Search app on iOS was updated to feature the same functionality.
Until May 2013, Google Search had offered a feature to translate search queries into other languages. A Google spokesperson told "Search Engine Land" that "Removing features is always tough, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Unfortunately, this feature never saw much pick up".
Instant search was announced in September 2010 as a feature that displayed suggested results while the user typed in their search query. The primary advantage of the new system was its ability to save time, with Marissa Mayer, then-vice president of search products and user experience, proclaiming that the feature would save 2–5 seconds per search, elaborating that "That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we'll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!" Matt Van Wagner of "Search Engine Land" wrote that "Personally, I kind of like Google Instant and I think it represents a natural evolution in the way search works", and also praised Google's efforts in public relations, writing that "With just a press conference and a few well-placed interviews, Google has parlayed this relatively minor speed improvement into an attention-grabbing front-page news story". The upgrade also became notable for the company switching Google Search's underlying technology from HTML to AJAX.
Instant Search could be disabled via Google's "preferences" menu for those who didn't want its functionality.
The publication "" compiled a list of words that Google Instant did not show suggested results for, with a Google spokesperson giving the following statement to "Mashable":
"PC Magazine" discussed the inconsistency in how some forms of the same topic are allowed; for instance, "lesbian" was blocked, while "gay" was not, and "cocaine" was blocked, while "crack" and "heroin" were not. The report further stated that seemingly normal words were also blocked due to pornographic innuendos, most notably "scat", likely due to having two completely separate contextual meanings, one for music and one for a sexual practice.
On July 26, 2017, Google removed Instant results, due to a growing number of searches on mobile devices, where interaction with search, as well as screen sizes, differ significantly from a computer.
Various search engines provide encrypted Web search facilities. In May 2010 Google rolled out SSL-encrypted web search. The encrypted search was accessed at codice_12 However, the web search is encrypted via Transport Layer Security (TLS) by default today, thus every search request should be automatically encrypted if TLS is supported by the web browser. On its support website, Google announced that the address codice_12 would be turned off April 30, 2018, stating that all Google products and most new browsers use HTTPS connections as the reason for the discontinuation.
Google Real-Time Search was a feature of Google Search in which search results also sometimes included real-time information from sources such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and news websites. The feature was introduced on December 7, 2009 and went offline on July 2, 2011 after the deal with Twitter expired. Real-Time Search included Facebook status updates beginning on February 24, 2010. A feature similar to Real-Time Search was already available on Microsoft's Bing search engine, which showed results from Twitter and Facebook. The interface for the engine showed a live, descending "river" of posts in the main region (which could be paused or resumed), while a bar chart metric of the frequency of posts containing a certain search term or hashtag was located on the right hand corner of the page above a list of most frequently reposted posts and outgoing links. Hashtag search links were also supported, as were "promoted" tweets hosted by Twitter (located persistently on top of the river) and thumbnails of retweeted image or video links.
In January 2011, geolocation links of posts were made available alongside results in Real-Time Search. In addition, posts containing syndicated or attached shortened links were made searchable by the "link:" query option. In July 2011 Real-Time Search became inaccessible, with the Real-Time link in the Google sidebar disappearing and a custom 404 error page generated by Google returned at its former URL. Google originally suggested that the interruption was temporary and related to the launch of Google+; they subsequently announced that it was due to the expiry of a commercial arrangement with Twitter to provide access to tweets.
Searches made by search engines, including Google, leave traces. This raises concerns about privacy. In principle, if details of a user's searches are found, those with access to the information—principally state agencies responsible for law enforcement and similar matters—can make deductions about the user's activities. This has been used for the detection and prosecution of lawbreakers; for example a murderer was found and convicted after searching for terms such as "tips with killing with a baseball bat".
A search may leave traces both on a computer used to make the search, and in records kept by the search provider. When using a search engine through a browser program on a computer, search terms and other information may be stored on the computer by default, unless the browser is set not to do this, or they are erased. Saved terms may be discovered on forensic analysis of the computer. An Internet Service Provider (ISP) or search engine provider (e.g., Google) may store records which relate search terms to an IP address and a time. Whether such logs are kept, and access to them by law enforcement agencies, is subject to legislation in different jurisdictions and working practices; the law may mandate, prohibit, or say nothing about logging of various types of information. Some search engines, located in jurisdictions where it is not illegal, make a feature of not storing user search information.
The keywords suggested by the Autocomplete feature show a population of users' research which is made possible by an identity management system. Volumes of personal data are collected via Eddystone web and proximity beacons.
Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users' machines to store these preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms and retain the data for more than a year.
Since 2012, Google Inc. has globally introduced encrypted connections for most of its clients, in order to bypass governative blockings of the commercial and IT services.
In late June 2011, Google introduced a new look to the Google home page in order to boost the use of the Google+ social tools.
One of the major changes was replacing the classic navigation bar with a black one. Google's digital creative director Chris Wiggins explains: "We're working on a project to bring you a new and improved Google experience, and over the next few months, you'll continue to see more updates to our look and feel." The new navigation bar has been negatively received by a vocal minority.
In November 2013, Google started testing yellow labels for advertisements displayed in search results, to improve user experience. The new labels, highlighted in yellow color, and aligned to the left of each sponsored link help users clearly differentiate between organic and sponsored results.
On December 15, 2016, Google rolled out a new desktop search interface that mimics their modular mobile user interface. The mobile design consists of a tabular design that highlights search features in boxes. and works by imitating the desktop Knowledge Graph real estate, which appears in the right-hand rail of the search engine result page, these featured elements frequently feature Twitter carousels, People Also Search For, and Top Stories (vertical and horizontal design) modules. The Local Pack and Answer Box were two of the original features of the Google SERP that were primarily showcased in this manner, but this new layout creates a previously unseen level of design consistency for Google results.
In addition to its tool for searching web pages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos (Google Videos), searching by locality, maps, and items for sale online. Google Videos allows searching the World Wide Web for video clips. The service evolved from Google Video, Google's discontinued video hosting service that also allowed to search the web for video clips.
In 2012, Google has indexed over 30 trillion web pages, and received 100 billion queries per month. It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Google operates other tools and services including Google News, Google Shopping, Google Maps, Google Custom Search, Google Earth, Google Docs, Picasa (discontinued), Panoramio (discontinued), YouTube, Google Translate, Google Blog Search and Google Desktop Search.
There are also products available from Google that are not directly search-related. Gmail, for example, is a webmail application, but still includes search features; Google Browser Sync does not offer any search facilities, although it aims to organize your browsing time.
Also Google starts many new beta products, like Google Social Search or Google Image Swirl.
In 2009, Google claimed that a search query requires altogether about 1 kJ or 0.0003 kW·h, which is enough to raise the temperature of one liter of water by 0.24 °C. According to green search engine Ecosia, the industry standard for search engines is estimated to be about 0.2 grams of CO2 emission per search. Google's 40,000 searches per second translate to 8 kg CO2 per second or over 252 million kilos of CO2 per year.
In 2003, "The New York Times" complained about Google's indexing, claiming that Google's caching of content on its site infringed its copyright for the content. In both "Field v. Google" and "Parker v. Google", the United States District Court of Nevada ruled in favor of Google.
Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. For approximately 40 minutes on January 31, 2009, all search results were mistakenly classified as malware and could therefore not be clicked; instead a warning message was displayed and the user was required to enter the requested URL manually. The bug was caused by human error. The URL of "/" (which expands to all URLs) was mistakenly added to the malware patterns file.
In 2007, a group of researchers observed a tendency for users to rely on Google Search exclusively for finding information, writing that "With the Google interface the user gets the impression that the search results imply a kind of totality. ... In fact, one only sees a small part of what one could see if one also integrates other research tools."
In 2011, Google Search query results have been shown by Internet activist Eli Pariser to be tailored to users, effectively isolating users in what he defined as a filter bubble. Pariser holds algorithms used in search engines such as Google Search responsible for catering "a personal ecosystem of information". Although contrasting views have mitigated the potential threat of "informational dystopia" and questioned the scientific nature of Pariser's claims, filter bubbles have been mentioned to account for the surprising results of the U.S. presidential election in 2016 alongside fake news and echo chambers, suggesting that Facebook and Google have designed personalized online realities in which "we only see and hear what we like".
In 2012, the US Federal Trade Commission fined Google US$22.5 million for violating their agreement not to violate the privacy of users of Apple's Safari web browser. The FTC was also continuing to investigate if Google's favoring of their own services in their search results violated antitrust regulations.
Google search engine robots are programmed to use algorithms that understand and predict human behavior. The book, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" by Ruha Benjamin talks about human bias as a behavior that the google search engine can recognize. In 2016, some users google searched “three Black teenagers” and images of criminal mugshots of young African American teenagers came up. Then, the users searched “three White teenagers” and were presented with photos of smiling, happy teenagers. They also searched for “three Asian teenagers,” and very revealing photos of Asian girls and women appeared. Benjamin came to the conclusion that these results reflect human prejudice and views on different ethnic groups. A group of analysts explained the concept of a racist computer program: “The idea here is that computers, unlike people, can’t be racist but we’re increasingly learning that they do in fact take after their makers...Some experts believe that this problem might stem from the hidden biases in the massive piles of data that the algorithms process as they learn to recognize patterns...reproducing our worst values”.
As people talk about "googling" rather than searching, the company has taken some steps to defend its trademark, in an effort to prevent it from becoming a generic trademark. This has led to lawsuits, threats of lawsuits, and the use of euphemisms, such as calling Google Search a famous web search engine.
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Genius
A genius is a person who displays exceptional intellectual ability, creative productivity, universality in genres or originality, typically to a degree that is associated with the achievement of new advances in a domain of knowledge. Despite the presence of scholars in many subjects throughout history, many geniuses have shown high achievements in only a single kind of activity.
There is no scientifically precise definition of a genius, although psychologists are converging on a definition that emphasizes creativity and eminent achievement. Sometimes genius is associated with talent, but several authors such as Cesare Lombroso and Arthur Schopenhauer systematically distinguish these terms.
Confucius
In ancient Rome, the "genius" (plural in Latin "genii") was the guiding spirit or tutelary deity of a person, family "(gens)", or place "(genius loci)". The noun is related to the Latin verbs "gignere" (to beget, to give birth to) and "generare" (to beget, to generate, to procreate), and derives directly from the Indo-European stem thereof: "ǵenh" (to produce, to beget, to give birth). Because the achievements of exceptional individuals seemed to indicate the presence of a particularly powerful "genius", by the time of Augustus, the word began to acquire its secondary meaning of "inspiration, talent". The term "genius" acquired its modern sense in the eighteenth century, and is a conflation of two Latin terms: "genius", as above, and "Ingenium", a related noun referring to our innate dispositions, talents, and inborn nature. Beginning to blend the concepts of the divine and the talented, the "Encyclopédie" article on genius (génie) describes such a person as "he whose soul is more expansive and struck by the feelings of all others; interested by all that is in nature never to receive an idea unless it evokes a feeling; everything excites him and on which nothing is lost."
The assessment of intelligence was initiated by Francis Galton (1822–1911) and James McKeen Cattell. They had advocated the analysis of reaction time and sensory acuity as measures of "neurophysiological efficiency" and the analysis of sensory acuity as a measure of intelligence.
Galton is regarded as the founder of psychometry. He studied the work of his older half-cousin Charles Darwin about biological evolution. Hypothesizing that eminence is inherited from ancestors, Galton did a study of families of eminent people in Britain, publishing it in 1869 as "Hereditary Genius". Galton's ideas were elaborated from the work of two early 19th-century pioneers in statistics: Carl Friedrich Gauss and Adolphe Quetelet. Gauss discovered the normal distribution (bell-shaped curve): given a large number of measurements of the same variable under the same conditions, they vary at random from a most frequent value, the "average", to two least frequent values at maximum differences greater and lower than the most frequent value. Quetelet discovered that the bell-shaped curve applied to social statistics gathered by the French government in the course of its normal processes on large numbers of people passing through the courts and the military. His initial work in criminology led him to observe "the greater the number of individuals observed the more do peculiarities become effaced...". This ideal from which the peculiarities were effaced became "the average man".
Galton was inspired by Quetelet to define the average man as "an entire normal scheme"; that is, if one combines the normal curves of every measurable human characteristic, one will, in theory, perceive a syndrome straddled by "the average man" and flanked by persons that are different. In contrast to Quetelet, Galton's average man was not statistical but was theoretical only. There was no measure of general averageness, only a large number of very specific averages. Setting out to discover a general measure of the average, Galton looked at educational statistics and found bell-curves in test results of all sorts; initially in mathematics grades for the final honors examination and in entrance examination scores for Sandhurst.
Galton's method in "Hereditary Genius" was to count and assess the eminent relatives of eminent men. He found that the number of eminent relatives was greater with a closer degree of kinship. This work is considered the first example of historiometry, an analytical study of historical human progress. The work is controversial and has been criticized for several reasons. Galton then departed from Gauss in a way that became crucial to the history of the 20th century AD. The bell-shaped curve was not random, he concluded. The differences between the average and the upper end were due to a non-random factor, "natural ability", which he defined as "those qualities of intellect and disposition, which urge and qualify men to perform acts that lead to reputation…a nature which, when left to itself, will, urged by an inherent stimulus, climb the path that leads to eminence." The apparent randomness of the scores was due to the randomness of this natural ability in the population as a whole, in theory.
Criticisms include that Galton's study fails to account for the impact of social status and the associated availability of resources in the form of economic inheritance, meaning that inherited "eminence" or "genius" can be gained through the enriched environment provided by wealthy families. Galton went on to develop the field of eugenics. Galton attempted to control for economic inheritance by comparing the adopted nephews of popes, who would have the advantage of wealth without being as closely related to popes as sons are to their fathers, to the biological children of eminent individuals.
Genius is expressed in a variety of forms (e.g., mathematical, literary, musical performance). Persons with genius tend to have strong intuitions about their domains, and they build on these insights with tremendous energy. Carl Rogers, a founder of the Humanistic Approach to Psychology, expands on the idea of a genius trusting his or her intuition in a given field, writing: "El Greco, for example, must have realized as he looked at some of his early work, that 'good artists do not paint like that.' But somehow he trusted his own experiencing of life, the process of himself, sufficiently that he could go on expressing his own unique perceptions. It was as though he could say, 'Good artists don't paint like this, but "I" paint like this.' Or to move to another field, Ernest Hemingway was surely aware that 'good writers do not write like this.' But fortunately he moved toward being Hemingway, being himself, rather than toward someone else's conception of a good writer."
A number of people commonly regarded as geniuses have been or were diagnosed with mental disorders, for example Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, John Forbes Nash Jr., and Ernest Hemingway.
It has been suggested that there exists a connection between mental illness, in particular schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and genius. Individuals with bipolar disorder and schizotypal personality disorder, the latter of which being more common amongst relatives of schizophrenics, tend to show elevated creativity.
In a 2010 study done in the Karolinska Institutet it was observed that highly creative individuals and schizophrenics have a lower density of thalamic dopamine D2 receptors. One of the investigators explained that "Fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus probably means a lower degree of signal filtering, and thus a higher flow of information from the thalamus." This could be a possible mechanism behind the ability of healthy highly creative people to see numerous uncommon connections in a problem-solving situation and the bizarre associations found in the schizophrenics.
See also: Creativity and mental illness
Galton was a pioneer in investigating both eminent human achievement and mental testing. In his book "Hereditary Genius", written before the development of IQ testing, he proposed that hereditary influences on eminent achievement are strong, and that eminence is rare in the general population. Lewis Terman chose "'near' genius or genius" as the classification label for the highest classification on his 1916 version of the Stanford–Binet test. By 1926, Terman began publishing about a longitudinal study of California schoolchildren who were referred for IQ testing by their schoolteachers, called Genetic Studies of Genius, which he conducted for the rest of his life. Catherine M. Cox, a colleague of Terman's, wrote a whole book, "The Early Mental Traits of 300 Geniuses", published as volume 2 of The Genetic Studies of Genius book series, in which she analyzed biographical data about historic geniuses. Although her estimates of childhood IQ scores of historical figures who never took IQ tests have been criticized on methodological grounds, Cox's study was thorough in finding out what else matters besides IQ in becoming a genius. By the 1937 second revision of the Stanford–Binet test, Terman no longer used the term "genius" as an IQ classification, nor has any subsequent IQ test. In 1939, David Wechsler specifically commented that "we are rather hesitant about calling a person a genius on the basis of a single intelligence test score".
The Terman longitudinal study in California eventually provided historical evidence regarding how genius is related to IQ scores. Many California pupils were recommended for the study by schoolteachers. Two pupils who were tested but rejected for inclusion in the study (because their IQ scores were too low) grew up to be Nobel Prize winners in physics, William Shockley, and Luis Walter Alvarez. Based on the historical findings of the Terman study and on biographical examples such as Richard Feynman, who had an IQ of 125 and went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics and become widely known as a genius, the current view of psychologists and other scholars of genius is that a minimum level of IQ (approximately 125) is necessary for genius but not sufficient, and must be combined with personality characteristics such as drive and persistence, plus the necessary opportunities for talent development. For instance, in a chapter in an edited volume on achievement, IQ researcher Arthur Jensen proposed a multiplicative model of genius consisting of high ability, high productivity, and high creativity. Jensen's model was motivated by the finding that eminent achievement is highly positively skewed, a finding known as Price's law, and related to Lotka's law.
Some high IQ individuals join a High IQ society. The most famous is Mensa International but others exist including The International High IQ Society, the Prometheus Society, the Triple Nine Society, and Magnus.
Various philosophers have proposed definitions of what genius is and what that implies in the context of their philosophical theories.
In the philosophy of David Hume, the way society perceives genius is similar to the way society perceives the ignorant. Hume states that a person with the characteristics of a genius is looked at as a person disconnected from society, as well as a person who works remotely, at a distance, away from the rest of the world. On the other hand, the mere ignorant is still more despised; nor is any thing deemed a surer sign of an illiberal genius in an age and nation where the sciences flourish, than to be entirely destitute of all relish for those noble entertainments. The most perfect character is supposed to lie between those extremes; retaining an equal ability and taste for books, company, and business; preserving in conversation that discernment and delicacy which arise from polite letters; and in business, that probity and accuracy which are the natural result of a just philosophy.
In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person. For Kant, originality was the essential character of genius. This genius is a talent for producing ideas which can be described as non-imitative. Kant's discussion of the characteristics of genius is largely contained within the "Critique of Judgment" and was well received by the Romantics of the early 19th century. In addition, much of Schopenhauer's theory of genius, particularly regarding talent and freedom from constraint, is directly derived from paragraphs of Part I of Kant's "Critique of Judgment".
In the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, a genius is someone in whom intellect predominates over "will" much more than within the average person. In Schopenhauer's aesthetics, this predominance of the intellect over the will allows the genius to create artistic or academic works that are objects of pure, disinterested contemplation, the chief criterion of the aesthetic experience for Schopenhauer. Their remoteness from mundane concerns means that Schopenhauer's geniuses often display maladaptive traits in more mundane concerns; in Schopenhauer's words, they fall into the mire while gazing at the stars, an allusion to Plato's dialogue "Theætetus", in which Socrates tells of Thales (the first philosopher) being ridiculed for falling in such circumstances. As he says in Volume 2 of "The World as Will and Representation":
In the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, genius entails that an individual possesses unique qualities and talents that make the genius especially valuable to the society in which he or she operates, once given the chance to contribute to society. Russell's philosophy further maintains, however, that it is possible for such geniuses to be crushed in their youth and lost forever when the environment around them is unsympathetic to their potential maladaptive traits. Russell rejected the notion he believed was popular during his lifetime that, "genius will out".
Sources listed in chronological order of publication within each category.
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Grape
A grape is a fruit, botanically a berry, of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus "Vitis".
Grapes can be eaten fresh as table grapes or they can be used for making wine, jam, grape juice, jelly, grape seed extract, raisins, vinegar, and grape seed oil. Grapes are a non-climacteric type of fruit, generally occurring in clusters.
The cultivation of the domesticated grape began 6,000–8,000 years ago in the Near East. Yeast, one of the earliest domesticated microorganisms, occurs naturally on the skins of grapes, leading to the discovery of alcoholic drinks such as wine. The earliest archeological evidence for a dominant position of wine-making in human culture dates from 8,000 years ago in Georgia.
The oldest known winery was found in Armenia, dating to around 4000 BC. By the 9th century AD the city of Shiraz was known to produce some of the finest wines in the Middle East. Thus it has been proposed that Syrah red wine is named after Shiraz, a city in Persia where the grape was used to make Shirazi wine.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics record the cultivation of purple grapes, and history attests to the ancient Greeks, Phoenicians, and Romans growing purple grapes both for eating and wine production. The growing of grapes would later spread to other regions in Europe, as well as North Africa, and eventually in North America.
In North America, native grapes belonging to various species of the genus "Vitis" proliferate in the wild across the continent, and were a part of the diet of many Native Americans, but were considered by early European colonists to be unsuitable for wine. In the 19th century, Ephraim Bull of Concord, Massachusetts, cultivated seeds from wild "Vitis labrusca" vines to create the Concord grape which would become an important agricultural crop in the United States.
Grapes are a type of fruit that grow in clusters of 15 to 300, and can be crimson, black, dark blue, yellow, green, orange, and pink. "White" grapes are actually green in color, and are evolutionarily derived from the purple grape. Mutations in two regulatory genes of white grapes turn off production of anthocyanins, which are responsible for the color of purple grapes. Anthocyanins and other pigment chemicals of the larger family of polyphenols in purple grapes are responsible for the varying shades of purple in red wines. Grapes are typically an ellipsoid shape resembling a prolate spheroid.
Raw grapes are 81% water, 18% carbohydrates, 1% protein, and have negligible fat (table). A 100 gram reference amount of raw grapes supplies 69 calories and a moderate amount of vitamin K (14% of the Daily Value), with no other micronutrients in significant content.
Most grapes come from cultivars of "Vitis vinifera", the European grapevine native to the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Minor amounts of fruit and wine come from American and Asian species such as:
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 75,866 square kilometers of the world are dedicated to grapes. Approximately 71% of world grape production is used for wine, 27% as fresh fruit, and 2% as dried fruit. A portion of grape production goes to producing grape juice to be reconstituted for fruits canned "with no added sugar" and "100% natural". The area dedicated to vineyards is increasing by about 2% per year.
There are no reliable statistics that break down grape production by variety. It is believed that the most widely planted variety is Sultana, also known as Thompson Seedless, with at least 3,600 km2 (880,000 acres) dedicated to it. The second most common variety is Airén. Other popular varieties include Cabernet Sauvignon, Sauvignon blanc, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Grenache, Tempranillo, Riesling, and Chardonnay.
Commercially cultivated grapes can usually be classified as either table or wine grapes, based on their intended method of consumption: eaten raw (table grapes) or used to make wine (wine grapes). While almost all of them belong to the same species, "Vitis vinifera", table and wine grapes have significant differences, brought about through selective breeding. Table grape cultivars tend to have large, seedless fruit (see below) with relatively thin skin. Wine grapes are smaller, usually seeded, and have relatively thick skins (a desirable characteristic in winemaking, since much of the aroma in wine comes from the skin). Wine grapes also tend to be very sweet: they are harvested at the time when their juice is approximately 24% sugar by weight. By comparison, commercially produced "100% grape juice", made from table grapes, is usually around 15% sugar by weight.
Seedless cultivars now make up the overwhelming majority of table grape plantings. Because grapevines are vegetatively propagated by cuttings, the lack of seeds does not present a problem for reproduction. It is an issue for breeders, who must either use a seeded variety as the female parent or rescue embryos early in development using tissue culture techniques.
There are several sources of the seedlessness trait, and essentially all commercial cultivators get it from one of three sources: Thompson Seedless, Russian Seedless, and Black Monukka, all being cultivars of "Vitis vinifera". There are currently more than a dozen varieties of seedless grapes. Several, such as Einset Seedless, Benjamin Gunnels's Prime seedless grapes, Reliance, and Venus, have been specifically cultivated for hardiness and quality in the relatively cold climates of northeastern United States and southern Ontario.
An offset to the improved eating quality of seedlessness is the loss of potential health benefits provided by the enriched phytochemical content of grape seeds (see Health claims, below).
In most of Europe and North America, dried grapes are referred to as "raisins" or the local equivalent. In the UK, three different varieties are recognized, forcing the EU to use the term "dried vine fruit" in official documents.
A "raisin" is any dried grape. While "raisin" is a French loanword, the word in French refers to the fresh fruit; "grappe" (from which the English "grape" is derived) refers to the bunch (as in "une grappe de raisins").
A "currant" is a dried Zante Black Corinth grape, the name being a corruption of the French "raisin de Corinthe" (Corinth grape). "Currant" has also come to refer to the blackcurrant and redcurrant, two berries unrelated to grapes.
A "sultana" was originally a raisin made from Sultana grapes of Turkish origin (known as Thompson Seedless in the United States), but the word is now applied to raisins made from either white grapes or red grapes that are bleached to resemble the traditional sultana.
Grape juice is obtained from crushing and blending grapes into a liquid. The juice is often sold in stores or fermented and made into wine, brandy, or vinegar. Grape juice that has been pasteurized, removing any naturally occurring yeast, will not ferment if kept sterile, and thus contains no alcohol. In the wine industry, grape juice that contains 7–23% of pulp, skins, stems and seeds is often referred to as "must". In North America, the most common grape juice is purple and made from Concord grapes, while white grape juice is commonly made from Niagara grapes, both of which are varieties of grapes, a different species from European wine grapes. In California, Sultana (known there as Thompson Seedless) grapes are sometimes diverted from the raisin or table market to produce white juice.
Winemaking from red and white grape flesh and skins produces substantial quantities of organic residues, collectively called pomace (also "marc"), which includes crushed skins, seeds, stems, and leaves generally used as compost. Grape pomace – some 10-30% of the total mass of grapes crushed – contains various phytochemicals, such as unfermented sugars, alcohol, polyphenols, tannins, anthocyanins, and numerous other compounds, some of which are harvested and extracted for commercial applications (a process sometimes called "valorization" of the pomace).
Anthocyanins tend to be the main polyphenolics in purple grapes, whereas flavan-3-ols (i.e. catechins) are the more abundant class of polyphenols in white varieties. Total phenolic content is higher in purple varieties due almost entirely to anthocyanin density in purple grape skin compared to absence of anthocyanins in white grape skin. Phenolic content of grape skin varies with cultivar, soil composition, climate, geographic origin, and cultivation practices or exposure to diseases, such as fungal infections.
Muscadine grapes contain a relatively high phenolic content among dark grapes. In muscadine skins, ellagic acid, myricetin, quercetin, kaempferol, and trans-resveratrol are major phenolics.
The flavonols syringetin, syringetin 3-O-galactoside, laricitrin and laricitrin 3-O-galactoside are also found in purple grape but absent in white grape.
Muscadine grape seeds contain about twice the total polyphenol content of skins. Grape seed oil from crushed seeds is used in cosmeceuticals and skincare products. Grape seed oil, including tocopherols (vitamin E) and high contents of phytosterols and polyunsaturated fatty acids such as linoleic acid, oleic acid, and alpha-linolenic acid.
Resveratrol, a stilbene compound, is found in widely varying amounts among grape varieties, primarily in their skins and seeds. Muscadine grapes have about one hundred times higher concentration of stilbenes than pulp. Fresh grape skin contains about 50 to 100 micrograms of resveratrol per gram.
Comparing diets among Western countries, researchers have discovered that although French people tend to eat higher levels of animal fat, the incidence of heart disease remains low in France. This phenomenon has been termed the French paradox, and is thought to occur from protective benefits of regularly consuming red wine, among other dietary practices. Alcohol consumption in moderation may be cardioprotective by its minor anticoagulant effect and vasodilation.
Although adoption of wine consumption is generally not recommended by health authorities, some research indicates moderate consumption, such as one glass of red wine a day for women and two for men, may confer health benefits. Alcohol itself may have protective effects on the cardiovascular system.
The consumption of grapes and raisins presents a potential health threat to dogs. Their toxicity to dogs can cause the animal to develop acute kidney failure (the sudden development of kidney failure) with anuria (a lack of urine production) and may be fatal.
Christians have traditionally used wine during worship services as a means of remembering the blood of Jesus Christ which was shed for the remission of sins. Christians who oppose the partaking of alcoholic beverages sometimes use grape juice or water as the "cup" or "wine" in the Lord's Supper.
The Catholic Church continues to use wine in the celebration of the Eucharist because it is part of the tradition passed down through the ages starting with Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, where Catholics believe the consecrated bread and wine "literally" become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, a dogma known as transubstantiation. Wine is used (not grape juice) both due to its strong Scriptural roots, and also to follow the tradition set by the early Christian Church. The Code of Canon Law of the Catholic Church (1983), Canon 924 says that the wine used must be natural, made from grapes of the vine, and not corrupt. In some circumstances, a priest may obtain special permission to use grape juice for the consecration; however, this is extremely rare and typically requires sufficient impetus to warrant such a dispensation, such as personal health of the priest.
Although alcohol is permitted in Judaism, grape juice is sometimes used as an alternative for kiddush on Shabbat and Jewish holidays, and has the same blessing as wine. Many authorities maintain that grape juice must be capable of turning into wine naturally in order to be used for kiddush. Common practice, however, is to use any kosher grape juice for kiddush.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12436
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Genetic disorder
A genetic disorder is a health problem caused by one or more abnormalities in the genome. It can be caused by a mutation in a single gene (monogenic) or multiple genes (polygenic) or by a chromosomal abnormality. Although polygenic disorders are the most common, the term is mostly used when discussing disorders with a single genetic cause, either in a gene or chromosome. The mutation responsible can occur spontaneously before embryonic development (a "de novo" mutation), or it can be inherited from two parents who are carriers of a faulty gene (autosomal recessive inheritance) or from a parent with the disorder (autosomal dominant inheritance). Some disorders are caused by a mutation on the X chromosome and have X-linked inheritance. Very few disorders are inherited on the Y chromosome or mitochondrial DNA.
There are well over 6,000 known genetic disorders, and new genetic disorders are constantly being described in medical literature. Around 1 in 50 people are affected by a known single-gene disorder, while around 1 in 263 are affected by a chromosomal disorder. Around 65% of people have some kind of health problem as a result of congenital genetic mutations. Due to the significantly large number of genetic disorders, approximately 1 in 21 people are affected by a genetic disorder classified as "rare" (usually defined as affecting less than 1 in 2,000 people). Most genetic disorders are rare in themselves.
Cancers are caused by genetic mutations but are generally omitted when referring to genetic disorders, since most are not hereditary (though predispositions and cancer syndromes exist).
A single-gene disorder (or monogenic disorder) is the result of a single mutated gene. Single-gene disorders can be passed on to subsequent generations in several ways. Genomic imprinting and uniparental disomy, however, may affect inheritance patterns. The divisions between recessive and dominant types are not "hard and fast", although the divisions between autosomal and X-linked types are (since the latter types are distinguished purely based on the chromosomal location of the gene). For example, the common form of dwarfism, achondroplasia, is typically considered a dominant disorder, but children with two genes for achondroplasia have a severe and usually lethal skeletal disorder, one that achondroplasics could be considered carriers for. Sickle-cell anemia is also considered a recessive condition, but heterozygous carriers have increased resistance to malaria in early childhood, which could be described as a related dominant condition. When a couple where one partner or both are sufferers or carriers of a single-gene disorder wish to have a child, they can do so through "in vitro" fertilization, which enables preimplantation genetic diagnosis to occur to check whether the embryo has the genetic disorder.
Most congenital metabolic disorders known as inborn errors of metabolism result from single-gene defects. Many such single-gene defects can decrease the fitness of affected people and are therefore present in the population in lower frequencies compared to what would be expected based on simple probabilistic calculations.
Only one mutated copy of the gene will be necessary for a person to be affected by an autosomal dominant disorder. Each affected person usually has one affected parent. The chance a child will inherit the mutated gene is 50%. Autosomal dominant conditions sometimes have reduced penetrance, which means although only one mutated copy is needed, not all individuals who inherit that mutation go on to develop the disease. Examples of this type of disorder are Huntington's disease, neurofibromatosis type 1, neurofibromatosis type 2, Marfan syndrome, hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer, hereditary multiple exostoses (a highly penetrant autosomal dominant disorder), tuberous sclerosis, Von Willebrand disease, and acute intermittent porphyria. Birth defects are also called congenital anomalies.
Two copies of the gene must be mutated for a person to be affected by an autosomal recessive disorder. An affected person usually has unaffected parents who each carry a single copy of the mutated gene and are referred to as genetic carriers. Each parent with a defective gene normally do not have symptoms. Two unaffected people who each carry one copy of the mutated gene have a 25% risk with each pregnancy of having a child affected by the disorder. Examples of this type of disorder are albinism, medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, Tay–Sachs disease, Niemann–Pick disease, spinal muscular atrophy, and Roberts syndrome. Certain other phenotypes, such as wet versus dry earwax, are also determined in an autosomal recessive fashion. Some autosomal recessive disorders are common because, in the past, carrying one of the faulty genes led to a slight protection against an infectious disease or toxin such as tuberculosis or malaria. Such disorders include cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, phenylketonuria and thalassaemia.
X-linked dominant disorders are caused by mutations in genes on the X chromosome. Only a few disorders have this inheritance pattern, with a prime example being X-linked hypophosphatemic rickets. Males and females are both affected in these disorders, with males typically being more severely affected than females. Some X-linked dominant conditions, such as Rett syndrome, incontinentia pigmenti type 2, and Aicardi syndrome, are usually fatal in males either "in utero" or shortly after birth, and are therefore predominantly seen in females. Exceptions to this finding are extremely rare cases in which boys with Klinefelter syndrome (44+xxy) also inherit an X-linked dominant condition and exhibit symptoms more similar to those of a female in terms of disease severity. The chance of passing on an X-linked dominant disorder differs between men and women. The sons of a man with an X-linked dominant disorder will all be unaffected (since they receive their father's Y chromosome), but his daughters will all inherit the condition. A woman with an X-linked dominant disorder has a 50% chance of having an affected fetus with each pregnancy, although in cases such as incontinentia pigmenti, only female offspring are generally viable.
X-linked recessive conditions are also caused by mutations in genes on the X chromosome. Males are much more frequently affected than females, because they only have the one X chromosome necessary for the condition to present. The chance of passing on the disorder differs between men and women. The sons of a man with an X-linked recessive disorder will not be affected (since they receive their father's Y chromosome), but his daughters will be carriers of one copy of the mutated gene. A woman who is a carrier of an X-linked recessive disorder (XRXr) has a 50% chance of having sons who are affected and a 50% chance of having daughters who are carriers of one copy of the mutated gene. X-linked recessive conditions include the serious diseases hemophilia A, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and Lesch–Nyhan syndrome, as well as common and less serious conditions such as male pattern baldness and red–green color blindness. X-linked recessive conditions can sometimes manifest in females due to skewed X-inactivation or monosomy X (Turner syndrome).
Y-linked disorders are caused by mutations on the Y chromosome. These conditions may only be transmitted from the heterogametic sex (e.g. male humans) to offspring of the same sex. More simply, this means that Y-linked disorders in humans can only be passed from men to their sons; females can never be affected because they do not possess Y-allosomes.
Y-linked disorders are exceedingly rare but the most well-known examples typically cause infertility. Reproduction in such conditions is only possible through the circumvention of infertility by medical intervention.
This type of inheritance, also known as maternal inheritance, is the rarest and applies to the 13 genes encoded by mitochondrial DNA. Because only egg cells contribute mitochondria to the developing embryo, only mothers (who are affected) can pass on mitochondrial DNA conditions to their children. An example of this type of disorder is Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy.
It is important to stress that the vast majority of mitochondrial diseases (particularly when symptoms develop in early life) are actually caused by a nuclear gene defect, as the mitochondria are mostly developed by non-mitochondrial DNA. These diseases most often follow autosomal recessive inheritance.
Genetic disorders may also be complex, multifactorial, or polygenic, meaning they are likely associated with the effects of multiple genes in combination with lifestyles and environmental factors. Multifactorial disorders include heart disease and diabetes. Although complex disorders often cluster in families, they do not have a clear-cut pattern of inheritance. This makes it difficult to determine a person's risk of inheriting or passing on these disorders. Complex disorders are also difficult to study and treat because the specific factors that cause most of these disorders have not yet been identified. Studies that aim to identify the cause of complex disorders can use several methodological approaches to determine genotype–phenotype associations. One method, the genotype-first approach, starts by identifying genetic variants within patients and then determining the associated clinical manifestations. This is opposed to the more traditional phenotype-first approach, and may identify causal factors that have previously been obscured by clinical heterogeneity, penetrance, and expressivity.
On a pedigree, polygenic diseases do tend to "run in families", but the inheritance does not fit simple patterns as with Mendelian diseases. But this does not mean that the genes cannot eventually be located and studied. There is also a strong environmental component to many of them (e.g., blood pressure).
A chromosomal disorder is a missing, extra, or irregular portion of chromosomal DNA. It can be from an atypical number of chromosomes or a structural abnormality in one or more chromosomes. An example of these disorders is trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), in which there is an extra copy of chromosome 21.
Due to the wide range of genetic disorders that are known, diagnosis is widely varied and dependent of the disorder. Most genetic disorders are diagnosed at birth or during early childhood however some, such as Huntington's disease, can escape detection until the patient is well into adulthood.
The basic aspects of a genetic disorder rests on the inheritance of genetic material. With an in depth family history, it is possible to anticipate possible disorders in children which direct medical professionals to specific tests depending on the disorder and allow parents the chance to prepare for potential lifestyle changes, anticipate the possibility of stillbirth, or contemplate termination. Prenatal diagnosis can detect the presence of characteristic abnormalities in fetal development through ultrasound, or detect the presence of characteristic substances via invasive procedures which involve inserting probes or needles into the uterus such as in amniocentesis.
Not all genetic disorders directly result in death; however, there are no known cures for genetic disorders. Many genetic disorders affect stages of development, such as Down syndrome, while others result in purely physical symptoms such as muscular dystrophy. Other disorders, such as Huntington's disease, show no signs until adulthood. During the active time of a genetic disorder, patients mostly rely on maintaining or slowing the degradation of quality of life and maintain patient autonomy. This includes physical therapy, pain management, and may include a selection of alternative medicine programs.
The treatment of genetic disorders is an ongoing battle, with over 1,800 gene therapy clinical trials having been completed, are ongoing, or have been approved worldwide. Despite this, most treatment options revolve around treating the symptoms of the disorders in an attempt to improve patient quality of life.
Gene therapy refers to a form of treatment where a healthy gene is introduced to a patient. This should alleviate the defect caused by a faulty gene or slow the progression of the disease. A major obstacle has been the delivery of genes to the appropriate cell, tissue, and organ affected by the disorder. How does one introduce a gene into the potentially trillions of cells which carry the defective copy? This question has been the roadblock between understanding the genetic disorder and correcting the genetic disorder.
Around 1 in 50 people are affected by a known single-gene disorder, while around 1 in 263 are affected by a chromosomal disorder. Around 65% of people have some kind of health problem as a result of congenital genetic mutations. Due to the significantly large number of genetic disorders, approximately 1 in 21 people are affected by a genetic disorder classified as "rare" (usually defined as affecting less than 1 in 2,000 people). Most genetic disorders are rare in themselves. There are well over 6,000 known genetic disorders, and new genetic disorders are constantly being described in medical literature.
The earliest known genetic condition in a hominid was in the fossil species "Paranthropus robustus," with over a third of individuals displaying amelogenesis imperfecta.
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Guanine
Guanine (; or G, Gua) is one of the four main nucleobases found in the nucleic acids DNA and RNA, the others being adenine, cytosine, and thymine (uracil in RNA). In DNA, guanine is paired with cytosine. The guanine nucleoside is called guanosine.
With the formula C5H5N5O, guanine is a derivative of purine, consisting of a fused pyrimidine-imidazole ring system with conjugated double bonds. Being unsaturated, the bicyclic molecule is planar.
Guanine, along with adenine and cytosine, is present in both DNA and RNA, whereas thymine is usually seen only in DNA, and uracil only in RNA. Guanine has two tautomeric forms, the major keto form (see figures) and rare enol form.
It binds to cytosine through three hydrogen bonds. In cytosine, the amino group acts as the hydrogen bond donor and the C-2 carbonyl and the N-3 amine as the hydrogen-bond acceptors. Guanine has the C-6 carbonyl group that acts as the hydrogen bond acceptor, while a group at N-1 and the amino group at C-2 act as the hydrogen bond donors.
Guanine can be hydrolyzed with strong acid to glycine, ammonia, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide. First, guanine gets deaminated to become xanthine. Guanine oxidizes more readily than adenine, the other purine-derivative base in DNA. Its high melting point of 350 °C reflects the intermolecular hydrogen bonding between the oxo and amino groups in the molecules in the crystal. Because of this intermolecular bonding, guanine is relatively insoluble in water, but it is soluble in dilute acids and bases.
The first isolation of guanine was reported in 1844 by the German chemist (1819–1885), who obtained it as a mineral formed from the excreta of sea birds, which is known as guano and which was used as a source of fertilizer; guanine was named in 1846.
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Genocide
Genocide is the intentional action to destroy a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part. A term coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe", the hybrid word "genocide" is a combination of the Greek word "γένος" ("genos", "race, people") and the Latin suffix "-caedo" ("act of killing").
The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such" including the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to "bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part", preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group.
Examples include the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Serbian genocide, the Guatemalan genocide, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and after 1980 the Bosnian genocide, the Anfal genocide, the Darfur genocide, the Rwandan genocide and the Yazidi genocide.
The Political Instability Task Force estimated that, between 1956 and 2016, a total of 43 genocides took place, causing the death of about 50 million people. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008.
Before 1944, various terms, including "massacre," "extermination," and "crimes against humanity" were used to describe the intentional systematic killings. In 1941, Winston Churchill, when describing the German invasion of the Soviet Union, spoke of "a crime without a name".
In 1944, Raphael Lemkin created the term "genocide" in his book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe". The book describes the implementation of Nazi policies in occupied Europe, and cites earlier mass killings. The term described the systematic destruction of a nation or people, and the word was quickly adopted by many in the international community. The word "genocide" is a combination of the Ancient Greek word "génos" (γένος, meaning "race" or "people") with the Latin "caedere" ("to kill"). The word "genocide" was used in indictments at the Nuremberg trials, held from 1945, but solely as a descriptive term, not yet as a formal legal term. The so-called Polish Genocide Trials of Arthur Greiser and Amon Leopold Goth in 1946 were the first trials in which judgments included the term genocide.
According to Lemkin, genocide was "a coordinated strategy to destroy a group of people, a process that could be accomplished through total annihilation as well as strategies that eliminate key elements of the group's basic existence, including language, culture, and economic infrastructure".
Lemkin defined genocide as follows:
The preamble to the 1948 Genocide Convention (CPPCG) notes that instances of genocide have taken place throughout history. But it was not until Lemkin coined the term and the prosecution of perpetrators of the Holocaust at the Nuremberg trials that the United Nations defined the crime of genocide under international law in the Genocide Convention.
Lemkin's lifelong interest in the mass murder of populations in the 20th century was initially in response to the killing of Armenians in 1915 and later to the mass murders in Nazi-controlled Europe. He referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history". He dedicated his life to mobilizing the international community, to work together to prevent the occurrence of such events. In a 1949 interview, Lemkin said "I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action."
After the Holocaust, which had been perpetrated by Nazi Germany prior to and during World War II, Lemkin successfully campaigned for the universal acceptance of international laws defining and forbidding genocides. In 1946, the first session of the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that "affirmed" that genocide was a crime under international law and enumerated examples of such events (but did not provide a full legal definition of the crime). In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" (CPPCG) which defined the crime of genocide for the first time.
The "CPPCG" was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into effect on 12 January 1951 (Resolution 260 (III)). It contains an internationally recognized definition of genocide which has been incorporated into the national criminal legislation of many countries, and was also adopted by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC). Article II of the Convention defines genocide as:
The first draft of the convention included political killings, but these provisions were removed in a political and diplomatic compromise following objections from some countries, including the USSR, a permanent United Nations Security Council member. The USSR argued that the convention's definition should follow the etymology of the term, and may have feared greater international scrutiny of its own mass killings. Other nations feared that including political groups in the definition would invite international intervention in domestic politics. However leading genocide scholar William Schabas states: "Rigorous examination of the travaux fails to confirm a popular impression in the literature that the opposition to inclusion of political genocide was some Soviet machination. The Soviet views were also shared by a number of other States for whom it is difficult to establish any geographic or social common denominator: Lebanon, Sweden, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic, Iran, Egypt, Belgium, and Uruguay. The exclusion of political groups was in fact originally promoted by a non-governmental organization, the World Jewish Congress, and it corresponded to Raphael Lemkin's vision of the nature of the crime of genocide."
Incitement to genocide is recognized as a separate crime under international law and an inchoate crime which does not require genocide to have taken place to be prosecutable.
Under international law, genocide has two mental (or "mens rea") elements – the general mental element and the element of specific intent ("dolus specialis"). The general element refers to the whether the prohibited acts were committed with intent, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence. For most serious international crimes, including genocide, the requirement is that the perpetrator act with intent. The Rome Statute defines intent as meaning to engage in the conduct and, in relation to consequences, as meaning to cause that consequence or being "aware that it will occur in the ordinary course of events".
The specific intent element defines the purpose of committing the acts: "to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such". The specific intent is a core factor distinguishing genocide from other international crimes, such as war crimes or crimes against humanity.
In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) noted in its judgement on "Jorgic v. Germany" case that, in 1992, the majority of legal scholars took the narrow view that "intent to destroy" in the CPPCG meant the intended physical-biological destruction of the protected group, and that this was still the majority opinion. But the ECHR also noted that a minority took a broader view, and did not consider biological-physical destruction to be necessary, as the intent to destroy a national, racial, religious or ethnic group was enough to qualify as genocide.
In the same judgement, the ECHR reviewed the judgements of several international and municipal courts. It noted that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice had agreed with the narrow interpretation (that biological-physical destruction was necessary for an act to qualify as genocide). The ECHR also noted that at the time of its judgement, apart from courts in Germany (which had taken a broad view), that there had been few cases of genocide under other Convention states' municipal laws, and that "There are no reported cases in which the courts of these States have defined the type of group destruction the perpetrator must have intended in order to be found guilty of genocide."
In the case of "Onesphore Rwabukombe", the German Supreme Court adhered to its previous judgement, and did not follow the narrow interpretation of the ICTY and the ICJ.
The phrase "in whole or in part" has been subject to much discussion by scholars of international humanitarian law. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found in "Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic – Trial Chamber I – Judgment – IT-98-33 (2001) ICTY8 (2 August 2001)" that Genocide had been committed. In "Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic – Appeals Chamber – Judgment – IT-98-33 (2004) ICTY 7 (19 April 2004)" paragraphs 8, 9, 10, and 11 addressed the issue of "in part" and found that "the part must be a substantial part of that group. The aim of the Genocide Convention is to prevent the intentional destruction of entire human groups, and the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole." The Appeals Chamber goes into details of other cases and the opinions of respected commentators on the Genocide Convention to explain how they came to this conclusion.
The judges continue in paragraph 12, "The determination of when the targeted part is substantial enough to meet this requirement may involve a number of considerations. The numeric size of the targeted part of the group is the necessary and important starting point, though not in all cases the ending point of the inquiry. The number of individuals targeted should be evaluated not only in absolute terms, but also in relation to the overall size of the entire group. In addition to the numeric size of the targeted portion, its prominence within the group can be a useful consideration. If a specific part of the group is emblematic of the overall group, or is essential to its survival, that may support a finding that the part qualifies as substantial within the meaning of Article 4 [of the Tribunal's Statute]."
In paragraph 13 the judges raise the issue of the perpetrators' access to the victims: "The historical examples of genocide also suggest that the area of the perpetrators' activity and control, as well as the possible extent of their reach, should be considered. [...] The intent to destroy formed by a perpetrator of genocide will always be limited by the opportunity presented to him. While this factor alone will not indicate whether the targeted group is substantial, it can—in combination with other factors—inform the analysis."
The drafters of the CPPCG chose not to include political or social groups among the protected groups. Instead they opted to focus on "stable" identities, attributes that are historically understood as being born into and unable or unlikely to change overtime. This definition conflicts with modern conceptions of race as a social construct rather than innate fact and the practice of changing religion, etc.
International criminal courts have typically applied a mix of objective and subjective markers for determining whether or not the targeted population is a distinct group. Differences in language, physical appearance, religion, and cultural practices are objective criterion that may show that the groups are distinct. However, in circumstances such as the Rwandan genocide, Hutus and Tutsis were often physically indistinguishable.
In such a situation where a definitive answer based on objective markers is not clear, courts have turned to the subjective standard that "if a victim was perceived by a perpetrator as belonging to a protected group, the victim could be considered by the Chamber as a member of the protected group". Stigmatization of the group by the perpetrators through legal measures, such as withholding citizenship, requiring the group to be identified, or isolating them from the whole could show that the perpetrators viewed the victims as a protected group.
The Genocide Convention establishes five prohibited acts that, when committed with the requisite intent, amount to genocide. Although massacre-style killings are the most commonly identified and punished as genocide, the range of violence that is contemplated by the law is significantly broader.
While mass killing is not necessary to commit genocide, it has been present in every recognized genocide. A near-uniform pattern has emerged throughout history in which men and adolescent boys are singled out for murder in the early stages, such as in the genocide of the Yazidis by Daesh, the Ottoman Turks' attack on the Armenians, and the Burmese security forces' attacks on the Rohingya. Men and boys are typically subject to "fast" killings, such as by gunshot. Women and girls are more likely to die slower deaths by slashing, burning, or as a result of sexual violence. The jurisprudence of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), among others, shows that both the initial executions and those that quickly follow other acts of extreme violence, such as rape and torture, are recognized as falling under the first prohibited act.
A less settled discussion is whether deaths that are further removed from the initial acts of violence can be addressed under this provision of the Genocide Convention. Legal scholars have posited, for example, that deaths resulting from other genocidal acts including causing serious bodily or mental harm or the successful deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction should be considered genocidal killings.
This second prohibited act can encompass a wide range of non-fatal genocidal acts. The ICTR and International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) have held that rape and sexual violence may constitute the second prohibited act of genocide by causing both physical and mental harm. In its landmark Akayesu decision, the ICTR held that rapes and sexual violence resulted in "physical and psychological destruction". Sexual violence is a hallmark of genocidal violence, with most genocidal campaigns explicitly or implicitly sanctioning it. It is estimated that 250,000 to 500,000 women were raped in the three months of the Rwandan genocide, many of whom were subjected to multiple rapes or gang rape. In Darfur, a systemic campaign of rape and often sexual mutilation was carried out and in Burma public mass rapes and gang rapes were inflicted on the Rohingya by Burmese security forces. Sexual slavery was documented in the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Turks and Daesh's genocide of the Yazidi. These acts are frequently, but not exclusively committed against women.
Torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, when committed with the requisite intent, are also genocide by causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. The ICTY found that both experiencing a failed execution and watching the murder of one's family members may constitute torture. The Syrian Commission of Inquiry (COI) also found that enslavement, removal of one's children into indoctrination or sexual slavery, and acts of physical and sexual violence rise to the level of torture, as well. While it was subject to some debate, the ICTY and, later, the Syrian COI held that under some circumstances deportation and forcible transfer may also cause serious bodily or mental harm.
The third prohibited act is distinguished from the genocidal act of killing because the deaths are not immediate (or may not even come to pass), but rather create circumstances that do not support prolonged life. Due to the longer period of time before the actual destruction would be achieved, the ICTR held that courts must consider the duration of time the conditions are imposed as an element of the act. The drafters incorporated the act to account for the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and to ensure that similar conditions never be imposed again. However, it could also apply to the Armenian death marches, the siege of Mount Sinjar by Daesh, the deprivation of water and forcible deportation against ethnic groups in Darfur, and the destruction and razing of communities in Burma.
The ICTR provided guidance into what constitutes a violation of the third act. In Akayesu, it identified "subjecting a group of people to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services below minimum requirement" as rising to genocide. In Kayishema and Ruzindana, it extended the list to include: "lack of proper housing, clothing, hygiene and medical care or excessive work or physical exertion" among the conditions. It further noted that, in addition to deprivation of necessary resources, rape could also fit within this prohibited act.
The fourth prohibited act is aimed at preventing the protected group from regenerating through reproduction. It encompasses acts with the single intent of affecting reproduction and intimate relationships, such as involuntary sterilization, forced abortion, prohibition of marriage, and long-term separation of men and women intended to prevent procreation. Rape has been found to violate the fourth prohibited act on two bases: where the rape was committed with the intent to impregnate her and thereby force her to carry a child of another group (in societies where group identity is determined by patrilineal identity) and where the person raped subsequently refuses to procreate as a result of the trauma. Accordingly, it can take into account both physical and mental measures imposed by the perpetrators.
The final prohibited act is the only prohibited act which does not lead to physical or biological destruction, but rather to destruction of the group as a cultural and social unit. It occurs when children of the protected group are transferred to the perpetrator group. Boys are typically taken into the group through changing their names to those common of the perpetrator group, converting their religion, and using them for labor or as soldiers. Girls who are transferred are not generally converted to the perpetrator group, but instead treated as chattel, as played out in both the Yazidi and Armenian genocides. The measures used to forcibly transfer children may be imposed by direct force or psychological coercion, such as threats, duress, or detention.
The convention came into force as international law on 12 January 1951 after the minimum 20 countries became parties. At that time however, only two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council were parties to the treaty: France and the Republic of China. The Soviet Union ratified in 1954, the United Kingdom in 1970, the People's Republic of China in 1983 (having replaced the Taiwan-based Republic of China on the UNSC in 1971), and the United States in 1988. This long delay in support for the convention by the world's most powerful nations caused the convention to languish for over four decades. Only in the 1990s did the international law on the crime of genocide begin to be enforced.
UN Security Council Resolution 1674, adopted by the United Nations Security Council on 28 April 2006, "reaffirms the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity". The resolution committed the council to action to protect civilians in armed conflict.
In 2008 the UN Security Council adopted resolution 1820, which noted that "rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or a constitutive act with respect to genocide".
Since the Convention came into effect in January 1951 about 80 United Nations member states have passed legislation that incorporates the provisions of CPPCG into their municipal law.
William Schabas has suggested that a permanent body as recommended by the Whitaker Report to monitor the implementation of the Genocide Convention, and require States to issue reports on their compliance with the convention (such as were incorporated into the United Nations Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture), would make the convention more effective.
Writing in 1998 Kurt Jonassohn and Karin Björnson stated that the CPPCG was a legal instrument resulting from a diplomatic compromise. As such the wording of the treaty is not intended to be a definition suitable as a research tool, and although it is used for this purpose, as it has an international legal credibility that others lack, other definitions have also been postulated. Jonassohn and Björnson go on to say that none of these alternative definitions have gained widespread support for various reasons.
Jonassohn and Björnson postulate that the major reason why no single generally accepted genocide definition has emerged is because academics have adjusted their focus to emphasise different periods and have found it expedient to use slightly different definitions to help them interpret events. For example, Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn studied the whole of human history, while Leo Kuper and R. J. Rummel in their more recent works concentrated on the 20th century, and Helen Fein, Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr have looked at post World War II events. Jonassohn and Björnson are critical of some of these studies, arguing that they are too expansive, and conclude that the academic discipline of genocide studies is too young to have a canon of work on which to build an academic paradigm.
The exclusion of social and political groups as targets of genocide in the CPPCG legal definition has been criticized by some historians and sociologists, for example M. Hassan Kakar in his book "The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979–1982" argues that the international definition of genocide is too restricted, and that it should include political groups or any group so defined by the perpetrator and quotes Chalk and Jonassohn: "Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator." In turn some states such as Ethiopia, France, and Spain include political groups as legitimate genocide victims in their anti-genocide laws.
Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr defined genocide as "the promotion and execution of policies by a state or its agents which result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a group ... [when] the victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal characteristics, i.e., ethnicity, religion or nationality". Harff and Gurr also differentiate between genocides and politicides by the characteristics by which members of a group are identified by the state. In genocides, the victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal characteristics, i.e., ethnicity, religion or nationality. In politicides the victim groups are defined primarily in terms of their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups. Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, Jr. state that "we follow Harff's distinction between genocides and 'pogroms', which she describes as 'short-lived outbursts by mobs, which, although often condoned by authorities, rarely persist'. If the violence persists for long enough, however, Harff argues, the distinction between condonation and complicity collapses."
According to R. J. Rummel, genocide has 3 different meanings. The ordinary meaning is murder by government of people due to their national, ethnic, racial, or religious group membership. The legal meaning of genocide refers to the international treaty, the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" (CPPCG). This also includes non-killings that in the end eliminate the group, such as preventing births or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. A generalized meaning of genocide is similar to the ordinary meaning but also includes government killings of political opponents or otherwise intentional murder. It is to avoid confusion regarding what meaning is intended that Rummel created the term democide for the third meaning.
Highlighting the potential for state and non-state actors to commit genocide in the 21st century, for example, in failed states or as non-state actors acquire weapons of mass destruction, Adrian Gallagher defined genocide as 'When a source of collective power (usually a state) intentionally uses its power base to implement a process of destruction in order to destroy a group (as defined by the perpetrator), in whole or in substantial part, dependent upon relative group size'. The definition upholds the centrality of intent, the multidimensional understanding of destroy, broadens the definition of group identity beyond that of the 1948 definition yet argues that a substantial part of a group has to be destroyed before it can be classified as genocide.
All signatories to the CPPCG are required to prevent and punish acts of genocide, both in peace and wartime, though some barriers make this enforcement difficult. In particular, some of the signatories—namely, Bahrain, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, the United States, Vietnam, Yemen, and former Yugoslavia—signed with the proviso that no claim of genocide could be brought against them at the International Court of Justice without their consent. Despite official protests from other signatories (notably Cyprus and Norway) on the ethics and legal standing of these reservations, the immunity from prosecution they grant has been invoked from time to time, as when the United States refused to allow a charge of genocide brought against it by former Yugoslavia following the 1999 Kosovo War.
It is commonly accepted that, at least since World War II, genocide has been illegal under customary international law as a peremptory norm, as well as under conventional international law. Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish for prosecution, because a chain of accountability must be established. International criminal courts and tribunals function primarily because the states involved are incapable or unwilling to prosecute crimes of this magnitude themselves.
The Nazi leaders who were prosecuted shortly after World War II for taking part in the Holocaust, and other mass murders, were charged under existing international laws, such as crimes against humanity, as the crime of "genocide' was not formally defined until the 1948 "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide" (CPPCG). Nevertheless, the recently coined term appeared in the indictment of the Nazi leaders, Count 3, which stated that those charged had "conducted deliberate and systematic genocide—namely, the extermination of racial and national groups—against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people, and national, racial or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others."
The term "Bosnian genocide" is used to refer either to the killings committed by Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995, or to ethnic cleansing that took place elsewhere during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War.
In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judged that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide. On 26 February 2007, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in the "Bosnian Genocide Case" upheld the ICTY's earlier finding that the massacre in Srebrenica and Zepa constituted genocide, but found that the Serbian government had not participated in a wider genocide on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, as the Bosnian government had claimed.
On 12 July 2007, European Court of Human Rights when dismissing the appeal by Nikola Jorgić against his conviction for genocide by a German court (Jorgic v. Germany) noted that the German courts wider interpretation of genocide has since been rejected by international courts considering similar cases. The ECHR also noted that in the 21st century "Amongst scholars, the majority have taken the view that ethnic cleansing, in the way in which it was carried out by the Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to expel Muslims and Croats from their homes, did not constitute genocide. However, there are also a considerable number of scholars who have suggested that these acts did amount to genocide, and the ICTY has found in the Momcilo Krajisnik case that the actus reus of genocide was met in Prijedor "With regard to the charge of genocide, the Chamber found that in spite of evidence of acts perpetrated in the municipalities which constituted the actus reus of genocide".
About 30 people have been indicted for participating in genocide or complicity in genocide during the early 1990s in Bosnia. To date, after several plea bargains and some convictions that were successfully challenged on appeal two men, Vujadin Popović and Ljubiša Beara, have been found guilty of committing genocide, Zdravko Tolimir has been found guilty of committing genocide and conspiracy to commit genocide, and two others, Radislav Krstić and Drago Nikolić, have been found guilty of aiding and abetting genocide. Three others have been found guilty of participating in genocides in Bosnia by German courts, one of whom Nikola Jorgić lost an appeal against his conviction in the European Court of Human Rights. A further eight men, former members of the Bosnian Serb security forces were found guilty of genocide by the State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina (See List of Bosnian genocide prosecutions).
Slobodan Milošević, as the former President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia, was the most senior political figure to stand trial at the ICTY. He died on 11 March 2006 during his trial where he was accused of genocide or complicity in genocide in territories within Bosnia and Herzegovina, so no verdict was returned. In 1995, the ICTY issued a warrant for the arrest of Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić on several charges including genocide. On 21 July 2008, Karadžić was arrested in Belgrade, and later tried in The Hague accused of genocide among other crimes. On 24 March 2016, Karadžić was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes and crimes against humanity, 10 of the 11 charges in total, and sentenced to 40 years' imprisonment. Mladić was arrested on 26 May 2011 in Lazarevo, Serbia, and was tried in The Hague. The verdict, delivered on 22 November 2017 found Mladić guilty of 10 of the 11 charges, including genocide and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is a court under the auspices of the United Nations for the prosecution of offenses committed in Rwanda during the genocide which occurred there during April 1994, commencing on 6 April. The ICTR was created on 8 November 1994 by the Security Council of the United Nations in order to judge those people responsible for the acts of genocide and other serious violations of the international law performed in the territory of Rwanda, or by Rwandan citizens in nearby states, between 1 January and 31 December 1994.
So far, the ICTR has finished nineteen trials and convicted twenty seven accused persons. On 14 December 2009 two more men were accused and convicted for their crimes. Another twenty five persons are still on trial. Twenty-one are awaiting trial in detention, two more added on 14 December 2009. Ten are still at large. The first trial, of Jean-Paul Akayesu, began in 1997. In October 1998, Akayesu was sentenced to life imprisonment. Jean Kambanda, interim Prime Minister, pleaded guilty.
The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, Ta Mok and other leaders, organized the mass killing of ideologically suspect groups. The total number of victims is estimated at approximately 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975–1979, including deaths from slave labour.
On 6 June 2003 the Cambodian government and the United Nations reached an agreement to set up the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) which would focus exclusively on crimes committed by the most senior Khmer Rouge officials during the period of Khmer Rouge rule of 1975–1979. The judges were sworn in early July 2006.
The genocide charges related to killings of Cambodia's Vietnamese and Cham minorities, which is estimated to make up tens of thousand killings and possibly more
The investigating judges were presented with the names of five possible suspects by the prosecution on 18 July 2007.
There has been disagreement between some of the international jurists and the Cambodian government over whether any other people should be tried by the Tribunal.
Since 2002, the International Criminal Court can exercise its jurisdiction if national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute genocide, thus being a "court of last resort," leaving the primary responsibility to exercise jurisdiction over alleged criminals to individual states. Due to the United States concerns over the ICC, the United States prefers to continue to use specially convened international tribunals for such investigations and potential prosecutions.
There has been much debate over categorizing the situation in Darfur as genocide. The ongoing conflict in Darfur, Sudan, which started in 2003, was declared a "genocide" by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell on 9 September 2004 in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Since that time however, no other permanent member of the UN Security Council has done so. In fact, in January 2005, an International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1564 of 2004, issued a report to the Secretary-General stating that "the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide." Nevertheless, the Commission cautioned that "The conclusion that no genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the Government authorities, directly or through the militias under their control, should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity of the crimes perpetrated in that region. International offences such as the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide."
In March 2005, the Security Council formally referred the situation in Darfur to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, taking into account the Commission report but without mentioning any specific crimes. Two permanent members of the Security Council, the United States and China, abstained from the vote on the referral resolution. As of his fourth report to the Security Council, the Prosecutor has found "reasonable grounds to believe that the individuals identified [in the UN Security Council Resolution 1593] have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes," but did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute for genocide.
In April 2007, the Judges of the ICC issued arrest warrants against the former Minister of State for the Interior, Ahmad Harun, and a Militia
Janjaweed leader, Ali Kushayb, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
On 14 July 2008, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC), filed ten charges of war crimes against Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir: three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder. The ICC's prosecutors claimed that al-Bashir "masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part" three tribal groups in Darfur because of their ethnicity.
On 4 March 2009, the ICC issued a warrant of arrest for Omar Al Bashir, President of Sudan as the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I concluded that his position as head of state does not grant him immunity against prosecution before the ICC. The warrant was for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It did not include the crime of genocide because the majority of the Chamber did not find that the prosecutors had provided enough evidence to include such a charge. Later the decision was changed by the Appeals Panel and after issuing the second decision, charges against Omar al-Bashir include three counts of genocide.
The concept of genocide can be applied to historical events of the past. The preamble to the CPPCG states that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity."
Revisionist attempts to challenge or affirm claims of genocide are illegal in some countries. For example, several European countries ban the denial of the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide, while in Turkey referring to the mass killings of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and Maronites as genocides may be prosecuted under Article 301.
William Rubinstein argues that the origin of 20th century genocides can be traced back to the collapse of the elite structure and normal modes of government in parts of Europe following the First World War:
In 1996 Gregory Stanton, the president of Genocide Watch, presented a briefing paper called "The 8 Stages of Genocide" at the United States Department of State. In it he suggested that genocide develops in eight stages that are "predictable but not inexorable".
The Stanton paper was presented to the State Department, shortly after the Rwandan Genocide and much of its analysis is based on why that genocide occurred. The preventative measures suggested, given the briefing paper's original target audience, were those that the United States could implement directly or indirectly by using its influence on other governments.
In April 2012, it was reported that Stanton would soon be officially adding two new stages, Discrimination and Persecution, to his original theory, which would make for a 10-stage theory of genocide.
In a paper for the Social Science Research Council Dirk Moses criticises the Stanton approach, concluding:
Other authors have focused on the structural conditions leading up to genocide and the psychological and social processes that create an evolution toward genocide. Ervin Staub showed that economic deterioration and political confusion and disorganization were starting points of increasing discrimination and violence in many instances of genocides and mass killing. They lead to scapegoating a group and ideologies that identified that group as an enemy. A history of devaluation of the group that becomes the victim, past violence against the group that becomes the perpetrator leading to psychological wounds, authoritarian cultures and political systems, and the passivity of internal and external witnesses (bystanders) all contribute to the probability that the violence develops into genocide. Intense conflict between groups that is unresolved, becomes intractable and violent can also lead to genocide. The conditions that lead to genocide provide guidance to early prevention, such as humanizing a devalued group, creating ideologies that embrace all groups, and activating bystander responses. There is substantial research to indicate how this can be done, but information is only slowly transformed into action.
Kjell Anderson uses a dichotomistic classification of genocides: "hot genocides, motivated by hate and the victims' threatening nature, with low-intensity cold genocides, rooted in victims' supposed inferiority."
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Germanic peoples
The Germanic peoples (from ) are a category of north European ethnic groups, first mentioned by Graeco-Roman authors. They are also associated with Germanic languages, which originated and dispersed among them, and are one of several criteria used to define Germanic ethnicity.
Although the English language possesses the adjective "Germanic" as distinct from "German", it lacks an equivalent distinct noun. The terms "Germanic peoples" and "Germani" are therefore used by modern English-speaking scholars to avoid confusion with the inhabitants of present-day Germany ("Deutschland"), including the modern "German" ("Deutsche") people and language.
Starting with Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE), several Roman Empire authors placed their homeland, "Germania", roughly between the Lower Rhine (west) and the Vistula Rivers (east), and distinguished them from other broad categories of peoples better known to Rome, especially the Celtic Gauls to their southwest, and "Scythian" Sarmatians to their further east and southeast. Greek writers, in contrast, consistently categorized the Germanic peoples from east of the Rhine as Gauls. And with the possible exception of some groups near the Rhine, there is no evidence that the Germanic peoples called themselves or their lands "Germanic" (see below). Latin and Greek writers report centuries of historical interactions with Germanic peoples on the Rhine and Danube River border regions, but from about 400, several long-established Germanic peoples on the Middle Danube were replaced by newcomers migrating from the further north or east of Europe. The description of peoples as Germanic in late antiquity was mainly restricted to those in the Rhine region, and thus referred to the Franks especially, and sometimes also the Alamanni.
Broader modern definitions of the Germanic peoples include peoples who were not known as "Germani" or Germanic peoples in their own time, but who are treated as one group of cultures, mostly because of their use of Germanic languages. Thus, in modern writing, "Germanic peoples" is a term which commonly includes peoples who were not referred to as Germanic by their contemporaries, and spoke distinct languages, but only categorized as Germanic in modern times. Examples include the late Roman era Goths, or the early medieval Norse-speaking Vikings in Scandinavia.
The languages of the earliest known Germanic peoples of classical antiquity have left only fragmentary evidence. The first long texts which have survived were written outside "Germania" in the Gothic language from the region that is today Ukraine. Languages in this family are widespread today in Europe, and have dispersed worldwide, the family being represented by major modern languages such as English, Dutch, Nordic languages and German. The Eastern Germanic branch of the Germanic language family, once found in what is now Poland and Ukraine, is extinct.
Apart from language and geography, proposed connections between the diverse Germanic peoples described by classical and medieval sources, archaeology, and linguistics are the subject of ongoing debate among scholars:
In the 21st century, genetic studies have begun to look more systematically at questions of ancestry, using both modern and ancient DNA. However, the connection between modern Germanic languages, ethnicity and genetic heritage is thought by many scholars to be unlikely to ever be simple or uncontroversial. Guy Halsall for example writes: "The danger, barely addressed (at best dismissed as a purely ‘ideological’ objection), is of reducing ethnicity to biology and thus to something close to the nineteenth-century idea of race, at the basis of the ‘nation state’."
Julius Caesar published the first basic description, possibly based on discussions with Gaulish allies during his campaign in Gaul, of what makes any people or peoples "Germanic", rather than for example Gaulish. The implied definition involved several criteria, allowing the possibility of debatable cases. Definitions of Germanic peoples continue to involve discussion of similar criteria:
In modern times, attempts to define characteristics which unite all or some of these peoples more objectively, using linguistic or archaeological criteria, have thus led to the possibility of the term "Germanic" being used to apply to more peoples, in other periods and regions. However, these definitions are still based upon the old definitions, and overlap with them.
Such modern definitions have focused attention upon uncertainties and disagreements about the ethnic origins and backgrounds of both early Roman-era Germanic peoples, and late-Roman Germanic peoples.
According to all available evidence, the theoretical concept of the Germanic peoples as a large grouping distinct from the Gauls—whose homeland was east of the Rhine, and included areas very far from it—originated with Julius Caesar's published account of his "Gallic Wars", and specifically those parts concerning his battles near the Rhine. Importantly for all future conceptions of what Germanic means, Caesar was apparently the first to categorize distant peoples such as the Cimbri and the large group of Suevian peoples as "Germanic". The Suevians and their languages, which had perhaps never been called Germanic before then, had started expanding their influence in his time, as Caesar experienced personally. Caesar's categorization of the "Germani" was in the context of explaining his battle against Ariovistus, who had been a Roman ally. He led a large and armed population, made up of several peoples from east of the Rhine, including significant Suevian contingents. Rome had suffered a history of Gaulish invasions from the distant north, including those by the Cimbri, whom they had previously categorized as Gauls. Caesar, while describing his subsequent use of Roman soldiers deep in Gaulish territory, categorized the Cimbri, together with the peoples allied under Ariovistus, not as Gaulish, but as "Germanic", apparently using an ethnic term that was more local to the Rhine region where he fought Ariovistus. Modern scholars are undecided about whether the Cimbri were Germanic speakers like the Suevians, and even where exactly they lived in northern Europe, though it is likely to have been in or near Jutland. Caesar thus proposed that these more distant peoples were the cause of invasions into Italy. His solution was controlling Gaul, and defending the Rhine as a boundary against these "Germani".
Several Roman writers—Strabo (about 63 BCE – 24 CE), Pliny the Elder (about 23–79 CE), and especially Tacitus (about 56–120 CE)—followed Caesar's tradition in the next few generations, by partly defining the Germanic peoples of their time geographically, according to their presumed homeland. This ""Germania magna"", or Greater "Germania", was seen as a large wild country roughly east of the Rhine, and north of the Danube, but not everyone from within the area bounded by those rivers was ever described by Roman authors as Germanic, and not all "Germani" lived there. The opening of Tacitus's "Germania" gave a rough definition only:
Germania is separated from the Gauls, the Rhaetians, and Pannonii, by the rivers Rhine and Danube. Mountain ranges, or the fear which each feels for the other, divide it from the Sarmatians and Dacians.
It is the northern part of Greater "Germania", including the North European Plain, Southern Scandinavia, and the Baltic coast that was presumed to be the original Germanic homeland by early Roman authors such as Caesar and Tacitus. (Modern scholars also see the central part of this area, between the Elbe and the Oder, as the region from which Germanic languages dispersed.) In the east, "Germania magna's" boundaries were unclear according to Tacitus, although geographers such as Ptolemy and Pomponius Mela took it to be the Vistula. For Tacitus the boundaries of Germania stretched further, to somewhere east of the Baltic Sea in the north, and its people blended with the "Scythian" (or Sarmatian) steppe peoples in the area of today's Ukraine in the south. In the north, greater "Germania" stretched all the way to the relatively unknown Arctic Ocean. In contrast, in the south of Greater "Germania" nearer the Danube, the Germanic peoples were seen by these Roman writers as immigrants or conquerors, living among other peoples whom they had come to dominate. More specifically, Tacitus noted various Suevian Germanic-speaking peoples from the Elbe river in the north, such as the Marcomanni and Quadi, pushing into the Hercynian forest regions towards the Danube, where the Gaulish Volcae, Helvetii and Boii had lived.
Roman writers who added to Caesar's theoretical description, especially Tacitus, also at least partly defined the "Germani" by non-geographic criteria such as their economy, religion, clothing, and language. Caesar had, for example, previously noted that the "Germani" had no druids, and were less interested in farming than Gauls, and also that Gaulish ("lingua gallica") was a language the Germanic King Ariovistus had to learn. Tacitus mentioned Germanic languages at least three times, each mention concerning eastern peoples whose ethnicity was uncertain, and such remarks are seen by some modern authors as evidence of a unifying Germanic language. His comments are not detailed, but they indicate that there were Suevian languages (plural) "within" the category of Germanic languages, and that customs varied between different Germanic peoples. For example:
Tacitus says nothing about the languages of the "Germani" living near the Rhine.
The etymology of the Latin word "Germani", from which Latin "Germania", and English "Germanic" are derived, is unknown, although several different proposals have been made. Even the language from which it derives is a subject of dispute.
Whatever it meant, the name probably applied originally only to a smaller group of people, the so-called ""Germani cisrhenani"", whose Latin scholarly name simply indicates that these were "Germani" living on the western side of the Rhine (see below). Tacitus reported that these Germanic peoples in Gaul, ancestors of the Tungri of his time, were the first people to be called "Germani". According to Tacitus, their name had transferred to peoples such as those within the alliance of Ariovistus, as a name having connotations that frightened potential enemies. While Caesar and Tacitus saw this Rhineland people as Germanic in the broader sense also, they do not fit easily with the much broader definitions of "Germanic" used by them or modern scholars. These original "Germani" are therefore a significant complication for all attempts to define the Germanic peoples according to which side of the Rhine they lived on, or according to their probable language.
Caesar described how the country of these "Germani cisrhenani" stretched well west of the Lower Rhine, into what is now Belgium, and how it had done so long before the Romans came into close contact. Neither Caesar nor Tacitus saw this as clashing with their broader definitions, because they believed these "Germani" had moved from east of the Rhine, where the other "Germani" lived. But this event was not recent: Caesar reported that they were already on the west side during the Cimbrian War (113–101 BCE), generations earlier. The early "Germani" on both sides of the Lower Rhine were however distinguished from the Suevian "Germani" by Caesar, Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, and Strabo. Strabo even said that the "Germani" near the Rhine not only differed little from the Celts, but also that the Latin-speakers called them "Germani" because they were the "genuine" Gauls (which is a possible meaning of "Germani" in Latin). Modern historical linguists and archaeologists have also come to doubt that these western "Germani" spoke a Germanic language as defined today, or shared the same material culture, at least at the time of their first contact with Caesar and the Romans. Caesar himself refers to them also as Gauls.
The older concept of the "Germani" being local to the Rhine, and especially the west bank of the lower Rhine, remained common among Graeco-Roman writers for a longer time than the more theoretical and general concept of Caesar. Cassius Dio writing in Greek in the 3rd century, consistently called the right-bank "Germani" of Caesar, the Celts (Κελτοί) and their country "Keltikḗ" (Κελτική). Cassius contrasted them with the "Gauls" ("Γαλάται") on the left bank of the Rhine, and described Caesar doing the same in a speech. He reported that the peoples on either side of the Rhine had long ago taken to using these contrasting names, treating it as a boundary, but "very anciently both peoples dwelling on either side of the river were called Celts". For Cassius Dio, the only "Germani" and the only "Germania" were west of the Rhine within the empire: "some of the Celts ("Keltoí"), whom we call Germans ("Germanoí")", had "occupied all the Belgic territory ["Belgikḗ"] along the Rhine and caused it to be called Germany ["Germanía"]".
At least two well-read 6th century Byzantine writers, Agathias and Procopius, understood the Franks on the Rhine to effectively be the old "Germani" under a new name, since, as Agathias wrote, they inhabit the banks of the Rhine and the surrounding territory.
All surviving written evidence implying any clear "Germanic" concept, broad or narrow, from before Julius Caesar is doubtful and unclear. There are two or three cases to consider.
After Caesar, Roman authors such as Tacitus followed his example in using the Germanic terminology to refer retroactively to peoples known to the Romans or Greeks before Caesar. As noted above, the Cimbri had previously been described as Celtic or Cimmerian, and Greek writers continued to do so, while Caesar described them as Germanic. Tacitus and Strabo both proposed with some uncertainty that the Bastarnae, a large people known to the Graeco-Roman world before Caesar, from the region of what is now Ukrainian Galicia and Moldava, might also have had mixed Germanic ancestry, and according to Tacitus, even a Germanic language. Pliny the Elder categorized them as a separate major division of the "Germani" like Istvaeones, Ingvaeones, and Irminones, but also separate from an eastern group which contained the Vandals and the Gutones, both in what is now Poland. (As already mentioned however, Livy said they spoke a language like that of the Scordisci.)
The theoretical descriptions of Germanic peoples by Tacitus, which have been very influential in modern times, may never have been commonly read or used in the Roman era. It is clear in any case that in later Roman times the Rhine frontier (or "Limes Germanicus"), the area where Caesar had first come in contact with Suevians and "Germani cisrhenani", was the normal "Germanic" area mentioned in writing. Walter Goffart has written that "the one incontrovertible Germanic thing" in the Roman era was "the two Roman provinces of 'Germania,' on the middle and lower course of the Rhine river" and: "Whatever 'Germania' had meant to Tacitus, it had narrowed by the time of St Jerome to an archaic or poetic term for the land normally called Francia". Edward James similarly wrote:
It seems clear that in the fourth century 'German' was no longer a term which included all western barbarians. [...] Ammianus Marcellinus, in the later fourth century, uses "Germania" only when he is referring to the Roman provinces of Upper Germany and Lower Germany; east of "Germania" are "Alamannia" and "Francia".
As an exceptional case, the poet Sidonius Apollinaris, living in what is now southern France, described the Burgundians of his time as speaking a "Germanic" tongue and being ""Germani"". Wolfram has proposed that this word was chosen not because of a comparison of languages, but because the Burgundians had come from the Rhine region, and even argued that the use of this word by Sidonius might be seen as evidence against Burgundians being speakers of East Germanic, given that the East Germanic-speaking Goths, also present in southern France at this time, were never described this way.
Far from the Rhine, the Gothic peoples in what is today Ukraine, and the Anglo-Saxons in the British Isles, were called Germanic in only one surviving classical text, by Zosimus (5th century), but this was an instance in which he mistakenly believed he was writing about Rhineland peoples. Otherwise, Goths and similar peoples such as the Gepids, were consistently described as Scythian.
In the Greek-speaking eastern Roman empire which continued to exist during the Middle Ages, the concept of "Germanic" was also lost or distorted. As explained by Walter Pohl, the late Roman equation of the Franks with the Germani led there to such non-classical contrasts as the French (West Franks) being "Germani" and the Germans (East Franks) being "Alamanni", or the Normans in Sicily being Franks, but the French being "Franks and also "Germani"". In the "Strategikon" of Maurice, written about 600, a contrast is made between three types of barbarian: Scythians, Slavs, and "blonde-haired" peoples such as the Franks and Langobards - apparently having no convenient name to cover them together.
Medieval writers in western Europe used Caesar's old geographical concept of "Germania", which, like the new Frankish and clerical jurisdictions of their time, used the Rhine as a frontier marker, although they did not commonly refer to any contemporary "Germani". For example, Louis the German ("") was named this way because he ruled east of the Rhine, and in contrast the kingdom west of the Rhine was still called "Gallia" (Gaul) in scholarly Latin.
Writers using Latin in West Germanic-speaking areas did recognize that those languages were related (Dutch, English, Lombardic, and German). To describe this fact they referred to "Teutonic" words and languages, seeing the nominative as a Latin translation of "Theodiscus", which was a concept that West Germanic speakers used to refer to themselves. It is the source of the modern words "Dutch", German "Deutsch", and Italian "Tedesco". Romance language speakers and others such as the Welsh were contrasted using words based on another old word, "Walhaz", the source of "Welsh", Wallach, Welsch, Walloon, etc., itself derived from the name of the Volcae, a Celtic group. Only a small number of writers were influenced by Tacitus, whose work was known at Fulda Abbey, and few used terminology such as "lingua Germanica" instead of "theudiscus sermo".
On the other hand, there were several more origin myths written after Jordanes (see above) which similarly connected some of the post Roman peoples to a common origin in Scandinavia. As pointed out by Walter Pohl, Paul the Deacon even implied that the Goths, like the Lombards, "descended from" "Germanic peoples", though it is unclear if they continued to be "Germanic" after leaving the north. Frechulf of Lisieux observed that some of his contemporaries believed that the Goths might belong to the ""nationes Theotistae"", like the Franks, and that both the Franks and the Goths might have come from Scandinavia. It is in this period, the 9th century Carolingian era, that scholars are also first recorded speculation about relationships between Gothic and West Germanic languages. Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel believed the Goths spoke a "teodisca lingua" like the Franks, and Walafrid Strabo, calling it a "theotiscus sermo", was even aware of their Bible translation. However, though the similarities were noticed, Gothic would not have been intelligible to a West Germanic speaker.
The first detailed origins legend of the Anglo-Saxons was by Bede (died 735), and in his case he named the Angles and Saxons of Britain as peoples who once lived in "Germania", like, he says, the Frisians, Rugians, Danes, Huns, Old Saxons ("Antiqui Saxones") and the Bructeri. He even says that British people still call them, corruptly, ""Garmani"". As with Jordanes and the Gutones, there is other evidence, linguistic and archaeological, which is consistent with his scholarly account, although this does not prove that Bede's non-scholarly contemporaries had accurate knowledge of historical details.
In western Europe then, there was limited scholarly awareness of the Tacitean "Germanic peoples", and even their potential connection to the Goths, but much more common were adherence to Caesar's concept of the geographical meaning of "Germania" east of the Rhine, and a perception of similarities between some Germanic languages - though they were not given this name until much later.
The ethnic military kingdoms which formed in the western Roman empire (see below) each developed their own legends about their ethnic origins, the so-called "Origo gentis" stories. These often included an ancient connection to Romans or Trojans, as apparently in the origin stories of the Franks, Burgundians and English, and they also typically mentioned the wild east of "Scythia". However, Jordanes (6th century), who wrote the most detailed surviving Gothic origins story, did effectively propose a connection to northern regions which much earlier authors had described as the remotest parts of "Germania", and established a tradition of connecting the earliest origins of Goths and other peoples to Scandinavia, which was for him a distant and almost unknown island. He thus connected the Goths ("Gothi") not only with ancient Amazons, Trojans, Huns, and the similarly-named Getae, but also to the Baltic sea. Some modern writers, such as Wolfram and Heather, still see this as confirmed by the mention of similar sounding "Gutones" near the south Baltic coast in earlier authors such as Tacitus and Ptolemy. Others have noted that Jordanes himself believed the Goths would have left the region centuries before those writers, making the identification doubtful. Indeed, he or his sources must have derived many of the names of ancient peoples and places from reading old Latin and Greek authors.
Very influentially, Jordanes called Scandinavia a "womb of nations" ("vagina nationum"), asserting that many peoples came from there in prehistoric times. This idea influenced later origin legends including the Lombard origin story, written by Paul the Deacon (8th century) who opens his work with an explanation of the theory. During the Carolingian renaissance he and other scholars even sometimes used the Germanic terminology. (See below.) The Scandinavian origin theme was still influential in medieval times and has even been influential in early modern speculations about Germanic peoples, for example in proposals about the origins of not only Goths and Gepids, but also of Rugians and Burgundians.
The citing of Jordanes and similar writers to attempt to prove that the Goths were "Germanic" in more than language continues to arouse debate among scholars, because while his work is unreliable, the Baltic connection on its own is consistent with linguistic and archaeological evidence. However, Walter Goffart in particular has criticized the methodology of many modern scholars for using Jordanes and other origins stories as independent sources of real tribal memories, but only when it matches their beliefs arrived at in other ways.
During the Renaissance there was a rediscovery and renewed interest in secular writings of classical antiquity. By the late 15th century, Tacitus had become a focus of interest all around Europe, and, among other effects, this revolutionized ideas in Germany concerning the history of Germany itself. Tacitus continues to be an important influence in Germanic studies of antiquity, and is often read together with the "Getica" of Jordanes, who wrote much later.
Tacitus's ethnography won the attention it had formerly been denied because there now was a Germany, the "German nation" that had come into existence since the Carolingians, which Tacitus could now equip with a heaven-sent ancient dignity and pedigree.
In this context, in the 19th century, the famous folklorist and linguist Jacob Grimm helped popularize the concept of Germanic languages as well as of Indo-european languages. Apart from the well-known Grimm's Fairy Tales, collected with his brother Wilhelm, he published, for example, "Deutsche Mythologie" attempting to reconstruct Germanic mythology, and a German dictionary, "Deutsches Wörterbuch", with detailed etymological proposals attempting to reconstruct the oldest Germanic language. He also popularized a new idea of these Germanic speakers, especially those in Germany, as clinging valiantly to their supposed Germanic civilization over the centuries.
The subsequently popular modern assertion of strong cultural continuity between Roman-era "Germani" and medieval or modern Germanic speakers, especially Germans, assumed a strong connection between a family trees of language categories, and both cultural and racial heritages. The name of the newly defined language family, "Germanic", was long unpopular in other countries such as England, where the medieval "Teutonic" was seen as less potentially misleading. Similarly, in Denmark "Gothic" was sometimes used as a term for the language group uniting the "Germani" and the Goths, and a modified Gothonic was proposed by Gudmund Schütte and used locally.
This romanticist, nationalist approach has been rejected by scholars in its simplest forms since approximately World War II. For example, the once common habit of referring to Roman-era Germanic peoples as "Germans" is discouraged by modern historians, and modern Germans are no longer seen as the main successors of the "Germani". Not only are ideas associated with Nazism now criticized, but also other romanticized ideas about the Germanic peoples. For example, Guy Halsall has mentioned the popularity of the "view of the peoples of Germania as, essentially, proto-democratic communes of freemen". [Peter Heather]] has pointed out as well that the Marxist theory "that some of Europe's barbarians were ultimately responsible for moving Europe onwards to the feudal modern of production has also lost much of its force".
Further, some historians now question whether there was any unifying Germanic culture even in Roman times, and secondly whether there was any significant continuity at all apart from language, connecting the Roman era Germanic peoples with the mixed new ethnic groups who formed in late antiquity. Sceptics of such connections include Walter Goffart, and others associated with him and the University of Toronto. Goffart lists four "contentions" about how the Germanic terminology biases the conclusions of historians, and is therefore misleading:
On the other hand, the possibility of a small but significant "core of tradition" ("Traditionskern") surviving with the ruling classes of Roman Germanic peoples, in the societies of new medieval Germanic-speaking peoples such as the Franks, Alamanni, Anglo-Saxons, and Goths, continues to be defended by other historians. This "Traditionskern" concept is associated for example with the Vienna School of History, initiated by Reinhard Wenskus, and later represented by scholars such as Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl.
Peter Heather for example, continues to use the Germanic terminology but writes that concerning proposals of Germanic continuity, "all subsequent discussion has accepted and started from Wenskus's basic observations" and "the "Germani" in the first millenium were thus not closed groups with continuous histories". Heather however believes that such caution now often goes too far in denying any large scale movements of people in specific cases, as exemplified by Patrick Amory's explanation of the Ostrogoths and their Kingdom of Italy.
Another proponent of relatively significant continuity, Wolf Liebeschuetz, has argued that the shared use of Germanic languages by, for example, Anglo-Saxons and Goths, implies that they must have had more links to "Germania" than only language. While little concrete evidence has survived, Liebeschuetz proposes that the existence of Weregild laws, stipulating compensation payments to avoid blood feuds, must have been of Germanic origin because such laws were not Roman. Liebeschuetz also argues that recent sceptical scholars "deprive the ancient Germans and their constituent tribes of any continuous identity" and this is "important" because it makes European history a product of Roman history, not "a joint creation of Roman and Germans".
Archaeologists divide the area of Roman-era "Germania" into several Iron Age "material cultures". At the time of Caesar, all had been under the strong influence of the La Tène culture, an old culture in the south and west of "Germania", which is strongly associated with Celtic-speaking Gauls, including those in Gaul itself. These La Tène peoples, who included the "Germani cisrhenani", are generally considered unlikely to have spoken Germanic languages as defined today, though some may have spoken unknown related languages or Celtic dialects. To the north of these zones however, in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany, the archaeological cultures started to become more distinct from La Tène culture during the Iron Age.
Concerning Germanic speakers within these northern regions, the relatively well-defined Jastorf culture matches the areas described by Tacitus, Pliny the elder and Strabo as Suevian homelands near the lower River Elbe, and stretching east on the Baltic coast to the Oder river. The Suevian peoples are seen by scholars as early West Germanic speakers. There is no consensus about whether neighbouring cultures in Scandinavia, Poland, and northwestern Germany were also part of a Germanic (or proto-Germanic)-speaking community at first, but this group of cultures were related to each other, and in contact. To the west of the Elbe for example, on what is now the German North Sea coast, was the so-called between the Jastorf culture and the La Tène influenced cultures of the Lower Rhine. To the east in what is now northern Poland was the Oksywie culture, later becoming the Wielbark culture with the arrival of Jastorf influences, probably representing the entry of East Germanic speakers. Related also to these and the Jastorf culture was the Przeworsk culture in southern Poland. It began as strongly La Tène-influenced local culture, and apparently became at least partly Germanic-speaking.
The Jastorf culture came into direct contact with La Tène cultures on the upper Elbe and Oder rivers, believed to correspond to the Celtic-speaking peoples such as the Boii and Volcae described in this area by Roman sources. In the south of their range, the Jastorf and Przeworsk material cultures spread together, in several directions.
Unlike archaeologists today, Caesar, the originator of the idea of the Germanic peoples, believed that in prehistory, before his time, the Rhine had divided "Germani" from the Gauls. However, he observed that there must already have been significant movements in both directions, over the Rhine. Not only did he believe that the "Germani" had a long-standing tendency to make raids and group movements from the northeast, involving peoples such as the Cimbri long before him, and the Suevians in his own time, it was also his understanding that there had been a time when the movement went in the opposite direction:
And there was formerly a time when the Gauls excelled the Germans ["Germani"] in prowess, and waged war on them offensively, and, on account of the great number of their people and the insufficiency of their land, sent colonies over the Rhine . Accordingly, the Volcae Tectosages, seized on those parts of Germany which are the most fruitful [and lie] around the Hercynian forest, (which, I perceive, was known by report to Eratosthenes and some other Greeks, and which they call Orcynia), and settled there.
Modern archaeologists, having found no sign of such movements, see the Gaulish La Tène culture as native to what is now southern Germany, and the La Tène-influenced cultures on both sides of the Lower Rhine in this period as quite distinct from the Elbe Germanic peoples, well into Roman times. On the other hand, the account of Caesar finds broad agreement with the archaeological record of the Celtic La Tène culture first expanding to the north, influencing all cultures there, and then suddenly having a weaker influence in that area. Subsequently, the Jastorf culture expanded in all directions from the region between the lower Elbe and Oder rivers.
All Germanic languages derive from the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), which is generally estimated to have been spoken between 4500 and 2500 BCE. They share distinctive characteristics which set them apart from other Indo-European sub-families of languages, such as Grimm's and Verner's law, the conservation of the PIE ablaut system in the Germanic verb system (notably in strong verbs), or the merger of the vowels "a" and "o" qualities ("ə", "a", "o" > "a;" "ā", "ō" > "ō"). During the Pre-Germanic linguistic period (2500–500 BCE), the proto-language has almost certainly been influenced by linguistic substrates still noticeable in the Germanic phonology and lexicon. The leading theory, suggested by archaeological and genetic evidence, postulates a diffusion of Indo-European languages from the Pontic–Caspian steppe towards Northern Europe during the third millennium BCE, via linguistic contacts and migrations from the Corded Ware culture towards modern-day Denmark, resulting in cultural mixing with the indigenous Funnelbeaker culture.
Between around 500 BCE and the beginning of the Common Era, archeological and linguistic evidence suggest that the "Urheimat" ('original homeland') of the Proto-Germanic language, the ancestral idiom of all attested Germanic dialects, was primarily situated in an area corresponding to the extent of the late Jastorf culture. One piece of evidence is the presence of early Germanic loanwords in the Finnic and Sámi languages (e.g. Finnic "kuningas", from Proto-Germanic "*kuningaz" 'king'; "rengas", from "*hringaz" ‘ring’; etc.), with the older loan layers possibly dating back to an earlier period of intense contacts between pre-Germanic and Finno-Permic (i.e. Finno-Samic) speakers. An archeological continuity can also be demonstrated between the Jastof culture and populations defined as Germanic by Roman sources.
Although Proto-Germanic is reconstructed dialect-free via the comparative method, it is almost certain that it was never a uniform proto-language. The late Jastorf culture occupied so much territory that it is unlikely that Germanic populations spoke a single dialect, and traces of early linguistic varieties have been highlighted by scholars. Sister dialects of Proto-Germanic itself certainly existed, as evidenced by some recorded Germanic proper names not following Grimm's law, and the reconstructed Proto-Germanic language was only one among several dialects spoken at that time by peoples identified as "Germanic" in Roman sources or archeological data.
Definite and comprehensive evidence of the use of Germanic lexical units occurred only after Caesar's conquest of Gaul in the 1st century BCE, after which contacts with Proto-Germanic speakers began to intensify. The "Alcis", a pair of brother gods worshipped by the Nahanarvali, are given by Tacitus as a Latinized form of "*alhiz" (a kind of 'stag'), and the word "sapo" ('hair dye') is certainly borrowed from Proto-Germanic "*saipwōn-" (English "soap)", as evidenced by the parallel Finnish loanword "saipio." The name of the "framea", described by Tacitus as a short spear carried by Germanic warriors, most likely derives from the compound "*fram-ij-an-" ('forward-going one'), as suggested by comparable semantical structures found in early runes (e.g., "raun-ij-az" 'tester', on a lancehead) and linguistic cognates attested in the later Old Norse, Old Saxon and Old High German languages: "fremja," "fremmian" and "fremmen" all meant 'to carry out'.
The origin of the Germanic runes remains controversial, although it has been stated that they bear a more formal resemblance to North Italic alphabets (especially the Camunic alphabet; 1st mill. BCE) than to Latin letters. They are not attested before the beginning of the Common Era in southern Scandinavia, and the connection between the two alphabets is therefore uncertain. In the absence of earlier evidence, it must be assumed that Proto-Germanic speakers living in "Germania" were members of preliterate societies. The only pre-Roman inscription that could be interpreted as Proto-Germanic, written in the Etruscan alphabet, has not been found in "Germania" but rather in the Venetic region. The inscription "harikastiteiva\\\ip", engraved on the Negau helmet in the 3rd–2nd centuries BCE, possibly by a Germanic-speaking warrior involved in combat in northern Italy, has been interpreted by some scholars as "Harigasti Teiwǣ" ("*harja-gastiz" 'army-guest' + "*teiwaz" '(war-)god'), which could be an invocation to a war-god or a mark of ownership engraved by its possessor. The inscription "Fariarix" ("*farjōn-" 'ferry' + "*rīk-" 'ruler') carved on tetradrachms found in Bratislava (mid-1st c. BCE) may indicate the Germanic name of a Celtic ruler.
The earliest attested runic inscriptions (Vimose comb, Øvre Stabu spearhead), initially concentrated in modern Denmark and written with the Elder Futhark system, are dated to the second half of the 2nd century CE. Their language, named Primitive Norse, Proto-Norse, or similar terms, and still very close to Proto-Germanic, has been interpreted as a northern variant of the Northwest Germanic dialects and the ancestor of the Old Norse language of the Viking Age (8th–11th c. CE). Based upon its dialect-free character and shared features with West Germanic languages, some scholars have contended that it served as a kind of koiné language. The merging of unstressed Proto-Germanic vowels, attested in runic inscriptions from the 4th and 5th centuries CE, also suggests that Primitive Norse could not have been a direct predecessor of West Germanic dialects.
By the time Germanic speakers entered written history, their linguistic territory had stretched farther south, since a Germanic dialect continuum covered a region roughly located between the Rhine, the Vistula, the Danube, and southern Scandinavia during the first two centuries of the Common Era. Neighbouring language varieties diverged only slightly between each other in this continuum, but remote dialects were not necessarily mutually intelligible due to accumulated differences over the distance. East Germanic speakers dwelt on the Baltic sea coasts and islands, while speakers of the Northwestern dialects occupied territories in present-day Denmark and bordering parts of Germany at the earliest date that they can be identified.
In the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, migrations of East Germanic "gentes" from the Baltic Sea coast southeastwards into the hinterland led to their separation from the dialect continuum. By the late 3rd century CE, linguistic divergences like the West Germanic loss of the final consonant "-z" had already occurred within the "residual" Northwest dialect continuum,"" which definitely ended after the 5th- and 6th-century migrations of Angles, Jutes and part of Saxon groups towards modern-day England.
Although they have certainly influenced academic views on ancient Germanic languages up until the 20th century, the traditional groupings given by contemporary authors such as Pliny and Tacitus are no longer regarded as reliable by modern linguists, who rather base their reasoning on the attested sound changes and shared mutations which occurred in geographically distant groups of dialects. The Germanic languages are traditionally divided between East, North and West Germanic branches. The modern prevailing view is that North and West Germanic were also encompassed in a larger subgroup called Northwest Germanic.
Further internal classifications are still debated among scholars, as it is unclear whether the internal features shared by several branches are due to early common innovations or to the later diffusion of local dialectal innovations. Although Old English and Old Frisian shared distinctive characteristics such as the Anglo-Frisian nasal spirant law, attested by the 6th century in inscriptions on both sides of the North Sea, and the use of the fuþorc system with additional runes to convey innovative and shared sound changes, it is unclear whether those common features are really inherited or have rather emerged by connections over the North Sea.
By the 1st century CE, the writings of Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus reported a division of Germanic peoples into large groupings. Tacitus, in his "Germania", specifically stated that one such division mentioned "in old songs" ("carminibus antiquis") derived three such groups from three brothers, sons of Mannus, who was son of an earth-born god, Tuisto. These terms are also sometimes used in older modern linguistic terminology, attempting to describe the divisions of later Germanic languages:
On the other hand, Tacitus wrote in the same passage that some believe that there are other groups which are just as old as these three, including "the Marsi, Gambrivii, Suevi, Vandilii". Of these, he discussed only the Suevi in detail, specifying that they were a very large grouping, with many peoples, with their own names. The largest, he said, was the Semnones near the Elbe, who "claim that they are the oldest and the noblest of the Suebi."
Pliny the Elder, somewhat similarly, named five races of Germani in his "Historia Naturalis", with the same basic three groups as Tacitus, plus two more eastern blocks of Germans, the Vandals, and further east the Bastarnae. He clarifies that the Istvaeones are near the Rhine, although he gives only one problematic example, the Cimbri. He also clarifies that the Suevi, though numerous, are actually in one of the three Mannus groups. His list:
These accounts and others from the period emphasize that the Suevi formed an especially large and powerful group. Tacitus speaks also of a geographical "Suevia" with two halves, one on either side of the Sudetes. The larger group that the Suevi were part of according to Pliny, the Hermiones, is mentioned in one other source: Pomponius Mela, in his slightly earlier "Description of the World", places "the farthest people of Germania, the Hermiones" somewhere to the east of the Cimbri and the Teutones, apparently on the Baltic. He did not mention Suevians.
Strabo, who focused mainly on "Germani" between the Elbe and Rhine, and does not mention the sons of Mannus, also set apart the names of "Germani" who are "not" Suevian, in two other groups, similarly implying three main divisions: "smaller German tribes, as the Cherusci, Chatti, Gamabrivi, Chattuarii, and next the ocean the Sicambri, Chaubi, Bructeri, Cimbri, Cauci, Caulci, Campsiani".
From the perspective of modern linguistic reconstructions, the classical ethnographers were not helpful in distinguishing two large groups that spoke types of Germanic very different from the Suevians and their neighbours, whose languages are the source of modern West Germanic.
The "Gothic peoples" in the territory of present-day Ukraine and Romania were seen by Graeco-Roman writers as culturally "Scythian", and not Germanic, and indeed some of them such as the Alans were clearly not Germanic-speaking either. Whether the Gothic-speaking peoples among them had any consciousness of their connections to other Germanic-speaking peoples is a subject of dispute between scholars.
Before Julius Caesar, Romans and Greeks had very little contact with northern Europe itself. Pytheas who travelled to Northern Europe some time in the late 4th century BCE was one of the only sources of information for later historians. The Romans and Greeks however had contact with northerners who came south.
The Bastarnae or Peucini are mentioned in historical sources going back as far as the 3rd century BCE through the 4th century CE. These Bastarnae were described by Greek and Roman authors as living in the territory east of the Carpathian Mountains north of the Danube's delta at the Black Sea. They were variously described as Celtic or Scythian, but much later Tacitus, in disagreement with Livy, said they were similar to the "Germani" in language. According to some authors then, they were the first "Germani" to reach the Greco-Roman world and the Black Sea area.
In 201–202 BCE, the Macedonians, under the leadership of King Philip V, conscripted the Bastarnae as soldiers to fight against the Roman Republic in the Second Macedonian War. They remained a presence in that area until late in the Roman Empire. The Peucini were a part of this people who lived on Peuce Island, at the mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea. King Perseus enlisted the service of the Bastarnae in 171–168 BCE to fight the Third Macedonian War. By 29 BCE, they were subdued by the Romans and those that remained presumably merged into various groups of Goths into the second century CE.
Another eastern people known from about 200 BCE and sometimes believed to be Germanic-speaking, are the Scirii, because they appear in a record in Olbia on the Black Sea which records that the city had been troubled by Scythians, Sciri and Galatians. There is a theory that their name, perhaps meaning pure, was intended to contrast with the Bastarnae, perhaps meaning mixed, or "bastards". Much later, Pliny the Elder placed them to the north near the Vistula together with an otherwise unknown people called the Hirrii. The Hirrii are sometimes equated with the Harii mentioned by Tacitus in this region, whom he considered to be Germanic Lugians. These names have also been compared to that of the Heruli, who are another people from the area of modern Ukraine, believed to have been Germanic. In later centuries the Scirii, like the Heruli, and many of the Goths, were among the peoples who allied with Attila and settled in the Middle Danube, Pannonian region.
Late in the 2nd century BCE, Roman and Greek sources recount the migrations of the far northern "Gauls", the Cimbri, Teutones and Ambrones. Caesar later classified them as Germanic. They first appeared in eastern Europe where some researchers propose they may have been in contact with the Bastarnae and Scordisci. In 113 BCE, they defeated the Boii at the Battle of Noreia in Noricum.
Their movements through parts of Gaul, Italy and Hispania resulted in the Cimbrian War between these groups and the Roman Republic, led primarily by its Consul, Gaius Marius.
In Gaul, a combined force of Cimbri and Teutoni and others defeated the Romans in the Battle of Burdigala (107 BCE) at Bordeaux, in the Battle of Arausio (105) at Orange in France, and in the Battle of Tridentum (102) at Trento in Italy. Their further incursions into Roman Italy were repelled by the Romans at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence) in 102 BCE, and the Battle of Vercellae in 101 BCE (in Vercelli in Piedmont).
One classical source, Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, mentions the northern Gauls somewhat later, associating them with eastern Europe, saying that both the Bastarae and the Cimbri were allies of Mithridates VI.
Caesar campaigned in what is now France from 58-50 BCE, in the period of the late Roman Republic. As mentioned above, Caesar wrote about this campaign in a way which introduced the term "Germanic" to refer to peoples such as the Cimbri and Suevi.
Still in the 1st century BCE the term "Germani" was used by Strabo (see above) and Cicero in ways clearly influenced by Caesar. Of the peoples encountered by Caesar, the Tribocci, Vangiones, Nemetes and Ubii were all found later, on the east of the Rhine, along the new frontier of the Roman empire.
During the reign of Augustus from 27 BCE until 14 CE, the Roman empire became established in Gaul, with the Rhine as a border. This empire made costly campaigns to pacify and control the large region between the Rhine and Elbe. In the reign of his successor Tiberius it became state policy to leave the border at the Rhine, and expand the empire no further in that direction. The Julio-Claudian dynasty, the extended family of Augustus, paid close personal attention to management of this Germanic frontier, establishing a tradition followed by many future emperors. Major campaigns were led from the Rhine personally by Nero Claudius Drusus, step-son of Augustus, then by his brother the future emperor Tiberius; next by the son of Drusus, Germanicus (father of the future emperor Caligula and grandfather of Nero).
In 38 BCE, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, consul of Transalpine Gaul, became the second Roman to lead forces over the Rhine. In 31 BCE Gaius Carrinas repulsed an attack by Suevi from east of the Rhine. In 25 BCE Marcus Vinicius took vengeance on some "Germani" in "Germania", who had killed Roman traders. In 17/16 BCE at the Battle of Bibracte the Sugambri, Usipetes, and Tencteri crossed the Rhine and defeated the 5th legion under Marcus Lollius, capturing the legion's eagle.
From 13 BCE until 17 CE there were major Roman campaigns across the Rhine nearly every year, often led by members of the family of Augustus. First came the pacification of the Usipetes, Sicambri, and Frisians near the Rhine, then attacks increased further from the Rhine, on the Chauci, Cherusci, Chatti and Suevi (including the Marcomanni). These campaigns eventually reached and even crossed the Elbe, and in 5 CE Tiberius was able to show strength by having a Roman fleet enter the Elbe and meet the legions in the heart of "Germania". However, within this period two Germanic kings formed large anti-Roman alliances. Both of them had spent some of their youth in Rome:
Strabo, writing in this period in Greek, mentioned that apart from the area near the Rhine itself, the areas to the east were now inhabited by the Suevi, "who are also named Germans, but are superior both in power and number to the others, whom they drove out, and who have now taken refuge on this side the Rhine". Various peoples had fallen "prey to the flames of war".
The Julio-Claudian dynasty also recruited northern Germanic warriors, particularly men of the Batavi, as personal bodyguards to the Roman emperor, forming the so-called Numerus Batavorum. After the end of the dynasty, in 69 AD, the Batavian bodyguard were dissolved by Galba in 68 because of its loyalty to the old dynasty. The decision caused deep offense to the Batavi, and contributed to the outbreak of the Revolt of the Batavi in the following year which united "Germani" and Gauls, all connected to Rome but living both within the empire and outside it, over the Rhine. Their indirect successors were the "Equites singulares Augusti" which were, likewise, mainly recruited from the Germani. They were apparently so similar to the Julio-Claudians' earlier German Bodyguard that they were given the same nickname, the "Batavi". Gaius Julius Civilis, a Roman military officer of Batavian origin, orchestrated the Revolt. The revolt lasted nearly a year and was ultimately unsuccessful.
The Emperor Domitian of the Flavian dynasty faced attacks from the Chatti in Germania superior, with its capital at Mainz, a large group which had not been in the alliance of Arminius or Maroboduus. The Romans claimed victory by 84 CE, and Domitian also improved the frontier defenses of Roman "Germania", consolidating control of the "Agri Decumates", and converting "Germania Inferior" and "Germania Superior" into normal Roman provinces. In 89 CE the Chatti were allies of Lucius Antonius Saturninus in his failed revolt. Domitian, and his eventual successor Trajan, also faced increasing concerns about an alliance on the Danube of the Suevian Marcomanni and Quadi, with the neighbouring Sarmatian Iazyges; it was in this area that dramatic events unfolded over the next few generations. Trajan himself expanded the empire in this region, taking over Dacia.
The Marcomannic Wars during the time of Marcus Aurelius ended in approximately 180 CE. Dio Cassius called it the war against the "Germani", noting that "Germani" was the term used for people who dwell up in those parts (in the north). A large number of peoples from north of the Danube were involved, not all Germanic-speaking, and there is much speculation about what events or plans led to this situation. Many scholars believe causative pressure was being created by aggressive movements of peoples further north, for example with the apparent expansion of the Wielbark culture of the Vistula, probably representing Gothic peoples who may have pressured Vandal peoples towards the Danube.
Other peoples, perhaps not all of them Germanic, were involved in various actions—these included the Costoboci, the Hasdingi and Lacringi Vandals, the Varisci (or Naristi) and the Cotini (not Germanic according to Tacitus), and possibly also the Buri.
After these Marcomannic wars, the Middle Danube began to change, and in the next century the peoples living there tended to be referred to as Gothic, rather than Germanic.
By the early 3rd century AD, large new groupings of Germanic people appeared near the Roman frontier, though they were not strongly unified. The first of these conglomerations mentioned in the historical sources were the Alamanni (a term meaning "all men") who appear in Roman texts sometime in the 3rd century CE. These are believed to have been a mixture of mainly Suevian peoples, who coalesced in the Agri Decumates. Emperor Severus Alexander was killed by his own soldiers in 235 CE for paying for peace with the Alamanni, following which the anti-aristocratic general Maximinus Thrax was elected to be emperor by the Pannonian army. According to the notoriously unreliable Augustan History ("Historia Augusta"), he was born in Thrace or Moesia to a Gothic father and an Alanic mother,
Secondly, soon after the appearance of the Alamanni on the Upper Rhine, the Franks began to be mentioned as occupying the land at the bend of the lower Rhine. In this case, the collective name was new, but the original peoples who composed the group were largely local, and their old names were still mentioned occasionally. The Franks were still sometimes called "Germani" as well.
Thirdly, the Goths and other "Gothic peoples" from the area of today's Poland and Ukraine, many of whom were Germanic-speaking peoples, began to appear in records of this period.
In 260 CE, as the Roman Imperial Crisis of the Third Century reached its climax, Postumus, a Germanic soldier in Roman service, established the Gallic Empire, which claimed suzerainty over Germania, Gaul, Hispania and Britannia. Postumus was eventually assassinated by his own followers, after which the Gallic Empire quickly disintegrated. The traditional types of border battles with "Germani", Sarmatians and Goths continued on the Rhine and Danube frontiers after this.
In the 350s Julian campaigned against the Alamanni and Franks on the Rhine. One result was that Julian accepted that the Salian Franks could live within the empire, north of Tongeren.
By 369, the Romans appear to have ceded their large province of Dacia to the Tervingi, Taifals and Victohali.
Since its very beginning, the Roman empire had proactively kept the northern peoples and the potential danger they represented under control, just as Caesar had proposed. However, the ability to handle the barbarians in the old way broke down in the late 4th century and the western part of the empire itself broke down. In addition to the Franks on the Rhine frontier, and Suevian peoples such as the Alamanni, a sudden movement of eastern Germanic-speaking "Gothic peoples" now played an increasing role both inside and outside imperial territory.
The Gothic wars of the late 4th century saw a rapid series of major events: the entry of a large number of Goths in 376; the defeat of a major Roman army and killing of emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianopolis in 378; and a subsequent major settlement treaty for the Goths which seems to have allowed them significant concessions compared to traditional treaties with barbarian peoples. While the eastern empire eventually recovered, the subsequent long-reigning western emperor Honorius (reigned 393-423) was unable to impose imperial authority over much of the empire for most of his reign. In contrast to the eastern empire, in the west the "attempts of its ruling class to use the Roman-barbarian kings to preserve the res publica failed".
The Gothic wars were affected indirectly by the arrival of the nomadic Huns from Central Asia in the Ukrainian region. Some Gothic peoples, such as the Gepids and the Greuthungi (sometimes seen as predecessors of the later Ostrogoths), joined the newly forming Hunnish faction, and played a prominent role in the Hunnic Empire, where Gothic became a lingua franca. Based on the description of Socrates Scholasticus, Guy Halsall has argued that the Hunnish hegemony developed after a major campaign by Valens against the Goths, which had caused great damage, but failed to achieve a decisive victory. Peter Heather has argued that Socrates should be rejected on this point, as inconsistent with the testimony of Ammianus.
The Gothic Thervingi, under the leadership of Athanaric, had in any case borne the impact of the campaign of Valens, and were also losers against the Huns, but clients of Rome. A new faction under leadership of Fritigern, a Christian, were given asylum inside the Roman Empire in 376 CE. They crossed the Danube and became "foederati". With the emperor occupied in the Middle East, the Tervingi were treated badly and becoming desperate; significant numbers of mounted Greuthungi, Alans and others were able to cross the river and support a Tervingian uprising leading to the massive Roman defeat at Adrianople.
Around 382, the Romans and the Goths now within the empire came to agreements about the terms under which the Goths should live. There is debate over the exact nature of such agreements, and for example whether they allowed the continuous semi-independent existence of pre-existing peoples; however the Goths do appear to have been allowed more privileges than in traditional settlements with such outside groups. One result of the comprehensive settlement was that the imperial army now had a larger number of Goths, including Gothic generals.
By 383 a new emperor, Theodosius I, was seen as victorious over the Goths and having brought the situation back under control. Goths were a prominent but resented part of the eastern military. The Greutungi and Alans had been settled in Pannonia by the western co-emperor Gratian (assassinated in 383) who was himself a Pannonian. Theodosius died 395, and was succeeded by his sons: Arcadius in the east, and Honorius, who was still a minor, in the west. The Western empire had however become destabilized since 383, with several young emperors including Gratian having previously been murdered. Court factions and military leaders in the east and west attempted to control the situation.
Alaric was a Roman military commander of Gothic background, who first appears in the record in the time of Theodosius. After the death of Theodosius, he became one of the various Roman competitors for influence and power in the difficult situation. The forces he led were described as mixed barbarian forces, and clearly included many other people of Gothic background, a phenomenon which had become common in the Balkans. In an important turning point for Roman history, during the factional turmoil, his army came to act increasingly as an independent political entity within the Roman empire, and at some point he came to be referred to as their king, probably around 401 CE, when he lost his official Roman title. This is the origin of the Visigoths, whom the empire later allowed to settle in what is now southwestern France. While military units had often had their own ethnic history and symbolism, this is the first time that such a group established a new kingdom. There is disagreement about whether Alaric or his family had a royal background, but there is no doubt that this kingdom was a new entity, very different from any previous Gothic kingdoms.
In the aftermath of the large-scale Gothic entries into the empire, the Germanic Rhine peoples, the Franks and Alemanni, became more secure in their positions in 395, when Stilicho made agreements with them; these treaties allowed him to withdraw the imperial forces from the Rhine frontier in order to use them in his conflicts with Alaric and the Eastern empire.
On the Danube, change was far more dramatic. In the words of Walter Goffart:
Between 401 and 411, four distinct groups of barbarians - different from Alaric's Goths - invaded Roman territory, all apparently on one-way journeys, in large-scale efforts to transpose themselves onto imperial soil and not just plunder and return home.
The reasons that these invasions apparently all dispersed from the same area, the Middle Danube, are uncertain. It is most often argued that the Huns must have already started moving west, and consequently pressuring the Middle Danube. Peter Heather for example writes that around 400, "a highly explosive situation was building up in the Middle Danube, as Goths, Vandals, Alans and other refugees from the Huns moved west of the Carpathians" into the area of modern Hungary on the Roman frontier.
Walter Goffart, in contrast, has pointed out that there is no clear evidence of new eastern groups arriving in the area immediately before the great movements, and so it remains possible that the Huns moved West after these large groups had left the Middle Danube. Goffart's suggestion is that the example of the Goths, such as those led by Alaric, had set an example leading to a "common perception, however indistinct, that warriors could improve their condition by forcing their existence on the attention of the Empire, demanding to be dealt with, and exacting a part in the imperial enterprise."
Whatever the chain of events, the Middle Danube later became the centre of Attila's loose empire containing many East Germanic people from the east, who remained there after the death of Attila. The makeup of peoples in that area, previously the home of the Germanic Marcomanni, Quadi and non-Germanic Iazyges, changed completely in ways which had a significant impact on the Roman empire and its European neighbours. Thereafter, though the new peoples ruling this area still included Germanic-speakers, as discussed above, they were not described by Romans as "Germani", but rather "Gothic peoples".
Motivated by the ensuing chaos in Gaul, in 406 the Roman army in Britain elected Constantine "III" as emperor and they took control there.
In 408, the eastern emperor Arcadius died, leaving a child as successor, and the west Roman military leader Stilicho was killed. Alaric, wanting a formal Roman command but unable to negotiate one, invaded Rome itself, twice, in 401 and 408.
Constantius III, who became "Magister militum" by 411, restored order step-by-step, eventually allowing the Visigoths to settle within the empire in southwest Gaul. He also committed to retaking control of Iberia, from the Rhine-crossing groups. When Constantius died in 421, having been co-emperor himself for one year, Honorius was the only emperor in the West. However, Honorius died in 423 without an heir. After this, the Western Roman empire steadily lost control of its provinces.
The Western Roman Empire declined gradually in the 5th and 6th centuries, and the eastern emperors had only limited control over events in Italy and the western empire. Germanic speakers, who by now dominated the Roman military in Europe, and lived both inside and outside the empire, played many roles in this complex dynamic. Notably, as the old territory of the western empire came to be ruled on a regional basis, the barbarian military forces, ruled now by kings, took over administration with differing levels of success. With some exceptions, such as the Alans and Bretons, most of these new political entities identified themselves with a Germanic-speaking heritage.
In the 420s, Flavius Aëtius was a general who successfully used Hunnish forces on several occasions, fighting Roman factions and various barbarians including Goths and Franks. In 429 he was elevated to the rank of "magister militum" in the western empire, which eventually allowed him to gain control of much of its policy by 433. One of his first conflicts was with Boniface, a rebellious governor of the province of Africa in modern Tunisia and Libya. Both sides sought an alliance with the Vandals based in southern Spain who had acquired a fleet there. In this context, the Vandal and Alan kingdom of North Africa and the western Mediterranean would come into being.
In the subsequent decades, the Franks and Alamanni tended to remain in small kingdoms but these began to extend deeper into the empire. In northern Gaul, a Roman military "King of Franks" also seems to have existed, Childeric I, whose successor Clovis I established dominance of the smaller kingdoms of the Franks and Alamanni, whom they defeated at the Battle of Zülpich in 496.
Compared to Gaul, what happened in Roman Britain, which was similarly both isolated from Italy and heavily Romanized, is less clearly recorded. However the end result was similar, with a Germanic-speaking military class, the Anglo-Saxons, taking over administration of what remained of Roman society, and conflict between an unknown number of regional powers. While major parts of Gaul and Britain redefined themselves ethnically on the basis of their new rulers, as Francia and England, in England the main population also became Germanic-speaking. The exact reasons for the difference are uncertain, but significant levels of migration played a role.
In 476 Odoacer, a Roman soldier who came from the peoples of the Middle Danube in the aftermath of the Battle of Nedao, became King of Italy, removing the last of the western emperors from power. He was murdered and replaced in 493 by Theoderic the Great, described as King of the Ostrogoths, one of the most powerful Middle Danube peoples of the old Hun alliance. Theoderic had been raised up and supported by the eastern emperors, and his administration continued a sophisticated Roman administration, in cooperation with the traditional Roman senatorial class. Similarly, culturally Roman lifestyles continued in North Africa under the Vandals, in Savoy under the Burgundians, and within the Visigothic realm.
The Ostrogothic kingdom ended in 542 when the eastern emperor Justinian made a last great effort to reconquer the Western Mediterranean. The conflicts destroyed the Italian senatorial class, and the eastern empire was also unable to hold Italy for long. In 568 the Lombard king Alboin, a Suevian people who had entered the Middle Danubian region from the north conquering and partly absorbing the frontier peoples there, entered Italy and created the Italian Kingdom of the Lombards there. These Lombards now included Suevi, Heruli, Gepids, Bavarians, Bulgars, Avars, Saxons, Goths, and Thuringians. As Peter Heather has written these "peoples" were no longer peoples in any traditional sense.
Older accounts which describe a long period of massive movements of peoples and military invasions are oversimplified, and describe only specific incidents. According to Herwig Wolfram, the Germanic peoples did not and could not "conquer the more advanced Roman world" nor were they able to "restore it as a political and economic entity"; instead, he asserts that the empire's "universalism" was replaced by "tribal particularism" which gave way to "regional patriotism". The Germanic peoples who overran the Western Roman Empire probably numbered less than 100,000 people per group, including approximately 15,000-20,000 warriors. They constituted a tiny minority of the population in the lands over which they seized control.
Apart from the common history many of them had in the Roman military, and on Roman frontiers, a new and longer-term unifying factor for the new kingdoms was that by 500, the start of the Middle Ages, most of the old Western empire had converted to the same Rome-centred Catholic form of Christianity. A key turning point was the conversion of Clovis I in 508. Before this point, many of the Germanic kingdoms, such as those of the Goths and Burgundians, now adhered to Arian Christianity - a form of Christianity which they perhaps took up in the time of the Arian emperor Valens, but which was now considered a heresy.
In the centuries after 568, the Visigothic kingdom, by now centred in Spain, was ended by the Umayyad conquest of Hispania in the 8th century. Much of continental catholic Europe became part of a greater Francia under the Merovingian and then the Carolingian dynasty, which began with Pepin the Short, the son of Charles Martel. Charles, though not a king, reconsolidated the Frankish kingdom's dominance over Saxons, Frisians, Bavarians and Burgundians, and defeated the Umayyads at the 732 Battle of Tours. Pepin's son Charlemagne conquered the Lombards in 774, and in an important turning point in European history, was crowned as emperor by Pope Leo III in Rome on Christmas Day, 800 CE. This consolidated a shift in the power structure from the south to the north, and was also a strong symbolic link to Rome and the Roman Christianity. The core of the new empire included what is now France, Germany and the Benelux countries. The empire laid the foundations for the medieval and early modern "ancien regime", finally destroyed only by the French Revolution. The Frankish-Catholic way of doing politics and war and religion also had a strong effect upon all neighbouring regions, including what became England, Spain, Italy, Austria, and Bohemia.
The effect of old Germanic culture on this new Latin-using empire is a topic of dispute, because there was much continuity with the old Roman legal systems, and the increasingly important Christian religion. An example which is argued to show an influence of earlier Germanic culture is law. The new kingdoms created new law codes in Latin, with occasional Germanic words. These were Roman-influenced, and under strong church influence all law was increasingly standardized to accord with Christian philosophy, and old Roman law.
Germanic languages in western Europe no longer exist apart from the remaining West Germanic languages of England, the Frankish homelands near the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta, and the large area between the Rhine and Elbe. With the splitting off of this latter area within the Frankish empire, the first ever political entity corresponding loosely to modern "Germany" came into existence.
In Eastern Europe the once relatively developed periphery of the Roman world collapsed culturally and economically, and this can be seen in the Germanic-associated archaeological evidence: in the area of today's southern Poland and Ukraine the collapse occurred not long after 400, and by 700 Germanic material culture was entirely west of the Elbe in the area where the Romans had been active since Caesar's time, and the Franks were now active. East of the Elbe was to become mainly Slavic-speaking.
Outside of the Roman-influenced zone, Germanic-speaking Scandinavia was in the Vendel period and eventually entered the Viking Age, with expansion to Britain, Ireland and Iceland in the west and as far as Russia and Greece in the east. Swedish Vikings, known locally as the Rus', ventured deep into Russia, where they founded the political entities of Kievan Rus'. They defeated the Khazar Khaganate and became the dominant power in Eastern Europe. The dominant language of these communities came to be East Slavic. By 900 CE the Vikings also secured a foothold on Frankish soil along the Lower Seine River valley in what became known as Normandy. On the other hand, the Scandinavian countries were, starting with Denmark, under the influence of Germany to their south, and also the lands where they had colonies. Bit by bit they became Christian, and organized themselves into Frankish- and Catholic-influenced kingdoms.
Caesar and Tacitus gave colorful descriptions of the Germanic peoples, but scholars note that these need to be viewed cautiously. For one thing, many of the tropes used, such as those concerning the red or blond hair, the blue eyes, and the undisciplined emotions of the Germanic peoples, were old ones that had long been used for any of the northern peoples such as Gauls. Secondly, the Germanic descriptions of both authors are recognized as having been intended to be both critical of Roman moral softness, and pushing for specific foreign policies.
Tacitus famously described the Germanic people as ethnically "unmixed", which had an influence on pre-1945 German racist nationalism. It was not necessarily meant to be purely positive:
For my own part, I agree with those who think that the tribes of Germany are free from all taint of inter-marriages with foreign nations, and that they appear as a distinct, unmixed race, like none but themselves. Hence, too, the same physical peculiarities throughout so vast a population. All have fierce blue eyes, red hair, huge frames, fit only for a sudden exertion. They are less able to bear laborious work. Heat and thirst they cannot in the least endure; to cold and hunger their climate and their soil inure them.
Modern scholars point out that one way of interpreting such remarks is that they are consistent with other comments by Tacitus indicating that the Germanic people lived very remotely, in unattractive countries, for example in the next part of the text:
Their country, though somewhat various in appearance, yet generally either bristles with forests or reeks with swamps; it is more rainy on the side of Gaul, bleaker on that of Noricum and Pannonia. It is productive of grain, but unfavourable to fruit-bearing trees; it is rich in flocks and herds, but these are for the most part undersized, and even the cattle have not their usual beauty or noble head.
Archaeological research has revealed that the early Germanic peoples were primarily agricultural, although husbandry and fishing were important sources of livelihood depending on the nature of their environment. They carried out extensive trade with their neighbours, notably exporting amber, slaves, mercenaries and animal hides, and importing weapons, metals, glassware and coins in return. They eventually came to excel at craftsmanship, particularly metalworking. In many cases, ancient Germanic smiths and other craftsmen produced products of higher quality than those of the Romans.
Before Tacitus, Julius Caesar described the "Germani" and their customs in his "Commentarii de Bello Gallico", though in certain cases it is still a matter of debate if he refers to Northern Celtic peoples or clearly identified Germanic peoples. Caesar notes that the Gauls had earlier dominated and sent colonies into the lands of the Germans, but that the Gauls had since degenerated under the influence of Roman civilization, and now considered themselves inferior in military prowess.
[The Germani] have neither Druids to preside over sacred offices, nor do they pay great regard to sacrifices. They rank in the number of the gods those alone whom they behold, and by whose instrumentality they are obviously benefited, namely, the sun, fire, and the moon; they have not heard of the other deities even by report. Their whole life is occupied in hunting and in the pursuits of the military art; from childhood they devote themselves to fatigue and hardships. Those who have remained chaste for the longest time, receive the greatest commendation among their people; they think that by this the growth is promoted, by this the physical powers are increased and the sinews are strengthened. And to have had knowledge of a woman before the twentieth year they reckon among the most disgraceful acts; of which matter there is no concealment, because they bathe promiscuously in the rivers and [only] use skins or small cloaks of deer's hides, a large portion of the body being in consequence naked.
They do not pay much attention to agriculture, and a large portion of their food consists in milk, cheese, and flesh; nor has any one a fixed quantity of land or his own individual limits; but the magistrates and the leading men each year apportion to the groups and families, who have united together, as much land as, and in the place in which, they think proper, and the year after compel them to remove elsewhere.
In a 2013 book which reviewed studies up until then it was remarked that: "If and when scientists find ancient Y-DNA from men whom we can guess spoke Proto-Germanic, it is most likely to be a mixture of haplogroup I1, R1a1a, R1b-P312 and R1b-106". This was based purely upon those being the Y-DNA groups judged to be most commonly shared by speakers of Germanic languages today. However, as remarked in that book: "All of these are far older than Germanic languages and some are common among speakers of other languages too."
Convenience links, bilingual where possible:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12446
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Ganges
The Ganges ( ) or Ganga (), is a trans-boundary river of South Asia which flows through India and Bangladesh. The river originates from the Gangotri Glacier of western Himalayas in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, and flows south and east through the Gangetic Plain of India and Bangladesh, eventually emptying into the Bay of Bengal.
The Ganges is a lifeline to millions who live along its course. It is a sacred river and worshipped as the goddess "Ganga" in Hinduism. It has been important historically; many former provincial or imperial capitals (such as Patliputra, Kannauj, Kara, Kashi, Allahabad, Murshidabad, Munger, Baharampur, Kampilya and Kolkata) have been located on its banks.
The Ganges is threatened by severe pollution. This poses a danger not only to humans but also to animals; the Ganges is home to approximately 140 species of fish and 90 species of amphibians. The river also contains reptiles and mammals, including critically endangered species such as the Gharial and South Asian river dolphin. The levels of fecal coliform bacteria from human waste in the river near Varanasi are more than a hundred times the Indian government's official limit. The Ganga Action Plan, an environmental initiative to clean up the river, has been considered a failure which is variously attributed to corruption, a lack of will in the government, poor technical expertise and environmental planning
The upper phase of the river Ganges begins at the confluence of the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda rivers in the town of Devprayag in the Garhwal division of the Indian state of Uttarakhand. The Bhagirathi is considered to be the source in Hindu culture and mythology, although the Alaknanda is longer, and therefore, hydro-logically the source stream. The headwaters of the Alakananda are formed by snow melt from peaks such as Nanda Devi, Trisul, and Kamet. The Bhagirathi rises at the foot of Gangotri Glacier, at Gomukh, at an elevation of and being mythologically referred to as residing in the matted locks of Shiva; symbolically Tapovan, which is a meadow of ethereal beauty at the feet of Mount Shivling, just away.
Although many small streams comprise the headwaters of the Ganges; the six longest and their five confluences are considered sacred. The six headstreams are the Alaknanda, Dhauliganga, Nandakini, Pindar, Mandakini and Bhagirathi. Their confluences, known as the Panch Prayag, are all along the Alaknanda. They are, in downstream order, Vishnuprayag, where the Dhauliganga joins the Alaknanda; Nandprayag, where the Nandakini joins; Karnaprayag, where the Pindar joins; Rudraprayag, where the Mandakini joins; and finally, Devprayag, where the Bhagirathi joins the Alaknanda to form the Ganges.
After flowing for through its narrow Himalayan valley, the Ganges emerges from the mountains at Rishikesh, then debouches onto the Gangetic Plain at the pilgrimage town of Haridwar. At Haridwar, a dam diverts some of its waters into the Ganges Canal, which irrigates the "Doab" region of Uttar Pradesh, whereas the river, whose course has been roughly southwest until this point, now begins to flow southeast through the plains of northern India.
The Ganges river follows an arching course passing through the cities of Kannauj, Farukhabad, and Kanpur. Along the way it is joined by the Ramganga, which contributes an average annual flow of about to the river. The Ganges joins the long River Yamuna and long underneath River Saraswati at the Triveni Sangam at Allahabad, (now Prayagraj) a confluence considered holy in Hinduism. At their confluence the Yamuna is larger than the Ganges, contributing about , is the largest tributary of the Ganges. or about 58.5% of the combined flow.
Now flowing east, the river meets the long Tamsa River (also called "Tons"), which flows north from the Kaimur Range and contributes an average flow of about . After the Tamsa, the long Gomti River joins, flowing south from the Himalayas. The Gomti contributes an average annual flow of about . Then the long Ghaghara River (Karnali River), also flowing south from the Himalayas of Tibet through Nepal joins. The Ghaghara (Karnali), with its average annual flow of about . After the Ghaghara confluence, the Ganges is joined from the south by the long Son River, which contributes about . The long Gandaki River, then the long Kosi River, join from the north flowing from Nepal, contributing about and respectively. The Kosi is the fourth largest tributary of the Ganges, after Yamuna, Ghaghara (Karnali) and Son River.The Kosi merges into the Ganges near Kursela in Bihar.
Along the way between Prayagraj and Malda, West Bengal, the Ganges river passes the towns of Chunar, Mirzapur, Varanasi, Ghazipur, Ara, Patna, Chapra, Hajipur, Mokama, Munger, Sahibganj, Rajmahal, Bhagalpur, Ballia, Buxar, Simaria, Sultanganj, and Farakka. At Bhagalpur, the river begins to flow south-southeast and at Farakka, it begins its attrition with the branching away of its first distributary, the long Bhāgirathi-Hooghly, which goes on to become the Hooghly River. Just before the border with Bangladesh the Farakka Barrage controls the flow of Ganges, diverting some of the water into a feeder canal linked to the Hooghly for the purpose of keeping it relatively silt-free. The Hooghly River is formed by the confluence of the Bhagirathi River and Ajay River at Katwa, and Hooghly has a number of tributaries of its own. The largest is the Damodar River, which is long, with a drainage basin of . The Hooghly River empties into the Bay of Bengal near Sagar Island. Between Malda and the Bay of Bengal, the Hooghly river passes the towns and cities of Murshidabad, Nabadwip, Kolkata and Howrah.
After entering Bangladesh, the main branch of the Ganges river is known as the Padma. The Padma is joined by the Jamuna River, the largest distributary of the Brahmaputra. Further downstream, the Padma joins the Meghna River, the converged flow of Surma-Meghna river system taking on the Meghna's name as it enters the Meghna Estuary, which empties into the Bay of Bengal. Here it forms the Bengal Fan, the world's largest submarine fan, which alone accounts for 10–20% of the global burial of organic carbon.
The Ganges Delta, formed mainly by the large, sediment-laden flows of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, is the world's largest delta, at about . It stretches along the Bay of Bengal.
Only the Amazon and Congo rivers have a greater average discharge than the combined flow of the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Surma-Meghna river system. In full flood only the Amazon is larger.
The Indian subcontinent lies atop the Indian tectonic plate, a minor plate within the Indo-Australian Plate. Its defining geological processes commenced seventy-five million years ago, when, as a part of the southern supercontinent Gondwana, it began a northeastwards drift—lasting fifty million years—across the then unformed Indian Ocean. The subcontinent's subsequent collision with the Eurasian Plate and subduction under it, gave rise to the Himalayas, the planet's highest mountain ranges. In the former seabed immediately south of the emerging Himalayas, plate movement created a vast trough, which, having gradually been filled with sediment borne by the Indus and its tributaries and the Ganges and its tributaries, now forms the Indo-Gangetic Plain.
The Indo-Gangetic Plain is geologically known as a foredeep or foreland basin.
Major left-bank tributaries include Gomti River, Ghaghara River, Gandaki river, and Kosi river; major right-bank tributaries include Yamuna river, Son river, Punpun and Damodar.The hydrology of the Ganges River is very complicated, especially in the Ganges Delta region. One result is different ways to determine the river's length, its discharge, and the size of its drainage basin.
The name "Ganges" is used for the river between the confluence of the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda rivers, in the Himalayas, and the first bifurcation of the river, near the Farakka Barrage and the India-Bangladesh Border. The length of the Ganges is frequently said to be slightly over long, about , or. In these cases the river's source is usually assumed to be the source of the Bhagirathi River, Gangotri Glacier at Gomukh and its mouth being the mouth of the Meghna River on the Bay of Bengal. Sometimes the source of the Ganges is considered to be at Haridwar, where its Himalayan headwater streams debouch onto the Gangetic Plain.
In some cases, the length of the Ganges is given by its Hooghly River distributary, which is longer than its main outlet via the Meghna River, resulting in a total length of about , if taken from the source of the Bhagirathi, or , if from Haridwar to the Hooghly's mouth. In other cases the length is said to be about , from the source of the Bhagirathi to the Bangladesh border, where its name changes to "Padma".
For similar reasons, sources differ over the size of the river's drainage basin. The basin covers parts of four countries, India, Nepal, China, and Bangladesh; eleven Indian states, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, West Bengal, and the Union Territory of Delhi. The Ganges basin, including the delta but not the Brahmaputra or Meghna basins, is about , of which is in India (about 80%), in Nepal (13%), in Bangladesh (4%), and in China (3%). Sometimes the Ganges and Brahmaputra–Meghna drainage basins are combined for a total of about or . The combined Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin (abbreviated GBM or GMB) drainage basin is spread across Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and China.
The Ganges basin ranges from the Himalaya and the Transhimalaya in the north, to the northern slopes of the Vindhya range in the south, from the eastern slopes of the Aravalli in the west to the Chota Nagpur plateau and the Sunderbans delta in the east. A significant portion of the discharge from the Ganges comes from the Himalayan mountain system. Within the Himalaya, the Ganges basin spreads almost 1,200 km from the Yamuna-Satluj divide along the Simla ridge forming the boundary with the Indus basin in the west to the Singalila Ridge along the Nepal-Sikkim border forming the boundary with the Brahmaputra basin in the east. This section of the Himalaya contains 9 of the 14 highest peaks in the world over 8,000m in height, including Mount Everest which is the high point of the Ganges basin. The other peaks over 8,000m in the basin are Kangchenjunga, Lhotse, Makalu, Cho Oyu, Dhaulagiri, Manaslu, Annapurna and Shishapangma. The Himalayan portion of the basin includes the south-eastern portion of the state of Himachal Pradesh, the entire state of Uttarakhand, the entire country of Nepal and the extreme north-western portion of the state of West Bengal.
The discharge of the Ganges also differs by source. Frequently, discharge is described for the mouth of the Meghna River, thus combining the Ganges with the Brahmaputra and Meghna. This results in a total average annual discharge of about , or . In other cases the average annual discharges of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna are given separately, at about for the Ganges, about for the Brahmaputra, and about for the Meghna.
The maximum peak discharge of the Ganges, as recorded at Hardinge Bridge in Bangladesh, exceeded . The minimum recorded at the same place was about , in 1997.
The hydrologic cycle in the Ganges basin is governed by the Southwest Monsoon. About 84% of the total rainfall occurs in the monsoon from June to September. Consequently, streamflow in the Ganges is highly seasonal. The average dry season to monsoon discharge ratio is about 1:6, as measured at Hardinge Bridge. This strong seasonal variation underlies many problems of land and water resource development in the region. The seasonality of flow is so acute it can cause both drought and floods. Bangladesh, in particular, frequently experiences drought during the dry season and regularly suffers extreme floods during the monsoon.
In the Ganges Delta many large rivers come together, both merging and bifurcating in a complicated network of channels. The two largest rivers, the Ganges and Brahmaputra, both split into distributary channels, the largest of which merge with other large rivers before themselves joining the Bay of Bengal. But this current channel pattern was not always the case. Over time the rivers in Ganges Delta have often changed course, sometimes altering the network of channels in significant ways.
Before the late 12th century the Bhagirathi-Hooghly distributary was the main channel of the Ganges and the Padma was only a minor spill-channel. The main flow of the river reached the sea not via the modern Hooghly River but rather by the Adi Ganga. Between the 12th and 16th centuries the Bhagirathi-Hooghly and Padma channels were more or less equally significant. After the 16th century the Padma grew to become the main channel of the Ganges. It is thought that the Bhagirathi-Hooghly became increasingly choked with silt, causing the main flow of the Ganges to shift to the southeast and the Padma River. By the end of the 18th century the Padma had become the main distributary of the Ganges. One result of this shift to the Padma was that the Ganges now joined the Meghna and Brahmaputra rivers before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. The present confluence of the Ganges and Meghna was formed very recently, about 150 years ago.
Also near the end of the 18th century, the course of the lower Brahmaputra changed dramatically, significantly altering its relationship with the Ganges. In 1787 there was a great flood on the Teesta River, which at the time was a tributary of the Ganges-Padma River. The flood of 1787 caused the Teesta to undergo a sudden change course, an avulsion, shifting east to join the Brahmaputra and causing the Brahmaputra to shift its course south, cutting a new channel. This new main channel of the Brahmaputra is called the Jamuna River. It flows south to join the Ganges-Padma. During ancient times, the main flow of the Brahmaputra was more easterly, passing by the city of Mymensingh and joining the Meghna River. Today this channel is a small distributary but retains the name Brahmaputra, sometimes Old Brahmaputra. The site of the old Brahmaputra-Meghna confluence, in the locality of Langalbandh, is still considered sacred by Hindus. Near the confluence is a major early historic site called Wari-Bateshwar.
In the rainy season of 1809, the lower channel of the Bhagirathi, leading to Kolkata, had been entirely shut; but in the following year it opened again and was nearly of the same size with the upper channel but both however suffered a considerable diminution, owing probably to the new communication opened below the Jalanggi on the upper channel.
The Late Harappan period, about 1900–1300 BCE, saw the spread of Harappan settlement eastward from the Indus River basin to the Ganges-Yamuna doab, although none crossed the Ganges to settle its eastern bank. The disintegration of the Harappan civilisation, in the early 2nd millennium BC, marks the point when the centre of Indian civilisation shifted from the Indus basin to the Ganges basin. There may be links between the Late Harappan settlement of the Ganges basin and the archaeological culture known as "Cemetery H" and the Indo-Aryan people of the Vedic period.
This river is the longest and the most sacred in India. But during the early Vedic Period and in the "Rigveda", the Indus and the Sarasvati River were given more spiritual importance, not the Ganges. But also, it is important to know that the later three Vedas gave much more importance to the Ganges, showing the change in cultural and religious views due to the events of that time. The Gangetic Plain became the centre of successive powerful states; from the Maurya Empire to the Mughal Empire.
The first European traveller to mention the Ganges was the Greek envoy Megasthenes (ca. 350–290 BCE). He did so several times in his work Indica: "India, again, possesses many rivers both large and navigable, which, having their sources in the mountains which stretch along the northern frontier, traverse the level country, and not a few of these, after uniting with each other, fall into the river called the Ganges. Now this river, which at its source is 30 stadia broad, flows from north to south, and empties its waters into the ocean forming the eastern boundary of the Gangaridai, a nation which possesses a vast force of the largest-sized elephants." (Diodorus II.37).
In 1951 a water sharing dispute arose between India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), after India declared its intention to build the Farakka Barrage. The original purpose of the barrage, which was completed in 1975, was to divert up to of water from the Ganges to the Bhagirathi-Hooghly distributary in order to restore navigability at the Port of Kolkata. It was assumed that during the worst dry season the Ganges flow would be around , thus leaving for the then East Pakistan. East Pakistan objected and a protracted dispute ensued. In 1996 a 30-year treaty was signed with Bangladesh. The terms of the agreement are complicated, but in essence they state that if the Ganges flow at Farakka was less than then India and Bangladesh would each receive 50% of the water, with each receiving at least for alternating ten-day periods. However, within a year the flow at Farakka fell to levels far below the historic average, making it impossible to implement the guaranteed sharing of water. In March 1997, flow of the Ganges in Bangladesh dropped to its lowest ever, . Dry season flows returned to normal levels in the years following, but efforts were made to address the problem. One plan is for another barrage to be built in Bangladesh at Pangsha, west of Dhaka. This barrage would help Bangladesh better utilise its share of the waters of the Ganges.
The Ganges is a sacred river to Hindus along every fragment of its length. All along its course, Hindus bathe in its waters, paying homage to their ancestors and to their gods by cupping the water in their hands, lifting it and letting it fall back into the river; they offer flowers and rose petals and float shallow clay dishes filled with oil and lit with wicks (diyas). On the journey back home from the Ganges, they carry small quantities of river water with them for use in rituals; Ganga Jal, literally "the water of the Ganges".
The Ganges is the embodiment of all sacred waters in Hindu mythology. Local rivers are said to be "like" the Ganges, and are sometimes called the local Ganges. The Godavari River of Maharashtra in Western India is called the Ganges of the South or the 'Dakshin Ganga'; the Godavari is the Ganges that was led by the sage Gautama to flow through Central India. The Ganges is invoked whenever water is used in Hindu ritual, and is therefore present in all sacred waters. In spite of this, nothing is more stirring for a Hindu than a dip in the actual river, which is thought to remit sins, especially at one of the famous tirthas such as Gangotri, Haridwar, Prayag, or Varanasi. The symbolic and religious importance of the Ganges is one of the few things that Hindus, even their skeptics, have agreed upon. Jawaharlal Nehru, a religious iconoclast himself, asked for a handful of his ashes to be thrown into the Ganges. "The Ganga," he wrote in his will, "is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga."
In late May or early June every year, Hindus celebrate the "karunasiri" and rise of the Ganges from earth to heaven. The day of the celebration, "Ganga Dashahara", the "dashami" (tenth day) of the waxing moon of the Hindu calendar month Jyestha, brings throngs of bathers to the banks of the river. A dip in the Ganges on this day is said to rid the bather of ten sins (dasha = Sanskrit "ten"; hara = to destroy) or alternatively, ten lifetimes of sins. Those who cannot journey to the river, however, can achieve the same results by bathing in any nearby body of water, which, for the true believer, takes on all the attributes of the Ganges.
The "karunasiri" is an old theme in Hinduism with a number of different versions of the story. In the Vedic version, Indra, the Lord of Swarga (Heaven) slays the celestial serpent, Vritra, releasing the celestial liquid, "soma", or the nectar of the gods which then plunges to the earth and waters it with sustenance.
In the Vaishnava version of the myth, the heavenly waters were then a river called "Vishnupadi" (Sanskrit: "from the foot of Vishnu"). As Lord Vishnu as the avatar Vamana completes his celebrated three strides —of earth, sky, and heaven— he stubs his toe on the vault of heaven, punches open a hole, and releases the "Vishnupadi", which until now had been circling around the cosmic egg. Flowing out of the vault, she plummets down to Indra's heaven, where she is received by Dhruva, once a steadfast worshipper of Vishnu, now fixed in the sky as the Pole star. Next, she streams across the sky forming the Milky Way and arrives on the moon. She then flows down earthwards to Brahma's realm, a divine lotus atop Mount Meru, whose petals form the earthly continents. There, the divine waters break up, with one stream, the Bhagirathi, flowing down one petal into Bharatvarsha (India) as the Ganges.
It is Shiva, however, among the major deities of the Hindu pantheon, who appears in the most widely known version of the "avatarana" story. Told and retold in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and several Puranas, the story begins with a sage, Kapila, whose intense meditation has been disturbed by the sixty thousand sons of King Sagara. Livid at being disturbed, Kapila sears them with his angry gaze, reduces them to ashes, and dispatches them to the netherworld. Only the waters of the Ganges, then in heaven, can bring the dead sons their salvation. A descendant of these sons, King Bhagiratha, anxious to restore his ancestors, undertakes rigorous penance and is eventually granted the prize of Ganges's descent from heaven. However, since her turbulent force would also shatter the earth, Bhagiratha persuades Shiva in his abode on Mount Kailash to receive Ganges in the coils of his tangled hair and break her fall. Ganges descends, is tamed in Shiva's locks, and arrives in the Himalayas. She is then led by the waiting Bhagiratha down into the plains at Haridwar, across the plains first to the confluence with the Yamuna at Prayag and then to Varanasi, and eventually to Ganges Sagar, where she meets the ocean, sinks to the netherworld, and saves the sons of Sagara. In honour of Bhagirath's pivotal role in the "avatarana", the source stream of the Ganges in the Himalayas is named Bhagirathi, (Sanskrit, "of Bhagiratha").
As the Ganges had descended from heaven to earth, she is also considered the vehicle of "ascent", from earth to heaven. As the "Triloka-patha-gamini", (Sanskrit: "triloka"= "three worlds", "patha" = "road", "gamini" = "one who travels") of the Hindu tradition, she flows in heaven, earth, and the netherworld, and, consequently, is a "tirtha" or crossing point of all beings, the living as well as the dead. It is for this reason that the story of the "avatarana" is told at "Shraddha" ceremonies for the deceased in Hinduism, and Ganges water is used in Vedic rituals after death. Among all hymns devoted to the Ganges, there are none more popular than the ones expressing the worshipper's wish to breathe his last surrounded by her waters. The "Gangashtakam" expresses this longing fervently: O Mother! ... Necklace adorning the worlds! Banner rising to heaven! I ask that I may leave of this body on your banks, Drinking your water, rolling in your waves, Remembering your name, bestowing my gaze upon you.
No place along her banks is more longed for at the moment of death by Hindus than Varanasi, the Great Cremation Ground, or "Mahashmshana". Those who are lucky enough to die in Varanasi, are cremated on the banks of the Ganges, and are granted instant salvation. If the death has occurred elsewhere, salvation can be achieved by immersing the ashes in the Ganges. If the ashes have been immersed in another body of water, a relative can still gain salvation for the deceased by journeying to the Ganges, if possible during the lunar "fortnight of the ancestors" in the Hindu calendar month of Ashwin (September or October), and performing the "Shraddha" rites.
Hindus also perform "pinda pradana", a rite for the dead, in which balls of rice and sesame seed are offered to the Ganges while the names of the deceased relatives are recited. Every sesame seed in every ball thus offered, according to one story, assures a thousand years of heavenly salvation for the each relative. Indeed, the Ganges is so important in the rituals after death that the "Mahabharata", in one of its popular "ślokas", says, "If only (one) bone of a (deceased) person should touch the water of the Ganges, that person shall dwell honoured in heaven." As if to illustrate this truism, the "Kashi Khanda" (Varanasi Chapter) of the Skanda Purana recounts the remarkable story of "Vahika", a profligate and unrepentant sinner, who is killed by a tiger in the forest. His soul arrives before Yama, the Lord of Death, to be judged for the afterworld. Having no compensating virtue, Vahika's soul is at once dispatched to hell. While this is happening, his body on earth, however, is being picked at by vultures, one of whom flies away with a foot bone. Another bird comes after the vulture, and in fighting him off, the vulture accidentally drops the bone into the Ganges below. Blessed by this event, Vahika, on his way to hell, is rescued by a celestial chariot which takes him instead to heaven.
Hindus consider the waters of the Ganges to be both pure and purifying. Nothing reclaims order from disorder more than the waters of the Ganges. Moving water, as in a river, is considered purifying in Hindu culture because it is thought to both absorb impurities and take them away. The swiftly moving Ganges, especially in its upper reaches, where a bather has to grasp an anchored chain in order to not be carried away, is considered especially purifying. What the Ganges removes, however, is not necessarily physical dirt, but symbolic dirt; it wipes away the sins of the bather, not just of the present, but of a lifetime.
A popular paean to the Ganges is the "Ganga Lahiri" composed by the seventeenth century poet Jagannatha who, as legend has it, was turned out of his Hindu Brahmin caste for having an affair with a Muslim woman. Having attempted futilely to be rehabilitated within the Hindu fold, the poet finally appeals to Ganges, the hope of the hopeless. Along with his beloved, Jagannatha sits at the top of the flight of steps leading to the water at the famous "Panchganga" Ghat in Varanasi. As he recites each verse of the poem, the waters of the Ganges rise up one step, until in the end they envelop the lovers and carry them away. "I come to you as a child to his mother," begins the "Ganga Lahiri". I come as an orphan to you, moist with love. I come without refuge to you, giver of sacred rest. I come a fallen man to you, uplifter of all. I come undone by disease to you, the perfect physician. I come, my heart dry with thirst, to you, ocean of sweet wine. Do with me whatever you will.It is Shiva's relationship with Ganga that is the best-known in Ganges mythology. Her descent, the "avatarana" is not a one time event, but a continuously occurring one in which she is forever falling from heaven into his locks and being forever tamed. Shiva, is depicted in Hindu iconography as "Gangadhara", the "Bearer of the Ganges", with Ganga, shown as a spout of water, rising from his hair. Ganga is the moving, restless, rolling energy in the form of which the otherwise recluse and unapproachable Shiva appears on earth. As water, this moving energy can be felt, tasted, and absorbed. The war-god Skanda addresses the sage Agastya in the "Kashi Khand" of the "Skanda Purana" in these words: One should not be amazed ... that this Ganges is really Power, for is she not the Supreme Shakti of the Eternal Shiva, taken in the form of water? This Ganges, filled with the sweet wine of compassion, was sent out for the salvation of the world by Shiva, the Lord of the Lords. Good people should not think this Triple-Pathed River to be like the thousand other earthly rivers, filled with water.
The Ganges is also the mother, the "Ganga Mata" (Hindi: "mata" ="mother") of Hindu worship and culture, accepting all and forgiving all. Unlike other goddesses, she has no destructive or fearsome aspect, destructive though she might be as a river in nature. She is also a mother of gods and demigods. In the "Mahabharata", she is the wife of Shantanu, and the mother of heroic warrior-patriarch, Bhishma. When Bhishma is mortally wounded in battle, Ganga comes out of the water in human form and weeps uncontrollably over his body.
The Ganges is the distilled lifeblood of the Hindu tradition; of its divinities, holy books, and enlightenment. As such, her worship does not require the usual rites of invocation ("avahana") at the beginning and dismissal ("visarjana") at the end, required in the worship of other gods. Her divinity is immediate and everlasting.
Early in ancient Indian culture, the river Ganges was associated with fecundity, its redeeming waters and its rich silt providing sustenance to all who lived along its banks. A counterpoise to the dazzling heat of the Indian summer, the Ganges came to be imbued with magical qualities and to be revered in anthropomorphic form. By the 5th century CE, an elaborate mythology surrounded the Ganges, now a goddess in her own right, and a symbol for all rivers of India. Hindu temples all over India had statues and reliefs of the goddess carved at their entrances, symbolically washing the sins of arriving worshippers and guarding the gods within. As protector of the sanctum sanctorum, the goddess soon came to be depicted with several characteristic accessories: the "makara" (a crocodile-like undersea monster, often shown with an elephant-like trunk), the "kumbha" (an overfull vase), various overhead parasol-like coverings, and a gradually increasing retinue of humans.
Central to the goddess's visual identification is the "makara", which is also her "vahana", or mount. An ancient symbol in India, it pre-dates all appearances of the goddess Ganga in art. The "makara" has a dual symbolism. On the one hand, it represents the life-affirming waters and plants of its environment; on the other, it represents fear, both fear of the unknown which it elicits by lurking in those waters, and real fear which it instils by appearing in sight. The earliest extant unambiguous pairing of the "makara" with Ganga is at the Udayagiri Caves in Central India (circa 400 CE). Here, in the Cave V, flanking the main figure of Vishnu shown in his boar incarnation, two river goddesses, Ganga and Yamuna appear atop their respective mounts, "makara" and "kurma" (a turtle or tortoise).
The "makara" is often accompanied by a "gana", a small boy or child, near its mouth, as, for example, shown in the Gupta period relief from Besnagar, Central India, in the left-most frame above. The "gana" represents both posterity and development ("udbhava"). The pairing of the fearsome, life-destroying "makara" with the youthful, life-affirming "gana" speaks to two aspects of the Ganges herself. Although she has provided sustenance to millions, she has also brought hardship, injury, and death by causing major floods along her banks. The goddess Ganga is also accompanied by a dwarf attendant, who carries a cosmetic bag, and on whom she sometimes leans, as if for support. (See, for example, frames 1, 2, and 4 above.)
The "purna kumbha" or full pot of water is the second most discernible element of the Ganga iconography. Appearing first also in the relief in the Udayagiri Caves (5th century), it gradually appeared more frequently as the theme of the goddess matured. By the seventh century it had become an established feature, as seen, for example, in the Dashavatara temple, Deogarh, Uttar Pradesh (seventh century), the Trimurti temple, Badoli, Chittorgarh, Rajasthan, and at the Lakshmaneshwar temple, Kharod, Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, (ninth or tenth century), and seen very clearly in frame 3 above and less clearly in the remaining frames. Worshipped even today, the full pot is emblematic of the formless Brahman, as well as of woman, of the womb, and of birth. Furthermore, The river goddesses Ganga and Saraswati were both born from Brahma's pot, containing the celestial waters.
In her earliest depictions at temple entrances, the goddess Ganga appeared standing beneath the overhanging branch of a tree, as seen as well in the Udayagiri caves. However, soon the tree cover had evolved into a "chatra" or parasol held by an attendant, for example, in the seventh-century Dasavatara temple at Deogarh. (The parasol can be clearly seen in frame 3 above; its stem can be seen in frame 4, but the rest has broken off.) The cover undergoes another transformation in the temple at Kharod, Bilaspur (ninth or tenth century), where the parasol is lotus-shaped, and yet another at the Trimurti temple at Badoli where the parasol has been replaced entirely by a lotus.
As the iconography evolved, sculptors, especially in central India, were producing animated scenes of the goddess, replete with an entourage and suggestive of a queen en route to a river to bathe. A relief similar to the depiction in frame 4 above, is described in as follows: A typical relief of about the ninth century that once stood at the entrance of a temple, the river goddess Ganga is shown as a voluptuously endowed lady with a retinue. Following the iconographic prescription, she stands gracefully on her composite "makara" mount and holds a water pot. The dwarf attendant carries her cosmetic bag, and a ... female holds the stem of a giant lotus leaf that serves as her mistress's parasol. The fourth figure is a male guardian. Often in such reliefs the "makara"'s tail is extended with great flourish into a scrolling design symbolizing both vegetation and water.
Kumbh Mela is a mass Hindu pilgrimage in which Hindus gather at the Ganges River. The normal Kumbh Mela is celebrated every 3 years, the "Ardh" (half) Kumbh is celebrated every six years at Haridwar and Prayag, the "Purna" (complete) Kumbh takes place every twelve years at four places (Prayag (Allahabad), Haridwar, Ujjain, and Nashik). The "Maha" (great) Kumbh Mela which comes after 12 'Purna Kumbh Melas', or 144 years, is held at Prayag (Allahabad).
The major event of the festival is ritual bathing at the banks of the river. Other activities include religious discussions, devotional singing, mass feeding of holy men and women and the poor, and religious assemblies where doctrines are debated and standardized. Kumbh Mela is the most sacred of all the pilgrimages. Thousands of holy men and women attend, and the auspiciousness of the festival is in part attributable to this. The sadhus are seen clad in saffron sheets with ashes and powder dabbed on their skin per the requirements of ancient traditions. Some, called "naga sanyasis", may not wear any clothes.
The Ganges and its all tributaries, especially the Yamuna, have been used for irrigation since ancient times. Dams and canals were common in gangetic plain by fourth century BCE. The Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin has a huge hydroelectric potential, on the order of 200,000 to 250,000 megawatts, nearly half of which could easily be harnessed. As of 1999, India tapped about 12% of the hydroelectric potential of the Ganges and just 1% of the vast potential of the Brahmaputra.
Megasthenes, a Greek ethnographer who visited India during the third century BCE when Mauryans ruled India described the existence of canals in the gangetic plain. Kautilya (also known as Chanakya), an advisor to Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of Maurya Empire, included the destruction of dams and levees as a strategy during war. Firuz Shah Tughlaq had many canals built, the longest of which, , was built in 1356 on the Yamuna River. Now known as the Western Yamuna Canal, it has fallen into disrepair and been restored several times. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built an irrigation canal on the Yamuna River in the early 17th century. It fell into disuse until 1830, when it was reopened as the Eastern Yamuna Canal, under British control. The reopened canal became a model for the Upper Ganges Canal and all following canal projects.
The first British canal in India—with no Indian antecedents—was the Ganges Canal built between 1842 and 1854.
Contemplated first by Col. John Russell Colvin in 1836, it did not at first elicit much enthusiasm from its eventual architect Sir Proby Thomas Cautley, who balked at idea of cutting a canal through extensive low-lying land in order to reach the drier upland destination. However, after the Agra famine of 1837–38, during which the East India Company's administration spent Rs. 2,300,000 on famine relief, the idea of a canal became more attractive to the company's budget-conscious Court of Directors. In 1839, the Governor General of India, Lord Auckland, with the Court's assent, granted funds to Cautley for a full survey of the swath of land that underlay and fringed the projected course of the canal. The Court of Directors, moreover, considerably enlarged the scope of the projected canal, which, in consequence of the severity and geographical extent of the famine, they now deemed to be the entire Doab region.
The enthusiasm, however, proved to be short lived. Auckland's successor as Governor General, Lord Ellenborough, appeared less receptive to large-scale public works, and for the duration of his tenure, withheld major funds for the project. Only in 1844, when a new Governor-General, Lord Hardinge, was appointed, did official enthusiasm and funds return to the Ganges canal project. Although the intervening impasse had seemingly affected Cautley's health and required him to return to Britain in 1845 for recuperation, his European sojourn gave him an opportunity to study contemporary hydraulic works in the United Kingdom and Italy. By the time of his return to India even more supportive men were at the helm, both in the North-Western Provinces, with James Thomason as Lt. Governor, and in British India with Lord Dalhousie as Governor-General. Canal construction, under Cautley's supervision, now went into full swing. A long canal, with another of branch lines, eventually stretched between the headworks in Haridwar, splitting into two branches below Aligarh, and its two confluences with the Yamuna (Jumna in map) mainstem in Etawah and the Ganges in Kanpur (Cawnpore in map). The Ganges Canal, which required a total capital outlay of £2.15 million, was officially opened in 1854 by Lord Dalhousie. According to historian Ian Stone: It was the largest canal ever attempted in the world, five times greater in its length than all the main irrigation lines of Lombardy and Egypt put together, and longer by a third than even the largest USA navigation canal, the Pennsylvania Canal.
A major barrage at Farakka was opened on 21 April 1975, It is located close to the point where the main flow of the river enters Bangladesh, and the tributary Hooghly (also known as Bhagirathi) continues in West Bengal past
Kolkata. This barrage, which feeds the Hooghly branch of the river by a long feeder canal, and its water flow management has been a long-lingering source of dispute with Bangladesh. Indo-Bangladesh Ganges Water Treaty signed in December 1996 addressed some of the water sharing issues between India and Bangladesh. There is Lav Khush Barrage across the river Ganges in Kanpur.
Tehri Dam was constructed on Bhagirathi River, tributary of the Ganges. It is located 1.5 km downstream of Ganesh Prayag, the place where Bhilangana meets Bhagirathi. Bhagirathi is called Ganges after Devprayag. Construction of the dam in an earthquake prone area was controversial.
Bansagar Dam was built on the Sone River, a tributary of the Ganges for both irrigation and hydroelectric power generation. Ganges flood waters along with Brahmaputra waters can be supplied to most of its right side basin area along with central and south India by constructing a coastal reservoir to store water on the Bay of Bengal sea area.
The Ganges Basin with its fertile soil is instrumental to the agricultural economies of India and Bangladesh. The Ganges and its tributaries provide a perennial source of irrigation to a large area. Chief crops cultivated in the area include rice, sugarcane, lentils, oil seeds, potatoes, and wheat. Along the banks of the river, the presence of swamps and lakes provides a rich growing area for crops such as legumes, chillies, mustard, sesame, sugarcane, and jute. There are also many fishing opportunities along the river, though it remains highly polluted. Also the major industrial towns of Unnao and Kanpur, situated on the banks of the river with the predominance of tanning industries add to the pollution. Kanpur is the largest city on the Ganges.
Tourism is another related activity. Three towns holy to Hinduism—Haridwar, Prayag (Allahabad), and Varanasi—attract millions of pilgrims to its waters to take a dip in the Ganges, which is believed to cleanse oneself of sins and help attain salvation. The rapids of the Ganges also are popular for river rafting, attracting adventure seekers in the summer months. Also, several cities such as Kanpur, Kolkata and Patna have developed riverfront walkways along the banks to attract tourists.
Human development, mostly agriculture, has replaced nearly all of the original natural vegetation of the Ganges basin. More than 95% of the upper Gangetic Plain has been degraded or converted to agriculture or urban areas. Only one large block of relatively intact habitat remains, running along the Himalayan foothills and including Rajaji National Park, Jim Corbett National Park, and Dudhwa National Park. As recently as the 16th and 17th centuries the upper Gangetic Plain harboured impressive populations of wild Asian elephants ("Elephas maximus"), Bengal tigers ("Panthera t. tigris"), Indian rhinoceros ("Rhinoceros unicornis"), gaurs ("Bos gaurus"), barasinghas ("Rucervus duvaucelii"), sloth bears ("Melursus ursinus") and Indian lions ("Panthera leo leo"). In the 21st century there are few large wild animals, mostly deer, wild boars, wildcats, and small numbers of Indian wolves, golden jackals, and red and Bengal foxes. Bengal tigers survive only in the Sundarbans area of the Ganges Delta. The Sundarbands freshwater swamp ecoregion, however, is nearly extinct. Threatened mammals in the upper Gangetic Plain include the tiger, elephant, sloth bear, and four-horned antelope ("Tetracerus quadricornis").
Many types of birds are found throughout the basin, such as myna, "Psittacula" parakeets, crows, kites, partridges, and fowls. Ducks and snipes migrate across the Himalayas during the winter, attracted in large numbers to wetland areas. There are no endemic birds in the upper Gangetic Plain. The great Indian bustard ("Ardeotis nigriceps") and lesser florican ("Sypheotides indicus") are considered globally threatened.
The natural forest of the upper Gangetic Plain has been so thoroughly eliminated it is difficult to assign a natural vegetation type with certainty. There are a few small patches of forest left, and they suggest that much of the upper plains may have supported a tropical moist deciduous forest with sal ("Shorea robusta") as a climax species.
A similar situation is found in the lower Gangetic Plain, which includes the lower Brahmaputra River. The lower plains contain more open forests, which tend to be dominated by "Bombax ceiba" in association with "Albizzia procera", "Duabanga grandiflora", and "Sterculia vilosa". There are early seral forest communities that would eventually become dominated by the climax species sal ("Shorea robusta"), if forest succession was allowed to proceed. In most places forests fail to reach climax conditions due to human causes. The forests of the lower Gangetic Plain, despite thousands of years of human settlement, remained largely intact until the early 20th century. Today only about 3% of the ecoregion is under natural forest and only one large block, south of Varanasi, remains. There are over forty protected areas in the ecoregion, but over half of these are less than . The fauna of the lower Gangetic Plain is similar to the upper plains, with the addition of a number of other species such as the smooth-coated otter ("Lutrogale perspicillata") and the large Indian civet ("Viverra zibetha").
It has been estimated that about 350 fish species live in the entire Ganges drainage, including several endemics. In a major 2007–2009 study of fish in the Ganges basin (including the river itself and its tributaries, but excluding the Brahmaputra and Meghna basins), a total of 143 fish species were recorded, including 10 non-native introduced species. The most diverse orders are Cypriniformes (barbs and allies), Siluriformes (catfish) and Perciformes (perciform fish), each comprising about 50%, 23% and 14% of the total fish species in the drainage.
There are distinct differences between the different sections of the river basin, but Cyprinidae is the most diverse throughout. In the upper section (roughly equalling the basin parts in Uttarakhand) more than 50 species have been recorded and Cyprinidae alone accounts for almost 80% those, followed by Balitoridae (about 15.6%) and Sisoridae (about 12.2%). Sections of the Ganges basin at altitudes above above sea level are generally without fish. Typical genera approaching this altitude are "Schizothorax", "Tor", "Barilius", "Nemacheilus" and "Glyptothorax". About 100 species have been recorded from the middle section of the basin (roughly equalling the sections in Uttar Pradesh and parts of Bihar) and more than 55% of these are in family Cyprinidae, followed by Schilbeidae (about 10.6%) and Clupeidae (about 8.6%). The lower section (roughly equalling the basin in parts of Bihar and West Bengal) includes major floodplains and is home to almost 100 species. About 46% of these are in the family Cyprinidae, followed by Schilbeidae (about 11.4%) and Bagridae (about 9%).
The Ganges basin supports major fisheries, but these have declined in recent decades. In the Allahabad region in the middle section of the basin, catches of carp fell from 424.91 metric tons in 1961–1968 to 38.58 metric tons in 2001–2006, and catches of catfish fell from 201.35 metric tons in 1961–1968 to 40.56 metric tons in 2001–2006. In the Patna region in the lower section of the basin, catches of carp fell from 383.2 metric tons to 118, and catfish from 373.8 metric tons to 194.48. Some of the fish commonly caught in fisheries include catla ("Catla catla"), golden mahseer ("Tor putitora"), tor mahseer ("Tor tor"), rohu ("Labeo rohita"), walking catfish ("Clarias batrachus"), pangas catfish ("Pangasius pangasius"), goonch catfish ("Bagarius"), snakeheads ("Channa"), bronze featherback ("Notopterus notopterus") and milkfish ("Chanos chanos").
The Ganges basin is home to about 30 fish species that are listed as threatened with the primary issues being overfishing (sometimes illegal), pollution, water abstraction, siltation and invasive species. Among the threatened species is the critically endangered Ganges shark ("Glyphis gangeticus"). Several fish species migrate between different sections of the river, but these movements may be prevented by the building of dams.
The main sections of the Ganges River are home to the gharial ("Gavialis gangeticus") and mugger crocodile ("Crocodylus palustris"), and the delta is home to the saltwater crocodile ("C. porosus"). Among the numerous aquatic and semi-aquatic turtles in the Ganges basin are the northern river terrapin ("Batagur baska"; only in the lowermost section of the basin), three-striped roofed turtle ("B. dhongoka"), red-crowned roofed turtle ("B. kachuga"), black pond turtle ("Geoclemys hamiltonii"), Brahminy river turtle ("Hardella thurjii"), Indian black turtle ("Melanochelys trijuga"), Indian eyed turtle ("Morenia petersi"), brown roofed turtle ("Pangshura smithii"), Indian roofed turtle ("Pangshura tecta"), Indian tent turtle ("Pangshura tentoria"), Indian flapshell turtle ("Lissemys punctata"), Indian narrow-headed softshell turtle ("Chitra indica"), Indian softshell turtle ("Nilssonia gangetica"), Indian peacock softshell turtle ("N. hurum") and Cantor's giant softshell turtle ("Pelochelys cantorii"; only in the lowermost section of Ganges basin). Most of these are seriously threatened.
The river's most famed faunal member is the freshwater Ganges river dolphin ("Platanista gangetica gangetica"), which has been declared India's national aquatic animal.
This dolphin used to exist in large schools near to urban centres in both the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, but is now seriously threatened by pollution and dam construction. Their numbers have now dwindled to a quarter of their numbers of fifteen years before, and they have become extinct in the Ganges' main tributaries. A recent survey by the World Wildlife Fund found only 3,000 left in the water catchment of both river systems.
The Ganges river dolphin is one of only five true freshwater dolphins in the world. The other four are the baiji ("Lipotes vexillifer") of the Yangtze River in China, now likely extinct; the Indus River dolphin of the Indus River in Pakistan; the Amazon river dolphin of the Amazon River in South America; and the Araguaian river dolphin (not considered a separate species until 2014) of the Araguaia–Tocantins basin in Brazil. There are several marine dolphins whose ranges include some freshwater habitats, but these five are the only dolphins who live only in freshwater rivers and lakes.
The Tibetan Plateau contains the world's third-largest store of ice. Qin Dahe, the former head of the China Meteorological Administration, said that the recent fast pace of melting and warmer temperatures will be good for agriculture and tourism in the short term; but issued a strong warning:
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its Fourth Report, stated that the Himalayan glaciers which feed the river, were at risk of melting by 2035. The IPCC has now withdrawn that prediction, as the original source admitted that it was speculative and the cited source was not a peer reviewed finding. In its statement, the IPCC stands by its general findings relating to the Himalayan glaciers being at risk from global warming (with consequent risks to water flow into the Gangetic basin). Many studies have suggested that the climate change will affect the water resources in the Ganges river basin including increased summer (monsoon) flow, and peak runoff could result in an increased risk of flooding.
The Ganges suffers from extreme pollution levels, caused by the 400 million people who live close to the river. Sewage from many cities along the river's course, industrial waste and religious offerings wrapped in non-degradable plastics add large amounts of pollutants to the river as it flows through densely populated areas. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many poorer people rely on the river on a daily basis for bathing, washing, and cooking. The World Bank estimates that the health costs of water pollution in India equal three percent of India's GDP. It has also been suggested that eighty percent of all illnesses in India and one-third of deaths can be attributed to water-borne diseases.
Varanasi, a city of one million people that many pilgrims visit to take a "holy dip" in the Ganges, releases around 200 million liters of untreated human sewage into the river each day, leading to large concentrations of fecal coliform bacteria. According to official standards, water safe for bathing should not contain more than 500 fecal coliforms per 100 ml, yet upstream of Varanasi's ghats the river water already contains 120 times as much, 60,000 fecal coliform bacteria per 100 ml.
After the cremation of the deceased at Varanasi's ghats the bones and ashes are thrown into the Ganges. However, in the past thousands of uncremated bodies were thrown into the Ganges during cholera epidemics, spreading the disease. Even today, holy men, pregnant women, people with leprosy or chicken pox, people who have been bitten by snakes, people who have committed suicide, the poor, and children under 5 are not cremated at the ghats but are left to float free, in order to decompose in the waters. In addition, those who cannot afford the large amount of wood needed to incinerate the entire body, leave behind a lot of half burned body parts.
After passing through Varanasi, and receiving 32 streams of raw sewage from the city, the concentration of fecal coliforms in the river's waters rises from 60,000 to 1.5 million, with observed peak values of 100 million per 100 ml. Drinking and bathing in its waters therefore carries a high risk of infection.
Between 1985 and 2000, Rs. 10 billion, around US$226 million, or less than 4 cents per person per year, were spent on the Ganga Action Plan, an environmental initiative that was "the largest single attempt to clean up a polluted river anywhere in the world." The Ganga Action Plan has been described variously as a "failure", a "major failure".
According to one study,
The Ganga Action Plan, which was taken on priority and with much enthusiasm, was delayed for two years. The expenditure was almost doubled. But the result was not very appreciable. Much expenditure was done over the political propaganda. The concerning governments and the related agencies were not very prompt to make it a success. The public of the areas was not taken into consideration. The releasing of urban and industrial wastes in the river was not controlled fully. The flowing of dirty water through drains and sewers were not adequately diverted. The continuing customs of burning dead bodies, throwing carcasses, washing of dirty clothes by washermen, and immersion of idols and cattle wallowing were not checked. Very little provision of public latrines was made and the open defecation of lakhs of people continued along the riverside. All these made the Action Plan a failure.
The failure of the Ganga Action Plan, has also been variously attributed to "environmental planning without proper understanding of the human–environment interactions," Indian "traditions and beliefs," "corruption and a lack of technical knowledge" and "lack of support from religious authorities."
In December 2009 the World Bank agreed to loan India US$1 billion over the next five years to help save the river. According to 2010 Planning Commission estimates, an investment of almost Rs. 70 billion (Rs. 70 billion, approximately US$1.5 billion) is needed to clean up the river.
In November 2008, the Ganges, alone among India's rivers, was declared a "National River", facilitating the formation of a National Ganga River Basin Authority that would have greater powers to plan, implement and monitor measures aimed at protecting the river.
In July 2014, the Government of India announced an integrated Ganges-development project titled "Namami Ganga" and allocated 2,037 crore for this purpose.
In March 2017 the High Court of Uttarakhand declared the Ganges River a legal "person", in a move that according to one newspaper, "could help in efforts to clean the pollution-choked rivers." , the ruling has been commented on in Indian newspapers to be hard to enforce, that experts do not anticipate immediate benefits, that the ruling is "hardly game changing," that experts believe "any follow-up action is unlikely," and that the "judgment is deficient to the extent it acted without hearing others (in states outside Uttarakhand) who have stakes in the matter."
The incidence of water-borne and enteric diseases—such as gastrointestinal disease, cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid—among people who use the river's waters for bathing, washing dishes and brushing teeth is high, at an estimated 66% per year.
Recent studies by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) say that the river is so full of killer pollutants that those living along its banks in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal are more prone to cancer than anywhere else in the country. Conducted by the National Cancer Registry Programme under the ICMR, the study throws up shocking findings indicating that the river is thick with heavy metals and lethal chemicals that cause cancer. According to Deputy Director General of NCRP A. Nandkumar, the incidence of cancer was highest in the country in areas drained by the Ganges and stated that the problem would be studied deeply and with the findings presented in a report to the health ministry.
Apart from that, many NGOs have came forward to rejuvenate river Ganges. Vikrant Tongad, an Environmental specialist from SAFE Green filed a petition against Simbhaoli Sugar Mill (Hapur UP) to NGT. NGT slapped a fine of Rs. 5 crore to Sugar Mill also, a fine of 25 Lakhs to Gopaljee Dairy for discharging untreated effluents into the Simbhaoli drain.
Along with ever-increasing pollution, water shortages are getting noticeably worse. Some sections of the river are already completely dry. Around Varanasi, the river once had an average depth of , but in some places, it is now only .
Illegal mining in the Ganges river bed for stones and sand for construction work has long been a problem in Haridwar district, Uttarakhand, where it touches the plains for the first time. This is despite the fact that quarrying has been banned in Kumbh Mela area zone covering 140 km2 area in Haridwar.
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Mobile Suit Gundam Wing
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, also known in Japan as , is a 1995 Japanese mecha anime series directed by Masashi Ikeda and written by Katsuyuki Sumizawa. It is the sixth installment in the "Gundam" franchise, taking place in the "After Colony" timeline. As with the original series, the plot of "Gundam Wing" centers on a war in the future (specifically the 2220s) between Earth and its orbital colonies in the Earth-Moon system.
The series aired in Japan on the terrestrial TV Asahi network. It ran for 49 episodes; beginning on April 7, 1995 and ending on March 29, 1996. It received multiple manga adaptations, as well as video games. Four original video animation (OVA) episodes were produced including a retelling of the series, "Operation Meteor", and a direct sequel, "". In 2010, Sumizawa started writing the novel "", another sequel to the series. While the series fared modestly well in Japan, it found greater success in the United States and popularized the "Gundam" franchise in the West.
In the distant future, Mankind has colonized space, with clusters of space colonies at each of the five Earth-Moon Lagrange points. Down on the Earth, the nations have come together to form the United Earth Sphere Alliance. This Alliance oppresses the colonies with its vast military might. The colonies wishing to be free, join together in a movement headed by the pacifist Heero Yuy. In the year After Colony 175, Yuy is shot dead by an assassin, forcing the colonies to search for other paths to peace. The assassination prompts five disaffected scientists from the Organization of the Zodiac, more commonly referred to as OZ, to turn rogue upon the completion of the mobile suit prototype Tallgeese.
The story of "Gundam Wing" begins in the year After Colony 195, with the start of "Operation Meteor": the scientists' plan for revenge against OZ. The operation involves five teenage boys, who have each been chosen and trained by each of the five scientists, then sent to Earth independently in extremely advanced mobile suits (one designed by each of the scientists) known as "Gundams" (called such because they are constructed from a rare and astonishingly durable material called Gundanium alloy, which can only be created in outer space). Each Gundam is sent from a different colony, and the pilots are initially unaware of each other's existence.
The series focuses primarily on the five Gundam pilots: Heero Yuy (an alias, not to be confused with the martyred pacifist), Duo Maxwell, Trowa Barton, Quatre Raberba Winner and Chang Wufei. Their mission is to use their Gundams to attack OZ directly, in order to rid the Alliance of its weapons and free the colonies from its oppressive rule. The series also focuses on Relena Peacecraft, heir to the pacifist Sanc Kingdom, who starts off as a seemingly ordinary girl until she gets caught up in the conflict between OZ and the Gundams; becoming an important political ally to the Gundam pilots (particularly Heero) in the process.
The making of "Gundam Wing" was influenced by "Mobile Fighter G Gundam" with the idea of having five main characters. Originally, the series was meant to be titled "Gundam Meteor" after "Operation Meteor." Bandai suggested having a Gundam with the ability of transforming into a plane-like form. The writers worked together for one week conceptualizing the characters, mobile suits and first 40 episodes. Director Masashi Ikeda reacted to their work comparing it to the first "Gundam" series, "Zeta" and "G" all at once. The series was more focused on drama than mecha, which the staff credits as one of the reasons for the show's popularity within the female demographic.
Writer Katsuyuki Sumizawa expressed difficulties in the making of the story as opposed to his work in novels due to the fact he relayed duties to other members. However, the handling of the five characters was made easy due to the setting. Early sketches of the protagonists by Ikeda were handled by character designer Shuko Murase. He was cast due to his work with Ikeda in "Samurai Troopers". The director wanted the designs to appeal to the female demographic. Originally, Duo Maxwell was set as the protagonist but was replaced by Heero Yuy. The staff members noted Heero was too different from previous Gundam protagonists and were afraid he would be unpopular. The voice casting was more difficult to do than the ones from previous series due to the different atmosphere.
Following the series' ending, the staff members were asked by the studio to make a sequel due to its popularity. Neither Ikeda nor executive producer Hideyuki Tomioka intended to make a sequel for "Gundam Wing". However, Sumizawa was bothered by the finale as he felt the series ended abruptly. Tomioka asked Sumizawa if he could write a continuation which he agreed.
"Gundam Wing" was not the first series in the "Gundam" franchise to be dubbed and distributed in the U.S. (the compilation movie version of the original "Mobile Suit Gundam", as well as the OVAs "" and "", preceded it by about two years), but it is well known as the first "Gundam" series to be aired on American television. This dub was produced by Bandai Entertainment and the voice work was done by Ocean Productions. The series aired on Cartoon Network's weekday afternoon after-school programming block Toonami; premiering on March 6, 2000. In the first extended promo leading up to the series' premiere, voice actor Peter Cullen narrated the back story, evoking memories of "Voltron's" opening credits. The promo was said to be so riveting that Bandai decided to use it as the official promo for the series.
It was broadcast in two formats; an edited version shown in the daytime on Toonami and an uncut version shown past midnight as part of Toonami's "Midnight Run." Examples of the edits included the removal of blood, profanity, atheism, and the word "kill" being replaced with the word "destroy" (this was extended to Duo's nickname, "The God of Death," changed to "The Great Destroyer," forcing the alteration of two episode titles), though the word "death" was mostly left intact. All "Gundam Wing" episodes have been released to VHS and DVD in the U.S. Differences between the two video systems is that the VHS episodes contain the edited version while the DVD episodes contain the uncut version.
Due to the closure of Bandai Entertainment, the series was out-of-print for sometime. On October 11, 2014 at their 2014 New York Comic-Con panel, Sunrise announced they will be releasing all of the Gundam franchise, including "Gundam Wing" in North America though distribution from Right Stuf Inc., beginning in Spring 2015. Right Stuf released the series on Blu-ray and DVD in two sets in November 2017. In addition, a collector's edition set containing the complete series, "Endless Waltz", "Operation Meteor" and the "Frozen Teardrop" picture drama was released in December 2017.
After the series ended, four original video animation (OVA) episodes, compiling various scenes from the series along with a few minutes of new footage, were released in 1996 as "Gundam Wing: Operation Meteor" I and II.
A three-part OVA titled "" was produced in 1997 as a sequel to the TV series; plot-wise, it brought the "After Colony" timeline to a close. The OVA was also notable for its massive redesigns of all the Gundams by Hajime Katoki, such as the Wing Gundam Zero's new "angel-winged" appearance. A compilation movie version of "Endless Waltz" (featuring additional footage, alterations of the music score and a different ending theme) was later released in Japan on August 1, 1998. "Endless Waltz" premiered on Cartoon Network in the U.S. on November 10, 2000. Both the OVA and movie versions of "Endless Waltz" were later released together on DVD. Right Stuf released both OVAs on Blu-ray and DVD in December 2017 (though "Operation Meteor" remains un-dubbed).
In addition to manga adaptations of the series and "Endless Waltz", several manga sidestories have also been produced. "" is a prequel, detailing the events leading up to series; the stories have been collected in a volume that also contains one brief open-ended interlude, "Preventer 5", that details an operation that occurs after "Endless Waltz". A coincident storyline to the series is presented in "". Several sequel manga, occurring between "Gundam Wing" and "Endless Waltz", have also been written: "Blind Target", "Ground Zero" and "Battlefield of Pacifists".
The "Gundam Wing", "Battlefield of Pacifists" and "Endless Waltz" manga series were published in English by Tokyopop, while "Blind Target", "Ground Zero" and "Episode Zero" were published by Viz Communications. Another sequel manga detailing the future of the colonies entitled "Tiel's Impulse" was printed in 1998 and has not been published in the United States.
In September 2010, "Gundam Ace" magazine began serializing a manga titled "New Mobile Report Gundam Wing Endless Waltz: The Glory of Losers" that retells the events of the anime while incorporating facts from "Episode Zero" and the novel "Frozen Teardrop". The manga also uses Hajime Katoki's Gundam redesigns from "Endless Waltz" and other subsequent media, instead of the original Kunio Okawara designs featured in the anime. Vertical published English editions of the manga volumes under the title "Mobile Suit Gundam Wing Endless Waltz: Glory of the Losers" from July 2017 to November 2019.
In early 2010, "Gundam Ace" magazine announced they would serialize a "New "Gundam Wing" Project". The project was eventually revealed to be a novel, titled "". Written by Katsuyuki Sumizawa, the novel begins a new timeline, following the "Mars Century" calendar ("MC") which was the successor of the previous "After Colony" calendar. According to an interview with the author, the novel spans backwards into the AC century and the Gundam pilots, Relena, and their children make appearances.
A fighting video game titled "" was developed by Natsume and released for the Super Famicom in Japan on March 29, 1996. A second fighting game titled "Shin Kidō Senki Gundam Wing: The Battle" was developed by Natsume and released for the PlayStation in Japan on October 11, 2002 as the 13th volume of the Simple Characters 2000 series. "Gundam Wing" characters and mecha have also appeared in several other video game series including "Super Robot Wars", "Gundam Battle Assault", "Another Century's Episode", "" and "".
Upon the series' debut in North America, "Gundam Wing" received a large roster of licensees for merchandise including wallscrolls, apparel, school supplies, skateboards, trading cards, model kits and action figures.
"Gundam Wing" was only a modest success in Japan during its initial run; it, along with "G Gundam", was the only "Gundam" series of the 1990s that managed an average television rating over four percent. It was ranked number two in "Animage" magazine's Anime Grand Prix in 1996 and was also ranked number 76 in the publication's list of the 100 most important anime of all time. The series is infamous within "dōjinshi" where authors tend to depict romantic relationships between several of the protagonists.
"Gundam Wing" was a greater success in North America, however, and is credited with single-handedly popularizing the "Gundam" franchise among Western audiences. Just over a week after its premiere on Cartoon Network on March 6, 2000, the series was the top rated program in all age groups. During the summer of 2000, it remained as the first or second top-rated show among kids and teens during its twelve airings per week on the Toonami block. "Gundam Wing" was ranked the 73rd best animated series by IGN, calling the series "so good that even those opposed to anime have to give the show its due credit".
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Gödel's completeness theorem
Gödel's completeness theorem is a fundamental theorem in mathematical logic that establishes a correspondence between semantic truth and syntactic provability in first-order logic. It makes a close link between model theory that deals with what is true in different models, and proof theory that studies what can be formally proven in particular formal systems.
It was first proved by Kurt Gödel in 1929. It was then simplified in 1947, when Leon Henkin observed in his Ph.D. thesis that the hard part of the proof can be presented as the Model Existence Theorem (published in 1949). Henkin's proof was simplified by Gisbert Hasenjaeger in 1953.
There are numerous deductive systems for first-order logic, including systems of natural deduction and Hilbert-style systems. Common to all deductive systems is the notion of a formal deduction. This is a sequence (or, in some cases, a finite tree) of formulas with a specially-designated conclusion. The definition of a deduction is such that it is finite and that it is possible to verify algorithmically (by a computer, for example, or by hand) that a given sequence (or tree) of formulas is indeed a deduction.
A first-order formula is called logically valid if it is true in every structure for the language of the formula (i.e. for any assignment of values to the variables of the formula). To formally state, and then prove, the completeness theorem, it is necessary to also define a deductive system. A deductive system is called complete if every logically valid formula is the conclusion of some formal deduction, and the completeness theorem for a particular deductive system is the theorem that it is complete in this sense. Thus, in a sense, there is a different completeness theorem for each deductive system. A converse to completeness is soundness, the fact that only logically valid formulas are provable in the deductive system.
If some specific deductive system of first-order logic is sound and complete, then it is "perfect" (a formula is provable if and only if it is logically valid), thus equivalent to any other deductive system with the same quality (any proof in one system can be converted into the other).
We first fix a deductive system of first-order predicate calculus, choosing any of the well-known equivalent systems. Gödel's original proof assumed the Hilbert-Ackermann proof system.
The completeness theorem says that if a formula is logically valid then there is a finite deduction (a formal proof) of the formula.
Thus, the deductive system is "complete" in the sense that no additional inference rules are required to prove all the logically valid formulas. A converse to completeness is soundness, the fact that only logically valid formulas are provable in the deductive system. Together with soundness (whose verification is easy), this theorem implies that a formula is logically valid if and only if it is the conclusion of a formal deduction.
The theorem can be expressed more generally in terms of logical consequence. We say that a sentence "s" is a syntactic consequence of a theory "T", denoted formula_1, if "s" is provable from "T" in our deductive system. We say that "s" is a semantic consequence of "T", denoted formula_2, if "s" holds in every model of "T". The completeness theorem then says that for any first-order theory "T" with a well-orderable language, and any sentence "s" in the language of "T",
Since the converse (soundness) also holds, it follows that formula_2 iff formula_1, and thus that syntactic and semantic consequence are equivalent for first-order logic.
This more general theorem is used implicitly, for example, when a sentence is shown to be provable from the axioms of group theory by considering an arbitrary group and showing that the sentence is satisfied by that group.
Gödel's original formulation is deduced by taking the particular case of a theory without any axiom.
The completeness theorem can also be understood in terms of consistency, as a consequence of Henkin's model existence theorem. We say that a theory "T" is syntactically consistent if there is no sentence "s" such that both "s" and its negation ¬"s" are provable from "T" in our deductive system. The model existence theorem says that for any first-order theory "T" with a well-orderable language,
Another version, with connections to the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem, says:
Given Henkin's theorem, the completeness theorem can be proved as follows: If formula_9, then formula_10 does not have models. By the contrapositive of Henkin's theorem, then formula_10 is syntactically inconsistent. So a contradiction (formula_12) is provable from formula_10 in the deductive system. Hence formula_14, and then by the properties of the deductive system, formula_1.
The Model Existence Theorem and its proof can be formalized in the framework of Peano arithmetic. Precisely, we can systematically define a model of any consistent effective first-order theory "T" in Peano arithmetic by interpreting each symbol of "T" by an arithmetical formula whose free variables are the arguments of the symbol. (In many cases, we will need to assume, as a hypothesis of the construction, that "T" is consistent, since Peano arithmetic may not prove that fact.) However, the definition expressed by this formula is not recursive (but is, in general, Δ2).
An important consequence of the completeness theorem is that it is possible to recursively enumerate the semantic consequences of any effective first-order theory, by enumerating all the possible formal deductions from the axioms of the theory, and use this to produce an enumeration of their conclusions.
This comes in contrast with the direct meaning of the notion of semantic consequence, that quantifies over all structures in a particular language, which is clearly not a recursive definition.
Also, it makes the concept of "provability," and thus of "theorem," a clear concept that only depends on the chosen system of axioms of the theory, and not on the choice of a proof system.
Gödel's second incompleteness theorem (see Gödel's incompleteness theorems), another celebrated result, shows that there are inherent limitations in what can be achieved with formal proofs in mathematics. The name for the incompleteness theorem refers to another meaning of "complete" (see model theory – Using the compactness and completeness theorems): A theory "T " is complete (or decidable) if for every formula "f" in the language of "T" either formula_16 or formula_17.
Gödel's second incompleteness theorem states that in any consistent effective theory "T" containing Peano arithmetic (PA), a formula "CT" like "CTformula_18" expressing the consistency of "T" cannot be proven within "T".
The completeness theorem implies the existence of a model of "T" in which the formula "CT" is false. Such a model (precisely, the set of "natural numbers" it contains) is necessarily a non-standard model, as it contains the code number of a proof of a contradiction of "T".
But "T" is consistent when viewed from the outside. Thus this code number of a proof of contradiction of "T" must be a non-standard number.
In fact, the model of "any" theory containing PA obtained by the systematic construction of the arithmetical model existence theorem, is "always" non-standard with a non-equivalent provability predicate and a non-equivalent way to interpret its own construction, so that this construction is non-recursive (as recursive definitions would be unambiguous).
Also, there is no recursive non-standard model of PA.
The completeness theorem and the compactness theorem are two cornerstones of first-order logic. While neither of these theorems can be proven in a completely effective manner, each one can be effectively obtained from the other.
The compactness theorem says that if a formula φ is a logical consequence of a (possibly infinite) set of formulas Γ then it is a logical consequence of a finite subset of Γ. This is an immediate consequence of the completeness theorem, because only a finite number of axioms from Γ can be mentioned in a formal deduction of φ, and the soundness of the deductive system then implies φ is a logical consequence of this finite set. This proof of the compactness theorem is originally due to Gödel.
Conversely, for many deductive systems, it is possible to prove the completeness theorem as an effective consequence of the compactness theorem.
The ineffectiveness of the completeness theorem can be measured along the lines of reverse mathematics. When considered over a countable language, the completeness and compactness theorems are equivalent to each other and equivalent to a weak form of choice known as weak König's lemma, with the equivalence provable in RCA0 (a second-order variant of Peano arithmetic restricted to induction over Σ01 formulas). Weak König's lemma is provable in ZF, the system of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory without axiom of choice, and thus the completeness and compactness theorems for countable languages are provable in ZF. However the situation is different when the language is of arbitrary large cardinality since then, though the completeness and compactness theorems remain provably equivalent to each other in ZF, they are also provably equivalent to a weak form of the axiom of choice known as the ultrafilter lemma. In particular, no theory extending ZF can prove either the completeness or compactness theorems over arbitrary (possibly uncountable) languages without also proving the ultrafilter lemma on a set of same cardinality.
The completeness theorem is a central property of first-order logic that does not hold for all logics. Second-order logic, for example, does not have a completeness theorem for its standard semantics (but does have the completeness property for Henkin semantics), and the set of logically-valid formulas in second-order logic is not recursively enumerable. The same is true of all higher-order logics. It is possible to produce sound deductive systems for higher-order logics, but no such system can be complete.
Lindström's theorem states that first-order logic is the strongest (subject to certain constraints) logic satisfying both compactness and completeness.
A completeness theorem can be proved for modal logic or intuitionistic logic with respect to Kripke semantics.
Gödel's original proof of the theorem proceeded by reducing the problem to a special case for formulas in a certain syntactic form, and then handling this form with an "ad hoc" argument.
In modern logic texts, Gödel's completeness theorem is usually proved with Henkin's proof, rather than with Gödel's original proof. Henkin's proof directly constructs a term model for any consistent first-order theory. James Margetson (2004) developed a computerized formal proof using the Isabelle theorem prover. Other proofs are also known.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12450
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Gough Whitlam
Edward Gough Whitlam (; 11 July 191621 October 2014) was the 21st Prime Minister of Australia, serving from 1972 to 1975. The Leader of the Labor Party from 1967 to 1977, Whitlam led his party to power for the first time in 23 years at the 1972 election. He won the 1974 election before being controversially dismissed by the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, at the climax of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. Whitlam remains the only Australian prime minister to have been removed from office in this manner.
Whitlam served as an air navigator in the Royal Australian Air Force for four years during World War II, and worked as a barrister following the war. He was first elected to Parliament in 1952, representing Werriwa in the House of Representatives. Whitlam became Deputy Leader of the Labor Party in 1960, and in 1967, after the retirement of Arthur Calwell, was elected Leader and became the Leader of the Opposition. After narrowly losing the 1969 election, Whitlam led Labor to victory at the 1972 election after 23 years of continuous Liberal-Country Coalition Government.
The Whitlam Government implemented a large number of new programmes and policy changes, including the termination of military conscription, institution of universal health care and free university education, and the implementation of legal aid programmes. With the opposition-controlled Senate delaying passage of bills, Whitlam called a double dissolution election in 1974 in which he won a slightly reduced majority in the House of Representatives, and picked up three Senate seats. The Whitlam government then instituted the first and only joint sitting enabled under s. 57 of the Constitution as part of the double dissolution process. Despite the government's second election victory, the opposition, reacting to government scandals and a flagging economy suffering from the 1973 oil crisis and the 1973–75 recession, continued to obstruct the government's programme in the Senate. In late 1975, the Opposition Senators refused to allow a vote on the government's appropriation bills, returning them to the House of Representatives with a demand that the government go to an election, thus denying the government supply. Whitlam refused to back down, arguing that his government, which held a clear majority in the House of Representatives, was being held to ransom by the Senate. The crisis ended on 11 November, when Whitlam arrived at a pre-arranged meeting with the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, at Government House to call a half-Senate election. Kerr dismissed him and commissioned the opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, as caretaker prime minister. Labor lost the subsequent election by a landslide.
Whitlam stepped down after losing again at the 1977 election, and retired from parliament in 1978. Upon the election of the Hawke Government in 1983, he was appointed as Ambassador to UNESCO, a position he filled with distinction, and was elected a member of the UNESCO Executive Board. He remained active into his nineties. The propriety and circumstances of his dismissal and the legacy of his government have been frequently debated in the decades after he left office.
Edward Gough Whitlam was born on 11 July 1916 at the family home 'Ngara', 46 Rowland Street, Kew, a suburb of Melbourne, the elder of two children (his sister, Freda, was born four years after him), to Martha (née Maddocks) and Fred Whitlam. His father was a federal public servant who later served as Commonwealth Crown Solicitor, and Whitlam senior's involvement in human rights issues was a powerful influence on his son. Since his maternal grandfather was also named Edward, from early childhood he was called by his middle name, Gough, which in turn had come from his paternal grandfather who had been named after the British soldier Field-Marshal Hugh Gough, 1st Viscount Gough.
In 1918, Fred Whitlam was promoted to deputy Crown solicitor and transferred to Sydney. The family lived first in the North Shore suburb of Mosman and then in Turramurra. At age six, Gough began his education at Chatswood Church of England Girls' School (early primary schooling at a girls' school was not unusual for small boys at the time). After a year there, he attended Mowbray House School and Knox Grammar School in the suburbs of Sydney.
Fred Whitlam was promoted again in 1927, this time to Assistant Crown Solicitor. The position was located in the new national capital of Canberra, and the Whitlam family moved there. Whitlam remains the only prime minister to have spent his formative years in Canberra. At the time, conditions remained primitive in what was dubbed "the bush capital" and "the land of the blowflies". Gough attended the government Telopea Park School. In 1932, Whitlam's father transferred him to Canberra Grammar School where, at the Speech Day ceremony that year, he was awarded a prize by the Governor-General, Sir Isaac Isaacs.
Whitlam enrolled at St Paul's College at the University of Sydney at the age of 18. He earned his first wages by appearing, with several other "Paulines", in a cabaret scene in the film "The Broken Melody"—the students were chosen because St Paul's required formal wear at dinner, and they could therefore supply their own costumes. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree with second-class honours in classics, Whitlam remained at St Paul's to begin his law studies. He had originally contemplated an academic career, but his lacklustre marks made that unlikely. Dropping out of Greek classes, he professed himself unable to care for the "dry as dust" lectures of Enoch Powell.
Soon after the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Whitlam enlisted in the Sydney University Regiment, part of the Militia. In late 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and with a year remaining in his legal studies, he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). In 1942, while awaiting entry into the service, Whitlam met and married Margaret Elaine Dovey, who had swum for Australia in the 1938 British Empire Games and was the daughter of barrister and future New South Wales Supreme Court judge Bill Dovey. He entered the RAAF on 20 June 1942.
Whitlam trained as a navigator and bomb aimer, before serving with No. 13 Squadron RAAF, based mainly on the Gove Peninsula, Northern Territory, flying Lockheed Ventura bombers. He reached the rank of Flight Lieutenant. While in the service, he began his political activities, distributing literature for the Australian Labor Party during the 1943 federal election and urging the passage of the "Fourteen Powers" referendum of 1944, which would have expanded the powers of the federal government. Although the party was victorious, the referendum it advocated was defeated. In 1961, Whitlam said of the referendum defeat, "My hopes were dashed by the outcome and from that moment I determined to do all I could do to modernise the Australian Constitution". While still in uniform, Whitlam joined the ALP in Sydney in 1945. He was discharged from the RAAF on 17 October 1945, and continued to use Air Force log books to record all of the flights he took until 2007. Whitlam completed his studies after the war, obtained his Bachelor of Laws, and was admitted to the federal and New South Wales bars in 1947.
With his war service loan, Whitlam built a house in seaside Cronulla. He also bought the block of land next door, using the prize money (£1,000 in security bonds) he received for winning the Australian National Quiz Championship in 1948 and 1949 (he was runner-up in 1950). He sought to make a career in the ALP there, but local Labor supporters were sceptical of Whitlam's loyalties, given his privileged background. In the postwar years, he practised law, concentrating on landlord/tenant matters, and sought to build his bona fides in the party. He ran twice—unsuccessfully—for the local council, once (also unsuccessfully) for the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, and campaigned for other candidates. In 1951, Bert Lazzarini, the Labor member for the Federal electorate of Werriwa, announced that he would stand down at the next election. Whitlam won the preselection as ALP candidate. Lazzarini died in 1952 before completing his term and Whitlam was elected to the House of Representatives in the ensuing by-election on 29 November 1952. Whitlam trebled Lazzarini's majority in a 12 percent swing to Labor.
Whitlam joined the ALP minority in the House of Representatives. His maiden speech provoked an interruption by a future prime minister, John McEwen, who was then told by the Speaker that maiden speeches are traditionally heard in silence. Whitlam responded to McEwen by stating that Benjamin Disraeli had been heckled in his maiden speech and had responded, "The time will come when you shall hear me." He told McEwen, "The time will come when you may interrupt me." According to early Whitlam biographers Laurie Oakes and David Solomon, this cool response put the Coalition government on notice that the new Member for Werriwa would be a force to be reckoned with.
In the rough and tumble debate in the House of Representatives, Whitlam called fellow MHR Bill Bourke "this grizzling Quisling", Garfield Barwick (who, as High Court Chief Justice, played a role in Whitlam's downfall) a "bumptious bastard", and stated that Bill Wentworth exhibited a "hereditary streak of insanity". After calling future prime minister William McMahon a "quean", he apologised.
The ALP had been out of office since the Chifley Government's defeat in 1949 and, since 1951, had been under the leadership of Bert Evatt, whom Whitlam greatly admired. In 1954, the ALP seemed likely to return to power. The Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, adroitly used the defection of a Soviet official to his advantage, and his coalition of the Liberal and Country parties was returned in the 1954 election with a seven-seat majority. After the election, Evatt attempted to purge the party of industrial groupers, who had long dissented from party policy, and who were predominantly Catholic and anti-communist. The ensuing division in the ALP, which came to be known as "The Split", sparked the birth of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). It was a conflict that helped to keep Labor out of power for a generation, since DLP supporters chose the Liberal Party in preferential voting. Whitlam supported Evatt throughout this period.
In 1955, a redistribution divided Whitlam's electorate of Werriwa in two, with his Cronulla home located in the new electorate of Hughes. Although Whitlam would have received ALP support in either division, he chose to continue standing for Werriwa and moved from Cronulla to Cabramatta. This meant even longer journeys for his older children to attend school, since neither electorate had a high school at the time, and they attended school in Sydney.
Whitlam was appointed to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Constitutional Review in 1956. Biographer Jenny Hocking calls his service on the committee, which included members from all parties in both chambers of Parliament, one of the "great influences in his political development". According to Hocking, service on the committee caused Whitlam to focus not on internal conflicts consuming the ALP, but on Labor goals which were possible and worthwhile in the constitutional framework. Many Labor goals, such as nationalisation, ran contrary to the Constitution. Whitlam came to believe that the Constitution—and especially Section 96 (which allowed the federal government to make grants to the states)—could be used to advance a worthwhile Labor programme.
By the late 1950s Whitlam was seen as a leadership contender once the existing Labor leaders exited the scene. Most of the party's major figures, including Evatt, Deputy Leader Arthur Calwell, Eddie Ward, and Reg Pollard, were in their sixties, twenty years older than Whitlam. In 1960, after losing three elections, Evatt resigned and was replaced by Calwell, with Whitlam defeating Ward for deputy leader. Calwell came within a handful of votes of winning the cliffhanger 1961 election. He had not wanted Whitlam as deputy leader, and believed Labor would have won if Ward had been in the position.
Soon after the 1961 election, events began to turn against Labor. When President Sukarno of Indonesia announced that he intended to take over West New Guinea as the colonial Dutch departed, Calwell responded by declaring that Indonesia must be stopped by force. Calwell's statement was called "crazy and irresponsible" by Prime Minister Menzies, and the incident reduced public support for the ALP. At that time, the Federal Conference of the Labor Party, which dictated policy to parliamentary members, consisted of six members from each state, but not Calwell or Whitlam. In early 1963 a special conference met in a Canberra hotel to determine Labor policy regarding a proposed US base in northern Australia; Calwell and Whitlam were photographed by "The Daily Telegraph" peering in through the doors, waiting for the verdict. In an accompanying story, Alan Reid of the "Telegraph" wrote that Labor was ruled by "36 faceless men". The Liberals seized on it, issuing a leaflet called "Mr Calwell and the Faceless Men" which accused Calwell and Whitlam of taking direction from "36 unknown men, not elected to Parliament nor responsible to the people".
Menzies manipulated the Opposition on issues that bitterly divided it, such as direct aid to the states for private schools, and the proposed base. He called an early election for November 1963, standing in support of those two issues. The Prime Minister performed better than Calwell on television and received an unexpected boost after the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. As a result, the Coalition easily defeated Labor on a 10-seat swing. Whitlam had hoped Calwell would step down after 1963, but he remained, reasoning that Evatt had been given three opportunities to win, and that he should be allowed a third try. Calwell dismissed proposals that the ALP leader and deputy leader should be entitled to membership of the party's conference (or on its governing 12-person Federal Executive, which had two representatives from each state), and instead ran successfully for one of the conference's Victoria seats. Labor did badly in a 1964 by-election in the Tasmanian electorate of Denison, and lost seats in the 1964 half-Senate election. The party was also defeated in the state elections in the most populous state, New South Wales, surrendering control of the state government for the first time since 1941.
Whitlam's relationship with Calwell, never good, deteriorated further after publication of a 1965 article in "The Australian". The article reported off-the-record comments Whitlam had made that his leader was "too old and weak" to win office, and that the party might be gravely damaged by an "old-fashioned" 70-year-old Calwell seeking his first term as prime minister. Later that year, at Whitlam's urging, and over Calwell's objection, the biennial party conference made major changes to the party's platform: deleting support for the White Australia policy and making the ALP's leader and deputy leader "ex officio" members of the conference and executive, along with the party's leader and deputy leader in the Senate. As Whitlam considered the Senate unrepresentative, he opposed the admission of its ALP leaders to the party's governing bodies.
Menzies retired in January 1966, and was succeeded as prime minister by the new Liberal Party leader, Harold Holt. After years of politics being dominated by the elderly Menzies and Calwell, the younger Holt was seen as a breath of fresh air, and attracted public interest and support in the run-up to the November election.
In early 1966, the 36-member conference, with Calwell's assent, banned any ALP parliamentarian from supporting federal assistance to the states for spending on both government and private schools, commonly called "state aid". Whitlam broke with the party on the issue, and was charged with gross disloyalty by the executive, an offence which carried the penalty of expulsion from the party. Before the matter could be heard, Whitlam left for Queensland, where he campaigned intensively for the ALP candidate Rex Patterson in the Dawson by-election. The ALP won, dealing the government its first by-election defeat since 1952. Whitlam survived the expulsion vote by a margin of only two, gaining both Queensland votes. At the end of April, Whitlam challenged Calwell for the leadership; though Calwell received two-thirds of the vote, he announced that if the party lost the upcoming election, he would not stand again for the leadership.
Holt called an election for November 1966, in which Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War was a major issue. Calwell called for an "immediate and unconditional withdrawal" of Australian troops from Vietnam. Whitlam, however, said that this would deprive Australia of any voice in a settlement, and that regular troops, rather than conscripts, should remain under some circumstances. Calwell considered Whitlam's remark disastrous, disputing the party line just five days before the election. The ALP suffered a crushing defeat; the party was reduced to 41 seats in the House of Representatives. Shortly after the election, Whitlam faced another expulsion vote for his stance on Vietnam, and survived. True to his word, Calwell resigned two months after the election. At the caucus meeting on 8 February 1967, Whitlam was elected party leader, defeating leading left-wing candidate Dr Jim Cairns.
Whitlam believed the Labor Party had little chance of being elected unless it could expand its appeal from the traditional working-class base to include the suburban middle class. He sought to shift control of the ALP from union officials to the parliamentary party, and hoped that even rank-and-file party members could be given a voice in the conference. In 1968, controversy erupted within the party when the executive refused to seat new Tasmanian delegate Brian Harradine, a Whitlam supporter who was considered a right-wing extremist. Whitlam resigned the leadership, demanding a vote of confidence from caucus. He defeated Cairns for the leadership in an unexpectedly close 38–32 vote. Despite the vote, the executive refused to seat Harradine.
With the ALP's governing bodies unwilling to reform themselves, Whitlam worked to build support for change among ordinary party members. He was successful in reducing union influence in the party, though he was never able to give the rank and file a direct vote in selecting the executive. The Victoria branch of the party had long been a problem; its executive was far to the left of the rest of the ALP, and had little electoral success. Whitlam was able to reconstruct the Victoria party organisation against the will of its leaders, and the reconstituted state party proved essential to victory in the 1972 election.
By the time of the 1969 party conference, Whitlam had gained considerable control over the ALP. That conference passed 61 resolutions, including broad changes to party policy and procedures. It called for the establishment of an Australian Schools Commission to consider the proper level of state aid for schools and universities, recognition of Aboriginal land claims, and expanded party policy on universal health care. The conference also called for increased federal involvement in urban planning, and formed the basis of "The Program" of modern socialism which Whitlam and the ALP presented to the voters in 1972.
Since 1918, Labor had called for the abolition of the existing Australian Constitution, and the vesting of all political power in Parliament, a plan which would turn the states into powerless geographic regions. Beginning in 1965, Whitlam sought to change this goal. He finally succeeded at the 1971 ALP Conference in Launceston, Tasmania, which called for Parliament to receive "such plenary powers as are necessary and desirable" to achieve the ALP's goals in domestic and international affairs. Labor also pledged to abolish the Senate; this goal was not erased from the party platform until 1979, after Whitlam had stepped down as leader.
Soon after taking the leadership, Whitlam reorganised the ALP caucus, assigning portfolios and turning the Labor frontbench into a shadow cabinet. While the Liberal-Country Coalition had a huge majority in the House of Representatives, Whitlam energised the party by campaigning intensively to win two by-elections in 1967: first in Corio in Victoria, and later that year in Capricornia in Queensland. The November half-Senate election saw a moderate swing to Labor and against the Coalition, compared with the general election the previous year. These federal victories, in which both Whitlam and Holt campaigned, helped give Whitlam the leverage he needed to carry out party reforms.
At the end of 1967, Holt vanished while swimming in rough seas near Melbourne; his body was never recovered. John McEwen, as leader of the junior Coalition partner, the Country Party, took over as prime minister for three weeks until the Liberals could elect a new leader. Senator John Gorton won the vote and became prime minister. The leadership campaign was conducted mostly by television, and Gorton appeared to have the visual appeal needed to keep Whitlam out of office. Gorton resigned his seat in the Senate, and in February 1968 won the by-election for Holt's seat of Higgins in Victoria. For the remainder of the year, Gorton appeared to have the better of Whitlam in the House of Representatives. In his chronicle of the Whitlam years, however, speechwriter Graham Freudenberg asserts that Gorton's erratic behaviour, Whitlam's strengthening of his party, and events outside Australia (such as the Vietnam War) ate away at Liberal dominance.
Gorton called an election for October 1969. Whitlam and the ALP, with little internal dissension, stood on a platform calling for domestic reform, an end to conscription, and the withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam by 1 July 1970. Whitlam knew that, given the ALP's poor position after the 1966 election, victory was unlikely. Nevertheless, Whitlam scored an 18-seat swing, Labor's best performance since losing government in 1949. It also scored a 7.1 percent two-party swing, the largest to not result in a change of government. Although the Coalition was returned for an eighth term in government, it was with a slim majority of three seats, down from 19 prior to the election. Labor actually won a bare majority of the two-party vote and only DLP preferences, especially in Melbourne-area seats, kept Whitlam from becoming prime minister. The 1970 half-Senate election brought little change to Coalition control, but the Liberal vote fell below 40 per cent for the first time, representing a severe threat to Gorton's leadership.
In March 1971, the resentment against Gorton came to a head when a confidence vote in the Liberal caucus resulted in a tie. Declaring that this was a sign he no longer had the confidence of the party, Gorton resigned, and William McMahon was elected his successor. With the Liberals in turmoil, Whitlam and the ALP sought to gain public trust as a credible government-in-waiting. The party's actions, such as its abandonment of the White Australia policy, gained favourable media attention. The Labor leader flew to Papua New Guinea and pledged himself to the independence of what was then under Australian trusteeship. In 1971, Whitlam flew to Beijing and met with Chinese officials, including Zhou Enlai. McMahon attacked Whitlam for the visit and claimed that the Chinese had manipulated him. This attack backfired when US President Richard Nixon announced that he would visit China the following year. His National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, visited Beijing between 9–11 July (less than a week after Whitlam's visit of 4–6 July), and, unknown to Whitlam, some of Kissinger's staff had been in Beijing preparing for Kissinger's visit at the same time as the Labor delegation. According to Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking, the incident transformed Whitlam into an international statesman, while McMahon was seen as reacting defensively to Whitlam's foreign policy ventures. Other errors by McMahon, such as a confused ad-lib speech while visiting Washington, and a statement to Indonesia's President Suharto that Australia was a "west European nation", also damaged the government.
By early 1972, Labor had established a clear lead in the polls; indeed, for the first time since 1955 its support was greater than the combined vote for the Coalition and DLP. Unemployment was at a ten-year peak, rising to 2.14 percent in August (though the unemployment rate was calculated differently compared to the present, and did not include thousands of rural workers on Commonwealth-financed relief work). Inflation was also at its highest rate since the early 1950s. The government recovered slightly in the August Budget session of Parliament, proposing income tax cuts and increased spending. The Labor strategy for the run-up to the election was to sit back and allow the Coalition to make mistakes. Whitlam controversially stated in March that "draft-dodging is not a crime" and that he would be open to a revaluation of the Australian dollar. With the Coalition sinking in the polls and his own personal approval ratings down as low as 28 percent, McMahon waited as long as he could, finally calling an election for the House of Representatives for 2 December. Whitlam noted that the polling day was the anniversary of the Battle of Austerlitz at which another "ramshackle, reactionary coalition" had been given a "crushing defeat".
Labor campaigned under the slogan "It's Time", an echo of Menzies' successful 1949 slogan, "It's Time for a Change". Surveys showed that even Liberal voters approved of the Labor slogan. Whitlam pledged an end to conscription and the release of individuals who had refused the draft; an income tax surcharge to pay for universal health insurance; free dental care for students; and renovation of aging urban infrastructure. The party pledged to eliminate university tuition fees and establish a schools commission to evaluate educational needs. The party benefited from the support of the proprietor of News Limited, Rupert Murdoch, who preferred Whitlam over McMahon. Labor was so dominant in the campaign that some of Whitlam's advisers urged him to stop joking about McMahon; people were feeling sorry for him. The election saw the ALP increase its tally by 12 seats, mostly in suburban Sydney and Melbourne, for a majority of nine in the House of Representatives. The ALP gained little beyond the suburban belts, however, losing a seat in South Australia and two in Western Australia.
Whitlam took office with a majority in the House of Representatives, but without control of the Senate (elected in the 1967 and 1970 half-elections). The Senate at that time consisted of ten members from each of the six states, elected by proportional representation. Historically, when Labor won government, the parliamentary caucus chose the ministers, with the party leader only having the power to assign portfolios. However, the new Labor caucus would not meet until after the final results came in on 15 December. In the meantime, McMahon would remain caretaker prime minister. Whitlam, however, was unwilling to wait as long as that. On 5 December, with Labor's win beyond doubt even though counting was still underway, Whitlam had the Governor-General, Sir Paul Hasluck, swear him in as prime minister and Labor's deputy leader, Lance Barnard, as deputy prime minister. The two men held 27 portfolios during the two weeks before a full cabinet could be determined.
During the two weeks the so-called "duumvirate" held office, Whitlam sought to fulfill those campaign promises that did not require legislation. Whitlam ordered negotiations to establish full relations with the People's Republic of China, and broke those with Taiwan. Legislation allowed the defence minister to grant exemptions from conscription. Barnard held this office, and exempted everyone. Seven men were at that time incarcerated for refusing conscription; Whitlam arranged for their liberation. The Whitlam government in its first days reopened the equal pay case pending before the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, and appointed a woman, Elizabeth Evatt, to the commission. Whitlam and Barnard eliminated sales tax on contraceptive pills, announced major grants for the arts, and appointed an interim schools commission. The duumvirate barred racially discriminatory sports teams from Australia, and instructed the Australian delegation at the United Nations to vote in favour of sanctions on apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. It also ordered the Australian Army Training Team home from Vietnam, ending Australia's involvement in the war; most troops, including all conscripts, had been withdrawn by McMahon.
According to Whitlam's speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, the duumvirate was a success, as it showed that the Labor government could manipulate the machinery of government, despite almost a quarter-century in opposition. However, Freudenberg noted that the rapid pace and public excitement caused by the duumvirate's actions caused the Opposition to be wary of giving Labor too easy a time, and gave rise to one post-mortem assessment of the Whitlam government: "We did too much too soon."
The McMahon government had consisted of 27 ministers, twelve of whom comprised the Cabinet. In the run-up to the election, the Labor caucus had decided that should the party take power, all 27 ministers were to be Cabinet members. Intense canvassing took place amongst ALP parliamentarians as the duumvirate did its work, and on 18 December the caucus elected the Cabinet. The results were generally acceptable to Whitlam, and within three hours, he had announced the portfolios of the Cabinet members. To give himself greater control over the Cabinet, in January 1973 Whitlam established five Cabinet committees (with the members appointed by himself, not the caucus) and took full control of the Cabinet agenda.
Whitlam, prime minister for fewer than three years between 1972 and 1975, pushed through a raft of reforms that radically changed Australia's economic, legal and cultural landscape.
The Whitlam government abolished the death penalty for federal crimes. Legal aid was established, with offices in each state capital. It abolished university fees, and established the Schools Commission to allocate funds to schools. Whitlam founded the Department of Urban Development and, having lived in developing Cabramatta, most of which lacked sewage facilities, established the National Sewerage Program, which set a goal to leave no urban home unsewered. The Whitlam government gave grants directly to local government units for urban renewal, flood prevention, and the promotion of tourism. Other federal grants financed highways linking the state capitals, and paid for standard-gauge rail lines between the states. The government attempted to set up a new city at Albury–Wodonga on the Victoria–New South Wales border. The process was started for "Advance Australia Fair" to become the country's national anthem in place of "God Save the Queen". The Order of Australia replaced the British honours system in early 1975.
In 1973, the National Gallery of Australia, then called the Australian National Gallery, bought the painting "Blue Poles" by contemporary artist Jackson Pollock for US$2 million (A$1.3 million at the time of payment), which was about a third of its annual budget. This required Whitlam's personal permission, which he gave on the condition the price was publicised. The purchase created a political and media scandal, and was said to symbolise, alternatively, Whitlam's foresight and vision or his profligate spending.
Whitlam travelled extensively as prime minister, and was the first Australian prime minister to visit China while in office. He was criticised for making this visit, especially after Cyclone Tracy struck Darwin; he interrupted an extensive tour of Europe for 48 hours (deemed too brief a period by many) to view the devastation.
From the start of the Whitlam government, the Opposition, led by Billy Snedden, who replaced McMahon as Liberal leader in December 1972, sought to use control of the Senate to baulk Whitlam. It did not seek to block all government legislation; the Coalition senators, led by Senate Liberal leader Reg Withers, sought to block government legislation only when the obstruction would advance the Opposition's agenda. The Whitlam government also had troubles in relations with the states. New South Wales refused the government's request to close the Rhodesian Information Centre in Sydney. The Queensland premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen refused to consider any adjustment in Queensland's border with Papua New Guinea, which, due to the state's ownership of islands in the Torres Strait, came within half a kilometre of the Papuan mainland. Liberal state governments in New South Wales and Victoria were re-elected by large margins in 1973. Whitlam and his majority in the House of Representatives proposed a constitutional referendum in December 1973, transferring control of wages and prices from the states to the federal government. The two propositions failed to attract a majority of voters in any state, and were rejected by over 800,000 votes nationwide.
In 1974, the Senate refused to pass six bills after they were passed twice by the House of Representatives. With the Opposition threatening to disrupt money supply to government, Whitlam used the Senate's recalcitrance to trigger a double dissolution election, holding it instead of the half-Senate election. After a campaign featuring the Labor slogan "Give Gough a fair go", the Whitlam government was returned, with its majority in the House of Representatives cut from seven to five and its Senate seats increased by three. It was only the second time since Federation that a Labor government had been elected to a second full term. The government and the opposition each had 29 Senators with two seats held by independents. The deadlock over the twice-rejected bills was broken, uniquely in Australian history, with a special joint sitting of the two houses of Parliament under Section 57 of the Constitution. This session, authorised by the new governor-general, John Kerr, passed bills providing for universal health insurance (known then as Medibank, today as Medicare) and providing the Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory with representation in the Senate, effective at the next election.
In February 1973, the Attorney General, Senator Lionel Murphy, led a police raid on the Melbourne office of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, which was under his ministerial responsibility. Murphy believed that ASIO might have files relating to threats against Yugoslav Prime Minister Džemal Bijedić, who was about to visit Australia, and feared ASIO might conceal or destroy them. The Opposition attacked the Government over the raid, terming Murphy a "loose cannon". A Senate investigation of the incident was cut short when Parliament was dissolved in 1974. According to journalist and author Wallace Brown, the controversy over the raid continued to dog the Whitlam government throughout its term, because the incident was "so silly".
By early 1974, the Senate had rejected nineteen government bills, ten of them twice. With a half-Senate election due by mid-year, Whitlam looked for ways to shore up support in that body. Queensland senator and former DLP leader Vince Gair signalled his willingness to leave the Senate for a diplomatic post. Gair's term would not expire until the following half-Senate election or upon a double dissolution election. With five Queensland seats at stake in the half-Senate election, the ALP was expected to win only two, but if six (including Gair's) were at stake, the party would be likely to win a third. Possible control of the Senate was therefore at stake; Whitlam agreed to Gair's request and had Governor-General Sir Paul Hasluck appoint him ambassador to Ireland. Word leaked of Gair's pending resignation, and Whitlam's opponents attempted to counteract his manoeuvre. On what became known as the "Night of the Long Prawns", Country Party members secreted Gair at a small party in a legislative office as the ALP searched for him to secure his written resignation. As Gair enjoyed beer and prawns, Bjelke-Petersen advised the Queensland governor, Colin Hannah, to issue writs for only the usual five vacancies, since Gair's seat was not yet vacant, effectively countering Whitlam's plan.
By mid-1974, Australia was in an economic slump, suffering from the 1973 oil crisis and 1973–75 recession. The 1973 oil crisis had caused prices to spike and, according to government figures, inflation topped 13 percent for over a year between 1973 and 1974. Part of the inflation was due to Whitlam's desire to increase wages and conditions of the Commonwealth Public Service as a pacesetter for the private sector. The Whitlam government had cut tariffs by 25 percent in 1973; 1974 saw an increase in imports of 30 percent and a $1.5 billion increase in the trade deficit. Primary producers of commodities such as beef were caught in a credit squeeze as short-term rates rose to extremely high levels. Unemployment also rose significantly. Unease within the ALP led to Barnard's defeat when Jim Cairns challenged him for his deputy leadership. Whitlam gave little help to his embattled deputy, who had formed the other half of the duumvirate.
Despite these economic indicators, the Budget presented in August 1974 saw large increases in spending, especially in education. Treasury officials had advised a series of tax and fee increases, ranging from excise taxes to the cost of posting a letter; their advice was mostly rejected by Cabinet. The Budget was unsuccessful in dealing with the inflation and unemployment, and Whitlam introduced large tax cuts in November. He also announced additional spending to help the private sector.
Beginning in October 1974, the Whitlam government sought overseas loans to finance its development plans, with the newly enriched oil nations a likely target. Whitlam attempted to secure financing before informing the Loan Council which included state officials hostile to Whitlam. His government empowered Pakistani financier Tirath Khemlani as an intermediary in the hope of securing US$4 billion in loans. While the Loans Affair did not result in a loan, according to author and Whitlam speechwriter Graham Freudenberg, "The only cost involved was the cost to the reputation of the Government. That cost was to be immense—it was government itself."
Whitlam appointed Senator Murphy to the High Court, even though Murphy's Senate seat would not be up for election if a half-Senate election were held. Labor then held three of the five short-term New South Wales Senate seats. Under proportional representation, Labor could hold its three short-term seats in the next half-Senate election but, if Murphy's seat were also contested, Labor was unlikely to win four out of six. Thus, a Murphy appointment meant the almost certain loss of a seat in the closely divided Senate at the next election. Whitlam appointed Murphy anyway. By convention, senators appointed by the state legislature to fill casual vacancies were from the same political party as the former senator. The New South Wales premier, Tom Lewis felt that this convention only applied to vacancies caused by deaths or ill-health, and arranged for the legislature to elect Cleaver Bunton, former mayor of Albury and an independent. By March 1975, many Liberal parliamentarians felt that Snedden was doing an inadequate job as leader of the Opposition, and that Whitlam was dominating him in the House of Representatives. Malcolm Fraser challenged Snedden for the leadership, and defeated him on 21 March.
Soon after Fraser's accession, controversy arose over the Whitlam government's actions in trying to restart peace talks in Vietnam. As the North prepared to end the civil war, Whitlam sent cables to both Vietnamese governments, telling Parliament that both cables were substantially the same. The Opposition contended he had misled Parliament, and a motion to censure Whitlam was defeated along party lines. The Opposition also attacked Whitlam for not allowing enough South Vietnamese refugees into Australia, with Fraser calling for the entry of 50,000. Freudenberg alleges that 1,026 Vietnamese refugees entered Australia in the final eight months of the Whitlam government, and only 399 in 1976 under Fraser. However, by 1977, Australia had accepted over five thousand refugees.
As the political situation deteriorated, Whitlam and his government continued to enact legislation: The Family Law Act 1975 provided for no-fault divorce while the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 caused Australia to ratify the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that Australia had signed under Holt, but which had never been ratified. In August 1975, Whitlam gave the Gurindji people of the Northern Territory title deeds to part of their traditional lands, beginning the process of Aboriginal land reform. The next month, Australia granted independence to Papua New Guinea.
Following the 1974 Carnation Revolution, Portugal began a process of decolonisation and began a withdrawal from Portuguese Timor (later East Timor). Australians had long taken an interest in the colony; the nation had sent troops to the region during World War II, and many East Timorese had fought the Japanese as guerrillas. In September 1974, Whitlam met with President Suharto in Indonesia and indicated that he would support Indonesia if it annexed East Timor. At the height of the Cold War, and in the context of the American retreat from Indo-China, he felt that incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia would enhance the stability of the region, and reduce the risk of the East Timorese FRETILIN movement, which many feared was communist, coming to power.
Whitlam had offered Barnard a diplomatic post and in early 1975 Barnard agreed to this, triggering a by-election in his Tasmanian electorate of Bass. The election on 28 June proved a disaster for Labor, which lost the seat with a swing against it of 17 percent. The next week, Whitlam removed deputy prime minister Cairns, who had misled Parliament about the Loans Affair amid controversy about his relationship with his office manager, Junie Morosi. At the time of Cairns's dismissal, one Senate seat was vacant, following the death on 30 June of Queensland ALP Senator Bertie Milliner. The state Labor party nominated Mal Colston, resulting in a deadlock. The unicameral Queensland legislature twice voted against Colston, and the party refused to submit any alternative candidates. Bjelke-Petersen finally convinced the legislature to elect a low-level union official, Albert Field, who had contacted his office and expressed a willingness to serve. In interviews, Field made it clear he would not support Whitlam. Field was expelled from the ALP for standing against Colston, and Labor senators boycotted his swearing-in. Whitlam argued that, because of the manner of filling vacancies, the Senate was "corrupted" and "tainted", with the Opposition enjoying a majority they did not win at the ballot box.
In October 1975, the Opposition, led by Malcolm Fraser, determined to withhold supply by deferring consideration of appropriation bills. With Field on leave (his Senate appointment having been challenged), the Coalition had an effective majority of 30–29 in the Senate. The Coalition believed that if Whitlam could not deliver supply, and would not advise new elections, Kerr would have to dismiss him. Supply would run out on 30 November.
The stakes were raised in the conflict on 10 October, when the High Court declared valid the Act granting the territories two senators each. In a half-Senate election, most successful candidates would not take their places until 1 July 1976, but the territories' senators, and those filling Field's and Bunton's seats, would assume their seats immediately. This gave Labor an outside chance of controlling the Senate, at least until 1 July 1976.
On 14 October, Labor minister Rex Connor, mastermind of the loans scheme, was forced to resign when Khemlani released documents showing that Connor had made misleading statements. The continuing scandal bolstered the Coalition in their stance that they would not concede supply. Whitlam on the other hand, convinced that he would win the battle, was glad of the distraction from the Loans Affair, and believed that he would "smash" not only the Senate, but Fraser's leadership as well.
Whitlam told the House of Representatives on 21 October,
Whitlam and his ministers repeatedly claimed that the Opposition was damaging not only the constitution, but the economy as well. The Coalition senators remained united, though several became increasingly concerned about the tactic of blocking supply. As the crisis dragged into November, Whitlam attempted to make arrangements for public servants and suppliers to be able to cash cheques at banks. These transactions would be temporary loans which the government would repay once supply was restored. This plan to prolong government without supply was presented to Kerr unsigned on 6 November, under the title "Draft Joint Opinion" (ostensibly of solicitor-general Maurice Byers and attorney-general Kep Enderby). It proposed that public employees, including members of the armed forces and police, "could assign arrears of pay by way of mortgage". The government's refusal to formalise this and other "advice" was a factor justifying Kerr's resort to advice from elsewhere.
Kerr was following the crisis closely. At a luncheon with Whitlam and several of his ministers on 30 October, Kerr suggested a compromise: if Fraser conceded supply, Whitlam would agree not to call the half-Senate election until May or June 1976, or alternatively would agree not to call the Senate into session until after 1 July. Whitlam rejected the idea, seeking to end the Senate's right to deny supply. On 3 November, after a meeting with Kerr, Fraser proposed that if the government agreed to hold a House of Representatives election at the same time as the half-Senate election, the Coalition would concede supply. Whitlam rejected this offer, stating that he had no intention of advising a House election for at least a year.
With the crisis unresolved, Kerr decided to dismiss Whitlam as prime minister. Fearing that Whitlam would go to the Queen and potentially have him removed, the Governor-General gave Whitlam no prior hint. Against Whitlam's advice, he conferred with High Court Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick, who agreed that he had the power to dismiss Whitlam.
A meeting among the party leaders, including Whitlam and Fraser, to resolve the crisis on the morning of 11 November came to nothing. Kerr and Whitlam met at the Governor-General's office that afternoon at 1.00 pm. Unknown to Whitlam, Fraser was waiting in an ante-room; Whitlam later stated that he would not have set foot in the building if he had known Fraser was there. Whitlam, as he had told Kerr by phone earlier that day, came prepared to advise a half-Senate election, to be held on 13 December. Kerr instead told Whitlam that he had terminated his commission as prime minister, and handed him a letter to that effect. After the conversation, Whitlam returned to the Prime Minister's residence, The Lodge, had lunch and conferred with his advisers. Immediately after his meeting with Whitlam, Kerr commissioned Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister, on the assurance he could obtain supply and would then advise Kerr to dissolve both houses for election.
In the confusion, Whitlam and his advisers did not immediately tell any Senate members of the dismissal, with the result that when the Senate convened at 2.00 pm, the appropriation bills were rapidly passed, with the ALP senators assuming the Opposition had given in. The bills were soon sent to Kerr to receive Royal Assent. At 2.34 pm, ten minutes after supply had been secured, Fraser rose in the House and announced he was prime minister. Whitlam immediately moved a successful no confidence motion against Fraser in the House. The Speaker, Gordon Scholes, was instructed to advise Kerr to reinstate Whitlam.
Kerr refused to receive Scholes, keeping him waiting for more than an hour. In that time Kerr rang Justice Anthony Mason to ask for advice. Mason told him that the no confidence motion in the House was "irrelevant". Kerr then prorogued Parliament by proclamation: his Official Secretary, David Smith, came to Parliament House to proclaim the dissolution from the front steps. A large, angry crowd had gathered, and Smith was nearly drowned out by their noise. He concluded his task by taking the unilateral step of re-instating the traditional ending for a royal proclamation "God save the Queen", a practise the Whitlam government had abolished. Whitlam, who had been standing behind Smith, then addressed the crowd:
Well may we say "God save the Queen", because nothing will save the Governor-General! The Proclamation which you have just heard read by the Governor-General's Official Secretary was countersigned Malcolm Fraser, who will undoubtedly go down in Australian history from Remembrance Day 1975 as Kerr's cur. They won't silence the outskirts of Parliament House, even if the inside has been silenced for a few weeks. ... Maintain your rage and enthusiasm for the campaign for the election now to be held and until polling day.
During the crisis, Whitlam had alleged that Country Party leader Anthony had close links to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Subsequently, it was alleged that Kerr acted on behalf of the United States government in procuring Whitlam's dismissal. The most common allegation is that the CIA influenced Kerr's decision to dismiss Whitlam. In 1966 Kerr had joined the Association for Cultural Freedom, a conservative group that was later revealed to have received CIA funding. Christopher Boyce, who was convicted for spying for the Soviet Union while an employee for a CIA contractor, claimed that the CIA wanted Whitlam removed from office because he threatened to close US military bases in Australia, including Pine Gap. Boyce said that Kerr was described by the CIA as "our man Kerr". According to Jonathan Kwitny of the "Wall Street Journal", the CIA "paid for Kerr's travel, built his prestige ... Kerr continued to go to the CIA for money". In 1974, the White House sent as ambassador to Australia Marshall Green, who was known as "the coupmaster" for his central role in the 1965 coup against Indonesian President Sukarno.
Whitlam later wrote that Kerr did not need any encouragement from the CIA. However, he also said that in 1977 United States Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher made a special trip to Sydney to meet with him and told him, on behalf of US President Jimmy Carter, of his willingness to work with whatever government Australians elected, and that the US would never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes.
Former ASIO chief Sir Edward Woodward has dismissed the notion of CIA involvement, as has journalist Paul Kelly. Justice Robert Hope, who had twice been royal commissioner investigating the Australian intelligence agencies, including ASIO, stated in 1998 that he had attempted to locate and interview a witness who had allegedly given in-camera evidence to the Church Committee about CIA involvement in the dismissal. He was unable to find either the witness or testimony, despite having the support of "a senior [US] senator". In his top secret supplementary report, however, Hope dismissed the idea of a CIA involvement in Australian politics.
On 28 May 2020, the Australian High Court ruled that letters between Kerr and Queen Elizabeth II could be accessed by historians, who hope to shed more light on the circumstances regarding his dismissal when the correspondence is unsealed from the National Archives.
As the ALP began the 1975 campaign, it seemed that its supporters would maintain their rage. Early rallies drew huge crowds, with attendees handing Whitlam money to pay election expenses. The crowds greatly exceeded those in any of Whitlam's earlier campaigns; in The Domain, Sydney, 30,000 people gathered for an ALP rally below a banner: "Shame Fraser Shame". Fraser's appearances drew protests, and a letter bomb sent to Kerr was defused by authorities. Instead of making a policy speech to keynote his campaign, Whitlam made a speech attacking his opponents and calling 11 November "a day which will live in infamy".
Polls from the first week of campaigning showed a nine-point swing against Labor, which would have decimated Labor if repeated in an election. Whitlam's campaign team disbelieved the results at first, but additional polling returns clearly showed that the electorate had turned against Labor. The Coalition attacked Labor for economic conditions, and released television commercials with the title "The Three Dark Years" showing images from Whitlam government scandals. The ALP campaign concentrated on the issue of Whitlam's dismissal and did not address the economy until its final days. By that time Fraser was confident of victory and content to sit back, avoid specifics and make no mistakes. In the election, the Coalition won the largest majority government in Australian history, winning 91 seats to Labor's 36. Labor suffered a 6.5 percent swing against it and its caucus was cut almost in half, suffering a 30-seat swing. Labor was left with five fewer seats than it had when Whitlam took the leadership. The Coalition also won a 37–25 majority in the Senate.
Whitlam stayed on as Opposition leader, surviving a leadership challenge. In early 1976, an additional controversy broke when it was reported that Whitlam had been involved in ALP attempts to raise $500,000 during the election from the Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr government of Iraq. No money had actually been paid, and no charges were filed.
The Whitlams were visiting China at the time of the Tangshan earthquake in July 1976, though they were staying in Tianjin, away from the epicentre. "The Age" printed a cartoon by Peter Nicholson showing the Whitlams huddled together in bed with Margaret Whitlam saying, "Did the earth move for you too, dear?" This cartoon prompted a page full of outraged letters from Labor partisans and a telegram from Gough Whitlam, safe in Tokyo, requesting the original of the cartoon.
In early 1977 Whitlam faced a leadership challenge from Bill Hayden, the last treasurer in the Whitlam government, and won by a two-vote margin. Fraser called an election for 10 December. Although Labor managed to pick up five seats, the Coalition still enjoyed a majority of 48. According to Freudenberg, "The meaning and the message were unmistakable. It was the Australian people's rejection of Edward Gough Whitlam." Whitlam's son Tony, who had joined his father in the House of Representatives at the 1975 election, was defeated. Shortly after the election, Whitlam resigned as party leader and was succeeded by Hayden.
Whitlam was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in June 1978, and resigned from Parliament on 31 July of the same year. He then held various academic positions. When Labor returned to power under Bob Hawke in 1983, Whitlam was appointed as Australia's ambassador to UNESCO, based in Paris. He served for three years in this post, defending UNESCO against allegations of corruption. At the end of his term as ambassador Whitlam was elected to the Executive Board of UNESCO for a 3-year term, until 1989. In 1985, he was appointed to Australia's Constitutional Commission.
Whitlam was appointed chairman of the National Gallery of Australia in 1987 after his son Nick, who was then managing director of the State Bank of New South Wales, turned down the position. He and Margaret Whitlam were part of the bid team that in 1993 persuaded the International Olympic Committee to give Sydney the right to host the 2000 Summer Olympics.
John Kerr died in 1991. He and Whitlam never reconciled; indeed, Whitlam always saw his dismissal from office as a "constitutional coup d'état". Whitlam and Fraser put aside their differences and became friends during the 1980s, though they never discussed the events of 1975. The two subsequently campaigned together in support of the 1999 Australian republic referendum. In March 2010, Fraser visited Whitlam at his Sydney office while on a book tour to promote his memoirs. Whitlam accepted an autographed copy of the book and presented Fraser with a copy of his 1979 book about the dismissal, "The Truth of the Matter".
During the 1990s Labor Government, Whitlam used the Australian Greens as a "decoy questioner" in parliament. According to Dee Margetts, Whitlam "didn't like what Keating and Hawke had done" and regularly sent the Greens questions to ask the government about policies he disagreed with.
In 2003, Whitlam's former research assistant Mark Latham became the leader of the ALP. Although Latham was more conservative than Whitlam, the former prime minister gave Latham much support, according to one account "anointing him as his political heir". Latham, like Whitlam, represented Werriwa in the House of Representatives. Whitlam supported Latham when he opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Whitlam supported fixed four-year terms for both houses of Parliament. In 2006, he accused the ALP of failing to press for this change. In April 2007, he and Margaret Whitlam were both made life members of the Australian Labor Party. This was the first time anyone had been made a life member of the party organisation at the national level.
In 2007, Whitlam testified at an inquest into the death of Brian Peters, one of five Australia-based TV personnel killed in East Timor in October 1975. Whitlam indicated that he had warned Peters' colleague, Greg Shackleton, who was also killed, that the Australian government could not protect them in East Timor and that they should not go there. He also said that Shackleton was "culpable" if he had not passed on Whitlam's warning.
Whitlam joined three other former prime ministers in February 2008 in returning to Parliament to witness the Federal Government apology to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations by the then prime minister Kevin Rudd. On 21 January 2009, Whitlam achieved a greater age () than any other prime minister of Australia, surpassing the previous record holder Frank Forde. On the 60th anniversary of his marriage to Margaret Whitlam, he called it "very satisfactory" and claimed a record for "matrimonial endurance". In 2010, it was reported that Whitlam had moved into an aged care facility in Sydney's inner east in 2007. Despite this, he continued to go to his office three days a week. Margaret Whitlam remained in the couple's nearby apartment. In early 2012, she suffered a fall there, leading to her death in hospital at the age of 92 on 17 March of that year, a month short of the Whitlams' 70th wedding anniversary.
Gough Whitlam died on the morning of 21 October 2014. His family announced that there would be a private cremation and a public memorial service. Whitlam was survived by his four children, five grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. He was the longest-lived Australian Prime Minister, dying at the age of 98 years and 102 days.
A state memorial service was held on 5 November 2014 in the Sydney Town Hall and was led by Kerry O'Brien. The Welcome to Country was given by Auntie Millie Ingram and eulogies were delivered by Graham Freudenberg, Cate Blanchett, Noel Pearson, John Faulkner and Antony Whitlam. Pearson's contribution in particular was hailed as "one of the best political speeches of our time". Musical performances were delivered by William Barton (a didgeridoo improvisation), Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody (their land rights protest song "From Little Things Big Things Grow"), as well as the Sydney Philharmonia Choir and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Northey. In accordance with Whitlam's wishes, the orchestra performed "In Tears of Grief" from Bach's "St Matthew Passion", "Va, pensiero" from Verdi's "Nabucco", "Un Bal" from "Symphonie fantastique" by Berlioz and, as the final piece, "Jerusalem" by Parry. "Jerusalem" was followed by a flypast of four RAAF F/A-18 Hornets in missing man formation. Those attending the memorial included the current and some former governors-general, the current and all living former prime ministers, and members of the family of Vincent Lingiari. The two-hour service, attended by 1,000 invited guests and 900 others, was screened to thousands outside the Hall, as well as in Cabramatta and Melbourne, and broadcast live by ABC television.
In honour of Whitlam, the Australian Electoral Commission created the Division of Whitlam in the House of Representatives in place of the Division of Throsby, with effect from the 2016 election. ACT Chief Minister Katy Gallagher announced that a future Canberra suburb will be named for Whitlam, and that his family would be consulted about other potential memorials. Gough Whitlam Park in Earlwood, New South Wales, is named after him.
Whitlam remains well remembered for the circumstances of his dismissal. It is a legacy he did little to efface; he wrote a 1979 book, "The Truth of the Matter" (the title is a play on that of Kerr's 1978 memoir, "Matters for Judgment") and devoted part of his subsequent book, "Abiding Interests", to the circumstances of his removal. According to journalist and author Paul Kelly, who penned two books on the crisis, Whitlam "achieved a paradoxical triumph: the shadow of the dismissal has obscured the sins of his government".
More books have been written about Whitlam, including his own writings, than about any other Australian prime minister. According to Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking, for a period of at least a decade, the Whitlam era was viewed almost entirely in negative terms, but that has changed. Still, she feels that Australians take for granted programmes and policies initiated by the Whitlam government, such as recognition of China, legal aid, and Medicare. Ross McMullin, who wrote an official history of the ALP, notes that Whitlam remains greatly admired by many Labor supporters because of his efforts to reform Australian government, and his inspiring leadership. Some rankings have put Whitlam high on the list of Australia's better prime ministers. Economist and writer Ross Gittins evaluated the Whitlam Government's responses to the economic challenges of the time.
Wallace Brown describes Whitlam in his book about his experiences covering Australian prime ministers as a journalist:
Whitlam was the most paradoxical of all Prime Ministers in the last half of the 20th century. A man of superb intellect, knowledge, and literacy, he yet had little ability when it came to economics. ... Whitlam rivalled Menzies in his passion for the House of Representatives and ability to use it as his stage, and yet his parliamentary skills were rhetorical and not tactical. He could devise a strategy and then often botch the tactics in trying to implement that strategy. ... Above all he was a man of grand vision with serious blind spots.
Whitlam's last words in the documentary film "Gough Whitlam – In His Own Words" (2002) were in response to a question about his status as an icon and elder statesman. He said:
"I hope this is not just because I was a martyr; the fact was, I was an achiever".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12454
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Ginnungagap
In Norse mythology, Ginnungagap ("gaping abyss", "yawning void") is the primordial void, mentioned in the Gylfaginning, the Eddaic text recording Norse cosmogony.
"Ginnunga-" is usually interpreted as deriving from a verb meaning "gape" or "yawn", but no such word occurs in Old Norse except in verse 3 of the Eddic poem "Vǫluspá", "gap var ginnunga", which may be a play on the term. In her edition of the poem, Ursula Dronke suggested it was borrowed from Old High German "ginunga", as the term Múspell is believed to have been borrowed from Old High German. An alternative etymology links the "ginn-" prefix with that found in terms with a sacral meaning, such as "ginn-heilagr", "ginn-regin" (both referring to the gods) and "ginn-runa" (referring to the runes), thus interpreting "Ginnungagap" as signifying a "magical (and creative) power-filled space".
Ginnungagap appears as the primordial void in the Norse creation account. The "Gylfaginning" states:
In the northern part of Ginnungagap lay the intense cold of Niflheim, and in the southern part lay the equally intense heat of Muspelheim. The cosmogonic process began when the effulgence of the two met in the middle of Ginnungagap.
Scandinavian cartographers from the early 15th century attempted to localise or identify Ginnungagap as a real geographic location from which the creation myth derived. A fragment from a 15th-century (pre-Columbus) Old Norse encyclopedic text entitled "Gripla" (Little Compendium) places Ginnungagap between Greenland and Vinland:
A scholion in a 15th-century manuscript of Adam of Bremen's "Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum" similarly refers to "Ghimmendegop" as the Norse word for the abyss in the far north.
Later, the 17th-century Icelandic bishop Guðbrandur Thorlaksson also used the name "Ginnungegap" to refer to a narrow body of water, possibly the Davis Strait, separating the southern tip of Greenland from "Estotelandia, pars America extrema", probably Baffin Island.
Ginnungagap is featured in the Marvel Universe, as a void that existed before the formation of the world. In this place were formed entities such as the Elder Gods, Xian, Ennead, Frost Giants, Fire Demons, Nyx and Amatsu-Mikaboshi.
It is mentioned in the fourth novel 'A Clash of Cymbals/The Triumph of Time' of the Cities in Flight series by James Blish when this Universe ends.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12458
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Green
Green is the color between blue and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by a combination of yellow and blue, or yellow and cyan; in the RGB color model, used on television and computer screens, it is one of the additive primary colors, along with red and blue, which are mixed in different combinations to create all other colors. By far the largest contributor to green in nature is chlorophyll, the chemical by which plants photosynthesize and convert sunlight into chemical energy. Many creatures have adapted to their green environments by taking on a green hue themselves as camouflage. Several minerals have a green color, including the emerald, which is colored green by its chromium content.
During post-classical and early modern Europe, green was the color commonly associated with wealth, merchants, bankers and the gentry, while red was reserved for the nobility. For this reason, the costume of the "Mona Lisa" by Leonardo da Vinci and the benches in the British House of Commons are green while those in the House of Lords are red. It also has a long historical tradition as the color of Ireland and of Gaelic culture. It is the historic color of Islam, representing the lush vegetation of Paradise. It was the color of the banner of Muhammad, and is found in the flags of nearly all Islamic countries.
In surveys made in American, European, and Islamic countries, green is the color most commonly associated with nature, life, health, youth, spring, hope, and envy. In the European Union and the United States, green is also sometimes associated with toxicity and poor health, but in China and most of Asia, its associations are very positive, as the symbol of fertility and happiness. Because of its association with nature, it is the color of the environmental movement. Political groups advocating environmental protection and social justice describe themselves as part of the Green movement, some naming themselves Green parties. This has led to similar campaigns in advertising, as companies have sold green, or environmentally friendly, products. Green is also the traditional color of safety and permission; a green light means go ahead, a green card permits permanent residence in the United States.
The word "green" comes from the Middle English and Old English word "grene", which, like the German word "grün", has the same root as the words "grass" and "grow". It is from a Common Germanic "*gronja-", which is also reflected in Old Norse "grænn", Old High German "gruoni" (but unattested in East Germanic), ultimately from a PIE root "*" "to grow", and root-cognate with "grass" and "to grow".
The first recorded use of the word as a color term in Old English dates to ca. AD 700.
Latin with "viridis" also has a genuine and widely used term for "green". Related to "virere" "to grow" and "ver" "spring", it gave rise to words in several Romance languages, French "vert", Italian "verde" (and English "vert", "verdure" etc.). Likewise the Slavic languages with "zelenъ". Ancient Greek also had a term for yellowish, pale green – χλωρός, "chloros" (cf. the color of chlorine), cognate with χλοερός "verdant" and χλόη "chloe, the green of new growth".
Thus, the languages mentioned above (Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Greek) have old terms for "green" which are derived from words for fresh, sprouting vegetation.
However, comparative linguistics makes clear that these terms were coined independently, over the past few millennia, and there is no identifiable single Proto-Indo-European or word for "green". For example, the Slavic "zelenъ" is cognate with Sanskrit "hari" "yellow, ochre, golden".
The Turkic languages also have "jašɨl" "green" or "yellowish green", compared to a Mongolian word for "meadow".
In some languages, including old Chinese, Thai, old Japanese, and Vietnamese, the same word can mean either blue or green. The Chinese character 青 (pronounced "qīng" in Mandarin, "ao" in Japanese, and "thanh" in Sino-Vietnamese) has a meaning that covers both blue and green; blue and green are traditionally considered shades of "青". In more contemporary terms, they are 藍 ("lán", in Mandarin) and 綠 ("lǜ", in Mandarin) respectively. Japanese also has two terms that refer specifically to the color green, 緑 ("midori", which is derived from the classical Japanese descriptive verb "midoru" "to be in leaf, to flourish" in reference to trees) and グリーン ("guriin", which is derived from the English word "green"). However, in Japan, although the traffic lights have the same colors as other countries have, the green light is described using the same word as for blue, "aoi", because green is considered a shade of aoi; similarly, green variants of certain fruits and vegetables such as green apples, green "shiso" (as opposed to red apples and red shiso) will be described with the word "aoi". Vietnamese uses a single word for both blue and green, "xanh", with variants such as "xanh da trời" (azure, lit. "sky blue"), "lam" (blue), and "lục" (green; also "xanh lá cây", lit. "leaf green").
"Green" in modern European languages corresponds to about 520–570 nm, but many historical and non-European languages make other choices, e.g. using a term for the range of ca. 450–530 nm ("blue/green") and another for ca. 530–590 nm ("green/yellow"). In the comparative study of color terms in the world's languages, green is only found as a separate category in languages with the fully developed range of six colors (white, black, red, green, yellow, and blue), or more rarely in systems with five colors (white, red, yellow, green, and black/blue). (See distinction of green from blue) These languages have introduced supplementary vocabulary to denote "green", but these terms are recognizable as recent adoptions that are not in origin color terms (much like the English adjective orange being in origin not a color term but the name of a fruit). Thus, the Thai word เขียว "kheīyw", besides meaning "green", also means "rank" and "smelly" and holds other unpleasant associations.
The Celtic languages had a term for "blue/green/grey", Proto-Celtic "*glasto-", which gave rise to Old Irish "glas" "green, grey" and to Welsh "glas" "blue". This word is cognate with the Ancient Greek γλαυκός "bluish green", contrasting with χλωρός "yellowish green" discussed above.
In modern Japanese, the term for green is 緑, while the old term for "blue/green", now means "blue". But in certain contexts, green is still conventionally referred to as 青, as in and , reflecting the absence of blue-green distinction in old Japanese (more accurately, the traditional Japanese color terminology grouped some shades of green with blue, and others with yellow tones).
The Persian language is traditionally lacking a black/blue/green distinction. The Persian word سبز "sabz" can mean "green", "black", or "dark". Thus, Persian erotic poetry, dark-skinned women are addressed as "sabz-eh", as in phrases like سبز گندم گون "sabz-eh-gandom-gun" (literally ""dark" wheat colored") or سبز مليح "sabz-eh-malih" ("a "dark" beauty"). Similarly, in Sudanese Arabic, dark-skinned people are described as أخضر "akhḍar", the term which in Standard Arabic stands unambiguously for "green".
In optics, the perception of green is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 495570nm. The sensitivity of the dark-adapted human eye is greatest at about 507nm, a blue-green color, while the light-adapted eye is most sensitive about 555nm, a yellow-green; these are the peak locations of the rod and cone (scotopic and photopic, respectively) luminosity functions.
The perception of greenness (in opposition to redness forming one of the opponent mechanisms in human color vision) is evoked by light which triggers the medium-wavelength "M" cone cells in the eye more than the long-wavelength "L" cones. Light which triggers this greenness response more than the yellowness or blueness of the other color opponent mechanism is called green. A green light source typically has a spectral power distribution dominated by energy with a wavelength of roughly 487570 nm.
Human eyes have color receptors known as cone cells, of which there are three types. In some cases, one is missing or faulty, which can cause color blindness, including the common inability to distinguish red and yellow from green, known as deuteranopia or redgreen color blindness. Green is restful to the eye. Studies show that a green environment can reduce fatigue.
In the subtractive color system, used in painting and color printing, green is created by a combination of yellow and blue, or yellow and cyan; in the RGB color model, used on television and computer screens, it is one of the additive primary colors, along with red and blue, which are mixed in different combinations to create all other colors. On the HSV color wheel, also known as the , the complement of green is magenta; that is, a color corresponding to an equal mixture of red and blue light (one of the purples). On a traditional color wheel, based on subtractive color, the complementary color to green is considered to be red.
In additive color devices such as computer displays and televisions, one of the primary light sources is typically a narrow-spectrum yellowish-green of dominant wavelength ~550nm; this "green" primary is combined with an orangish-red "red" primary and a purplish-blue "blue" primary to produce any color in betweenthe RGB color model. A unique green (green appearing neither yellowish nor bluish) is produced on such a device by mixing light from the green primary with some light from the blue primary.
Lasers emitting in the green part of the spectrum are widely available to the general public in a wide range of output powers. Green laser pointers outputting at 532nm (563.5 THz) are relatively inexpensive compared to other wavelengths of the same power, and are very popular due to their good beam quality and very high apparent brightness. The most common green lasers use diode pumped solid state (DPSS) technology to create the green light. An infrared laser diode at 808nm is used to pump a crystal of neodymium-doped yttrium vanadium oxide (Nd:YVO4) or neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet (Nd:YAG) and induces it to emit 281.76 THz (1064 nm). This deeper infrared light is then passed through another crystal containing potassium, titanium and phosphorus (KTP), whose non-linear properties generate light at a frequency that is twice that of the incident beam (563.5 THz); in this case corresponding to the wavelength of 532nm ("green"). Other green wavelengths are also available using DPSS technology ranging from 501 nm to 543 nm. Green wavelengths are also available from gas lasers, including the helium–neon laser (543nm), the Argon-ion laser (514nm) and the Krypton-ion laser (521nm and 531nm), as well as liquid dye lasers. Green lasers have a wide variety of applications, including pointing, illumination, surgery, laser light shows, spectroscopy, interferometry, fluorescence, holography, machine vision, non-lethal weapons and bird control.
As of mid-2011, direct green laser diodes at 510nm and 500nm have become generally available, although the price remains relatively prohibitive for widespread public use. The efficiency of these lasers (peak 3%) compared to that of DPSS green lasers (peak 35%) may also be limiting adoption of the diodes to niche uses.
Many minerals provide pigments which have been used in green paints and dyes over the centuries. Pigments, in this case, are minerals which reflect the color green, rather that emitting it through luminescent or phosphorescent qualities. The large number of green pigments makes it impossible to mention them all. Among the more notable green minerals, however is the emerald, which is colored green by trace amounts of chromium and sometimes vanadium. Chromium(III) oxide (Cr2O3), is called chrome green, also called viridian or institutional green when used as a pigment. For many years, the source of amazonite's color was a mystery. Widely thought to have been due to copper because copper compounds often have blue and green colors, the blue-green color is likely to be derived from small quantities of lead and water in the feldspar. Copper is the source of the green color in malachite pigments, chemically known as basic copper(II) carbonate.
Verdigris is made by placing a plate or blade of copper, brass or bronze, slightly warmed, into a vat of fermenting wine, leaving it there for several weeks, and then scraping off and drying the green powder that forms on the metal. The process of making verdigris was described in ancient times by Pliny. It was used by the Romans in the murals of Pompeii, and in Celtic medieval manuscripts as early as the 5th century AD. It produced a blue-green which no other pigment could imitate, but it had drawbacks: it was unstable, it could not resist dampness, it did not mix well with other colors, it could ruin other colors with which it came into contact, and it was toxic. Leonardo da Vinci, in his treatise on painting, warned artists not to use it. It was widely used in miniature paintings in Europe and Persia in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its use largely ended in the late 19th century, when it was replaced by the safer and more stable chrome green. Viridian, as described above, was patented in 1859. It became popular with painters, since, unlike other synthetic greens, it was stable and not toxic. Vincent van Gogh used it, along with Prussian blue, to create a dark blue sky with a greenish tint in his painting "Café Terrace at Night".
Green earth is a natural pigment used since the time of the Roman Empire. It is composed of clay colored by iron oxide, magnesium, aluminum silicate, or potassium. Large deposits were found in the South of France near Nice, and in Italy around Verona, on Cyprus, and in Bohemia. The clay was crushed, washed to remove impurities, then powdered. It was sometimes called Green of Verona.
Mixtures of oxidized cobalt and zinc were also used to create green paints as early as the 18th century.
Cobalt green, sometimes known as Rinman's green or zinc green, is a translucent green pigment made by heating a mixture of cobalt (II) oxide and zinc oxide. Sven Rinman, a Swedish chemist, discovered this compound in 1780. Green chrome oxide was a new synthetic green created by a chemist named Pannetier in Paris in about 1835. Emerald green was a synthetic deep green made in the 19th century by hydrating chrome oxide. It was also known as Guignet green.
There is no natural source for green food colorings which has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. Chlorophyll, the E numbers E140 and E141, is the most common green chemical found in nature, and only allowed in certain medicines and cosmetic materials. Quinoline Yellow (E104) is a commonly used coloring in the United Kingdom but is banned in Australia, Japan, Norway and the United States. Green S (E142) is prohibited in many countries, for it is known to cause hyperactivity, asthma, urticaria, and insomnia.
To create green sparks, fireworks use barium salts, such as barium chlorate, barium nitrate crystals, or barium chloride, also used for green fireplace logs. Copper salts typically burn blue, but cupric chloride (also known as "campfire blue") can also produce green flames. Green pyrotechnic flares can use a mix ratio 75:25 of boron and potassium nitrate. Smoke can be turned green by a mixture: solvent yellow 33, solvent green 3, lactose, magnesium carbonate plus sodium carbonate added to potassium chlorate.
Green is common in nature, as many plants are green because of a complex chemical known as chlorophyll, which is involved in photosynthesis. Chlorophyll absorbs the long wavelengths of light (red) and short wavelengths of light (blue) much more efficiently than the wavelengths that appear green to the human eye, so light reflected by plants is enriched in green. Chlorophyll absorbs green light poorly because it first arose in organisms living in oceans where purple halobacteria were already exploiting photosynthesis. Their purple color arose because they extracted energy in the green portion of the spectrum using bacteriorhodopsin. The new organisms that then later came to dominate the extraction of light were selected to exploit those portions of the spectrum not used by the halobacteria.
Animals typically use the color green as camouflage, blending in with the chlorophyll green of the surrounding environment. Most fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds appear green because of a reflection of blue light coming through an over-layer of yellow pigment. Perception of color can also be affected by the surrounding environment. For example, broadleaf forests typically have a yellow-green light about them as the trees filter the light. Turacoverdin is one chemical which can cause a green hue in birds, especially. Invertebrates such as insects or mollusks often display green colors because of porphyrin pigments, sometimes caused by diet. This can causes their feces to look green as well. Other chemicals which generally contribute to greenness among organisms are flavins (lychochromes) and hemanovadin. Humans have imitated this by wearing green clothing as a camouflage in military and other fields. Substances that may impart a greenish hue to one's skin include biliverdin, the green pigment in bile, and ceruloplasmin, a protein that carries copper ions in chelation.
The green huntsman spider is green due to the presence of bilin pigments in the spider's hemolymph (circulatory system fluids) and tissue fluids. It hunts insects in green vegetation, where it is well camouflaged.
There is no green pigment in green eyes; like the color of blue eyes, it is an optical illusion; its appearance is caused by the combination of an amber or light brown pigmentation of the stroma, given by a low or moderate concentration of melanin, with the blue tone imparted by the Rayleigh scattering of the reflected light. Green eyes are most common in Northern and Central Europe. They can also be found in Southern Europe, West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia. In Iceland, 89% of women and 87% of men have either blue or green eye color. A study of Icelandic and Dutch adults found green eyes to be much more prevalent in women than in men. Among European Americans, green eyes are most common among those of recent Celtic and Germanic ancestry, about 16%.
Neolithic cave paintings do not have traces of green pigments, but neolithic peoples in northern Europe did make a green dye for clothing, made from the leaves of the birch tree. It was of very poor quality, more brown than green. Ceramics from ancient Mesopotamia show people wearing vivid green costumes, but it is not known how the colors were produced.
In Ancient Egypt, green was the symbol of regeneration and rebirth, and of the crops made possible by the annual flooding of the Nile. For painting on the walls of tombs or on papyrus, Egyptian artists used finely ground malachite, mined in the west Sinai and the eastern desert; a paintbox with malachite pigment was found inside the tomb of King Tutankhamun. They also used less expensive green earth pigment, or mixed yellow ochre and blue azurite. To dye fabrics green, they first colored them yellow with dye made from saffron and then soaked them in blue dye from the roots of the woad plant.
For the ancient Egyptians, green had very positive associations. The hieroglyph for green represented a growing papyrus sprout, showing the close connection between green, vegetation, vigor and growth. In wall paintings, the ruler of the underworld, Osiris, was typically portrayed with a green face, because green was the symbol of good health and rebirth. Palettes of green facial makeup, made with malachite, were found in tombs. It was worn by both the living and the dead, particularly around the eyes, to protect them from evil. Tombs also often contained small green amulets in the shape of scarab beetles made of malachite, which would protect and give vigor to the deceased. It also symbolized the sea, which was called the "Very Green."
In Ancient Greece, green and blue were sometimes considered the same color, and the same word sometimes described the color of the sea and the color of trees. The philosopher Democritus described two different greens: "cloron", or pale green, and "prasinon", or leek green. Aristotle considered that green was located midway between black, symbolizing the earth, and white, symbolizing water. However, green was not counted among the four classic colors of Greek painting – red, yellow, black and white – and is rarely found in Greek art.
The Romans had a greater appreciation for the color green; it was the color of Venus, the goddess of gardens, vegetables and vineyards. The Romans made a fine green earth pigment that was widely used in the wall paintings of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Lyon, Vaison-la-Romaine, and other Roman cities. They also used the pigment verdigris, made by soaking copper plates in fermenting wine. By the second century AD, the Romans were using green in paintings, mosaics and glass, and there were ten different words in Latin for varieties of green.
In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the color of clothing showed a person's social rank and profession. Red could only be worn by the nobility, brown and gray by peasants, and green by merchants, bankers and the gentry and their families. The Mona Lisa wears green in her portrait, as does the bride in the Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck.
There were no good vegetal green dyes which resisted washing and sunlight for those who wanted or were required to wear green. Green dyes were made out of the fern, plantain, buckthorn berries, the juice of nettles and of leeks, the digitalis plant, the broom plant, the leaves of the fraxinus, or ash tree, and the bark of the alder tree, but they rapidly faded or changed color. Only in the 16th century was a good green dye produced, by first dyeing the cloth blue with woad, and then yellow with "Reseda luteola", also known as yellow-weed.
The pigments available to painters were more varied; monks in monasteries used verdigris, made by soaking copper in fermenting wine, to color medieval manuscripts. They also used finely-ground malachite, which made a luminous green. They used green earth colors for backgrounds.
During the early Renaissance, painters such as Duccio di Buoninsegna learned to paint faces first with a green undercoat, then with pink, which gave the faces a more realistic hue. Over the centuries the pink has faded, making some of the faces look green.
The 18th and 19th centuries brought the discovery and production of synthetic green pigments and dyes, which rapidly replaced the earlier mineral and vegetable pigments and dyes. These new dyes were more stable and brilliant than the vegetable dyes, but some contained high levels of arsenic, and were eventually banned.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, green was associated with the romantic movement in literature and art. The German poet and philosopher Goethe declared that green was the most restful color, suitable for decorating bedrooms. Painters such as John Constable and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot depicted the lush green of rural landscapes and forests. Green was contrasted to the smoky grays and blacks of the Industrial Revolution.
The second half of the 19th century saw the use of green in art to create specific emotions, not just to imitate nature. One of the first to make color the central element of his picture was the American artist James McNeil Whistler, who created a series of paintings called "symphonies" or "noctures" of color, including "Symphony in gray and green; The Ocean" between 1866 and 1872.
The late nineteenth century also brought the systematic study of color theory, and particularly the study of how complementary colors such as red and green reinforced each other when they were placed next to each other. These studies were avidly followed by artists such as Vincent van Gogh. Describing his painting, The "Night Cafe", to his brother Theo in 1888, Van Gogh wrote: "I sought to express with red and green the terrible human passions. The hall is blood red and pale yellow, with a green billiard table in the center, and four lamps of lemon yellow, with rays of orange and green. Everywhere it is a battle and antithesis of the most different reds and greens."
In the 1980s green became a political symbol, the color of the Green Party in Germany and in many other European countries. It symbolized the environmental movement, and also a new politics of the left which rejected traditional socialism and communism. (See section below.)
Green can communicate safety to proceed, as in traffic lights. Green and red were standardized as the colors of international railroad signals in the 19th century. The first traffic light, using green and red gas lamps, was erected in 1868 in front of the Houses of Parliament in London. It exploded the following year, injuring the policeman who operated it. In 1912, the first modern electric traffic lights were put up in Salt Lake City, Utah. Red was chosen largely because of its high visibility, and its association with danger, while green was chosen largely because it could not be mistaken for red. Today green lights universally signal that a system is turned on and working as it should. In many video games, green signifies both health and completed objectives, opposite red.
Green is the color most commonly associated in Europe and the United States with nature, vivacity and life.
It is the color of many environmental organizations, such as Greenpeace, and of the Green Parties in Europe. Many cities have designated a garden or park as a green space, and use green trash bins and containers. A green cross is commonly used to designate pharmacies in Europe.
In China, green is associated with the east, with sunrise, and with life and growth. In Thailand, the color green is considered auspicious for those born on a Wednesday day (light green for those born at night).
Green is the color most commonly associated in the United States and Europe with springtime, freshness, and hope. Green is often used to symbolize rebirth and renewal and immortality. In Ancient Egypt; the god Osiris, king of the underworld, was depicted as green-skinned. Green as the color of hope is connected with the color of springtime; hope represents the faith that things will improve after a period of difficulty, like the renewal of flowers and plants after the winter season.
Green the color most commonly associated in Europe and the United States with youth. It also often is used to describe anyone young, inexperienced, probably by the analogy to immature and unripe fruit. Examples include green cheese, a term for a fresh, unaged cheese, and greenhorn, an inexperienced person.
Surveys also show that green is the color most associated with the calm, the agreeable, and tolerance. Red is associated with heat, blue with cold, and green with an agreeable temperature. Red is associated with dry, blue with wet, and green, in the middle, with dampness. Red is the most active color, blue the most passive; green, in the middle, is the color of neutrality and calm, sometimes used in architecture and design for these reasons. Blue and green together symbolize harmony and balance.
Green is often associated with jealousy and envy. The expression "green-eyed monster" was first used by William Shakespeare in Othello: "it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on." Shakespeare also used it in the Merchant of Venice, speaking of "green-eyed jealousy."
Green today is not commonly associated in Europe and the United States with love and sexuality, but in stories of the medieval period it sometimes represented love and the base, natural desires of man. It was the color of the serpent in the Garden of Eden who caused the downfall of Adam and Eve. However, for the troubadours, green was the color of growing love, and light green clothing was reserved for young women who were not yet married.
In Persian and Sudanese poetry, dark-skinned women, called "green" women, were considered erotic. The Chinese term for cuckold is "to wear a green hat." This was because in ancient China, prostitutes were called "the family of the green lantern" and a prostitute's family would wear a green headscarf.
In Victorian England, the color green was associated with homosexuality.
In legends, folk tales and films, fairies, dragons, monsters, and the devil are often shown as green.
In the Middle Ages, the devil was usually shown as either red, black or green. Dragons were usually green, because they had the heads, claws and tails of reptiles.
Modern Chinese dragons are also often green, but unlike European dragons, they are benevolent; Chinese dragons traditionally symbolize potent and auspicious powers, particularly control over water, rainfall, hurricane, and floods. The dragon is also a symbol of power, strength, and good luck. The Emperor of China usually used the dragon as a symbol of his imperial power and strength. The dragon dance is a popular feature of Chinese festivals.
In Irish folklore and English folklore, the color was sometimes was associated with witchcraft, and with faeries and spirits. The type of Irish fairy known as a leprechaun is commonly portrayed wearing a green suit, though before the 20th century he was usually described as wearing a red suit.
In theater and film, green was often connected with monsters and the inhuman. The earliest films of Frankenstein were in black and white, but in the poster for the 1935 version "The Bride of Frankenstein", the monster had a green face. Actor Bela Lugosi wore green-hued makeup for the role of Dracula in the 1927–1928 Broadway stage production.
Like other common colors, green has several completely opposite associations. While it is the color most associated by Europeans and Americans with good health, it is also the color most often associated with toxicity and poison. There was a solid foundation for this association; in the nineteenth century several popular paints and pigments, notably verdigris, vert de Schweinfurt and vert de Paris, were highly toxic, containing copper or arsenic. The intoxicating drink absinthe was known as "the green fairy".
A green tinge in the skin is sometimes associated with nausea and sickness. The expression 'green at the gills' means appearing sick. The color, when combined with gold, is sometimes seen as representing the fading of youth. In some Far East cultures the color green is used as a symbol of sickness or nausea.
Green in Europe and the United States is sometimes associated with status and prosperity. From the Middle Ages to the 19th century it was often worn by bankers, merchants country gentlemen and others who were wealthy but not members of the nobility. The benches in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, where the landed gentry sat, are colored green.
In the United States green was connected with the dollar bill. Since 1861, the reverse side of the dollar bill has been green. Green was originally chosen because it deterred counterfeiters, who tried to use early camera equipment to duplicate banknotes. Also, since the banknotes were thin, the green on the back did not show through and muddle the pictures on the front of the banknote. Green continues to be used because the public now associates it with a strong and stable currency.
One of the more notable uses of this meaning is found in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". The Emerald City in this story is a place where everyone wears tinted glasses that make everything appear green. According to the populist interpretation of the story, the city's color is used by the author, L. Frank Baum, to illustrate the financial system of America in his day, as he lived in a time when America was debating the use of paper money versus gold.
Green is one of the three colors (along with red and black, or red and gold) of Pan-Africanism. Several African countries thus use the color on their flags, including Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Ethiopia, Togo, Guinea, Benin, and Zimbabwe. The Pan-African colors are borrowed from the Ethiopian flag, one of the oldest independent African countries. Green on some African flags represents the natural richness of Africa.
Many flags of the Islamic world are green, as the color is considered sacred in Islam (see below). The flag of Hamas, as well as the flag of Iran, is green, symbolizing their Islamist ideology. The 1977 flag of Libya consisted of a simple green field with no other characteristics. It was the only national flag in the world with just one color and no design, insignia, or other details. Some countries used green in their flags to represent their country's lush vegetation, as in the flag of Jamaica, and hope in the future, as in the flags of Portugal and Nigeria. The green cedar of Lebanon tree on the Flag of Lebanon officially represents steadiness and tolerance.
Green is a symbol of Ireland, which is often referred to as the "Emerald Isle". The color is particularly identified with the republican and nationalist traditions in modern times. It is used this way on the flag of the Republic of Ireland, in balance with white and the Protestant orange. Green is a strong trend in the Irish holiday St. Patrick's Day.
The first recorded green party was a political faction in Constantinople during the 6th century Byzantine Empire. which took its name from a popular chariot racing team. They were bitter opponents of the blue faction, which supported Emperor Justinian I and which had its own chariot racing team. In 532 AD rioting between the factions began after one race, which led to the massacre of green supporters and the destruction of much of the center of Constantinople. (See Nika Riots).
Green was the traditional color of Irish nationalism, beginning in the 17th century. The green harp flag, with a traditional gaelic harp, became the symbol of the movement. It was the banner of the Society of United Irishmen, which organized the Irish Rebellion of 1798, calling for Irish independence. The uprising was suppressed with great bloodshed by the British army. When Ireland achieved independence in 1922, green was incorporated into the national flag.
In the 1970s green became the color of the third biggest Swiss Federal Council political party, the Swiss People's Party SVP. The ideology is Swiss nationalism, national conservatism, right-wing populism, economic liberalism, agrarianism, isolationism, euroscepticism. The SVP was founded on September 22, 1971 and has 90,000 members.
In the 1980s green became the color of a number of new European political parties organized around an agenda of environmentalism. Green was chosen for its association with nature, health, and growth. The largest green party in Europe is Alliance '90/The Greens (German: Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) in Germany, which was formed in 1993 from the merger of the German Green Party, founded in West Germany in 1980, and Alliance 90, founded during the Revolution of 1989–1990 in East Germany. In the 2009 federal elections, the party won 11% of the votes and 68 out of 622 seats in the Bundestag.
Green parties in Europe have programs based on ecology, grassroots democracy, nonviolence, and social justice. Green parties are found in over one hundred countries, and most are members of the Global Green Network.
Greenpeace is a non-governmental environmental organization which emerged from the anti-nuclear and peace movements in the 1970s. Its ship, the Rainbow Warrior, frequently tried to interfere with nuclear tests and whaling operations. The movement now has branches in forty countries.
The Australian Greens party was founded in 1992. In the 2010 federal election, the party received 13% of the vote (more than 1.6 million votes) in the Senate, a first for any Australian minor party.
Green is the color associated with Puerto Rico's Independence Party, the smallest of that country's three major political parties, which advocates Puerto Rican independence from the United States.
Green is the traditional color of Islam. According to tradition, the robe and banner of Muhammad were green, and according to the Koran (XVIII, 31 and LXXVI, 21) those fortunate enough to live in paradise wear green silk robes. Muhammad is quoted in a hadith as saying that "water, greenery, and a beautiful face" were three universally good things.
Al-Khidr ("The Green One"), was an important Qur'anic figure who was said to have met and traveled with Moses. He was given that name because of his role as a diplomat and negotiator. Green was also considered to be the median color between light and obscurity.
Roman Catholic and more traditional Protestant clergy wear green vestments at liturgical celebrations during Ordinary Time. In the Eastern Catholic Church, green is the color of Pentecost. Green is one of the Christmas colors as well, possibly dating back to pre-Christian times, when evergreens were worshiped for their ability to maintain their color through the winter season. Romans used green holly and evergreen as decorations for their winter solstice celebration called Saturnalia, which eventually evolved into a Christmas celebration. In Ireland and Scotland especially, green is used to represent Catholics, while orange is used to represent Protestantism. This is shown on the national flag of Ireland.
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Gradient
In vector calculus, the gradient of a scalar-valued differentiable function of several variables is the vector field (or vector-valued function) formula_1 whose value at a point formula_2 is the vector whose components are the partial derivatives of formula_3 at formula_2. That is, for formula_5, its gradient formula_6 is defined at the point formula_7 in "n-"dimensional space as the vector:
The nabla symbol formula_9, written as an upside-down triangle and pronounced "del""", denotes the vector differential operator.
The gradient is dual to the derivative formula_10: the value of the gradient at a point is a tangent vector – a vector at each point; while the value of the derivative at a point is a "co"tangent vector – a linear function on vectors. They are related in that the dot product of the gradient of at a point with another tangent vector equals the directional derivative of at of the function along ; that is, formula_11.
The gradient vector can be interpreted as the "direction and rate of fastest increase". If the gradient of a function is non-zero at a point , the direction of the gradient is the direction in which the function increases most quickly from , and the magnitude of the gradient is the rate of increase in that direction. Further, the gradient is the zero vector at a point if and only if it is a stationary point (where the derivative vanishes). The gradient thus plays a fundamental role in optimization theory, where it is used to maximize a function by gradient ascent.
The gradient admits multiple generalizations to more general functions on manifolds; see .
Consider a room where the temperature is given by a scalar field, , so at each point the temperature is , independent of time. At each point in the room, the gradient of at that point will show the direction in which the temperature rises most quickly, moving away from . The magnitude of the gradient will determine how fast the temperature rises in that direction.
Consider a surface whose height above sea level at point is . The gradient of at a point is a plane vector pointing in the direction of the steepest slope or grade at that point. The steepness of the slope at that point is given by the magnitude of the gradient vector.
The gradient can also be used to measure how a scalar field changes in other directions, rather than just the direction of greatest change, by taking a dot product. Suppose that the steepest slope on a hill is 40%. A road going directly uphill has slope 40%, but a road going around the hill at an angle will have a shallower slope. For example, if the road is at a 60° angle from the uphill direction (when both directions are projected onto the horizontal plane), then the slope along the road will be the dot product between the gradient vector and a unit vector along the road, namely 40% times the cosine of 60°, or 20%.
More generally, if the hill height function is differentiable, then the gradient of dotted with a unit vector gives the slope of the hill in the direction of the vector, the directional derivative of along the unit vector.
The gradient (or gradient vector field) of a scalar function is denoted or where (nabla) denotes the vector differential operator, del. The notation is also commonly used to represent the gradient. The gradient of is defined as the unique vector field whose dot product with any vector at each point is the directional derivative of along . That is,
Formally, the gradient is "dual" to the derivative; see relationship with derivative.
When a function also depends on a parameter such as time, the gradient often refers simply to the vector of its spatial derivatives only (see Spatial gradient).
The magnitude and direction of the gradient vector are independent of the particular coordinate representation.
In the three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system with a Euclidean metric, the gradient, if it exists, is given by:
where , , are the standard unit vectors in the directions of the , and coordinates, respectively. For example, the gradient of the function
is
In some applications it is customary to represent the gradient as a row vector or column vector of its components in a rectangular coordinate system; this article follows the convention of the gradient being a column vector, while the derivative is a row vector.
In cylindrical coordinates with a Euclidean metric, the gradient is given by:
where is the axial distance, is the azimuthal or azimuth angle, is the axial coordinate, and , and are unit vectors pointing along the coordinate directions.
In spherical coordinates, the gradient is given by:
where is the radial distance, is the azimuthal angle and is the polar angle, and , and are again local unit vectors pointing in the coordinate directions (that is, the normalized covariant basis).
For the gradient in other orthogonal coordinate systems, see Orthogonal coordinates (Differential operators in three dimensions).
We consider general coordinates, which we write as , where is the number of dimensions of the domain. Here, the upper index refers to the position in the list of the coordinate or component, so refers to the second component—not the quantity squared. The index variable refers to an arbitrary element . Using Einstein notation, the gradient can then be written as:
where formula_20 and formula_21 refer to the unnormalized local covariant and contravariant bases respectively, formula_22 is the inverse metric tensor, and the Einstein summation convention implies summation over "i" and "j".
If the coordinates are orthogonal we can easily express the gradient (and the differential) in terms of the normalized bases, which we refer to as formula_23 and formula_24, using the scale factors (also known as Lamé coefficients) formula_25 :
where we cannot use Einstein notation, since it is impossible to avoid the repetition of more than two indices. Despite the use of upper and lower indices, formula_28, formula_29, and formula_30 are neither contravariant nor covariant.
The latter expression evaluates to the expressions given above for cylindrical and spherical coordinates.
The gradient is closely related to the (total) derivative ((total) differential) formula_10: they are transpose (dual) to each other. Using the convention that vectors in formula_32 are represented by column vectors, and that covectors (linear maps formula_33) are represented by row vectors, the gradient formula_1 and the derivative formula_10 are expressed as a column and row vector, respectively, with the same components, but transpose of each other:
While these both have the same components, they differ in what kind of mathematical object they represent: at each point, the derivative is a cotangent vector, a linear form (covector) which expresses how much the (scalar) output changes for a given infinitesimal change in (vector) input, while at each point, the gradient is a tangent vector, which represents an infinitesimal change in (vector) input. In symbols, the gradient is an element of the tangent space at a point, formula_38, while the derivative is a map from the tangent space to the real numbers, formula_39. The tangent spaces at each point of formula_32 can be "naturally" identified with the vector space formula_32 itself, and similarly the cotangent space at each point can be naturally identified with the dual vector space formula_42 of covectors; thus the value of the gradient at a point can be thought of a vector in the original formula_32, not just as a tangent vector.
Computationally, given a tangent vector, the vector can be "multiplied" by the derivative (as matrices), which is equal to taking the dot product with the gradient:
The best linear approximation to a differentiable function
at a point in is a linear map from to which is often denoted by or and called the differential or (total) derivative of at . The function , which maps to , is called the (total) differential or exterior derivative of and is an example of a differential 1-form.
Much as the derivative of a function of a single variable represents the slope of the tangent to the graph of the function, the directional derivative of a function in several variables represents the slope of the tangent hyperplane in the direction of the vector.
The gradient is related to the differential by the formula
for any , where formula_47 is the dot product: taking the dot product of a vector with the gradient is the same as taking the directional derivative along the vector.
If is viewed as the space of (dimension ) column vectors (of real numbers), then one can regard as the row vector with components
so that is given by matrix multiplication. Assuming the standard Euclidean metric on , the gradient is then the corresponding column vector, that is,
The best linear approximation to a function can be expressed in terms of the gradient, rather than the derivative. The gradient of a function from the Euclidean space to at any particular point in characterizes the best linear approximation to at . The approximation is as follows:
for close to , where is the gradient of computed at , and the dot denotes the dot product on . This equation is equivalent to the first two terms in the multivariable Taylor series expansion of at .
Let be an open set in . If the function is differentiable, then the differential of is the (Fréchet) derivative of . Thus is a function from to the space such that
where · is the dot product.
As a consequence, the usual properties of the derivative hold for the gradient, though the gradient is not a derivative itself, but rather dual to the derivative:
The gradient is linear in the sense that if and are two real-valued functions differentiable at the point , and and are two constants, then is differentiable at , and moreover
If and are real-valued functions differentiable at a point , then the product rule asserts that the product is differentiable at , and
Suppose that is a real-valued function defined on a subset of , and that is differentiable at a point . There are two forms of the chain rule applying to the gradient. First, suppose that the function is a parametric curve; that is, a function maps a subset into . If is differentiable at a point such that , then
where ∘ is the composition operator: .
More generally, if instead , then the following holds:
where T denotes the transpose Jacobian matrix.
For the second form of the chain rule, suppose that is a real valued function on a subset of , and that is differentiable at the point . Then
A level surface, or isosurface, is the set of all points where some function has a given value.
If is differentiable, then the dot product of the gradient at a point with a vector gives the directional derivative of at in the direction . It follows that in this case the gradient of is orthogonal to the level sets of . For example, a level surface in three-dimensional space is defined by an equation of the form . The gradient of is then normal to the surface.
More generally, any embedded hypersurface in a Riemannian manifold can be cut out by an equation of the form such that is nowhere zero. The gradient of is then normal to the hypersurface.
Similarly, an affine algebraic hypersurface may be defined by an equation , where is a polynomial. The gradient of is zero at a singular point of the hypersurface (this is the definition of a singular point). At a non-singular point, it is a nonzero normal vector.
The gradient of a function is called a gradient field. A (continuous) gradient field is always a conservative vector field: its line integral along any path depends only on the endpoints of the path, and can be evaluated by the gradient theorem (the fundamental theorem of calculus for line integrals). Conversely, a (continuous) conservative vector field is always the gradient of a function.
The Jacobian matrix is the generalization of the gradient for vector-valued functions of several variables and differentiable maps between Euclidean spaces or, more generally, manifolds. A further generalization for a function between Banach spaces is the Fréchet derivative.
Since the total derivative of a vector field is a linear mapping from vectors to vectors, it is a tensor quantity.
In rectangular coordinates, the gradient of a vector field is defined by:
(where the Einstein summation notation is used and the tensor product of the vectors and is a dyadic tensor of type (2,0)). Overall, this expression equals the transpose of the Jacobian matrix:
In curvilinear coordinates, or more generally on a curved manifold, the gradient involves Christoffel symbols:
where are the components of the inverse metric tensor and the are the coordinate basis vectors.
Expressed more invariantly, the gradient of a vector field can be defined by the Levi-Civita connection and metric tensor:
where is the connection.
For any smooth function on a Riemannian manifold , the gradient of is the vector field such that for any vector field ,
that is,
where denotes the inner product of tangent vectors at defined by the metric and is the function that takes any point to the directional derivative of in the direction , evaluated at . In other words, in a coordinate chart from an open subset of to an open subset of , is given by:
where denotes the th component of in this coordinate chart.
So, the local form of the gradient takes the form:
Generalizing the case , the gradient of a function is related to its exterior derivative, since
More precisely, the gradient is the vector field associated to the differential 1-form using the musical isomorphism
(called "sharp") defined by the metric . The relation between the exterior derivative and the gradient of a function on is a special case of this in which the metric is the flat metric given by the dot product.
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Gauss (unit)
The gauss, symbol (sometimes Gs), is a unit of measurement of magnetic induction, also known as "magnetic flux density". The unit is part of the Gaussian system of units, which inherited it from the older CGS-EMU system. It was named after the German mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1936. One gauss is defined as one maxwell per square centimeter.
As the cgs system has been superseded by the International System of Units (SI), the use of the gauss has been deprecated by the standards bodies, but is still regularly used in various subfields of science. The SI unit for magnetic flux density is the tesla (symbol T), which corresponds to .
Albeit not a component of the International System of Units, the usage of the gauss generally follows the rules for SI units. Since the name is derived from a person's name, its symbol is the uppercase letter "G". When the unit is spelled out, it is written in lowercase ("gauss"), unless it begins a sentence. The gauss may be combined with metric prefixes, such as in milligauss, mG (or mGs).
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Glacier
A glacier ( or ) is a persistent body of dense ice that is constantly moving under its own weight. A glacier forms where the accumulation of snow exceeds its ablation (melting and sublimation) over many years, often centuries. Glaciers slowly deform and flow under stresses induced by their weight, creating crevasses, seracs, and other distinguishing features. They also abrade rock and debris from their substrate to create landforms such as cirques and moraines. Glaciers form only on land and are distinct from the much thinner sea ice and lake ice that form on the surface of bodies of water.
On Earth, 99% of glacial ice is contained within vast ice sheets (also known as "continental glaciers") in the polar regions, but glaciers may be found in mountain ranges on every continent including Oceania's high-latitude oceanic island countries such as New Zealand. Between latitudes 35°N and 35°S, glaciers occur only in the Himalayas, Andes, and a few high mountains in East Africa, Mexico, New Guinea and on Zard Kuh in Iran. With more than 7,000, Pakistan has more glaciers than anywhere except the polar regions. Glaciers cover about 10% of Earth's land surface. Continental glaciers cover nearly or about 98% of Antarctica's , with an average thickness of . Greenland and Patagonia also have huge expanses of continental glaciers. The volume of glaciers, not including the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, has been estimated at 170,000 km3.
Glacial ice is the largest reservoir of fresh water on Earth. Many glaciers from temperate, alpine and seasonal polar climates store water as ice during the colder seasons and release it later in the form of meltwater as warmer summer temperatures cause the glacier to melt, creating a water source that is especially important for plants, animals and human uses when other sources may be scant. Within high-altitude and Antarctic environments, the seasonal temperature difference is often not sufficient to release meltwater.
Since glacial mass is affected by long-term climatic changes, e.g., precipitation, mean temperature, and cloud cover, glacial mass changes are considered among the most sensitive indicators of climate change and are a major source of variations in sea level.
A large piece of compressed ice, or a glacier, appears blue, as large quantities of water appear blue. This is because water molecules absorb other colors more efficiently than blue. The other reason for the blue color of glaciers is the lack of air bubbles. Air bubbles, which give a white color to ice, are squeezed out by pressure increasing the density of the created ice.
The word "glacier" is a loanword from French and goes back, via Franco-Provençal, to the Vulgar Latin ', derived from the Late Latin ', and ultimately Latin "", meaning "ice". The processes and features caused by or related to glaciers are referred to as glacial. The process of glacier establishment, growth and flow is called glaciation. The corresponding area of study is called glaciology. Glaciers are important components of the global cryosphere.
Glaciers are categorized by their morphology, thermal characteristics, and behavior. "Alpine glaciers" form on the crests and slopes of mountains. A glacier that fills a valley is called a "valley glacier", or alternatively an "alpine glacier" or "mountain glacier". A large body of glacial ice astride a mountain, mountain range, or volcano is termed an "ice cap" or "ice field". Ice caps have an area less than by definition.
Glacial bodies larger than are called "ice sheets" or "continental glaciers". Several kilometers deep, they obscure the underlying topography. Only nunataks protrude from their surfaces. The only extant ice sheets are the two that cover most of Antarctica and Greenland. They contain vast quantities of fresh water, enough that if both melted, global sea levels would rise by over . Portions of an ice sheet or cap that extend into water are called ice shelves; they tend to be thin with limited slopes and reduced velocities. Narrow, fast-moving sections of an ice sheet are called "ice streams". In Antarctica, many ice streams drain into large ice shelves. Some drain directly into the sea, often with an ice tongue, like Mertz Glacier.
"Tidewater glaciers" are glaciers that terminate in the sea, including most glaciers flowing from Greenland, Antarctica, Baffin and Ellesmere Islands in Canada, Southeast Alaska, and the Northern and Southern Patagonian Ice Fields. As the ice reaches the sea, pieces break off, or calve, forming icebergs. Most tidewater glaciers calve above sea level, which often results in a tremendous impact as the iceberg strikes the water. Tidewater glaciers undergo centuries-long cycles of advance and retreat that are much less affected by climate change than those of other glaciers.
Thermally, a "temperate glacier" is at melting point throughout the year, from its surface to its base. The ice of a "polar glacier" is always below the freezing point from the surface to its base, although the surface snow pack may experience seasonal melting. A "subpolar glacier" includes both temperate and polar ice, depending on depth beneath the surface and position along the length of the glacier. In a similar way, the thermal regime of a glacier is often described by its basal temperature. A "cold-based glacier" is below freezing at the ice-ground interface and is thus frozen to the underlying substrate. A "warm-based glacier" is above or at freezing at the interface and is able to slide at this contact. This contrast is thought to a large extent to govern the ability of a glacier to effectively erode its bed, as sliding ice promotes plucking at rock from the surface below. Glaciers which are partly cold-based and partly warm-based are known as "polythermal".
Glaciers form where the accumulation of snow and ice exceeds ablation. A glacier usually originates from a landform called 'cirque' (or corrie or cwm) – a typically armchair-shaped geological feature (such as a depression between mountains enclosed by arêtes) – which collects and compresses through gravity the snow that falls into it. This snow collects and is compacted by the weight of the snow falling above it, forming névé. Further crushing of the individual snowflakes and squeezing the air from the snow turns it into "glacial ice". This glacial ice will fill the cirque until it "overflows" through a geological weakness or vacancy, such as the gap between two mountains. When the mass of snow and ice is sufficiently thick, it begins to move by a combination of surface slope, gravity, and pressure. On steeper slopes, this can occur with as little as 15 m (50 ft) of snow-ice.
In temperate glaciers, snow repeatedly freezes and thaws, changing into granular ice called firn. Under the pressure of the layers of ice and snow above it, this granular ice fuses into denser firn. Over a period of years, layers of firn undergo further compaction and become glacial ice. Glacier ice is slightly more dense than ice formed from frozen water because glacier ice contains fewer trapped air bubbles.
Glacial ice has a distinctive blue tint because it absorbs some red light due to an overtone of the infrared OH stretching mode of the water molecule. Liquid water is blue for the same reason. The blue of glacier ice is sometimes misattributed to Rayleigh scattering of bubbles in the ice.
A glacier originates at a location called its glacier head and terminates at its glacier foot, snout, or terminus.
Glaciers are broken into zones based on surface snowpack and melt conditions. The ablation zone is the region where there is a net loss in glacier mass. The upper part of a glacier, where accumulation exceeds ablation, is called the accumulation zone. The equilibrium line separates the ablation zone and the accumulation zone; it is the contour where the amount of new snow gained by accumulation is equal to the amount of ice lost through ablation. In general, the accumulation zone accounts for 60–70% of the glacier's surface area, more if the glacier calves icebergs. Ice in the accumulation zone is deep enough to exert a downward force that erodes underlying rock. After a glacier melts, it often leaves behind a bowl- or amphitheater-shaped depression that ranges in size from large basins like the Great Lakes to smaller mountain depressions known as cirques.
The accumulation zone can be subdivided based on its melt conditions.
The health of a glacier is usually assessed by determining the glacier mass balance or observing terminus behavior. Healthy glaciers have large accumulation zones, more than 60% of their area is snow-covered at the end of the melt season, and they have a terminus with vigorous flow.
Following the Little Ice Age's end around 1850, glaciers around the Earth have retreated substantially. A slight cooling led to the advance of many alpine glaciers between 1950 and 1985, but since 1985 glacier retreat and mass loss has become larger and increasingly ubiquitous.
Glaciers move, or flow, downhill by the force of gravity and the internal deformation of ice. Ice behaves like a brittle solid until its thickness exceeds about 50 m (160 ft). The pressure on ice deeper than 50 m causes plastic flow. At the molecular level, ice consists of stacked layers of molecules with relatively weak bonds between layers. When the stress on the layer above exceeds the inter-layer binding strength, it moves faster than the layer below.
Glaciers also move through basal sliding. In this process, a glacier slides over the terrain on which it sits, lubricated by the presence of liquid water. The water is created from ice that melts under high pressure from frictional heating. Basal sliding is dominant in temperate or warm-based glaciers.
Although evidence in favour of glacial flow was known by the early 19th century, other theories of glacial motion were advanced, such as the idea that meltwater, refreezing inside glaciers, caused the glacier to dilate and extend its length. As it became clear that glaciers behaved to some degree as if the ice were a viscous fluid, it was argued that "regelation", or the melting and refreezing of ice at a temperature lowered by the pressure on the ice inside the glacier, was what allowed the ice to deform and flow. James Forbes came up with the essentially correct explanation in the 1840s, although it was several decades before it was fully accepted.
The top of a glacier are rigid because they are under low pressure. This upper section is known as the "fracture zone" and moves mostly as a single unit over the plastic-flowing lower section. When a glacier moves through irregular terrain, cracks called crevasses develop in the fracture zone. Crevasses form because of differences in glacier velocity. If two rigid sections of a glacier move at different speeds or directions, shear forces cause them to break apart, opening a crevasse. Crevasses are seldom more than deep but in some cases can be at least deep. Beneath this point, the plasticity of the ice prevents the formation of cracks. Intersecting crevasses can create isolated peaks in the ice, called seracs.
Crevasses can form in several different ways. Transverse crevasses are transverse to flow and form where steeper slopes cause a glacier to accelerate. Longitudinal crevasses form semi-parallel to flow where a glacier expands laterally. Marginal crevasses form near the edge of the glacier, caused by the reduction in speed caused by friction of the valley walls. Marginal crevasses are largely transverse to flow. Moving glacier ice can sometimes separate from the stagnant ice above, forming a bergschrund. Bergschrunds resemble crevasses but are singular features at a glacier's margins. Crevasses make travel over glaciers hazardous, especially when they are hidden by fragile snow bridges.
Below the equilibrium line, glacial meltwater is concentrated in stream channels. Meltwater can pool in proglacial lakes on top of a glacier or descend into the depths of a glacier via moulins. Streams within or beneath a glacier flow in englacial or sub-glacial tunnels. These tunnels sometimes reemerge at the glacier's surface.
The speed of glacial displacement is partly determined by friction. Friction makes the ice at the bottom of the glacier move more slowly than ice at the top. In alpine glaciers, friction is also generated at the valley's side walls, which slows the edges relative to the center.
Mean glacial speed varies greatly but is typically around per day. There may be no motion in stagnant areas; for example, in parts of Alaska, trees can establish themselves on surface sediment deposits. In other cases, glaciers can move as fast as per day, such as in Greenland's Jakobshavn Isbræ. Glacial speed is affected by factors such as slope, ice thickness, snowfall, longitudinal confinement, basal temperature, meltwater production, and bed hardness.
A few glaciers have periods of very rapid advancement called surges. These glaciers exhibit normal movement until suddenly they accelerate, then return to their previous movement state. These surges may be caused by failure of the underlying bedrock, the pooling of meltwater at the base of the glacier — perhaps delivered from a supraglacial lake — or the simple accumulation of mass beyond a critical "tipping point". Temporary rates up to per day have occurred when increased temperature or overlying pressure caused bottom ice to melt and water to accumulate beneath a glacier.
In glaciated areas where the glacier moves faster than one km per year, glacial earthquakes occur. These are large scale earthquakes that have seismic magnitudes as high as 6.1. The number of glacial earthquakes in Greenland peaks every year in July, August and September and increased rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s. In a study using data from January 1993 through October 2005, more events were detected every year since 2002, and twice as many events were recorded in 2005 as there were in any other year.
"Ogives" (or "Forbes bands") are alternating wave crests and valleys that appear as dark and light bands of ice on glacier surfaces. They are linked to seasonal motion of glaciers; the width of one dark and one light band generally equals the annual movement of the glacier. Ogives are formed when ice from an icefall is severely broken up, increasing ablation surface area during summer. This creates a swale and space for snow accumulation in the winter, which in turn creates a ridge. Sometimes ogives consist only of undulations or color bands and are described as wave ogives or band ogives.
Glaciers are present on every continent and in approximately fifty countries, excluding those (Australia, South Africa) that have glaciers only on distant subantarctic island territories. Extensive glaciers are found in Antarctica, Argentina, Chile, Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Iceland. Mountain glaciers are widespread, especially in the Andes, the Himalayas, the Rocky Mountains, the Caucasus, Scandinavian mountains, and the Alps. Snezhnika glacier in Pirin Mountain, Bulgaria with a latitude of 41°46′09″ N is the southernmost glacial mass in Europe. Mainland Australia currently contains no glaciers, although a small glacier on Mount Kosciuszko was present in the last glacial period. In New Guinea, small, rapidly diminishing, glaciers are located on Puncak Jaya. Africa has glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, on Mount Kenya, and in the Rwenzori Mountains. Oceanic islands with glaciers include Iceland, several of the islands off the coast of Norway including Svalbard and Jan Mayen to the far north, New Zealand and the subantarctic islands of Marion, Heard, Grande Terre (Kerguelen) and Bouvet. During glacial periods of the Quaternary, Taiwan, Hawaii on Mauna Kea and Tenerife also had large alpine glaciers, while the Faroe and Crozet Islands were completely glaciated.
The permanent snow cover necessary for glacier formation is affected by factors such as the degree of slope on the land, amount of snowfall and the winds. Glaciers can be found in all latitudes except from 20° to 27° north and south of the equator where the presence of the descending limb of the Hadley circulation lowers precipitation so much that with high insolation snow lines reach above . Between 19˚N and 19˚S, however, precipitation is higher, and the mountains above usually have permanent snow.
Even at high latitudes, glacier formation is not inevitable. Areas of the Arctic, such as Banks Island, and the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica are considered polar deserts where glaciers cannot form because they receive little snowfall despite the bitter cold. Cold air, unlike warm air, is unable to transport much water vapor. Even during glacial periods of the Quaternary, Manchuria, lowland Siberia, and central and northern Alaska, though extraordinarily cold, had such light snowfall that glaciers could not form.
In addition to the dry, unglaciated polar regions, some mountains and volcanoes in Bolivia, Chile and Argentina are high () and cold, but the relative lack of precipitation prevents snow from accumulating into glaciers. This is because these peaks are located near or in the hyperarid Atacama Desert.
Glaciers erode terrain through two principal processes: abrasion and plucking.
As glaciers flow over bedrock, they soften and lift blocks of rock into the ice. This process, called plucking, is caused by subglacial water that penetrates fractures in the bedrock and subsequently freezes and expands. This expansion causes the ice to act as a lever that loosens the rock by lifting it. Thus, sediments of all sizes become part of the glacier's load. If a retreating glacier gains enough debris, it may become a rock glacier, like the Timpanogos Glacier in Utah.
Abrasion occurs when the ice and its load of rock fragments slide over bedrock and function as sandpaper, smoothing and polishing the bedrock below. The pulverized rock this process produces is called rock flour and is made up of rock grains between 0.002 and 0.00625 mm in size. Abrasion leads to steeper valley walls and mountain slopes in alpine settings, which can cause avalanches and rock slides, which add even more material to the glacier. Glacial abrasion is commonly characterized by glacial striations. Glaciers produce these when they contain large boulders that carve long scratches in the bedrock. By mapping the direction of the striations, researchers can determine the direction of the glacier's movement. Similar to striations are chatter marks, lines of crescent-shape depressions in the rock underlying a glacier. They are formed by abrasion when boulders in the glacier are repeatedly caught and released as they are dragged along the bedrock.
The rate of glacier erosion varies. Six factors control erosion rate:
When the bedrock has frequent fractures on the surface, glacial erosion rates tend to increase as plucking is the main erosive force on the surface; when the bedrock has wide gaps between sporadic fractures, however, abrasion tends to be the dominant erosive form and glacial erosion rates become slow. Glaciers in lower latitudes tend to be much more erosive than glaciers in higher latitudes, because they have more meltwater reaching the glacial base and facilitate sediment production and transport under the same moving speed and amount of ice.
Material that becomes incorporated in a glacier is typically carried as far as the zone of ablation before being deposited. Glacial deposits are of two distinct types:
Larger pieces of rock that are encrusted in till or deposited on the surface are called "glacial erratics". They range in size from pebbles to boulders, but as they are often moved great distances, they may be drastically different from the material upon which they are found. Patterns of glacial erratics hint at past glacial motions.
Glacial moraines are formed by the deposition of material from a glacier and are exposed after the glacier has retreated. They usually appear as linear mounds of till, a non-sorted mixture of rock, gravel, and boulders within a matrix of fine powdery material. Terminal or end moraines are formed at the foot or terminal end of a glacier. Lateral moraines are formed on the sides of the glacier. Medial moraines are formed when two different glaciers merge and the lateral moraines of each coalesce to form a moraine in the middle of the combined glacier. Less apparent are ground moraines, also called "glacial drift", which often blankets the surface underneath the glacier downslope from the equilibrium line. The term "moraine" is of French origin. It was coined by peasants to describe alluvial embankments and rims found near the margins of glaciers in the French Alps. In modern geology, the term is used more broadly and is applied to a series of formations, all of which are composed of till. Moraines can also create moraine-dammed lakes.
Drumlins are asymmetrical, canoe-shaped hills made mainly of till. Their heights vary from 15 to 50 meters, and they can reach a kilometer in length. The steepest side of the hill faces the direction from which the ice advanced ("stoss"), while a longer slope is left in the ice's direction of movement ("lee"). Drumlins are found in groups called "drumlin fields" or "drumlin camps". One of these fields is found east of Rochester, New York; it is estimated to contain about 10,000 drumlins. Although the process that forms drumlins is not fully understood, their shape implies that they are products of the plastic deformation zone of ancient glaciers. It is believed that many drumlins were formed when glaciers advanced over and altered the deposits of earlier glaciers.
Before glaciation, mountain valleys have a characteristic "V" shape, produced by eroding water. During glaciation, these valleys are often widened, deepened and smoothed to form a "U"-shaped glacial valley or glacial trough, as it is sometimes called. The erosion that creates glacial valleys truncates any spurs of rock or earth that may have earlier extended across the valley, creating broadly triangular-shaped cliffs called truncated spurs. Within glacial valleys, depressions created by plucking and abrasion can be filled by lakes, called paternoster lakes. If a glacial valley runs into a large body of water, it forms a fjord.
Typically glaciers deepen their valleys more than their smaller tributaries. Therefore, when glaciers recede, the valleys of the tributary glaciers remain above the main glacier's depression and are called hanging valleys.
At the start of a classic valley glacier is a bowl-shaped cirque, which has escarped walls on three sides but is open on the side that descends into the valley. Cirques are where ice begins to accumulate in a glacier. Two glacial cirques may form back to back and erode their backwalls until only a narrow ridge, called an arête is left. This structure may result in a mountain pass. If multiple cirques encircle a single mountain, they create pointed pyramidal peaks; particularly steep examples are called horns.
Passage of glacial ice over an area of bedrock may cause the rock to be sculpted into a knoll called a "roche moutonnée," or "sheepback" rock. Roches moutonnées may be elongated, rounded and asymmetrical in shape. They range in length from less than a meter to several hundred meters long. Roches moutonnées have a gentle slope on their up-glacier sides and a steep to vertical face on their down-glacier sides. The glacier abrades the smooth slope on the upstream side as it flows along, but tears rock fragments loose and carries them away from the downstream side via plucking.
As the water that rises from the ablation zone moves away from the glacier, it carries fine eroded sediments with it. As the speed of the water decreases, so does its capacity to carry objects in suspension. The water thus gradually deposits the sediment as it runs, creating an alluvial plain. When this phenomenon occurs in a valley, it is called a "valley train". When the deposition is in an estuary, the sediments are known as bay mud. Outwash plains and valley trains are usually accompanied by basins known as "kettles". These are small lakes formed when large ice blocks that are trapped in alluvium melt and produce water-filled depressions. Kettle diameters range from 5 m to 13 km, with depths of up to 45 meters. Most are circular in shape because the blocks of ice that formed them were rounded as they melted.
When a glacier's size shrinks below a critical point, its flow stops and it becomes stationary. Meanwhile, meltwater within and beneath the ice leaves stratified alluvial deposits. These deposits, in the forms of columns, terraces and clusters, remain after the glacier melts and are known as "glacial deposits". Glacial deposits that take the shape of hills or mounds are called "kames". Some kames form when meltwater deposits sediments through openings in the interior of the ice. Others are produced by fans or deltas created by meltwater. When the glacial ice occupies a valley, it can form terraces or kames along the sides of the valley. Long, sinuous glacial deposits are called "eskers". Eskers are composed of sand and gravel that was deposited by meltwater streams that flowed through ice tunnels within or beneath a glacier. They remain after the ice melts, with heights exceeding 100 meters and lengths of as long as 100 km.
Very fine glacial sediments or rock flour is often picked up by wind blowing over the bare surface and may be deposited great distances from the original fluvial deposition site. These eolian loess deposits may be very deep, even hundreds of meters, as in areas of China and the Midwestern United States. Katabatic winds can be important in this process.
Large masses, such as ice sheets or glaciers, can depress the crust of the Earth into the mantle. The depression usually totals a third of the ice sheet or glacier's thickness. After the ice sheet or glacier melts, the mantle begins to flow back to its original position, pushing the crust back up. This post-glacial rebound, which proceeds very slowly after the melting of the ice sheet or glacier, is currently occurring in measurable amounts in Scandinavia and the Great Lakes region of North America.
A geomorphological feature created by the same process on a smaller scale is known as "dilation-faulting". It occurs where previously compressed rock is allowed to return to its original shape more rapidly than can be maintained without faulting. This leads to an effect similar to what would be seen if the rock were hit by a large hammer. Dilation faulting can be observed in recently de-glaciated parts of Iceland and Cumbria.
The polar ice caps of Mars show geologic evidence of glacial deposits. The south polar cap is especially comparable to glaciers on Earth. Topographical features and computer models indicate the existence of more glaciers in Mars' past. At mid-latitudes, between 35° and 65° north or south, Martian glaciers are affected by the thin Martian atmosphere. Because of the low atmospheric pressure, ablation near the surface is solely caused by sublimation, not melting. As on Earth, many glaciers are covered with a layer of rocks which insulates the ice. A radar instrument on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found ice under a thin layer of rocks in formations called lobate debris aprons (LDAs).
The pictures below illustrate how landscape features on Mars closely resemble those on the Earth.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=12463
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Economy of Jordan
The economy of Jordan is classified as an emerging market economy. Jordan's GDP per capita rose by 351% in the 1970s, declined 30% in the 1980s, and rose 36% in the 1990s. After King Abdullah II's accession to the throne in 1999, liberal economic policies were introduced. Jordan's economy has been growing at an annual rate of 8% between 1999 and 2008. However, growth has slowed to 2% after the Arab Spring in 2011. Substantial increase of the population, coupled with slowed economic growth and rising public debt led to a worsening of poverty and unemployment in the country. As of 2019, Jordan boasts a GDP of US$44.4 billion, ranking it 89th worldwide.
Jordan has Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) with the United States, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, the European Union, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Turkey and Syria. More FTA's are planned with Iraq, the Palestinian Authority, the GCC, Lebanon, and Pakistan. Jordan is a member of the Greater Arab Free Trade Agreement, the Euro-Mediterranean free trade area, the Agadir Agreement, and also enjoys advanced status with the EU.
Jordan's economic resource base centers on phosphates, potash, and their fertilizer derivatives; tourism; overseas remittances; and foreign aid. These are its principal sources of hard currency earnings. Lacking coal reserves, hydroelectric power, large tracts of forest or commercially viable oil deposits, Jordan relies on natural gas for 93% of its domestic energy needs. Jordan used to depend on Iraq for oil until the American-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Jordan also has a plethora of industrial zones producing goods in the textile, aerospace, defense, ICT, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic sectors. Jordan is an emerging knowledge economy.
The main obstacles to Jordan's economy are scarce water supplies, complete reliance on oil imports for energy, and regional instability. Just over 10% of its land is arable and the water supply is limited. Rainfall is low and highly variable, and much of Jordan's available ground water is not renewable.
In the last few years Jordan's economic growth has slowed, averaging around 2%. Jordan's total foreign debt in 2011 was $19 billion, representing 60% of its GDP. In 2016, the debt reached $35.1 billion representing 93.4% of its GDP. This substantial increase is attributed to effects of regional instability causing: decrease in tourist activity; decreased foreign investments; increased military expenditure; attacks on Egyptian pipeline supplying the Kingdom with gas; the collapse of trade with Iraq and Syria; expenses from hosting Syrian refugees and accumulated interests from loans. According to the World Bank, Syrian refugees have cost Jordan more than $2.5 billion a year, amounting to 6% of the GDP and 25% of the government's annual revenue. With the presence of Syrian refugees in Jordan, wage growth went considerably down as a result of competition for jobs between refugees and Jordan citizens. The downturn that began in 2011, continued to 2018. The country's top five contributing sectors to GDP, government services, finance, manufacturing, transport, and tourism and hospitality were badly impacted by the Syrian civil war. Foreign aid covers only a small part of these costs, 63% of the total costs are covered by Jordan. An austerity programme was adopted by the government which aims to reduce Jordan's debt-to-GDP ratio to 77% by 2021. The programme succeeded in preventing the debt from rising above 95% in 2018.
This is a chart of trend of gross domestic product of Jordan at market prices by the International Monetary Fund with figures in millions of Jordanian Dinars.
For purchasing power parity comparisons, the Jordanian Dinar is exchanged per US dollar at 0.359.
Jordan's population is 6,342,948 and mean wages were $4.19 per man-hour in 2009.
Jordan is classified by the World Bank as an "upper middle income country." According to the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, Jordan has the third freest economy in the Middle East and North Africa, behind only Bahrain and Qatar, and the 32nd freest in the world. Jordan ranked as having the 35th best infrastructure in the world, according to the World Economic Forum's Index of Economic Competitiveness. The Kingdom scored higher than many of its peers in the Persian Gulf and Europe like Kuwait, Israel. and Ireland. The 2010 AOF Index of Globalization ranked Jordan as the most globalized country in the Middle East and North Africa region. Jordan's banking sector is classified as "highly developed" by the IMF along with the GCC economies and Lebanon
The official currency in Jordan is the Jordanian dinar and divides into 100 qirsh (also called piastres) or 1000 fils. Since 23 October 1995, the dinar has been officially pegged to the IMF's special drawing rights (SDRs). In practice, it is fixed at 1 US$ = 0.709 dinar, which translates to approximately 1 dinar = 1.41044 dollars. The Central Bank buys US dollars at 0.708 dinar, and sell US dollars at 0.7125 dinar, Exchangers buys US dollars at 0.708 and sell US dollars at 0.709.
The Jordanian market is considered one of the most developed Arab market outside the Persian Gulf states. Jordan ranked 18th on the 2012 Global Retail Development Index which lists the 30 most attractive retail markets in the world. Jordan was ranked as the 19th most expensive country in the world to live in 2010 and the most expensive Arab country to live in.
Jordan has been a member of the World Trade Organization since 2000. In the 2009 Global Enabling Trade Report, Jordan ranked 4th in the Arab World behind the UAE, Bahrain, and Qatar. The Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States that went into effect in December 2001 would phase out duties on nearly all goods and services by 2010.
The flows of remittance to Jordan had experienced rapid growth rates, particularly during the end of the 1970s and 1980s, where Jordan had started exporting high skilled labour to the Persian Gulf States. The money that migrants send home, remittances, represents today an important source of external funding for many developing countries, including Jordan. According to the World Bank data on remittances, with about 3000 million USD in 2010, Jordan ranks at 10th place among all developing countries. Jordan has ranked constantly among the top 20 remittances-recipient countries over the last decade. In addition, the Arab Monetary Fund (AMF) statistics in 2010 indicate that Jordan was the third biggest recipient of remittances among Arab countries after Egypt and Lebanon. The host countries that have absorbed most of the Jordanian expatriates are Saudi Arabia and the United Arab of Emirates (UAE), where the available recorded number of the Jordanian expatriates, working abroad, indicates that about 90% of these migrants are working in Persian Gulf countries.
The proportion of skilled workers in Jordan is among the highest in the region. Many of the world's major software and hardware IT companies are present in Jordan. The presence of such firms underlines Jordan's attractiveness as a stable base with high-calibre human resources from which to serve the wider region. According to a report published in January 2012 by the founder of venture capital firm Finaventures, Rachid Sefraoui, Amman is one of the top 10 best cities in the world to launch a tech start-up.
Jordan has high unemployment rates, 11.9% in the fourth quarter of 2010 but some estimate it to be as high as a quarter of the working-age population. An estimated 13.3% of citizens live under the poverty line. Since the mid-1970s, migrants’ remittances are Jordan's most important source of foreign exchange, and a decisive factor in the country's economic development and the rising standard of living of the population.
Agriculture in Jordan constituted almost 40% of GNP in the early 1950s; on the eve of the June 1967 War, it was 17%. By the mid-1980s, agriculture's share of GNP in Jordan was only about 6%.
Jordan hosts SOFEX, the world's fastest growing and region's only special operations and homeland security exhibition and conference. Jordan is a regional and international provider of advanced military goods and services. The KADDB Industrial Park, specialized in defense manufacturing, was opened in September 2009 in Mafraq. By 2015, the park is expected to provide around 15,000 job opportunities whereas the investment volume is expected to reach JD500 million. A report by Strategic Foresight Group has calculated the opportunity cost of conflict for the Middle East from 1991 to 2010 at $12 trillion. Jordan's share in this is almost $84 billion.
Jordan has a 138% mobile phone penetration rate and a 63% internet penetration rate. 41.6% of all mobile phones in Jordan are smartphones, compared with 40% in the United States and 26% in the United Kingdom. 97% of Jordanian households own at least one television set while 90% have satellite reception.
Furthermore, 61% of Jordanian households own at least one personal computer or laptop.
According to an investment survey, Jordan ranked as the 9th best outsourcing destination worldwide. Amman is one of the top 10 cities in the world to launch a tech start-up in 2012 and is becoming referred to as the "Silicon Valley of the Middle East".
Jordan has hosted the World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa six times and plans to hold it again at the Dead Sea for the seventh time in 2013. Amman also hosts the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week semiannually and is the only city in the region to hold such a prestigious event that is usually held by the likes of New York, Paris, and Milan.
Jordan is one of the most liberal countries in the Middle East allowing a debate to consider introducing a secular government. In the 2010 Human Development Index, Jordan was placed in the "high human development" bracket and came 7th among Arab countries, after the Persian Gulf states and Lebanon. The 2010 Quality of Life Index prepared by "International Living" magazine ranked Jordan second in the MENA with 55.0 points after Israel.
Decades of political stability and security and strict law enforcement make Jordan one of the top 10 countries worldwide in security. In the 2010 Newsweek "World's Best Countries" list, Jordan ranked 53rd worldwide, and 3rd among Arab countries after Kuwait and the UAE. Jordan is also among the top ten countries whose citizens feel safest walking the streets at night.
As of 2011, 63% of working Jordanians are insured with the Social Security Corporation, as well as 120,000 foreigners, with plans to include the rest of Jordanian workers both inside and outside the kingdom as well as students, housewives, business owners, and the unemployed. Only 1.6% of Jordanians make less than $2 a day, one of the lowest in the developing world according to the Human Poverty Index.
In the 2010 Gallup Global Wellbeing Survey, 30% of Jordanians described their financial situation as "thriving", surpassed most of the Arab countries with the exception of Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In 2008, the Jordanian government launched the "Decent Housing for a Decent Living" project aimed at building 120,000 affordable housing units within the next 5 years, plus an additional 100,000 housing units if the need arises.
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 1980–2017.
Despite increases in production, the agriculture sector's share of the economy has declined steadily to just 2.4 percent of gross domestic product by 2004. About 4 percent of Jordan's labor force worked in the agricultural sector in 2002. The most profitable segment of Jordan's agriculture is fruit and vegetable production (including tomatoes, cucumbers, citrus fruit, and bananas) in the Jordan Valley. The rest of crop production, especially cereal production, remains volatile because of the lack of consistent rainfall. Fishing and forestry are negligible in terms of the overall domestic economy. The fishing industry is evenly divided between live capture and aquaculture; the live weight catch totaled just over 1,000 metric tons in 2002. The forestry industry is even smaller in economic terms; approximately 240,000 total cubic meters of roundwood were removed in 2002, the vast majority for fuelwood.
Potash and phosphates are among the country's main economic exports. In 2003 approximately 2 million tons of potash salt production translated into US$192 million in export earnings, making it the second most lucrative exported good. Potash production totaled 1.9 million tons in 2004 and 1.8 million tons in 2005. In 2004 approximately 6.75 million tons of phosphate rock production generated US$135 million in export earnings, placing it fourth on Jordan's principal export list. With production totaling 6.4 million tons in 2005, Jordan was the world's third largest producer of raw phosphates. In addition to these two major minerals, smaller quantities of unrefined salt, copper ore, gypsum, manganese ore, and the mineral precursors to the production of ceramics (glass sand, clays, and feldspar) are also mined.
The industrial sector, which includes mining, manufacturing, construction, and power, accounted for approximately 26 percent of gross domestic product in 2004 (including manufacturing, 16.2 percent; construction, 4.6 percent; and mining, 3.1 percent). More than 21 percent of the country's labor force was reported to be employed in this sector in 2002. The main industrial products are potash, phosphates, pharmaceuticals, cement, clothes, and fertilizers. The most promising segment of this sector is construction. In the past several years, demand has increased rapidly for housing and offices of foreign enterprises based in Jordan to better access the Iraqi market. The manufacturing sector has grown as well (to nearly 20 percent of GDP by 2005), in large part as a result of the United States–Jordan Free Trade Agreement (ratified in 2001 by the U.S. Senate); the agreement has led to the establishment of approximately 13 Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZs) throughout the country. The QIZs, which provide duty-free access to the U.S. market, produce mostly light industrial products, especially ready-made garments. By 2004 the QIZs accounted for nearly US$1.1 billion in exports according to the Jordanian government.
Jordan's free trade agreement (FTA) with the US – the first in the Arab world – has already made the US one of Jordan's most significant markets. By 2010, it would have barrier-free export access in almost all sectors. A number of trade agreements with countries in the Middle Eastern and North African regions and beyond should also reap increasing benefits, not in the least the Agadir Agreement, which is seen as a precursor to an FTA with the EU. Jordan also recently signed an FTA with Canada. Furthermore, Jordan's plethora of industrial zones offering tax incentives, low utility costs and improved infrastructure links are helping incubate new developments. The relatively high skills level is also a key factor in promoting investment and stimulating the economy, particularly in value-added sectors. Despite the fact that Jordan has few natural resources it does benefit from abundant reserves of potash and phosphates, which are widely used in the production of fertilisers. Exports by these industries are expected to have a combined worth of $1bn in 2008. Other important industries include pharmaceuticals, which exported around $435m in 2006 and $260m in the first half of 2008 alone, as well as textiles, which were worth $1.19bn in 2007. Although the value of Jordan's industrial sector is high, the kingdom faces a number of challenges. Because the country is dependent on importing raw materials, it is vulnerable to price volatility. Shortages in water and power also make consistent development difficult. Despite these challenges, Jordan's economic openness and long-standing fertiliser and pharmaceutical industries should continue to provide a solid source of foreign currency.
Jordan has a plethora of industrial zones and special economic zones aimed at increasing exports and making Jordan an industrial giant. The Mafraq SEZ is focused on industry and logistics hoping to become the regional logistics hub with air, road, and rail links to neighboring countries and eventually Europe and the Persian Gulf. The Ma'an SEZ is primarily industrial focusing on satisfying domestic demand and reducing reliance on imports. With a national rail system under construction, Jordan expects trade to grow significantly and Jordan will mostly become the trade hub of the Levant and even the Middle East region as a whole due to its geography and natural resources.
Telecommunications is a billion-dollar industry with estimates showing that core markets of fixed-line, mobile and data service generate annual revenue of around JD836.5m ($1.18bn) per year, which is equivalent to 13.5% of GDP. Jordan's IT sector is the most developed and competitive in the region due to the 2001 telecom liberalization. Market share of the mobile sector, the most competitive telecoms market, is currently fairly evenly divided between the three operators, with Zain, owned by MTC Kuwait, maintaining the largest share (39%), followed by France Telecom's brand Orange (36%) and Umniah (25%), which is 96% owned by Bahrain's Batelco. End of year figures for 2007 show that the market trend is towards greater parity, with Zain's share falling in the space of a year from 47% in 2006 and the other two operators picking up subscribers. The increased competition has led to pricing that is more favourable to consumers. Mobile penetration is currently around 80%.
Ambitious subsequent national strategies were formulated already since Y 2000 as a private sector initiative directly led by his majesty the king of Jordan. Information technology association in Jordan (int@j ) was established to kick off a private sector process that would focus on preparing Jordan for the new economy through IT and shall reflect the national objectives towards automation and modernization in co-operation with the ministry of information technology in Jordan the (MOICT). The latest strategy will take the sector through to 2011, aims to bring Jordan to precise objectives. The ICT sector currently accounts for over a 14% (indirect) of the kingdom's GDP. This figure includes foreign investment and total domestic revenue from the sector. Employment growth in the sector was progressive and reached up to 60.000 (indirect ) by 2008. The government is working to address employment issues and education related to sector by developing ICT training and opportunities to increase the overall penetration of ICT in Jordanian society. The policy outlines a number of objectives for the country to reach within the next three years, including almost doubling the size of the sector to $3bn, and pushing internet user penetration up to 50%.
The early founder of Int@j and its first chairman of the board is Karim Kawar and early activists who drove the national strategic objectives and helped formulate an action plan through the developing pillars were Marwan Juma Jordan's minister of ICT, Doha Abdelkhaleq on labour and education. Humam Mufti on advocacy and Nashat Masri on Capital and finance amongst others.
Such an infrastructure made Jordan a suitable location for IT startups that operate in the fields of web development, mobile application development, online services, and investment in IT businesses.
The IT industry in Jordan in the year 2000 and beyond got a very big boost after the Gulf War of 1991. This boost came from a large influx of immigrants from the Gulf countries to Jordan, mostly from Jordanian expatriates from Kuwait, totaling few hundred thousands. This large wave impacted Jordan in many ways, and one of them was on its IT industry.
Energy remains perhaps the biggest challenge for continued growth for Jordan's economy. Spurred by the surge in the price of oil to more than $145 a barrel at its peak, the Jordanian government has responded with an ambitious plan for the sector. The country's lack of domestic resources is being addressed via a $14bn investment programme in the sector. The programme aims to reduce reliance on imported products from the current level of 96%, with renewables meeting 10% of energy demand by 2020 and nuclear energy meeting 60% of energy needs by 2035. The government also announced in 2007 that it would scale back subsidies in several areas, including energy, where there have historically been regressive subsidies for fuel and electricity. In another new step, the government is opening up the sector to competition, and intends to offer all the planned new energy projects to international tender.
Unlike most of its neighbors, Jordan has no significant petroleum resources of its own and is heavily dependent on oil imports to fulfill its domestic energy needs. In 2002 proved oil reserves totaled only . Jordan produced only in 2004 but consumed an estimated . According to U.S. government figures, oil imports had reached about in 2004. The Iraq invasion of 2003 disrupted Jordan's primary oil supply route from its eastern neighbor, which under Saddam Hussein had provided the kingdom with highly discounted crude oil via overland truck routes. Since late 2003, an alternative supply route by tanker through the Al Aqabah port has been established; Saudi Arabia is now Jordan's primary source of imported oil; Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are secondary sources. Although not so heavily discounted as Iraqi crude oil, supplies from Saudi Arabia and the UAE are subsidized to some extent.
In the face of continued high oil costs, interest has increased in the possibility of exploiting Jordan's vast oil shale resources, which are estimated to total approximately 40 billion tons, 4 billion tons of which are believed to be recoverable. Jordan's oil shale resources could produce of oil, enabling production of about . The oil shale in Jordan has the fourth largest in the world which currently, there are several companies who are negotiating with the Jordanian government about exploiting the oil shale like Royal Dutch Shell, Petrobras and Eesti Energia.
Natural gas is increasingly being used to fulfill the country's domestic energy needs, especially with regard to electricity generation. Jordan was estimated to have only modest natural gas reserves (about 6 billion cubic meters in 2002), but new estimates suggest a much higher total. In 2003 the country produced and consumed an estimated 390 million cubic meters of natural gas. The primary source is located in the eastern portion of the country at the Risha gas field. Until the early 2010s, the country imported the bulk of its natural gas via the Arab Gas Pipeline that stretches from the Al Arish terminal in Egypt underwater to Al Aqabah and then to northern Jordan, where it links to two major power stations. This Egypt–Jordan pipeline supplied Jordan with approximately 1 billion cubic meters of natural gas per year. Gas supplies from Egypt were halted in 2013 due to insurgent activities in the Sinai and domestic gas shortages in Egypt. In light of this, a liquified natural gas terminal was built in the Port of Aqaba to facilitate gas imports. In 2017, a low-capacity gas pipeline from Israel was completed which supplies the Arab Potash factories near the Dead Sea. As of 2018, a large capacity pipeline from Israel is under construction in northern Jordan which is expected to begin operating by 2020 and will supply the kingdom with 3 BCM of gas per year, thereby satisfying most of Jordan's natural gas consumption needs.
The state-owned National Electric Power Company (NEPCO) produces most of Jordan's electricity (94%). Since mid-2000, privatization efforts have been undertaken to increase independent power generation facilities; a Belgian firm was set to begin operations at a new power plant near Amman with an estimated capacity of 450 megawatts. Power plants at Az Zarqa (400 megawatts) and Al Aqabah (650 MW) are Jordan's other primary electricity providers. As a whole, the country consumed nearly 8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2003 while producing only 7.5 billion kWh of electricity. Electricity production in 2004 rose to 8.7 billion kWh, but production must continue to increase in order to meet demand, which the government estimates would continue to grow by about 5% per year. About 99 percent of the population is reported to have access to electricity.
The transportation sector on average contributes some 10% to Jordan's GDP, with transportation and communications accounting for $2.14bn in 2007. Well aware of the sector's importance to the country's service and industry-oriented economy, in 2008 the government formulated a new national transport strategy with the aim to improve, modernise and further privatise the sector. With no imminent solution to the ongoing security crisis in Iraq in sight, prospects for the Jordanian transport sector as a whole look bright. The country will arguably remain one of the major transit points for both goods and people destined for Iraq, while the number of tourists visiting Jordan is set to continue to increase. The main events to follow in the near future are the relocation of Aqaba's main port, a national railway system, and the construction of a new terminal at QAIA. Volatility in fuel prices is almost certainly going to have negative effects on operational costs and as such may hamper the sector's average annual growth of around 6%. However, uncertain fuel prices also offer a great deal of incentive to boost private investments in alternative modes of transport such as public buses and improved trains.
Although the state remains a major influence, Jordan's media sector has seen significant privatisation and liberalisation efforts in recent years. Based on official rack rates, research firm Ipsos estimated that the advertisement sector spent some $280m towards publicity in Jordan's media, 80% of which was spent on newspapers, followed by TV, radio and magazines. The biggest event of 2007 was the cancelled launch of ATV, the kingdom's first private broadcaster. As a result, the state-owned Jordan TV (JTV) remains the country's sole broadcaster. In recent years, Jordan has also seen a spectacular rise in the number of blogs, websites and news portals as sources of news information. The increasing diversification of Jordan's media is a good sign and should boost advertising revenues and private initiatives.
Recording growth of 30%, 2007 turned out to be yet another outstanding year for Jordan's advertising industry. Following nearly a decade of double-digit growth, however, most publicity specialists expect to see a relative slowdown in 2008. Unlike 2007, no major campaigns were planned for the first part of 2008. Additionally, the Jordanian advertising had some catching up to do with the rest of the region in terms of average expenditure per capita. As the sector matures, it is only normal for growth figures to gradually decrease. Since 2000 total ad spend increased from $77m to $280m in 2007, an increase of 260%. The Jordanian telecoms sector was the biggest ad spender in 2007, accounting for around 20% of the market, followed by banking and finance sector (12%), services industry (11%), real estate (8%) and the automotive sector (5%). In the next year, particularly if there is a downturn, it would become increasingly important for the sector to develop good vocational training and to begin to take advantage of new media markets.
Services accounted for more than 70 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2004. The sector employed nearly 75 percent of the labor force in 2002.
The banking sector is widely regarded as advanced by both regional and international terms. In 2007, total profits of the 15 listed banks rose 14.89% to JD640m ($909m). Jordan's strong growth of 6% in 2007 was reflected in a 20.57% expansion in net credit to JD17.9bn ($25.4bn) by the end of the year. Most improvement was in trade, construction and industry. Many banks suffered from the sharp correction in the Amman Stock Market in 2006, encouraging them to focus on core banking business in 2007, and this was reflected in a 16.65% rise in net interest and commission income to JD1.32bn ($1.87bn). The stock market also picked up in 2007 and total portfolio income losses decreased. Although Jordan's banking sector is small by global standards, it has attracted strong interest from regional investors in Lebanon and the GCC. New regulations introduced by the CBJ, in addition to political stability, have helped to create a favourable investment environment. Its conservative policies helped Jordan avoid the global financial crisis of 2009, Jordanian banks was one of the only countries that posted a profit in 2009.
Contributing an estimated JD477.5m ($678.05m), or 4.25% of Jordan's GDP, according to figures from the Central Bank, the construction sector performed strongly in 2007. The Great Amman Municipality (GAM) completed its master plan for the capital, which is expected to grow from 700 km2 today to 1700 km2 by 2025. Amman is changing from a predominantly horizontal to a largely vertical city due to various clusters of high-rises. Significant developments outside Amman include the rapid residential build-up of Zarqa, the transformation of Aqaba into a commercial and tourist centre, and the construction of a series of high-end hotels and tourist resorts along the Dead Sea. A new airport terminal, Amman ring road and a light rail between the capital and Zarqa are being constructed.
Despite recording a relative slowdown compared to the expansion of recent years, Jordan's construction and real estate market continued to grow in 2007. Trading totaled JD5.6bn ($8bn), up from JD5.2bn ($7.4bn) in 2006, according to Jordan's Land and Survey Department. Although the years of astounding growth—some 75% in 2004 and 48% in 2005—seem to have passed, the future looks bright for real estate, as demand continues to outstrip supply, while Jordan remains a very attractive investment destination for foreign businesses, second-home buyers and Jordanians working abroad. With Jordan's continuing sharp population growth, as well as its strategic location at the heart of the Middle East, the kingdom's main market drivers indicate a bright future for years to come. Although a number of class-A office space developments are currently under construction, it would take a few years to close the gap between demand and supply. The Amman retail market may become more saturated in the short term. Consequently, developers may turn to other cities to build supermarkets and malls.
Jordan's insurance market, with 29 companies operating in a country of just 5.7 million people, is saturated, despite regulatory encouragements for mergers and acquisitions. In terms of market share based on premiums, motor coverage accounts for 42.4%, medical insurance 18.6%, fire and property damage 17%, life 9.8%, marine and transport 7.9% and other insurance the remaining 4.3%. The insurance sector made up 2.52% of GDP in 2006, up from 2.43% in 2005. Current plans call for increasing the sector's GDP contribution to 7% in the short term and 10% in the long term. The sector holds great potential but remains underdeveloped. Region-wide price increases and a lack of consumer understanding of products are two major challenges. In addition, cultural considerations, including religion, make improving market penetration difficult. The cost of living has also risen, and the IMF forecasts that the inflation rate would reach 9% in 2008. Salaries have remained unchanged, however, leaving consumers with less disposable income. Other than mandatory motor coverage, insurance products are considered a luxury by average Jordanians, who must often prioritise spending. There would likely only be a few changes to the market in the coming year. Members of the sector would like to see greater coordination among the regulators and those working for the kingdom's legal system in order to improve insurance laws.
The state of the tourism sector is widely regarded as below potential, especially given the country's rich history, ancient ruins, Mediterranean climate, and diverse geography. Despite personal appeals by the king and an increasingly sophisticated marketing campaign, the industry is still adversely affected by the political instability of the region. More than 5 million visitors entered Jordan in 2004, generating US$1.3 billion in earnings. Earnings from tourism rose to US$1.4 billion in 2005. The fact that the bulk of Jordan's tourist trade emanates from elsewhere in the Middle East should contribute to the industry's growth potential in the years ahead, as Jordan is relatively stable, open, and safe in comparison to many of its neighbors. The tourism sector remains an important element of the Jordanian economy, directly employing some 30,000 Jordanians and contributing 10% to the kingdom's GDP. Despite a decline in Arab and Gulf visitors, 2007 marked a year of steady growth for the tourism sector. Revenues jumped 13% to nearly $2.11bn during the first 11 months, up from $1.86bn for the same period in 2006. The sector is overseen by the government's National Tourism Strategy (NTS), which was established in 2004 to take the industry through 2010. NTS aimed to double tourism revenues during the period and to increase tourism-related jobs to 91,719. The first goal has already been met but the second one might be more of a challenge: between 2004 and 2007 the total number of people employed in the sector rose from 23,544 to 35,484. This is impressive growth, but less than half the 90,000-or-more goal. NTS hopes to place Jordan as a boutique destination for high-end tourists. The strategy identifies seven priorities or niche markets: cultural heritage (archaeology); religious; ecotourism; health and wellness; adventure; meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (MICE); and cruises. The Jordan Tourism Board's (JTB) marketing budget has increased in the past year from JD6m ($8.52m) to JD11.5m ($16.3m). These are positive times for tourism in Jordan, with steady growth and major projects in the pipeline. The sector has to make improvements of infrastructure and marketing, but overall the industry has been improving for the past several years.
Since 1995, economic growth has been low. Real GDP has grown at only about 1.5% annually, while the official unemployment has hovered at 14% (unofficial estimates are double this number). The budget deficit and public debt have remained high and continue to widen, yet during this period inflation has remained low due mainly to stable monetary policy and the continued peg to the United States Dollar. Exports of manufactured goods have risen at an annual rate of 9%. Monetary stability has been reinforced, even when tensions were renewed in the region during 1998, and during the illness and ultimate death of King Hussein in 1999.
Expectations of increased trade and tourism as a consequence of Jordan's peace treaty with Israel have been disappointing. Security-related restrictions to trade with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have led to a substantial decline in Jordan's exports there. Following his ascension, King Abdullah improved relations with Arabic states of the Persian Gulf and Syria, but this brought few real economic benefits. Most recently the Jordanians have focused on WTO membership and a Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. as means to encourage export-led growth.
The stock market capitalisation of listed companies in Jordan was valued at $37.639 billion in 2005 by the World Bank.
According to the 2015 Middle East and North Africa Salary Survey conducted by Bayt.com, Respondents from GCC (49%) seem somewhat happier with the raise they received in 2014, as compared to respondents from Levant (42%):
Though a town of only 100,000 people, Aqaba is setting an example of how to attract investment. In a decade, domestic and foreign investment into the Aqaba region has increased dramatically and the town's population is set to double over the next 10 years. Certainly, the town benefits from some natural advantages. Located at the southern tip of the country, between Saudi Arabia and Israel on the shores of the Red Sea, the city is close to the Suez Canal, with easy access to key trade centres in both the Middle East and Africa. Aqaba is also the kingdom's only deep-water port town, taking up most of Jordan's scant of coastline. The Aqaba Special Economic Zone (ASEZ) has been responsible for most of this development since it opened in 2001.
It covers 375 km2 and offers a basket of tax and tariff incentives, as well as full repatriation rights and more flexible operating regulations. There is a 5% flat tax on most economic activities, no tariffs on imported goods, no currency restrictions and no property taxes for corporate land. Additionally – and somewhat controversially, given Jordan's past issues with unemployment – companies based in ASEZ are allowed to employ up to 70% foreign workers in their operations. Jordan's investment profile has been growing nationally, but according to the Jordan Investment Board (JIB), the ASEZ has exceeded investment targets by 33%. By 2006 it had already brought in around $8bn in investment, some $2bn more than the original target of $6bn by 2020. ASEZ expects to attract a further $12bn spread across a number of sectors, including tourism, finance and industry. The Development Law of 2008 set in place a universal framework for special development areas based on the Aqaba model.
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Telecommunications in Jordan
Jordan has a highly developed communications infrastructure. Jordan's telecom infrastructure is growing at a very rapid pace and continually being updated and expanded. Communications in Jordan occur across many media, including telephone, radio, television, and internet.
50% of households have at least one main line telephone. 103% of the population has a cell phone; 15% have more than one.
In mid 2004, XPress Telecom was launched as the country's digital radio trunking operator.
40% of Jordanian households have a PC. This is expected to double in the coming years when the government reduces the sales tax on PCs and internet service in an effort to make Jordan the high-tech capital of the Middle East. The Jordanian Government is also providing every university student with a laptop in partnership with the private sector. All Jordan's schools are connected with internet service and the Jordanian Government is heavily purchasing computers and smart technology to be equipped in Jordan's classrooms.
As of 2013, Internet penetration in Jordan was 63%. It was 50.5 per cent by the end of 2011. Internet usage more than doubled from 2007 to 2009 with the rapid growth expected to continue. Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) figures indicate that Internet penetration stood at 29 per cent by the end of 2009 and 38 per cent by the end of 2010.
The Jordanian government has announced that the sales tax on computers and internet connection would be removed in order to further stimulate the ICT industry in Jordan. King Abdullah II told the BBC in 2004 that he hoped to make his country the tech hub of the Middle East. Jordan has more internet start up companies than any other country in the Middle East, and thus was dubbed the Middle East's "Silicon Valley". Amman was ranked as the 10th-best city in the world to launch a tech startup, according to a 2012 list compiled by Finaventures, a California-based venture-capital firm. Tech entrepreneurs have praised the ability to access high speed internet connections in Jordan, comparing this to Dubai and Saudi Arabia. "Al Jami'a Street", in Jordan's northern city of Irbid, was ranked as the street with the highest number of internet cafes in the world by the Guinness World Records.
The IT industry in Jordan in the year 2000 and beyond got a very big boost after the Gulf War of 1991. This boost came from a large influx of immigrants from the Gulf countries to Jordan, mostly from Jordanian expatriates from Kuwait, totaling few hundred thousands. This large wave impacted Jordan in many ways, and one of them was on its IT industry.
When King Abdullah II ascended to the throne in 1999, he stated his intentions to turn Jordan into the high-tech capital of the Middle East and to create a Silicon Valley-like venture in Jordan. All Jordanian schools are equipped with computers and internet connection and instituted an ICT curriculum into Jordan's education system. ICT faculties were established in Jordanian universities and these campuses have been churning out 15,000 ICT graduates every year. Information access centers were established across the Kingdom to allow rural areas access to the Internet.
The number of phone lines has decreased dramatically in the past three years to below 500K telephone lines, due to the introduction of WI-Max technology and 3G networks.
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Transport in Jordan
With the exception of a railway system, Jordan has a developed public and private transportation system. There are three international airports in Jordan. The Hedjaz Jordan Railway runs one passenger train a day each way.
In 2009, it was estimated that Jordan had of paved highways. Some of the major highways in Jordan are:
"Total:" 507 km - "narrow gauge" of (2008)
Railway companies in Jordan are:
The Jordanian government has begun acquiring land for new rail routes. Following a study by BNP Paribas, three routes are planned, which are expected to be tendered later in 2010. The three routes are:
However, in late 2010 the government announced an economic relief package and following the 2011 Jordanian protests it was decided to reduce the expected three year capital investment plan in the national railway network by 72 percent, partly to fund the relief package. Therefore, it is unclear when the ambitions railway expansion plan will be carried out.
There are also plans for a light rail system operating between Amman and Zarqa and metro line in Amman.
Currently, two connected but non-contiguously operated sections of the Hedjaz Railway exist:
In August 2011, Jordanian government approved the construction of the railway from Aqaba to the Iraqi border (near Trebil). The Iraqis in the meantime started the construction of the line from the border to their current railhead at Ramadi.
gas 473 km; oil 49 km
The port of Aqaba on the Gulf of Aqaba is the only sea port in Jordan.
"total:"
7 ships (with a volume of or over) totaling /
"ships by type (1999):"
bulk carrier 2, cargo ship 2, container ship 1, livestock carrier 1, roll-on/roll-off ship 1
The governments of Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq own and operate the Arab Bridge Maritime company, which is the largest passenger transport company on the Red Sea.
18 as of 2012
As of 2012, there was a total of 16 airports, the main airports being:
"total (2012):"
16
"over" :
8
:
5
"under" :
1
"total (2012):"
2
"under" :
2
56
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Foreign relations of Jordan
The foreign relations of Jordan have consistently followed a pro-Western foreign policy and traditionally Jordan has had close relations with the United States and the United Kingdom. These relations were damaged when Jordan proclaimed its neutrality during the Gulf War and maintained relations with Iraq. In public, Jordan continued to call for the lifting of UN sanctions against Iraq within the context of implementing UNIC resolutions.
Since the end of the war, Jordan has largely restored its relations with Western countries through its participation in the Middle East war process and enforcement of UN sanctions against Iraq.
Jordan signed a non-aggression pact with Israel (the Washington Declaration) in Washington, D.C., on July 25, 1994. Jordan and Israel signed a historic peace treaty on October 26, 1994, witnessed by President Clinton, accompanied by Secretary of State Warren Christopher. The U.S. has participated with Jordan and Israel in trilateral development discussions during which key issues have been water-sharing and security; cooperation on Jordan Rift Valley development; infrastructure projects; and trade, finance, and banking issues.
In 2013, the United States approved the CIA–led Timber Sycamore covert operation, based in Jordan, to train and arm Syrian rebels .
Jordan also participates in the multilateral war talks, and recently Jordan has signed a free trade agreement with the United States. Jordan is an active member of the UN and several of its specialized and related agencies, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and World Health Organization (WHO). Jordan is a member of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Non-Aligned Movement, and Arab League.
Within the context of the European Union's "European Neighbourhood Policy" the EU and Jordan have jointly adopted an Action plan to reinforce their political and economic interdependence, and further implement their current Association Agreement. This Action Plan covers a timeframe of three to five years and will encourage and support Jordan's national reform objectives and further integration into European economic and social structures.
Israel captured Jerusalem in 1967, which is located at the West Bank of Jordan. Since 1967 Pakistan has been demanding its vacation at the international level. Jordan together with Pakistan is playing an effective role in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
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Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler (; ; 27 December 1571 – 15 November 1630) was a German astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer. He is a key figure in the 17th-century scientific revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books "Astronomia nova", "Harmonices Mundi", and "Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae". These works also provided one of the foundations for Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg. Later he became an assistant to the astronomer Tycho Brahe in Prague, and eventually the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II. He also taught mathematics in Linz, and was an adviser to General Wallenstein.
Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, invented an improved version of the refracting (or Keplerian) telescope, and was mentioned in the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei. He was a corresponding member of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome.
Kepler lived in an era when there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, but there was a strong division between astronomy (a branch of mathematics within the liberal arts) and physics (a branch of natural philosophy). Kepler also incorporated religious arguments and reasoning into his work, motivated by the religious conviction and belief that God had created the world according to an intelligible plan that is accessible through the natural light of reason.
Kepler described his new astronomy as "celestial physics", as "an excursion into Aristotle's "Metaphysics"", and as "a supplement to Aristotle's "On the Heavens"", transforming the ancient tradition of physical cosmology by treating astronomy as part of a universal mathematical physics.
Kepler was born on 27 December, the feast day of St John the Evangelist, 1571, in the Free Imperial City of Weil der Stadt (now part of the Stuttgart Region in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, 30 km west of Stuttgart's center). His grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had been Lord Mayor of the city. By the time Johannes was born, he had two brothers and one sister and the Kepler family fortune was in decline. His father, Heinrich Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and he left the family when Johannes was five years old. He was believed to have died in the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands. His mother, Katharina Guldenmann, an innkeeper's daughter, was a healer and herbalist. Born prematurely, Johannes claimed to have been weak and sickly as a child. Nevertheless, he often impressed travelers at his grandfather's inn with his phenomenal mathematical faculty.
He was introduced to astronomy at an early age and developed a love for it that would span his entire life. At age six, he observed the Great Comet of 1577, writing that he "was taken by [his] mother to a high place to look at it." In 1580, at age nine, he observed another astronomical event, a lunar eclipse, recording that he remembered being "called outdoors" to see it and that the moon "appeared quite red". However, childhood smallpox left him with weak vision and crippled hands, limiting his ability in the observational aspects of astronomy.
In 1589, after moving through grammar school, Latin school, and seminary at Maulbronn, Kepler attended Tübinger Stift at the University of Tübingen. There, he studied philosophy under Vitus Müller and theology under Jacob Heerbrand (a student of Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg), who also taught Michael Maestlin while he was a student, until he became Chancellor at Tübingen in 1590. He proved himself to be a superb mathematician and earned a reputation as a skilful astrologer, casting horoscopes for fellow students. Under the instruction of Michael Maestlin, Tübingen's professor of mathematics from 1583 to 1631, he learned both the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system of planetary motion. He became a Copernican at that time. In a student disputation, he defended heliocentrism from both a theoretical and theological perspective, maintaining that the Sun was the principal source of motive power in the universe. Despite his desire to become a minister, near the end of his studies, Kepler was recommended for a position as teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz. He accepted the position in April 1594, at the age of 23.
Kepler's first major astronomical work, "Mysterium Cosmographicum" ("The Cosmographic Mystery", 1596), was the first published defense of the Copernican system. Kepler claimed to have had an epiphany on 19 July 1595, while teaching in Graz, demonstrating the periodic conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the zodiac: he realized that regular polygons bound one inscribed and one circumscribed circle at definite ratios, which, he reasoned, might be the geometrical basis of the universe. After failing to find a unique arrangement of polygons that fit known astronomical observations (even with extra planets added to the system), Kepler began experimenting with 3-dimensional polyhedra. He found that each of the five Platonic solids could be inscribed and circumscribed by spherical orbs; nesting these solids, each encased in a sphere, within one another would produce six layers, corresponding to the six known planets—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. By ordering the solids selectively—octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, tetrahedron, cube—Kepler found that the spheres could be placed at intervals corresponding to the relative sizes of each planet's path, assuming the planets circle the Sun. Kepler also found a formula relating the size of each planet's orb to the length of its orbital period: from inner to outer planets, the ratio of increase in orbital period is twice the difference in orb radius. However, Kepler later rejected this formula, because it was not precise enough.
As he indicated in the title, Kepler thought he had revealed God's geometrical plan for the universe. Much of Kepler's enthusiasm for the Copernican system stemmed from his theological convictions about the connection between the physical and the spiritual; the universe itself was an image of God, with the Sun corresponding to the Father, the stellar sphere to the Son, and the intervening space between to the Holy Spirit. His first manuscript of "Mysterium" contained an extensive chapter reconciling heliocentrism with biblical passages that seemed to support geocentrism.
With the support of his mentor Michael Maestlin, Kepler received permission from the Tübingen university senate to publish his manuscript, pending removal of the Bible exegesis and the addition of a simpler, more understandable description of the Copernican system as well as Kepler's new ideas. "Mysterium" was published late in 1596, and Kepler received his copies and began sending them to prominent astronomers and patrons early in 1597; it was not widely read, but it established Kepler's reputation as a highly-skilled astronomer. The effusive dedication, to powerful patrons as well as to the men who controlled his position in Graz, also provided a crucial doorway into the patronage system.
Though the details would be modified in light of his later work, Kepler never relinquished the Platonist polyhedral-spherist cosmology of "Mysterium Cosmographicum". His subsequent main astronomical works were in some sense only further developments of it, concerned with finding more precise inner and outer dimensions for the spheres by calculating the eccentricities of the planetary orbits within it. In 1621, Kepler published an expanded second edition of "Mysterium", half as long again as the first, detailing in footnotes the corrections and improvements he had achieved in the 25 years since its first publication.
In terms of the impact of "Mysterium", it can be seen as an important first step in modernizing the theory proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus in his "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium". Whilst Copernicus sought to advance a heliocentric system in this book, he resorted to Ptolemaic devices (viz., epicycles and eccentric circles) in order to explain the change in planets' orbital speed, and also continued to use as a point of reference the center of the Earth's orbit rather than that of the Sun "as an aid to calculation and in order not to confuse the reader by diverging too much from Ptolemy." Modern astronomy owes much to "Mysterium Cosmographicum", despite flaws in its main thesis, "since it represents the first step in cleansing the Copernican system of the remnants of the Ptolemaic theory still clinging to it."
In December 1595, Kepler was introduced to Barbara Müller, a 23-year-old widow (twice over) with a young daughter, Regina Lorenz, and he began courting her. Müller, an heiress to the estates of her late husbands, was also the daughter of a successful mill owner. Her father Jobst initially opposed a marriage. Even though Kepler had inherited his grandfather's nobility, Kepler's poverty made him an unacceptable match. Jobst relented after Kepler completed work on "Mysterium", but the engagement nearly fell apart while Kepler was away tending to the details of publication. However, Protestant officials—who had helped set up the match—pressured the Müllers to honor their agreement. Barbara and Johannes were married on 27 April 1597.
In the first years of their marriage, the Keplers had two children (Heinrich and Susanna), both of whom died in infancy. In 1602, they had a daughter (Susanna); in 1604, a son (Friedrich); and in 1607, another son (Ludwig).
Following the publication of "Mysterium" and with the blessing of the Graz school inspectors, Kepler began an ambitious program to extend and elaborate his work. He planned four additional books: one on the stationary aspects of the universe (the Sun and the fixed stars); one on the planets and their motions; one on the physical nature of planets and the formation of geographical features (focused especially on Earth); and one on the effects of the heavens on the Earth, to include atmospheric optics, meteorology, and astrology.
He also sought the opinions of many of the astronomers to whom he had sent "Mysterium", among them Reimarus Ursus (Nicolaus Reimers Bär)—the imperial mathematician to Rudolph II and a bitter rival of Tycho Brahe. Ursus did not reply directly, but republished Kepler's flattering letter to pursue his priority dispute over (what is now called) the Tychonic system with Tycho. Despite this black mark, Tycho also began corresponding with Kepler, starting with a harsh but legitimate critique of Kepler's system; among a host of objections, Tycho took issue with the use of inaccurate numerical data taken from Copernicus. Through their letters, Tycho and Kepler discussed a broad range of astronomical problems, dwelling on lunar phenomena and Copernican theory (particularly its theological viability). But without the significantly more accurate data of Tycho's observatory, Kepler had no way to address many of these issues.
Instead, he turned his attention to chronology and "harmony," the numerological relationships among music, mathematics and the physical world, and their astrological consequences. By assuming the Earth to possess a soul (a property he would later invoke to explain how the sun causes the motion of planets), he established a speculative system connecting astrological aspects and astronomical distances to weather and other earthly phenomena. By 1599, however, he again felt his work limited by the inaccuracy of available data—just as growing religious tension was also threatening his continued employment in Graz. In December of that year, Tycho invited Kepler to visit him in Prague; on 1 January 1600 (before he even received the invitation), Kepler set off in the hopes that Tycho's patronage could solve his philosophical problems as well as his social and financial ones.
On 4 February 1600, Kepler met Tycho Brahe and his assistants Franz Tengnagel and Longomontanus at Benátky nad Jizerou (35 km from Prague), the site where Tycho's new observatory was being constructed. Over the next two months, he stayed as a guest, analyzing some of Tycho's observations of Mars; Tycho guarded his data closely, but was impressed by Kepler's theoretical ideas and soon allowed him more access. Kepler planned to test his theory from "Mysterium Cosmographicum" based on the Mars data, but he estimated that the work would take up to two years (since he was not allowed to simply copy the data for his own use). With the help of Johannes Jessenius, Kepler attempted to negotiate a more formal employment arrangement with Tycho, but negotiations broke down in an angry argument and Kepler left for Prague on 6 April. Kepler and Tycho soon reconciled and eventually reached an agreement on salary and living arrangements, and in June, Kepler returned home to Graz to collect his family.
Political and religious difficulties in Graz dashed his hopes of returning immediately to Brahe; in hopes of continuing his astronomical studies, Kepler sought an appointment as a mathematician to Archduke Ferdinand. To that end, Kepler composed an essay—dedicated to Ferdinand—in which he proposed a force-based theory of lunar motion: "In Terra inest virtus, quae Lunam ciet" ("There is a force in the earth which causes the moon to move"). Though the essay did not earn him a place in Ferdinand's court, it did detail a new method for measuring lunar eclipses, which he applied during 10 July eclipse in Graz. These observations formed the basis of his explorations of the laws of optics that would culminate in "Astronomiae Pars Optica".
On 2 August 1600, after refusing to convert to Catholicism, Kepler and his family were banished from Graz. Several months later, Kepler returned, now with the rest of his household, to Prague. Through most of 1601, he was supported directly by Tycho, who assigned him to analyzing planetary observations and writing a tract against Tycho's (by then deceased) rival, Ursus. In September, Tycho secured him a commission as a collaborator on the new project he had proposed to the emperor: the "Rudolphine Tables" that should replace the "Prutenic Tables" of Erasmus Reinhold. Two days after Tycho's unexpected death on 24 October 1601, Kepler was appointed his successor as the imperial mathematician with the responsibility to complete his unfinished work. The next 11 years as imperial mathematician would be the most productive of his life.
Kepler's primary obligation as imperial mathematician was to provide astrological advice to the emperor. Though Kepler took a dim view of the attempts of contemporary astrologers to precisely predict the future or divine specific events, he had been casting well-received detailed horoscopes for friends, family, and patrons since his time as a student in Tübingen. In addition to horoscopes for allies and foreign leaders, the emperor sought Kepler's advice in times of political trouble. Rudolph was actively interested in the work of many of his court scholars (including numerous alchemists) and kept up with Kepler's work in physical astronomy as well.
Officially, the only acceptable religious doctrines in Prague were Catholic and Utraquist, but Kepler's position in the imperial court allowed him to practice his Lutheran faith unhindered. The emperor nominally provided an ample income for his family, but the difficulties of the over-extended imperial treasury meant that actually getting hold of enough money to meet financial obligations was a continual struggle. Partly because of financial troubles, his life at home with Barbara was unpleasant, marred with bickering and bouts of sickness. Court life, however, brought Kepler into contact with other prominent scholars (Johannes Matthäus Wackher von Wackhenfels, Jost Bürgi, David Fabricius, Martin Bachazek, and Johannes Brengger, among others) and astronomical work proceeded rapidly.
As Kepler slowly continued analyzing Tycho's Mars observations—now available to him in their entirety—and began the slow process of tabulating the "Rudolphine Tables", Kepler also picked up the investigation of the laws of optics from his lunar essay of 1600. Both lunar and solar eclipses presented unexplained phenomena, such as unexpected shadow sizes, the red color of a total lunar eclipse, and the reportedly unusual light surrounding a total solar eclipse. Related issues of atmospheric refraction applied to "all" astronomical observations. Through most of 1603, Kepler paused his other work to focus on optical theory; the resulting manuscript, presented to the emperor on 1 January 1604, was published as "Astronomiae Pars Optica" (The Optical Part of Astronomy). In it, Kepler described the inverse-square law governing the intensity of light, reflection by flat and curved mirrors, and principles of pinhole cameras, as well as the astronomical implications of optics such as parallax and the apparent sizes of heavenly bodies. He also extended his study of optics to the human eye, and is generally considered by neuroscientists to be the first to recognize that images are projected inverted and reversed by the eye's lens onto the retina. The solution to this dilemma was not of particular importance to Kepler as he did not see it as pertaining to optics, although he did suggest that the image was later corrected "in the hollows of the brain" due to the "activity of the Soul." Today, "Astronomiae Pars Optica" is generally recognized as the foundation of modern optics (though the law of refraction is conspicuously absent). With respect to the beginnings of projective geometry, Kepler introduced the idea of continuous change of a mathematical entity in this work. He argued that if a focus of a conic section were allowed to move along the line joining the foci, the geometric form would morph or degenerate, one into another. In this way, an ellipse becomes a parabola when a focus moves toward infinity, and when two foci of an ellipse merge into one another, a circle is formed. As the foci of a hyperbola merge into one another, the hyperbola becomes a pair of straight lines. He also assumed that if a straight line is extended to infinity it will meet itself at a single point at infinity, thus having the properties of a large circle.
In October 1604, a bright new evening star (SN 1604) appeared, but Kepler did not believe the rumors until he saw it himself. Kepler began systematically observing the nova. Astrologically, the end of 1603 marked the beginning of a fiery trigon, the start of the about 800-year cycle of great conjunctions; astrologers associated the two previous such periods with the rise of Charlemagne (c. 800 years earlier) and the birth of Christ (c. 1600 years earlier), and thus expected events of great portent, especially regarding the emperor. It was in this context, as the imperial mathematician and astrologer to the emperor, that Kepler described the new star two years later in his "De Stella Nova". In it, Kepler addressed the star's astronomical properties while taking a skeptical approach to the many astrological interpretations then circulating. He noted its fading luminosity, speculated about its origin, and used the lack of observed parallax to argue that it was in the sphere of fixed stars, further undermining the doctrine of the immutability of the heavens (the idea accepted since Aristotle that the celestial spheres were perfect and unchanging). The birth of a new star implied the variability of the heavens. In an appendix, Kepler also discussed the recent chronology work of the Polish historian Laurentius Suslyga; he calculated that, if Suslyga was correct that accepted timelines were four years behind, then the Star of Bethlehem—analogous to the present new star—would have coincided with the first great conjunction of the earlier 800-year cycle.
The extended line of research that culminated in "Astronomia nova" ("A New Astronomy")—including the first two laws of planetary motion—began with the analysis, under Tycho's direction, of Mars' orbit. Kepler calculated and recalculated various approximations of Mars' orbit using an equant (the mathematical tool that Copernicus had eliminated with his system), eventually creating a model that generally agreed with Tycho's observations to within two arcminutes (the average measurement error). But he was not satisfied with the complex and still slightly inaccurate result; at certain points the model differed from the data by up to eight arcminutes. The wide array of traditional mathematical astronomy methods having failed him, Kepler set about trying to fit an ovoid orbit to the data.
In Kepler's religious view of the cosmos, the Sun (a symbol of God the Father) was the source of motive force in the Solar System. As a physical basis, Kepler drew by analogy on William Gilbert's theory of the magnetic soul of the Earth from "De Magnete" (1600) and on his own work on optics. Kepler supposed that the motive power (or motive "species") radiated by the Sun weakens with distance, causing faster or slower motion as planets move closer or farther from it. Perhaps this assumption entailed a mathematical relationship that would restore astronomical order. Based on measurements of the aphelion and perihelion of the Earth and Mars, he created a formula in which a planet's rate of motion is inversely proportional to its distance from the Sun. Verifying this relationship throughout the orbital cycle, however, required very extensive calculation; to simplify this task, by late 1602 Kepler reformulated the proportion in terms of geometry: "planets sweep out equal areas in equal times"—Kepler's second law of planetary motion.
He then set about calculating the entire orbit of Mars, using the geometrical rate law and assuming an egg-shaped ovoid orbit. After approximately 40 failed attempts, in early 1605 he at last hit upon the idea of an ellipse, which he had previously assumed to be too simple a solution for earlier astronomers to have overlooked. Finding that an elliptical orbit fit the Mars data, he immediately concluded that "all planets move in ellipses, with the sun at one focus"—Kepler's first law of planetary motion. Because he employed no calculating assistants, however, he did not extend the mathematical analysis beyond Mars. By the end of the year, he completed the manuscript for "Astronomia nova", though it would not be published until 1609 due to legal disputes over the use of Tycho's observations, the property of his heirs.
In the years following the completion of "Astronomia Nova", most of Kepler's research was focused on preparations for the "Rudolphine Tables" and a comprehensive set of ephemerides (specific predictions of planet and star positions) based on the table (though neither would be completed for many years). He also attempted (unsuccessfully) to begin a collaboration with Italian astronomer Giovanni Antonio Magini. Some of his other work dealt with chronology, especially the dating of events in the life of Jesus, and with astrology, especially criticism of dramatic predictions of catastrophe such as those of Helisaeus Roeslin.
Kepler and Roeslin engaged in a series of published attacks and counter-attacks, while physician Philip Feselius published a work dismissing astrology altogether (and Roeslin's work in particular). In response to what Kepler saw as the excesses of astrology on the one hand and overzealous rejection of it on the other, Kepler prepared "Tertius Interveniens" [Third-party Interventions]. Nominally this work—presented to the common patron of Roeslin and Feselius—was a neutral mediation between the feuding scholars, but it also set out Kepler's general views on the value of astrology, including some hypothesized mechanisms of interaction between planets and individual souls. While Kepler considered most traditional rules and methods of astrology to be the "evil-smelling dung" in which "an industrious hen" scrapes, there was an "occasional grain-seed, indeed, even a pearl or a gold nugget" to be found by the conscientious scientific astrologer. Conversely, Sir Oliver Lodge observed that Kepler was somewhat disdainful of astrology, as Kepler was "continually attacking and throwing sarcasm at astrology, but it was the only thing for which people would pay him, and on it after a fashion he lived."
In the first months of 1610, Galileo Galilei—using his powerful new telescope—discovered four satellites orbiting Jupiter. Upon publishing his account as "Sidereus Nuncius" [Starry Messenger], Galileo sought the opinion of Kepler, in part to bolster the credibility of his observations. Kepler responded enthusiastically with a short published reply, "Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo" [Conversation with the Starry Messenger]. He endorsed Galileo's observations and offered a range of speculations about the meaning and implications of Galileo's discoveries and telescopic methods, for astronomy and optics as well as cosmology and astrology. Later that year, Kepler published his own telescopic observations of the moons in "Narratio de Jovis Satellitibus", providing further support of Galileo. To Kepler's disappointment, however, Galileo never published his reactions (if any) to "Astronomia Nova".
After hearing of Galileo's telescopic discoveries, Kepler also started a theoretical and experimental investigation of telescopic optics using a telescope borrowed from Duke Ernest of Cologne. The resulting manuscript was completed in September 1610 and published as "Dioptrice" in 1611. In it, Kepler set out the theoretical basis of double-convex converging lenses and double-concave diverging lenses—and how they are combined to produce a Galilean telescope—as well as the concepts of real vs. virtual images, upright vs. inverted images, and the effects of focal length on magnification and reduction. He also described an improved telescope—now known as the "astronomical" or "Keplerian telescope"—in which two convex lenses can produce higher magnification than Galileo's combination of convex and concave lenses.
Around 1611, Kepler circulated a manuscript of what would eventually be published (posthumously) as "Somnium" [The Dream]. Part of the purpose of "Somnium" was to describe what practicing astronomy would be like from the perspective of another planet, to show the feasibility of a non-geocentric system. The manuscript, which disappeared after changing hands several times, described a fantastic trip to the Moon; it was part allegory, part autobiography, and part treatise on interplanetary travel (and is sometimes described as the first work of science fiction). Years later, a distorted version of the story may have instigated the witchcraft trial against his mother, as the mother of the narrator consults a demon to learn the means of space travel. Following her eventual acquittal, Kepler composed 223 footnotes to the story—several times longer than the actual text—which explained the allegorical aspects as well as the considerable scientific content (particularly regarding lunar geography) hidden within the text.
As a New Year's gift that year (1611), he also composed for his friend and some-time patron, Baron Wackher von Wackhenfels, a short pamphlet entitled "Strena Seu de Nive Sexangula" ("A New Year's Gift of Hexagonal Snow"). In this treatise, he published the first description of the hexagonal symmetry of snowflakes and, extending the discussion into a hypothetical atomistic physical basis for the symmetry, posed what later became known as the Kepler conjecture, a statement about the most efficient arrangement for packing spheres.
In 1611, the growing political-religious tension in Prague came to a head. Emperor Rudolph—whose health was failing—was forced to abdicate as King of Bohemia by his brother Matthias. Both sides sought Kepler's astrological advice, an opportunity he used to deliver conciliatory political advice (with little reference to the stars, except in general statements to discourage drastic action). However, it was clear that Kepler's future prospects in the court of Matthias were dim.
Also in that year, Barbara Kepler contracted Hungarian spotted fever, then began having seizures. As Barbara was recovering, Kepler's three children all fell sick with smallpox; Friedrich, 6, died. Following his son's death, Kepler sent letters to potential patrons in Württemberg and Padua. At the University of Tübingen in Württemberg, concerns over Kepler's perceived Calvinist heresies in violation of the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord prevented his return. The University of Padua—on the recommendation of the departing Galileo—sought Kepler to fill the mathematics professorship, but Kepler, preferring to keep his family in German territory, instead travelled to Austria to arrange a position as teacher and district mathematician in Linz. However, Barbara relapsed into illness and died shortly after Kepler's return.
Kepler postponed the move to Linz and remained in Prague until Rudolph's death in early 1612, though between political upheaval, religious tension, and family tragedy (along with the legal dispute over his wife's estate), Kepler could do no research. Instead, he pieced together a chronology manuscript, "Eclogae Chronicae", from correspondence and earlier work. Upon succession as Holy Roman Emperor, Matthias re-affirmed Kepler's position (and salary) as imperial mathematician but allowed him to move to Linz.
In Linz, Kepler's primary responsibilities (beyond completing the "Rudolphine Tables") were teaching at the district school and providing astrological and astronomical services. In his first years there, he enjoyed financial security and religious freedom relative to his life in Prague—though he was excluded from Eucharist by his Lutheran church over his theological scruples. It was also during his time in Linz that Kepler had to deal with the accusation and ultimate verdict of witchcraft against his mother Katharina in the Protestant town of Leonberg. That blow, happening only a few years after Kepler's excommunication, is not seen as a coincidence but as a symptom of the full-fledged assault waged by the Lutherans against Kepler.
His first publication in Linz was "De vero Anno" (1613), an expanded treatise on the year of Christ's birth; he also participated in deliberations on whether to introduce Pope Gregory's reformed calendar to Protestant German lands; that year he also wrote the influential mathematical treatise "Nova stereometria doliorum vinariorum", on measuring the volume of containers such as wine barrels, published in 1615.
On 30 October 1613, Kepler married the 24-year-old Susanna Reuttinger. Following the death of his first wife Barbara, Kepler had considered 11 different matches over two years (a decision process formalized later as the marriage problem). He eventually returned to Reuttinger (the fifth match) who, he wrote, "won me over with love, humble loyalty, economy of household, diligence, and the love she gave the stepchildren." The first three children of this marriage (Margareta Regina, Katharina, and Sebald) died in childhood. Three more survived into adulthood: Cordula (born 1621); Fridmar (born 1623); and Hildebert (born 1625). According to Kepler's biographers, this was a much happier marriage than his first.
Since completing the "Astronomia nova", Kepler had intended to compose an astronomy textbook. In 1615, he completed the first of three volumes of "Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae" ("Epitome of Copernican Astronomy"); the first volume (books I–III) was printed in 1617, the second (book IV) in 1620, and the third (books V–VII) in 1621. Despite the title, which referred simply to heliocentrism, Kepler's textbook culminated in his own ellipse-based system. The "Epitome" became Kepler's most influential work. It contained all three laws of planetary motion and attempted to explain heavenly motions through physical causes. Though it explicitly extended the first two laws of planetary motion (applied to Mars in "Astronomia nova") to all the planets as well as the Moon and the Medicean satellites of Jupiter, it did not explain how elliptical orbits could be derived from observational data.
As a spin-off from the "Rudolphine Tables" and the related "Ephemerides", Kepler published astrological calendars, which were very popular and helped offset the costs of producing his other work—especially when support from the Imperial treasury was withheld. In his calendars—six between 1617 and 1624—Kepler forecast planetary positions and weather as well as political events; the latter were often cannily accurate, thanks to his keen grasp of contemporary political and theological tensions. By 1624, however, the escalation of those tensions and the ambiguity of the prophecies meant political trouble for Kepler himself; his final calendar was publicly burned in Graz.
In 1615, Ursula Reingold, a woman in a financial dispute with Kepler's brother Christoph, claimed Kepler's mother Katharina had made her sick with an evil brew. The dispute escalated, and in 1617 Katharina was accused of witchcraft; witchcraft trials were relatively common in central Europe at this time. Beginning in August 1620, she was imprisoned for fourteen months. She was released in October 1621, thanks in part to the extensive legal defense drawn up by Kepler. The accusers had no stronger evidence than rumors. Katharina was subjected to "territio verbalis", a graphic description of the torture awaiting her as a witch, in a final attempt to make her confess. Throughout the trial, Kepler postponed his other work to focus on his "harmonic theory". The result, published in 1619, was "Harmonices Mundi" ("Harmony of the World").
Kepler was convinced "that the geometrical things have provided the Creator with the model for decorating the whole world". In "Harmony", he attempted to explain the proportions of the natural world—particularly the astronomical and astrological aspects—in terms of music. The central set of "harmonies" was the "musica universalis" or "music of the spheres", which had been studied by Pythagoras, Ptolemy and many others before Kepler; in fact, soon after publishing "Harmonices Mundi", Kepler was embroiled in a priority dispute with Robert Fludd, who had recently published his own harmonic theory.
Kepler began by exploring regular polygons and regular solids, including the figures that would come to be known as Kepler's solids. From there, he extended his harmonic analysis to music, meteorology, and astrology; harmony resulted from the tones made by the souls of heavenly bodies—and in the case of astrology, the interaction between those tones and human souls. In the final portion of the work (Book V), Kepler dealt with planetary motions, especially relationships between orbital velocity and orbital distance from the Sun. Similar relationships had been used by other astronomers, but Kepler—with Tycho's data and his own astronomical theories—treated them much more precisely and attached new physical significance to them.
Among many other harmonies, Kepler articulated what came to be known as the third law of planetary motion. He then tried many combinations until he discovered that (approximately) ""The square of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances"." Although he gives the date of this epiphany (8 March 1618), he does not give any details about how he arrived at this conclusion. However, the wider significance for planetary dynamics of this purely kinematical law was not realized until the 1660s. When conjoined with Christiaan Huygens' newly discovered law of centrifugal force, it enabled Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley, and perhaps Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke to demonstrate independently that the presumed gravitational attraction between the Sun and its planets decreased with the square of the distance between them. This refuted the traditional assumption of scholastic physics that the power of gravitational attraction remained constant with distance whenever it applied between two bodies, such as was assumed by Kepler and also by Galileo in his mistaken universal law that gravitational fall is uniformly accelerated, and also by Galileo's student Borrelli in his 1666 celestial mechanics.
In 1623, Kepler at last completed the "Rudolphine Tables", which at the time was considered his major work. However, due to the publishing requirements of the emperor and negotiations with Tycho Brahe's heir, it would not be printed until 1627. In the meantime, religious tension – the root of the ongoing Thirty Years' War – once again put Kepler and his family in jeopardy. In 1625, agents of the Catholic Counter-Reformation placed most of Kepler's library under seal, and in 1626 the city of Linz was besieged. Kepler moved to Ulm, where he arranged for the printing of the "Tables" at his own expense.
In 1628, following the military successes of the Emperor Ferdinand's armies under General Wallenstein, Kepler became an official advisor to Wallenstein. Though not the general's court astrologer per se, Kepler provided astronomical calculations for Wallenstein's astrologers and occasionally wrote horoscopes himself. In his final years, Kepler spent much of his time traveling, from the imperial court in Prague to Linz and Ulm to a temporary home in Sagan, and finally to Regensburg. Soon after arriving in Regensburg, Kepler fell ill. He died on 15 November 1630, and was buried there; his burial site was lost after the Swedish army destroyed the churchyard. Only Kepler's self-authored poetic epitaph survived the times:
Kepler's belief that God created the cosmos in an orderly fashion caused him to attempt to determine and comprehend the laws that govern the natural world, most profoundly in astronomy. The phrase "I am merely thinking God's thoughts after Him" has been attributed to him, although this is probably a capsulized version of a writing from his hand:
Those laws [of nature] are within the grasp of the human mind; God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.
Kepler's laws of planetary motion were not immediately accepted. Several major figures such as Galileo and René Descartes completely ignored Kepler's "Astronomia nova." Many astronomers, including Kepler's teacher, Michael Maestlin, objected to Kepler's introduction of physics into his astronomy. Some adopted compromise positions. Ismaël Bullialdus accepted elliptical orbits but replaced Kepler's area law with uniform motion in respect to the empty focus of the ellipse, while Seth Ward used an elliptical orbit with motions defined by an equant.
Several astronomers tested Kepler's theory, and its various modifications, against astronomical observations. Two transits of Venus and Mercury across the face of the sun provided sensitive tests of the theory, under circumstances when these planets could not normally be observed. In the case of the transit of Mercury in 1631, Kepler had been extremely uncertain of the parameters for Mercury, and advised observers to look for the transit the day before and after the predicted date. Pierre Gassendi observed the transit on the date predicted, a confirmation of Kepler's prediction. This was the first observation of a transit of Mercury. However, his attempt to observe the transit of Venus just one month later was unsuccessful due to inaccuracies in the Rudolphine Tables. Gassendi did not realize that it was not visible from most of Europe, including Paris. Jeremiah Horrocks, who observed the 1639 Venus transit, had used his own observations to adjust the parameters of the Keplerian model, predicted the transit, and then built apparatus to observe the transit. He remained a firm advocate of the Keplerian model.
"Epitome of Copernican Astronomy" was read by astronomers throughout Europe, and following Kepler's death, it was the main vehicle for spreading Kepler's ideas. In the period 1630 – 1650, this book was the most widely used astronomy textbook, winning many converts to ellipse-based astronomy. However, few adopted his ideas on the physical basis for celestial motions. In the late 17th century, a number of physical astronomy theories drawing from Kepler's work—notably those of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Robert Hooke—began to incorporate attractive forces (though not the quasi-spiritual motive species postulated by Kepler) and the Cartesian concept of inertia. This culminated in Isaac Newton's "Principia Mathematica" (1687), in which Newton derived Kepler's laws of planetary motion from a force-based theory of universal gravitation.
Beyond his role in the historical development of astronomy and natural philosophy, Kepler has loomed large in the philosophy and historiography of science. Kepler and his laws of motion were central to early histories of astronomy such as Jean-Étienne Montucla's 1758 "Histoire des mathématiques" and Jean-Baptiste Delambre's 1821 "Histoire de l'astronomie moderne". These and other histories written from an Enlightenment perspective treated Kepler's metaphysical and religious arguments with skepticism and disapproval, but later Romantic-era natural philosophers viewed these elements as central to his success.
William Whewell, in his influential "History of the Inductive Sciences" of 1837, found Kepler to be the archetype of the inductive scientific genius; in his "Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences" of 1840, Whewell held Kepler up as the embodiment of the most advanced forms of scientific method. Similarly, Ernst Friedrich Apelt—the first to extensively study Kepler's manuscripts, after their purchase by Catherine the Great—identified Kepler as a key to the "Revolution of the sciences".
Apelt, who saw Kepler's mathematics, aesthetic sensibility, physical ideas, and theology as part of a unified system of thought, produced the first extended analysis of Kepler's life and work.
Alexandre Koyré's work on Kepler was, after Apelt, the first major milestone in historical interpretations of Kepler's cosmology and its influence. In the 1930s and 1940s, Koyré, and a number of others in the first generation of professional historians of science, described the "Scientific Revolution" as the central event in the history of science, and Kepler as a (perhaps the) central figure in the revolution. Koyré placed Kepler's theorization, rather than his empirical work, at the center of the intellectual transformation from ancient to modern world-views. Since the 1960s, the volume of historical Kepler scholarship has expanded greatly, including studies of his astrology and meteorology, his geometrical methods, the role of his religious views in his work, his literary and rhetorical methods, his interaction with the broader cultural and philosophical currents of his time, and even his role as an historian of science.
Philosophers of science—such as Charles Sanders Peirce, Norwood Russell Hanson, Stephen Toulmin, and Karl Popper—have repeatedly turned to Kepler: examples of incommensurability, analogical reasoning, falsification, and many other philosophical concepts have been found in Kepler's work. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli even used Kepler's priority dispute with Robert Fludd to explore the implications of analytical psychology on scientific investigation.
Modern translations of a number of Kepler's books appeared in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the systematic publication of his collected works began in 1937 (and is nearing completion in the early 21st century).
An edition in eight volumes, " Kepleri Opera omnia," was prepared by Christian Frisch (1807–1881), during 1858 to 1871, on the occasion of Kepler's 300th birthday.
Frisch's edition only included Kepler's Latin, with a Latin commentary.
A new edition was planned beginning in 1914 by Walther von Dyck (1856–1934). Dyck compiled copies of Kepler's unedited manuscripts, using international diplomatic contacts to convince the Soviet authorities to lend him the manuscripts kept in Leningrad for photographic reproduction. These manuscripts contained several works by Kepler that had not been available to Frisch. Dyck's photographs remain the basis for the modern editions of Kepler's unpublished manuscripts.
Max Caspar (1880–1956) published his German translation of Kepler's "Mysterium Cosmographicum" in 1923.
Both Dyck and Caspar were influenced in their interest in Kepler by mathematician Alexander von Brill (1842–1935).
Caspar became Dyck's collaborator, succeeding him as project leader in 1934, establishing the "Kepler-Kommission" in the following year. Assisted by Martha List (1908–1992) and Franz Hammer (1898–1979), Caspar continued editorial work during World War II.
Max Caspar also published a biography of Kepler in 1948. The commission was later chaired by Volker Bialas (during 1976–2003) and Ulrich Grigull (during 1984–1999) and Roland Bulirsch (1998–2014).
Kepler has acquired a popular image as an icon of scientific modernity and a man before his time; science popularizer Carl Sagan described him as "the first astrophysicist and the last scientific astrologer".
The debate over Kepler's place in the Scientific Revolution has produced a wide variety of philosophical and popular treatments. One of the most influential is Arthur Koestler's 1959 "The Sleepwalkers", in which Kepler is unambiguously the hero (morally and theologically as well as intellectually) of the revolution.
A well-received, if fanciful, historical novel by John Banville, "Kepler" (1981), explored many of the themes developed in Koestler's non-fiction narrative and in the philosophy of science.
Somewhat more fanciful is a recent work of nonfiction, "Heavenly Intrigue" (2004), suggesting that Kepler murdered Tycho Brahe to gain access to his data.
In Austria, Kepler left behind such a historical legacy that he was one of the motifs of a silver collector's coin: the 10-euro Johannes Kepler silver coin, minted on 10 September 2002. The reverse side of the coin has a portrait of Kepler, who spent some time teaching in Graz and the surrounding areas. Kepler was acquainted with Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg personally, and he probably influenced the construction of Eggenberg Castle (the motif of the obverse of the coin). In front of him on the coin is the model of nested spheres and polyhedra from "Mysterium Cosmographicum".
The German composer Paul Hindemith wrote an opera about Kepler entitled "Die Harmonie der Welt", and a symphony of the same name was derived from music for the opera.
Philip Glass wrote an opera called "Kepler" based on Kepler's life (2009).
Kepler is honored together with Nicolaus Copernicus with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on 23 May.
Directly named for Kepler's contribution to science are Kepler's laws of planetary motion, Kepler's Supernova (Supernova 1604, which he observed and described) and the Kepler Solids, a set of geometrical constructions, two of which were described by him, and the Kepler conjecture on sphere packing.
A critical edition of Kepler's collected works ("Johannes Kepler Gesammelte Werke", KGW) in 22 volumes is being edited by the "Kepler-Kommission" (founded 1935) on behalf of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
The Kepler-Kommission also publishes "Bibliographia Kepleriana" (2nd ed. List, 1968), a complete bibliography of editions of Kepler's works, with a supplementary volume to the second edition (ed. Hamel 1998).
Footnotes
Citations
From the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15736
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John Bardeen
John Bardeen (; May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American physicist. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, making possible the development of almost every modern electronic device, from telephones to computers, and ushering in the Information Age. Bardeen's developments in superconductivity—for which he was awarded his second Nobel Prize—are used in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
In 1990, Bardeen appeared on "LIFE Magazine"'s list of "100 Most Influential Americans of the Century."
Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on May 23, 1908. He was the son of Charles Bardeen, the first dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School.
Bardeen attended the University High School at Madison. He graduated from the school in 1923 at age 15. He could have graduated several years earlier, but this was postponed because he took courses at another high school and because of his mother's death. He entered the University of Wisconsin in 1923. While in college, he joined the Zeta Psi fraternity. He raised the needed membership fees partly by playing billiards. He was initiated as a member of Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. He chose engineering because he did not want to be an academic like his father. He also felt that engineering had good job prospects.
Bardeen received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1928 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He graduated in 1928 despite taking a year off to work in Chicago. He took all the graduate courses in physics and mathematics that had interested him, and he graduated in five years instead of the usual four. This allowed him time to complete his Master's thesis, which was supervised by Leo J. Peters. He received his Master of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1929 from Wisconsin.
Bardeen furthered his studies by staying on at Wisconsin, but he eventually went to work for Gulf Research Laboratories, the research arm of the Gulf Oil Corporation that was based in Pittsburgh. From 1930 to 1933, Bardeen worked there on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys. He worked as a geophysicist. After the work failed to keep his interest, he applied and was accepted to the graduate program in mathematics at Princeton University.
As a graduate student, Bardeen studied mathematics and physics. Under physicist Eugene Wigner, he ended up writing his thesis on a problem in solid-state physics. Before completing his thesis, he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University in 1935. He spent the next three years there, from 1935 to 1938, working with to-be Nobel laureates in physics John Hasbrouck van Vleck and Percy Williams Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals, and also did some work on level density of nuclei. He received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Princeton in 1936.
From 1941 to 1944, Bardeen headed the group working on magnetic mines and torpedoes and mine and torpedo countermeasures at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory. During this period his wife Jane gave birth to a son (Bill, born in 1941) and a daughter (Betsy, born in 1944).
In October 1945, Bardeen began work at Bell Labs. He was a member of a solid-state physics group, led by William Shockley and chemist Stanley Morgan. Other personnel working in the group were Walter Brattain, physicist Gerald Pearson, chemist Robert Gibney, electronics expert Hilbert Moore and several technicians. He moved his family to Summit, New Jersey.
The assignment of the group was to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. Their first attempts were based on Shockley's ideas about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity. These experiments mysteriously failed every time in all sorts of configurations and materials. The group was at a standstill until Bardeen suggested a theory that invoked surface states that prevented the field from penetrating the semiconductor. The group changed its focus to study these surface states, and they met almost daily to discuss the work. The rapport of the group was excellent, and ideas were freely exchanged. By the winter of 1946 they had enough results that Bardeen submitted a paper on the surface states to "Physical Review". Brattain started experiments to study the surface states through observations made while shining a bright light on the semiconductor's surface. This led to several more papers (one of them co-authored with Shockley), which estimated the density of the surface states to be more than enough to account for their failed experiments. The pace of the work picked up significantly when they started to surround point contacts between the semiconductor and the conducting wires with electrolytes. Moore built a circuit that allowed them to vary the frequency of the input signal easily and suggested that they use glycol borate (gu), a viscous chemical that didn't evaporate. Finally they began to get some evidence of power amplification when Pearson, acting on a suggestion by Shockley, put a voltage on a droplet of gu placed across a p–n junction.
On December 23, 1947, Bardeen and Brattain were working without Shockley when they succeeded in creating a point-contact transistor that achieved amplification. By the next month, Bell Labs' patent attorneys started to work on the patent applications.
Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered that Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and patented in 1930 by Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925.
Shockley publicly took the lion's share of the credit for the invention of transistor; this led to a deterioration of Bardeen's relationship with Shockley. Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor. Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.
The "transistor" (a portmanteau of "transconductance" and "resistor") was 1/50 the size of the vacuum tubes it replaced in televisions and radios, used far less power, was far more reliable, and it allowed electrical devices to become more compact.
By 1951, Bardeen was looking for a new job. Fred Seitz, a friend of Bardeen, convinced the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign to make Bardeen an offer of $10,000 a year. Bardeen accepted the offer and left Bell Labs. He joined the engineering and physics faculties at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1951. He was Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at Illinois. His Ph.D. student Nick Holonyak (1954), invented the LED in 1962.
At Illinois, he established two major research programs, one in the Electrical Engineering Department and one in the Physics Department. The research program in the Electrical Engineering Department dealt with both experimental and theoretical aspects of semiconductors, and the research program in the Physics Department dealt with theoretical aspects of macroscopic quantum systems, particularly superconductivity and quantum liquids.
He was an active professor at Illinois from 1951 to 1975 and then became Professor Emeritus. In his later life, Bardeen remained active in academic research, during which time he focused on understanding the flow of electrons in charge density waves (CDWs) through metallic linear chain compounds. His proposals that CDW electron transport is a collective quantum phenomenon (see Macroscopic quantum phenomena) were initially greeted with skepticism. However, experiments reported in 2012 show oscillations in CDW current versus magnetic flux through tantalum trisulfide rings, similar to the behavior of superconducting quantum interference devices (see SQUID and Aharonov–Bohm effect), lending credence to the idea that collective CDW electron transport is fundamentally quantum in nature. (See quantum mechanics.) Bardeen continued his research throughout the 1980s, and published articles in "Physical Review Letters" and "Physics Today" less than a year before he died.
In 1956, John Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with William Shockley of Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments and Walter Brattain of Bell Telephone Laboratories ""for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect"".
At the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Brattain and Shockley received their awards that night from King Gustaf VI Adolf. Bardeen brought only one of his three children to the Nobel Prize ceremony. King Gustav chided Bardeen because of this, and Bardeen assured the King that the next time he would bring all his children to the ceremony. He kept his promise.
In 1957, Bardeen, in collaboration with Leon Cooper and his doctoral student John Robert Schrieffer, proposed the standard theory of superconductivity known as the BCS theory (named for their initials).
In 1972, Bardeen shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Leon N Cooper of Brown University and John Robert Schrieffer of the University of Pennsylvania "for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory". This was Bardeen's second Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field. Only three others have ever received more than one Nobel Prize.
Bardeen brought his three children to the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. Bardeen gave much of his Nobel Prize money to fund the Fritz London Memorial Lectures at Duke University.
In addition to being awarded the Nobel prize twice, Bardeen has numerous other awards including:
Bardeen was also an important adviser to Xerox Corporation. Though quiet by nature, he took the uncharacteristic step of urging Xerox executives to keep their California research center, Xerox PARC, afloat when the parent company was suspicious that its research center would amount to little.
Bardeen married Jane Maxwell on July 18, 1938. While at Princeton, he met Jane during a visit to his old friends in Pittsburgh.
Bardeen was a scientist with a very unassuming personality. While he served as a professor for almost 40 years at the University of Illinois, he was best remembered by neighbors for hosting cookouts where he would prepare food for his friends, many of whom were unaware of his accomplishments at the university. He would always ask his guests if they liked the hamburger bun toasted (since he liked his that way). He enjoyed playing golf and going on picnics with his family. Lillian Hoddeson, a University of Illinois historian who wrote a book on Bardeen, said that because he "differed radically from the popular stereotype of 'genius' and was uninterested in appearing other than ordinary, the public and the media often overlooked him."
When Bardeen was asked about his beliefs during a 1988 interview, he responded: "I am not a religious person, and so do not think about it very much". However, he has also said: "I feel that science cannot provide an answer to the ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of life." Bardeen did believe in a code of moral values and behaviour. John Bardeen's children were taken to church by his wife, who taught Sunday school and was a church elder. Despite this, he and his wife made it clear that they did not have faith in an afterlife and other religious ideas.
Bardeen died of heart disease at age 82 at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 30, 1991. Although he lived in Champaign-Urbana, he had come to Boston for medical consultation. Bardeen and his wife Jane (1907–1997) are buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison, Wisconsin. They were survived by three children, James, William and Elizabeth Bardeen Greytak, and six grandchildren.
In honor of Professor Bardeen, the engineering quadrangle at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is named the Bardeen Quad.
Also in honor of Bardeen, Sony Corporation endowed a $3 million John Bardeen professorial chair at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, beginning in 1990. SONY Corporation owed much of its success to commercializing Bardeen's transistors in portable TVs and radios, and had worked with Illinois researchers. The current John Bardeen Professor is Nick Holonyak, Bardeen's doctoral student and protege.
At the time of Bardeen's death, then-University of Illinois chancellor Morton Weir said, "It is a rare person whose work changes the life of every American; John's did."
Bardeen was honored on a March 6, 2008, United States postage stamp as part of the "American Scientists" series designed by artist Victor Stabin. The $0.41 stamp was unveiled in a ceremony at the University of Illinois. His citation reads: "Theoretical physicist John Bardeen (1908–1991) shared the Nobel Prize in Physics twice — in 1956, as co-inventor of the transistor and in 1972, for the explanation of superconductivity. The transistor paved the way for all modern electronics, from computers to microchips. Diverse applications of superconductivity include infrared sensors and medical imaging systems." The other scientists on the "American Scientists" sheet include biochemist Gerty Cori, chemist Linus Pauling and astronomer Edwin Hubble.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15737
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Jewellery
Jewellery or jewelry (American English; see spelling differences) consists of decorative items worn for personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes. From a western perspective, the term is restricted to durable ornaments, excluding flowers for example. For many centuries metal such as gold used in different carats from 21 , 18 , 12 , 9 or even lowers, often combined with gemstones, has been the normal material for jewellery, but other materials such as shells and other plant materials may be used. It is one of the oldest type of archaeological artefact – with 100,000-year-old beads made from "Nassarius" shells thought to be the oldest known jewellery. The basic forms of jewellery vary between cultures but are often extremely long-lived; in European cultures the most common forms of jewellery listed above have persisted since ancient times, while other forms such as adornments for the nose or ankle, important in other cultures, are much less common.
Jewellery may be made from a wide range of materials. Gemstones and similar materials such as amber and coral, precious metals, beads, and shells have been widely used, and enamel has often been important. In most cultures jewellery can be understood as a status symbol, for its material properties, its patterns, or for meaningful symbols. Jewellery has been made to adorn nearly every body part, from hairpins to toe rings, and even genital jewellery. In modern European culture the amount worn by adult males is relatively low compared with other cultures and other periods in European culture.
The word "jewellery" itself is derived from the word "jewel", which was anglicised from the Old French ""jouel"", and beyond that, to the Latin word ""jocale"", meaning plaything. In British English, Indian English, New Zealand English, Hiberno-English, Australian English, and South African English it is spelled "jewellery," while the spelling is "jewelry" in American English. Both are used in Canadian English, though "jewelry" prevails by a two to one margin. In French and a few other European languages the equivalent term, "joaillerie", may also cover decorated metalwork in precious metal such as "objets d'art" and church items, not just objects worn on the person.
Humans have used jewellery for a number of different reasons:
Most cultures at some point have had a practice of keeping large amounts of wealth stored in the form of jewellery. Numerous cultures store wedding dowries in the form of jewellery or make jewellery as a means to store or display coins. Alternatively, jewellery has been used as a currency or trade good; an example being the use of slave beads.
Many items of jewellery, such as brooches and buckles, originated as purely functional items, but evolved into decorative items as their functional requirement diminished.
Jewellery can symbolise group membership (as in the case, of the Christian crucifix or the Jewish Star of David) or status (as in the case of chains of office, or the Western practice of married people wearing wedding rings).
Wearing of amulets and devotional medals to provide protection or to ward off evil is common in some cultures. These may take the form of symbols (such as the ankh), stones, plants, animals, body parts (such as the Khamsa), or glyphs (such as stylised versions of the Throne Verse in Islamic art).
In creating jewellery, gemstones, coins, or other precious items are often used, and they are typically set into precious metals. Platinum alloys range from 900 (90% pure) to 950 (95.0% pure). The silver used in jewellery is usually sterling silver, or 92.5% fine silver. In costume jewellery, stainless steel findings are sometimes used.
Other commonly used materials include glass, such as fused-glass or enamel; wood, often carved or turned; shells and other natural animal substances such as bone and ivory; natural clay; polymer clay; Hemp and other twines have been used as well to create jewellery that has more of a natural feel. However, any inclusion of lead or lead solder will give a British Assay office (the body which gives U.K. jewellery its stamp of approval, the Hallmark) the right to destroy the piece, however it is very rare for the assay office to do so.
Beads are frequently used in jewellery. These may be made of glass, gemstones, metal, wood, shells, clay and polymer clay. Beaded jewellery commonly encompasses necklaces, bracelets, earrings, belts and rings. Beads may be large or small; the smallest type of beads used are known as seed beads, these are the beads used for the "woven" style of beaded jewellery. Seed beads are also used in an embroidery technique where they are sewn onto fabric backings to create broad collar neck pieces and beaded bracelets. Bead embroidery, a popular type of handwork during the Victorian era, is enjoying a renaissance in modern jewellery making. Beading, or beadwork, is also very popular in many African and indigenous North American cultures.
Silversmiths, goldsmiths, and lapidaries use methods including forging, casting, soldering or welding, cutting, carving and "cold-joining" (using adhesives, staples and rivets to assemble parts).
Diamonds were first mined in India. Pliny may have mentioned them, although there is some debate as to the exact nature of the stone he referred to as "Adamas"; In 2005, Australia, Botswana, Russia and Canada ranked among the primary sources of gemstone diamond production. There are negative consequences of the diamond trade in certain areas. Diamonds mined during the recent civil wars in Angola, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and other nations have been labelled as blood diamonds when they are mined in a war zone and sold to finance an insurgency.
The British crown jewels contain the Cullinan Diamond, part of the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found (1905), at 3,106.75 carats (621.35 g).
Now popular in engagement rings, this usage dates back to the marriage of Maximilian I to Mary of Burgundy in 1477.
A popular style is the diamond solitaire, which features a single large diamond mounted prominently. Within solitaire, there are 3 categories in which a ring can be classified into: prong, bezel and tension setting.
Many precious and semiprecious stones are used for jewellery. Among them are:
Some gemstones (like pearls, coral, and amber) are classified as organic, meaning that they are produced by living organisms. Others are inorganic, meaning that they are generally composed of and arise from minerals.
Some gems, for example, amethyst, have become less valued as methods of extracting and importing them have progressed. Some man-made gems can serve in place of natural gems, such as cubic zirconia, which can be used in place of diamond.
For platinum, gold, and silver jewellery, there are many techniques to create finishes. The most common are high-polish, satin/matte, brushed, and hammered. High-polished jewellery is the most common and gives the metal a highly reflective, shiny look. Satin, or matte finish reduces the shine and reflection of the jewellery, and this is commonly used to accentuate gemstones such as diamonds. Brushed finishes give the jewellery a textured look and are created by brushing a material (similar to sandpaper) against the metal, leaving "brush strokes". Hammered finishes are typically created by using a rounded steel hammer and hammering the jewellery to give it a wavy texture.
Some jewellery is plated to give it a shiny, reflective look or to achieve a desired colour. Sterling silver jewellery may be plated with a thin layer of 0.999 fine silver (a process known as flashing) or may be plated with rhodium or gold. Base metal costume jewellery may also be plated with silver, gold, or rhodium for a more attractive finish.
Jewellery has been used to denote status. In ancient Rome, only certain ranks could wear rings; later, sumptuary laws dictated who could wear what type of jewellery. This was also based on rank of the citizens of that time. Cultural dictates have also played a significant role. For example, the wearing of earrings by Western men was considered effeminate in the 19th century and early 20th century. More recently, the display of body jewellery, such as piercings, has become a mark of acceptance or seen as a badge of courage within some groups but is completely rejected in others. Likewise, hip hop culture has popularised the slang term bling-bling, which refers to ostentatious display of jewellery by men or women.
Conversely, the jewellery industry in the early 20th century launched a campaign to popularise wedding rings for men, which caught on, as well as engagement rings for men, which did not, going so far as to create a false history and claim that the practice had medieval roots. By the mid-1940s, 85% of weddings in the U.S. featured a double-ring ceremony, up from 15% in the 1920s. Religion has also played a role in societies influence. Islam, for instance, considers the wearing of gold by men as a social taboo, and many religions have edicts against excessive display. In Christianity, the New Testament gives injunctions against the wearing of gold, in the writings of the apostles Paul and Peter. In Revelation 17, "the great whore" or false religious system, is depicted as being "decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand." (Rev. 17:4) For Muslims it is considered haraam for a man to wear gold. Christian denominations forbidding the use of jewellery by both men and women include Amish-Mennonites and Holiness churches.
The history of jewellery is long and goes back many years, with many different uses among different cultures. It has endured for thousands of years and has provided various insights into how ancient cultures worked.
The earliest known Jewellery was actually created not by humans ("Homo sapiens") but by Neanderthal living in Europe. Specifically, perforated beads made from small sea shells have been found dating to 115,000 years ago in the Cueva de los Aviones, a cave along the southeast coast of Spain. Later in Kenya, at Enkapune Ya Muto, beads made from perforated ostrich egg shells have been dated to more than 40,000 years ago. In Russia, a stone bracelet and marble ring are attributed to a similar age.
Later, the European early modern humans had crude necklaces and bracelets of bone, teeth, berries, and stone hung on pieces of string or animal sinew, or pieces of carved bone used to secure clothing together. In some cases, jewellery had shell or mother-of-pearl pieces.
A decorated engraved pendant (the Star Carr Pendant) dating to around 11,000 BC, and thought to be the oldest Mesolithic art in Britain, was found at the site of Star Carr in North Yorkshire in 2015. In southern Russia, carved bracelets made of mammoth tusk have been found. The Venus of Hohle Fels features a perforation at the top, showing that it was intended to be worn as a pendant.
Around seven-thousand years ago, the first sign of copper jewellery was seen. In October 2012 the Museum of Ancient History in Lower Austria revealed that they had found a grave of a female jewellery worker – forcing archaeologists to take a fresh look at prehistoric gender roles after it appeared to be that of a female fine metal worker – a profession that was previously thought to have been carried out exclusively by men.
The first signs of established jewellery making in Ancient Egypt was around 3,000–5,000 years ago. The Egyptians preferred the luxury, rarity, and workability of gold over other metals. In Predynastic Egypt jewellery soon began to symbolise political and religious power in the community. Although it was worn by wealthy Egyptians in life, it was also worn by them in death, with jewellery commonly placed among grave goods.
In conjunction with gold jewellery, Egyptians used coloured glass, along with semi-precious gems. The colour of the jewellery had significance. Green, for example, symbolised fertility. Lapis lazuli and silver had to be imported from beyond the country's borders.
Egyptian designs were most common in Phoenician jewellery. Also, ancient Turkish designs found in Persian jewellery suggest that trade between the Middle East and Europe was not uncommon. Women wore elaborate gold and silver pieces that were used in ceremonies.
By approximately 5,000 years ago, jewellery-making had become a significant craft in the cities of Mesopotamia. The most significant archaeological evidence comes from the Royal Cemetery of Ur, where hundreds of burials dating 2900–2300 BC were unearthed; tombs such as that of Puabi contained a multitude of artefacts in gold, silver, and semi-precious stones, such as lapis lazuli crowns embellished with gold figurines, close-fitting collar necklaces, and jewel-headed pins. In Assyria, men and women both wore extensive amounts of jewellery, including amulets, ankle bracelets, heavy multi-strand necklaces, and cylinder seals.
Jewellery in Mesopotamia tended to be manufactured from thin metal leaf and was set with large numbers of brightly coloured stones (chiefly agate, lapis, carnelian, and jasper). Favoured shapes included leaves, spirals, cones, and bunches of grapes. Jewellers created works both for human use and for adorning statues and idols. They employed a wide variety of sophisticated metalworking techniques, such as cloisonné, engraving, fine granulation, and filigree.
Extensive and meticulously maintained records pertaining to the trade and manufacture of jewellery have also been unearthed throughout Mesopotamian archaeological sites. One record in the Mari royal archives, for example, gives the composition of various items of jewellery:
The Greeks started using gold and gems in jewellery in 1600 BC, although beads shaped as shells and animals were produced widely in earlier times. Around 1500 BC, the main techniques of working gold in Greece included casting, twisting bars, and making wire. Many of these sophisticated techniques were popular in the Mycenaean period, but unfortunately this skill was lost at the end of the Bronze Age. The forms and shapes of jewellery in ancient Greece such as the armring (13th century BC), brooch (10th century BC) and pins (7th century BC), have varied widely since the Bronze Age as well. Other forms of jewellery include wreaths, earrings, necklace and bracelets. A good example of the high quality that gold working techniques could achieve in Greece is the ‘Gold Olive Wreath’ (4th century BC), which is modeled on the type of wreath given as a prize for winners in athletic competitions like the Olympic Games. Jewellery dating from 600 to 475 BC is not well represented in the archaeological record, but after the Persian wars the quantity of jewellery again became more plentiful. One particularly popular type of design at this time was a bracelet decorated with snake and animal-heads Because these bracelets used considerably more metal, many examples were made from bronze. By 300 BC, the Greeks had mastered making coloured jewellery and using amethysts, pearl, and emeralds. Also, the first signs of cameos appeared, with the Greeks creating them from Indian Sardonyx, a striped brown pink and cream agate stone. Greek jewellery was often simpler than in other cultures, with simple designs and workmanship. However, as time progressed, the designs grew in complexity and different materials were soon used.
Jewellery in Greece was hardly worn and was mostly used for public appearances or on special occasions. It was frequently given as a gift and was predominantly worn by women to show their wealth, social status, and beauty. The jewellery was often supposed to give the wearer protection from the "Evil Eye" or endowed the owner with supernatural powers, while others had a religious symbolism. Older pieces of jewellery that have been found were dedicated to the Gods.
They worked two styles of pieces: cast pieces and pieces hammered out of sheet metal. Fewer pieces of cast jewellery have been recovered. It was made by casting the metal onto two stone or clay moulds. The two halves were then joined together, and wax, followed by molten metal, was placed in the centre. This technique had been practised since the late Bronze Age. The more common form of jewellery was the hammered sheet type. Sheets of metal would be hammered to thickness and then soldered together. The inside of the two sheets would be filled with wax or another liquid to preserve the metal work. Different techniques, such as using a stamp or engraving, were then used to create motifs on the jewellery. Jewels may then be added to hollows or glass poured into special cavities on the surface.
The Greeks took much of their designs from outer origins, such as Asia, when Alexander the Great conquered part of it. In earlier designs, other European influences can also be detected. When Roman rule came to Greece, no change in jewellery designs was detected. However, by 27 BC, Greek designs were heavily influenced by the Roman culture. That is not to say that indigenous design did not thrive. Numerous polychrome butterfly pendants on silver foxtail chains, dating from the 1st century, have been found near Olbia, with only one example ever found anywhere else.
Gorgons, pomegranates, acorns, lotus flowers and palms were a clear indicator of Greek influence in Etruscan jewelry. The modelling of heads, which was a typical practice from the Greek severe period, was a technique that spread throughout the Etruscan territory. An even clearer evidence of new influences is the shape introduced in the Orientalizing era: The Bullae. A pear shaped vessel used to hold perfume. Its surface was usually decorated with repoussé and engraved symbolic figures.
Much of the jewelry found was not "worn" by Etruscans, but were made to accompany them in the after world. Most, if not all, techniques of Etruscan goldsmiths were not invented by them as they are dated to the third millennium BC.
Although jewellery work was abundantly diverse in earlier times, especially among the barbarian tribes such as the Celts, when the Romans conquered most of Europe, jewellery was changed as smaller factions developed the Roman designs. The most common artefact of early Rome was the brooch, which was used to secure clothing together. The Romans used a diverse range of materials for their jewellery from their extensive resources across the continent. Although they used gold, they sometimes used bronze or bone, and in earlier times, glass beads & pearl. As early as 2,000 years ago, they imported Sri Lankan sapphires and Indian diamonds and used emeralds and amber in their jewellery. In Roman-ruled England, fossilised wood called jet from Northern England was often carved into pieces of jewellery. The early Italians worked in crude gold and created clasps, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets. They also produced larger pendants that could be filled with perfume.
Like the Greeks, often the purpose of Roman jewellery was to ward off the "Evil Eye" given by other people. Although women wore a vast array of jewellery, men often only wore a finger ring. Although they were expected to wear at least one ring, some Roman men wore a ring on every finger, while others wore none. Roman men and women wore rings with an engraved gem on it that was used with wax to seal documents, a practice that continued into medieval times when kings and noblemen used the same method. After the fall of the Roman Empire, the jewellery designs were absorbed by neighbouring countries and tribes.
Post-Roman Europe continued to develop jewellery making skills. The Celts and Merovingians in particular are noted for their jewellery, which in terms of quality matched or exceeded that of the Byzantine Empire. Clothing fasteners, amulets, and, to a lesser extent, signet rings, are the most common artefacts known to us. A particularly striking Celtic example is the Tara Brooch. The Torc was common throughout Europe as a symbol of status and power. By the 8th century, jewelled weaponry was common for men, while other jewellery (with the exception of signet rings) seemed to become the domain of women. Grave goods found in a 6th–7th century burial near Chalon-sur-Saône are illustrative. A young girl was buried with: 2 silver fibulae, a necklace (with coins), bracelet, gold earrings, a pair of hair-pins, comb, and buckle. The Celts specialised in continuous patterns and designs, while Merovingian designs are best known for stylised animal figures. They were not the only groups known for high quality work. Note the Visigoth work shown here, and the numerous decorative objects found at the Anglo-Saxon Ship burial at Sutton Hoo Suffolk, England are a particularly well-known example. On the continent, cloisonné and garnet were perhaps the quintessential method and gemstone of the period.
The Eastern successor of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, continued many of the methods of the Romans, though religious themes came to predominate. Unlike the Romans, the Franks, and the Celts, however, Byzantium used light-weight gold leaf rather than solid gold, and more emphasis was placed on stones and gems. As in the West, Byzantine jewellery was worn by wealthier females, with male jewellery apparently restricted to signet rings. Woman's jewellery had some peculiarities like kolts that decorated headband.
Like other contemporary cultures, jewellery was commonly buried with its owner.
The Renaissance and exploration both had significant impacts on the development of jewellery in Europe. By the 17th century, increasing exploration and trade led to increased availability of a wide variety of gemstones as well as exposure to the art of other cultures. Whereas prior to this the working of gold and precious metal had been at the forefront of jewellery, this period saw increasing dominance of gemstones and their settings. An example of this is the Cheapside Hoard, the stock of a jeweller hidden in London during the Commonwealth period and not found again until 1912. It contained Colombian emerald, topaz, amazonite from Brazil, spinel, iolite, and chrysoberyl from Sri Lanka, ruby from India, Afghan lapis lazuli, Persian turquoise, Red Sea peridot, as well as Bohemian and Hungarian opal, garnet, and amethyst. Large stones were frequently set in box-bezels on enamelled rings. Notable among merchants of the period was Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who brought the precursor stone of the Hope Diamond to France in the 1660s.
When Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned as Emperor of the French in 1804, he revived the style and grandeur of jewellery and fashion in France. Under Napoleon's rule, jewellers introduced "parures", suites of matching jewellery, such as a diamond tiara, diamond earrings, diamond rings, a diamond brooch, and a diamond necklace. Both of Napoleon's wives had beautiful sets such as these and wore them regularly. Another fashion trend resurrected by Napoleon was the cameo. Soon after his cameo decorated crown was seen, cameos were highly sought. The period also saw the early stages of costume jewellery, with fish scale covered glass beads in place of pearls or conch shell cameos instead of stone cameos. New terms were coined to differentiate the arts: jewellers who worked in cheaper materials were called "bijoutiers", while jewellers who worked with expensive materials were called "joailliers", a practice which continues to this day.
Starting in the late 18th century, Romanticism had a profound impact on the development of western jewellery. Perhaps the most significant influences were the public's fascination with the treasures being discovered through the birth of modern archaeology and a fascination with Medieval and Renaissance art. Changing social conditions and the onset of the Industrial Revolution also led to growth of a middle class that wanted and could afford jewellery. As a result, the use of industrial processes, cheaper alloys, and stone substitutes led to the development of paste or costume jewellery. Distinguished goldsmiths continued to flourish, however, as wealthier patrons sought to ensure that what they wore still stood apart from the jewellery of the masses, not only through use of precious metals and stones but also though superior artistic and technical work. One such artist was the French goldsmith François-Désiré Froment-Meurice. A category unique to this period and quite appropriate to the philosophy of romanticism was mourning jewellery. It originated in England, where Queen Victoria was often seen wearing jet jewellery after the death of Prince Albert, and it allowed the wearer to continue wearing jewellery while expressing a state of mourning at the death of a loved one.
In the United States, this period saw the founding in 1837 of Tiffany & Co. by Charles Lewis Tiffany. Tiffany's put the United States on the world map in terms of jewellery and gained fame creating dazzling commissions for people such as the wife of Abraham Lincoln. Later, it would gain popular notoriety as the setting of the film Breakfast at Tiffany's. In France, Pierre Cartier founded Cartier SA in 1847, while 1884 saw the founding of Bulgari in Italy. The modern production studio had been born and was a step away from the former dominance of individual craftsmen and patronage.
This period also saw the first major collaboration between East and West. Collaboration in Pforzheim between German and Japanese artists led to Shakudō plaques set into Filigree frames being created by the Stoeffler firm in 1885). Perhaps the grand finalé – and an appropriate transition to the following period – were the masterful creations of the Russian artist Peter Carl Fabergé, working for the Imperial Russian court, whose Fabergé eggs and jewellery pieces are still considered as the epitome of the goldsmith's art.
Many whimsical fashions were introduced in the extravagant eighteenth century. Cameos that were used in connection with jewellery were the attractive trinkets along with many of the small objects such as brooches, ear-rings and scarf-pins. Some of the necklets were made of several pieces joined with the gold chains were in and bracelets were also made sometimes to match the necklet and the brooch. At the end of the Century the jewellery with cut steel intermixed with large crystals was introduced by an Englishman, Matthew Boulton of Birmingham.
In the 1890s, jewellers began to explore the potential of the growing Art Nouveau style and the closely related German Jugendstil, British (and to some extent American) Arts and Crafts Movement, Catalan Modernisme, Austro-Hungarian Sezession, Italian "Liberty", etc.
Art Nouveau jewellery encompassed many distinct features including a focus on the female form and an emphasis on colour, most commonly rendered through the use of enamelling techniques including basse-taille, champleve, cloisonné, and plique-à-jour. Motifs included orchids, irises, pansies, vines, swans, peacocks, snakes, dragonflies, mythological creatures, and the female silhouette.
René Lalique, working for the Paris shop of Samuel Bing, was recognised by contemporaries as a leading figure in this trend. The Darmstadt Artists' Colony and Wiener Werkstätte provided perhaps the most significant input to the trend, while in Denmark Georg Jensen, though best known for his Silverware, also contributed significant pieces. In England, Liberty & Co., (notably through the Cymric designs of Archibald Knox) and the British arts & crafts movement of Charles Robert Ashbee contributed slightly more linear but still characteristic designs. The new style moved the focus of the jeweller's art from the setting of stones to the artistic design of the piece itself. Lalique's dragonfly design is one of the best examples of this. Enamels played a large role in technique, while sinuous organic lines are the most recognisable design feature.
The end of World War I once again changed public attitudes, and a more sober style developed.
Growing political tensions, the after-effects of the war, and a reaction against the perceived decadence of the turn of the 20th century led to simpler forms, combined with more effective manufacturing for mass production of high-quality jewellery. Covering the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the style has become popularly known as Art Deco. Walter Gropius and the German Bauhaus movement, with their philosophy of "no barriers between artists and craftsmen" led to some interesting and stylistically simplified forms. Modern materials were also introduced: plastics and aluminium were first used in jewellery, and of note are the chromed pendants of Russian-born Bauhaus master Naum Slutzky. Technical mastery became as valued as the material itself. In the West, this period saw the reinvention of granulation by the German Elizabeth Treskow, although development of the re-invention has continued into the 1990s. It is based on the basic shapes.
In Asia, the Indian subcontinent has the longest continuous legacy of jewellery making anywhere, with a history of over 5,000 years. One of the first to start jewellery making were the peoples of the Indus Valley Civilization, in what is now predominately modern-day Pakistan and part of northern and western India. Early jewellery making in China started around the same period, but it became widespread with the spread of Buddhism around 2,000 years ago.
The Chinese used silver in their jewellery more than gold. Blue kingfisher feathers were tied onto early Chinese jewellery and later, blue gems and glass were incorporated into designs. However, jade was preferred over any other stone. The Chinese revered jade because of the human-like qualities they assigned to it, such as its hardness, durability, and beauty. The first jade pieces were very simple, but as time progressed, more complex designs evolved. Jade rings from between the 4th and 7th centuries BC show evidence of having been worked with a compound milling machine, hundreds of years before the first mention of such equipment in the west.
In China, the most uncommon piece of jewellery is the earring, which was worn neither by men nor women. In modern times, earrings are still considered culturally taboo for men in China—in fact, in 2019, the Chinese video streaming service iQiyi began blurring the ears of male actors wearing earrings. Amulets were common, often with a Chinese symbol or dragon. Dragons, Chinese symbols, and phoenixes were frequently depicted on jewellery designs.
The Chinese often placed their jewellery in their graves. Most Chinese graves found by archaeologists contain decorative jewellery.
The Indian subcontinent has a long jewellery history, which went through various changes through cultural influence and politics for more than 5,000–8,000 years. Because India had an abundant supply of precious metals and gems, it prospered financially through export and exchange with other countries. While European traditions were heavily influenced by waxing and waning empires, India enjoyed a continuous development of art forms for some 5,000 years. One of the first to start jewellery making were the peoples of the Indus Valley Civilization (encompassing present-day Pakistan and north and northwest India). By 1500 BC, the peoples of the Indus Valley were creating gold earrings and necklaces, bead necklaces, and metallic bangles. Before 2100 BC, prior to the period when metals were widely used, the largest jewellery trade in the Indus Valley region was the bead trade. Beads in the Indus Valley were made using simple techniques. First, a bead maker would need a rough stone, which would be bought from an eastern stone trader. The stone would then be placed into a hot oven where it would be heated until it turned deep red, a colour highly prized by people of the Indus Valley. The red stone would then be chipped to the right size and a hole bored through it with primitive drills. The beads were then polished. Some beads were also painted with designs. This art form was often passed down through the family. Children of bead makers often learned how to work beads from a young age. Persian style also played a big role in India's jewellery. Each stone had its own characteristics related to Hinduism.
Jewellery in the Indus Valley was worn predominantly by females, who wore numerous clay or shell bracelets on their wrists. They were often shaped like doughnuts and painted black. Over time, clay bangles were discarded for more durable ones. In present-day India, bangles are made out of metal or glass. Other pieces that women frequently wore were thin bands of gold that would be worn on the forehead, earrings, primitive brooches, chokers, and gold rings. Although women wore jewellery the most, some men in the Indus Valley wore beads. Small beads were often crafted to be placed in men and women's hair. The beads were about one millimetre long.
A female skeleton (presently on display at the National Museum, New Delhi, India) wears a carlinean bangle (bracelet) on her left hand. "Kada" is a special kind of bracelet and is widely popular in Indian culture. They symbolize animals such as peacock, elephant, etc.
According to Hindu belief, gold and silver are considered as sacred metals. Gold is symbolic of the warm sun, while silver suggests the cool moon. Both are the quintessential metals of Indian jewellery. Pure gold does not oxidise or corrode with time, which is why Hindu tradition associates gold with immortality. Gold imagery occurs frequently in ancient Indian literature. In the Vedic Hindu belief of cosmological creation, the source of physical and spiritual human life originated in and evolved from a golden womb (hiranyagarbha) or egg (hiranyanda), a metaphor of the sun, whose light rises from the primordial waters.
Jewellery had great status with India's royalty; it was so powerful that they established laws, limiting wearing of jewellery to royalty. Only royalty and a few others to whom they granted permission could wear gold ornaments on their feet. This would normally be considered breaking the appreciation of the sacred metals. Even though the majority of the Indian population wore jewellery, Maharajas and people related to royalty had a deeper connection with jewellery. The Maharaja's role was so important that the Hindu philosophers identified him as central to the smooth working of the world. He was considered as a divine being, a deity in human form, whose duty was to uphold and protect dharma, the moral order of the universe.
Navaratna (nine gems) is a powerful jewel frequently worn by a Maharaja (Emperor). It is an amulet, which comprises diamond, pearl, ruby, sapphire, emerald, topaz, cat's eye, coral, and hyacinth (red zircon). Each of these stones is associated with a celestial deity, represented the totality of the Hindu universe when all nine gems are together. The diamond is the most powerful gem among the nine stones. There were various cuts for the gemstone. Indian Kings bought gemstones privately from the sellers. Maharaja and other royal family members value gem as Hindu God. They exchanged gems with people to whom they were very close, especially the royal family members and other intimate allies.
India was the first country to mine diamonds, with some mines dating back to 296 BC. India traded the diamonds, realising their valuable qualities. Historically, diamonds have been given to retain or regain a lover's or ruler's lost favour, as symbols of tribute, or as an expression of fidelity in exchange for concessions and protection. Mughal emperors and Kings used the diamonds as a means of assuring their immortality by having their names and worldly titles inscribed upon them. Moreover, it has played and continues to play a pivotal role in Indian social, political, economic, and religious event, as it often has done elsewhere. In Indian history, diamonds have been used to acquire military equipment, finance wars, foment revolutions, and tempt defections. They have contributed to the abdication or the decapitation of potentates. They have been used to murder a representative of the dominating power by lacing his food with crushed diamond. Indian diamonds have been used as security to finance large loans needed to buttress politically or economically tottering regimes. Victorious military heroes have been honoured by rewards of diamonds and also have been used as ransom payment for release from imprisonment or abduction.
Today, many of the jewellery designs and traditions are used, and jewellery is commonplace in Indian ceremonies and weddings.
Jewellery played a major role in the fate of the Americas when the Spanish established an empire to seize South American gold. Jewellery making developed in the Americas 5,000 years ago in Central and South America. Large amounts of gold was easily accessible, and the Aztecs, Mixtecs, Mayans, and numerous Andean cultures, such as the Mochica of Peru, created beautiful pieces of jewellery.
With the Mochica culture, goldwork flourished. The pieces are no longer simple metalwork, but are now masterful examples of jewellery making. Pieces are sophisticated in their design, and feature inlays of turquoise, mother of pearl, spondylus shell, and amethyst. The nose and ear ornaments, chest plates, small containers and whistles are considered masterpieces of ancient Peruvian culture.
Among the Aztecs, only nobility wore gold jewellery, as it showed their rank, power, and wealth. Gold jewellery was most common in the Aztec Empire and was often decorated with feathers from Quetzal birds and others. In general, the more jewellery an Aztec noble wore, the higher his status or prestige. The Emperor and his High Priests, for example, would be nearly completely covered in jewellery when making public appearances. Although gold was the most common and a popular material used in Aztec jewellery, jade, turquoise, and certain feathers were considered more valuable. In addition to adornment and status, the Aztecs also used jewellery in sacrifices to appease the gods. Priests also used gem-encrusted daggers to perform animal and human sacrifices.
Another ancient American civilization with expertise in jewellery making were the Maya. At the peak of their civilization, the Maya were making jewellery from jade, gold, silver, bronze, and copper. Maya designs were similar to those of the Aztecs, with lavish headdresses and jewellery. The Maya also traded in precious gems. However, in earlier times, the Maya had little access to metal, so they made the majority of their jewellery out of bone or stone. Merchants and nobility were the only few that wore expensive jewellery in the Maya region, much the same as with the Aztecs.
In North America, Native Americans used shells, wood, turquoise, and soapstone, almost unavailable in South and Central America. The turquoise was used in necklaces and to be placed in earrings. Native Americans with access to oyster shells, often located in only one location in America, traded the shells with other tribes, showing the great importance of the body adornment trade in Northern America.
Native American jewellery is the personal adornment, often in the forms of necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings, pins, brooches, labrets, and more, made by the Indigenous peoples of the United States. Native American jewellery reflects the cultural diversity and history of its makers. Native American tribes continue to develop distinct aesthetics rooted in their personal artistic visions and cultural traditions. Artists create jewellery for adornment, ceremonies, and trade. Lois Sherr Dubin writes, "[i]n the absence of written languages, adornment became an important element of Indian [Native American] communication, conveying many levels of information." Later, jewellery and personal adornment "...signaled resistance to assimilation. It remains a major statement of tribal and individual identity."
Within the Haida Nation of the Pacific Northwest, copper was used as a form of jewelry for creating bracelets.
Metalsmiths, beaders, carvers, and lapidaries combine a variety of metals, hardwoods, precious and semi-precious gemstones, beadwork, quillwork, teeth, bones, hide, vegetal fibres, and other materials to create jewellery. Contemporary Native American jewellery ranges from hand-quarried and processed stones and shells to computer-fabricated steel and titanium jewellery.
Jewellery making in the Pacific started later than in other areas because of recent human settlement. Early Pacific jewellery was made of bone, wood, and other natural materials, and thus has not survived. Most Pacific jewellery is worn above the waist, with headdresses, necklaces, hair pins, and arm and waist belts being the most common pieces.
Jewellery in the Pacific, with the exception of Australia, is worn to be a symbol of either fertility or power. Elaborate headdresses are worn by many Pacific cultures and some, such as the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, wear certain headdresses once they have killed an enemy. Tribesman may wear boar bones through their noses.
Island jewellery is still very much primal because of the lack of communication with outside cultures. Some areas of Borneo and Papua New Guinea are yet to be explored by Western nations. However, the island nations that were flooded with Western missionaries have had drastic changes made to their jewellery designs. Missionaries saw any type of tribal jewellery as a sign of the wearer's devotion to paganism. Thus many tribal designs were lost forever in the mass conversion to Christianity.
Australia is now the number one supplier of opals in the world. Opals had already been mined in Europe and South America for many years prior, but in the late 19th century, the Australian opal market became predominant. Australian opals are only mined in a few select places around the country, making it one of the most profitable stones in the Pacific.
The New Zealand Māori traditionally had a strong culture of personal adornment, most famously the hei-tiki. Hei-tikis are traditionally carved by hand from bone, nephrite, or bowenite.
Nowadays a wide range of such traditionally inspired items such as bone carved pendants based on traditional fishhooks "hei matau" and other greenstone jewellery are popular with young New Zealanders of all backgrounds – for whom they relate to a generalized sense of New Zealand identity. These trends have contributed towards a worldwide interest in traditional Māori culture and arts.
Other than jewellery created through Māori influence, modern jewellery in New Zealand is multicultural and varied.
Most modern commercial jewellery continues traditional forms and styles, but designers such as Georg Jensen have widened the concept of wearable art. The advent of new materials, such as plastics, Precious Metal Clay (PMC), and colouring techniques, has led to increased variety in styles. Other advances, such as the development of improved pearl harvesting by people such as Mikimoto Kōkichi and the development of improved quality artificial gemstones such as moissanite (a diamond simulant), has placed jewellery within the economic grasp of a much larger segment of the population.
The "jewellery as art" movement was spearheaded by artisans such as Robert Lee Morris and continued by designers such as Gill Forsbrook in the UK. Influence from other cultural forms is also evident. One example of this is bling-bling style jewellery, popularised by hip-hop and rap artists in the early 21st century, e.g. grills, a type of jewellery worn over the teeth.
The late 20th century saw the blending of European design with oriental techniques such as Mokume-gane. The following are innovations in the decades straddling the year 2000: "Mokume-gane, hydraulic die forming, anti-clastic raising, fold-forming, reactive metal anodising, shell forms, PMC, photoetching, and [use of] CAD/CAM."
Also, 3D printing as a production technique gains more and more importance. With a great variety of services offering this production method, jewellery design becomes accessible to a growing number of creatives. An important advantage of using 3d printing are the relatively low costs for prototypes, small batch series or unique and personalized designs. Shapes that are hard or impossible to create by hand can often be realized by 3D printing. Popular materials to print include polyamide, steel and wax (latter for further processing). Every printable material has its very own constraints that have to be considered while designing the piece of jewellery using 3D modelling software.
Artisan jewellery continues to grow as both a hobby and a profession. With more than 17 United States periodicals about beading alone, resources, accessibility, and a low initial cost of entry continues to expand production of hand-made adornments. Some fine examples of artisan jewellery can be seen at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The increase in numbers of students choosing to study jewellery design and production in Australia has grown in the past 20 years, and Australia now has a thriving contemporary jewellery community. Many of these jewellers have embraced modern materials and techniques, as well as incorporating traditional workmanship.
More expansive use of metal to adorn the wearer, where the piece is larger and more elaborate than what would normally be considered jewellery, has come to be referred to by designers and fashion writers as metal couture.
Freemasons attach jewels to their detachable collars when in Lodge to signify a Brothers Office held with the Lodge. For example, the square represents the Master of the Lodge and the dove represents the Deacon.
Jewellery used in body modification can be simple and plain or dramatic and extreme. The use of simple silver studs, rings, and earrings predominates. Common jewellery pieces such as earrings are a form of body modification, as they are accommodated by creating a small hole in the ear.
Padaung women in Myanmar place large golden rings around their necks. From as early as five years old, girls are introduced to their first neck ring. Over the years, more rings are added. In addition to the twenty-plus pounds of rings on her neck, a woman will also wear just as many rings on her calves. At their extent, some necks modified like this can reach long. The practice has health impacts and has in recent years declined from cultural norm to tourist curiosity. Tribes related to the Paduang, as well as other cultures throughout the world, use jewellery to stretch their earlobes or enlarge ear piercings. In the Americas, labrets have been worn since before first contact by Innu and First Nations peoples of the northwest coast. Lip plates are worn by the African Mursi and Sara people, as well as some South American peoples.
In the late twentieth century, the influence of modern primitivism led to many of these practices being incorporated into western subcultures. Many of these practices rely on a combination of body modification and decorative objects, thus keeping the distinction between these two types of decoration blurred.
In many cultures, jewellery is used as a temporary body modifier; in some cases, with hooks or other objects being placed into the recipient's skin. Although this procedure is often carried out by tribal or semi-tribal groups, often acting under a trance during religious ceremonies, this practice has seeped into western culture. Many extreme-jewellery shops now cater to people wanting large hooks or spikes set into their skin. Most often, these hooks are used in conjunction with pulleys to hoist the recipient into the air. This practice is said to give an erotic feeling to the person and some couples have even performed their marriage ceremony whilst being suspended by hooks.
According to a 2007 KPMG study, the largest jewellery market is the United States with a market share of 30.8%, Japan, India, China, and the Middle East each with 8–9%, and Italy with 5%. The authors of the study predict a dramatic change in market shares by 2015, where the market share of the United States will have dropped to around 25%, and China and India will increase theirs to over 13%. The Middle East will remain more or less constant at 9%, whereas Europe's and Japan's marketshare will be halved and become less than 4% for Japan, and less than 3% for the biggest individual European countries, Italy and the UK.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15739
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Jim Jarmusch
James Robert Jarmusch (; born January 22, 1953) is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, editor, and composer. He has been a major proponent of independent cinema since the 1980s, directing films such as "Stranger Than Paradise" (1984), "Down by Law" (1986), "Mystery Train" (1989), "Dead Man" (1995), "" (1999), "Coffee and Cigarettes" (2003), "Broken Flowers" (2005), "Only Lovers Left Alive" (2013), and "Paterson" (2016). "Stranger Than Paradise" was added to the National Film Registry in December 2002. As a musician, Jarmusch has composed music for his films and released two albums with Jozef van Wissem.
Jarmusch was born January 22, 1953, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the middle of three children of middle-class suburbanites. His mother, of German and Irish descent, had been a reviewer of film and theatre for the "Akron Beacon Journal" before marrying his father, a businessman of Czech and German descent who worked for the B.F. Goodrich Company. She introduced Jarmusch to cinema by leaving him at a local cinema to watch matinee double features such as "Attack of the Crab Monsters" and "Creature From the Black Lagoon" while she ran errands. The first adult film he recalls seeing was the 1958 cult classic "Thunder Road", the violence and darkness of which left an impression on the seven-year-old Jarmusch. Another B-movie influence from his childhood was "Ghoulardi", an eccentric Cleveland television show which featured horror films.
Despite his enthusiasm for film, Jarmusch was an avid reader in his youth and had a greater interest in literature, which was encouraged by his grandmother. Though he refused to attend church with his Episcopalian parents (not being enthused by "the idea of sitting in a stuffy room wearing a little tie"), Jarmusch credits literature with shaping his metaphysical beliefs and leading him to reconsider theology in his mid-teens.
From his peers he developed a taste for counterculture, and he and his friends would steal the records and books of their older siblings – this included works by William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and The Mothers of Invention. They made fake identity documents which allowed them to visit bars at the weekend but also the local art house cinema, which typically showed pornographic films but would occasionally feature underground films such as Robert Downey, Sr.'s "Putney Swope" and Andy Warhol's "Chelsea Girls". At one point, he took an apprenticeship with a commercial photographer. He later remarked, "Growing up in Ohio was just planning to get out."
After graduating from high school in 1971, Jarmusch moved to Chicago and enrolled in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. After being asked to leave due to neglecting to take any journalism courses – Jarmusch favored literature and art history – he transferred to Columbia University the following year, with the intention of becoming a poet. At Columbia, he studied English and American literature under professors including New York School avant garde poets Kenneth Koch and David Shapiro. At Columbia, he began to write short "semi-narrative abstract pieces" and edited the undergraduate literary journal "The Columbia Review".
During his final year at Columbia, Jarmusch moved to Paris for what was initially a summer semester on an exchange program, but this turned into ten months. There, he worked as a delivery driver for an art gallery, and spent most of his time at the Cinémathèque Française.
Jarmusch graduated from Columbia University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975. Broke and working as a musician in New York City after returning from Paris in 1976, he applied on a whim to the graduate film school of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (then under the direction of Hollywood director László Benedek). Despite his lack of experience in filmmaking, his submission of a collection of photographs and an essay about film secured his acceptance into the program. He studied there for four years, meeting fellow students and future collaborators Sara Driver, Tom DiCillo, Howard Brookner, and Spike Lee in the process. During the late 1970s in New York City, Jarmusch and his contemporaries were part of an alternative culture scene centered on the CBGB music club.
In his final year at New York University, Jarmusch worked as an assistant to the film noir director Nicholas Ray, who was at that time teaching in the department. In an anecdote, Jarmusch recounted of the formative experience of showing his mentor his first script; Ray disapproved of its lack of action, to which Jarmusch responded after meditating on the critique by reworking the script to be even less eventful. On Jarmusch's return with the revised script, Ray reacted favourably to his student's dissent, citing approvingly the young student's obstinate independence. Jarmusch was the only person Ray brought to work – as his personal assistant – on "Lightning Over Water", a documentary about his dying years on which he was collaborating with Wim Wenders. Ray died in 1979 after a long fight with cancer. A few days afterwards, having been encouraged by Ray and New York underground filmmaker Amos Poe and using scholarship funds given by the Louis B. Mayer Foundation to pay for his school tuition, Jarmusch started work on a film for his final project. The university, unimpressed with Jarmusch's use of his funding as well as the project itself, promptly refused to award him a degree.
Jarmusch's final year university project was completed in 1980 as "Permanent Vacation", his first feature film. It had its premiere at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg (formerly known as Filmweek Mannheim) and won the Josef von Sternberg Award. It was made on a shoestring budget of around $12,000 in misdirected scholarship funds and shot by cinematographer Tom DiCillo on 16 mm film. The 75 minute quasi-autobiographical feature follows an adolescent drifter (Chris Parker) as he wanders around downtown Manhattan.
The film was not released theatrically, and did not attract the sort of adulation from critics that greeted his later work. "The Washington Post" staff writer Hal Hinson would disparagingly comment in an aside during a review of Jarmusch's "Mystery Train" (1989) that in the director's debut, "the only talent he demonstrated was for collecting egregiously untalented actors". The bleak and unrefined "Permanent Vacation" is nevertheless one of the director's most personal films, and established many of the hallmarks he would exhibit in his later work, including derelict urban settings, chance encounters, and a wry sensibility.
Jarmusch's first major film, "Stranger Than Paradise", was produced on a budget of approximately $125,000 and released in 1984 to much critical acclaim. A deadpan comedy recounting a strange journey of three disillusioned youths from New York through Cleveland to Florida, the film broke many conventions of traditional Hollywood filmmaking. It was awarded the Camera d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival as well as the 1985 National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Film, and became a landmark work in modern independent film.
In 1986, Jarmusch wrote and directed "Down by Law", starring musicians John Lurie and Tom Waits, and Italian comic actor Roberto Benigni (his introduction to American audiences) as three convicts who escape from a New Orleans jailhouse. Shot like the director's previous efforts in black and white, this constructivist neo-noir was Jarmusch's first collaboration with Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller, who had been known for his work with Wenders.
His next two films each experimented with parallel narratives: "Mystery Train" (1989) told three successive stories set on the same night in and around a small Memphis hotel, and "Night on Earth" (1991) involved five cab drivers and their passengers on rides in five different world cities, beginning at sundown in Los Angeles and ending at sunrise in Helsinki. Less bleak and somber than Jarmusch's earlier work, "Mystery Train" nevertheless retained the director's askance conception of America. He wrote "Night on Earth" in about a week, out of frustration at the collapse of the production of another film he had written and the desire to visit and collaborate with friends such as Benigni, Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder and Isaach de Bankolé.
As a result of his early work, Jarmusch became an influential representative of the trend of the American road movie. Not intended to appeal to mainstream filmgoers, these early Jarmusch films were embraced by art house audiences, gaining a small but dedicated American following and cult status in Europe and Japan. Each of the four films had its premiere at the New York Film Festival, while "Mystery Train" was in competition at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. Jarmusch's distinctive aesthetic and "auteur" status fomented a critical backlash at the close of this early period, however; though reviewers praised the charm and adroitness of "Mystery Train" and "Night On Earth", the director was increasingly charged with repetitiveness and risk-aversion.
A film appearance in 1989 as a used car dealer in the cult comedy "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" further solidified his interest and participation in the road movie genre. In 1991 Jarmusch appeared as himself in Episode One of John Lurie's cult television series "Fishing With John".
In 1995, Jarmusch released "Dead Man", a period film set in the 19th century American West starring Johnny Depp and Gary Farmer. Produced at a cost of almost $9 million with a high-profile cast including John Hurt, Gabriel Byrne and, in his final role, Robert Mitchum, the film marked a significant departure for the director from his previous features. Earnest in tone in comparison to its self-consciously hip and ironic predecessors, "Dead Man" was thematically expansive and of an often violent and progressively more surreal character. The film was shot in black and white by Robby Müller, and features a score composed and performed by Neil Young, for whom Jarmusch subsequently filmed the tour documentary "Year of the Horse", released to tepid reviews in 1997.
Though ill-received by mainstream American reviewers, "Dead Man" found much favor internationally and among critics, many of whom lauded it as a visionary masterpiece. It has been hailed as one of the few films made by a Caucasian that presents an authentic Native American culture and character, and Jarmusch stands by it as such, though it has attracted both praise and castigation for its portrayal of the American West, violence, and especially Native Americans.
Following artistic success and critical acclaim in the American independent film community, he achieved mainstream recognition with his far-East philosophical crime film "", shot in Jersey City and starring Forest Whitaker as a young inner-city man who has found purpose for his life by unyieldingly conforming it to the "Hagakure", an 18th-century philosophy text and training manual for samurai, becoming, as directed, a terrifyingly deadly hit-man for a local mob boss to whom he may owe a debt, and who then betrays him. The soundtrack was supplied by RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan, which blends into the director's "aesthetics of sampling". The film was unique among other things for the number of books important to and discussed by its characters, most of them listed bibliographically as part of the end credits. The film is also considered to be a homage to "Le Samourai", a 1967 French New Wave film by auteur Jean-Pierre Melville, which starred renowned French actor Alain Delon in a strikingly similar role and narrative.
A five-year gap followed the release of "Ghost Dog", which the director has attributed to a creative crisis he experienced in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in New York City. 2004 saw the eventual release of "Coffee and Cigarettes", a collection of eleven short films of characters sitting around drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes that had been filmed by Jarmusch over the course of the previous two decades. The first vignette, "Strange to Meet You", had been shot for and aired on "Saturday Night Live" in 1986, and paired Roberto Benigni with comedian Steven Wright. This had been followed three years later by "Twins", a segment featuring actors Steve Buscemi and Joie and Cinqué Lee, and then in 1993 with the Short Film Palme d'Or-winning "Somewhere in California", starring musicians Tom Waits and Iggy Pop.
He followed "Coffee and Cigarettes" in 2005 with "Broken Flowers", which starred Bill Murray as an early retiree who goes in search of the mother of his unknown son in attempt to overcome a midlife crisis. Following the release of "Broken Flowers", Jarmusch signed a deal with Fortissimo Films, whereby the distributor would fund and have "first-look" rights to the director's future films, and cover some of the overhead costs of his production company, Exoskeleton.
In 2009, Jarmusch released "The Limits of Control", a sparse, meditative crime film set in Spain, it starred Isaach de Bankolé as a lone assassin with a secretive mission. A behind-the-scenes documentary, "Behind Jim Jarmusch", was filmed over three days on the set of the film in Seville by director Léa Rinaldi.
In October 2009, Jarmusch appeared as himself in an episode of the HBO series "Bored to Death", and the following September, Jarmusch helped to curate the All Tomorrow's Parties music festival in Monticello, New York.
In an August 2010 interview, Jarmusch revealed his forthcoming work schedule at that time:
I'm working on a documentary about the Stooges [Iggy Pop-fronted band]. It's going to take a few years. There's no rush on it, but it's something that Iggy asked me to do. I'm co-writing an "opera." It won't be a traditional opera, but it'll be about the inventor Nikola Tesla, with the composer Phil Klein. I have a new film project that's really foremost for me that I hope to shoot early next year with Tilda Swinton and Michael Fassbender and Mia Wasikowska, who was Alice in Wonderland in Tim Burton's film. I don't have that quite financed yet, so I'm working on that. I'm also making music and hoping to maybe score some silent films to put out. Our band will have an EP that we'll give out at ATP. We have enough music for three EPs or an album.
Jarmusch eventually attained funding for the aforementioned film project after a protracted period and, in July 2012, Jarmusch began shooting "Only Lovers Left Alive" with Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston (who replaced Fassbender), Mia Wasikowska, Anton Yelchin, and John Hurt, while Jarmusch's musical project SQÜRL were the main contributors to the film's soundtrack. The film screened at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), with Jarmusch explaining the seven-year completion time frame at the former: "The reason it took so long is that no one wanted to give us the money. It took years to put it together. Its getting more and more difficult for films that are a little unusual, or not predictable, or don't satisfy people's expectations of something." The film's budget was US$7 million and its UK release date was February 21, 2014.
Jarmusch wrote and directed "Paterson" in 2016. The film follows the daily experiences of an inner-city bus driver and poet (Adam Driver) in Paterson, New Jersey, who shares the same name as the city. Paterson was inspired by objectivist American poet William Carlos Williams and his epic poem "Paterson". The film features the wry, minimalist style found in Jarmusch's other works, and earned 22 award nominations for Jarmusch, Driver and Nellie, the dog featured in the film. The story focuses on Paterson's poetry writing efforts, interspersed with his observations and experiences of the residents he encounters on his bus route and in his daily life.
Jarmusch wrote and directed his first horror film, the zombie comedy "The Dead Don't Die", which was presented at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and received mixed reviews.
In 2014 Jarmusch shunned the "auteur theory" and likened the filmmaking process to human sexual reproduction:
I put 'A film by' as a protection of my rights, but I don't really believe it. It's important for me to have a final cut, and I do for every film. So I'm in the editing room every day, I'm the navigator of the ship, but I'm not the captain, I can't do it without everyone's equally valuable input. For me it's phases where I'm very solitary, writing, and then I'm preparing, getting the money, and then I'm with the crew and on a ship and it's amazing and exhausting and exhilarating, and then I'm alone with the editor again ... I've said it before, it's like seduction, wild sex, and then pregnancy in the editing room. That's how it feels for me.
Jarmusch has been characterized as a minimalist filmmaker whose idiosyncratic films are unhurried. His films often eschew traditional narrative structure, lacking clear plot progression and focus more on mood and character development. In an interview early in his career, he stated that his goal was "to approximate real time for the audience."
Jarmusch's early work is marked by a brooding, contemplative tone, featuring extended silent scenes and prolonged still shots. He has experimented with a vignette format in three films that were either released, or begun around, the early 1990s: "Mystery Train," "Night on Earth" and "Coffee and Cigarettes". "The Salt Lake Tribune" critic Sean P. Means wrote that Jarmusch blends "film styles and genres with sharp wit and dark humor", while his style is also defined by a signature deadpan comedic tone.
The protagonists of Jarmusch's films are usually lone adventurers. The director's male characters have been described by critic Jennie Yabroff as "three time losers, petty thiefs and inept con men, all ... eminently likeable, if not down right charming"; while novelist Paul Auster described them as "laconic, withdrawn, sorrowful mumblers".
Jarmusch has revealed that his instinct is a greater influence during the filmmaking process than any cognitive processes. He explained: "I feel like I have to listen to the film and let it tell me what it wants. Sometimes it mumbles and it isn't very clear." Films such as "Dead Man" and "Limits of Control" have polarized fans and general viewers alike, as Jarmusch's stylistic instinct is embedded in his strong sense of independence.
Though his films are predominantly set in the United States, Jarmusch has advanced the notion that he looks at America "through a foreigner's eyes", with the intention of creating a form of world cinema that synthesizes European and Japanese film with that of Hollywood. His films have often included foreign actors and characters, and (at times substantial) non-English dialogue. In his two later-nineties films, he dwelt on different cultures' experiences of violence, and on textual appropriations between cultures: a wandering Native American's love of William Blake, a black hitman's passionate devotion to the "Hagakure". The interaction and syntheses between different cultures, the arbitrariness of national identity, and irreverence towards ethnocentric, patriotic or nationalistic sentiment are recurring themes in Jarmusch's work.
Jarmusch's fascination for music is another characteristic that is readily apparent in his work. Musicians appear frequently in key roles – John Lurie, Tom Waits, Gary Farmer, Youki Kudoh, RZA and Iggy Pop have featured in multiple Jarmusch films, while Joe Strummer and Screamin' Jay Hawkins appear in "Mystery Train" and GZA, Jack and Meg White feature in "Coffee and Cigarettes". Hawkins' song "I Put a Spell on You" was central to the plot of "Stranger than Paradise", while "Mystery Train" is inspired by and named after a song popularized by Elvis Presley, who is also the subject of a vignette in "Coffee and Cigarettes". In the words of critic Vincent Canby, "Jarmusch's movies have the tempo and rhythm of blues and jazz, even in their use – or omission – of language. His films work on the senses much the way that some music does, unheard until it's too late to get it out of one's head."
On his narrative focus, Jarmusch remarked in a 1989 interview, "I'd rather make a movie about a guy walking his dog than about the emperor of China."
Jarmusch is ascribed as having instigated the American independent film movement with "Stranger Than Paradise". In her description of the film in a 2005 profile of the director for "The New York Times", critic Lynn Hirschberg declared that "Stranger than Paradise" "permanently upended the idea of independent film as an intrinsically inaccessible avant-garde form". The success of the film accorded the director a certain iconic status within arthouse cinema, as an idiosyncratic and uncompromising auteur, exuding the aura of urban cool embodied by downtown Manhattan. Such perceptions were compounded with the release of his subsequent features in the late 1980s, establishing him as one of the generation's most prominent and influential independent filmmakers.
New York critic and festival director Kent Jones undermined the "urban cool" association that Jarmusch has garnered and was quoted in a February 2014 media article, following the release of his eleventh feature film:
There's been an overemphasis on the hipness factor – and a lack of emphasis on his incredible attachment to the idea of celebrating poetry and culture. You can complain about the preciousness of a lot of his movies, [but] they are unapologetically standing up for poetry. [His attitude is] 'if you want to call me an elitist, go ahead, I don't care'.
Jarmusch's staunch independence has been represented by his success in retaining the negatives for all of his films, an achievement that was described by the "Guardian"'s Jonathan Romney as "extremely rare." British producer Jeremy Thomas, who was one of the eventual financiers of "Only Lovers Left Alive" called Jarmusch "one of the great American independent film-makers" who is "the last of the line." Thomas believes that filmmakers like Jarmusch "are not coming through ... any more."
In a 1989 review of his work, Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" called Jarmusch "the most adventurous and arresting film maker to surface in the American cinema in this decade". Jarmusch was recognized with the Filmmaker on the Edge award at the 2004 Provincetown International Film Festival. A retrospective of the director's films was hosted at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during February 1994, and another, "The Sad and Beautiful World of Jim Jarmusch", by the American Film Institute in August 2005.
While Swinton, who has worked with Jarmusch on numerous occasions, describes him as a "rock star," the director admits that "I don't know where I fit in. I don't feel tied to my time." Dutch lute player Jozef van Wissem, who worked on the score for "Only Lovers Left Alive" calls Jarmusch a "cultural sponge" who "absorbs everything."
In the early 1980s, Jarmusch was part of a revolving lineup of musicians in Robin Crutchfield's Dark Day project, and later became the keyboardist and one of two vocalists for The Del-Byzanteens, a No Wave band who released the LP "Lies to Live By" in 1982.
Jarmusch is also featured on the album "Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture" (2005) in two interludes described by Sean Fennessy in a Pitchfork review of the album as both "bizarrely pretentious" and "reason alone to give it a listen". Jarmusch and Michel Gondry each contributed a remix to a limited edition release of the track "Blue Orchid" by The White Stripes in 2005.
The author of a series of essays on influential bands, Jarmusch has also had at least two poems published. He is a founding member of The Sons of Lee Marvin, a humorous "semi-secret society" of artists resembling the iconic actor, which issues communiqués and meets on occasion for the ostensible purpose of watching Marvin's films.
He released three collaborative albums with lutist Jozef van Wissem, "Concerning the Entrance into Eternity" (Important Records), "The Mystery of Heaven" (Sacred Bones Records), in 2012 and the 2019 release "An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil" (Sacred Bones Records).
Jarmusch is a member of rock band SQÜRL with film associate Carter Logan and sound engineer Shane Stoneback. SQÜRL's version of Wanda Jackson's 1961 song "Funnel of Love", featuring Madeline Follin of Cults on vocals, opens Jarmusch's 2014 film "Only Lovers Left Alive".
Dutch lute composer Jozef van Wissem also collaborated with Jarmusch on the soundtrack for "Only Lovers Left Alive" and the pair also play in a duo. Jarmusch first met van Wissem on a street in New York City's SoHo area in 2007, at which time the lute player handed the director a CD—several months later, Jarmusch asked van Wissem to send his catalog of recordings and the two started playing together as part of their developing friendship. Van Wissem explained in early April 2014: "I know the way [Jarmusch] makes his films is kind of like a musician. He has music in his head when he's writing a script so it's more informed by a tonal thing than it is by anything else."
In 1980 he won with his film Permanent Vacation the Josef von Sternberg Award at the International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg. In 1999, he was laureate of the Douglas Sirk Preis at Filmfest Hamburg, Germany.
In 1984 he won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes Film Festival for "Stranger Than Paradise".
In 2004 Jarmusch was honored with the Filmmaker on the Edge Award at the Provincetown International Film Festival.
In 2005 he won the Grand Prix of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival for his film "Broken Flowers".
Jarmusch rarely discusses his personal life in public. He divides his time between New York City and the Catskill Mountains. He stopped drinking coffee in 1986, the year of the first installment of "Coffee and Cigarettes", although he continues to smoke cigarettes.
In a February 2014 interview, Jarmusch stated that he is not interested in eternal life, as "there's something about the cycle of life that's very important, and to have that removed would be a burden".
The moving image collection of Jim Jarmusch is held at the Academy Film Archive.
Live albums
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Johannes Gutenberg
Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (; – February 3, 1468) was a German goldsmith, inventor, printer, and publisher who introduced printing to Europe with the printing press. His introduction of mechanical movable type printing to Europe started the Printing Revolution and is regarded as a milestone of the second millennium, ushering in the modern period of human history. It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.
Gutenberg in 1439 was the first European to use movable type. Among his many contributions to printing are: the invention of a process for mass-producing movable type; the use of oil-based ink for printing books; adjustable molds; mechanical movable type; and the use of a wooden printing press similar to the agricultural screw presses of the period. His truly epochal invention was the combination of these elements into a practical system that allowed the mass production of printed books and was economically viable for printers and readers alike. Gutenberg's method for making type is traditionally considered to have included a type metal alloy and a hand mould for casting type. The alloy was a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony that melted at a relatively low temperature for faster and more economical casting, cast well, and created a durable type.
In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information—including revolutionary ideas—transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class. Across Europe, the increasing cultural self-awareness of its people led to the rise of proto-nationalism, accelerated by the flowering of the European vernacular languages to the detriment of Latin's status as "lingua franca". In the 19th century, the replacement of the hand-operated Gutenberg-style press by steam-powered rotary presses allowed printing on an industrial scale, while Western-style printing was adopted all over the world, becoming practically the sole medium for modern bulk printing.
The use of movable type was a marked improvement on the handwritten manuscript, which was the existing method of book production in Europe, and upon woodblock printing, and revolutionized European book-making. Gutenberg's printing technology spread rapidly throughout Europe and later the world. His major work, the Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible), was the first printed version of the Bible and has been acclaimed for its high aesthetic and technical quality.
Gutenberg was born in the German city of Mainz, Rhine-Main area, the youngest son of the patrician merchant Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, and his second wife, Else Wyrich, who was the daughter of a shopkeeper. It is assumed that he was baptized in the area close to his birthplace of St. Christoph. According to some accounts, Friele was a goldsmith for the bishop at Mainz, but most likely, he was involved in the cloth trade. Gutenberg's year of birth is not precisely known, but it was sometime between the years of 1394 and 1404. In the 1890s the city of Mainz declared his official and symbolic date of birth to be June 24, 1400.
John Lienhard, technology historian, says "Most of Gutenberg's early life is a mystery. His father worked with the ecclesiastic mint. Gutenberg grew up knowing the trade of goldsmithing." This is supported by historian Heinrich Wallau, who adds, "In the 14th and 15th centuries his [ancestors] claimed a hereditary position as ... retainers of the household of the master of the archiepiscopal mint. In this capacity they doubtless acquired considerable knowledge and technical skill in metal working. They supplied the mint with the metal to be coined, changed the various species of coins, and had a seat at the assizes in forgery cases."
Wallau adds, "His surname was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors 'zu Laden, zu Gutenberg'. The house of Gänsfleisch was one of the patrician families of the town, tracing its lineage back to the thirteenth century." Patricians (the wealthy and political elite) in Mainz were often named after houses they owned. Around 1427, the name "zu Gutenberg", after the family house in Mainz, is documented to have been used for the first time.
In 1411, there was an uprising in Mainz against the patricians, and more than a hundred families were forced to leave. As a result, the Gutenbergs are thought to have moved to Eltville am Rhein (Alta Villa), where his mother had an inherited estate. According to historian Heinrich Wallau, "All that is known of his youth is that he was not in Mainz in 1430. It is presumed that he migrated for political reasons to Strasbourg, where the family probably had connections." He is assumed to have studied at the University of Erfurt, where there is a record of the enrolment of a student called Johannes de Altavilla in 1418—Altavilla is the Latin form of Eltville am Rhein.
Nothing is now known of Gutenberg's life for the next fifteen years, but in March 1434, a letter by him indicates that he was living in Strasbourg, where he had some relatives on his mother's side. He also appears to have been a goldsmith member enrolled in the Strasbourg militia. In 1437, there is evidence that he was instructing a wealthy tradesman on polishing gems, but where he had acquired this knowledge is unknown. In 1436/37 his name also comes up in court in connection with a broken promise of marriage to a woman from Strasbourg, Ennelin. Whether the marriage actually took place is not recorded. Following his father's death in 1419, he is mentioned in the inheritance proceedings.
Around 1439, Gutenberg was involved in a financial misadventure making polished metal mirrors (which were believed to capture holy light from religious relics) for sale to pilgrims to Aachen: in 1439 the city was planning to exhibit its collection of relics from Emperor Charlemagne but the event was delayed by one year due to a severe flood and the capital already spent could not be repaid. When the question of satisfying the investors came up, Gutenberg is said to have promised to share a "secret". It has been widely speculated that this secret may have been the idea of printing with movable type. Also around 1439–40, the Dutch Laurens Janszoon Coster came up with the idea of printing. Legend has it that the idea came to him "like a ray of light".
Until at least 1444 Gutenberg lived in Strasbourg, most likely in the St. Arbogast parish. It was in Strasbourg in 1440 that he is said to have perfected and unveiled the secret of printing based on his research, mysteriously entitled "Aventur und Kunst" (enterprise and art). It is not clear what work he was engaged in, or whether some early trials with printing from movable type may have been conducted there. After this, there is a gap of four years in the record. In 1448, he was back in Mainz, where he took out a loan from his brother-in-law Arnold Gelthus, quite possibly for a printing press or related paraphernalia. By this date, Gutenberg may have been familiar with intaglio printing; it is claimed that he had worked on copper engravings with an artist known as the Master of Playing Cards.
By 1450, the press was in operation, and a German poem had been printed, possibly the first item to be printed there. Gutenberg was able to convince the wealthy moneylender Johann Fust for a loan of 800 guilders. Peter Schöffer, who became Fust's son-in-law, also joined the enterprise. Schöffer had worked as a scribe in Paris and is believed to have designed some of the first typefaces.
Gutenberg's workshop was set up at Hof Humbrecht, a property belonging to a distant relative. It is not clear when Gutenberg conceived the Bible project, but for this he borrowed another 800 guilders from Fust, and work commenced in 1452. At the same time, the press was also printing other, more lucrative texts (possibly Latin grammars). There is also some speculation that there may have been two presses, one for the pedestrian texts, and one for the Bible. One of the profit-making enterprises of the new press was the printing of thousands of indulgences for the church, documented from 1454 to 1455.
In 1455 Gutenberg completed his "42-line Bible", known as the Gutenberg Bible. About 180 copies were printed, most on paper and some on vellum.
Some time in 1456, there was a dispute between Gutenberg and Fust, and Fust demanded his money back, accusing Gutenberg of misusing the funds. Gutenberg's two rounds of financing from Fust, a total of 1,600 guilders at 6% interest, now amounted to 2,026 guilders. Fust sued at the archbishop's court. A November 1455 legal document records that there was a partnership for a "project of the books," the funds for which Gutenberg had used for other purposes, according to Fust. The court decided in favor of Fust, giving him control over the Bible printing workshop and half of all printed Bibles.
Thus Gutenberg was effectively bankrupt, but it appears he retained (or restarted) a small printing shop, and participated in the printing of a Bible in the town of Bamberg around 1459, for which he seems at least to have supplied the type. But since his printed books never carry his name or a date, it is difficult to be certain, and there is consequently a considerable scholarly debate on this subject. It is also possible that the large "Catholicon" dictionary, 300 copies of 754 pages, printed in Mainz in 1460, was executed in his workshop.
Meanwhile, the Fust–Schöffer shop was the first in Europe to bring out a book with the printer's name and date, the "Mainz Psalter" of August 1457, and while proudly proclaiming the mechanical process by which it had been produced, it made no mention of Gutenberg.
In 1462, during the devastating Mainz Diocesan Feud, Mainz was sacked by archbishop Adolph von Nassau, and Gutenberg was exiled. An old man by now, he moved to Eltville where he may have initiated and supervised a new printing press belonging to the brothers Bechtermünze.
In January 1465, Gutenberg's achievements were recognized and he was given the title "Hofmann" (gentleman of the court) by von Nassau. This honor included a stipend, an annual court outfit, as well as 2,180 litres of grain and 2,000 litres of wine tax-free. It is believed he may have moved back to Mainz around this time, but this is not certain.
Gutenberg died in 1468 and was buried in the Franciscan church at Mainz, his contributions largely unknown. This church and the cemetery were later destroyed, and Gutenberg's grave is now lost.
In 1504, he was mentioned as the inventor of typography in a book by Professor Ivo Wittig. It was not until 1567 that the first portrait of Gutenberg, almost certainly an imaginary reconstruction, appeared in Heinrich Pantaleon's biography of famous Germans.
Between 1450 and 1455, Gutenberg printed several texts, some of which remain unidentified; his texts did not bear the printer's name or date, so attribution is possible only from typographical evidence and external references. Certainly several church documents including a papal letter and two indulgences were printed, one of which was issued in Mainz. In view of the value of printing in quantity, seven editions in two styles were ordered, resulting in several thousand copies being printed. Some printed editions of "Ars Minor", a schoolbook on Latin grammar by Aelius Donatus may have been printed by Gutenberg; these have been dated either 1451–52 or 1455.
In 1455, Gutenberg completed copies of a beautifully executed folio Bible ("Biblia Sacra"), with 42 lines on each page. Copies sold for 30 florins each, which was roughly three years' wages for an average clerk. Nonetheless, it was significantly cheaper than a manuscript Bible that could take a single scribe over a year to prepare. After printing, some copies were rubricated or hand-illuminated in the same elegant way as manuscript Bibles from the same period.
48 substantially complete copies are known to survive, including two at the British Library that can be viewed and compared online. The text lacks modern features such as page numbers, indentations, and paragraph breaks.
An undated 36-line edition of the Bible was printed, probably in Bamberg in 1458–60, possibly by Gutenberg. A large part of it was shown to have been set from a copy of Gutenberg's Bible, thus disproving earlier speculation that it was the earlier of the two.
Gutenberg's early printing process, and what texts he printed with movable type, are not known in great detail. His later Bibles were printed in such a way as to have required large quantities of type, some estimates suggesting as many as 100,000 individual sorts. Setting each page would take, perhaps, half a day, and considering all the work in loading the press, inking the type, pulling the impressions, hanging up the sheets, distributing the type, etc., it is thought that the Gutenberg–Fust shop might have employed as many as 25 craftsmen.
Gutenberg's technique of making movable type remains unclear. In the following decades, punches and copper matrices became standardized in the rapidly disseminating printing presses across Europe. Whether Gutenberg used this sophisticated technique or a somewhat primitive version has been the subject of considerable debate.
In the standard process of making type, a hard metal punch (made by punchcutting, with the letter carved back to front) is hammered into a softer copper bar, creating a "matrix". This is then placed into a hand-held mould and a piece of type, or "sort", is cast by filling the mould with molten type-metal; this cools almost at once, and the resulting piece of type can be removed from the mould. The matrix can be reused to create hundreds, or thousands, of identical sorts so that the same character appearing anywhere within the book will appear very uniform, giving rise, over time, to the development of distinct styles of typefaces or fonts. After casting, the sorts are arranged into type cases, and used to make up pages which are inked and printed, a procedure which can be repeated hundreds, or thousands, of times. The sorts can be reused in any combination, earning the process the name of "movable type". (For details, see Typography.)
The invention of the making of types with punch, matrix and mold has been widely attributed to Gutenberg. However, recent evidence suggests that Gutenberg's process was somewhat different. If he used the punch and matrix approach, all his letters should have been nearly identical, with some variation due to miscasting and inking. However, the type used in Gutenberg's earliest work shows other variations.
In 2001, the physicist Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Princeton librarian Paul Needham, used digital scans of a Papal bull in the Scheide Library, Princeton, to carefully compare the same letters (types) appearing in different parts of the printed text. The irregularities in Gutenberg's type, particularly in simple characters such as the hyphen, suggested that the variations could not have come either from ink smear or from wear and damage on the pieces of metal on the types themselves. Although some identical types are clearly used on other pages, other variations, subjected to detailed image analysis, suggested that they could not have been produced from the same matrix. Transmitted light pictures of the page also appeared to reveal substructures in the type that could not arise from traditional punchcutting techniques. They hypothesized that the method involved impressing simple shapes to create alphabets in "cuneiform" style in a matrix made of some soft material, perhaps sand. Casting the type would destroy the mould, and the matrix would need to be recreated to make each additional sort. This could explain the variations in the type, as well as the substructures observed in the printed images.
Thus, they speculated that "the decisive factor for the birth of typography", the use of reusable moulds for casting type, was a more progressive process than was previously thought. They suggested that the additional step of using the punch to create a mould that could be reused many times was not taken until twenty years later, in the 1470s. Others have not accepted some or all of their suggestions, and have interpreted the evidence in other ways, and the truth of the matter remains uncertain.
A 1568 history by Hadrianus Junius of Holland claims that the basic idea of the movable type came to Gutenberg from Laurens Janszoon Coster via Fust, who was apprenticed to Coster in the 1430s and may have brought some of his equipment from Haarlem to Mainz. While Coster appears to have experimented with moulds and castable metal type, there is no evidence that he had actually printed anything with this technology. He was an inventor and a goldsmith. However, there is one indirect supporter of the claim that Coster might be the inventor. The author of the Cologne Chronicle of 1499 quotes Ulrich Zell, the first printer of Cologne, that printing was performed in Mainz in 1450, but that some type of printing of lower quality had previously occurred in the Netherlands. However, the chronicle does not mention the name of Coster, while it actually credits Gutenberg as the "first inventor of printing" in the very same passage (fol. 312). The first securely dated book by Dutch printers is from 1471, and the Coster connection is today regarded as a mere legend.
The 19th-century printer and typefounder Fournier Le Jeune suggested that Gutenberg was not using type cast with a reusable matrix, but wooden types that were carved individually. A similar suggestion was made by Nash in 2004. This remains possible, albeit entirely unproven.
It has also been questioned whether Gutenberg used movable types at all. In 2004, Italian professor Bruno Fabbiani claimed that examination of the 42-line Bible revealed an overlapping of letters, suggesting that Gutenberg did not in fact use movable type (individual cast characters) but rather used whole plates made from a system somewhat like a modern typewriter, whereby the letters were stamped successively into the plate and then printed. However, most specialists regard the occasional overlapping of type as caused by paper movement over pieces of type of slightly unequal height.
Although Gutenberg was financially unsuccessful in his lifetime, the printing technologies spread quickly, and news and books began to travel across Europe much faster than before. It fed the growing Renaissance, and since it greatly facilitated scientific publishing, it was a major catalyst for the later scientific revolution.
The capital of printing in Europe shifted to Venice, where visionary printers like Aldus Manutius ensured widespread availability of the major Greek and Latin texts. The claims of an Italian origin for movable type have also focused on this rapid rise of Italy in movable-type printing. This may perhaps be explained by the prior eminence of Italy in the paper and printing trade. Additionally, Italy's economy was growing rapidly at the time, facilitating the spread of literacy. Christopher Columbus had a geography book (printed with movable type) bought by his father. That book is in a Spanish museum. Finally, the city of Mainz was sacked in 1462, driving many (including a number of printers and punch cutters) into exile.
Printing was also a factor in the Reformation. Martin Luther's 95 Theses were printed and circulated widely; subsequently he issued broadsheets outlining his anti-indulgences position (certificates of indulgences were one of the first items Gutenberg had printed). The broadsheet contributed to development of the newspaper.
In the decades after Gutenberg, many conservative patrons looked down on cheap printed books; books produced by hand were considered more desirable.
Today there is a large antique market for the earliest printed objects. Books printed prior to 1500 are known as "incunabula".
There are many statues of Gutenberg in Germany, including the famous one by Bertel Thorvaldsen (1837) at Gutenbergplatz in Mainz, home to the eponymous Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and the Gutenberg Museum on the history of early printing. The latter publishes the "Gutenberg-Jahrbuch", the leading periodical in the field.
Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library, commemorates Gutenberg's name. The Mainzer Johannisnacht commemorates the person Johannes Gutenberg in his native city since 1968.
In 1952, the United States Postal Service issued a five hundredth anniversary stamp commemorating Johannes Gutenberg invention of the movable-type printing press.
In 1961 the Canadian philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan entitled his pioneering study in the fields of print culture, cultural studies, and media ecology, "The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man".
Regarded as one of the most influential people in human history, Gutenberg remains a towering figure in the popular image. In 1999, the A&E Network ranked Gutenberg the No. 1 most influential person of the second millennium on their "Biographies of the Millennium" countdown. In 1997, Time–Life magazine picked Gutenberg's invention as the most important of the second millennium.
In space, he is commemorated in the name of the asteroid 777 Gutemberga.
Two operas based on Gutenberg are "G, Being the Confession and Last Testament of Johannes Gensfleisch, also known as Gutenberg, Master Printer, formerly of Strasbourg and Mainz", from 2001 with music by Gavin Bryars; and "La Nuit de Gutenberg", with music by Philippe Manoury, premiered in 2011 in Strasbourg.
In 2018, WordPress, the open-source CMS platform, named its new editing system Gutenberg in tribute to him.
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Josef Terboven
Josef Antonius Heinrich Terboven (23 May 1898 – 8 May 1945) was a Nazi leader, best known as the "Reichskommissar" for Norway during the German occupation of Norway and the Quisling regime.
Terboven (from the Dutch "ter Boven") was born in Essen, Germany, as the son of minor landed gentry of Dutch descent. He served in the German field artillery and nascent air force in World War I and was awarded the Iron Cross, rising to the rank of lieutenant. He studied law and political science at the universities of Munich and Freiburg, where he first got involved in politics.
Dropping out of the university in 1923, Terboven joined the NSDAP with member number 25247 and participated in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. When the NSDAP was subsequently outlawed, he found work at a bank for a few years before he was laid off in 1925.
He then went to work full-time for the Nazi party. Terboven helped establish the party in Essen and became Gauleiter there in 1928. From 1925 on he was part of the Sturmabteilung, in which he reached the rank of "Obergruppenführer" by 1936. On 29 June 1934, Terboven married Ilse Stahl, Joseph Goebbels' former secretary and mistress. Adolf Hitler was the guest of honour at the wedding. Terboven was made "Oberpräsident der Rheinprovinz" in 1935.
Terboven was made "Reichskommissar" for Norway on 24 April 1940, even before the military invasion was completed on 10 June 1940. He moved into Skaugum, the official residence of the Crown Prince of Norway, in September 1940 and made his headquarters in Stortinget (the Norwegian parliament buildings). Ilse and their daughter Inge did not accompany him to Norway, remaining in Germany.
"Reichskommissar" Terboven only had supervisory authority over the civilian administration in Norway. The German civilian administration did not rule Norway directly, however, and remained relatively small. Daily affairs were managed by the existing Norwegian state administration, headed by an acting cabinet and then by the Quisling cabinet. Terboven did not have authority over the 400,000 regular German Army forces stationed in Norway which was under the command of "Generaloberst" Nikolaus von Falkenhorst, but he did command a personal force of around 6,000 men, of whom 800 were part of the secret police.
In contrast to the military forces commanded by Falkenhorst, which aimed to reach an understanding with the Norwegian people and were under orders by Falkenhorst to treat Norwegians with courtesy, Terboven behaved in the same petty and ruthless way he did as governor of the Rheinprovinz, and was widely disliked, not only by the Norwegians, but also by many Germans. From 1941, he increasingly focused on crushing the irregular military resistance against the Germans, declaring martial law in Trondheim in 1942, and ordering the destruction of Telavåg. Goebbels expressed annoyance in his diary about what he called Terboven's "bullying tactics" against the Norwegians, as they alienated the population against the Germans. Terboven nevertheless remained in ultimate charge of Norway until the end of the war in 1945, even after the proclamation of a Norwegian puppet regime under Vidkun Quisling, the Quisling government. On 18 December 1944, Falkenhorst was dismissed from his command for opposing certain radical policies of Terboven.
As the tide of the war turned against Germany, Terboven's personal aspiration was to organise a "Fortress Norway" (Festung Norwegen) for the Nazi regime's last stand. Hitler's successor, Admiral Dönitz, dismissed Terboven from his post as Reichskommissar on 7 May, transferring his powers to General Franz Böhme.
Terboven also planned concentration camps in Norway, establishing Falstad concentration camp near Levanger and Bredtvet concentration camp in Oslo in late 1941.
On 18 July 1942 the Beisfjord massacre occurred. Terboven ordered the massacre a few days earlier.
In July 1942 at least one German guard employed by the Korgen prison camp was killed. The commandant ordered retribution: execution by gunfire for "39 prisoners at Korgen and 20 at Osen"; in the days that followed, Terboven also ordered retribution: around 400 prisoners shot and killed in various camps.
With the announcement of Germany's surrender, Terboven committed suicide on 8 May 1945 by detonating 50 kg of dynamite in a bunker on the Skaugum compound. He died alongside the body of "Obergruppenführer" Wilhelm Rediess, SS and Police Leader and commander of all SS troops in Norway, who had shot himself earlier. His family survived him in West Germany, and Ilse died in 1972.
In the 1965 film "The Heroes of Telemark", Josef Terboven was played by English actor Eric Porter.
He is portrayed in the 1996 film "Hamsun" by Edgar Selge.
A character resembling him appears in the single player campaign of "Battlefield V" and interrogates the player during a scene.
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James Brown
James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer, songwriter, dancer, musician, record producer and bandleader. A progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th century music and dance, he is often referred to by the honorific nicknames "Godfather of Soul" and "Soul Brother No. 1". In a career that lasted over 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres.
Brown began his career as a gospel singer in Toccoa, Georgia. He joined a rhythm and blues vocal group, the Gospel Starlighters (which later evolved into the Famous Flames) founded by Bobby Byrd, in which he was the lead singer. First coming to national public attention in the late 1950s as a member of the singing group The Famous Flames with the hit ballads "Please, Please, Please" and "Try Me", Brown built a reputation as a tireless live performer with the Famous Flames and his backing band, sometimes known as the James Brown Band or the James Brown Orchestra. His success peaked in the 1960s with the live album "Live at the Apollo" and hit singles such as "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and "It's a Man's Man's Man's World".
During the late 1960s, Brown moved from a continuum of blues and gospel-based forms and styles to a profoundly "Africanized" approach to music-making, emphasizing stripped-down and interlocking rhythms, that influenced the development of funk music. By the early 1970s, Brown had fully established the funk sound after the formation of the J.B.s with records such as "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine" and "The Payback". He also became noted for songs of social commentary, including the 1968 hit "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud". Brown continued to perform and record until his death from pneumonia in 2006.
Brown recorded 17 singles that reached No. 1 on the "Billboard" R&B charts. He also holds the record for the most singles listed on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart which did not reach No. 1. Brown was inducted into 1st class of the Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2013 as an artist and then in 2017 as a songwriter. He also received honors from many other institutions, including inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Songwriters Hall of Fame. In Joel Whitburn's analysis of the "Billboard" R&B charts from 1942 to 2010, Brown is ranked No. 1 in The Top 500 Artists. He is ranked No. 7 on "Rolling Stone" list of its 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. "Rolling Stone" has also cited Brown as the most sampled artist of all time.
Brown was born on May 3, 1933, in Barnwell, South Carolina, to 16-year-old Susie (née Behling; 1917–2003), and 22-year-old Joseph Gardner Brown (1911–1993), in a small wooden shack. Brown's name was supposed to have been Joseph James Brown Jr., but his first and middle names were mistakenly reversed on his birth certificate. He later legally changed his name to remove "Jr." In his autobiography, Brown stated that he also had Chinese and Native American ancestry, and that his father was of mixed African-American and Native American descent, whilst his mother was of mixed African-American and Asian descent. The Brown family lived in extreme poverty in Elko, South Carolina, which was an impoverished town at the time. They later moved to Augusta, Georgia, when James was four or five. His family first settled at one of his aunts' brothels. They later moved into a house shared with another aunt. Brown's mother eventually left the family after a contentious and abusive marriage and moved to New York. Brown spent long stretches of time on his own, hanging out in the streets and hustling to get by. He managed to stay in school until the sixth grade.
He began singing in talent shows as a young child, first appearing at Augusta's Lenox Theater in 1944, winning the show after singing the ballad "So Long". While in Augusta, Brown performed buck dances for change to entertain troops from Camp Gordon at the start of World War II as their convoys traveled over a canal bridge near his aunt's home. He learned to play the piano, guitar, and harmonica during this period. He became inspired to become an entertainer after hearing "Caldonia" by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. In his teen years, Brown briefly had a career as a boxer. At the age of 16, he was convicted of robbery and sent to a juvenile detention center in Toccoa. There, he formed a gospel quartet with four fellow cellmates, including Johnny Terry. Brown met singer Bobby Byrd when the two played against each other in a baseball game outside the detention center. Byrd also discovered that Brown could sing, after hearing of "a guy called Music Box", which was Brown's musical nickname at the prison. Byrd has since claimed he and his family helped to secure an early release, which led to Brown promising the court he would "sing for the Lord". Brown was released on a work sponsorship with Toccoa business owner S.C. Lawson. Lawson was impressed with Brown's work ethic and secured his release with a promise to keep him employed for two years. Brown was paroled on June 14, 1952. He would go on to work with both of Lawson's sons, and would come back to visit the family from time to time throughout his career. Shortly after being paroled he joined the gospel group the Ever-Ready Gospel Singers, featuring Byrd's sister Sarah.
Brown eventually joined Byrd's group in 1954. The group had evolved from the Gospel Starlighters, an a cappella gospel group, to an R&B group with the name the Avons. He reputedly joined the band after one of its members, Troy Collins, died in a car crash. Along with Brown and Byrd, the group consisted of Sylvester Keels, Doyle Oglesby, Fred Pulliam, Nash Knox and Nafloyd Scott. Influenced by R&B groups such as Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Orioles and Billy Ward and his Dominoes, the group changed its name, first to the Toccoa Band and then to the Flames. Nafloyd's brother Baroy later joined the group on bass guitar, and Brown, Byrd and Keels switched lead positions and instruments, often playing drums and piano. Johnny Terry later joined, by which time Pulliam and Oglesby had long left.
Berry Trimier became the group's first manager, booking them at parties near college campuses in Georgia and South Carolina. The group had already gained a reputation as a good live act when they renamed themselves the Famous Flames. In 1955, the group had contacted Little Richard while performing in Macon. Richard convinced the group to get in contact with his manager at the time, Clint Brantley, at his nightclub. Brantley agreed to manage them after seeing the group audition. He then sent them to a local radio station to record a demo session, where they performed their own composition "Please, Please, Please", which was inspired when Little Richard wrote the words of the title on a napkin and Brown was determined to make a song out of it. The Famous Flames eventually signed with King Records' Federal subsidiary in Cincinnati, Ohio, and issued a re-recorded version of "Please, Please, Please" in March 1956. The song became the group's first R&B hit, selling over a million copies. None of their follow-ups gained similar success. By 1957, Brown had replaced Clint Brantley as manager and hired Ben Bart, chief of Universal Attractions Agency. That year the original Flames broke up, after Bart changed the name of the group to "James Brown and The Famous Flames".
In October 1958, Brown released the ballad "Try Me", which hit number one on the R&B chart in the beginning of 1959, becoming the first of seventeen chart-topping R&B hits. Shortly afterwards, he recruited his first band, led by J. C. Davis, and reunited with Bobby Byrd who joined a revived Famous Flames lineup that included Eugene "Baby" Lloyd Stallworth and Bobby Bennett, with Johnny Terry sometimes coming in as the "fifth Flame". Brown, the Flames, and his entire band debuted at the Apollo Theater on April 24, 1959, opening for Brown's idol, Little Willie John. Federal Records issued two albums credited to Brown and the Famous Flames (both contained previously released singles). By 1960, Brown began multi-tasking in the recording studio involving himself, his singing group, the Famous Flames, and his band, a separate entity from The Flames, sometimes named the James Brown Orchestra or the James Brown Band. That year the band released the top ten R&B hit "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" on Dade Records, owned by Henry Stone, billed under the pseudonym "Nat Kendrick & the Swans" due to label issues. As a result of its success, King president Syd Nathan shifted Brown's contract from Federal to the parent label, King, which according to Brown in his autobiography meant "you got more support from the company". While with King, Brown, under the Famous Flames lineup, released the hit-filled album "Think!" and the following year released two albums with the James Brown Band earning second billing. With the Famous Flames, Brown sang lead on several more hits, including "I'll Go Crazy" and "Think", songs that hinted at his emerging style.
In 1962, Brown and his band scored a hit with their cover of the instrumental "Night Train", becoming a top five R&B single. That same year, the ballads "Lost Someone" and "Baby You're Right", the latter a Joe Tex composition, added to his repertoire and increased his reputation with R&B audiences. On October 24, 1962, Brown financed a live recording of a performance at the Apollo and convinced Syd Nathan to release the album, despite Nathan's belief that no one would buy a live album due to the fact that Brown's singles had already been bought and that live albums were usually bad sellers. "Live at the Apollo" was released the following June and became an immediate hit, eventually reaching number two on the Top LPs chart and selling over a million copies, staying on the charts for 14 months. In 1963, Brown scored his first top 20 pop hit with his rendition of the standard "Prisoner of Love". He also launched his first label, Try Me Records, which included recordings by the likes of Tammy Montgomery (later to be famous as Tammi Terrell), Johnny & Bill (Famous Flames associates Johnny Terry and Bill Hollings) and the Poets, which was another name used for Brown's backing band. During this time Brown began an ill-fated two-year relationship with 17-year-old Tammi Terrell when she sang in his revue. Terrell ended their personal and professional relationship because of his abusive behavior.
In 1964, seeking bigger commercial success, Brown and Bobby Byrd formed the production company, Fair Deal, linking the operation to the Mercury imprint, Smash Records. King Records, however, fought against this and was granted an injunction preventing Brown from releasing any recordings for the label. Prior to the injunction, Brown had released three vocal singles, including the blues-oriented hit "Out of Sight", which further indicated the direction his music was going to take. Touring throughout the year, Brown and the Famous Flames grabbed more national attention after giving an explosive show-stopping performance on the live concert film "The T.A.M.I. Show". The Flames' dynamic gospel-tinged vocals, polished choreography and timing as well as Brown's energetic dance moves and high-octane singing upstaged the proposed closing act, the Rolling Stones.
Having signed a new deal with King, Brown released his song "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" in 1965, which became his first top ten pop hit and won him his first Grammy Award. Brown also signed a production deal with Loma Records. Later in 1965, he issued "I Got You", which became his second single in a row to reach number-one on the R&B chart and top ten on the pop chart. Brown followed that up with the ballad "It's a Man's Man's Man's World", a third Top 10 Pop hit (No. 1 R&B) which confirmed his stance as a top-ranking performer, especially with R&B audiences from that point on.
By 1967, Brown's emerging sound had begun to be defined as funk music. That year he released what some critics cited as the first true funk song, "Cold Sweat", which hit number-one on the R&B chart (Top 10 Pop) and became one of his first recordings to contain a drum break and also the first that featured a harmony that was reduced to a single chord. The instrumental arrangements on tracks such as "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose" and "Licking Stick-Licking Stick" (both recorded in 1968) and "Funky Drummer" (recorded in 1969) featured a more developed version of Brown's mid-1960s style, with the horn section, guitars, bass and drums meshed together in intricate rhythmic patterns based on multiple interlocking riffs.
Changes in Brown's style that started with "Cold Sweat" also established the musical foundation for Brown's later hits, such as "I Got the Feelin'" (1968) and "Mother Popcorn" (1969). By this time Brown's vocals frequently took the form of a kind of rhythmic declamation, not quite sung but not quite spoken, that only intermittently featured traces of pitch or melody. This would become a major influence on the techniques of rapping, which would come to maturity along with hip hop music in the coming decades. Brown's style of funk in the late 1960s was based on interlocking syncopated parts: strutting bass lines, syncopated drum patterns, and iconic percussive guitar riffs. The main guitar ostinatos for "Ain't It Funky" and "Give It Up or Turn It Loose" (both 1969), are examples of Brown's refinement of New Orleans funk; irresistibly danceable riffs, stripped down to their rhythmic essence. On both recordings the tonal structure is bare bones. The pattern of attack-points is the emphasis, not the pattern of pitches, as if the guitar were an African drum, or idiophone. Alexander Stewart states that this popular feel was passed along from "New Orleans—through James Brown's music, to the popular music of the 1970s". Those same tracks were later resurrected by countless hip-hop musicians from the 1970s onward. As a result, James Brown remains to this day the world's most sampled recording artist, but, two tracks that he wrote, are also synonymous with modern dance, especially with house music, jungle music, and drum and bass music, (which were sped up exponentially, in the latter two genres). These songs are, "Funky Drummer", and "Think (About It)", that he wrote for Lynn Collins, and, features his signature, "Whoo - Yeah", which were sampled, on a multitude of late 1980s - early 1990s house music tracks.
"Bring it Up" has an Afro-Cuban guajeo-like structure. All three of these guitar riffs are based on an onbeat/offbeat structure. Stewart says that it "is different from a time line (such as clave and tresillo) in that it is not an exact pattern, but more of a loose organizing principle."
It was around this time as the musician's popularity increased that he acquired the nickname "Soul Brother No. 1", after failing to win the title "King of Soul" from Solomon Burke during a Chicago gig two years prior. Brown's recordings during this period influenced musicians across the industry, most notably groups such as Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, Booker T. & the M.G.s as well as vocalists such as Edwin Starr, David Ruffin and Dennis Edwards from The Temptations, and Michael Jackson, who, throughout his career, cited Brown as his ultimate idol.
Brown's band during this period employed musicians and arrangers who had come up through the jazz tradition. He was noted for his ability as a bandleader and songwriter to blend the simplicity and drive of R&B with the rhythmic complexity and precision of jazz. Trumpeter Lewis Hamlin and saxophonist/keyboardist Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis (the successor to previous bandleader Nat Jones) led the band. Guitarist Jimmy Nolen provided percussive, deceptively simple riffs for each song, and Maceo Parker's prominent saxophone solos provided a focal point for many performances. Other members of Brown's band included stalwart Famous Flames singer and sideman Bobby Byrd, trombonist Fred Wesley, drummers John "Jabo" Starks, Clyde Stubblefield and Melvin Parker, saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney, guitarist Alphonso "Country" Kellum and bassist Bernard Odum.
In addition to a torrent of singles and studio albums, Brown's output during this period included two more successful live albums, "Live at the Garden" (1967) and "Live at the Apollo, Volume II" (1968), and a 1968 television special, "". His music empire expanded along with his influence on the music scene. As Brown's music empire grew, his desire for financial and artistic independence grew as well. Brown bought radio stations during the late 1960s, including WRDW in his native Augusta, where he shined shoes as a boy. In November 1967, James Brown purchased radio station WGYW in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a reported $75,000, according to the January 20, 1968 "Record World" magazine. The call letters were changed to WJBE reflecting his initials. WJBE began on January 15, 1968, and broadcast a Rhythm & Blues format. The station slogan was "WJBE 1430 Raw Soul". Brown also bought WEBB in Baltimore in 1970.
Brown branched out to make several recordings with musicians outside his own band. In an attempt to appeal to the older, more affluent, and predominantly white adult contemporary audience, Brown recorded "Gettin' Down To It" (1969) and "Soul on Top" (1970)—two albums consisting mostly of romantic ballads, jazz standards, and homologous reinterpretations of his earlier hits—with the Dee Felice Trio and the Louie Bellson Orchestra. In 1968, he recorded a number of funk-oriented tracks with The Dapps, a white Cincinnati band, including the hit "I Can't Stand Myself". He also released three albums of Christmas music with his own band.
In March 1970, most of Brown's mid-to-late 1960s road band walked out on him due to money disputes, a development augured by the prior disbandment of The Famous Flames singing group for the same reason in 1968. Brown and erstwhile Famous Flames singer Bobby Byrd (who chose to remain in the band during this tumultuous period) subsequently recruited several members of the Cincinnati-based The Pacemakers, which included Bootsy Collins and his brother Phelps "Catfish" Collins; augmented by the remaining members of the 1960s road band (including Fred Wesley, who rejoined Brown's outfit in December 1970) and other newer musicians, they would form the nucleus of The J.B.'s, Brown's new backing ensemble. Shortly following their first performance together, the band entered the studio to record the Brown-Byrd composition, "Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine"; the song and other contemporaneous singles would further cement Brown's influence in the nascent genre of funk music. This iteration of the J.B.'s dissolved after a March 1971 European tour (documented on the 1991 archival release "Love Power Peace") due to additional money disputes and Bootsy Collins' use of LSD; the Collins brothers would soon become integral members of Parliament-Funkadelic, while a new lineup of the J.B.'s coalesced around Wesley, St. Clair Pinckney and drummer John Starks.
In 1971, Brown began recording for Polydor Records which also took over distribution of Brown's King Records catalog. Many of his sidemen and supporting players, including Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s, Bobby Byrd, Lyn Collins, Vicki Anderson and former rival Hank Ballard, released records on the People label, an imprint founded by Brown that was purchased by Polydor as part of Brown's new contract. The recordings on the People label, almost all of which were produced by Brown himself, exemplified his "house style". Several tracks thought by critics to be excessively sexual, were released at this time. He would later soften his vocal approach. Songs such as "I Know You Got Soul" by Bobby Byrd, "Think" by Lyn Collins and "Doing It to Death" by Fred Wesley & the J.B.'s are considered as much a part of Brown's recorded legacy as the recordings released under his own name. That year, he also began touring African countries and was received well by audiences there. During the 1972 presidential election, James Brown openly proclaimed his support of Richard Nixon for reelection to the presidency over Democratic candidate George McGovern. The decision led to a boycott of his performances and, according to Brown, cost him a big portion of his black audience. As a result, Brown's record sales and concerts in the United States reached a lull in 1973 as he failed to land a number-one R&B single that year. Brown relied more on touring outside the United States where he continued to perform for sold-out crowds in cities such as London, Paris and Lausanne. That year he also faced problems with the IRS for failure to pay back taxes, charging he hadn't paid upwards of $4.5 million; five years earlier, the IRS had claimed he owed nearly $2 million.
In 1973, Brown provided the score for the blaxploitation film "Black Caesar". He also recorded another soundtrack for the film, "Slaughter's Big Rip-Off". Following the release of these soundtracks, Brown acquired a self-styled nickname, "The Godfather of Soul", which remains his most popular nickname. In 1974 he returned to the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts with "The Payback", with the parent album reaching the same spot on the album charts; he would reach No. 1 two more times in 1974, with "My Thang" and "Papa Don't Take No Mess". Later that year, he returned to Africa and performed in Kinshasa as part of the buildup to The Rumble in the Jungle fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Admirers of Brown's music, including Miles Davis and other jazz musicians, began to cite him as a major influence on their own styles. However, Brown, like others who were influenced by his music, also "borrowed" from other musicians. His 1976 single, "Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved, Loved)" (R&B No. 31), interpolated the main riff from "Fame" by David Bowie while omitting any attribution to the latter song's composers (including Bowie, John Lennon and guitarist Carlos Alomar), not the other way around as was often believed. The riff was composed by Alomar, who had briefly been a member of Brown's band in the late 1960s.
"Papa Don't Take No Mess" would prove to be his final single to reach the No. 1 spot on the R&B charts and his final Top 40 pop single of the 1970s, though he continued to occasionally have Top 10 R&B recordings. Among his top ten R&B hits during this latter period included "Funky President" and "Get Up Offa That Thing", the latter song released in 1976 and aimed at musical rivals such as Barry White, The Ohio Players and K.C. and the Sunshine Band. Brown credited his then-wife and two of their children as writers of the song to avoid concurrent tax problems with the IRS. Starting in October 1975, Brown produced, directed, and hosted "Future Shock", an Atlanta-based television variety show that ran for three years.
Although his records were mainstays of the vanguard New York underground disco scene exemplified by DJs such as David Mancuso and Francis Grasso from 1969 onwards, Brown did not consciously yield to the trend until 1975's "Sex Machine Today". By 1977, he was no longer a dominant force in R&B. After "Get Up Offa That Thing", thirteen of Brown's late 1970s recordings for Polydor failed to reach the Top 10 of the R&B chart, with only "Bodyheat" in 1976 and the disco-oriented "It's Too Funky in Here" in 1979 reaching the R&B Top 15 and the ballad "Kiss in '77" reaching the Top 20. After 1976's "Bodyheat", he also failed to appear on the Billboard Hot 100. As a result, Brown's concert attendance began dropping and his reported disputes with the IRS caused his business empire to collapse. In addition, Brown's former bandmates, including Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker and the Collins brothers, had found bigger success as members of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic collective. The emergence of disco also stopped Brown's success on the R&B charts because its slicker, more commercial style had superseded his more raw funk productions.
By the release of 1979's "The Original Disco Man", Brown was not providing much production or writing, leaving most of it to producer Brad Shapiro, resulting in the song "It's Too Funky in Here" becoming Brown's most successful single in this period. After two more albums failed to chart, Brown left Polydor in 1981. It was around this time that Brown changed the name of his band from the J.B.'s to the Soul Generals (or Soul G's). The band retained that name until his death. Despite the decline in his record sales Brown enjoyed something of a resurgence in this period, starting with appearances in the feature films "The Blues Brothers", "Doctor Detroit" and "Rocky IV", as well as guest-starring in the "Miami Vice" episode "Missing Hours" (1987). In 1984, he teamed with rap musician Afrika Bambaattaa on the song "Unity". A year later he signed with Scotti Brothers Records and issued the moderately successful album "Gravity" in 1986. It included Brown's final Top 10 pop hit, "Living in America", marking his first Top 40 entry since 1974 and his first Top 10 pop entry since 1968. Produced and written by Dan Hartman, it was also featured prominently on the "Rocky IV" film and soundtrack. Brown performed the song in the film at Apollo Creed's final fight, shot in the Ziegfeld Room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and was credited in the film as "The Godfather of Soul". 1986 also saw the publication of his autobiography, "James Brown: The Godfather of Soul", co-written with Bruce Tucker. In 1987, Brown won the Grammy for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance for "Living in America".
In 1988, Brown worked with the production team Full Force on the new jack swing-influenced album "I'm Real". It spawned his final two Top 10 R&B hits, "I'm Real" and "Static", which peaked at No. 2 and No. 5, respectively, on the R&B charts. Meanwhile, the drum break from the second version of the original 1969 hit "Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose" (the recording included on the compilation album "In the Jungle Groove") became so popular at hip hop dance parties (especially for breakdance) during the early 1980s that hip hop pioneer Kurtis Blow called the song "the national anthem of hip hop".
After his stint in prison during the late 1980s, Brown met Larry Fridie and Thomas Hart who produced the first James Brown biopic, entitled "James Brown: The Man, the Message, the Music", released in 1992. He returned to music with the album "Love Over-Due" in 1991. It included the single "(So Tired of Standing Still We Got to) Move On", which peaked at No. 48 on the R&B chart. His former record label Polydor also released the four-CD box set "Star Time", spanning Brown's career to date. Brown's release from prison also prompted his former record labels to reissue his albums on CD, featuring additional tracks and commentary by music critics and historians. That same year, Brown appeared on rapper MC Hammer's video for "Too Legit to Quit". Hammer had been noted, alongside Big Daddy Kane, for bringing Brown's unique stage shows and their own energetic dance moves to the hip-hop generation; both listed Brown as their idol. Both musicians also sampled his work, with Hammer having sampled the rhythms from "Super Bad" for his song "Here Comes the Hammer", from his best-selling album "Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em". Big Daddy Kane sampled many times. Before the year was over, Brown–who had immediately returned to work with his band following his release–organized a pay-per-view concert following a show at Los Angeles' Wiltern Theatre, that was well received.
On June 10, 1991, James Brown and a star-filled line up performed before a crowd at the Wiltern Theatre for a live pay-per-view at-home audience. "James Brown: Living in America – Live!" was the brainchild of Indiana producer Danny Hubbard. It featured
M.C. Hammer as well as Bell Biv Devoe, Heavy D & the Boys, En Vogue, C+C Music Factory, Quincy Jones, Sherman Hemsley and Keenen Ivory Wayans. Ice-T, Tone Loc and Kool Moe Dee performed paying homage to Brown. This was Brown's first public performance since his parole from the South Carolina prison system in February. He had served two-and-a-half years of two concurrent six-year sentences for aggravated assault and other felonies.
Brown continued making recordings. In 1993 his album "Universal James" was released. It included his final "Billboard" charting single, "Can't Get Any Harder", which peaked at No. 76 on the US R&B chart and reached No. 59 on the UK chart. Its brief charting in the UK was probably due to the success of a remixed version of "I Feel Good" featuring Dakeyne. Brown also released the singles "How Long" and "Georgia-Lina", which failed to chart. In 1995, Brown returned to the Apollo and recorded "Live at the Apollo 1995". It included a studio track titled "Respect Me", which was released as a single; again it failed to chart. Brown's final studio albums, "I'm Back" and "The Next Step", were released in 1998 and 2002 respectively. "I'm Back" featured the song "Funk on Ah Roll", which peaked at No. 40 in the UK but did not chart in his native US. "The Next Step" included Brown's final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In". Both albums were produced by Derrick Monk. Brown's concert success, however, remained unabated and he kept up with a grueling schedule throughout the remainder of his life, living up to his previous nickname, "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business", in spite of his advanced age. In 2003, Brown participated in the PBS "American Masters" television documentary "James Brown: Soul Survivor", which was directed by Jeremy Marre.
Brown celebrated his status as an icon by appearing in a variety of entertainment and sports events, including an appearance on the WCW pay-per-view event, SuperBrawl X, where he danced alongside wrestler Ernest "The Cat" Miller, who based his character on Brown, during his in-ring skit with The Maestro. Brown then appeared in Tony Scott's short film "" in 2001. He was featured alongside Clive Owen, Gary Oldman, Danny Trejo and Marilyn Manson. Brown also made a cameo appearance in the 2002 Jackie Chan film "The Tuxedo", in which Chan was required to finish Brown's act after having accidentally knocked out the singer. In 2002, Brown appeared in "Undercover Brother", playing himself.
In 2004, Brown performed in Hyde Park, London as a support act for Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts. The beginning of 2005 saw the publication of Brown's second book, "I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul", written with Marc Eliot. In February and March, he participated in recording sessions for an intended studio album with Fred Wesley, Pee Wee Ellis, and other longtime collaborators. Though he lost interest in the album, which remains unreleased, a track from the sessions, "Gut Bucket", appeared on a compilation CD included with the August 2006 issue of "MOJO". He appeared at Edinburgh 50,000 – The Final Push, the final Live 8 concert on July 6, 2005, where he performed a duet with British pop star Will Young on "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag". The previous week he had performed a duet with another British pop star, Joss Stone, on the United Kingdom chat show "Friday Night with Jonathan Ross". In 2006, Brown continued his "Seven Decades of Funk World Tour", his last concert tour where he performed all over the world. His final U.S. performances were in San Francisco on August 20, 2006, as headliner at the Festival of the Golden Gate (Foggfest) on the Great Meadow at Fort Mason. The following day, August 21, he performed at Humboldt State University in Arcata, CA, at a small theatre (800 seats) on campus. His last shows were greeted with positive reviews, and one of his final concert appearances at the Irish Oxegen festival in Punchestown in 2006 was performed for a record crowd of 80,000 people. He played a full concert as part of the BBC's Electric Proms on October 27, 2006, at The Roundhouse, supported by The Zutons, with special appearances from Max Beasley and The Sugababes.
Brown's last televised appearance was at his induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame in November 2006, before his death the following month. Before his death, Brown had been scheduled to perform a duet with singer Annie Lennox on the song "Vengeance" for her new album "Venus", which was released in 2007.
On December 23, 2006, Brown became very ill and arrived at his dentist's office in Atlanta, Georgia, several hours late. His appointment was for dental implant work. During that visit, Brown's dentist observed that he looked "very bad ... weak and dazed". Instead of performing the work, the dentist advised Brown to see a doctor right away about his medical condition.
Brown went to the Emory Crawford Long Memorial Hospital the next day for medical evaluation and was admitted for observation and treatment. According to Charles Bobbit, his longtime personal manager and friend, Brown had been struggling with a noisy cough since returning from a November trip to Europe. Yet, Bobbit said, the singer had a history of never complaining about being sick and often performed while ill. Although Brown had to cancel upcoming concerts in Waterbury, Connecticut, and Englewood, New Jersey, he was confident that the doctor would discharge him from the hospital in time for his scheduled New Year's Eve shows at the Count Basie Theatre in New Jersey and the B. B. King Blues Club in New York, in addition to performing a song live on CNN for the Anderson Cooper New Year's Eve special. Brown remained hospitalized, however, and his condition worsened throughout the day.
On Christmas Day 2006, Brown died at approximately 1:45 a.m. EST (06:45 UTC), at age 73, from congestive heart failure, resulting from complications of pneumonia. Bobbit was at his bedside and later reported that Brown stuttered, "I'm going away tonight," then took three long, quiet breaths and fell asleep before dying.
In 2019, an investigation by CNN and other journalists led to suggestions that Brown had been murdered.
After Brown's death, his relatives, a host of celebrities, and thousands of fans gathered, on December 28, 2006, for a public memorial service at the Apollo Theater in New York City and, on December 30, 2006, at the James Brown Arena in Augusta, Georgia. A separate, private ceremony was held in North Augusta, South Carolina, on December 29, 2006, with Brown's family in attendance. Celebrities at these various memorial events included Michael Jackson, Jimmy Cliff, Joe Frazier, Buddy Guy, Ice Cube, Ludacris, Dr. Dre, Little Richard, Dick Gregory, MC Hammer, Prince, Jesse Jackson, Ice-T, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bootsy Collins, LL Cool J, Lil Wayne, Lenny Kravitz, 50 Cent, Stevie Wonder, and Don King. Rev. Al Sharpton officiated at all of Brown's public and private memorial services.
Brown's memorial ceremonies were all elaborate, complete with costume changes for the deceased and videos featuring him in concert. His body, placed in a Promethean casket—bronze polished to a golden shine—was driven through the streets of New York to the Apollo Theater in a white, glass-encased horse-drawn carriage. In Augusta, Georgia, his memorial procession stopped to pay respects at his statue, en route to the James Brown Arena. During the public memorial there, a video showed Brown's last performance in Augusta, Georgia, with the Ray Charles version of "Georgia on My Mind" playing soulfully in the background. His last backup band, The Soul Generals, also played some of his hits during that tribute at the arena. The group was joined by Bootsy Collins on bass, with MC Hammer performing a dance in James Brown style. Former Temptations lead singer Ali-Ollie Woodson performed "Walk Around Heaven All Day" at the memorial services.
Brown signed his last will and testament on August 1, 2000, before J. Strom Thurmond Jr., an attorney for the estate. The irrevocable trust, separate and apart from Brown's will, was created on his behalf, that same year, by his attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, one of three personal representatives of Brown's estate. His will covered the disposition of his personal assets, such as clothing, cars, and jewelry, while the irrevocable trust covered the disposition of the music rights, business assets of James Brown Enterprises, and his Beech Island, South Carolina estate.
During the reading of the will on January 11, 2007, Thurmond revealed that Brown's six adult living children (Terry Brown, Larry Brown, Daryl Brown, Yamma Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas and Venisha Brown) were named in the document, while Hynie and James II were not mentioned as heirs. Brown's will had been signed 10 months before James II was born and more than a year before Brown's marriage to Tomi Rae Hynie. Like Brown's will, his irrevocable trust omitted Hynie and James II as recipients of Brown's property. The irrevocable trust had also been established before, and not amended since, the birth of James II.
On January 24, 2007, Brown's children filed a lawsuit, petitioning the court to remove the personal representatives from the estate (including Brown's attorney, as well as trustee Albert "Buddy" Dallas) and appoint a special administrator because of perceived impropriety and alleged mismanagement of Brown's assets. On January 31, 2007, Hynie also filed a lawsuit against Brown's estate, challenging the validity of the will and the irrevocable trust. Hynie's suit asked the court both to recognize her as Brown's widow and to appoint a special administrator for the estate.
On January 27, 2015, Judge Doyet Early III ruled that Tomi Rae Hynie Brown was officially the widow of James Brown. The decision was based on the grounds that Hynie's previous marriage was invalid and that James Brown had abandoned his efforts to annul his own marriage to Hynie.
On February 19, 2015, the South Carolina Supreme Court intervened, halting all lower court actions in the estate and undertaking to review previous actions itself. The South Carolina Court of Appeals in July 2018 ruled that Tomi Rae was, in fact, Mr. Brown's wife.
For many years, Brown's touring show was one of the most extravagant productions in American popular music. At the time of Brown's death, his band included three guitarists, two bass guitar players, two drummers, three horns and a percussionist. The bands that he maintained during the late 1960s and 1970s were of comparable size, and the bands also included a three-piece amplified string section that played during the ballads. Brown employed between 40 and 50 people for the James Brown Revue, and members of the revue traveled with him in a bus to cities and towns all over the country, performing upwards of 330 shows a year with almost all of the shows as one-nighters.
Before James Brown appeared on stage, his personal MC gave him an elaborate introduction accompanied by drumrolls, as the MC worked in Brown's various sobriquets along with the names of many of his hit songs. The introduction by Fats Gonder, captured on Brown's 1963 album "Live at the Apollo" is a representative example:
James Brown's performances were famous for their intensity and length. His own stated goal was to "give people more than what they came for — make them tired, 'cause "that's" what they came for.'" Brown's concert repertoire consisted mostly of his own hits and recent songs, with a few R&B covers mixed in. Brown danced vigorously as he sang, working popular dance steps such as the Mashed Potato into his routine along with dramatic leaps, splits and slides. In addition, his horn players and singing group (The Famous Flames) typically performed choreographed dance routines, and later incarnations of the Revue included backup dancers. Male performers in the Revue were required to wear tuxedoes and cummerbunds long after more casual concert wear became the norm among the younger musical acts. Brown's own extravagant outfits and his elaborate processed hairdo completed the visual impression. A James Brown concert typically included a performance by a featured vocalist, such as Vicki Anderson or Marva Whitney, and an instrumental feature for the band, which sometimes served as the opening act for the show.
A trademark feature of Brown's stage shows, usually during the song "Please, Please, Please", involved Brown dropping to his knees while clutching the microphone stand in his hands, prompting the show's longtime MC, Danny Ray, to come out, drape a cape over Brown's shoulders and escort him off the stage after he had worked himself to exhaustion during his performance. As Brown was escorted off the stage by the MC, Brown's vocal group, the Famous Flames, (Bobby Byrd, Lloyd Stallworth, and Bobby Bennett ), continued singing the background vocals "Please, please don't go-oh". Brown would then shake off the cape and stagger back to the microphone to perform an encore. Brown's routine was inspired by a similar one used by the professional wrestler Gorgeous George, as well as Little Richard. In his 2005 autobiography "I Feel Good: A Memoir in a Life of Soul", Brown, who was a fan of Gorgeous George, credited the wrestler as the inspiration for both his cape routine and concert attire, stating "seeing him on TV helped create the James Brown you see on stage".
Brown performs a version of the cape routine over the closing credits of the film "Blues Brothers 2000" and in the film of the "T.A.M.I. Show" (1964) in which he and The Famous Flames upstaged the Rolling Stones. The Police refer to "James Brown on the "T.A.M.I. Show"" in their 1980 song "When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What's Still Around".
Brown demanded extreme discipline, perfection and precision from his musicians and dancers – performers in his Revue showed up for rehearsals and members wore the right "uniform" or "costume" for concert performances. During an interview conducted by Terri Gross during the NPR segment "Fresh Air" with Maceo Parker, a former saxophonist in Brown's band for most of the 1960s and part of the 1970s and 1980s, Parker offered his experience with the discipline that Brown demanded of the band:
Brown also had a practice of directing, correcting and assessing fines on members of his band who broke his rules, such as wearing unshined shoes, dancing out of sync or showing up late on stage. During some of his concert performances, Brown danced in front of his band with his back to the audience as he slid across the floor, flashing hand signals and splaying his pulsating fingers to the beat of the music. Although audiences thought Brown's dance routine was part of his act, this practice was actually his way of pointing to the offending member of his troupe who played or sang the wrong note or committed some other infraction. Brown used his splayed fingers and hand signals to alert the offending person of the fine that person must pay to him for breaking his rules.
Brown's demands of his support acts were, meanwhile, quite the reverse. As Fred Wesley recalled of his time as musical director of the JBs, if Brown felt intimidated by a support act he would try to "undermine their performances by shortening their sets without notice, demanding that they not do certain showstopping songs, and even insisting on doing the unthinkable, playing drums on some of their songs. A sure set killer."
Brown's main social activism was in preserving the need for education among youths, influenced by his own troubled childhood and his being forced to drop out of the seventh grade for wearing "insufficient clothes". Due to heavy dropout rates in the 1960s, Brown released the pro-education song, "Don't Be a Drop-Out". Royalties of the song were donated to dropout-prevention charity programs. The success of this led to Brown meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House. Johnson cited Brown for being a positive role model to the youth. A lifelong Republican, Brown gained the confidence of President Richard Nixon, to whom he found he had to explain the plight of Black Americans.
Throughout the remainder of his life, Brown made public speeches in schools and continued to advocate the importance of education in school. Upon filing his will in 2002, Brown advised that most of the money in his estate go into creating the I Feel Good, Inc. Trust to benefit disadvantaged children and provide scholarships for his grandchildren. His final single, "Killing Is Out, School Is In", advocated against murders of young children in the streets. Brown often gave out money and other items to children while traveling to his childhood hometown of Augusta. A week before his death, while looking gravely ill, Brown gave out toys and turkeys to kids at an Atlanta orphanage, something he had done several times over the years.
Though Brown performed at benefit rallies for civil rights organizations in the mid-1960s, Brown often shied away from discussing civil rights in his songs in fear of alienating his crossover audience. In 1968, in response to a growing urge of anti-war advocacy during the Vietnam War, Brown recorded the song, "America Is My Home". In the song, Brown performed a rap, advocating patriotism and exhorting listeners to "stop pitying yoursel[ves] and get up and fight". At the time of the song's release, Brown had been participating in performing for troops stationed in Vietnam.
On April 5, 1968, a day after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, Brown provided a free citywide televised concert at the Boston Garden to maintain public order and calm concerned Boston relatives (over the objections of the police chief, who wanted to call off the concert, which he thought would incite violence). The show was later released on DVD as "". According to the documentary, "The Night James Brown Saved Boston", then-mayor Kevin White had strongly restrained the Boston police from cracking down on minor violence and protests after the assassination, while religious and community leaders worked to keep tempers from flaring. White arranged to have Brown's performance broadcast multiple times on Boston's public television station, WGBH, thus keeping potential rioters off the streets, watching the concert for free. Angered by not being told of this, Brown demanded $60,000 for "gate" fees (money he thought would be lost from ticket sales on account of the concert being broadcast for free) and then threatened to go public about the secret arrangement when the city balked at paying up afterwards, news of which would have been a political death blow to White and spark riots of its own. White eventually lobbied the behind-the-scenes power-brokering group known as "The Vault" to come up with money for Brown's gate fee and other social programs, contributing $100,000. Brown received $15,000 from them via the city. White also persuaded management at the Garden to give up their share of receipts to make up the differences. Following this successful performance, Brown was cautioned by President Johnson to visit cities ravaged from riots following King's assassination to not resort to violence, telling them to "cool it, there's another way".
Responding to pressure from black activists, including H. Rap Brown, to take a bigger stance on their issues and from footage of black on black crime committed in inner cities, Brown wrote the lyrics to the song "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud", which his bandleader Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis accompanied with a musical composition. Released late that summer, the song's lyrics helped to make it an anthem for the civil rights movement. Brown only performed the song sporadically following its initial release and later stated he had regrets recording it, saying in 1984, "Now 'Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud' has done more for the black race than any other record, but if I had my choice, I wouldn't have done it, because I don't like defining anyone by race. To teach race is to teach separatism." In his autobiography he stated:
The song is obsolete now ... But it was necessary to teach pride then, and I think the song did a lot of good for a lot of people ... People called "Black and Proud" militant and angry – maybe because of the line about dying on your feet instead of living on your knees. But really, if you listen to it, it sounds like a children's song. That's why I had children in it, so children who heard it could grow up feeling pride ... The song cost me a lot of my crossover audience. The racial makeup at my concerts was mostly black after that. I don't regret it, though, even if it was misunderstood.
In 1969, Brown recorded two more songs of social commentary, "World" and "I Don't Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing", the latter song pleading for equal opportunity and self-reliance rather than entitlement. In 1970, in response to some black leaders for not being outspoken enough, he recorded "Get Up, Get into It, Get Involved" and "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing". In 1971, he began touring Africa, including Zambia and Nigeria. He was made "freeman of the city" in Lagos, Nigeria, by Oba Adeyinka Oyekan, for his "influence on black people all over the world". With his company, James Brown Enterprises, Brown helped to provide jobs for blacks in business in the communities. As the 1970s continued, Brown continued to record songs of social commentary, most prominently 1972's "King Heroin" and the two-part ballad "Public Enemy", which dealt with drug addiction.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Brown endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey and appeared with Humphrey at political rallies. Brown began supporting Republican president Richard Nixon after being invited to perform at Nixon's inaugural ball in January 1969. Brown's endorsement of Nixon during the 1972 presidential election negatively impacted his career during that period with several national Black organizations boycotting his records and protesting at his concert shows. Brown stated he was neither Democratic nor Republican despite his support of Republican presidents such as Nixon and Ronald Reagan. In 1999, when being interviewed by "Rolling Stone", the magazine asked him to name a hero in the 20th century; Brown mentioned John F. Kennedy and then-96-year-old U.S. Senator, and former Dixiecrat, Strom Thurmond, stating "when the young whippersnappers get out of line, whether Democratic or Republican, an old man can walk up and say 'Wait a minute, son, it goes this way.' And that's great for our country. He's like a grandfather to me." In 2003, Brown was the featured attraction of a Washington D.C. fundraiser for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Following the deaths of Ronald Reagan and his friend Ray Charles, Brown said to CNN, "I'm kind of in an uproar. I love the country and I got – you know I've been around a long time, through many presidents and everything. So after losing Mr. Reagan, who I knew very well, then Mr. Ray Charles, who I worked with and lived with like, all our life, we had a show together in Oakland many, many years ago and it's like you found the placard."
At the end of his life, James Brown lived in Beech Island, South Carolina, directly across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Brown had diabetes that went undiagnosed for years, according to his longtime manager Charles Bobbit. In 2004, Brown was successfully treated for prostate cancer. Regardless of his health, Brown maintained his reputation as the "hardest working man in show business" by keeping up with his grueling performance schedule.
In 1962, Tammi Terrell joined the James Brown Revue. Even though she was only 17, Brown became sexually involved with Terrell in a relationship that continued until she escaped his abuse. Bobby Bennett, former member of the Famous Flames told Rolling Stone about the abuse he witnessed, "He beat Tammi Terrell terrible," said Bennett. "She was bleeding, shedding blood." Terrell, who died in 1970, was Brown's girlfriend before she became famous as Marvin Gaye's singing partner in the mid-Sixties. "Tammi left him because she didn't want her butt whipped," said Bennett, who also claimed he saw Brown kick one pregnant girlfriend down a flight of stairs.
Brown was married four times. His first marriage was to Velma Warren in 1953, and they had three sons together. Over a decade later, the couple had separated and the final divorce decree was issued 1969. They maintained a close friendship that lasted until Brown's death. Brown's second marriage was to Deidre "Deedee" Jenkins, on October 22, 1970. They had two daughters together. The couple were separated by 1979, after what his daughter describes as years of domestic abuse, and the final divorce decree was issued on January 10, 1981. His third marriage was to Adrienne Lois Rodriguez (March 9, 1950 – January 6, 1996), in 1984. It was a contentious marriage that made headlines due to domestic abuse complaints. Rodriguez filed for divorce in 1988, "citing years of cruelty treatment," but they reconciled. Less than a year after Rodriguez died in 1996, Brown hired Tomi Rae Hynie to be a background singer for his band and she later became his fourth wife.
On December 23, 2002, Brown and Hynie held a wedding ceremony that was officiated by the Rev. Larry Flyer. Following Brown's death, controversy surrounded the circumstances of the marriage, with Brown's attorney, Albert "Buddy" Dallas, reporting that the marriage was not valid; Hynie was still married to Javed Ahmed, a man from Bangladesh. Hynie claimed Ahmed married her to obtain residency through a Green Card and that the marriage was annulled but the annulment did not occur until April 2004. In an attempt to prove her marriage to Brown was valid, Hynie produced a 2001 marriage certificate as proof of her marriage to Brown, but she did not provide King with court records pointing to an annulment of her marriage to him or to Ahmed. According to Dallas, Brown was angry and hurt that Hynie had concealed her prior marriage from him and Brown moved to file for annulment from Hynie. Dallas added that though Hynie's marriage to Ahmed was annulled after she married Brown, the Brown–Hynie marriage was not valid under South Carolina law because Brown and Hynie did not remarry after the annulment. In August 2003, Brown took out a full-page public notice in "Variety" featuring Hynie, James II and himself on vacation at Disney World to announce that he and Hynie were going their separate ways. In 2015, a judge ruled Hynie as Brown's legal widow.
Brown had numerous children and acknowledged nine of them including five sons – Teddy (1954–1973), Terry, Larry, Daryl and James Joseph Brown Jr. and four daughters – Lisa, Dr. Yamma Noyola Brown Lumar, Deanna Brown Thomas and Venisha Brown (1964–2018). Brown also had eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Brown's eldest son, Teddy, died in a car crash on June 14, 1973. According to an August 22, 2007, article published in the British newspaper "The Daily Telegraph", DNA tests indicate that Brown also fathered at least three extramarital children. The first one of them to be identified is LaRhonda Pettit (born 1962), a retired air stewardess and teacher who lives in Houston. During contesting of Brown's will, another of the Brown family attorneys, Debra Opri, revealed to Larry King that Brown wanted a DNA test performed after his death to confirm the paternity of James Brown Jr. (born 2001)—not for Brown's sake but for the sake of the other family members. In April 2007, Hynie selected a guardian ad litem whom she wants appointed by the court to represent her son, James Brown Jr., in the paternity proceedings. James Brown Jr. was confirmed to be his biological son.
For most of his career, Brown had a strict drug- and alcohol-free policy for any member in his entourage, including band members, and would fire people who disobeyed orders, particularly those who used or abused drugs and alcohol. Some early members of Brown's vocal group the Famous Flames were fired due to alcohol use. Despite the policy, some of the original members of Brown's 1970s band, the J.B.'s, including Catfish and Bootsy Collins, intentionally took LSD during a concert gig in 1971, causing Brown to fire them after the show because he had suspected them of being on drugs all along.
However, by the mid-1980s it was alleged that Brown himself was using drugs. After he met and later married Adrienne Rodriguez in 1984, she and Brown began using PCP ("angel dust"). This drug usage resulted in violent outbursts from him and he was arrested several times for domestic violence against Rodriguez while high on the drug. By January 1988, Brown faced four criminal charges within a 12-month span relating to driving, PCP, and gun possession. After an April 1988 arrest for domestic abuse, Brown went on the CNN program "Sonya Live in L.A." with host Sonya Friedman. The interview went viral due to Brown's irreverent demeanor with some asserting that Brown was high.
One of Brown's former mistresses recalled in a "GQ" magazine article on Brown some years after his death that Brown would smoke PCP "until that got hard to find", and cocaine, mixed with tobacco in Kool cigarettes. In January 1998, he spent a week in rehab to deal with an addiction to prescription drugs. A week after his release, he was arrested for an unlawful use of a handgun and possession of cannabis. Prior to his death in December 2006, when Brown entered Emory University Hospital, traces of cocaine were found in the singer's urine. His widow suggested Brown would "do crack" with a female acquaintance.
Brown's personal life was marred by several brushes with the law. At the age of 16, he was convicted of theft and served three years in juvenile prison. During a concert held at Club 15 in Macon, Georgia in 1963, while Otis Redding was performing alongside his former band Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, Brown reportedly tried to shoot his musical rival Joe Tex. The incident led to multiple people being shot and stabbed. Since Brown was still on parole at the time, he relied on his agent Clint Brantley "and a few thousand dollars to make the situation disappear". According to Jenkins, "seven people got shot", and after the shootout ended, a man appeared and gave "each one of the injured a hundred dollars apiece not to carry it no further and not to talk to the press". Brown was never charged for the incident.
On July 16, 1978, after performing at the Apollo, Brown was arrested for reportedly failing to turn in records from one of his radio stations after the station was forced to file for bankruptcy. Brown was arrested on April 3, 1988, for assault, and again in May 1988 on drug and weapons charges, and again on September 24, 1988, following a high-speed car chase on Interstate 20 near the Georgia–South Carolina state border. He was convicted of carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer, along with various drug-related and driving offenses. Although he was sentenced to six years in prison, he was eventually released on parole on February 27, 1991, after serving two years of his sentence. Brown's FBI file, released to "The Washington Post" in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act, related Brown's claim that the high-speed chase did not occur as claimed by the police, and that local police shot at his car several times during an incident of police harassment and assaulted him after his arrest. Local authorities found no merit to Brown's accusations.
In 1998, a woman named Mary Simons accused Brown in a civil suit of holding her captive for three days, demanding oral sex and firing a gun in his office; Simons' charge was eventually dismissed. In another civil suit, filed by former background singer Lisa Rushton alleged that between 1994 and 1999, Brown allegedly demanded sexual favors and when refused, would cut off her pay and kept her offstage. She also claimed Brown would "place a hand on her buttocks and loudly told her in a crowded restaurant to not look or speak to any other man besides himself;" Rushton eventually withdrew her lawsuit. In yet another civil suit, a woman named Lisa Agbalaya, who worked for Brown, said the singer would tell her he had "bull testicles", handed her a pair of zebra-print underwear, told her to wear them while he massaged her with oil, and fired her after she refused. A Los Angeles jury cleared the singer of sexual harassment but found him liable for wrongful termination.
The police were summoned to Brown's residence on July 3, 2000, after he was accused of charging at an electric company repairman with a steak knife when the repairman visited Brown's house to investigate a complaint about having no lights at the residence. In 2003, Brown was pardoned by the South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole, and Pardon Services for past crimes that he was convicted of committing in South Carolina.
Brown was repeatedly arrested for domestic violence. Adrienne Rodriguez, his third wife, had him arrested four times between 1987 and 1995 on charges of assault. In one incident, Rodriguez reported to authorities that Brown beat her with an iron pipe and shot at her car. Rodriguez was hospitalized after the last assault in October 1995, but charges were dropped after she died in January 1996.
In January 2004, Brown was arrested in South Carolina on a domestic violence charge after Tomi Rae Hynie accused him of pushing her to the floor during an argument at their home, where she suffered scratches and bruises to her right arm and hip. Later that year in June 2004, Brown pleaded no contest to the domestic violence incident, but served no jail time. Instead, Brown was required to forfeit a US$1,087 bond as punishment.
In January 2005, a woman named Jacque Hollander filed a lawsuit against James Brown, which stemmed from an alleged 1988 rape. When the case was initially heard before a judge in 2002, Hollander's claims against Brown were dismissed by the court as the limitations period for filing the suit had expired. Hollander claimed that stress from the alleged assault later caused her to contract Graves' disease, a thyroid condition. Hollander claimed that the incident took place in South Carolina while she was employed by Brown as a publicist. Hollander alleged that, during her ride in a van with Brown, Brown pulled over to the side of the road and sexually assaulted her while he threatened her with a shotgun. In her case against Brown, Hollander entered as evidence a DNA sample and a polygraph result, but the evidence was not considered due to the limitations defense. Hollander later attempted to bring her case before the Supreme Court, but nothing came of her complaint.
Brown received awards and honors throughout his lifetime and after his death. In 1993 the City Council of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, conducted a poll of residents to choose a new name for the bridge that crossed the Yampa River on Shield Drive. The winning name, with 7,717 votes, was "James Brown Soul Center of the Universe Bridge". The bridge was officially dedicated in September 1993, and Brown appeared at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the event. A petition was started by local ranchers to return the name to "Stockbridge" for historical reasons, but they backed off after citizens defeated their efforts because of the popularity of Brown's name. Brown returned to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on July 4, 2002, for an outdoor festival, performing with bands such as The String Cheese Incident.
During his long career, Brown received many prestigious music industry awards and honors. In 1983 he was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. Brown was one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at its inaugural induction dinner in New York on January 23, 1986. At that time, the members of his original vocal group, The Famous Flames (Bobby Byrd, Johnny Terry, Bobby Bennett, and Lloyd Stallworth) were not inducted. However, on April 14, 2012, The Famous Flames were automatically and retroactively inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Brown, without the need for nomination and voting, on the basis that they should have been inducted with him in 1986. On February 25, 1992, Brown was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 34th annual Grammy Awards. Exactly a year later, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 4th annual Rhythm & Blues Foundation Pioneer Awards. A ceremony was held for Brown on January 10, 1997, to honor him with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
On June 15, 2000, Brown was honored as an inductee to the New York Songwriters Hall of Fame. On August 6, 2002, he was honored as the first BMI Urban Icon at the BMI Urban Awards. His BMI accolades include an impressive ten R&B Awards and six Pop Awards. On November 14, 2006, Brown was inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, and he was one of several inductees to perform at the ceremony. In recognition of his accomplishments as an entertainer, Brown was a recipient of Kennedy Center Honors on December 7, 2003. In 2004 "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked James Brown as No. 7 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. In an article for "Rolling Stone", critic Robert Christgau cited Brown as "the greatest musician of the rock era".
He appeared on the BET Awards June 24, 2003, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award presented by Michael Jackson, and performed with him.
Brown was also honored in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia, for his philanthropy and civic activities. On November 20, 1993, Mayor Charles DeVaney of Augusta held a ceremony to dedicate a section of 9th Street between Broad and Twiggs Streets, renamed "James Brown Boulevard", in the entertainer's honor. On May 6, 2005, as a 72nd birthday present for Brown, the city of Augusta unveiled a life-sized bronze James Brown statue on Broad Street. The statue was to have been dedicated a year earlier, but the ceremony was put on hold because of a domestic abuse charge that Brown faced at the time. In 2005, Charles "Champ" Walker and the We Feel Good Committee went before the County commission and received approval to change Augusta's slogan to "We Feel Good". Afterward, officials renamed the city's civic center the James Brown Arena, and James Brown attended a ceremony for the unveiling of the namesake center on October 15, 2006.
On December 30, 2006, during the public memorial service at the James Brown Arena, Dr. Shirley A.R. Lewis, president of Paine College, a historically black college in Augusta, Georgia, bestowed posthumously upon Brown an honorary doctorate in recognition and honor of his many contributions to the school in its times of need. Brown had originally been scheduled to receive the honorary doctorate from Paine College during its May 2007 commencement.
During the 49th Annual Grammy Awards presentation on February 11, 2007, James Brown's famous cape was draped over a microphone by Danny Ray at the end of a montage in honor of notable people in the music industry who died during the previous year. Earlier that evening, Christina Aguilera delivered an impassioned performance of Brown's hit "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" followed by a standing ovation, while Chris Brown performed a dance routine in honor of James Brown.
On August 17, 2013, the official R&B Music Hall of Fame honored and inducted James Brown at a ceremony held at the Waetejen Auditorium at Cleveland State University.
ART THE BOX began in early 2015 as a collaboration between three organizations: the City of Augusta, the Downtown Development Authority and the Greater Augusta Arts Council. 19 local artists were selected by a committee to create art on 23 local traffic signal control cabinets (TSCCs). A competition was held to create the James Brown Tribute Box on the corner of James Brown Blvd. (9th Ave.) and Broad St. This box was designed and painted by local artist, Ms. Robbie Pitts Bellamy and has become a favorite photo opportunity to visitors and locals in Augusta, Georgia.
"I have a lot of musical heroes but I think James Brown is at the top of the list," remarked Public Enemy's Chuck D. "Absolutely the funkiest man on Earth ... In a black household, James Brown is part of the fabric – Motown, Stax, Atlantic and James Brown."
As a tribute to James Brown, the Rolling Stones covered the song, "I'll Go Crazy" from Brown's "Live at the Apollo" album, during their 2007 European tour. Jimmy Page has remarked, "He [James Brown] was almost a musical genre in his own right and he changed and moved forward the whole time so people were able to learn from him."
On December 22, 2007, the first annual "Tribute Fit For the King of King Records" in honor of James Brown was held at the Madison Theater in Covington, Kentucky. The tribute, organized by Bootsy Collins, featured appearances by Afrika Bambaataa, Chuck D of Public Enemy, The Soul Generals, Buckethead, Freekbass, Triage and many of Brown's surviving family members. Comedian Michael Coyer was the MC for the event. During the show, the mayor of Cincinnati proclaimed December 22 as James Brown Day.
As of 2019, a significant collection of James Brown clothing, memorabilia, and personal artifacts are on exhibit in downtown Augusta, Georgia at the Augusta History Museum.
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Jon Postel
Jonathan Bruce Postel (; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium.
The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. The Channel Islands' Domain Registry building was named after him in early 2016.
Postel attended Van Nuys High School, and then UCLA where he earned his B.S. (1966) as well as his M.S. (1968) in Engineering. He then went on to complete his Ph.D. there in Computer Science in 1974, with Dave Farber as his thesis advisor.
Postel started work at UCLA on 23 December 1969 as a Postgraduate Research Engineer (I) where he was involved in early work on the ARPANET. He was involved in the development of the Internet domain system and, at his instigation, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed a second set of protocols for handling data between networks, which is now known as Internet Protocol (IP). Together with Cerf and Steve Crocker, Postel worked on implementing most of the ARPANET protocols. Cerf would later become one of the principal designers of the TCP/IP standard, which works because of the sentence known as Postel's Law.
Postel worked with ARPANET until 24 August 1973 when he left to join MITRE Corporation. He assisted with Network Information Center which was being set up at SRI by Elizabeth Feinler. In March 1977, he joined the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California as a research scientist.
Postel was the RFC Editor from 1969 until his death, and wrote and edited many important RFCs, including RFC 791, RFC 792 and RFC 793, which define the basic protocols of the Internet protocol suite, and RFC 2223, "Instructions to RFC Authors". Between 1982 and 1984 Postel co-authored the RFCs which became the foundation of today's DNS (RFC 819, RFC 881, RFC 882 and RFC 920) which were joined in 1995 by RFC 1591 which he also co-wrote.
In total, he wrote or co-authored more than 200 RFCs.
Postel served on the Internet Architecture Board and its predecessors for many years. He was the Director of the names and number assignment clearinghouse, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from its inception. He was the first member of the Internet Society, and was on its Board of Trustees. He was the original and long-time .us Top-Level Domain administrator. He also managed the Los Nettos Network.
All of the above were part-time activities he assumed in conjunction with his primary position as Director of the Computer Networks Division, Division 7, of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15767
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Joyce K. Reynolds
Joyce Kathleen Reynolds (March 8, 1952 – December 28, 2015) was an American computer scientist who played a significant role in developing protocols underlying the Internet. She authored or co-authored many RFCs, most notably those introducing and specifying the Telnet, FTP, and POP protocols.
Reynolds held bachelor's and master's degrees in social sciences from the University of Southern California.
From 1983 until 1998, she worked with Jon Postel to develop early functions of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, such as the global allocation of IP addresses, Autonomous System (AS) number allocation, and management of the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS). After Postel's death in 1998, Reynolds helped supervise the transition of the IANA functions to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. She worked with ICANN in this role until 2001, while remaining an employee of ISI.
From 1987 to 2006, she served on the editorial team of the Request for Comments series, co-leading the RFC Editor function at the ISI from 1998 until 2006.
As Area Director of the User Services area, she was a member of the Internet Engineering Steering Group of the IETF from 1990 to March 1998.
With Bob Braden, she received the 2006 Postel Award in recognition of her services to the Internet. She is mentioned, along with a brief biography, in RFC 1336, "Who's Who in the Internet" (1992).
She died on December 28, 2015, due to complications from cancer.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15768
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Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne (; ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the "Voyages extraordinaires", a series of bestselling adventure novels including "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864), "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870), and "Around the World in Eighty Days" (1872).
Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation was markedly different in Anglophone regions where he had often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels have often been printed. Since the 1980s, his literary reputation has improved.
Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback.
Verne was born on 8 February 1828, on Île Feydeau, a small artificial island on the Loire River within the town of Nantes, in No. 4 Rue Olivier-de-Clisson, the house of his maternal grandmother Dame Sophie Allotte de la Fuÿe. His parents were Pierre Verne, an attorney originally from Provins, and Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe, a Nantes woman from a local family of navigators and shipowners, of distant Scottish descent. In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred meters away to No. 2 Quai Jean-Bart, where Verne's brother Paul was born the same year. Three sisters, Anna (1836), Mathilde (1839), and Marie (1842) would follow.
In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes. The teacher, Madame Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some 30 years before. Madame Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway and that he would eventually return like Robinson Crusoe from his desert island paradise. The theme of the Robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, including "The Mysterious Island" (1874), "Second Fatherland" (1900), and "The School for Robinsons" (1882).
In 1836, Verne went on to École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father. Verne quickly distinguished himself in "mémoire" (recitation from memory), geography, Greek, Latin, and singing. In the same year, 1836, Pierre Verne bought a vacation house at 29 Rue des Réformés in the village of Chantenay (now part of Nantes) on the Loire River. In his brief memoir "Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse" ("Memories of Childhood and Youth", 1890), Verne recalled a deep fascination with the river and with the many merchant vessels navigating it. He also took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Verne took joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncle's name would be memorialized in two late novels ("The Will of an Eccentric" (1900) and "Robur the Conqueror" (1886), respectively).
Legend has it that in 1839, at the age of 11, Verne secretly procured a spot as cabin boy on the three-mast ship "Coralie" with the intention of traveling to the Indies and bringing back a coral necklace for his cousin Caroline. The evening the ship set out for the Indies, it stopped first at Paimboeuf where Pierre Verne arrived just in time to catch his son and make him promise to travel "only in his imagination". It is now known that the legend is an exaggerated tale invented by Verne's first biographer, his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye, though it may have been inspired by a real incident.
In 1840, the Vernes moved again to a large apartment at No. 6 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, where the family's youngest child, Marie, was born in 1842. In the same year Verne entered another religious school, the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien, as a lay student. His unfinished novel "Un prêtre en 1839" ("A Priest in 1839"), written in his teens and the earliest of his prose works to survive, describes the seminary in disparaging terms. From 1844 to 1846, Verne and his brother were enrolled in the Lycée Royal (now the Lycée Georges-Clemenceau) in Nantes. After finishing classes in rhetoric and philosophy, he took the baccalauréat at Rennes and received the grade "Good Enough" on 29 July 1846.
By 1847, when Verne was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning "Un prêtre en 1839" and seeing two verse tragedies, "Alexandre VI" and "La Conspiration des poudres" ("The Gunpowder Plot"), to completion. However, his father took it for granted that Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice.
In 1847, Verne's father sent him to Paris, primarily to begin his studies in law school, and secondarily (according to family legend) to distance him temporarily from Nantes. His cousin Caroline, with whom he was in love, was married on 27 April 1847, to Émile Dezaunay, a man of 40, with whom she would have five children.
After a short stay in Paris, where he passed first-year law exams, Verne returned to Nantes for his father's help in preparing for the second year (provincial law students were in that era required to go to Paris to take exams). While in Nantes, he met Rose Herminie Arnaud Grossetière, a young woman one year his senior, and fell intensely in love with her. He wrote and dedicated some 30 poems to her, including "La Fille de l'air" ("The Daughter of Air"), which describes her as "blonde and enchanting / winged and transparent". His passion seems to have been reciprocated, at least for a short time, but Grossetière's parents frowned upon the idea of their daughter marrying a young student of uncertain future. They married her instead to Armand Terrien de la Haye, a rich landowner 10 years her senior, on 19 July 1848.
The sudden marriage sent Verne into deep frustration. He wrote a hallucinatory letter to his mother, apparently composed in a state of half-drunkenness, in which under pretext of a dream he described his misery. This requited but aborted love affair seems to have permanently marked the author and his work, and his novels include a significant number of young women married against their will (Gérande in "Master Zacharius" (1854), Sava in "Mathias Sandorf" (1885), Ellen in "A Floating City" (1871), etc.), to such an extent that the scholar Christian Chelebourg attributed the recurring theme to a "Herminie complex". The incident also led Verne to bear a grudge against his birthplace and Nantes society, which he criticized in his poem "La sixième ville de France" ("The Sixth City of France").
In July 1848, Verne left Nantes again for Paris, where his father intended him to finish law studies and take up law as a profession. He obtained permission from his father to rent a furnished apartment at 24 Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, which he shared with Édouard Bonamy, another student of Nantes origin. (On his 1847 Paris visit, Verne had stayed at 2 Rue Thérèse, the house of his aunt Charuel, on the Butte Saint-Roch.sfn|Compère|1997c
Verne arrived in Paris during a time of political upheaval: the French Revolution of 1848. In February, Louis Philippe I had been overthrown and had fled; on 24 February, a provisional government of the French Second Republic took power, but political demonstrations continued, and social tension remained. In June, barricades went up in Paris, and the government sent Louis-Eugène Cavaignac to crush the insurrection. Verne entered the city shortly before the election of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte as the first president of the Republic, a state of affairs that would last until the French coup of 1851 . In a letter to his family, Verne described the bombarded state of the city after the recent June Days uprising but assured them that the anniversary of Bastille Day had gone by without any significant conflict.
Verne used his family connections to make an entrance into Paris society. His uncle Francisque de Chatêaubourg introduced him into literary salons, and Verne particularly frequented those of Mme de Barrère, a friend of his mother's. While continuing his law studies, he fed his passion for the theatre, writing numerous plays. Verne later recalled: "I was greatly under the influence of Victor Hugo, indeed, very excited by reading and re-reading his works. At that time I could have recited by heart whole pages of "Notre Dame de Paris", but it was his dramatic work that most influenced me." Another source of creative stimulation came from a neighbor: living on the same floor in the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie apartment house was a young composer, Aristide Hignard, with whom Verne soon became good friends, and Verne wrote several texts for Hignard to set as chansons.
During this period, Verne's letters to his parents primarily focused on expenses and on a suddenly appearing series of violent stomach cramps, the first of many he would suffer from during his life. (Modern scholars have hypothesized that he suffered from colitis; Verne believed the illness to have been inherited from his mother's side.) Rumors of an outbreak of cholera in March 1849 exacerbated these medical concerns. Yet another health problem would strike in 1851 when Verne suffered the first of four attacks of facial paralysis. These attacks, rather than being psychosomatic, were due to an inflammation in the middle ear, though this cause remained unknown to Verne during his life.
In the same year, Verne was required to enlist in the French military, but the sortition process spared him, to his great relief. He wrote to his father: "You should already know, dear papa, what I think of the military life, and of these domestic servants in livery. … You have to abandon all dignity to perform such functions." Verne's strong antiwar sentiments, to the dismay of his father, would remain steadfast throughout his life.
Though writing profusely and frequenting the salons, Verne diligently pursued his law studies and graduated with a "licence en droit" in January 1851.
Thanks to his visits to salons, Verne came into contact in 1849 with Alexandre Dumas through the mutual acquaintance of a celebrated chirologist of the time, the Chevalier d'Arpentigny. Verne became close friends with Dumas' son, Alexandre Dumas, fils, and showed him a manuscript for a stage comedy, "Les Pailles rompues" ("The Broken Straws"). The two young men revised the play together, and Dumas, through arrangements with his father, had it produced by the Opéra-National at the Théâtre Historique in Paris, opening on 12 June 1850.
In 1851, Verne met with a fellow writer from Nantes, Pierre-Michel-François Chevalier (known as "Pitre-Chevalier"), the editor-in-chief of the magazine "Musée des familles" ("The Family Museum"). Pitre-Chevalier was looking for articles about geography, history, science, and technology, and was keen to make sure that the educational component would be made accessible to large popular audiences using a straightforward prose style or an engaging fictional story. Verne, with his delight in diligent research, especially in geography, was a natural for the job. Verne first offered him a short historical adventure story, "The First Ships of the Mexican Navy", written in the style of James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels had deeply influenced him. Pitre-Chevalier published it in July 1851, and in the same year published a second short story, "A Voyage in a Balloon"(August 1851). The latter story, with its combination of adventurous narrative, travel themes, and detailed historical research, would later be described by Verne as "the first indication of the line of novel that I was destined to follow".
Dumas fils put Verne in contact with Jules Seveste, a stage director who had taken over the directorship of the Théâtre-Historique and renamed it the Théâtre Lyrique. Seveste offered Verne the job of secretary of the theatre, with little or no salary attached. Verne accepted, using the opportunity to write and produce several comic operas written in collaboration with Hignard and the prolific librettist Michel Carré. To celebrate his employment at the Théâtre Lyrique, Verne joined with ten friends to found a bachelors' dining club, the "Onze-sans-femme" (Eleven Bachelors).
For some time, Verne's father pressed him to abandon his writing and begin a business as a lawyer. However, Verne argued in his letters that he could only find success in literature. The pressure to plan for a secure future in law reached its climax in January 1852, when his father offered Verne his own Nantes law practice. Faced with this ultimatum, Verne decided conclusively to continue his literary life and refuse the job, writing: "Am I not right to follow my own instincts? It's because I know who I am that I realize what I can be one day."
Meanwhile, Verne was spending much time at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, conducting research for his stories and feeding his passion for science and recent discoveries, especially in geography. It was in this period that Verne met the illustrious geographer and explorer Jacques Arago, who continued to travel extensively despite his blindness (he had lost his sight completely in 1837). The two men became good friends, and Arago's innovative and witty accounts of his travels led Verne toward a newly developing genre of literature: that of travel writing.
In 1852, two new pieces from Verne appeared in the "Musée des familles": "Martin Paz", a novella set in Lima, which Verne wrote in 1851 and published 10 July through 11 August 1852, and "Les Châteaux en Californie, ou, Pierre qui roule n'amasse pas mousse" ("The Castles in California, or, A Rolling Stone Gathers No Moss"), a one-act comedy full of racy double entendres. In April and May 1854, the magazine published Verne's short story "Master Zacharius", an E. T. A. Hoffmann-like fantasy featuring a sharp condemnation of scientific hubris and ambition, followed soon afterward by "A Winter Amid the Ice", a polar adventure story whose themes closely anticipated many of Verne's novels. The "Musée" also published some nonfiction popular science articles which, though unsigned, are generally attributed to Verne. Verne's work for the magazine was cut short in 1856 when he had a serious quarrel with Pitre-Chevalier and refused to continue contributing (a refusal he would maintain until 1863, when Pitre-Chevalier died, and the magazine went to new editorship).
While writing stories and articles for Pitre-Chevalier, Verne began to form the idea of inventing a new kind of novel, a "Roman de la Science" (novel of science), which would allow him to incorporate large amounts of the factual information he so enjoyed researching in the Bibliothèque. He is said to have discussed the project with the elder Alexandre Dumas, who had tried something similar with an unfinished novel, "Isaac Laquedem", and who enthusiastically encouraged Verne's project.
At the end of 1854, another outbreak of cholera led to the death of Jules Seveste, Verne's employer at the Théâtre Lyrique and by then a good friend. Though his contract only held him to a further year of service, Verne remained connected to the theatre for several years after Seveste's death, seeing additional productions to fruition. He also continued to write plays and musical comedies, most of which were not performed.
In May 1856, Verne traveled to Amiens to be the best man at the wedding of a Nantes friend, Auguste Lelarge, to an Amiens woman named Aimée du Fraysse de Viane. Verne, invited to stay with the bride's family, took to them warmly, befriending the entire household and finding himself increasingly attracted to the bride's sister, Honorine de Viane Morel, a widow aged 26 with two young children. Hoping to find a secure source of income, as well as a chance to court Morel in earnest, he jumped at her brother's offer to go into business with a broker. Verne's father was initially dubious but gave in to his son's requests for approval in November 1856. With his financial situation finally looking promising, Verne won the favor of Morel and her family, and the couple were married on 10 January 1857.
Verne plunged into his new business obligations, leaving his work at the Théâtre Lyrique and taking up a full-time job as an "agent de change" on the Paris Bourse, where he became the associate of the broker Fernand Eggly. Verne woke up early each morning so that he would have time to write, before going to the Bourse for the day's work; in the rest of his spare time, he continued to consort with the "Onze-Sans-Femme" club (all eleven of its "bachelors" had by this time gotten married). He also continued to frequent the Bibliothèque to do scientific and historical research, much of which he copied onto notecards for future use—a system he would continue for the rest of his life. According to the recollections of a colleague, Verne "did better in repartee than in business".
In July 1858, Verne and Aristide Hignard seized an opportunity offered by Hignard's brother: a sea voyage, at no charge, from Bordeaux to Liverpool and Scotland. The journey, Verne's first trip outside France, deeply impressed him, and upon his return to Paris he fictionalized his recollections to form the backbone of a semi-autobiographical novel, "Backwards to Britain" (written in the autumn and winter of 1859–1860 and not published until 1989). A second complementary voyage in 1861 took Hignard and Verne to Stockholm, from where they traveled to Christiania and through Telemark. Verne left Hignard in Denmark to return in haste to Paris, but missed the birth on 3 August 1861 of his only biological son, Michel.
Meanwhile, Verne continued work on the idea of a "Roman de la Science", which he developed in a rough draft inspired, according to his recollections, by his "love for maps and the great explorers of the world". It took shape as a story of travel across Africa and would eventually become his first published novel, "Five Weeks in a Balloon".
In 1862, through their mutual acquaintance Alfred de Bréhat, Verne came into contact with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel, and submitted to him the manuscript of his developing novel, then called "Voyage en Ballon". Hetzel, already the publisher of Balzac, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and other well-known authors, had long been planning to launch a high-quality family magazine in which entertaining fiction would combine with scientific education. He saw Verne, with his demonstrated inclination toward scrupulously researched adventure stories, as an ideal contributor for such a magazine, and accepted the novel, giving Verne suggestions for improvement. Verne made the proposed revisions within two weeks and returned to Hetzel with the final draft, now titled "Five Weeks in a Balloon". It was published by Hetzel on 31 January 1863.
To secure his services for the planned magazine, to be called the "Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation" ("Magazine of Education and Recreation"), Hetzel also drew up a long-term contract in which Verne would give him three volumes of text per year, each of which Hetzel would buy outright for a flat fee. Verne, finding both a steady salary and a sure outlet for writing at last, accepted immediately. For the rest of his lifetime, most of his novels would be serialized in Hetzel's "Magasin" before their appearance in book form, beginning with his second novel for Hetzel, "The Adventures of Captain Hatteras" (1864–65).
When "The Adventures of Captain Hatteras" was published in book form in 1866, Hetzel publicly announced his literary and educational ambitions for Verne's novels by saying in a preface that Verne's works would form a novel sequence called the "Voyages extraordinaires" ("Extraordinary Voyages" or "Extraordinary Journeys"), and that Verne's aim was "to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format that is his own, the history of the universe". Late in life, Verne confirmed that this commission had become the running theme of his novels: "My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe… And I have tried at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style. It is said that there can't be any style in a novel of adventure, but it isn't true." However, he also noted that the project was extremely ambitious: "Yes! But the Earth is very large, and life is very short! In order to leave a completed work behind, one would need to live to be at least 100 years old!"
Hetzel influenced many of Verne's novels directly, especially in the first few years of their collaboration, for Verne was initially so happy to find a publisher that he agreed to almost all of the changes Hetzel suggested. For example, when Hetzel disapproved of the original climax of "Captain Hatteras", including the death of the title character, Verne wrote an entirely new conclusion in which Hatteras survived. Hetzel also rejected Verne's next submission, "Paris in the Twentieth Century", believing its pessimistic view of the future and its condemnation of technological progress were too subversive for a family magazine. (The manuscript, believed lost for some time after Verne's death, was finally published in 1994.)
The relationship between publisher and writer changed significantly around 1869 when Verne and Hetzel were brought into conflict over the manuscript for "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Verne had initially conceived of the submariner Captain Nemo as a Polish scientist whose acts of vengeance were directed against the Russians who had killed his family during the January uprising. Hetzel, not wanting to alienate the lucrative Russian market for Verne's books, demanded that Nemo be made an enemy of the slave trade, a situation that would make him an unambiguous hero. Verne, after fighting vehemently against the change, finally invented a compromise in which Nemo's past is left mysterious. After this disagreement, Verne became notably cooler in his dealings with Hetzel, taking suggestions into consideration but often rejecting them outright.
From that point, Verne published two or more volumes a year. The most successful of these are: "Voyage au centre de la Terre" ("Journey to the Center of the Earth", 1864); "De la Terre à la Lune" ("From the Earth to the Moon", 1865); "Vingt mille lieues sous les mers" ("Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", 1869); and "Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours" ("Around the World in Eighty Days"), which first appeared in "Le Temps" in 1872. Verne could now live on his writings. But most of his wealth came from the stage adaptations of "Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours" (1874) and "Michel Strogoff" (1876), which he wrote with Adolphe d'Ennery.
In 1867, Verne bought a small boat, the "Saint-Michel", which he successively replaced with the "Saint-Michel II" and the "Saint-Michel III" as his financial situation improved. On board the "Saint-Michel III", he sailed around Europe. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the "Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation", a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in book form. His brother Paul contributed to "40th French climbing of the Mont-Blanc" and a collection of short stories – "Doctor Ox" – in 1874. Verne became wealthy and famous.
Meanwhile, Michel Verne married an actress against his father's wishes, had two children by an underage mistress and buried himself in debts. The relationship between father and son improved as Michel grew older.
Though he was raised Catholic, Verne became a deist in his later years, from about 1870 onward. Some scholars believe his deist philosophy is reflected in his novels, as they often involve the notion of God or divine providence but rarely mention the concept of Christ.
On 9 March 1886, as Verne was coming home, his twenty-six-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot at him twice with a pistol. The first bullet missed, but the second one entered Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp that could not be overcome. This incident was hushed up in the media, but Gaston spent the rest of his life in a mental asylum.
After the death of both his mother and Hetzel, Jules Verne began publishing darker works. In 1888, Verne entered politics and was elected town councilor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements and served for fifteen years.
Verne was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur in 1870. He was promoted to an Officier de la Légion d'honneur in 1892.
On 24 March 1905, while ill with diabetes, Verne died at his home in Amiens, 44 Boulevard Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). His son, Michel Verne, oversaw publication of the novels "Invasion of the Sea" and "The Lighthouse at the End of the World" after Jules's death. The "Voyages extraordinaires" series continued for several years afterwards at the same rate of two volumes a year. It was later discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, and the original versions were eventually published at the end of the 20th century by the Jules Verne Society (Société Jules Verne). In 1919, Michel Verne published The Barsac Mission (), which original drafts contained references to Esperanto, language about which his father had great interest.
In 1989, Verne's great-grandson discovered his ancestor's as-yet-unpublished novel "Paris in the Twentieth Century", which was subsequently published in 1994.
Verne's largest body of work is the "Voyages extraordinaires" series, which includes all of his novels except for the two rejected manuscripts "Paris in the Twentieth Century" and "Backwards to Britain" (published posthumously in 1994 and 1989, respectively) and for projects left unfinished at his death (many of which would be posthumously adapted or rewritten for publication by his son Michel). Verne also wrote many plays, poems, song texts, operetta libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.
After his debut under Hetzel, Verne was enthusiastically received in France by writers and scientists alike, with George Sand and Théophile Gautier among his earliest admirers. Several notable contemporary figures, from the geographer Vivien de Saint-Martin to the critic Jules Claretie, spoke highly of Verne and his works in critical and biographical notes.
However, Verne's growing popularity among readers and playgoers (due especially to the highly successful stage version of "Around the World in Eighty Days") led to a gradual change in his literary reputation. As the novels and stage productions continued to sell, many contemporary critics felt that Verne's status as a commercially popular author meant he could only be seen as a mere genre-based storyteller, rather than a serious author worthy of academic study.
This denial of formal literary status took various forms, including dismissive criticism by such writers as Émile Zola and the lack of nomination to Verne for membership in the Académie Française, and was recognized by Verne himself, who said in a late interview: "The great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature." To Verne, who considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal", this critical dismissal on the basis of literary ideology could only be seen as the ultimate snub.
This bifurcation of Verne as a popular genre writer but a critical "persona non grata" continued after his death, with early biographies (including one by Verne's own niece, Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe) focusing on error-filled and embroidered hagiography of Verne as a popular figure rather than on Verne's actual working methods or his output. Meanwhile, sales of Verne's novels in their original unabridged versions dropped markedly even in Verne's home country, with abridged versions aimed directly at children taking their place.
However, the decades after Verne's death also saw the rise in France of the "Jules Verne cult", a steadily growing group of scholars and young writers who took Verne's works seriously as literature and willingly noted his influence on their own pioneering works. Some of the cult founded the Société Jules Verne, the first academic society for Verne scholars; many others became highly respected avant garde and surrealist literary figures in their own right. Their praise and analyses, emphasizing Verne's stylistic innovations and enduring literary themes, proved highly influential for literary studies to come.
In the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in large part to a sustained wave of serious literary study from well-known French scholars and writers, Verne's reputation skyrocketed in France. Roland Barthes' seminal essay "Nautilus et Bateau Ivre" ("The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat") was influential in its exegesis of the "Voyages extraordinares" as a purely literary text, while book-length studies by such figures as Marcel Moré and Jean Chesneaux considered Verne from a multitude of thematic vantage points.
French literary journals devoted entire issues to Verne and his work, with essays by such imposing literary figures as Michel Butor, Georges Borgeaud, Marcel Brion, Pierre Versins, Michel Foucault, René Barjavel, Marcel Lecomte, Francis Lacassin, and Michel Serres; meanwhile, Verne's entire published opus returned to print, with unabridged and illustrated editions of his works printed by Livre de Poche and Éditions Rencontre. The wave reached its climax in Verne's sesquicentennial year 1978, when he was made the subject of an academic colloquium at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, and "Journey to the Center of the Earth" was accepted for the French university system's Agrégation reading list. Since these events, Verne has been consistently recognized in Europe as a legitimate member of the French literary canon, with academic studies and new publications steadily continuing.
Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries has been considerably slower in changing. Throughout the 20th century, most Anglophone scholars dismissed Verne as a genre writer for children and a naïve proponent of science and technology (despite strong evidence to the contrary on both counts), thus finding him more interesting as a technological "prophet" or as a subject of comparison to English-language writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells than as a topic of literary study in his own right. This narrow view of Verne has undoubtedly been influenced by the poor-quality English translations and very loosely adapted Hollywood film versions through which most American and British readers have discovered Verne. However, since the mid-1980s a considerable number of serious English-language studies and translations have appeared, suggesting that a rehabilitation of Verne's Anglophone reputation may currently be underway.
Translation of Verne into English began in 1852, when Verne's short story "A Voyage in a Balloon" (1851) was published in the American journal "Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art" in a translation by Anne T. Wilbur. Translation of his novels began in 1869 with William Lackland's translation of "Five Weeks in a Balloon" (originally published in 1863), and continued steadily throughout Verne's lifetime, with publishers and hired translators often working in great haste to rush his most lucrative titles into English-language print. Unlike Hetzel, who targeted all ages with his publishing strategies for the "Voyages extraordinaires", the British and American publishers of Verne chose to market his books almost exclusively to young audiences; this business move, with its implication that Verne could be treated purely as a children's author, had a long-lasting effect on Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries.
These early English-language translations have been widely criticized for their extensive textual omissions, errors, and alterations, and are not considered adequate representations of Verne's actual novels. The British writer Adam Roberts, in an essay for "The Guardian" titled "Jules Verne deserves a better translation service", commented: "I'd always liked reading Jules Verne and I've read most of his novels; but it wasn't until recently that I really understood I hadn't been reading Jules Verne at all... It's a bizarre situation for a world-famous writer to be in. Indeed, I can't think of a major writer who has been so poorly served by translation."
Similarly, the American novelist Michael Crichton observed:
Since 1965, a considerable number of more accurate English translations of Verne have appeared. However, the highly criticized older translations continue to be republished, due to their public domain status and in many cases their easy availability in online sources.
The relationship between Verne's "Voyages extraordinaires" and the literary genre science fiction is a complex one. Verne, like H. G. Wells, is frequently cited as one of the founders of the genre, and his profound influence on its development is indisputable; however, many earlier writers, such as Lucian of Samosata, Voltaire, and Mary Shelley, have also been cited as creators of science fiction, an unavoidable ambiguity arising from the vague definition and history of the genre.
A primary issue at the heart of the dispute is the question of whether Verne's works count as science fiction to begin with. Maurice Renard claimed that Verne "never wrote a single sentence of scientific-marvelous". Verne himself argued repeatedly in interviews that his novels were not meant to be read as scientific, saying "I have invented nothing". His own goal was rather to "depict the earth [and] at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style", as he pointed out in an example:
Closely related to Verne's science-fiction reputation is the often-repeated claim that he is a "prophet" of scientific progress, and that many of his novels involve elements of technology that were fantastic for his day but later became commonplace. These claims have a long history, especially in America, but the modern scholarly consensus is that such claims of prophecy are heavily exaggerated. In a 1961 article critical of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"s scientific accuracy, Theodore L. Thomas speculated that Verne's storytelling skill and readers misremembering a book they read as children caused people to "remember things from it that are not there. The impression that the novel contains valid scientific prediction seems to grow as the years roll by". As with science fiction, Verne himself flatly denied that he was a futuristic prophet, saying that any connection between scientific developments and his work was "mere coincidence" and attributing his indisputable scientific accuracy to his extensive research: "even before I began writing stories, I always took numerous notes out of every book, newspaper, magazine, or scientific report that I came across."
Verne's novels have had a wide influence on both literary and scientific works; writers known to have been influenced by Verne include Marcel Aymé, Roland Barthes, René Barjavel, Michel Butor, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, François Mauriac, Raymond Roussel, Claude Roy, Julio Cortázar, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Jean-Paul Sartre, while scientists and explorers who acknowledged Verne's inspiration have included Richard E. Byrd, Yuri Gagarin, Simon Lake, Hubert Lyautey, Guglielmo Marconi, Fridtjof Nansen, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Wernher von Braun, and Jack Parsons. Verne is credited with helping inspire the steampunk genre, a literary and social movement that glamorizes science fiction based on 19th-century technology.
Ray Bradbury summed up Verne's influence on literature and science the world over by saying: "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne."
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Johannes Rau
Johannes Rau (; 16 January 193127 January 2006) was a German politician (SPD). He was President of Germany from 1 July 1999 until 30 June 2004 and Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 20 September 1978 to 9 June 1998. In the latter role, he also served as President of the Bundesrat in 1982/83 and in 1994/1995.
Rau was born in the Barmen part of Wuppertal, Rhine Province, as the third of five children. His family was strongly Protestant. As a schoolboy, Rau was active in the Confessing Church, a circle of the German Protestant Church which resisted Nazism.
Rau left school in 1949 and worked as a publisher, especially with the Protestant Youth Publishing House.
Rau was a member of the All-German People's Party (GVP), which was founded by Gustav Heinemann. The party was known for proposing German reunification from 1952 until it was disbanded in 1957.
In 1958, the pacifist Rau and his political mentor, Gustav Heinemann, joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), where he was active in the Wuppertal chapter. He served as deputy chairman of the SPD party of Wuppertal and was elected later on to the City Council (1964–1978), where he served as chairman of the SPD Group (1964–1967) and later as Mayor (1969–1970).
In 1958, Rau was elected for the first time as member of the "Landtag" (state parliament) of North Rhine-Westphalia. In 1967, he became chairman of the SPD fraction in the Landtag, and in 1970, he was Minister of Science and Education in the cabinet of Minister President Heinz Kühn. He soon gained a reputation as a reformer. As part of the mass education campaign of the 1970s, he founded five universities, each at different sites, in North Rhine-Westphalia and initiated Germany's first distance learning university at Hagen (modelled on the "Open University").
In 1977, Rau became Chairman of the North Rhine-Westphalia SPD and, in 1978, Minister President of the state, which he remained until 1998, with four successful elections for the SPD, which became strongest party in the Landtag each time and gained an absolute majority three times, in 1980, 1985, 1990 and finally 1995. From 1995 onwards, Rau led an SPD-Greens coalition in North Rhine-Westphalia. Rau twice served as President of the Bundesrat in 1982/83 and 1994/95.
In 1987, Rau was his party's candidate to become chancellor of Germany for the SPD, but he lost the elections against Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democrats (CDU). In 1994, Rau was a candidate to become President of Germany but lost to Roman Herzog.
In 1998, Rau stepped down from his positions as SPD chairman and Minister President, and on 23 May 1999, he was elected President of Germany by the Federal Assembly of Germany to succeed Roman Herzog (CDU). On 1 July 2004, he was succeeded by Horst Köhler. In common with all other Federal presidents except for Heinemann, who had not wished to be seen off in this manner, Rau was honored by a Großer Zapfenstreich which, at his request, included the hymn "Jesus bleibet meine Freude" (literally "that Jesus remain my Joy", but commonly Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring).
During 2000, Rau became the first German head of state to address the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in German. The controversial step prompted some Israeli delegates to walk out. However, Israeli President Moshe Katsav supported and praised him for bridging the gap between the two states. Rau had a deep and lifelong commitment to bringing reconciliation between Germany and its past.
Rau had a long history of heart disease and died 11 days after his 75th birthday on 27 January 2006. The funeral took place on 7 February following a funeral act of state on the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin in the closest of family and friends.
The maxim of Rau was "to reconcile, not divide".
As his personal motto, Rau adopted the Confessing Church dictum "teneo, quia teneor" (I hold because I am held).
In his acceptance speech after his election, Rau claimed "A patriot I will be" because "a patriot is someone who loves his fatherland, a nationalist is someone who despises the fatherlands of the others". The quote can be attributed to the French writer Romain Gary.
Rau was awarded fifteen honorary doctorates.
In 2001, he received the Leo Baeck Medal for his humanitarian work promoting tolerance and social justice.
Rau was known as a practising Christian (and sometimes titled , "Brother John", to ridicule his intense Christian position; however, he sometimes used this term himself). He held lay positions in, and was a member of, the Synod of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland, a member church of the Evangelical Church in Germany.
On 9 August 1982, Rau married the political scientist, Christina Delius (born 1956). Christina Rau is a granddaughter of her husband's mentor, Gustav Heinemann, former President of Germany. The couple had three children: Anna Christina, born 1983, Philip Immanuel, born 1985 and Laura Helene, born 1986.
Since 1995 Rau was aware of his dangerous aneurysm in the abdominal aorta, but declined an operation out of respect for his office and the upcoming election as president. On 23 July 2000 the operation took place at the University Hospital of Essen. On 18 August 2004, he had to undergo serious heart surgery, in which an artificial heart valve was inserted. Only two months later (19 October 2004) a hematoma in the abdominal cavity was surgically removed.
After leaving office, Rau lived with his family in the federal capital, Berlin. However, they also kept a house in Wuppertal.
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Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels (; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted associates, and was known for his skills in public speaking and his deeply virulent antisemitism, which was evident in his publicly voiced views. He advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust.
Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a Doctor of Philology degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1921. He joined the Nazi Party in 1924, and worked with Gregor Strasser in their northern branch. He was appointed "Gauleiter" (district leader) for Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933, Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry quickly gained and exerted control over the news media, arts, and information in Germany. He was particularly adept at using the relatively new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes. Topics for party propaganda included antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches, and (after the start of the Second World War) attempting to shape morale.
In 1943, Goebbels began to pressure Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Hitler finally appointed him as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War on 23 July 1944, whereby Goebbels undertook largely unsuccessful measures to increase the number of people available for armaments manufacture and the Wehrmacht.
As the war drew to a close and Nazi Germany faced defeat, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children joined him in Berlin. They moved into the underground "Vorbunker", part of Hitler's underground bunker complex, on 22 April 1945. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler's will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany; he served one day in this post. The following day, Goebbels and his wife committed suicide, after poisoning their six children with cyanide.
Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on 29 October 1897 in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach near Düsseldorf. Both of his parents were Roman Catholics with modest family backgrounds. His father Fritz was a German factory clerk; his mother Katharina ("née" Odenhausen) was born to Dutch and German parents in the Netherlands. Goebbels had five siblings: Konrad (1893–1947), Hans (1895–1949), Maria (1896–1896), Elisabeth (1901–1915), and Maria (1910–1949), who married the German filmmaker Max W. Kimmich in 1938. In 1932, Goebbels published a pamphlet of his family tree to refute the rumours that his grandmother was of Jewish ancestry.
During childhood, Goebbels suffered from ill health, which included a long bout of inflammation of the lungs. He had a deformed right foot that turned inwards, due to a congenital deformity. It was thicker and shorter than his left foot. He underwent a failed operation to correct it just prior to starting grammar school. Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of his shortened leg and walked with a limp. He was rejected for military service in World War I because of this deformity.
Goebbels was educated at a "Gymnasium", where he completed his "Abitur" (university entrance examination) in 1917. He was the top student of his class and was given the traditional honour to speak at the awards ceremony. His parents initially hoped that he would become a Catholic priest, and Goebbels seriously considered it. He studied literature and history at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg, Freiburg, and Munich, aided by a scholarship from the Albertus Magnus Society. By this time Goebbels had begun to distance himself from the church.
Historians, including Richard J. Evans and Roger Manvell, speculate that Goebbels' lifelong pursuit of women may have been in compensation for his physical disability. At Freiburg, he met and fell in love with Anka Stalherm, who was three years his senior. She went on to Würzburg to continue school, as did Goebbels. In 1921 he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, "Michael", a three-part work of which only Parts I and III have survived. Goebbels felt he was writing his "own story". Antisemitic content and material about a charismatic leader may have been added by Goebbels shortly before the book was published in 1929 by Eher-Verlag, the publishing house of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers' Party; NSDAP). By 1920, the relationship with Anka was over. The break-up filled Goebbels with thoughts of suicide.
At the University of Heidelberg, Goebbels wrote his doctoral thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz, a minor 19th-century romantic dramatist. He had hoped to write his thesis under the supervision of Friedrich Gundolf, a literary historian. It did not seem to bother Goebbels that Gundolf was Jewish. Gundolf was no longer teaching, so directed Goebbels to associate professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg. Waldberg, also Jewish, recommended Goebbels write his thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz. After submitting the thesis and passing his oral examination, Goebbels earned his PhD in 1921. By 1940 he had written 14 books.
Goebbels returned home and worked as a private tutor. He also found work as a journalist and was published in the local newspaper. His writing during that time reflected his growing antisemitism and dislike for modern culture. In the summer of 1922, he met and began a love affair with Else Janke, a schoolteacher. After she revealed to him that she was half-Jewish, Goebbels stated the "enchantment [was] ruined." Nevertheless, he continued to see her on and off until 1927.
He continued for several years to try to become a published author. His diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued for the rest of his life, provided an outlet for his desire to write. The lack of income from his literary works (he wrote two plays in 1923, neither of which sold) forced him to take employment as a caller on the stock exchange and as a bank clerk in Cologne, a job he detested. He was dismissed from the bank in August 1923 and returned to Rheydt. During this period, he read avidly and was influenced by the works of Oswald Spengler, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the British-born German writer whose book "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" (1899) was one of the standard works of the extreme right in Germany. He also began to study the "social question" and read the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, August Bebel and Gustav Noske. According to German historian Peter Longerich, Goebbels's diary entries from late 1923 to early 1924 reflected the writings of a man who was isolated, preoccupied with "religious-philosophical" issues, and lacked a sense of direction. Diary entries of mid-December 1923 forward show Goebbels was moving towards the "Völkisch" nationalist movement.
Goebbels first took an interest in Adolf Hitler and Nazism in 1924. In February 1924, Hitler's trial for treason began in the wake of his failed attempt to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch of 8–9 November 1923. The trial attracted widespread press coverage and gave Hitler a platform for propaganda. Hitler was sentenced to five years prison, but was released on 20 December 1924, after serving just over a year. Goebbels was drawn to the NSDAP mostly because of Hitler's charisma and commitment to his beliefs. He joined the NSDAP around this time, becoming member number 8762. In late 1924, Goebbels offered his services to Karl Kaufmann, who was "Gauleiter" (NSDAP district leader) for the Rhine-Ruhr District. Kaufmann put him in touch with Gregor Strasser, a leading Nazi organiser in northern Germany, who hired him to work on their weekly newspaper and undertake secretarial work for the regional party offices. He was also put to work as party speaker and representative for Rhineland-Westphalia. Members of Strasser's northern branch of the NSDAP, including Goebbels, had a more socialist outlook than the rival Hitler group in Munich. Strasser disagreed with Hitler on many parts of the party platform, and in November 1926 began working on a revision.
Hitler viewed Strasser's actions as a threat to his authority, and summoned 60 "Gauleiters" and party leaders, including Goebbels, to a special conference in Bamberg, in Streicher's "Gau" of Franconia, where he gave a two-hour speech repudiating Strasser's new political programme. Hitler was opposed to the socialist leanings of the northern wing, stating it would mean "political bolshevization of Germany." Further, there would be "no princes, only Germans," and a legal system with no "Jewish system of exploitation ... for plundering of our people." The future would be secured by acquiring land, not through expropriation of the estates of the former nobility, but through colonising territories to the east. Goebbels was horrified by Hitler's characterisation of socialism as "a Jewish creation" and his assertion that a Nazi government would not expropriate private property. He wrote in his diary: "I no longer fully believe in Hitler. That's the terrible thing: my inner support has been taken away."
After reading Hitler's book "Mein Kampf", Goebbels found himself agreeing with Hitler's assertion of a "Jewish doctrine of Marxism". In February 1926 Goebbels gave a speech titled "Lenin or Hitler?" in which he asserted that communism or Marxism could not save the German people, but he believed it would cause a "socialist nationalist state" to arise in Russia. In 1926, Goebbels published a pamphlet titled ""Nazi-Sozi"" which attempted to explain how National Socialism differed from Marxism.
In hopes of winning over the opposition, Hitler arranged meetings in Munich with the three Greater Ruhr "Gau" leaders, including Goebbels. Goebbels was impressed when Hitler sent his own car to meet them at the railway station. That evening Hitler and Goebbels both gave speeches at a beer hall rally. The following day, Hitler offered his hand in reconciliation to the three men, encouraging them to put their differences behind them. Goebbels capitulated completely, offering Hitler his total loyalty. He wrote in his diary: "I love him ... He has thought through everything," "Such a sparkling mind can be my leader. I bow to the greater one, the political genius." He later wrote: "Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius." As a result of the Bamberg and Munich meetings, Strasser's new draft of the party programme was discarded. The original National Socialist Program of 1920 was retained unchanged, and Hitler's position as party leader was greatly strengthened.
At Hitler's invitation, Goebbels spoke at party meetings in Munich and at the annual Party Congress, held in Weimar in 1926. For the following year's event, Goebbels was involved in the planning for the first time. He and Hitler arranged for the rally to be filmed. Receiving praise for doing well at these events led Goebbels to shape his political ideas to match Hitler's, and to admire and idolise him even more.
Goebbels was first offered the position of party "Gauleiter" for the Berlin section in August 1926. He travelled to Berlin in mid-September and by the middle of October accepted the position. Thus Hitler's plan to divide and dissolve the northwestern "Gauleiters" group that Goebbels had served in under Strasser was successful. Hitler gave Goebbels great authority over the area, allowing him to determine the course for organisation and leadership for the "Gau". Goebbels was given control over the local "Sturmabteilung" (SA) and "Schutzstaffel" (SS) and answered only to Hitler. The party membership numbered about 1,000 when Goebbels arrived, and he reduced it to a core of 600 of the most active and promising members. To raise money, he instituted membership fees and began charging admission to party meetings. Aware of the value of publicity (both positive and negative), he deliberately provoked beer-hall battles and street brawls, including violent attacks on the Communist Party of Germany. Goebbels adapted recent developments in commercial advertising to the political sphere, including the use of catchy slogans and subliminal cues. His new ideas for poster design included using large type, red ink, and cryptic headers that encouraged the reader to examine the fine print to determine the meaning.
Like Hitler, Goebbels practised his public speaking skills in front of a mirror. Meetings were preceded by ceremonial marches and singing, and the venues were decorated with party banners. His entrance (almost always late) was timed for maximum emotional impact. Goebbels usually meticulously planned his speeches ahead of time, using pre-planned and choreographed inflection and gestures, but he was also able to improvise and adapt his presentation to make a good connection with his audience. He used loudspeakers, decorative flames, uniforms, and marches to attract attention to speeches.
Goebbels' tactic of using provocation to bring attention to the NSDAP, along with violence at the public party meetings and demonstrations, led the Berlin police to ban the NSDAP from the city on 5 May 1927. Violent incidents continued, including young Nazis randomly attacking Jews in the streets. Goebbels was subjected to a public speaking ban until the end of October. During this period, he founded the newspaper "Der Angriff" ("The Attack") as a propaganda vehicle for the Berlin area, where few supported the party. It was a modern-style newspaper with an aggressive tone; 126 libel suits were pending against Goebbels at one point. To his disappointment, circulation was initially only 2,000. Material in the paper was highly anti-communist and antisemitic. Among the paper's favourite targets was the Jewish Deputy Chief of the Berlin Police Bernhard Weiß. Goebbels gave him the derogatory nickname "Isidore" and subjected him to a relentless campaign of Jew-baiting in the hope of provoking a crackdown he could then exploit. Goebbels continued to try to break into the literary world, with a revised version of his book "Michael" finally being published, and the unsuccessful production of two of his plays ("Der Wanderer" and "Die Saat" ("The Seed")). The latter was his final attempt at playwriting. During this period in Berlin he had relationships with many women, including his old flame Anka Stalherm, who was now married and had a small child. He was quick to fall in love, but easily tired of a relationship and moved on to someone new. He worried too about how a committed personal relationship might interfere with his career.
The ban on the NSDAP was lifted before the Reichstag elections on 20 May 1928. The NSDAP lost nearly 100,000 voters and earned only 2.6 per cent of the vote nationwide. Results in Berlin were even worse, where they attained only 1.4 per cent of the vote. Goebbels was one of 12 NSDAP members to gain election to the Reichstag. This gave him immunity from prosecution for a long list of outstanding charges, including a three-week jail sentence he received in April for insulting the deputy police chief Weiß. The Reichstag changed the immunity regulations in February 1931, and Goebbels was forced to pay fines for libellous material he had placed in "Der Angriff" over the course of the previous year.
In his newspaper "Berliner Arbeiterzeitung" ("Berlin Workers Newspaper"), Gregor Strasser was highly critical of Goebbels' failure to attract the urban vote. However, the party as a whole did much better in rural areas, attracting as much as 18 per cent of the vote in some regions. This was partly because Hitler had publicly stated just prior to the election that Point 17 of the party programme, which mandated the expropriation of land without compensation, would apply only to Jewish speculators and not private landholders. After the election, the party refocused their efforts to try to attract still more votes in the agricultural sector. In May, shortly after the election, Hitler considered appointing Goebbels as party propaganda chief. But he hesitated, as he worried that the removal of Gregor Strasser from the post would lead to a split in the party. Goebbels considered himself well suited to the position, and began to formulate ideas about how propaganda could be used in schools and the media.
By 1930 Berlin was the party's second-strongest base of support after Munich. That year the violence between the Nazis and communists led to local SA troop leader Horst Wessel being shot by two members of the Communist Party of Germany. He later died in hospital. Exploiting Wessel's death, Goebbels turned him into a martyr for the Nazi movement. He officially declared Wessel's march "Die Fahne hoch" ("Raise the flag"), renamed as the "Horst-Wessel-Lied", to be the NSDAP anthem.
The Great Depression greatly impacted Germany and by 1930 there was a dramatic increase in unemployment. During this time, the Strasser brothers started publishing a new daily newspaper in Berlin, the "Nationaler Sozialist". Like their other publications, it conveyed the brothers' own brand of Nazism, including nationalism, anti-capitalism, social reform, and anti-Westernism. Goebbels complained vehemently about the rival Strasser newspapers to Hitler, and admitted that their success was causing his own Berlin newspapers to be "pushed to the wall". In late April 1930, Hitler publicly and firmly announced his opposition to Gregor Strasser and appointed Goebbels to replace him as Reich leader of NSDAP propaganda. One of Goebbels' first acts was to ban the evening edition of the "Nationaler Sozialist". Goebbels was also given control of other Nazi papers across the country, including the party's national newspaper, the "Völkischer Beobachter" ("People's Observer"). He still had to wait until 3 July for Otto Strasser and his supporters to announce they were leaving the NSDAP. Upon receiving the news, Goebbels was relieved the "crisis" with the Strassers was finally over and glad that Otto Strasser had lost all power.
The rapid deterioration of the economy led to the resignation on 27 March 1930 of the coalition government that had been elected in 1928. A new cabinet was formed, and Paul von Hindenburg used his power as president to govern via emergency decrees. He appointed Heinrich Brüning as chancellor. Goebbels took charge of the NSDAP's national campaign for Reichstag elections called for 14 September 1930. Campaigning was undertaken on a huge scale, with thousands of meetings and speeches held all over the country. Hitler's speeches focused on blaming the country's economic woes on the Weimar Republic, particularly its adherence to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which required war reparations that had proven devastating to the German economy. He proposed a new German society based on race and national unity. The resulting success took even Hitler and Goebbels by surprise: the party received 6.5 million votes nationwide and took 107 seats in the Reichstag, making it the second largest party in the country.
In late 1930 Goebbels met Magda Quandt, a divorcée who had joined the party a few months earlier. She worked as a volunteer in the party offices in Berlin, helping Goebbels organise his private papers. Her flat on the "Reichskanzlerplatz" soon became a favourite meeting place for Hitler and other NSDAP officials. Goebbels and Quandt married on 19 December 1931.
For two further elections held in 1932, Goebbels organised massive campaigns that included rallies, parades, speeches, and Hitler travelling around the country by aeroplane with the slogan "the Führer over Germany". Goebbels wrote in his diary that the Nazis must gain power and exterminate Marxism. He undertook numerous speaking tours during these election campaigns and had some of their speeches published on gramophone records and as pamphlets. Goebbels was also involved in the production of a small collection of silent films that could be shown at party meetings, though they did not yet have enough equipment to widely use this medium. Many of Goebbels' campaign posters used violent imagery such as a giant half-clad male destroying political opponents or other perceived enemies such as "International High Finance". His propaganda characterised the opposition as "November criminals", "Jewish wire-pullers", or a communist threat. Support for the party continued to grow, but neither of these elections led to a majority government. In an effort to stabilise the country and improve economic conditions, Hindenburg appointed Hitler as Reich chancellor on 30 January 1933.
To celebrate Hitler's appointment as chancellor, Goebbels organised a torchlight parade in Berlin on the night of 30 January of an estimated 60,000 men, many in the uniforms of the SA and SS. The spectacle was covered by a live state radio broadcast, with commentary by longtime party member and future Minister of Aviation Hermann Göring. Goebbels was disappointed not to be given a post in Hitler's new cabinet. Bernhard Rust was appointed as Minister of Culture, the post that Goebbels was expecting to receive. Like other NSDAP officials, Goebbels had to deal with Hitler's leadership style of giving contradictory orders to his subordinates, while placing them into positions where their duties and responsibilities overlapped. In this way, Hitler fostered distrust, competition, and infighting among his subordinates to consolidate and maximise his own power. The NSDAP took advantage of the Reichstag fire of 27 February 1933, with Hindenburg passing the Reichstag Fire Decree the following day at Hitler's urging. This was the first of several pieces of legislation that dismantled democracy in Germany and put a totalitarian dictatorship—headed by Hitler—in its place. On 5 March, yet another Reichstag election took place, the last to be held before the defeat of the Nazis at the end of the Second World War. While the NSDAP increased their number of seats and percentage of the vote, it was not the landslide expected by the party leadership. Goebbels finally received Hitler's appointment to the cabinet, officially becoming head of the newly created Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda on 14 March.
The role of the new ministry, which set up its offices in the 18th-century Ordenspalais across from the Reich Chancellery, was to centralise Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural and intellectual life. Goebbels hoped to increase popular support of the party from the 37 per cent achieved at the last free election held in Germany on 25 March 1933 to 100 per cent support. An unstated goal was to present to other nations the impression that the NSDAP had the full and enthusiastic backing of the entire population. One of Goebbels' first productions was staging the Day of Potsdam, a ceremonial passing of power from Hindenburg to Hitler, held in Potsdam on 21 March. He composed the text of Hitler's decree authorising the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, held on 1 April. Later that month, Goebbels travelled back to Rheydt, where he was given a triumphal reception. The townsfolk lined the main street, which had been renamed in his honour. On the following day, Goebbels was declared a local hero.
Goebbels converted the 1 May holiday from a celebration of workers' rights (observed as such especially by the communists) into a day celebrating the NSDAP. In place of the usual ad hoc labour celebrations, he organised a huge party rally held at Tempelhof Field in Berlin. The following day, all trade union offices in the country were forcibly disbanded by the SA and SS, and the Nazi-run German Labour Front was created to take their place. "We are the masters of Germany," he commented in his diary entry of 3 May. Less than two weeks later, he gave a speech at the Nazi book burning in Berlin on 10 May, a ceremony he suggested.
Meanwhile, the NSDAP began passing laws to marginalise Jews and remove them from German society. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, passed on 7 April 1933, forced all non-Aryans to retire from the legal profession and civil service. Similar legislation soon deprived Jewish members of other professions of their right to practise. The first Nazi concentration camps (initially created to house political dissenters) were founded shortly after Hitler seized power. In a process termed "Gleichschaltung" (co-ordination), the NSDAP proceeded to rapidly bring all aspects of life under control of the party. All civilian organisations, including agricultural groups, volunteer organisations, and sports clubs, had their leadership replaced with Nazi sympathisers or party members. By June 1933, virtually the only organisations not in the control of the NSDAP were the army and the churches. In a move to manipulate Germany's middle class and shape popular opinion, the regime passed on 4 October 1933 the "Schriftleitergesetz" (Editor's Law), which became the cornerstone of the Nazi Party's control of the popular press. Modeled to some extent on the system in Benito Mussolini's Italy, the law defined a "Schriftleiter" as anyone who wrote, edited, or selected texts and/or illustrated material for serial publication. Individuals selected for this position were chosen based on experiential, educational, and racial criteria. The law required journalists to "regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life and as a conception of government."
At the end of June 1934, top officials of the SA and opponents of the regime, including Gregor Strasser, were arrested and killed in a purge later called the Night of Long Knives. Goebbels was present at the arrest of SA leader Ernst Röhm in Munich. On 2 August 1934, President von Hindenburg died. In a radio broadcast, Goebbels announced that the offices of president and chancellor had been combined, and Hitler had been formally named as "Führer und Reichskanzler" (leader and chancellor).
The propaganda ministry was organised into seven departments: administration and legal; mass rallies, public health, youth, and race; radio; national and foreign press; films and film censorship; art, music, and theatre; and protection against counter-propaganda, both foreign and domestic. Goebbels's style of leadership was tempestuous and unpredictable. He would suddenly change direction and shift his support between senior associates; he was a difficult boss and liked to berate his staff in public. Goebbels was successful at his job, however; "Life" wrote in 1938 that "[p]ersonally he likes nobody, is liked by nobody, and runs the most efficient Nazi department." John Gunther wrote in 1940 that Goebbels "is the cleverest of all the Nazis", but could not succeed Hitler because "everybody hates him".
The Reich Film Chamber, which all members of the film industry were required to join, was created in June 1933. Goebbels promoted the development of films with a Nazi slant, and ones that contained subliminal or overt propaganda messages. Under the auspices of the "Reichskulturkammer" (Reich Chamber of Culture), created in September, Goebbels added additional sub-chambers for the fields of broadcasting, fine arts, literature, music, the press, and the theatre. As in the film industry, anyone wishing to pursue a career in these fields had to be a member of the corresponding chamber. In this way anyone whose views were contrary to the regime could be excluded from working in their chosen field and thus silenced. In addition, journalists (now considered employees of the state) were required to prove Aryan descent back to the year 1800, and if married, the same requirement applied to the spouse. Members of any chamber were not allowed to leave the country for their work without prior permission of their chamber. A committee was established to censor books, and works could not be re-published unless they were on the list of approved works. Similar regulations applied to other fine arts and entertainment; even cabaret performances were censored. Many German artists and intellectuals left Germany in the pre-war years rather than work under these restrictions.
Goebbels was particularly interested in controlling the radio, which was then still a fairly new mass medium. Sometimes under protest from individual states (particularly Prussia, headed by Göring), Goebbels gained control of radio stations nationwide, and placed them under the "Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft" (German National Broadcasting Corporation) in July 1934. Manufacturers were urged by Goebbels to produce inexpensive home receivers, called "Volksempfänger" (people's receiver), and by 1938 nearly ten million sets had been sold. Loudspeakers were placed in public areas, factories, and schools, so that important party broadcasts would be heard live by nearly all Germans. On 2 September 1939 (the day after the start of the war), Goebbels and the Council of Ministers proclaimed it illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Disseminating news from foreign broadcasts could result in the death penalty. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and later Minister for Armaments and War Production, later said the regime "made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought."
A major focus of Nazi propaganda was Hitler himself, who was glorified as a heroic and infallible leader and became the focus of a cult of personality. Much of this was spontaneous, but some was stage-managed as part of Goebbels' propaganda work. Adulation of Hitler was the focus of the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, where his moves were carefully choreographed. The rally was the subject of the film "Triumph of the Will", one of several Nazi propaganda films directed by Leni Riefenstahl. It won the Gold Medal at the 1935 Venice Film Festival. At the 1935 Nazi party congress rally at Nuremberg, Goebbels declared that "Bolshevism is the declaration of war by Jewish-led international subhumans against culture itself."
Goebbels was involved in planning the staging of the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in Berlin. It was around this time that he met and started having an affair with the actress Lída Baarová, whom he continued to see until 1938. A major project in 1937 was the Degenerate Art Exhibition, organised by Goebbels, which ran in Munich from July to November. The exhibition proved wildly popular, attracting over two million visitors. A degenerate music exhibition took place the following year. Meanwhile, Goebbels was disappointed by the lack of quality in the National Socialist artwork, films, and literature.
In 1933, Hitler signed the "Reichskonkordat" (Reich Concordat), a treaty with the Vatican that required the regime to honour the independence of Catholic institutions and prohibited clergy from involvement in politics. However, the regime continued to target the Christian churches and to try to weaken their influence. Throughout 1935 and 1936, hundreds of clergy and nuns were arrested, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or sexual offences. Goebbels widely publicised the trials in his propaganda campaigns, showing the cases in the worst possible light. Restrictions were placed on public meetings, and Catholic publications faced censorship. Catholic schools were required to reduce religious instruction and crucifixes were removed from state buildings. Hitler often vacillated on whether or not the "Kirchenkampf" (church struggle) should be a priority, but his frequent inflammatory comments on the issue were enough to convince Goebbels to intensify his work on the issue; in February 1937 he stated he wanted to eliminate the Protestant church.
In response to the persecution, Pope Pius XI had the ""Mit brennender Sorge"" ("With Burning Concern") Encyclical smuggled into Germany for Passion Sunday 1937 and read from every pulpit. It denounced the systematic hostility of the regime toward the church. In response, Goebbels renewed the regime's crackdown and propaganda against Catholics. His speech of 28 May in Berlin in front of 20,000 party members, which was also broadcast on the radio, attacked the Catholic church as morally corrupt. As a result of the propaganda campaign, enrolment in denominational schools dropped sharply, and by 1939 all such schools were disbanded or converted to public facilities. Harassment and threats of imprisonment led the clergy to be much more cautious in their criticism of the regime. Partly out of foreign policy concerns, Hitler ordered a scaling back of the church struggle by the end of July 1937.
As early as February 1933, Hitler announced that rearmament must be undertaken, albeit clandestinely at first, as to do so was in violation of the Versailles Treaty. A year later he told his military leaders that 1942 was the target date for going to war in the east. Goebbels was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Hitler aggressively pursuing Germany's expansionist policies sooner rather than later. At the time of the Reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, Goebbels summed up his general attitude in his diary: "[N]ow is the time for action. Fortune favors the brave! He who dares nothing wins nothing." In the lead-up to the Sudetenland crisis in 1938, Goebbels took the initiative time and again to use propaganda to whip up sympathy for the Sudeten Germans while campaigning against the Czech government. Still, Goebbels was well aware there was a growing "war panic" in Germany and so by July had the press conduct propaganda efforts at a lower level of intensity. After the western powers acceded to Hitler's demands concerning Czechoslovakia in 1938, Goebbels soon redirected his propaganda machine against Poland. From May onwards, he orchestrated a campaign against Poland, fabricating stories about atrocities against ethnic Germans in Danzig and other cities. Even so, he was unable to persuade the majority of Germans to welcome the prospect of war. He privately held doubts about the wisdom of risking a protracted war against Britain and France by attacking Poland.
After the Invasion of Poland in 1939, Goebbels used his propaganda ministry and the Reich chambers to control access to information domestically. To his chagrin, his rival Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, continually challenged Goebbels' jurisdiction over the dissemination of international propaganda. Hitler declined to make a firm ruling on the subject, so the two men remained rivals for the remainder of the Nazi era. Goebbels did not participate in the military decision making process, nor was he made privy to diplomatic negotiations until after the fact.
The Propaganda Ministry took over the broadcasting facilities of conquered countries immediately after surrender, and began broadcasting prepared material using the existing announcers as a way to gain the trust of the citizens. Most aspects of the media, both domestically and in the conquered countries, were controlled by Goebbels and his department. The German Home Service, the Armed Forces Programme, and the German European Service were all rigorously controlled in everything from the information they were permitted to disseminate to the music they were allowed to play. Party rallies, speeches, and demonstrations continued; speeches were broadcast on the radio and short propaganda films were exhibited using 1,500 mobile film vans. Hitler made fewer public appearances and broadcasts as the war progressed, so Goebbels increasingly became the voice of the Nazi regime for the German people. From May 1940 he wrote frequent editorials that were published in "Das Reich" which were later read aloud over the radio. He found films to be his most effective propaganda medium, after radio. At his insistence, initially half the films made in wartime Germany were propaganda films (particularly on antisemitism) and war propaganda films (recounting both historical wars and current exploits of the Wehrmacht).
Goebbels became preoccupied with morale and the efforts of the people on the home front. He believed that the more the people at home were involved in the war effort, the better their morale would be. For example, he initiated a programme for the collection of winter clothing and ski equipment for troops on the eastern front. At the same time, Goebbels implemented changes to have more "entertaining material" in radio and film produced for the public, decreeing in late 1942 that 20 per cent of the films should be propaganda and 80 per cent light entertainment. As "Gauleiter" of Berlin, Goebbels dealt with increasingly serious shortages of necessities such as food and clothing, as well as the need to ration beer and tobacco, which were important for morale. Hitler suggested watering the beer and degrading the quality of the cigarettes so that more could be produced, but Goebbels refused, saying the cigarettes were already of such low quality that it was impossible to make them any worse. Through his propaganda campaigns, he worked hard to maintain an appropriate level of morale among the public about the military situation, neither too optimistic nor too grim. The series of military setbacks the Germans suffered in this period – the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne (May 1942), the Allied victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein (November 1942), and especially the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad (February 1943) – were difficult matters to present to the German public, who were increasingly weary of the war and sceptical that it could be won. On 15 January 1943, Hitler appointed Goebbels as head of the newly created Air Raid Damage committee, which meant Goebbels was nominally in charge of nationwide civil air defences and shelters as well as the assessment and repair of damaged buildings. In actuality, the defence of areas other than Berlin remained in the hands of the local "Gauleiters", and his main tasks were limited to providing immediate aid to the affected civilians and using propaganda to improve their morale.
By early 1943, the war produced a labour crisis for the regime. Hitler created a three-man committee with representatives of the State, the army, and the Party in an attempt to centralise control of the war economy. The committee members were Hans Lammers (head of the Reich Chancellery), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the "Oberkommando der Wehrmacht" (Armed Forces High Command; OKW), and Martin Bormann, who controlled the Party. The committee was intended to independently propose measures regardless of the wishes of various ministries, with Hitler reserving most final decisions to himself. The committee, soon known as the "Dreierausschuß" (Committee of Three), met eleven times between January and August 1943. However, they ran up against resistance from Hitler's cabinet ministers, who headed deeply entrenched spheres of influence and were excluded from the committee. Seeing it as a threat to their power, Goebbels, Göring, and Speer worked together to bring it down. The result was that nothing changed, and the Committee of Three declined into irrelevance by September 1943.
Partly in response to being excluded from the Committee of Three, Goebbels pressured Hitler to introduce measures that would produce "total war", including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, and enlisting men in previously exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Some of these measures were implemented in an edict of 13 January, but to Goebbels' dismay, Göring demanded that his favourite restaurants in Berlin should remain open, and Lammers successfully lobbied Hitler to have women with children exempted from conscription, even if they had child care available. After receiving an enthusiastic response to his speech of 30 January 1943 on the topic, Goebbels believed he had the support of the German people in his call for total war. His next speech, the Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943, was a passionate demand for his audience to commit to total war, which he presented as the only way to stop the Bolshevik onslaught and save the German people from destruction. The speech also had a strong antisemitic element and hinted at the extermination of the Jewish people that was already underway. The speech was presented live on radio and was filmed as well. During the live version of the speech, Goebbels accidentally begins to mention the "extermination" of the Jews; this is omitted in the published text of the speech.
Goebbels' efforts had little impact for the time being, as while Hitler was in principle in favour of total war, he was not prepared to implement changes over the objections of his ministers. The discovery around this time of a mass grave of Polish officers that had been killed by the Red Army in the 1940 Katyn massacre was made use of by Goebbels in his propaganda in an attempt to drive a wedge between the Soviets and the other western allies.
After the Allied invasion of Sicily (July 1943) and the strategic Soviet victory in the Battle of Kursk (July–August 1943), Goebbels began to recognise that the war could no longer be won. Following the Allied invasion of Italy and the fall of Mussolini in September, he raised with Hitler the possibility of a separate peace, either with the Soviets or with Britain. Hitler rejected both of these proposals.
As Germany's military and economic situation grew steadily worse, on 25 August 1943 "Reichsführer-SS" Heinrich Himmler took over the post of interior minister, replacing Wilhelm Frick. Intensive air raids on Berlin and other cities took the lives of thousands of people. Göring's Luftwaffe attempted to retaliate with air raids on London in early 1944, but they no longer had sufficient aircraft to make much of an impact. While Goebbels' propaganda in this period indicated that a huge retaliation was in the offing, the V-1 flying bombs, launched on British targets beginning in mid-June 1944, had little effect, with only around 20 per cent reaching their intended targets. To boost morale, Goebbels continued to publish propaganda to the effect that further improvements to these weapons would have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war. Meanwhile, in the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, the Allies successfully gained a foothold in France.
Throughout July 1944, Goebbels and Speer continued to press Hitler to bring the economy to a total war footing. The 20 July plot, where Hitler was almost killed by a bomb at his field headquarters in East Prussia, played into the hands of those who had been pushing for change: Bormann, Goebbels, Himmler, and Speer. Over the objections of Göring, Goebbels was appointed on 23 July as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War, charged with maximising the manpower for the Wehrmacht and the armaments industry at the expense of sectors of the economy not critical to the war effort. Through these efforts, he was able to free up an additional half a million men for military service. However, as many of these new recruits came from the armaments industry, the move put him in conflict with armaments minister Speer. Untrained workers from elsewhere were not readily absorbed into the armaments industry, and likewise, the new Wehrmacht recruits waited in barracks for their turn to be trained.
At Hitler's behest, the "Volkssturm" (People's Storm) – a nationwide militia of men previously considered unsuitable for military service – was formed on 18 October 1944. Goebbels recorded in his diary that 100,000 recruits were sworn in from his "Gau" alone. However, the men, mostly age 45 to 60, received only rudimentary training and many were not properly armed. Goebbels' notion that these men could effectively serve on the front lines against Soviet tanks and artillery was unrealistic at best. The programme was deeply unpopular.
In the last months of the war, Goebbels' speeches and articles took on an increasingly apocalyptic tone. By the beginning of 1945, with the Soviets on the Oder River and the Western Allies preparing to cross the Rhine River, he could no longer disguise the fact that defeat was inevitable. Berlin had little in the way of fortifications or artillery, and even "Volkssturm" units were in short supply, as almost everything and everyone had been sent to the front. Goebbels noted in his diary on 21 January that millions of Germans were fleeing westward. He tentatively discussed with Hitler the issue of making peace overtures to the western allies, but Hitler again refused. Privately, Goebbels was conflicted at pushing the case with Hitler since he did not want to lose Hitler's confidence.
When other Nazi leaders urged Hitler to leave Berlin and establish a new centre of resistance in the National Redoubt in Bavaria, Goebbels opposed this, arguing for a heroic last stand in Berlin. His family (except for Magda's son Harald, who had served in the Luftwaffe and been captured by the Allies) moved into their house in Berlin to await the end. He and Magda may have discussed suicide and the fate of their young children in a long meeting on the night of 27 January. He knew how the outside world would view the criminal acts committed by the regime, and had no desire to subject himself to the "debacle" of a trial. He burned his private papers on the night of 18 April.
Goebbels knew how to play on Hitler's fantasies, encouraging him to see the hand of providence in the death of United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April. Whether Hitler really saw this event as a turning point as Goebbels proclaimed is not known. By this time, Goebbels had gained the position he had wanted so long – at the side of Hitler. Göring was utterly discredited, although he was not stripped of his offices until 23 April. Himmler, whose appointment as commander of Army Group Vistula had led to disaster on the Oder, was also in disgrace with Hitler. Most of Hitler's inner circle, including Göring, Himmler, Ribbentrop, and Speer, prepared to leave Berlin immediately after Hitler's birthday celebration on 20 April. Even Bormann was "not anxious" to meet his end at Hitler's side. On 22 April, Hitler announced that he would stay in Berlin until the end and then shoot himself. Goebbels moved with his family into the "Vorbunker", connected to the lower "Führerbunker" under the Reich Chancellery garden in central Berlin, that same day. He told Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss that he would not entertain the idea of either surrender or escape. On 23 April, Goebbels made the following proclamation to the people of Berlin:
After midnight on 29 April, with the Soviets advancing ever closer to the bunker complex, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony within the "Führerbunker". Afterwards, Hitler hosted a modest wedding breakfast. Hitler then took secretary Traudl Junge to another room and dictated his last will and testament. Goebbels and Bormann were two of the witnesses.
In his last will and testament, Hitler named no successor as Führer or leader of the Nazi Party. Instead, he appointed Goebbels as Reich Chancellor; Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was at Flensburg near the Danish border, as Reich President; and Bormann as Party Minister. Goebbels wrote a postscript to the will stating that he would "categorically refuse" to obey Hitler's order to leave Berlin–as he put it, "the first time in my life" that he had not complied with Hitler's orders. He felt compelled to remain with Hitler "for reasons of humanity and personal loyalty". Further, his wife and children would be staying, as well. They would end their lives "side by side with the Führer".
In the mid-afternoon of 30 April, Hitler shot himself. Goebbels was depressed, and stated that he would walk around the Chancellery garden until he was killed by the Russian shelling. Voss later recounted Goebbels as saying: "It is a great pity that such a man (Hitler) is not with us any longer. But there is nothing to be done. For us, everything is lost now and the only way out left for us is the one which Hitler chose. I shall follow his example."
On 1 May, Goebbels carried out his sole official act as Chancellor. He dictated a letter to General Vasily Chuikov and ordered German General Hans Krebs to deliver it under a white flag. Chuikov, as commander of the Soviet 8th Guards Army, commanded the Soviet forces in central Berlin. Goebbels' letter informed Chuikov of Hitler's death and requested a ceasefire. After this was rejected, Goebbels decided that further efforts were futile.
Later on 1 May, Vice-Admiral Voss saw Goebbels for the last time: "... While saying goodbye I asked Goebbels to join us. But he replied: 'The captain must not leave his sinking ship. I have thought about it all and decided to stay here. I have nowhere to go because with little children I will not be able to make it, especially with a leg like mine...' " On the evening of 1 May, Goebbels arranged for an SS dentist, Helmut Kunz, to inject his six children with morphine so that when they were unconscious, an ampule of cyanide could be then crushed in each of their mouths. According to Kunz's later testimony, he gave the children morphine injections but it was Magda Goebbels and SS-"Obersturmbannführer" Ludwig Stumpfegger, Hitler's personal doctor, who administered the cyanide.
At around 20:30, Goebbels and Magda left the bunker and walked up to the garden of the Chancellery, where they killed themselves. There are several different accounts of this event. One account was that they each bit on a cyanide ampule near where Hitler had been buried and were given a coup de grâce immediately afterwards. Goebbels' SS adjutant Günther Schwägermann testified in 1948 that they walked ahead of him up the stairs and out into the Chancellery garden. He waited in the stairwell and heard the shots sound. Schwägermann then walked up the remaining stairs and, once outside, saw their lifeless bodies. Following Goebbels' prior order, Schwägermann had an SS soldier fire several shots into Goebbels' body, which did not move.
The bodies were then doused with petrol, but they were only partially burned and not buried. A few days later, Voss was brought back to the bunker by the Soviets to identify the partly burned bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels and their children. The remains of the Goebbels' family, Hitler, Braun, General Krebs, and Hitler's dogs were repeatedly buried and exhumed. The last burial was at the SMERSH facility in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946. In 1970, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains. On 4 April 1970, a Soviet KGB team used detailed burial charts to exhume five wooden boxes at the Magdeburg SMERSH facility. Those were burned, crushed, and scattered into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.
Goebbels was antisemitic from a young age. After joining the NSDAP and meeting Hitler, his antisemitism grew and became more radical. He began to see the Jews as a destructive force with a negative impact on German society. After the Nazis seized control, he repeatedly urged Hitler to take action against the Jews. Despite his extreme antisemitism, Goebbels spoke of the "rubbish of race-materialism" and of the unnecessity of biological racism for the Nazi ideology. He also described Himmler's ideology as "in many regards, mad" and thought Alfred Rosenberg's theories were ridiculous.
The Nazi Party's goal was to remove Jews from German cultural and economic life, and eventually to remove them from the country altogether. In addition to his propaganda efforts, Goebbels actively promoted the persecution of the Jews through pogroms, legislation, and other actions. Discriminatory measures he instituted in Berlin in the early years of the regime included bans against their using public transport and requiring that Jewish shops be marked as such.
In November 1938, the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath was killed in Paris by a young Jewish man. In response, Goebbels arranged for inflammatory antisemitic material to be released by the press, and the result was the start of a pogrom. Jews were attacked and synagogues destroyed all over Germany. The situation was further inflamed by a speech Goebbels gave at a party meeting on the night of 8 November, where he obliquely called for party members to incite further violence against Jews while making it appear to be a spontaneous series of acts by the German people. At least a hundred Jews were killed, several hundred synagogues were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of Jewish shops were vandalised in an event called "Kristallnacht" (Night of Broken Glass). Around 30,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The destruction stopped after a conference held on 12 November, where Göring pointed out that the destruction of Jewish property was in effect the destruction of German property since the intention was that it would all eventually be confiscated.
Goebbels continued his intensive antisemitic propaganda campaign that culminated in Hitler's 30 January 1939 Reichstag speech, which Goebbels helped to write:
While Goebbels had been pressing for expulsion of the Berlin Jews since 1935, there were still 62,000 living in the city in 1940. Part of the delay in their deportation was that they were needed as workers in the armaments industry. Deportations of German Jews began in October 1941, with the first transport from Berlin leaving on 18 October. Some Jews were shot immediately on arrival in destinations such as Riga and Kaunas. In preparation for the deportations, Goebbels ordered that all German Jews were required by law to wear an identifying yellow badge as of 5 September 1941. On 6 March 1942, Goebbels received a copy of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. The document made the Nazi policy clear: the Jewish population of Europe was to be sent to extermination camps in occupied areas of Poland and killed. His diary entries of the period show that he was well aware of the fate of the Jews. "In general, it can probably be established that 60 per cent of them will have to be liquidated, while only 40 per cent can be put to work. ... A judgment is being carried out on the Jews which is barbaric but thoroughly deserved," he wrote on 27 March 1942.
Goebbels had frequent discussions with Hitler about the fate of the Jews, a subject they discussed almost every time they met. He was aware throughout that the Jews were being exterminated, and completely supported this decision. He was one of the few top Nazi officials to do so publicly.
Hitler was very fond of Magda Goebbels and the children. He enjoyed staying at the Goebbels' Berlin apartment, where he could relax. Magda had a close relationship with Hitler, and became a member of his small coterie of female friends. She also became an unofficial representative of the regime, receiving letters from all over Germany from women with questions about domestic matters or child custody issues.
In 1936, Goebbels met the Czech actress Lída Baarová and by the winter of 1937 began an intense affair with her. Magda had a long conversation with Hitler about it on 15 August 1938. Unwilling to put up with a scandal involving one of his top ministers, Hitler demanded that Goebbels break off the relationship. Thereafter, Joseph and Magda seemed to reach a truce until the end of September. The couple had another falling out at that point, and once again Hitler became involved, insisting the couple stay together. Hitler arranged for publicity photos to be taken of himself with the reconciled couple in October. Magda too had affairs, including a relationship with Kurt Ludecke in 1933 and Karl Hanke in 1938.
The Goebbels family included Harald Quandt (Magda's son from her first marriage; born 1921), plus Helga (1932), Hilde (1934), Helmuth (1935), Holde (1937), Hedda (1938), and Heide (1940). Harald was the only member of the family to survive the war.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15777
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Coen brothers
Joel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Coen (born September 21, 1957), collectively referred to as the Coen brothers (), are American filmmakers. Their films span many genres and styles, which they frequently subvert or parody. Their most acclaimed works include: "Miller's Crossing" (1990), "Barton Fink" (1991), "Fargo" (1996), "The Big Lebowski" (1998), "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000), "No Country for Old Men" (2007), "Burn After Reading" (2008), "A Serious Man" (2009), "True Grit" (2010), "Inside Llewyn Davis" (2013), and "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" (2018).
The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, although until "The Ladykillers" (2004) Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. They often alternate top billing for their screenplays while sharing editing credits under the alias Roderick Jaynes. They have been nominated for 13 Academy Awards together, and individually for one award each, winning Best Original Screenplay for "Fargo" and Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for "No Country for Old Men". The duo also won the Palme d'Or for "Barton Fink" (1991).
The Coens have written a number of films they did not direct, including the biographical war drama "Unbroken" (2014), the historical legal thriller "Bridge of Spies" (2015), and lesser-known, commercially unsuccessful comedies such as "Crimewave" (1985), "The Naked Man" (1998) and "Gambit" (2012). Ethan is also a writer of short stories, theater and poetry.
Known for many distinctive stylistic trademarks including genre hybridity, the brothers' films "No Country for Old Men", "A Serious Man" and "Inside Llewyn Davis" have been ranked in the BBC's 2016 poll of the greatest motion pictures since 2000.
Joel Daniel Coen (born November 29, 1954) and Ethan Jesse Coen (born September 21, 1957) were born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Their mother, Rena (née Neumann), was an art historian at St. Cloud State University, and their father, Edward Coen, was an economist at the University of Minnesota. The brothers have an older sister, Deborah, who grew up to become a psychiatrist working in Israel. Both sides of the Coen family were Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European origin. Their paternal grandfather, Victor Coen, was a barrister in the Inns of Court in London before retiring to Hove with their grandmother. Edward Coen was an American citizen born in the United States, but grew up in Croydon, London and studied at the London School of Economics. Afterwards he moved to the United States, where he met the Coens' mother, and served in the United States Army during World War II.
The Coens developed an early interest in cinema through the medium of television. They grew up watching Italian films (ranging from the works of Federico Fellini to the "Sons of Hercules" films) aired on a Minneapolis station, the Tarzan films and the comedies of Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope and Doris Day. In the mid-1960s, Joel saved money from mowing lawns to buy a Vivitar Super 8 camera. Together, the brothers remade movies they saw on television, with their neighborhood friend Mark Zimering ("Zeimers") as the star. Cornel Wilde's 1965 film "The Naked Prey" became their "Zeimers in Zambezi", which featured Ethan as a native with a spear. The 1943 film "Lassie Come Home" was reinterpreted as their "Ed... A Dog", with Ethan playing the mother role in his sister's tutu. They also made original films like "Henry Kissinger, Man on the Go", "Lumberjacks of the North" and "The Banana Film".
Joel and Ethan graduated from St. Louis Park High School in 1973 and 1976, respectively, and from Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
After Simon's Rock, Joel spent four years in the undergraduate film program at New York University, where he made a 30-minute thesis film called "Soundings". In 1979 he briefly enrolled in the graduate film program at the University of Texas at Austin, following a woman he had married who was in the graduate linguistics program. The marriage soon ended in divorce and Joel left UT Austin after nine months.
Ethan went on to Princeton University and earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy in 1979. His senior thesis was a 41-page essay, "Two Views of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy," which was supervised by Raymond Geuss.
Joel has been married to actress Frances McDormand since 1984. In 1995, they adopted a son, Pedro McDormand Coen, from Paraguay when he was six months old. McDormand has acted in several Coen Brothers films: "Blood Simple", "Raising Arizona", "Miller's Crossing", "Barton Fink", "Fargo", "The Man Who Wasn't There", "Burn After Reading", and "Hail, Caesar!". For her performance in "Fargo" she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Ethan married film editor Tricia Cooke in 1990. They have two children: daughter Dusty and son Buster Jacob, who goes to Vassar College.
Both couples live in New York.
After graduating from New York University, Joel worked as a production assistant on a variety of industrial films and music videos. He developed a talent for film editing and met Sam Raimi while assisting Edna Ruth Paul in editing Raimi's first feature film, "The Evil Dead" (1981).
In 1984 the brothers wrote and directed "Blood Simple", their first commercial film together. Set in Texas, the film tells the tale of a shifty, sleazy bar owner who hires a private detective to kill his wife and her lover. The film contains elements that point to their future direction: distinctive homages to genre movies (in this case noir and horror), plot twists layered over a simple story, dark humor, and "mise-en-scène". The film starred Frances McDormand, who went on to feature in many of the Coen brothers' films (and marry Joel). Upon release the film received much praise and won awards for Joel's direction at both the Sundance and Independent Spirit awards.
Their next project was "Crimewave" (1985), directed by Sam Raimi and written by the Coens and Raimi. Joel and Raimi also made cameo appearances in "Spies Like Us" (1985).
The brothers' next film was "Raising Arizona" (1987), the story of an unlikely married couple: ex-convict H.I. (Nicolas Cage) and police officer Ed (Holly Hunter), who long for a baby but are unable to conceive. When a local furniture tycoon (Trey Wilson) appears on television with his newly born quintuplets and jokes that they "are more than we can handle", H.I. steals one of the quintuplets to bring up as their own. The film featured Frances McDormand, John Goodman, William Forsythe, Sam McMurray, and Randall "Tex" Cobb.
"Miller's Crossing", released in 1990, starred Albert Finney, Gabriel Byrne, and John Turturro. The film is about feuding gangsters in the Prohibition era, inspired by Dashiell Hammett's novels "Red Harvest" (1929) and "The Glass Key" (serialized in 1930).
The following year, they released "Barton Fink" (1991); set in 1941, in which a New York playwright, the eponymous Barton Fink (played by John Turturro), moves to Los Angeles to write a B-movie. He settles down in his hotel room to commence writing but suffers writer's block until he is invaded by the man next door (John Goodman). "Barton Fink" was a critical success, earning Oscar nominations and winning three major awards at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, including the Palme d'Or. It was their first film with cinematographer Roger Deakins, a key collaborator for the next 25 years.
"The Hudsucker Proxy" (co-written with Raimi) was released in 1994. In it, the board of a large corporation in 1958 New York City appoints a naive schmo as president (Tim Robbins) for underhanded reasons. The film bombed at the box office ($30 million budget, $3 million gross in the USA), even though it featured Paul Newman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Frances McDormand appears in a brief uncredited role.
The Coens wrote and directed the crime thriller "Fargo" (1996), set in their home state of Minnesota. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), who has serious financial problems, has his wife kidnapped so that his wealthy father-in-law will pay the ransom. His plan goes wrong when the kidnappers deviate from the plan and local cop Marge Gunderson (McDormand) starts to investigate. Produced on a small budget of $7 million, "Fargo" was a critical and commercial success, with particular praise for its dialogue and McDormand's performance. The film received several awards, including a BAFTA award and Cannes award for direction, and two Oscars: a Best Original Screenplay and a Best Actress Oscar for McDormand.
In the Coens' next film, the black comedy "The Big Lebowski" (1998), "The Dude" (Jeff Bridges), a Los Angeles slacker, is used as an unwitting pawn in a kidnapping plot with his bowling buddies (Steve Buscemi and John Goodman). Despite initially receiving mixed reviews and underperforming at the box office, it is now well received by critics, and is regarded as a classic cult film. An annual festival, Lebowski Fest, began in 2002, and many adhere to the philosophy of "Dudeism". "Entertainment Weekly" ranked it 8th on their Funniest Movies of the Past 25 Years list in 2008.
"Gates of Eden", a collection of short stories written by Ethan Coen, was published in 1998. The same year, Ethan co-wrote the comedy "The Naked Man", directed by their storyboard artist J. Todd Anderson.
The Coen brothers' next film, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000), was another critical and commercial success. The title was borrowed from the Preston Sturges film "Sullivan's Travels" (1941), whose lead character, movie director John Sullivan, had planned to make a film with that title. Based loosely on Homer's "Odyssey" (complete with a Cyclops, sirens, "et al."), the story is set in Mississippi in the 1930s and follows a trio of escaped convicts who, after absconding from a chain gang, journey home to recover bank-heist loot the leader has buried—but they have no clear perception of where they are going. The film highlighted the comic abilities of George Clooney as the oddball lead character Ulysses Everett McGill, and of Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro, his sidekicks. The film's bluegrass and old-time soundtrack, offbeat humor and digitally desaturated cinematography made it a critical and commercial hit. It was the first feature film to use all-digital color grading. The film's soundtrack CD was also successful, spawning a concert and concert/documentary DVD, "Down from the Mountain."
The Coens next produced another noirish thriller, "The Man Who Wasn't There" (2001). Set in late 1940s California, a laconic chain-smoking barber (played by Billy Bob Thornton) discovers a way to blackmail his wife's lover and use the proceeds to invest in a dry cleaning business.
The Coens directed the 2003 film "Intolerable Cruelty", starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a throwback to the romantic comedies of the 1940s. It focuses on hotshot divorce lawyer Miles Massey and a beautiful divorcée whom Massey managed to prevent from receiving any money in her divorce. She vows to get even with him while, at the same time, he becomes smitten with her. "Intolerable Cruelty" received generally positive reviews, although it is considered one of the duo's weaker films. Also that year, they executive produced and did an uncredited rewrite of the Christmas black comedy "Bad Santa", which garnered positive reviews.
In 2004, the Coens made "The Ladykillers", a remake of the Ealing Studios classic. A professor, played by Tom Hanks, assembles a team to rob a casino. They rent a room in an elderly woman's home to plan the heist. When the woman discovers the plot, the gang decides to murder her to ensure her silence. The Coens received some of the most lukewarm reviews of their careers in response to this film.
They directed two short films for two separate anthology films—"Paris, je t'aime" ("Tuileries", 2006) starring Steve Buscemi, and "To Each His Own Cinema" ("World Cinema", 2007) starring Josh Brolin. Both films received highly positive reviews.
"No Country for Old Men", released in November 2007, closely follows the 2005 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), living near the Texas/Mexico border, stumbles upon, and decides to take, two million dollars in drug money. He must then go on the run to avoid those trying to recover the money, including sociopathic killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who confounds both Llewelyn and local sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). The plotline is a return to noir themes, but in some respects it was a departure for the Coens; with the exception of Stephen Root, none of the stable of regular Coen actors appears in the film. "No Country" received nearly universal critical praise, garnering a 94% "Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, all of which were received by the Coens, as well as Best Supporting Actor received by Bardem. The Coens, as "Roderick Jaynes", were also nominated for Best Editing, but lost. It was the first time since 1961 (when Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise won for "West Side Story") that two directors received the Academy Award for Best Director at the same time.
In January 2008, Ethan Coen's play "Almost an Evening" premiered off-broadway at the Atlantic Theater Company Stage 2, opening to mostly enthusiastic reviews. The initial run closed on February 10, 2008, but the same production was moved to a new theatre for a commercial off-Broadway run at the Bleecker Street Theater in New York City. Produced by The Atlantic Theater Company, it ran there from March 2008 through June 1, 2008. and Art Meets Commerce. In May 2009, the Atlantic Theater Company produced Coen's "Offices", as part of their mainstage season at the Linda Gross Theater.
"Burn After Reading", a comedy starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney, was released September 12, 2008, and portrays a collision course between a gym instructor, spies and Internet dating. Released to positive reviews, it debuted at #1 in North America.
In 2009, the Coens directed a television commercial titled "Air Freshener" for the Reality Coalition.
They next directed "A Serious Man", released October 2, 2009, a "gentle but dark" period comedy (set in 1967) with a low budget. The film is based loosely on the Coens' childhoods in an academic family in the largely Jewish suburb of Saint Louis Park, Minnesota; it also drew comparisons to the "Book of Job". Filming took place late in the summer of 2008, in the neighborhoods of Roseville and Bloomington, Minnesota, at Normandale Community College, and at St. Olaf College. The film was nominated for the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.
"True Grit" (2010) is based on the 1968 novel of the same name by Charles Portis. Filming was done in Texas and New Mexico. Hailee Steinfeld stars as Mattie Ross along with Jeff Bridges as Marshal Rooster Cogburn. Matt Damon and Josh Brolin also appear in the movie. "True Grit" was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Ethan Coen wrote the one-act comedy "Talking Cure", which was produced on Broadway in 2011 as part of "Relatively Speaking", an anthology of three one-act plays by Coen, Elaine May, and Woody Allen.
"Inside Llewyn Davis" (2013) is a treatise on the 1960s folk music scene in New York City's Greenwich Village, and very loosely based on the life of Dave Van Ronk. The film stars Oscar Isaac, Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan. It won the Grand Prix at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where it was highly praised by critics. They received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Song for "Please Mr. Kennedy", which is heard in the film.
"Fargo", a television series inspired by their film of the same name, premiered in April 2014 on the FX network. It is created by Noah Hawley and executive produced by the brothers.
The Coens also contributed to the screenplay for "Unbroken", along with Richard LaGravenese and William Nicholson. The film, directed by Angelina Jolie, and based on Laura Hillenbrand's non-fiction book, "" (2010) which itself was based on the life of Louis Zamperini, was released on December 25, 2014 to average reviews.
The Coens co-wrote, with playwright Matt Charman, the screenplay for the dramatic historical thriller "Bridge of Spies", about the 1960 U-2 Incident. The film was directed by Steven Spielberg, and released on October 4, 2015 to critical acclaim. They were nominated for the Best Original Screenplay at the 88th Academy Awards.
The Coens directed the film "Hail, Caesar!", about a "fixer" in 1950s Hollywood trying to discover what happened to a cast member who vanishes during filming. It stars Coen regulars George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johansson and Tilda Swinton, as well as Channing Tatum, Ralph Fiennes, Jonah Hill, and Alden Ehrenreich. The film was released on February 5, 2016.
In 2016, the Coens gave to their longtime friend and collaborator John Turturro the right to use his character of Jesus Quintana from "The Big Lebowski" in his own spin-off, "The Jesus Rolls", which he would also write and direct. The Coens have no involvement in the production. In August 2016, the film began principal photography.
The Coens first wrote the script for "Suburbicon" in 1986. The film was eventually directed by George Clooney and began filming in October 2016. It was released by Paramount Pictures in the fall of 2017.
The Coens most recently directed "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs", a Western anthology starring Tim Blake Nelson, Liam Neeson, and James Franco. It began streaming on Netflix on November 16, 2018, after a brief theatrical run.
In a 1998 interview with Alex Simon for "Venice" magazine, the Coens discussed a project called "The Contemplations", which would be an anthology of short films based on stories in a leather bound book from a "dusty old library". This project may have influenced or evolved into "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs", which has the same structure.
In 2001, Joel stated that "a Cold War comedy called "62 Skidoo" is one I'd like to do someday".
The Coens had hoped to film James Dickey's novel "To the White Sea". They were due to start production in 2002, with Jeremy Thomas producing and Brad Pitt in the lead role, but it was canceled when the Coens felt that the budget offered was not enough to successfully produce the film.
In 2008, it was announced that the Coen brothers would write and direct an adaptation of Michael Chabon's novel "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" (2007). They were to produce the film with Scott Rudin for Columbia Pictures. In the fall of 2012, however, Chabon told "Mother Jones" that "the Coen brothers wrote a draft of a script and then they seemed to move on", and that the film rights had "lapsed back to me".
In 2009, the Coens stated that they are interested in making a sequel to "Barton Fink" called "Old Fink", which would take place in the 1960s, around the same time period as "A Serious Man". The Coens also stated that they have had talks with John Turturro in reprising his role as Fink, but they were waiting "until he was actually old enough to play the part".
In 2011, the Coens were working on a television project, called "Harve Karbo", about a quirky Los Angeles private eye for Imagine Television.
In December 2013, the Coens stated in an interview that they are working on a new musical comedy centered around an opera singer, though they have said it is "not a musical per se". In the same interview, they revealed they are also working on a sword and sandals drama film set in ancient Rome.
In August 2015, it was announced that Warner Bros. had optioned the film rights to Ross Macdonald's novel "Black Money" for the Coen brothers to potentially write and direct.
In October 2016, "The Hollywood Reporter" reported that the Coens would work on the screenplay for Fox titled "Dark Web", and based on Joshuah Bearman's two-part "Wired" article about Ross Ulbricht and his illicit Silk Road online marketplace. The project originated in 2013, with novelist Dennis Lehane on board for the screenplay. Chernin Entertainment will produce.
On February 10, 2017, it was announced that the "Scarface" remake's script was being written by the Coens. Luca Guadagnino has announced plans to direct the film.
It was announced in March 2019 that Joel Coen would be directing an adaptation of "Macbeth" starring Denzel Washington. This will be Joel's first directorial effort without his brother Ethan, who is taking a break from films to focus on theater.
The Coen brothers' own film production company, Mike Zoss Productions located in New York City, has been credited on their films from "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" onwards. It was named after Mike Zoss Drug, an independent pharmacy in St. Louis Park since 1950 that was the brothers' beloved hangout when they were growing up in the Twin Cities. The name was also used for the pharmacy in "No Country for Old Men". The Mike Zoss logo consists of a crayon drawing of a horse, standing in a field of grass, with its head turned around as it looks back over its hindquarters.
Up to 2003, Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing, due to guild rules that disallowed multiple director credits to prevent dilution of the position's significance. The only exception to this rule is if the co-directors are an "established duo". From 2004 on, they were able to share the director credit and since then, the Coen brothers have become only the third duo to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director. The first two pairs to achieve this were Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins (who won for "West Side Story" in 1961), and Warren Beatty and Buck Henry (who were nominated for "Heaven Can Wait" in 1978).
Only seven other directors have won three Oscars for the same film, a distinction the duo shares with Billy Wilder, James L. Brooks, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Bong Joon-ho.
With four Academy Award nominations for "No Country for Old Men" for the duo (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing as Roderick Jaynes), the Coen brothers have tied the record for the most nominations by a single nominee (counting an "established duo" as one nominee) for the same film. Orson Welles set the record in 1941 with "Citizen Kane" being nominated for Best Picture (though at the time, individual producers were not named as nominees), Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay. Warren Beatty received the same nominations, first for "Heaven Can Wait" in 1978 and again in 1981 with "Reds". Alan Menken also then achieved the same feat when he was nominated for Best Score and triple-nominated for Best Song for "Beauty and the Beast" in 1991. In 2018, Alfonso Cuarón was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography for "Roma".
The Coen brothers frequently cast certain actors in their films, most frequently Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Tilda Swinton, Jon Polito, George Clooney, and John Turturro. They have worked twice with Jeff Bridges, Billy Bob Thornton, Scarlett Johansson, and Tim Blake Nelson and at least three times with Michael Badalucco, Richard Jenkins, Stephen Root, Bruce Campbell, J.K. Simmons, and Josh Brolin.
The Coens similarly tend to collaborate with certain filmmakers as well, especially Roger Deakins, Jess Gonchor, Skip Lievsay, and Mary Zophres. They used cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld on their first three films, through "Miller's Crossing", until Sonnenfeld left to pursue his own directing career. Deakins has been the Coen brothers' cinematographer for all their subsequent films except "Burn After Reading", on which they employed Emmanuel Lubezki, and "Inside Llewyn Davis" and "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs", on which they employed Bruno Delbonnel.
Sam Raimi is another frequent collaborator. He helped write "The Hudsucker Proxy", which the Coen brothers directed, and the Coen brothers helped write "Crimewave", which Raimi directed. Raimi took tips about filming "A Simple Plan" (1998) from the Coen brothers, who had recently finished "Fargo". (Both films are set in blindingly white snow, which reflects much light and can make metering for a correct exposure tricky). Raimi has cameo appearances in "Miller's Crossing" and "The Hudsucker Proxy". Raimi and the Coens met when Raimi directed "The Evil Dead" (1981), for which Joel was hired as an assistant editor.
Carter Burwell has scored all of the Coens' films, aside from "Crimewave" (1985), although T Bone Burnett produced much of the traditional music in "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "The Ladykillers", and was in charge of archive music for "The Big Lebowski". Skip Lievsay handles the sound editing for all of the Coens' films.
Most of the Coens' films have been credited to the editor "Roderick Jaynes", an alias which refers collectively to the two Coen brothers. Tricia Cooke, Ethan's wife, was also an editor on three of their films ("The Big Lebowski", "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", and "The Man Who Wasn't There") after working as assistant editor on four of their earlier films ("Miller's Crossing", "Barton Fink", "The Hudsucker Proxy", and "Fargo"). Michael R. Miller edited "Raising Arizona" and "Miller's Crossing".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15780
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Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language and universal literature. His best-known books, "Ficciones" ("Fictions") and "El Aleph" ("The Aleph"), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, philosophy, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, and mythology. Borges' works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have been considered by some critics to mark the beginning of the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature. His late poems converse with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor prize (Prix International), which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude". He dedicated his final work, "The Conspirators", to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born into an educated middle-class family on 24 August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires so the family resided in Palermo, then a poorer neighbourhood. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of criollo (Spanish) origin. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America and the Argentine War of Independence, and she spoke often of their heroic actions.
His 1929 book, "Cuaderno San Martín", includes the poem "Isidoro Acevedo", commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, de Acevedo Laprida fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. De Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born.
Borges's own father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam (24 February 1874 – 14 February 1938) was a lawyer, and wrote the novel "El caudillo" in 1921. Borges Haslam was born in Entre Ríos of Spanish, Portuguese, and English descent, the son of Francisco Borges Lafinur, a colonel, and Frances Ann Haslam, an Englishwoman. Borges Haslam grew up speaking English at home. The family frequently traveled to Europe. Borges Haslam wed Leonor Acevedo Suarez in 1898 and their offspring also included the painter Norah Borges, sister of Jorge Luis Borges.
At age nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince" into Spanish. It was published in a local journal, but Borges' friends thought the real author was his father. Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations. Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt", despite the 1921 opus "El caudillo". Jorge Luis Borges wrote, "as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action."
Jorge Luis Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, was bilingual in Spanish and English, reading Shakespeare in the latter at the age of twelve. The family lived in a large house with an English library of over one thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that "if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library."
His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and spent the next decade in Europe. In Geneva, Borges Haslam was treated by an eye specialist, while his son and daughter attended school. Jorge Luis learned French, read Thomas Carlyle in English, and began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was eighteen, he met writer Maurice Abramowicz and began a literary friendship that would last for the remainder of his life. He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war. After World War I, the family spent three years living in various cities: Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid. They remained in Europe until 1921.
At that time, Borges discovered the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's "The Golem" (1915) which became influential to his work. In Spain, Borges fell in with and became a member of the avant-garde, anti-Modernismo Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, close to the Imagists. His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine "Grecia". While in Spain, he met such noted Spanish writers as Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna.
In 1921, Borges returned with his family to Buenos Aires. He had little formal education, no qualifications and few friends. He wrote to a friend that Buenos Aires was now "overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and decorative young ladies". He brought with him the doctrine of Ultraism and launched his career, publishing surreal poems and essays in literary journals. Borges published his first published collection of poetry, "Fervor de Buenos Aires", in 1923 and contributed to the avant-garde review "Martín Fierro".
Borges co-founded the journals "Prisma", a broadsheet distributed largely by pasting copies to walls in Buenos Aires, and "Proa". Later in life, Borges regretted some of these early publications, attempting to purchase all known copies to ensure their destruction.
By the mid-1930s, he began to explore existential questions and fiction. He worked in a style that Argentine critic Ana María Barrenechea has called "irreality." Many other Latin American writers, such as Juan Rulfo, Juan José Arreola, and Alejo Carpentier, were investigating these themes, influenced by the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger. In this vein, Borges biographer Edwin Williamson underlines the danger of inferring an autobiographically inspired basis for the content or tone of certain of his works: books, philosophy, and imagination were as much a source of real inspiration to him as his own lived experience, if not more so.
From the first issue, Borges was a regular contributor to "Sur", founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. It was then Argentina's most important literary journal and helped Borges find his fame. Ocampo introduced Borges to Adolfo Bioy Casares, another well-known figure of Argentine literature who was to become a frequent collaborator and close friend. They wrote a number of works together, some under the "nom de plume" H. Bustos Domecq, including a parody detective series and fantasy stories. During these years, a family friend, Macedonio Fernández, became a major influence on Borges. The two would preside over discussions in cafés, at country retreats, or in Fernandez's tiny apartment in the Balvanera district. He appears by name in Borges's "Dialogue about a Dialogue", in which the two discuss the immortality of the soul. In 1933, Borges gained an editorial appointment at "Revista Multicolor de los Sábados" (the literary supplement of the Buenos Aires newspaper "Crítica"), where he first published the pieces collected as "Historia universal de la infamia" ("A Universal History of Infamy") in 1935.
The book includes two types of writing: the first lies somewhere between non-fictional essays and short stories, using fictional techniques to tell essentially true stories. The second consists of literary forgeries, which Borges initially passed off as translations of passages from famous but seldom-read works. In the following years, he served as a literary adviser for the publishing house Emecé Editores, and from 1936-39 wrote weekly columns for "El Hogar". In 1938, Borges found work as the first assistant at the Miguel Cané Municipal Library. It was in a working-class area and there were so few books that cataloging more than one hundred books per day, he was told, would leave little to do for the other staff and would make them look bad. The task took him about an hour each day and the rest of his time he spent in the basement of the library, writing and translating.
Borges's father died in 1938, shortly before his 64th birthday. On Christmas Eve that year, Borges suffered a severe head injury; during treatment, he nearly died of sepsis. While recovering from the accident, Borges began exploring a new style of writing for which he would become famous. His first story written after his accident, "Pierre Menard, Author of the "Quixote",” came out in May 1939. One of his most famous works, "Menard" examines the nature of authorship, as well as the relationship between an author and his historical context. His first collection of short stories, "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" ("The Garden of Forking Paths"), appeared in 1941, composed mostly of works previously published in "Sur".
The title story concerns a Chinese professor in England, Dr. Yu Tsun, who spies for Germany during World War I, in an attempt to prove to the authorities that an Asian person is able to obtain the information that they seek. A combination of book and maze, it can be read in many ways. Through it, Borges arguably invented the hypertext novel and went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel.
Composed of stories taking up over sixty pages, the book was generally well received, but "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" failed to garner for him the literary prizes many in his circle expected. Victoria Ocampo dedicated a large portion of the July 1942 issue of "Sur" to a "Reparation for Borges." Numerous leading writers and critics from Argentina and throughout the Spanish-speaking world contributed writings to the "reparation" project.
With his vision beginning to fade in his early thirties and unable to support himself as a writer, Borges began a new career as a public lecturer. He became an increasingly public figure, obtaining appointments as president of the Argentine Society of Writers and as professor of English and American Literature at the Argentine Association of English Culture. His short story "Emma Zunz" was made into a film (under the name of "Días de odio", "Days of Hate", directed in 1954 by Leopoldo Torre Nilsson). Around this time, Borges also began writing screenplays.
In 1955, he became director of the Argentine National Library. By the late 1950s he had become completely blind. Neither the coincidence nor the irony of his blindness as a writer escaped Borges:
His later collection of poetry, "Elogio de la Sombra" ("In Praise of Darkness"), develops this theme. In 1956 the University of Cuyo awarded Borges the first of many honorary doctorates and the following year he received the National Prize for Literature . From 1956 to 1970, Borges also held a position as a professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires and other temporary appointments at other universities. In the fall of 1967 and spring of 1968, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University.
As his eyesight deteriorated, Borges relied increasingly on his mother's help. When he was not able to read and write anymore (he never learned to read Braille), his mother, to whom he had always been close, became his personal secretary. When Perón returned from exile and was re-elected president in 1973, Borges immediately resigned as director of the National Library.
Eight of Borges's poems appear in the 1943 anthology of Spanish American Poets by H.R. Hays. "The Garden of Forking Paths", one of the first Borges stories to be translated into English, appeared in the August 1948 issue of "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine", translated by Anthony Boucher. Though several other Borges translations appeared in literary magazines and anthologies during the 1950s (and one story appeared in the science fiction magazine "Fantastic Universe" in 1960), his international fame dates from the early 1960s.
In 1961, Borges received the first "Prix International", which he shared with Samuel Beckett. While Beckett had garnered a distinguished reputation in Europe and America, Borges had been largely unknown and untranslated in the English-speaking world and the prize stirred great interest in his work. The Italian government named Borges "Commendatore" and the University of Texas at Austin appointed him for one year to the Tinker Chair. This led to his first lecture tour in the United States. In 1962, two major anthologies of Borges's writings were published in English by New York presses: "Ficciones" and "Labyrinths". In that year, Borges began lecture tours of Europe. Numerous honors were to accumulate over the years such as a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America "for distinguished contribution to the mystery genre" (1976), the Balzan Prize (for Philology, Linguistics and literary Criticism) and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (all 1980), as well as the French Legion of Honour (1983) and the Diamond Konex Award for Literature Arts as the most important writer in the last decade in his country.
In 1967, Borges began a five-year period of collaboration with the American translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, through whom he became better known in the English-speaking world. Di Giovanni contended that Borges' popularity was due to him writing with multiple languages in mind and deliberately using Latin words as a bridge from Spanish to English.
Borges continued to publish books, among them "El libro de los seres imaginarios" ("Book of Imaginary Beings", 1967, co-written with Margarita Guerrero), "El informe de Brodie" ("Dr. Brodie's Report", 1970), and "El libro de arena" ("The Book of Sand", 1975). He lectured prolifically. Many of these lectures were anthologized in volumes such as "Siete noches" ("Seven Nights") and "Nueve ensayos dantescos" ("Nine Dantesque Essays").
His presence in 1967 on campus at the University of Virginia (UVA) in the U.S. influenced a group of students among whom was Jared Loewenstein, who would later become founder and curator of the Jorge Luis Borges Collection at UVA, one of the largest repositories of documents and manuscripts pertaining to Borges's early works. In 1984, he travelled to Athens, Greece, and later to Rethymnon, Crete, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of Philosophy at the University of Crete.
In 1967, Borges married the recently widowed Elsa Astete Millán. Friends believed that his mother, who was 90 and anticipating her own death, wanted to find someone to care for her blind son. The marriage lasted less than three years. After a legal separation, Borges moved back in with his mother, with whom he lived until her death at age 99. Thereafter, he lived alone in the small flat he had shared with her, cared for by Fanny, their housekeeper of many decades.
From 1975 until the time of his death, Borges traveled internationally. He was often accompanied in these travels by his personal assistant María Kodama, an Argentine woman of Japanese and German ancestry. In April 1986, a few months before his death, he married her via an attorney in Paraguay, in what was then a common practice among Argentines wishing to circumvent the Argentine laws of the time regarding divorce. On his religious views, Borges declared himself an agnostic, clarifying: "Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen."
During his final days in Geneva, Borges began brooding about the possibility of an afterlife. Although calm and collected about his own death, Borges began probing Kodama as to whether she inclined more towards the Shinto beliefs of her father or the Catholicism of her mother. Kodama "had always regarded Borges as an Agnostic, as she was herself", but given the insistence of his questioning, she offered to call someone more "qualified". Borges responded, "You are asking me if I want a priest." He then instructed her to call two clergymen, a Catholic priest, in memory of his mother, and a Protestant minister, in memory of his English grandmother. He was visited first by Father Pierre Jacquet and by Pastor Edouard de Montmollin.
Borges died of liver cancer on 14 June 1986, aged 86, in Geneva. His burial was preceded by an ecumenical service at the Protestant Cathédrale de Saint Pierre on 18 June. With many Swiss and Argentine dignitaries present, Pastor de Montmollin read the First Chapter of St John's Gospel. He then preached that "Borges was a man who had unceasingly searched for the right word, the term that could sum up the whole, the final meaning of things." He explained, however, that no man can reach that word through his own efforts and in trying becomes lost in a labyrinth. Pastor de Montmollin concluded, "It is not man who discovers the word, it is the Word that comes to him."
Father Jacquet also preached, saying that, when visiting Borges before his death, he had found "a man full of love, who received from the Church the forgiveness of his sins". After the funeral, Borges was laid to rest in Geneva's Cimetière de Plainpalais. His grave, marked by a rough-hewn headstone, is adorned with carvings derived from Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse art and literature.
Kodama, his widow and heir on the basis of the marriage and two wills, gained control over his works. Her assertive administration of his estate resulted in a bitter dispute with the French publisher Gallimard regarding the republication of the complete works of Borges in French, with Pierre Assouline in "Le Nouvel Observateur" (August 2006) calling her "an obstacle to the dissemination of the works of Borges". Kodama took legal action against Assouline, considering the remark unjustified and defamatory, asking for a symbolic compensation of one euro.
Kodama also rescinded all publishing rights for existing collections of his work in English, including the translations by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, in which Borges himself collaborated, and from which di Giovanni would have received an unusually high fifty percent of the royalties. Kodama commissioned new translations by Andrew Hurley, which have become the official translations in English.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Borges was a vocal supporter of Hipólito Yrigoyen and the social democratic Radical Civic Union. In 1945, Borges signed a manifesto calling for an end to military rule and the establishment of political liberty and democratic elections. By the 1960s, he had grown more skeptical of democracy. During a 1971 conference at Columbia University, a creative writing student asked Borges what he regarded as "a writer's duty to his time". Borges replied, "I think a writer's duty is to be a writer, and if he can be a good writer, he is doing his duty. Besides, I think of my own opinions as being superficial. For example, I am a Conservative, I hate the Communists, I hate the Nazis, I hate the anti-Semites, and so on; but I don't allow these opinions to find their way into my writings—except, of course, when I was greatly elated about the Six-Day War. Generally speaking, I think of keeping them in watertight compartments. Everybody knows my opinions, but as for my dreams and my stories, they should be allowed their full freedom, I think. I don't want to intrude into them, I'm writing fiction, not fables." In the 1980s, towards the end of his life, Borges regained his earlier faith in democracy and held it out as the only hope for Argentina. In 1983, Borges applauded the election of the Radical Civic Union's Raúl Alfonsín and welcomed the end of military rule with the following words: "I once wrote that democracy is the abuse of statistics...On October 30 1983, Argentine democracy refuted me splendidly. Splendidly and resoundingly."
Borges recurrently declared himself a "Spencerian anarchist who believes in the individual and not in the State" due to his father's influence. In an interview with Richard Burgin during the late 1960s, Borges described himself as a "mild" adherent of classical liberalism. He further recalled that his opposition to Marxism and communism was absorbed in his childhood. "Well, I have been brought up to think that the individual should be strong and the State should be weak. I couldn't be enthusiastic about theories where the State is more important than the individual." He labeled himself a "Spencerian anarchist", following his father. After the overthrow via coup d'état of President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, Borges supported efforts to purge Argentina's Government of Peronists and dismantle the former President's welfare state. He was enraged that the Communist Party of Argentina opposed these measures and sharply criticized them in lectures and in print. Borges's opposition to the Party in this matter ultimately led to a permanent rift with his longtime lover, Argentine Communist Estela Canto.
In a 1956 interview given to "El Hogar", he said "[Communists] are in favor of totalitarian regimes and systematically combat freedom of thought, oblivious of the fact that the principal victims of dictatorships are, precisely, intelligence and culture."
He elaborated: "Many people are in favor of dictatorships because they allow them to avoid thinking for themselves. Everything is presented to them ready-made. There are even agencies of the State that supply them with opinions, passwords, slogans, and even idols to exalt or cast down according to the prevailing wind or in keeping with the directives of the thinking heads of the single party."
In later years, Borges frequently expressed contempt for Marxist and Communist authors, poets, and intellectuals. In an interview with Burgin, Borges referred to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda as "a very fine poet" but a "very mean man" for unconditionally supporting the Soviet Union and demonizing the United States. Borges commented about Neruda, "Now he knows that's rubbish."
In the same interview, Borges also criticized famed Marxist poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, who was abducted by Nationalist soldiers and executed without trial during the Spanish Civil War. In Borges' opinion, Lorca's poetry and plays, when examined against his tragic death, appeared better than they actually were.
In 1934, Argentine ultra-nationalists, sympathetic to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, asserted Borges was secretly Jewish, and by implication, not truly Argentinian. Borges responded with the essay "Yo, Judío" ("Me, I'm a Jew"), a reference to the old phrase "Yo, Argentino" ("Me, I'm Argentinian") uttered by potential victims during pogroms against Argentine Jews, to signify one was not Jewish. In the essay, Borges declares he would be proud to be a Jew, and remarks that any pure Castilian is likely to come from ancient Jewish descent, from a millennium ago.
Both before and during the Second World War, Borges regularly published essays attacking the Nazi police state and its racist ideology. His outrage was fueled by his deep love for German literature. In an essay published in 1937, Borges attacked the Nazi Party's use of children's books to inflame antisemitism. He wrote, "I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime."
In a 1938 essay, Borges reviewed an anthology which rewrote German authors of the past to fit the Nazi party line. He was disgusted by what he described as Germany's "chaotic descent into darkness" and the attendant rewriting of history. He argued that such books sacrificed the German people's culture, history and integrity in the name of restoring their national honour. Such use of children's books for propaganda he writes, "perfect the criminal arts of barbarians."
In a 1944 essay, Borges postulated,
In 1946, Borges published the short story "Deutsches Requiem", which masquerades as the last testament of a condemned Nazi war criminal named Otto Dietrich zur Linde.
In a 1971 conference at Columbia University, Borges was asked about the story by a student from the creative writing program. He recalled, "When the Germans were defeated I felt great joy and relief, but at the same time I thought of the German defeat as being somehow tragic, because here we have perhaps the most educated people in Europe, who have a fine literature, a fine tradition of philosophy and poetry. Yet these people were bamboozled by a madman named Adolf Hitler, and I think there is tragedy there."
In a 1967 interview with Burgin, Borges recalled how his interactions with Argentina's Nazi sympathisers led him to create the story. He recalled, "And then I realized that those people that were on the side of Germany, that they never thought of German victories or the German glory. What they really liked was the idea of the Blitzkrieg, of London being on fire, of the country being destroyed. As to the German fighters, they took no stock in them. Then I thought, well now Germany has lost, now America has saved us from this nightmare, but since nobody can doubt on which side I stood, I'll see what can be done from a literary point of view in favor of the Nazis. And then I created the ideal Nazi."
At Columbia University in 1971, Borges further elaborated on the story's creation, "I tried to imagine what a real Nazi might be like. I mean someone who thought of violence as being praiseworthy for its own sake. Then I thought that this archetype of the Nazis wouldn't mind being defeated; after all, defeats and victories are mere matters of chance. He would still be glad of the fact, even if the Americans and British won the war. Naturally, when I am with Nazis, I find they are not my idea of what a Nazi is, but this wasn't meant to be a political tract. It was meant to stand for the fact that there was something tragic in the fate of a real Nazi. Except that I wonder if a real Nazi ever existed. At least, when I went to Germany, I never met one. They were all feeling sorry for themselves and wanted me to feel sorry for them as well."
In 1946, Argentine President Juan Perón began transforming Argentina into a one-party state with the assistance of his wife, Evita. Almost immediately, the spoils system was the rule of the day, as ideological critics of the ruling "Partido Justicialista" were fired from government jobs. During this period, Borges was informed that he was being "promoted" from his position at the Miguel Cané Library to a post as inspector of poultry and rabbits at the Buenos Aires municipal market. Upon demanding to know the reason, Borges was told, "Well, you were on the side of the Allies, what do you expect?" Borges resigned the following day.
Perón's treatment of Borges became a cause célèbre for the Argentine intelligentsia. The Argentine Society of Writers (SADE) held a formal dinner in his honour. At the dinner, a speech was read which Borges had written for the occasion. It said:
In the aftermath, Borges found himself much in demand as a lecturer and one of the intellectual leaders of the Argentine opposition. In 1951 he was asked by anti-Peronist friends to run for president of SADE. Borges, then suffering from depression caused by a failed romance, reluctantly accepted. He later recalled that he would awake every morning and remember that Perón was President and feel deeply depressed and ashamed. Perón's government had seized control of the Argentine mass media and regarded SADE with indifference. Borges later recalled, however, "Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors." Meanwhile, SADE became an increasing refuge for critics of the regime. SADE official Luisa Mercedes Levinson noted, "We would gather every week to tell the latest jokes about the ruling couple and even dared to sing the songs of the French Resistance, as well as 'La Marseillaise'".
After Evita Perón's death on 26 July 1952, Borges received a visit from two policemen, who ordered him to put up two portraits of the ruling couple on the premises of SADE. Borges indignantly refused, calling it a ridiculous demand. The policemen replied that he would soon face the consequences. The Justicialist Party placed Borges under 24-hour surveillance and sent policemen to sit in on his lectures; in September they ordered SADE to be permanently closed down. Like much of the Argentine opposition to Perón, SADE had become marginalized due to persecution by the State, and very few active members remained.
According to Edwin Williamson,
On 16 September 1955, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu's "Revolución Libertadora" toppled the ruling party and forced Perón into exile. Borges was overjoyed and joined demonstrators marching through the streets of Buenos Aires. According to Williamson, Borges shouted, "Viva la Patria", until his voice grew hoarse. Due to the influence of Borges' mother and his own role on the opposition to Peron, the provisional government appointed Borges as the Director of the National Library.
In his essay "L'Illusion Comique", Borges wrote there were two histories of Peronism in Argentina. The first he described as "the criminal one", composed of the police state tactics used against both real and imagined anti-Peronists. The second history was, according to Borges, "the theatrical one" composed of "tales and fables made for consumption by dolts." He argued that, despite their claims to detest capitalism, Juan and Eva Perón "copied its methods, dictating names and slogans to the people" in the same way that multi-national corporations "impose their razor blades, cigarettes, and washing machines." Borges then listed the numerous conspiracy theories the ruling couple dictated to their followers and how those theories were accepted without question.
Borges concluded:
In a 1967 interview, Borges said, "Perón was a humbug, and he knew it, and everybody knew it. But Perón could be very cruel. I mean, he had people tortured, killed. And his wife was a common prostitute."
When Perón returned from exile in 1973 and regained the Presidency, Borges was enraged. In a 1975 interview for "National Geographic", he said "Damn, the snobs are back in the saddle. If their posters and slogans again defile the city, I'll be glad I've lost my sight. Well, they can't humiliate me as they did before my books sold well."
After being accused of being unforgiving, Borges quipped, "I resented Perón's making Argentina look ridiculous to the world ... as in 1951, when he announced control over thermonuclear fusion, which still hasn't happened anywhere but in the sun and the stars. For a time, Argentines hesitated to wear band aids for fear friends would ask, 'Did the atomic bomb go off in your hand?' A shame, because Argentina really has world-class scientists."
After Borges' death in 1986, the Peronist "Partido Justicialista" declined to send a delegate to the writer's memorial service in Buenos Aires. A spokesman for the Party said that this was in reaction to "certain declarations he had made about the country." Later, at the City Council of Buenos Aires, Peronist politicians refused to honor Borges as an Argentine, commenting that he "chose to die abroad." When infuriated politicians from the other parties demanded to know the real reason, the Peronists finally explained that Borges had made statements about Evita Perón which they called "unacceptable".
During the 1970s, Borges at first expressed support for Argentina's military junta, but was scandalized by the junta's actions during the Dirty War. In protest against their support of the regime, Borges ceased publishing in the newspaper "La Nación".
In 1985, he wrote a short poem about the Falklands War called "Juan López y John Ward", about two fictional soldiers (one from each side), who died in the Falklands, in which he refers to "islands that were too famous". He also said about the war: "The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb."
Borges was an observer at the trials of the military junta in 1985 and wrote that "not to judge and condemn the crimes would be to encourage impunity and to become, somehow, its accomplice." Borges added that "the news of the missing people, the crimes and atrocities [the military] committed" had inspired him to return to his earlier Emersonian faith in democracy.
Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort argue that Borges "may have been the most important figure in Spanish-language literature since Cervantes. He was clearly of tremendous influence, writing intricate poems, short stories, and essays that instantiated concepts of dizzying power."
In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies. His longest work of fiction is a fourteen-page story, "The Congress", first published in 1971. His late-onset blindness strongly influenced his later writing. Borges wrote: "When I think of what I've lost, I ask, 'Who know themselves better than the blind?' – for every thought becomes a tool."
Paramount among his intellectual interests are elements of mythology, mathematics, theology, integrating these through literature, sometimes playfully, sometimes with great seriousness.
Borges composed poetry throughout his life. As his eyesight waned (it came and went, with a struggle between advancing age and advances in eye surgery), he increasingly focused on writing poetry, since he could memorize an entire work in progress.
His poems embrace the same wide range of interests as his fiction, along with issues that emerge in his critical works and translations, and from more personal musings. For example, his interest in idealism runs through his work, reflected in the fictional world of Tlön in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and in his essay "A New Refutation of Time". It also appears as a theme in "On Exactitude in Science" and in his poems "Things" and "El Golem" ("The Golem") and his story "The Circular Ruins".
Borges was a notable translator. He translated works of literature in English, French, German, Old English, and Old Norse into Spanish. His first publication, for a Buenos Aires newspaper, was a translation of Oscar Wilde's story "The Happy Prince" into Spanish when he was nine. At the end of his life he produced a Spanish-language version of a part of Snorri Sturluson's "Prose Edda". He also translated (while simultaneously subtly transforming) the works of, among others, Ambrose Bierce, William Faulkner, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf. Borges wrote and lectured extensively on the art of translation, holding that a translation may improve upon the original, may even be unfaithful to it, and that alternative and potentially contradictory renderings of the same work can be equally valid. Borges employed the devices of literary forgery and the review of an imaginary work, both forms of modern pseudo-epigrapha.
Borges's best-known set of literary forgeries date from his early work as a translator and literary critic with a regular column in the Argentine magazine "El Hogar". Along with publishing numerous legitimate translations, he also published original works, for example, in the style of Emanuel Swedenborg or " One Thousand and One Nights", originally claiming them to be translations of works he had chanced upon. In another case, he added three short, falsely attributed pieces into his otherwise legitimate and carefully researched anthology "El matrero". Several of these are gathered in the "A Universal History of Infamy".
While Borges was the great popularizer of the review of an imaginary work, he had developed the idea from Thomas Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus", a book-length review of a non-existent German transcendentalist work, and the biography of its equally non-existent author. In "This Craft of Verse", Borges says that in 1916 in Geneva "[I] discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read "Sartor Resartus", and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart."
In the introduction to his first published volume of fiction, "The Garden of Forking Paths", Borges remarks, "It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." He then cites both "Sartor Resartus" and Samuel Butler's "The Fair Haven", remarking, however, that "those works suffer under the imperfection that they themselves are books, and not a whit less tautological than the others. A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write "notes" on imaginary books."
On the other hand, Borges was wrongly attributed some works, like the poem "Instantes".
Borges's change in style from regionalist "criollismo" to a more cosmopolitan style brought him much criticism from journals such as "Contorno", a leftist, Sartre-influenced Argentine publication founded by David Viñas and his brother, along with other intellectuals such as Noé Jitrik and Adolfo Prieto. In the post-Peronist Argentina of the early 1960s, "Contorno" met with wide approval from the youth who challenged the authenticity of older writers such as Borges and questioned their legacy of experimentation. Magic realism and exploration of universal truths, they argued, had come at the cost of responsibility and seriousness in the face of society's problems.
The "Contorno" writers acknowledged Borges and Eduardo Mallea for being "doctors of technique" but argued that their work lacked substance due to their lack of interaction with the reality that they inhabited, an existentialist critique of their refusal to embrace existence and reality in their artwork.
The story "The Sect of the Phoenix" is famously interpreted to allude to the ubiquity of sexual intercourse among humans – a concept whose essential qualities the narrator of the story is not able to relate to.
With a few notable exceptions, women are almost entirely absent from Borges' fiction. However, there are some instances in Borges' later writings of romantic love, for example the story "Ulrikke" from "The Book of Sand". The protagonist of the story "El muerto" also lusts after the "splendid, contemptuous, red-haired woman" of Azevedo Bandeira and later "sleeps with the woman with shining hair". Although they do not appear in the stories, women are significantly discussed as objects of unrequited love in his short stories "The Zahir" and "The Aleph". The plot of "La Intrusa" was based on a true story of two friends. Borges turned their fictional counterparts into brothers, excluding the possibility of a homosexual relationship.
Borges was never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, something which continually distressed the writer. He was one of several distinguished authors who never received the honour. Borges commented, "Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me".
Some observers speculated that Borges did not receive the award in his later life because of his conservative political views, or, more specifically, because he had accepted an honour from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Borges was nominated in 1967, and was among the final three choices considered by the committee, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary, in 2017. The committee considered Borges, Graham Greene and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with the last chosen winner.
Many of Borges's best-known stories deal with themes of time ("The Secret Miracle"), infinity ("The Aleph"), mirrors ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") and labyrinths ("The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths", "The House of Asterion", "The Immortal", "The Garden of Forking Paths"). Williamson writes, "His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author's ability to generate "poetic faith" in his reader."
His stories often have fantastical themes, such as a library containing every possible 410-page text ("The Library of Babel"), a man who forgets nothing he experiences ("Funes, the Memorious"), an artifact through which the user can see everything in the universe ("The Aleph"), and a year of still time given to a man standing before a firing squad ("The Secret Miracle"). Borges told realistic stories of South American life, of folk heroes, streetfighters, soldiers, gauchos, detectives, and historical figures. He mixed the real and the fantastic, fact with fiction. His interest in compounding fantasy, philosophy, and the art of translation are evident in articles such as "The Translators of "The Book of One Thousand and One Nights"". In the "Book of Imaginary Beings", a thoroughly researched bestiary of mythical creatures, Borges wrote, "There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition." Borges's interest in fantasy was shared by Bioy Casares, with whom he coauthored several collections of tales between 1942 and 1967.
Often, especially early in his career, the mixture of fact and fantasy crossed the line into the realm of hoax or literary forgery.
"The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941) presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges uses the recurring image of "a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression" so we "become aware of all the possible choices we might make." The forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings. Borges saw man's search for meaning in a seemingly infinite universe as fruitless and instead uses the maze as a riddle for time, not space. He examined the themes of universal randomness ("The Lottery in Babylon") and madness ("The Zahir"). Due to the success of the "Forking Paths" story, the term "Borgesian" came to reflect a quality of narrative non-linearity.
The philosophical term "Borgesian conundrum" is named after him and has been defined as the ontological question of "whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him." The original concept was put forward by Borges in "Kafka and His Precursors". After reviewing works that were written before those of Kafka, Borges wrote:
Along with other young Argentine writers of his generation, Borges initially rallied around the fictional character of Martín Fierro. "Martín Fierro", a poem by José Hernández, was a dominant work of 19th century Argentine literature. Its eponymous hero became a symbol of Argentine sensibility, untied from European values – a gaucho, free, poor, "pampas"-dwelling.
The character Fierro is illegally drafted to serve at a border fort to defend it against the indigenous population but ultimately deserts to become a "gaucho matrero", the Argentine equivalent of a North American western outlaw. Borges contributed keenly to the avant garde "Martín Fierro magazine" in the early 1920s.
As Borges matured, he came to a more nuanced attitude toward the Hernández poem. In his book of essays on the poem, Borges separates his admiration for the aesthetic virtues of the work from his mixed opinion of the moral virtues of its protagonist. In his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" (1951), Borges celebrates how Hernández expresses the Argentine character. In a key scene in the poem, Martín Fierro and El Moreno compete by improvising songs on universal themes such as time, night, and the sea, reflecting the real-world gaucho tradition of "payadas", improvised musical dialogues on philosophical themes. Borges points out that Hernández evidently knew the difference between actual gaucho tradition of composing poetry versus the "gauchesque" fashion among Buenos Aires literati.
In his works he refutes the arch-nationalist interpreters of the poem and disdains others, such as critic Eleuterio Tiscornia, for their Europeanising approach. Borges denies that Argentine literature should distinguish itself by limiting itself to "local colour", which he equates with cultural nationalism. Racine and Shakespeare's work, he says, looked beyond their countries' borders. Neither, he argues, need the literature be bound to the heritage of old world Spanish or European tradition. Nor should it define itself by the conscious rejection of its colonial past. He asserts that Argentine writers need to be free to define Argentine literature anew, writing about Argentina and the world from the point of view of those who have inherited the whole of world literature. Williamson says "Borges's main argument is that the very fact of writing from the margins provides Argentine writers with a special opportunity to innovate without being bound to the canons of the centre, ... at once a part of and apart from the centre, which gives them much potential freedom".
Borges focused on universal themes, but also composed a substantial body of literature on themes from Argentine folklore and history. His first book, the poetry collection "Fervor de Buenos Aires" ("Passion for Buenos Aires"), appeared in 1923. Borges's writings on things Argentine, include Argentine culture ("History of the Tango"; "Inscriptions on Horse Wagons"), folklore ("Juan Muraña", "Night of the Gifts"), literature ("The Argentine Writer and Tradition", "Almafuerte"; "Evaristo Carriego"), and national concerns ("Celebration of the Monster", "Hurry, Hurry", "The Mountebank", "Pedro Salvadores"). Ultranationalists, however, continued to question his Argentine identity.
Borges's interest in Argentine themes reflects, in part, the inspiration of his family tree. Borges had an English paternal grandmother who, around 1870, married the "criollo" Francisco Borges, a man with a military command and a historic role in the Argentine Civil Wars in what is now Argentina and Uruguay.
Spurred by pride in his family's heritage, Borges often used those civil wars as settings in fiction and quasi-fiction (for example, "The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz," "The Dead Man," "Avelino Arredondo") as well as poetry ("General Quiroga Rides to His Death in a Carriage"). Borges's maternal great-grandfather, Manuel Isidoro Suárez, was another military hero, whom Borges immortalized in the poem "A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín".
His non-fiction explores many of the themes found in his fiction. Essays such as "The History of the Tango" or his writings on the epic poem "Martín Fierro" explore Argentine themes, such as the identity of the Argentine people and of various Argentine subcultures. The varying genealogies of characters, settings, and themes in his stories, such as "La muerte y la brújula", used Argentine models without pandering to his readers or framing Argentine culture as "exotic".
In fact, contrary to what is usually supposed, the geographies found in his fictions often do not correspond to those of real-world Argentina. In his essay "El escritor argentino y la tradición", Borges notes that the very absence of camels in the Qur'an was proof enough that it was an Arabian work (despite the fact that camels are, in fact, mentioned in the Qur'an). He suggested that only someone trying to write an "Arab" work would purposefully include a camel. He uses this example to illustrate how his dialogue with universal existential concerns was just as Argentine as writing about gauchos and tangos.
At the time of the Argentine Declaration of Independence in 1816, the population was predominantly "criollo" (of Spanish ancestry). From the mid-1850s on waves of immigration from Europe, especially Italy and Spain, arrived in the country, and in the following decades the Argentine national identity diversified. Borges was writing in a strongly European literary context, immersed in Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature. He also read translations of Near Eastern and Far Eastern works. Borges's writing is also informed by scholarship of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism, including prominent religious figures, heretics, and mystics.
Religion and heresy are explored in such stories as "Averroes's Search", "The Writing of the God", "The Theologians", and "Three Versions of Judas". The curious inversion of mainstream Christian concepts of redemption in the last story is characteristic of Borges's approach to theology in his literature.
In describing himself, he said, "I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors." As a young man, he visited the frontier "pampas" which extend beyond Argentina into Uruguay and Brazil. Borges said that his father wished him "to become a citizen of the world, a great cosmopolitan," in the way of Henry and William James.
Borges lived and studied in Switzerland and Spain as a young student. As Borges matured, he traveled through Argentina as a lecturer and, internationally, as a visiting professor; he continued to tour the world as he grew older, finally settling in Geneva where he had spent some of his youth. Drawing on the influence of many times and places, Borges's work belittled nationalism and racism. Portraits of diverse coexisting cultures characteristic of Argentina are especially pronounced in the book "Six Problems for don Isidoro Parodi" (co-authored with Bioy Casares) and "Death and the Compass". Borges wrote that he considered Mexican essayist Alfonso Reyes to be "the best prose-writer in the Spanish language of any time."
Borges was also an admirer of some Oriental culture, e.g. the ancient Chinese board game of Go, about which he penned some verses, while The Garden of Forking Paths had a strong oriental theme.
Borges was rooted in the Modernism predominant in its early years and was influenced by Symbolism. Like Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, he combined an interest in his native culture with broader perspectives, also sharing their multilingualism and inventiveness with language. However, while Nabokov and Joyce tended toward progressively larger works, Borges remained a miniaturist. His work progressed "away" from what he referred to as "the baroque": his later style is far more transparent and naturalistic than his earlier works. Borges represented the humanist view of media that stressed the social aspect of art driven by emotion. If art represented the tool, then Borges was more interested in how the tool could be used to relate to people.
Existentialism saw its apogee during the years of Borges's greatest artistic production. It has been argued that his choice of topics largely ignored existentialism's central tenets. Critic Paul de Man notes, "Whatever Borges's existential anxieties may be, they have little in common with Sartre's robustly prosaic view of literature, with the earnestness of Camus' moralism, or with the weighty profundity of German existential thought. Rather, they are the consistent expansion of a purely poetic consciousness to its furthest limits."
The essay collection "Borges y la Matemática" (Borges and Mathematics, 2003) by Argentine mathematician and writer Guillermo Martínez, outlines how Borges used concepts from mathematics in his work. Martínez states that Borges had, for example, at least a superficial knowledge of set theory, which he handles with elegance in stories such as "The Book of Sand". Other books such as "The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel" by William Goldbloom Bloch (2008) and "Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics" by Floyd Merrell (1991) also explore this relationship.
Fritz Mauthner, philosopher of language and author of the "Wörterbuch der Philosophie" ("Dictionary of Philosophy"), had an important influence on Borges. Borges always recognized the influence of this German philosopher. According to the literary review "Sur," the book was one of the five books most noted and read by Borges. The first time that Borges mentioned Mauthner was in 1928 in his book "The language of the Argentines" (El idioma de los argentinos). In a 1962 interview Borges described Mauthner as possessing a fine sense of humor as well as great knowledge and erudition.
In an interview , Denis Dutton asked Borges who were the “…philosophers who have influenced your works, in whom you’ve been the most interested….” In reply, Borges named Berkeley and Schopenhauer.
He was also influenced by Spinoza, about whom Borges wrote a famous poem
It is not without humour that Borges once wrote “Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca.”(I always imagined paradise to be some kind of a library"
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15781
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Jane Austen
Jane Austen (; 16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her use of biting irony, along with her realism, humour, and social commentary, have long earned her acclaim among critics, scholars, and popular audiences alike.
With the publications of "Sense and Sensibility" (1811), "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "Mansfield Park" (1814) and "Emma" (1816), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion", both published posthumously in 1818, and began another, eventually titled "Sanditon", but died before its completion. She also left behind three volumes of juvenile writings in manuscript, a short epistolary novel "Lady Susan", and another unfinished novel, "The Watsons". Her six full-length novels have rarely been out of print, although they were published anonymously and brought her moderate success and little fame during her lifetime.
A significant transition in her posthumous reputation occurred in 1833, when her novels were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series, illustrated by Ferdinand Pickering, and sold as a set. They gradually gained wider acclaim and popular readership. In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew's publication of "A Memoir of Jane Austen" introduced a compelling version of her writing career and supposedly uneventful life to an eager audience.
Austen has inspired many critical essays and literary anthologies. Her novels have inspired many films, from 1940's "Pride and Prejudice" to more recent productions like "Sense and Sensibility" (1995), "Emma" (1996), "Mansfield Park" (1999), "Pride & Prejudice" (2005), "Love & Friendship" (2016), and "Emma". (2020).
There is little biographical information about Jane Austen's life except the few letters that survived and the biographical notes her family members wrote. During her lifetime, Austen may have written as many as 3,000 letters, but only 161 survived. Many of the letters were written to Austen's older sister Cassandra, who in 1843 burned the greater part of them and cut pieces out of those she kept. Ostensibly, Cassandra destroyed or censored her sister's letters to prevent their falling into the hands of relatives and ensuring that "younger nieces did not read any of Jane Austen's sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbours or family members". Cassandra believed that in the interest of tact and Jane's penchant for forthrightness, these details should be destroyed. The paucity of record of Austen's life leaves modern biographers little with which to work.
The situation was compounded as successive generations of the family expunged and sanitised the already opaque details of Austen's biography. The heirs of Jane's brother, Admiral Francis Austen, destroyed more letters; details were excised from the "Biographical Notice" her brother wrote in 1818; and family details continued to be omitted or embellished in her nephew's "A Memoir of Jane Austen", published in 1869, and in William and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh's biography "Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters", published in 1913. The legend the family and relatives created reflects their biases in favour of "good quiet Aunt Jane", portraying a woman whose domestic situation was happy and whose family was the mainstay of her life. Austen scholar, Jan Fergus explains that modern biographies tend to include details excised from the letters and family biographical materials, but that the challenge is to avoid the polarising view that Austen experienced periods of deep unhappiness and was "an embittered, disappointed woman trapped in a thoroughly unpleasant family".
Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, on 16 December 1775. She was born a month later than her parents expected; her father wrote of her arrival in a letter that her mother "certainly expected to have been brought to bed a month ago". He added that her arrival was particularly welcome as "a future companion to her sister". The winter of 1776 was particularly harsh and it was not until 5 April that she was baptised at the local church with the single name Jane.
For much of Jane's life, her father, George Austen (1731–1805), served as the rector of the Anglican parishes at Steventon and at nearby Deane. He came from an old, respected, and wealthy family of wool merchants. Over the centuries as each generation of eldest sons received inheritances, their wealth was consolidated, and George's branch of the family fell into poverty. He and his two sisters were orphaned as children and had to be taken in by relatives. His sister Philadelphia went to India to find a husband and George entered St John's College, Oxford on a fellowship, where he most likely met Cassandra Leigh (1739–1827). She came from the prominent Leigh family; her father was rector at All Souls College, Oxford, where she grew up among the gentry. Her eldest brother James inherited a fortune and large estate from his great-aunt Perrot, with the only condition that he change his name to Leigh-Perrot.
George and Cassandra exchanged miniatures in 1763 and probably were engaged around that time. George received the living for the Steventon parish from the wealthy husband of his second cousin, Thomas Knight, who owned Steventon and its associated farms, one of which the Austen family rented to live in. Two months after Cassandra's father died, they married on 26 April 1764 at St Swithin's Church in Bath, by licence, in a simple ceremony. They left for Hampshire the same day.
Their income was modest, with George's small "per annum" living; Cassandra brought to the marriage the expectation of a small inheritance at the time of her mother's death. The Austens took up temporary residence at the nearby Deane rectory until Steventon, a 16th-century house in disrepair, underwent necessary renovations. Cassandra gave birth to three children while living at Deane: James in 1765, George in 1766, and Edward in 1767. Her custom was to keep an infant at home for several months and then place it with Elizabeth Littlewood, a woman living nearby to nurse and raise for twelve to eighteen months.
In 1768, the family finally took up residence in Steventon. Henry was the first child to be born there, in 1771. At about this time, Cassandra could no longer ignore the signs that little George was developmentally disabled. He was subject to seizures, may have been deaf and mute, and she chose to send him out to be fostered. In 1773, Cassandra was born, followed by Francis in 1774, and Jane in 1775.
According to Honan, the atmosphere of the Austen home was an "open, amused, easy intellectual" one, where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed. The family relied on the patronage of their kin and hosted visits from numerous family members. Cassandra Austen spent the summer of 1770 in London with George's sister, Philadelphia, and her daughter Eliza, accompanied by his other sister, Mrs Walter and her daughter Philly. Philadelphia and Eliza Hancock were, according to Le Faye, "the bright comets flashing into an otherwise placid solar system of clerical life in rural Hampshire, and the news of their foreign travels and fashionable London life, together with their sudden descents upon the Steventon household in between times, all helped to widen Jane's youthful horizon and influence her later life and works."
Cassandra Austen's cousin Thomas Leigh visited a number of times in the 1770s and 1780s, inviting young Cassie to visit them in Bath in 1781. The first mention of Jane occurs in family documents on her return, "... and almost home they were when they met Jane & Charles, the two little ones of the family, who had to go as far as New Down to meet the chaise, & have the pleasure of riding home in it." Le Faye writes that "Mr Austen's predictions for his younger daughter were fully justified. Never were sisters more to each other than Cassandra and Jane; while in a particularly affectionate family, there seems to have been a special link between Cassandra and Edward on the one hand, and between Henry and Jane on the other."
From 1773 until 1796, George Austen supplemented his income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time, who boarded at his home. The Reverend Austen had an annual income of £200 from his two livings. This was a very modest income at the time; by comparison, a skilled worker like a blacksmith or a carpenter could make about £100 annually while the typical annual income of a gentry family was between £1,000 and £5,000.
During this period of her life, Austen attended church regularly, socialised with friends and neighbours, and read novels—often of her own composition—aloud to her family in the evenings. Socialising with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone's home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. Her brother Henry later said that "Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it".
In 1783, Austen and her sister Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs Ann Cawley who took them with her to Southampton when she moved there later in the year. In the autumn both girls were sent home when they caught typhus and Austen nearly died. Austen was from then home educated, until she attended boarding school in Reading with her sister from early in 1785 at the Reading Abbey Girls' School, ruled by Mrs La Tournelle, who possessed a cork leg and a passion for theatre. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. The sisters returned home before December 1786 because the school fees for the two girls were too high for the Austen family. After 1786, Austen "never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment".
The remainder of her education came from reading, guided by her father and brothers James and Henry. Irene Collins believes that Austen "used some of the same school books as the boys" her father tutored. Austen apparently had unfettered access both to her father's library and that of a family friend, Warren Hastings. Together these collections amounted to a large and varied library. Her father was also tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.
Private theatricals were an essential part of Austen's education. From her early childhood, the family and friends staged a series of plays in the rectory barn, including Richard Sheridan's "The Rivals" (1775) and David Garrick's "Bon Ton". Austen's eldest brother James wrote the prologues and epilogues and she probably joined in these activities, first as a spectator and later as a participant. Most of the plays were comedies, which suggests how Austen's satirical gifts were cultivated. At the age of 12, she tried her own hand at dramatic writing; she wrote three short plays during her teenage years.
From the age of eleven, and perhaps earlier, Austen wrote poems and stories for her own and her family's amusement. In these works, the details of daily life are exaggerated, common plot devices are parodied, and the "stories are full of anarchic fantasies of female power, licence, illicit behaviour, and general high spirits", according to Janet Todd. Austen later compiled fair copies of twenty-nine early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the "Juvenilia", containing work written between 1787 and 1793. She called the three notebooks "Volume the First", "Volume the Second" and "Volume the Third", and they preserve 90,000 words she wrote during those years. The "Juvenilia" are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, "boisterous" and "anarchic"; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne.
Among these works are a satirical novel in letters titled "Love and Freindship" , written at age fourteen in 1790, in which she mocked popular novels of sensibility. The next year she wrote "The History of England", a manuscript of thirty-four pages accompanied by thirteen watercolour miniatures by her sister, Cassandra. Austen's "History" parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith's "History of England" (1764). Honan speculates that not long after writing "Love and Freindship", Austen decided to "write for profit, to make stories her central effort", that is, to become a professional writer. When she was around eighteen years old, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works.
In August 1792, aged seventeen, Austen started writing "Catharine or the Bower", which presaged her mature work, especially "Northanger Abbey"; it was left unfinished and the story picked up in "Lady Susan", which Todd describes as less prefiguring than "Catharine". A year later, she began, but abandoned a short play, later titled "Sir Charles Grandison or the happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts", which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgements of Austen's favourite contemporary novel, "The History of Sir Charles Grandison" (1753), by Samuel Richardson.
When Austen became an aunt for the first time at age eighteen, she sent new-born niece Fanny-Catherine Austen-Knight "five short pieces of ... the Juvenilia now known collectively as 'Scraps' .., purporting to be her 'Opinions and Admonitions on the conduct of Young Women. For niece Jane-Anna-Elizabeth Austen (also born in 1793) Jane Austen wrote "two more 'Miscellanious [sic] Morsels', dedicating them to [Anna] on 2 June 1793, 'convinced that if you seriously attend to them, You will derive from them very important Instructions, with regard to your Conduct in Life. There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as 1811 (when she was 36), and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814.
Between 1793 and 1795 (aged eighteen to twenty) Austen wrote "Lady Susan", a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work. It is unlike any of Austen's other works. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the novella's heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray and abuse her lovers, friends and family. Tomalin writes:
Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration ... It stands alone in Austen's work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters.
According to Janet Todd, the model for the title character may have been Eliza de Feuillide, who inspired Austen with stories of her glamorous life and various adventures. Eliza's French husband was guillotined in 1794; she married Jane's brother Henry Austen in 1797.
When Austen was twenty, Tom Lefroy, a neighbour, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796. He had just finished a university degree and was moving to London for training as a barrister. Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen's letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: "I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together."
Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was a "very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man". Five days later in another letter, Austen wrote that she expected an "offer" from her "friend" and that "I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat", going on to write "I will confide myself in the future to Mr Tom Lefroy, for whom I don't give a sixpence" and refuse all others. The next day, Austen wrote: "The day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea".
Halperin cautioned that Austen often satirised popular sentimental romantic fiction in her letters, and some of the statements about Lefroy may have been ironic. However, it is clear that Austen was genuinely attracted to Lefroy and subsequently none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him. The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January. Marriage was impractical as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again. In November 1798, Lefroy was still on Austen's mind as she wrote to her sister she had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject.
After finishing "Lady Susan", Austen began her first full-length novel "Elinor and Marianne". Her sister remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as "Sense and Sensibility".
Austen began a second novel, "First Impressions" (later published as "Pride and Prejudice"), in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21; as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an "established favourite". At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing "First Impressions". Cadell returned Mr. Austen's letter, marking it "Declined by Return of Post". Austen may not have known of her father's efforts. Following the completion of "First Impressions", Austen returned to "Elinor and Marianne" and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to "Sense and Sensibility". In 1797, Austen met her cousin (and future sister-in-law), Eliza de Feuillide, a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feuillide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. The description of the execution of the Comte de Feuillide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life.
During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of "Elinor and Marianne", Austen began writing a third novel with the working title "Susan"—later "Northanger Abbey"—a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered "Susan" to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being "in the press", but did nothing more. The manuscript remained in Crosby's hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816.
In December 1800 George Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to 4, Sydney Place in Bath. While retirement and travel were good for the elder Austens, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving from the only home she had ever known. An indication of her state of mind is her lack of productivity as a writer during the time she lived at Bath. She was able to make some revisions to "Susan", and she began and then abandoned a new novel, "The Watsons", but there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795–1799. Tomalin suggests this reflects a deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing Austen wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few months after her father died. It is often claimed that Austen was unhappy in Bath, which caused her to lose interest in writing, but it is just as possible that Austen's social life in Bath prevented her from spending much time writing novels. The critic Robert Irvine argued that if Austen spent more time writing novels when she was in the countryside, it might just have been because she had more spare time as opposed to being more happy in the countryside as is often argued. Furthermore, Austen frequently both moved and travelled over southern England during this period, which was hardly a conducive environment for writing a long novel. Austen sold the rights to publish "Susan" to a publisher Crosby & Company, who paid her £10. The Crosby & Company advertised "Susan", but never published it.
The years from 1801 to 1804 are something of a blank space for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons. In December 1802 Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane's niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive—he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance. No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal. Irvine described Bigg-Wither as a somebody who "...seems to have been a man very hard to like, let alone love".
In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling her that "having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection". The English scholar Douglas Bush wrote that Austen had "had a very high ideal of the love that should unite a husband and wife ... All of her heroines ... know in proportion to their maturity, the meaning of ardent love". A possible autobiographical element in "Sense and Sensibility" occurs when Elinor Dashwood contemplates that "the worse and most irremediable of all evils, a connection for life" with an unsuitable man.
In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started, but did not complete, her novel "The Watsons". The story centres on an invalid and impoverished clergyman and his four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as "a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women's lives". Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort.
Her father's relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and their mother in a precarious financial situation. Edward, James, Henry, and Francis Austen (known as Frank) pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters. For the next four years, the family's living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They spent part of the time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the city in June 1805 for a family visit to Steventon and Godmersham. They moved for the autumn months to the newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing, on the Sussex coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage. It was here that Austen is thought to have written her fair copy of "Lady Susan" and added its "Conclusion". In 1806 the family moved to Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family.
On 5 April 1809, about three months before the family's move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of "Susan" if needed to secure the immediate publication of the novel, and requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher. Crosby replied that he had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find another publisher. She did not have the resources to buy the copyright back at that time, but was able to purchase it in 1816.
Around early 1809 Austen's brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life—the use of a large cottage in Chawton village that was part of Edward's nearby estate, Chawton House. Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809. Life was quieter in Chawton than it had been since the family's move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialise with gentry and entertained only when family visited. Her niece Anna described the family's life in Chawton as "a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write."
At the time, married British women did not have the legal power to sign contracts, and it was common for a woman wishing to publish to have a male relative represent her to sign the contract. Like most women authors at the time, Austen had to publish her books anonymously. At the time, the ideal roles for a woman were as wife and mother, and writing for women was regarded at best as a secondary form of activity; a woman who wished to be a full-time writer was felt to be degrading her femininity, so books by women were usually published anonymously in order to maintain the conceit that the female writer was only publishing as a sort of part-time job, and was not seeking to become a "literacy lioness" (i.e a celebrity).
During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen published four generally well-received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish "Sense and Sensibility", which, like all of Jane Austen's novels except "Pride and Prejudice", was published "on commission", that is, at the author's financial risk. When publishing on commission, publishers would advance the costs of publication, repay themselves as books were sold and then charge a 10% commission for each book sold, paying the rest to the author. If a novel did not recover its costs through sales, the author was responsible for them. The alternative to selling via commission was the selling the copyright, where an author received a one-time payment from the publisher for the manuscript, which occurred with "Pride and Prejudice". Austen's experience with "Susan" (the manuscript that became "Northanger Abbey") where she sold the copyright to the publisher Crosby & Sons for £10, who did not publish the book, forcing her to buy back the copyright in order to get her work published, left Austen leery of this method of publishing. The final alternative, of selling by subscription, where a group of people would agree to buy a book in advance, was not an option for Austen as only authors who were well known or had an influential aristocratic patron who would recommend an up-coming book to their friends, could sell by subscription. "Sense and Sensibility" appeared in October 1811, and was described as being written "By a Lady". As it was sold on commission, Egerton used expensive paper and set the price at 15 shillings.
Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable among young aristocratic opinion-makers; the edition sold out by mid-1813. Austen's novels were published in larger editions than was normal for this period. The small size of the novel-reading public and the large costs associated with hand production (particularly the cost of handmade paper) meant that most novels were published in editions of 500 copies or less to reduce the risks to the publisher and the novelist. Even some of the most successful titles during this period were issued in editions of not more than 750 or 800 copies and later reprinted if demand continued. Austen's novels were published in larger editions, ranging from about 750 copies of "Sense and Sensibility" to about 2,000 copies of "Emma". It is not clear whether the decision to print more copies than usual of Austen's novels was driven by the publishers or the author. Since all but one of Austen's books were originally published "on commission", the risks of overproduction were largely hers (or Cassandra's after her death) and publishers may have been more willing to produce larger editions than was normal practice when their own funds were at risk. Editions of popular works of non-fiction were often much larger.
Austen made £140 from "Sense and Sensibility", which provided her with some financial and psychological independence. After the success of "Sense and Sensibility", all of Austen's subsequent books were billed as written "By the author of "Sense and Sensibility"" and Austen's name never appeared on her books during her lifetime. Egerton then published "Pride and Prejudice", a revision of "First Impressions", in January 1813. Austen sold the copyright to "Pride and Prejudice" to Egerton for £110. To maximise profits, he used cheap paper and set the price at 18 shillings. He advertised the book widely and it was an immediate success, garnering three favourable reviews and selling well. Had Austen sold "Pride and Prejudice" on commission, she would had made a profit of £475, or twice her father's annual income. By October 1813 Egerton was able to begin selling a second edition. "Mansfield Park" was published by Egerton in May 1814. While "Mansfield Park" was ignored by reviewers, it was very popular with readers. All copies were sold within six months, and Austen's earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels.
Unknown to Austen, her novels were translated into French and published in cheaply produced, pirated editions in France. The literary critic Noel King commented that given the prevailing rage in France at the time was for lush romantic fantasies, it is remarkable that her novels with the emphasis on everyday English life had any sort of a market in France. However, King cautioned that Austen's chief translator in France, Madame Isabelle de Montolieu, had only the most rudimentary knowledge of English, and her translations were more of "imitations" than translations proper, as Montolieu depended upon assistants to provide a summary, which she then translated into an embellished French that often radically altered Austen's plots and characters. The first of the Austen novels to be published that credited her as the author was in France, when "Persuasion" was published in 1821 as "La Famille Elliot ou L'Ancienne Inclination".
Austen learned that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences. In November 1815, the Prince Regent's librarian James Stanier Clarke invited Austen to visit the Prince's London residence and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming "Emma" to the Prince. Though Austen disliked the Prince Regent, she could scarcely refuse the request. Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent on the account of his womanising, gambling, drinking, spendthrift ways and generally disreputable behaviour. She later wrote "Plan of a Novel, according to Hints from Various Quarters", a satiric outline of the "perfect novel" based on the librarian's many suggestions for a future Austen novel. Austen was greatly annoyed by Clarke's often pompous literary advice, and the "Plan of A Novel" parodying Clarke was intended as her revenge for all of the unwanted letters she had received from the royal librarian.
In mid-1815 Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher, who published "Emma" in December 1815 and a second edition of "Mansfield Park" in February 1816. "Emma" sold well, but the new edition of "Mansfield Park" did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from "Emma". These were the last of Austen's novels to be published during her lifetime.
While Murray prepared "Emma" for publication, Austen began "The Elliots", later published as "Persuasion". She completed her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of "Emma", Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for "Susan" from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen's bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and costing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums. Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters.
Austen was feeling unwell by early 1816, but ignored the warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular deterioration. The majority of biographers rely on Zachary Cope's 1964 retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison's disease, although her final illness has also been described as resulting from Hodgkin's lymphoma. When her uncle died and left his entire fortune to his wife, effectively disinheriting his relatives, she suffered a relapse, writing, "I am ashamed to say that the shock of my Uncle's Will brought on a relapse ... but a weak Body must excuse weak Nerves".
She continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with the ending of "The Elliots", she rewrote the final two chapters, which she finished on 6 August 1816. In January 1817 Austen began "The Brothers" (titled "Sanditon" when published in 1925), and completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably due to illness. Todd describes "Sanditon"s heroine, Diana Parker, as an "energetic invalid". In the novel, Austen mocked hypochondriacs and though she describes the heroine as "bilious", five days after abandoning the novel she wrote of herself that she was turning "every wrong colour" and living "chiefly on the sofa". She put down her pen on 18 March 1817, making a note of it.
Austen made light of her condition, describing it as "bile" and rheumatism. As her illness progressed, she experienced difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was confined to bed. In May Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment, by which time she suffered agonising pain and welcomed death. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817 at the age of 41. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen's personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation and mentions the "extraordinary endowments of her mind", but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer.
In the months after Austen's death in July 1817, Cassandra, Henry Austen and Murray arranged for the publication of "Persuasion" and "Northanger Abbey" as a set. Henry Austen contributed a "Biographical Note" dated December 1817, which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Tomalin describes it as "a loving and polished eulogy". Sales were good for a year—only 321 copies remained unsold at the end of 1818.
Although Austen's six novels were out of print in England in the 1820s, they were still being read through copies housed in private libraries and circulating libraries. Austen had early admirers. The first piece of what we might now call fan fiction (or real-person fiction) using her as a character dates to 1823. It's in a letter to the editor in "The Lady's Magazine". It refers to Austen's genius and suggests that aspiring authors were envious of her powers.
In 1832 Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of her novels, and over the following winter published five illustrated volumes as part of his "Standard Novels" series. In October 1833, Bentley released the first collected edition of her works. Since then, Austen's novels have been continuously in print.
Austen's works critique the sentimental novels of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. The earliest English novelists, Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, were followed by the school of sentimentalists and romantics such as Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style and genre Austen rejected, returning the novel on a "slender thread" to the tradition of Richardson and Fielding for a "realistic study of manners". In the mid-20th century, literary critics F. R. Leavis and Ian Watt placed her in the tradition of Richardson and Fielding; both believe that she used their tradition of "irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both".
Walter Scott noted Austen's "resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction—'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries'". Yet her rejection of these genres is complex, as evidenced by "Northanger Abbey" and "Emma". Similar to William Wordsworth, who excoriated the modern frantic novel in the "Preface" to his "Lyrical Ballads" (1800), Austen distances herself from escapist novels; the discipline and innovation she demonstrates is similar to his, and she shows "that rhetorically less is artistically more." She eschewed popular Gothic fiction, stories of terror in which a heroine typically was stranded in a remote location, a castle or abbey (32 novels between 1784 and 1818 contain the word "abbey" in their title). Yet in "Northanger Abbey" she alludes to the trope, with the heroine, Catherine, anticipating a move to a remote locale. Rather than full-scale rejection or parody, Austen transforms the genre, juxtaposing reality, with descriptions of elegant rooms and modern comforts, against the heroine's "novel-fueled" desires. Nor does she completely denigrate Gothic fiction: instead she transforms settings and situations, such that the heroine is still imprisoned, yet her imprisonment is mundane and real—regulated manners and the strict rules of the ballroom. In "Sense and Sensibility" Austen presents characters who are more complex than in staple sentimental fiction, according to critic Keymer, who notes that although it is a parody of popular sentimental fiction, "Marianne in her sentimental histrionics responds to the calculating world ... with a quite justifiable scream of female distress."
Richardson's "Pamela", the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic love story with a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to have the right to choose husbands and yet were restricted by social conventions. Austen attempted Richardson's epistolary style, but found the flexibility of narrative more conducive to her realism, a realism in which each conversation and gesture carries a weight of significance. The narrative style utilises free indirect speech—she was the first English novelist to do so extensively—through which she had the ability to present a character's thoughts directly to the reader and yet still retain narrative control. The style allows an author to vary discourse between the narrator's voice and values and those of the characters.
Austen had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according to scholar Mary Lascelles: "Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters." Techniques such as fragmentary speech suggest a character's traits and their tone; "syntax and phrasing rather than vocabulary" is utilised to indicate social variants. Dialogue reveals a character's mood—frustration, anger, happiness—each treated differently and often through varying patterns of sentence structures. When Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the convoluted sentence structure reveals that he has wounded her:
From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.
Austen's plots highlight women's traditional dependence on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. As an art form, the 18th-century novel lacked the seriousness of its equivalents from the 19th century, when novels were treated as "the natural vehicle for discussion and ventilation of what mattered in life". Rather than delving too deeply into the psyche of her characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues them with humour, according to critic John Bayley. He believes that the well-spring of her wit and irony is her own attitude that comedy "is the saving grace of life". Part of Austen's fame rests on the historical and literary significance that she was the first woman to write great comic novels. Samuel Johnson's influence is evident, in that she follows his advice to write "a representation of life as may excite mirth".
Her humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority, allowing her most successful characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet, to transcend the trivialities of life, which the more foolish characters are overly absorbed in. Austen used comedy to explore the individualism of women's lives and gender relations, and she appears to have used it to find the goodness in life, often fusing it with "ethical sensibility", creating artistic tension. Critic Robert Polhemus writes, "To appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule ... and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and the telling contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical bias with her sense of the good."
As Austen's works were published anonymously, they brought her little personal renown. They were fashionable among opinion-makers, but were rarely reviewed. Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious. They most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels. Sir Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, contributed one anonymously. Using the review as a platform to defend the then-disreputable genre of the novel, he praised Austen's realism. The other important early review was attributed to Richard Whately in 1821. However, Whately denied having authored the review, which drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, and praised the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Scott and Whately set the tone for almost all subsequent 19th-century Austen criticism.
Because Austen's novels did not conform to Romantic and Victorian expectations that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and colour in the writing", 19th-century critics and audiences preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. In a rare sympathetic review, in this case of "Emma" in 1815, Sir Walter Scott wrote that book displayed "the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him". Though Scott was positive, Austen's work did not match the prevailing aesthetic values of the Romantic zeitgeist. Her novels were republished in Britain from the 1830s and sold at a steady rate, but they were not best-sellers. The first French critic who paid notice to Austen was Philarète Chasles who completely dismissed her as a writer, giving her two sentences in an 1842 essay on the influence of Sir Walter Scott, calling her a boring, imitative writer who wrote nothing of substance. Apart from Chasles, Austen was almost completely ignored in France until 1878.
Austen had many admiring readers in the 19th century, who considered themselves part of a literary elite. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes expressed this viewpoint in a series of enthusiastic articles published in the 1840s and 1850s. This theme continued later in the century with novelist Henry James, who referred to Austen several times with approval and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among "the fine painters of life".
The publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's "A Memoir of Jane Austen" in 1869 introduced Austen to a wider public as "dear aunt Jane", the respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the "Memoir" spurred the reissue of Austen's novels—the first popular editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated editions and collectors' sets quickly followed. Author and critic Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as "Austenolatry". In 1878, the French critic Léon Boucher published the essay "Le Roman Classique en Angleterre", where he called Austen a "genius", which was the first time that epithet had been used in France to describe Austen. The first proper translation of Austen into French that was completely faithful to the original occurred in 1899 when Félix Fénéon translated "Northanger Abbey" into French as "Catherine Moreland". Around the start of the 20th century, members of the literary elite reacted against the popularisation of Austen. They referred to themselves as "Janeites" in order to distinguish themselves from the masses who did not properly understand her works. For example, Henry James responded negatively to what he described as "a beguiled infatuation" with Austen, a rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen's "intrinsic merit and interest". The American literary critic A. Walton Litz noted that the "anti-Janites" in the 19th and 20th centuries comprise a formidable literary squad of Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, D.H. Lawrence and Kingsley Amis, but in "every case the adverse judgement merely reveals the special limitations or eccentricities of the critic, leaving Jane Austen relatively untouched".
Several of Austen's works have been subject to academic study. The first dissertation on Austen was published in 1883, by George Pellew, a student at Harvard University. The first examination came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley. In his essay, Bradley groups Austen's novels into "early" and "late" works, a distinction still used by scholars today. The first academic books devoted to Austen in France was "Jane Austen" by Paul and Kate Rague published in 1914, where the Ragues set out to explain why French critics and readers should take Austen seriously. The same year, Léonie Villard published "Jane Austen, Sa Vie et Ses Oeuvres", which was originally her PhD thesis, marking the first time that Austen was the subject of serious academic study in France. The second examination in English was R.W. Chapman's 1923 edition of Austen's collected works. Not only was it the first scholarly edition of Austen's works, it was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen's works.
With the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles' "Jane Austen and Her Art", the academic study of Austen took hold. Lascelles's work included an analysis of the books Austen read and the effect of her reading on her work as well as an extended analysis of Austen's style and her "narrative art". Concern arose that academics were taking over Austen criticism and that it was becoming increasingly esoteric, a debate that has continued since.
The period since World War II has seen more scholarship on Austen using a diversity of critical approaches, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially, postcolonial theory. The continuing disconnection between the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and the academic appreciation of Austen has widened considerably. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Austen was in disfavor with the authorities who only wanted Western authors to be published in translation whose work could be presented as representing the West in a negative light, and Austen was regarded as too "frivolous" for this purpose. As hostile as the treatment of Austen was in the 1950s, it paled besides the treatment of her books during the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in China between 1966–69, when Austen was banned as a "British bourgeois imperialist" author. In the late 1970s, Austen was allowed to be published in China, where her popularity with readers confounded the authorities who had trouble understanding that people sometimes want to read books for enjoyment instead of dialectical purposes. A sign of the way that Austen can still spark debate can be seen when the American English professor Gene Koppel mentioned in a lecture that Austen and her family were "Tories of the deepest dye" [the Tories were the conservative party while the Whigs were the liberal party], a statement which greatly upset many of Koppel's liberal students, who much to his amusement, complained to him how was it possible that Austen was a conservative. The conservative Koppel noted several feminist authors such as Claudia Johnson and Mollie Sandock were claiming Austen for their own cause. Citing the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Koppel argued that different people can and do react to the same work of literature in different ways as art is always a subjective discipline as various people have their standards for evaluating literature. As such, Koppel argued that competing interpretations of Austen's work, provided that they are grounded in readings of her work are all equally valid, and so it is equally possible to see Austen as a feminist critiquing Regency society and as a conservative upholding the values of Regency society.
Austen's novels have resulted in sequels, prequels and adaptations of almost every type, from soft-core pornography to fantasy. From the 19th century, her family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were over 100 printed adaptations. The first dramatic adaptation of Austen was published in 1895, Rosina Filippi's "Duologues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen: Arranged and Adapted for Drawing-Room Performance", and Filippi was also responsible for the first professional stage adaptation, "The Bennets" (1901). The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of "Pride and Prejudice" starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. BBC television dramatisations since the 1970s have attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen's plots, characterisations and settings. The British critic Robert Irvine noted that in American film adaptations of Austen's novels, starting with the 1940 version of "Pride and Prejudice" and continuing on to today, class is subtly downplayed as the United States is officially an egalitarian nation where all people are equal and the society of Regency England depicted by Austen that is grounded in a hierarchy based upon the ownership of land and the antiquity of the family name is one that Americans cannot embrace in its entirety.
From 1995 many Austen adaptations appeared, with Ang Lee's film of "Sense and Sensibility", for which screenwriter and star Emma Thompson won an Academy Award, and the BBC's immensely popular TV mini-series "Pride and Prejudice", starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. A 2005 British production of "Pride and Prejudice", directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, was followed in 2007 by ITV's "Mansfield Park", "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion", and in 2016 by "Love & Friendship" starring Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan, a film version of "Lady Susan", that borrowed the title of Austen's "Love and " [sic].
Austen is on the £10 note which was introduced in 2017, replacing Charles Darwin.
Novels
Unfinished fiction
Other works
Juvenilia—Volume the First (1787–1793)
Juvenilia—Volume the Second (1787–1793)
Juvenilia—Volume the Third (1787–1793)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15782
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John Horton Conway
John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 – 11 April 2020) was an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He also made contributions to many branches of recreational mathematics, most notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.
Born and raised in Liverpool, Conway spent the first half of his career at the University of Cambridge before moving to the United States, where he held the John von Neumann Professorship at Princeton University for the rest of his career. On 11 April 2020, at age 82, he died of complications from COVID-19.
Conway was born on 26 December 1937 in Liverpool, the son of Cyril Horton Conway and Agnes Boyce. He became interested in mathematics at a very early age. By the time he was 11, his ambition was to become a mathematician. After leaving sixth form, he studied mathematics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. A "terribly introverted adolescent" in school, he took his admission to Cambridge as an opportunity to transform himself into an extrovert, a change which would later earn him the nickname of "the world's most charismatic mathematician".
Conway was awarded a BA in 1959 and, supervised by Harold Davenport, began to undertake research in number theory. Having solved the open problem posed by Davenport on writing numbers as the sums of fifth powers, Conway began to become interested in infinite ordinals. It appears that his interest in games began during his years studying the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, where he became an avid backgammon player, spending hours playing the game in the common room. He was awarded his doctorate in 1964 and was appointed as College Fellow and Lecturer in Mathematics at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge in 1986, he took up the appointment to the John von Neumann Chair of Mathematics at Princeton University.
Conway was especially known for the invention of the Game of Life, one of the early examples of a cellular automaton. His initial experiments in that field were done with pen and paper, long before personal computers existed.
Since the game was introduced by Martin Gardner in "Scientific American" in 1970, it has spawned hundreds of computer programs, web sites, and articles. It is a staple of recreational mathematics. There is an extensive wiki devoted to curating and cataloging the various aspects of the game. From the earliest days, it has been a favorite in computer labs, both for its theoretical interest and as a practical exercise in programming and data display. Conway used to hate the Game of Life—largely because it had come to overshadow some of the other deeper and more important things he has done. Nevertheless, the game did help launch a new branch of mathematics, the field of cellular automata.
The Game of Life is known to be Turing complete.
Conway's career was intertwined with that of mathematics popularizer and "Scientific American" columnist Martin Gardner. When Gardner featured Conway's Game of Life in his Mathematical Games column in October 1970, it became the most widely read of all his columns and made Conway an instant celebrity. Gardner and Conway had first corresponded in the late 1950s, and over the years Gardner had frequently written about recreational aspects of Conway's work. For instance, he discussed Conway's game of Sprouts (Jul 1967), Hackenbush (Jan 1972), and his angel and devil problem (Feb 1974). In the September 1976 column, he reviewed Conway's book "On Numbers and Games" and even managed to explain Conway's surreal numbers.
Conway was probably the most important member of Martin Gardner's Mathematical Grapevine. He regularly visited Gardner and often wrote him long letters summarizing his recreational research. In a 1976 visit, Gardner kept him for a week, pumping him for information on the Penrose tilings which had just been announced. Conway had discovered many (if not most) of the major properties of the tilings. Gardner used these results when he introduced the world to Penrose tiles in his January 1977 column. The cover of that issue of "Scientific American" features the Penrose tiles and is based on a sketch by Conway.
Conferences called Gathering 4 Gardner are held every two years to celebrate the legacy of Martin Gardner, and Conway himself was often a featured speaker at these events, discussing various aspects of recreational mathematics.
Conway was widely known for his contributions to combinatorial game theory (CGT), a theory of partisan games. This he developed with Elwyn Berlekamp and Richard Guy, and with them also co-authored the book "Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays". He also wrote the book "On Numbers and Games" ("ONAG") which lays out the mathematical foundations of CGT.
He was also one of the inventors of sprouts, as well as philosopher's football. He developed detailed analyses of many other games and puzzles, such as the Soma cube, peg solitaire, and Conway's soldiers. He came up with the angel problem, which was solved in 2006.
He invented a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers, which are closely related to certain games and have been the subject of a mathematical novelette by Donald Knuth. He also invented a nomenclature for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation. Much of this is discussed in the 0th part of "ONAG".
In the mid-1960s with Michael Guy, Conway established that there are sixty-four convex uniform polychora excluding two infinite sets of prismatic forms. They discovered the grand antiprism in the process, the only non-Wythoffian uniform polychoron. Conway has also suggested a system of notation dedicated to describing polyhedra called Conway polyhedron notation.
In the theory of tessellations, he devised the Conway criterion which describes rules for deciding if a prototile will tile the plane.
He investigated lattices in higher dimensions and was the first to determine the symmetry group of the Leech lattice.
In knot theory, Conway formulated a new variation of the Alexander polynomial and produced a new invariant now called the Conway polynomial. After lying dormant for more than a decade, this concept became central to work in the 1980s on the novel knot polynomials. Conway further developed tangle theory and invented a system of notation for tabulating knots, nowadays known as Conway notation, while correcting a number of errors in the 19th-century knot tables and extending them to include all but four of the non-alternating primes with 11 crossings.(Some might say "all but 3½ of the non-alternating primes with 11 crossings." The typographical duplication in the published version of his 1970 table seems to be an effort to include one of the two missing knots that was included in the draft of the table that he sent to Fox [Compare D. Lombardero's 1968 Princeton Senior Thesis, which distinguished this one, but not the other, from all others, based on its Alexander polynomial].)
He was the primary author of the "ATLAS of Finite Groups" giving properties of many finite simple groups. Working with his colleagues Robert Curtis and Simon P. Norton he constructed the first concrete representations of some of the sporadic groups. More specifically, he discovered three sporadic groups based on the symmetry of the Leech lattice, which have been designated the Conway groups. This work made him a key player in the successful classification of the finite simple groups.
Based on a 1978 observation by mathematician John McKay, Conway and Norton formulated the complex of conjectures known as monstrous moonshine. This subject, named by Conway, relates the monster group with elliptic modular functions, thus bridging two previously distinct areas of mathematics—finite groups and complex function theory. Monstrous moonshine theory has now been revealed to also have deep connections to string theory.
Conway introduced the Mathieu groupoid, an extension of the Mathieu group M12 to 13 points.
As a graduate student, he proved one case of a conjecture by Edward Waring, that every integer could be written as the sum of 37 numbers each raised to the fifth power, though Chen Jingrun solved the problem independently before Conway's work could be published.
Conway has written textbooks and done original work in algebra, focusing particularly on quaternions and octonions. Together with Neil Sloane, he invented the icosians.
He invented a base 13 function as a counterexample to the converse of the intermediate value theorem: the function takes on every real value in each interval on the real line, so it has a Darboux property but is "not" continuous.
For calculating the day of the week, he invented the Doomsday algorithm. The algorithm is simple enough for anyone with basic arithmetic ability to do the calculations mentally. Conway could usually give the correct answer in under two seconds. To improve his speed, he practised his calendrical calculations on his computer, which was programmed to quiz him with random dates every time he logged on. One of his early books was on finite-state machines.
In 2004, Conway and Simon B. Kochen, another Princeton mathematician, proved the free will theorem, a startling version of the "no hidden variables" principle of quantum mechanics. It states that given certain conditions, if an experimenter can freely decide what quantities to measure in a particular experiment, then elementary particles must be free to choose their spins to make the measurements consistent with physical law. In Conway's provocative wording: "if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles."
Conway received the Berwick Prize (1971), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1981), became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992, was the first recipient of the Pólya Prize (LMS) (1987), won the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics (1998) and received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition (2000) of the American Mathematical Society. In 2001 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Liverpool.
His FRS nomination, in 1981, reads:
In 2017 Conway was given honorary membership of the British Mathematical Association.
On 8 April 2020, Conway developed symptoms of COVID-19. On 11 April, he died in New Brunswick, New Jersey at the age of 82.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15807
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Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, ; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. Conrad wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe.
Conrad is considered an early modernist, though his works contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced numerous authors, and many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that Conrad's fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew, among other things, on his native Poland's national experiences and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.
Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv (), Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire; the region had once been part of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. He was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski—a writer, translator, political activist, and would-be revolutionary—and his wife Ewa Bobrowska. He was christened "Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski" after his maternal grandfather Józef, his paternal grandfather Teodor, and the heroes (both named "Konrad") of two poems by Adam Mickiewicz, "Dziady" and "Konrad Wallenrod", and was known to his family as "Konrad", rather than "Józef".
Though the vast majority of the surrounding area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, and the great majority of Berdychiv's residents were Jewish, almost all the countryside was owned by the Polish "szlachta" (nobility), to which Conrad's family belonged as bearers of the Nałęcz coat-of-arms. Polish literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem by the area's Polish population.
The Korzeniowski family had played a significant role in Polish attempts to regain independence. Conrad's paternal grandfather Teodor had served under Prince Józef Poniatowski during Napoleon's Russian campaign and had formed his own cavalry squadron during the November 1830 Uprising. Conrad's fiercely patriotic father Apollo belonged to the "Red" political faction, whose goal was to re-establish the pre-partition boundaries of Poland, but which also advocated land reform and the abolition of serfdom. Conrad's subsequent refusal to follow in Apollo's footsteps, and his choice of exile over resistance, were a source of lifelong guilt for Conrad.
Because of the father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire. This led to his imprisonment in Pavilion X of the Warsaw Citadel. Conrad would write: "[I]n the courtyard of this Citadel—characteristically for our nation—my childhood memories begin." On 9 May 1862 Apollo and his family were exiled to Vologda, north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. In January 1863 Apollo's sentence was commuted, and the family was sent to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where conditions were much better. However, on 18 April 1865 Ewa died of tuberculosis.
Apollo did his best to home-school Conrad. The boy's early reading introduced him to the two elements that later dominated his life: in Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea" he encountered the sphere of activity to which he would devote his youth; Shakespeare brought him into the orbit of English literature. Most of all, though, he read Polish Romantic poetry. Half a century later he explained that "The Polishness in my works comes from Mickiewicz and Słowacki. My father read [Mickiewicz's] "Pan Tadeusz" aloud to me and made me read it aloud... I used to prefer [Mickiewicz's] "Konrad Wallenrod" [and] "Grażyna". Later I preferred Słowacki. You know why Słowacki?... [He is the soul of all Poland]".
In the autumn of 1866 young Conrad was sent for a year-long retreat for health reasons, to Kiev and his mother's family estate at .
In December 1867, Apollo took his son to the Austrian-held part of Poland, which for two years had been enjoying considerable internal freedom and a degree of self-government. After sojourns in Lwów and several smaller localities, on 20 February 1869 they moved to Kraków (until 1596 the capital of Poland), likewise in Austrian Poland. A few months later, on 23 May 1869, Apollo Korzeniowski died, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven. Like Conrad's mother, Apollo had been gravely ill with tuberculosis.
The young Conrad was placed in the care of Ewa's brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski. Conrad's poor health and his unsatisfactory schoolwork caused his uncle constant problems and no end of financial outlay. Conrad was not a good student; despite tutoring, he excelled only in geography. At that time he likely received private tutoring only as there is no evidence he attended any school regularly. Since the boy's illness was clearly of nervous origin, the physicians supposed that fresh air and physical work would harden him; his uncle hoped that well-defined duties and the rigors of work would teach him discipline. Since he showed little inclination to study, it was essential that he learn a trade; his uncle saw him as a sailor-cum-businessman who would combine maritime skills with commercial activities. In fact, in the autumn of 1871, thirteen-year-old Conrad announced his intention to become a sailor. He later recalled that as a child he had read (apparently in French translation) Leopold McClintock's book about his 1857–59 expeditions in the "Fox", in search of Sir John Franklin's lost ships ' and '. He also recalled having read books by the American James Fenimore Cooper and the English Captain Frederick Marryat. A playmate of his adolescence recalled that Conrad spun fantastic yarns, always set at sea, presented so realistically that listeners thought the action was happening before their eyes.
In August 1873 Bobrowski sent fifteen-year-old Conrad to Lwów to a cousin who ran a small boarding house for boys orphaned by the 1863 Uprising; group conversation there was in French. The owner's daughter recalled:
Conrad had been at the establishment for just over a year when in September 1874, for uncertain reasons, his uncle removed him from school in Lwów and took him back to Kraków.
On 13 October 1874 Bobrowski sent the sixteen-year-old to Marseilles, France, for Conrad's planned merchant-marine career on French merchant ships. His uncle provided him with a monthly stipend as well (set at 150 francs). Though Conrad had not completed secondary school, his accomplishments included fluency in French (with a correct accent), some knowledge of Latin, German and Greek, probably a good knowledge of history, some geography, and probably already an interest in physics. He was well read, particularly in Polish Romantic literature. He belonged to the second generation in his family that had had to earn a living outside the family estates, having been born and reared partly in the milieu of the working intelligentsia, a social class that was starting to play an important role in Central and Eastern Europe. He had absorbed enough of the history, culture and literature of his native land to be able eventually to develop a distinctive world view and make unique contributions to the literature of his adoptive Britain. It was tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and grew in his adulthood abroad that would give rise to Conrad's greatest literary achievements. Zdzisław Najder, himself an emigrant from Poland, observes:
It has been suggested that when Conrad left Poland, he wanted to break once and for all with his Polish past. In refutation of this, Najder quotes from Conrad's 14 August 1883 letter to family friend Stefan Buszczyński, written nine years after Conrad had left Poland:
In Marseilles Conrad had an intensive social life, often stretching his budget. A trace of these years can be found in the northern Corsica town of Luri, where there is a plaque to a Corsican merchant seaman, Dominique Cervoni, whom Conrad befriended. Cervoni became the inspiration for some of Conrad's characters, such as the title character of the 1904 novel "Nostromo". Conrad visited Corsica with his wife in 1921, partly in search of connections with his long-dead friend and fellow merchant seaman.
In late 1877 Conrad's maritime career was interrupted by the refusal of the Russian consul to provide documents needed for him to continue his service; this led Conrad to fall into debts, and in March 1878 he attempted suicide. He survived, and received further financial aid from his uncle, allowing him to resume his normal life. After nearly four years in France and on French ships, Conrad joined the British merchant marine, enlisting in April 1878 (he had most likely started learning English shortly before), and for the next fifteen years served under the Red Ensign. He worked on a variety of ships as crew member (steward, apprentice, able-bodied seaman) and then as third, second and first mate, until eventually achieving captain's rank. During the 19 years from the time that Conrad had left Kraków in October 1874 until he signed off the "Adowa" in January 1894, he had worked in ships, including long periods in port, for 10 years and almost 8 months. He had spent just over 8 years at sea—9 months of it as a passenger. His sole captaincy took place in 1888–89, when he commanded the barque "Otago" from Sydney to Mauritius.
Most of Conrad's stories and novels, and many of their characters, were drawn from his seafaring career and persons whom he had met or heard about. For his fictional characters he often borrowed the authentic names of actual persons. The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo, appears as "Almayer" in his first novel, "Almayer's Folly". Conrad frequently borrowed the authentic names of actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr ("Typhoon"), Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon ("Youth"), Captain Lingard ("Almayer's Folly" and elsewhere), Captain Ellis ("The Shadow Line"). "Conrad," writes J.I.M. Stewart, "appears to have attached some mysterious significance to such links with actuality." Equally curious is "a great deal of namelessness in Conrad, requiring some minor virtuosity to maintain." We never learn the surname of the protagonist of "Lord Jim". Conrad also preserves, in "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'", the authentic name of the ship, the "Narcissus", in which he sailed in 1884.
During a brief call in India in 1885–86, 28-year-old Conrad sent five letters to Joseph Spiridion, a Pole eight years his senior whom he had befriended at Cardiff in June 1885 just before sailing for Singapore in the clipper ship "Tilkhurst". These letters are Conrad's first preserved texts in English. His English is generally correct but stiff to the point of artificiality; many fragments suggest that his thoughts ran along the lines of Polish syntax and phraseology. More importantly, the letters show a marked change in views from those implied in his earlier correspondence of 1881–83. He had departed from "hope for the future" and from the conceit of "sailing [ever] toward Poland", and from his Panslavic ideas. He was left with a painful sense of the hopelessness of the Polish question and an acceptance of England as a possible refuge. While he often adjusted his statements to accord to some extent with the views of his addressees, the theme of hopelessness concerning the prospects for Polish independence often occurs authentically in his correspondence and works before 1914.
The year 1890 marked Konrad's first return to Poland, where he would visit his uncle and other relatives and acquaintances. His visit took place while he was waiting to proceed to the Belgian Congo, having been hired by Albert Thys, deputy director of the "Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo". Conrad's association with the Belgian company, on the Congo River, would inspire his novella, "Heart of Darkness". During this period, in 1890 in the Congo, Conrad befriended the Irish Republican and advocate for human rights, Sir Roger Casement.
Conrad left Africa at the end of December 1890, arriving in Brussels by late January next year, and rejoined the British marine, as first mate, in November. When he left London on 25 October 1892 aboard the passenger clipper ship "Torrens", one of the passengers was William Henry Jacques, a consumptive Cambridge University graduate who died less than a year later (19 September 1893) and was, according to Conrad's "A Personal Record", the first reader of the still-unfinished manuscript of Conrad's "Almayer's Folly". Jacques encouraged Conrad to continue writing the novel.
Conrad completed his last long-distance voyage as a seaman on 26 July 1893 when the "Torrens" docked at London and "J. Conrad Korzemowin" (per the certificate of discharge) debarked. When the "Torrens" had left Adelaide on 13 March 1893, the passengers had included two young Englishmen returning from Australia and New Zealand: 25-year-old lawyer and future novelist John Galsworthy; and Edward Lancelot Sanderson, who was going to help his father run a boys' preparatory school at Elstree. They were probably the first Englishmen and non-sailors with whom Conrad struck up a friendship; he would remain in touch with both. The protagonist of one of Galsworthy's first literary attempts, "The Doldrums" (1895–96), the first mate Armand, is obviously modelled on Conrad. At Cape Town, where the "Torrens" remained from 17 to 19 May, Galsworthy left the ship to look at the local mines. Sanderson continued his voyage and seems to have been the first to develop closer ties with Conrad. Later that year, Conrad would visit his relatives in Poland and Ukraine once again.
In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he had decided on a literary career. His first novel, "Almayer's Folly", set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895. Its appearance marked his first use of the pen name "Joseph Conrad"; "Konrad" was, of course, the third of his Polish given names, but his use of it—in the anglicised version, "Conrad"—may also have been an homage to the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz's patriotic narrative poem, "Konrad Wallenrod".
Edward Garnett, a young publisher's reader and literary critic who would play one of the chief supporting roles in Conrad's literary career, had—like Unwin's first reader of "Almayer's Folly", Wilfrid Hugh Chesson—been impressed by the manuscript, but Garnett had been "uncertain whether the English was good enough for publication." Garnett had shown the novel to his wife, Constance Garnett, later a translator of Russian literature. She had thought Conrad's foreignness a positive merit.
While Conrad had only limited personal acquaintance with the peoples of Maritime Southeast Asia, the region looms large in his early work. According to Najder, Conrad, the exile and wanderer, was aware of a difficulty that he confessed more than once: the lack of a common cultural background with his Anglophone readers meant he could not compete with English-language authors writing about the English-speaking world. At the same time, the choice of a non-English colonial setting freed him from an embarrassing division of loyalty: "Almayer's Folly", and later "An Outpost of Progress" (1897, set in a Congo exploited by King Leopold II of Belgium) and "Heart of Darkness" (1899, likewise set in the Congo), contain bitter reflections on colonialism. The Malay states came theoretically under the suzerainty of the Dutch government; Conrad did not write about the area's British dependencies, which he never visited. He "was apparently intrigued by... struggles aimed at preserving national independence. The prolific and destructive richness of tropical nature and the dreariness of human life within it accorded well with the pessimistic mood of his early works."
"Almayer's Folly", together with its successor, "An Outcast of the Islands" (1896), laid the foundation for Conrad's reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales—a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate him for the rest of his career.
Almost all of Conrad's writings were first published in newspapers and magazines: influential reviews like "The Fortnightly Review" and the "North American Review"; avant-garde publications like the "Savoy", "New Review", and "The English Review"; popular short-fiction magazines like "The Saturday Evening Post" and "Harper's Magazine"; women's journals like the "Pictorial Review" and "Romance"; mass-circulation dailies like the "Daily Mail" and the "New York Herald"; and illustrated newspapers like "The Illustrated London News" and the "Illustrated Buffalo Express". He also wrote for "The Outlook", an imperialist weekly magazine, between 1898 and 1906.
Financial success long eluded Conrad, who often requested advances from magazine and book publishers, and loans from acquaintances such as John Galsworthy. Eventually a government grant ("Civil List pension") of £100 per annum, awarded on 9 August 1910, somewhat relieved his financial worries, and in time collectors began purchasing his manuscripts. Though his talent was early on recognised by English intellectuals, popular success eluded him until the 1913 publication of "Chance", which is often considered one of his weaker novels.
Conrad was a reserved man, wary of showing emotion. He scorned sentimentality; his manner of portraying emotion in his books was full of restraint, scepticism and irony. In the words of his uncle Bobrowski, as a young man Conrad was "extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved, and in addition excitable. In short [...] all the defects of the "Nałęcz" family."
Conrad suffered throughout life from ill health, physical and mental. A newspaper review of a Conrad biography suggested that the book could have been subtitled "Thirty Years of Debt, Gout, Depression and Angst". In 1891 he was hospitalised for several months, suffering from gout, neuralgic pains in his right arm and recurrent attacks of malaria. He also complained of swollen hands "which made writing difficult". Taking his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski's advice, he convalesced at a spa in Switzerland. Conrad had a phobia of dentistry, neglecting his teeth until they had to be extracted. In one letter he remarked that every novel he had written had cost him a tooth. Conrad's physical afflictions were, if anything, less vexatious than his mental ones. In his letters he often described symptoms of depression; "the evidence", writes Najder, "is so strong that it is nearly impossible to doubt it."
In March 1878, at the end of his Marseilles period, 20-year-old Conrad attempted suicide, by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver. According to his uncle, who was summoned by a friend, Conrad had fallen into debt. Bobrowski described his subsequent "study" of his nephew in an extensive letter to , his own ideological opponent and a friend of Conrad's late father Apollo. To what extent the suicide attempt had been made in earnest, likely will never be known, but it is suggestive of a situational depression.
In 1888 during a stop-over on Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, Conrad developed a couple of romantic interests. One of these would be described in his 1910 story "A Smile of Fortune", which contains autobiographical elements (e.g., one of the characters is the same Chief Mate Burns who appears in "The Shadow Line"). The narrator, a young captain, flirts ambiguously and surreptitiously with Alice Jacobus, daughter of a local merchant living in a house surrounded by a magnificent rose garden. Research has confirmed that in Port Louis at the time there was a 17-year-old Alice Shaw, whose father, a shipping agent, owned the only rose garden in town.
More is known about Conrad's other, more open flirtation. An old friend, Captain Gabriel Renouf of the French merchant marine, introduced him to the family of his brother-in-law. Renouf's eldest sister was the wife of Louis Edward Schmidt, a senior official in the colony; with them lived two other sisters and two brothers. Though the island had been taken over in 1810 by Britain, many of the inhabitants were descendants of the original French colonists, and Conrad's excellent French and perfect manners opened all local salons to him. He became a frequent guest at the Schmidts', where he often met the Misses Renouf. A couple of days before leaving Port Louis, Conrad asked one of the Renouf brothers for the hand of his 26-year-old sister Eugenie. She was already, however, engaged to marry her pharmacist cousin. After the rebuff, Conrad did not pay a farewell visit but sent a polite letter to Gabriel Renouf, saying he would never return to Mauritius and adding that on the day of the wedding his thoughts would be with them.
On 24 March 1896 Conrad married an Englishwoman, Jessie George. The couple had two sons, Borys and John. The elder, Borys, proved a disappointment in scholarship and integrity. Jessie was an unsophisticated, working-class girl, sixteen years younger than Conrad. To his friends, she was an inexplicable choice of wife, and the subject of some rather disparaging and unkind remarks. (See Lady Ottoline Morrell's opinion of Jessie in Impressions.) However, according to other biographers such as Frederick Karl, Jessie provided what Conrad needed, namely a "straightforward, devoted, quite competent" companion. Similarly, Jones remarks that, despite whatever difficulties the marriage endured, "there can be no doubt that the relationship sustained Conrad's career as a writer", which might have been much less successful without her.
The couple rented a long series of successive homes, occasionally in France, sometimes briefly in London, but mostly in the English countryside, sometimes from friends—to be close to friends, to enjoy the peace of the countryside, but above all because it was more affordable. Except for several vacations in France and Italy, a 1914 vacation in his native Poland, and a 1923 visit to the United States, Conrad lived the rest of his life in England.
The 1914 vacation with his wife and sons in Poland, at the urging of Józef Retinger, coincided with the outbreak of World War I. On 28 July 1914, the day war broke out between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, Conrad and the Retingers arrived in Kraków (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), where Conrad visited childhood haunts. As the city lay only a few miles from the Russian border, there was a risk of being stranded in a battle zone. With wife Jessie and younger son John ill, Conrad decided to take refuge in the mountain resort town of Zakopane. They left Kraków on 2 August. A few days after arrival in Zakopane, they moved to the Konstantynówka "pension" operated by Conrad's cousin Aniela Zagórska; it had been frequented by celebrities including the statesman Józef Piłsudski and Conrad's acquaintance, the young concert pianist Artur Rubinstein.
Zagórska introduced Conrad to Polish writers, intellectuals and artists who had also taken refuge in Zakopane, including novelist Stefan Żeromski and Tadeusz Nalepiński, a writer friend of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Conrad aroused interest among the Poles as a famous writer and an exotic compatriot from abroad. He charmed new acquaintances, especially women. However, Marie Curie's physician sister, Bronisława Dłuska, scolded him for having used his great talent for purposes other than bettering the future of his native land.
But thirty-two-year-old Aniela Zagórska (daughter of the "pension" keeper), Conrad's niece who would translate his works into Polish in 1923–39, idolised him, kept him company, and provided him with books. He particularly delighted in the stories and novels of the ten-years-older, recently deceased Bolesław Prus, read everything by his fellow victim of Poland's 1863 Uprising—"my beloved Prus"—that he could get his hands on, and pronounced him "better than Dickens"—a favourite English novelist of Conrad's.
Conrad, who was noted by his Polish acquaintances to still be fluent in his native tongue, participated in their impassioned political discussions. He declared presciently, as Piłsudski had earlier in 1914 in Paris, that in the war, for Poland to regain independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires), and the Central Powers must in turn be beaten by France and Britain.
After many travails and vicissitudes, at the beginning of November 1914 Conrad managed to bring his family back to England. On his return, he was determined to work on swaying British opinion in favour of restoring Poland's sovereignty.
Jessie Conrad would later write in her memoirs: "I understood my husband so much better after those months in Poland. So many characteristics that had been strange and unfathomable to me before, took, as it were, their right proportions. I understood that his temperament was that of his countrymen."
The most extensive and ambitious political statement that Conrad ever made was his 1905 essay, "Autocracy and War", whose starting point was the Russo-Japanese War (he finished the article a month before the Battle of Tsushima Strait). The essay begins with a statement about Russia's incurable weakness and ends with warnings against Prussia, the dangerous aggressor in a future European war. For Russia he predicted a violent outburst in the near future, but Russia's lack of democratic traditions and the backwardness of her masses made it impossible for the revolution to have a salutary effect. Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government in Russia as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship. He saw western Europe as torn by antagonisms engendered by economic rivalry and commercial selfishness. In vain might a Russian revolution seek advice or help from a materialistic and egoistic western Europe that armed itself in preparation for wars far more brutal than those of the past.
Conrad's distrust of democracy sprang from his doubts whether the propagation of democracy as an aim in itself could solve any problems. He thought that, in view of the weakness of human nature and of the "criminal" character of society, democracy offered boundless opportunities for demagogues and charlatans. Conrad kept his distance from partisan politics, and never voted in British national elections.
He accused social democrats of his time of acting to weaken "the national sentiment, the preservation of which [was his] concern"—of attempting to dissolve national identities in an impersonal melting-pot. "I look at the future from the depth of a very black past and I find that nothing is left for me except fidelity to a cause lost, to an idea without future." It was Conrad's hopeless fidelity to the memory of Poland that prevented him from believing in the idea of "international fraternity", which he considered, under the circumstances, just a verbal exercise. He resented some socialists' talk of freedom and world brotherhood while keeping silent about his own partitioned and oppressed Poland.
Before that, in the early 1880s, letters to Conrad from his uncle Tadeusz show Conrad apparently having hoped for an improvement in Poland's situation not through a liberation movement but by establishing an alliance with neighbouring Slavic nations. This had been accompanied by a faith in the Panslavic ideology—"surprising", Najder writes, "in a man who was later to emphasize his hostility towards Russia, a conviction that... Poland's [superior] civilization and... historic... traditions would [let] her play a leading role... in the Panslavic community, [and his] doubts about Poland's chances of becoming a fully sovereign nation-state."
Conrad's alienation from "partisan" politics went together with an abiding sense of the thinking man's burden imposed by his personality, as described in an 1894 letter of Conrad's to a relative-by-marriage and fellow author, Marguerite Poradowska ("née" Gachet, and cousin of Vincent van Gogh's physician, Paul Gachet) of Brussels:
In a 23 October 1922 letter to mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell, in response to the latter's book, "The Problem of China", which advocated socialist reforms and an oligarchy of sages who would reshape Chinese society, Conrad explained his own distrust of political panaceas:
Leo Robson writes:
But, writes Robson, Conrad is no moral nihilist:
In an August 1901 letter to the editor of "The New York Times Saturday Book Review", Conrad wrote: "Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism."
On 3 August 1924, Conrad died at his house, Oswalds, in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England, probably of a heart attack. He was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name, as "Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski". Inscribed on his gravestone are the lines from Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" which he had chosen as the epigraph to his last complete novel, "The Rover":
Conrad's modest funeral took place amid great crowds. His old friend Edward Garnett recalled bitterly:
Another old friend of Conrad's, Cunninghame Graham, wrote Garnett: "Aubry was saying to me... that had Anatole France died, all Paris would have been at his funeral."
Twelve years later, Conrad's wife Jessie died on 6 December 1936 and was interred with him.
In 1996 his grave was designated a Grade II listed structure.
Despite the opinions even of some who knew Conrad personally, such as fellow-novelist Henry James, Conrad—even when only writing elegantly crafted letters to his uncle and acquaintances—was always at heart a writer who sailed, rather than a sailor who wrote. He used his sailing experiences as a backdrop for many of his works, but he also produced works of similar world view, without the nautical motifs. The failure of many critics to appreciate this caused him much frustration.
He wrote oftener about life at sea and in exotic parts than about life on British land because—unlike, for example, his friend John Galsworthy, author of "The Forsyte Saga"—he knew little about everyday domestic relations in Britain. When Conrad's "The Mirror of the Sea" was published in 1906 to critical acclaim, he wrote to his French translator: "The critics have been vigorously swinging the censer to me... Behind the concert of flattery, I can hear something like a whisper: 'Keep to the open sea! Don't land!' They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean." Writing to his friend Richard Curle, Conrad remarked that "the public mind fastens on externals" such as his "sea life", oblivious to how authors transform their material "from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience".
Nevertheless, Conrad found much sympathetic readership, especially in the United States. H.L. Mencken was one of the earliest and most influential American readers to recognise how Conrad conjured up "the general out of the particular". F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing to Mencken, complained about having been omitted from a list of Conrad imitators. Since Fitzgerald, dozens of other American writers have acknowledged their debts to Conrad, including William Faulkner, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Thomas Pynchon.
An October 1923 visitor to Oswalds, Conrad's home at the time—Cyril Clemens, a cousin of Mark Twain—quoted Conrad as saying: "In everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention."
Conrad the artist famously aspired, in the words of his preface to "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" (1897), "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you "see". That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."
Writing in what to the visual arts was the age of Impressionism, and what to music was the age of impressionist music, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order: for instance, in the evocative "Patna" and courtroom scenes of "Lord Jim"; in the scenes of the "melancholy-mad elephant" and the "French gunboat firing into a continent", in "Heart of Darkness"; in the doubled protagonists of "The Secret Sharer"; and in the verbal and conceptual resonances of "Nostromo" and "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'".
Conrad used his own memories as literary material so often that readers are tempted to treat his life and work as a single whole. His "view of the world", or elements of it, is often described by citing at once both his private and public statements, passages from his letters, and citations from his books. Najder warns that this approach produces an incoherent and misleading picture. "An... uncritical linking of the two spheres, literature and private life, distorts each. Conrad used his own experiences as raw material, but the finished product should not be confused with the experiences themselves."
Many of Conrad's characters were inspired by actual persons he met, including, in his first novel, "Almayer's Folly" (completed 1894), William Charles Olmeijer, the spelling of whose surname Conrad probably altered to "Almayer" inadvertently. The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo, subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination. Conrad often borrowed the authentic names of actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr ("Typhoon"), Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon ("Youth"), Captain Lingard ("Almayer's Folly" and elsewhere), Captain Ellis ("The Shadow Line"). "Conrad", writes J. I. M. Stewart, "appears to have attached some mysterious significance to such links with actuality." Equally curious is "a great deal of namelessness in Conrad, requiring some minor virtuosity to maintain." Thus we never learn the surname of the protagonist of "Lord Jim". Conrad also preserves, in "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'", the authentic name of the ship, the "Narcissus", in which he sailed in 1884.
Apart from Conrad's own experiences, a number of episodes in his fiction were suggested by past or contemporary publicly known events or literary works. The first half of the 1900 novel "Lord Jim" (the "Patna" episode) was inspired by the real-life 1880 story of the ; the second part, to some extent by the life of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. The 1901 short story "Amy Foster" was inspired partly by an anecdote in Ford Madox Ford's "The Cinque Ports" (1900), wherein a shipwrecked sailor from a German merchant ship, unable to communicate in English, and driven away by the local country people, finally found shelter in a pigsty.
In "Nostromo" (completed 1904), the theft of a massive consignment of silver was suggested to Conrad by a story he had heard in the Gulf of Mexico and later read about in a "volume picked up outside a second-hand bookshop." The novel's political strand, according to Maya Jasanoff, is related to the creation of the Panama Canal. "In January 1903", she writes, "just as Conrad started writing "Nostromo", the US and Colombian secretaries of state signed a treaty granting the United States a one-hundred-year renewable lease on a six-mile strip flanking the canal... While the [news]papers murmured about revolution in Colombia, Conrad opened a fresh section of "Nostromo" with hints of dissent in Costaguana", his fictional South American country. He plotted a revolution in the Costaguanan fictional port of Sulaco that mirrored the real-life secessionist movement brewing in Panama. When Conrad finished the novel on 1 September 1904, writes Jasanoff, "he left Sulaco in the condition of Panama. As Panama had gotten its independence instantly recognized by the United States and its economy bolstered by American investment in the canal, so Sulaco had "its" independence instantly recognized by the United States, and its economy underwritten by investment in the [fictional] San Tomé [silver] mine."
"The Secret Agent" (completed 1906) was inspired by the French anarchist Martial Bourdin's 1894 death while apparently attempting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. Conrad's story "The Secret Sharer" (completed 1909) was inspired by an 1880 incident when Sydney Smith, first mate of the "Cutty Sark", had killed a seaman and fled from justice, aided by the ship's captain. The plot of "Under Western Eyes" (completed 1910) is kicked off by the assassination of a brutal Russian government minister, modelled after the real-life 1904 assassination of Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. The near-novella "Freya of the Seven Isles" (completed in March 1911) was inspired by a story told to Conrad by a Malaya old hand and fan of Conrad's, Captain Carlos M. Marris.
For the natural surroundings of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago and South America, which Conrad described so vividly, he could rely on his own observations. What his brief landfalls could not provide was a thorough understanding of exotic cultures. For this he resorted, like other writers, to literary sources. When writing his Malayan stories, he consulted Alfred Russel Wallace's "The Malay Archipelago" (1869), James Brooke's journals, and books with titles like "Perak and the Malays", "My Journal in Malayan Waters", and "Life in the Forests of the Far East". When he set about writing his novel "Nostromo", set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, he turned to "The War between Peru and Chile"; Edward Eastwick, "Venezuela: or, Sketches of Life in a South American Republic" (1868); and George Frederick Masterman, "Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay" (1869). As a result of relying on literary sources, in "Lord Jim", as J. I. M. Stewart writes, Conrad's "need to work to some extent from second-hand" led to "a certain thinness in Jim's relations with the... peoples... of Patusan..." This prompted Conrad at some points to alter the nature of Charles Marlow's narrative to "distanc[e] an uncertain command of the detail of Tuan Jim's empire."
In keeping with his scepticism and melancholy, Conrad almost invariably gives lethal fates to the characters in his principal novels and stories. Almayer ("Almayer's Folly", 1894), abandoned by his beloved daughter, takes to opium, and dies; Peter Willems ("An Outcast of the Islands", 1895) is killed by his jealous lover Aïssa; the ineffectual "Nigger", James Wait ("The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'", 1897), dies aboard ship and is buried at sea; Mr. Kurtz ("Heart of Darkness", 1899) expires, uttering the words, "The horror! The horror!"; "Tuan" Jim ("Lord Jim", 1900), having inadvertently precipitated a massacre of his adoptive community, deliberately walks to his death at the hands of the community's leader; in Conrad's 1901 short story, "Amy Foster", a Pole transplanted to England, Yanko Goorall (an English transliteration of the Polish "Janko Góral", "Johnny Highlander"), falls ill and, suffering from a fever, raves in his native language, frightening his wife Amy, who flees; next morning Yanko dies of heart failure, and it transpires that he had simply been asking in Polish for water; Captain Whalley ("The End of the Tether", 1902), betrayed by failing eyesight and an unscrupulous partner, drowns himself; Gian' Battista Fidanza, the eponymous respected Italian-immigrant "Nostromo" () of the novel "Nostromo" (1904), illicitly obtains a treasure of silver mined in the South American country of "Costaguana" and is shot dead due to mistaken identity; Mr. Verloc, "The Secret Agent" (1906) of divided loyalties, attempts a bombing, to be blamed on terrorists, that accidentally kills his mentally defective brother-in-law Stevie, and Verloc himself is killed by his distraught wife, who drowns herself by jumping overboard from a channel steamer; in "Chance" (1913), Roderick Anthony, a sailing-ship captain, and benefactor and husband of Flora de Barral, becomes the target of a poisoning attempt by her jealous disgraced financier father who, when detected, swallows the poison himself and dies (some years later, Captain Anthony drowns at sea); in "Victory" (1915), Lena is shot dead by Jones, who had meant to kill his accomplice Ricardo and later succeeds in doing so, then himself perishes along with another accomplice, after which Lena's protector Axel Heyst sets fire to his bungalow and dies beside Lena's body.
When a principal character of Conrad's does escape with his life, he sometimes does not fare much better. In "Under Western Eyes" (1911), Razumov betrays a fellow University of St. Petersburg student, the revolutionist Victor Haldin, who has assassinated a savagely repressive Russian government minister. Haldin is tortured and hanged by the authorities. Later Razumov, sent as a government spy to Geneva, a centre of anti-tsarist intrigue, meets the mother and sister of Haldin, who share Haldin's liberal convictions. Razumov falls in love with the sister and confesses his betrayal of her brother; later he makes the same avowal to assembled revolutionists, and their professional executioner bursts his eardrums, making him deaf for life. Razumov staggers away, is knocked down by a streetcar, and finally returns as a cripple to Russia.
Conrad was keenly conscious of tragedy in the world and in his works. In 1898, at the start of his writing career, he had written to his Scottish writer-politician friend Cunninghame Graham: "What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. [A]s soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife—the tragedy begins." But in 1922, near the end of his life and career, when another Scottish friend, Richard Curle, sent Conrad proofs of two articles he had written about Conrad, the latter objected to being characterised as a gloomy and tragic writer. "That reputation... has deprived me of innumerable readers... I absolutely object to being called a "tragedian"."
Conrad claimed that he "never kept a diary and never owned a notebook." John Galsworthy, who knew him well, described this as "a statement which surprised no one who knew the resources of his memory and the brooding nature of his creative spirit." Nevertheless, after Conrad's death, Richard Curle published a heavily modified version of Conrad's diaries describing his experiences in the Congo; in 1978 a more complete version was published as "The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces".
Unlike many authors who make it a point not to discuss work in progress, Conrad often did discuss his current work and even showed it to select friends and fellow authors, such as Edward Garnett, and sometimes modified it in the light of their critiques and suggestions.
Edward Said was struck by the sheer quantity of Conrad's correspondence with friends and fellow writers; by 1966, it "amount[ed] to eight published volumes". Edward Said comments: "[I]t seemed to me that if Conrad wrote of himself, of the problem of self-definition, with such sustained urgency, some of what he wrote must have had meaning for his fiction. [I]t [was] difficult to believe that a man would be so uneconomical as to pour himself out in letter after letter and then not use and reformulate his insights and discoveries in his fiction." Edward Said found especially close parallels between Conrad's letters and his shorter fiction. "Conrad... believed... that artistic distinction was more tellingly demonstrated in a shorter rather than a longer work... He believed that his [own] life was like a series of short episodes... because he was himself so many different people...: he was a Pole and an Englishman, a sailor and a writer." Another scholar, Najder, writes:
Conrad borrowed from other, Polish- and French-language authors, to an extent sometimes skirting plagiarism. When the Polish translation of his 1915 novel "Victory" appeared in 1931, readers noted striking similarities to Stefan Żeromski's kitschy novel, "The History of a Sin" ("Dzieje grzechu", 1908), including their endings. Comparative-literature scholar Yves Hervouet has demonstrated in the text of "Victory" a whole mosaic of influences, borrowings, similarities and allusions. He further lists hundreds of concrete borrowings from other, mostly French authors in nearly all of Conrad's works, from "Almayer's Folly" (1895) to his unfinished "Suspense". Conrad seems to have used eminent writers' texts as raw material of the same kind as the content of his own memory. Materials borrowed from other authors often functioned as allusions. Moreover, he had a phenomenal memory for texts and remembered details, "but [writes Najder] it was not a memory strictly categorized according to sources, marshalled into homogeneous entities; it was, rather, an enormous receptacle of images and pieces from which he would draw."
Conrad, like other artists, faced constraints arising from the need to propitiate his audience and confirm its own favourable self-regard. This may account for his describing the admirable crew of the "Judea" in his 1898 story "Youth" as "Liverpool hard cases", whereas the crew of the "Judea"'s actual 1882 prototype, the "Palestine", had included not a single Liverpudlian, and half the crew had been non-Britons; and for Conrad's turning the real-life 1880 criminally negligent British Captain J. L. Clark, of the , in his 1900 novel "Lord Jim", into the captain of the fictitious "Patna"—"a sort of renegade New South Wales German" so monstrous in physical appearance as to suggest "a trained baby elephant." Similarly, in his letters Conrad—during most of his literary career, struggling for sheer financial survival—often adjusted his views to the predilections of his correspondents. And when he wished to criticise the conduct of European imperialism in what would later be termed the "Third World", he turned his gaze upon the Dutch and Belgian colonies, not upon the British Empire.
The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad's novels, especially compared to those of near-contemporaries like his friend and frequent benefactor John Galsworthy, is such as to open him to criticism similar to that later applied to Graham Greene. But where "Greeneland" has been characterised as a recurring and recognisable atmosphere independent of setting, Conrad is at pains to create a sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village; often he chose to have his characters play out their destinies in isolated or confined circumstances. In the view of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, it was not until the first volumes of Anthony Powell's sequence, "A Dance to the Music of Time", were published in the 1950s, that an English novelist achieved the same command of atmosphere and precision of language with consistency, a view supported by later critics like A. N. Wilson; Powell acknowledged his debt to Conrad. Leo Gurko, too, remarks, as "one of Conrad's special qualities, his abnormal awareness of place, an awareness magnified to almost a new dimension in art, an ecological dimension defining the relationship between earth and man."
T. E. Lawrence, one of many writers whom Conrad befriended, offered some perceptive observations about Conrad's writing:
The Irish novelist-poet-critic Colm Tóibín captures something similar:
In a letter of 14 December 1897 to his Scottish friend, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote that science tells us, "Understand that thou art nothing, less than a shadow, more insignificant than a drop of water in the ocean, more fleeting than the illusion of a dream."
In a letter of 20 December 1897 to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad metaphorically described the universe as a huge machine:
Conrad wrote Cunninghame Graham on 31 January 1898:
Leo Robson suggests that
According to Robson,
Conrad spoke his native Polish and the French language fluently from childhood and only acquired English in his twenties. He chose, however, to write his fiction in his third language, English. He says in his preface to "A Personal Record" that writing in English was for him "natural", and that the idea of his having made a deliberate choice between English and French, as some had suggested, was in error. He explained that, though he had been familiar with French from childhood, "I would have been afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly 'crystallized'." In 1915, as Jo Davidson sculpted his bust, Conrad answered his question: "Ah… to write French you have to know it. English is so plastic—if you haven't got a word you need you can make it, but to write French you have to be an artist like Anatole France." These statements, as so often in Conrad's "autobiographical" writings, are subtly disingenuous. In 1897 Conrad was visited by a fellow Pole, the philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski, who asked Conrad, "Why don't you write in Polish?" Lutosławski recalled Conrad explaining: "I value our beautiful Polish literature too much to bring into it my clumsy efforts. But for the English my gifts are sufficient and secure my daily bread."
Conrad wrote in "A Personal Record" that English was "the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—of my very dreams!" In 1878 Conrad's four-year experience in the French merchant marine had been cut short when the French discovered that he did not have a permit from the Imperial Russian consul to sail with the French. This, and some typically disastrous Conradian investments, had left him destitute and had precipitated a suicide attempt. With the concurrence of his mentor-uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who had been summoned to Marseilles, Conrad decided to seek employment with the British merchant marine, which did not require Russia's permission. Thus began Conrad's sixteen years' seafarer's acquaintance with the British and with the English language.
Had Conrad remained in the Francophone sphere or had he returned to Poland, the son of the Polish poet, playwright, and translator Apollo Korzeniowski—from childhood exposed to Polish and foreign literature, and ambitious to himself become a writer—he might have ended writing in French or Polish instead of English. Certainly his Uncle Tadeusz thought Conrad might write in Polish; in an 1881 letter he advised his 23-year-old nephew:
In the opinion of some biographers, Conrad's third language, English, remained under the influence of his first two languages—Polish and French. This makes his English seem unusual. Najder writes that:
Inevitably for a trilingual Polish–French–English-speaker, Conrad's writings occasionally show linguistic spillover: "Franglais" or "Poglish"—the inadvertent use of French or Polish vocabulary, grammar, or syntax in his English writings. In one instance, Najder uses "several slips in vocabulary, typical for Conrad (Gallicisms) and grammar (usually Polonisms)" as part of internal evidence against Conrad's sometime literary collaborator Ford Madox Ford's claim to have written a certain instalment of Conrad's novel "Nostromo", for publication in "T. P.'s Weekly", on behalf of an ill Conrad.
The impracticality of working with a language which has long ceased to be one's principal language of daily use is illustrated by Conrad's 1921 attempt at translating into English the Polish physicist, columnist, story-writer, and comedy-writer Bruno Winawer's short play, "The Book of Job". Najder writes:
As a practical matter, by the time Conrad set about writing fiction, he had little choice but to write in English. Poles who accused Conrad of cultural apostasy because he wrote in English instead of Polish missed the point—as do Anglophones who see, in Conrad's default choice of English as his artistic medium, a testimonial to some sort of innate superiority of the English language.
According to Conrad's close friend and literary assistant Richard Curle, the fact of Conrad writing in English was "obviously misleading" because Conrad "is no more completely English in his art than he is in his nationality". Conrad, according to Curle, "could never have written in any other language save the English language...for he would have been dumb in any other language but the English."
Conrad always retained a strong emotional attachment to his native language. He asked his visiting Polish niece Karola Zagórska, "Will you forgive me that my sons don't speak Polish?" In June 1924, shortly before his death, he apparently expressed a desire that his son John marry a Polish girl and learn Polish, and toyed with the idea of returning for good to now independent Poland.
Conrad bridled at being referred to as a Russian or "Slavonic" writer. The only Russian writer he admired was Ivan Turgenev. "The critics," he wrote an acquaintance on 31 January 1924, six months before his death, "detected in me a new note and as, just when I began to write, they had discovered the existence of Russian authors, they stuck that label on me under the name of Slavonism. What I venture to say is that it would have been more just to charge me at most with Polonism." However, though Conrad protested that Dostoyevsky was "too Russian for me" and that Russian literature generally was "repugnant to me hereditarily and individually", "Under Western Eyes" is viewed as Conrad's response to the themes explored in Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment".
In 1975 the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe published an essay, "", which provoked controversy by calling Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist". Achebe's view was that "Heart of Darkness" cannot be considered a great work of art because it is "a novel which celebrates... dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race." Referring to Conrad as a "talented, tormented man", Achebe notes that Conrad (via the protagonist, Charles Marlow) reduces and degrades Africans to "limbs", "ankles", "glistening white eyeballs", etc. while simultaneously (and fearfully) suspecting a common kinship between himself and these natives—leading Marlow to sneer the word "ugly." Achebe also cited Conrad's description of an encounter with an African: "A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days." Achebe's essay, a landmark in postcolonial discourse, provoked debate, and the questions it raised have been addressed in most subsequent literary criticism of Conrad.
Achebe's critics argue that he fails to distinguish Marlow's view from Conrad's, which results in very clumsy interpretations of the novella. In their view, Conrad portrays Africans sympathetically and their plight tragically, and refers sarcastically to, and condemns outright, the supposedly noble aims of European colonists, thereby demonstrating his skepticism about the moral superiority of white men. Ending a passage that describes the condition of chained, emaciated slaves, the novelist remarks: "After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings." Some observers assert that Conrad, whose native country had been conquered by imperial powers, empathised by default with other subjugated peoples. Jeffrey Meyers notes that Conrad, like his acquaintance Roger Casement, "was one of the first men to question the Western notion of progress, a dominant idea in Europe from the Renaissance to the Great War, to attack the hypocritical justification of colonialism and to reveal... the savage degradation of the white man in Africa." Likewise, E.D. Morel, who led international opposition to King Leopold II's rule in the Congo, saw Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" as a condemnation of colonial brutality and referred to the novella as "the most powerful thing written on the subject."
Conrad scholar Peter Firchow writes that "nowhere in the novel does Conrad or any of his narrators, personified or otherwise, claim superiority on the part of Europeans on the grounds of alleged genetic or biological difference". If Conrad or his novel is racist, it is only in a weak sense, since "Heart of Darkness" acknowledges racial distinctions "but does not suggest an essential superiority" of any group. Achebe's reading of "Heart of Darkness" can be (and has been) challenged by a reading of Conrad's other African story, "An Outpost of Progress", which has an omniscient narrator, rather than the embodied narrator, Marlow. Some younger scholars, such as Masood Ashraf Raja, have also suggested that if we read Conrad beyond "Heart of Darkness", especially his Malay novels, racism can be further complicated by foregrounding Conrad's positive representation of Muslims.
In 1998 H.S. Zins wrote in "Pula: Botswana Journal of African Studies":
Adam Hochschild makes a similar point:
Conrad's experience in the Belgian-run Congo made him one of the fiercest critics of the "white man's mission." It was also, writes Najder, Conrad's most daring and last "attempt to become a "homo socialis", a cog in the mechanism of society. By accepting the job in the trading company, he joined, for once in his life, an organized, large-scale group activity on land... It is not accidental that the Congo expedition remained an isolated event in Conrad's life. Until his death he remained a recluse in the social sense and never became involved with any institution or clearly defined group of people."
Conrad was a Russian subject, having been born in the Russian part of what had once been the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After the father's death, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski had attempted to secure Austrian citizenship for him—to no avail, probably because Conrad had not received permission from Russian authorities to remain abroad permanently and had not been released from being a Russian subject. Conrad could not return to Ukraine, in the Russian Empire—he would have been liable to many years' military service and, as the son of political exiles, to harassment.
In a letter of 9 August 1877, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski broached two important subjects: the desirability of Conrad's naturalisation abroad (tantamount to release from being a Russian subject) and Conrad's plans to join the British merchant marine. "[D]o you speak English?... I never wished you to become naturalized in France, mainly because of the compulsory military service... I thought, however, of your getting naturalized in Switzerland..." In his next letter, Bobrowski supported Conrad's idea of seeking citizenship of the United States or of "one of the more important Southern [American] Republics".
Eventually Conrad would make his home in England. On 2 July 1886 he applied for British nationality, which was granted on 19 August 1886. Yet, in spite of having become a subject of Queen Victoria, Conrad had not ceased to be a subject of Tsar Alexander III. To achieve the latter, he had to make many visits to the Russian Embassy in London and politely reiterate his request. He would later recall the Embassy's home at Belgrave Square in his novel "The Secret Agent". Finally, on 2 April 1889, the Russian Ministry of Home Affairs released "the son of a Polish man of letters, captain of the British merchant marine" from the status of Russian subject.
An anchor-shaped monument to Conrad at Gdynia, on Poland's Baltic Seacoast, features a quotation from him in Polish: ""Nic tak nie nęci, nie rozczarowuje i nie zniewala, jak życie na morzu"" ("[T]here is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea" – ).
In Circular Quay, Sydney, Australia, a plaque in a "writers walk" commemorates Conrad's visits to Australia between 1879 and 1892. The plaque notes that "Many of his works reflect his 'affection for that young continent.'"
In San Francisco in 1979, a small triangular square at Columbus Avenue and Beach Street, near Fisherman's Wharf, was dedicated as "Joseph Conrad Square" after Conrad. The square's dedication was timed to coincide with release of Francis Ford Coppola's "Heart of Darkness"-inspired film, "Apocalypse Now".
In the latter part of World War II, the Royal Navy cruiser "HMS Danae" was rechristened ORP "Conrad" and served as part of the Polish Navy.
Notwithstanding the undoubted sufferings that Conrad endured on many of his voyages, sentimentality and canny marketing place him at the best lodgings in several of his destinations. Hotels across the Far East still lay claim to him as an honoured guest, with, however, no evidence to back their claims: Singapore's Raffles Hotel continues to claim he stayed there though he lodged, in fact, at the Sailors' Home nearby. His visit to Bangkok also remains in that city's collective memory, and is recorded in the official history of The Oriental Hotel (where he never, in fact, stayed, lodging aboard his ship, the "Otago") along with that of a less well-behaved guest, Somerset Maugham, who pilloried the hotel in a short story in revenge for attempts to eject him.
A plaque commemorating "Joseph Conrad–Korzeniowski" has been installed near Singapore's Fullerton Hotel.
Conrad is also reported to have stayed at Hong Kong's Peninsula Hotel—at a port that, in fact, he never visited. Later literary admirers, notably Graham Greene, followed closely in his footsteps, sometimes requesting the same room and perpetuating myths that have no basis in fact. No Caribbean resort is yet known to have claimed Conrad's patronage, although he is believed to have stayed at a Fort-de-France "pension" upon arrival in Martinique on his first voyage, in 1875, when he travelled as a passenger on the "Mont Blanc".
In April 2013, a monument to Conrad was unveiled in the Russian town of Vologda, where he and his parents lived in exile in 1862–63. The monument was removed, with unclear explanation, in June 2016.
After the publication of "Chance" in 1913, Conrad was the subject of more discussion and praise than any other English writer of the time. He had a genius for companionship, and his circle of friends, which he had begun assembling even prior to his first publications, included authors and other leading lights in the arts, such as Henry James, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, John Galsworthy, Edward Garnett, Garnett's wife Constance Garnett (translator of Russian literature), Stephen Crane, Hugh Walpole, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Norman Douglas, Jacob Epstein, T. E. Lawrence, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Maurice Ravel, Valery Larbaud, Saint-John Perse, Edith Wharton, James Huneker, anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, Józef Retinger (later a founder of the European Movement, which led to the European Union, and author of "Conrad and His Contemporaries"). In the early 1900s Conrad composed a short series of novels in collaboration with Ford Madox Ford.
In 1919 and 1922 Conrad's growing renown and prestige among writers and critics in continental Europe fostered his hopes for a Nobel Prize in Literature. It was apparently the French and Swedes—not the English—who favoured Conrad's candidacy.
In April 1924 Conrad, who possessed a hereditary Polish status of nobility and coat-of-arms ("Nałęcz"), declined a (non-hereditary) British knighthood offered by Labour Party Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. Conrad kept a distance from official structures—he never voted in British national elections—and seems to have been averse to public honours generally; he had already refused honorary degrees from Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Yale universities.
In the Polish People's Republic, translations of Conrad's works were openly published, except for "Under Western Eyes", which in the 1980s was published as an underground ""bibuła"".
Conrad's narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including T. S. Eliot, Maria Dąbrowska, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Gerald Basil Edwards, Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, André Malraux, George Orwell, Graham Greene, William Golding, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Gabriel García Márquez, Peter Matthiessen, John le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon J. M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie. Many films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's works.
A striking portrait of Conrad, aged about 46, was drawn by the historian and poet Henry Newbolt, who met him about 1903:
On 12 October 1912, American music critic James Huneker visited Conrad and later recalled being received by "a man of the world, neither sailor nor novelist, just a simple-mannered gentleman, whose welcome was sincere, whose glance was veiled, at times far-away, whose ways were French, Polish, anything but 'literary,' bluff or English."
After respective separate visits to Conrad in August and September 1913, two British aristocrats, the socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell and the mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell—who were lovers at the time—recorded their impressions of the novelist. In her diary, Morrell wrote:
A month later, Bertrand Russell visited Conrad at Capel House, and the same day on the train wrote down his impressions:
Russell's "Autobiography", published over half a century later in 1968, confirms his original experience:
It was not only Anglophones who remarked on Conrad's very strong foreign accent when speaking English. After he had made the acquaintance of French poet Paul Valéry and composer Maurice Ravel in December 1922, Valéry wrote of having been astonished at Conrad's "horrible" accent in English.
The subsequent friendship and correspondence between Conrad and Russell lasted, with long intervals, to the end of Conrad's life. In one letter, Conrad avowed his "deep admiring affection, which, if you were never to see me again and forget my existence tomorrow will be unalterably yours "usque ad finem"." Conrad in his correspondence often used the Latin expression meaning "to the very end", which he seems to have adopted from his faithful guardian, mentor and benefactor, his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski.
Conrad looked with less optimism than Russell on the possibilities of scientific and philosophic knowledge. In a 1913 letter to acquaintances who had invited Conrad to join their society, he reiterated his belief that it was impossible to understand the essence of either reality or life: both science and art penetrate no further than the outer shapes.
Najder describes Conrad as "[a]n alienated émigré... haunted by a sense of the unreality of other people – a feeling natural to someone living outside the established structures of family, social milieu, and country".
Conrad's sense of loneliness throughout his exile's life found memorable expression in the 1901 short story, "Amy Foster".
A number of works in various genres and media have been based on, or inspired by, Conrad's writings, including:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15823
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John Updike
John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others being Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and Colson Whitehead), Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in "The New Yorker" starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for "The New York Review of Books". His most famous work is his "Rabbit" series (the novels "Rabbit, Run"; "Rabbit Redux"; "Rabbit Is Rich"; "Rabbit at Rest"; and the novella "Rabbit Remembered"), which chronicles the life of the middle-class everyman Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to death. Both "Rabbit Is Rich" (1982) and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990) were recognized with the Pulitzer Prize.
Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", Updike was recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific outputhe wrote on average a book a year. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity".
His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and sensual detail. His work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice" that describes the physical world extravagantly while remaining squarely in the realist tradition. He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due".
Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the only child of Linda Grace (née Hoyer) and Wesley Russell Updike, and was raised in the nearby small town of Shillington. The family later moved to the unincorporated village of Plowville. His mother's attempts to become a published writer impressed the young Updike. "One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is of seeing her at her desk ... I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in."
These early years in Berks County, Pennsylvania, would influence the environment of the Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy, as well as many of his early novels and short stories. Updike graduated from Shillington High School as co-valedictorian and class president in 1950 and received a full scholarship to Harvard College, where he was the roommate of Christopher Lasch during their first year. Updike had already received recognition for his writing as a teenager by winning a Scholastic Art & Writing Award, and at Harvard he soon became well known among his classmates as a talented and prolific contributor to "The Harvard Lampoon", of which he was president. He graduated "summa cum laude" in 1954 with a degree in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Upon graduation, Updike attended the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford with the ambition of becoming a cartoonist. After returning to the United States, Updike and his family moved to New York, where he became a regular contributor to "The New Yorker". This was the beginning of his professional writing career.
Updike stayed at "The New Yorker" as a full staff writer for only two years, writing "Talk of the Town" columns and submitting poetry and short stories to the magazine. In New York, Updike wrote the poems and stories that came to fill his early books like "The Carpentered Hen" (1958) and "The Same Door" (1959). These works were influenced by Updike's early engagement with "The New Yorker". This early work also featured the influence of J. D. Salinger ("A&P"); John Cheever ("Snowing in Greenwich Village"); and the Modernists Marcel Proust, Henry Green, James Joyce, and Vladimir Nabokov.
During this time, Updike underwent a profound spiritual crisis. Suffering from a loss of religious faith, he began reading Søren Kierkegaard and the theologian Karl Barth. Both deeply influenced his own religious beliefs, which in turn figured prominently in his fiction. Updike remained a believing Christian for the rest of his life.
Later, Updike and his family relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts. Many commentators, including a columnist in the local "Ipswich Chronicle", asserted that the fictional town of Tarbox in "Couples" was based on Ipswich. Updike denied the suggestion in a letter to the paper. Impressions of Updike's day-to-day life in Ipswich during the 1960s and 1970s are included in a letter to the same paper published soon after Updike's death and written by a friend and contemporary. In Ipswich, Updike wrote "Rabbit, Run" (1960), on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and "The Centaur" (1963), two of his most acclaimed and famous works; the latter won the National Book Award.
"Rabbit, Run" featured Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a former high school basketball star and middle-class paragon who would become Updike's most enduring and critically acclaimed character. Updike wrote three additional novels about him. "Rabbit, Run" was featured in "Time"s All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels.
Updike's career and reputation were nurtured and expanded by his long association with "The New Yorker", which published him frequently throughout his career, despite the fact that he had departed the magazine's employment after only two years. Updike's memoir indicates that he stayed in his "corner of New England to give its domestic news" with a focus on the American home from the point of view of a male writer. Updike's contract with the magazine gave it right of first offer for his short-story manuscripts, but William Shawn, "The New Yorker"'s editor from 1952 to 1987, rejected several as too explicit.
The Maple short stories, collected in "Too Far To Go" (1979), reflected the ebb and flow of Updike's first marriage; "Separating" (1974) and "Here Come the Maples" (1976) related to his divorce. These stories also reflect the role of alcohol in 1970s America. They were the basis for the television movie also called "Too Far To Go", broadcast by NBC in 1979.
Updike's short stories were collected in several volumes published by Alfred A. Knopf over five decades. In 2013, the Library of America issued a two-volume boxed edition of 186 stories under the title "The Collected Stories".
In 1971, Updike published a sequel to "Rabbit, Run" called "Rabbit Redux", his response to the 1960s; Rabbit reflected much of Updike's resentment and hostility towards the social and political changes that beset the United States during that time.
Updike's early Olinger period was set in the Pennsylvania of his youth; it ended around 1965 with the lyrical "Of the Farm".
After his early novels, Updike became most famous for his chronicling infidelity, adultery, and marital unrest, especially in suburban America; and for his controversial depiction of the confusion and freedom inherent in this breakdown of social mores.
He once wrote that it was "a subject which, if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me". The most prominent of Updike's novels of this vein is "Couples" (1968), a novel about adultery in a small fictional Massachusetts town called Tarbox. It garnered Updike an appearance on the cover of "Time" magazine with the headline "The Adulterous Society". Both the magazine article and, to an extent, the novel struck a chord of national concern over whether American society was abandoning all social standards of conduct in sexual matters.
"The Coup" (1978), a lauded novel about an African dictatorship inspired by a visit he made to Africa, found Updike working in new territory.
In 1980, he published another novel featuring Harry Angstrom, "Rabbit Is Rich", which won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—all three major American literary prizes. The novel found "Rabbit the fat and happy owner of a Toyota dealership." Updike found it difficult to end the book, because he was "having so much fun" in the imaginary county Rabbit and his family inhabited.
After writing "Rabbit Is Rich", Updike published "The Witches of Eastwick" (1984), a playful novel about witches living in Rhode Island. He described it as an attempt to "make things right with my, what shall we call them, feminist detractors". One of Updike's most popular novels, it was adapted as a film and included on Harold Bloom's list of canonical 20th-century literature (in "The Western Canon"). In 2008 Updike published "The Widows of Eastwick", a return to the witches in their old age. It was his last published novel.
In 1986, he published the unconventional novel "Roger's Version", the second volume of the so-called "Scarlet Letter" trilogy, about an attempt to prove God's existence using a computer program. Author and critic Martin Amis called it a "near-masterpiece". The novel "S." (1989), uncharacteristically featuring a female protagonist, concluded Updike's reworking of Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter".
Updike enjoyed working in series; in addition to the Rabbit novels and the Maples stories, a recurrent Updike alter ego is the moderately well-known, unprolific Jewish novelist and eventual Nobel laureate Henry Bech, chronicled in three comic short-story cycles: "Bech, a Book" (1970), "Bech Is Back" (1981) and "Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel" (1998). These stories were compiled as "The Complete Henry Bech" (2001) by Everyman's Library. Bech is a comical and self-conscious antithesis of Updike's own literary persona: Jewish, a World War II veteran, reclusive, and unprolific to a fault.
In 1990, he published the last Rabbit novel, "Rabbit at Rest", which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Over 500 pages long, the novel is among Updike's most celebrated. In 2000, Updike included the novella "Rabbit Remembered" in his collection "Licks of Love", drawing the Rabbit saga to a close. His Pulitzers for the last two Rabbit novels make Updike one of only three writers to have won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, the others being William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington.
In 1995, Everyman's Library collected and canonized the four novels as the omnibus "Rabbit Angstrom"; Updike wrote an introduction in which he described Rabbit as "a ticket to the America all around me. What I saw through Rabbit's eyes was more worth telling than what I saw through my own, though the difference was often slight." Updike later called Rabbit "a brother to me, and a good friend. He opened me up as a writer."
After the publication of "Rabbit at Rest", Updike spent the rest of the 1990s and early 2000s publishing novels in a wide range of genres; the work of this period was frequently experimental in nature. These styles included the historical fiction of "Memories of the Ford Administration" (1992), the magical realism of "Brazil" (1994), the science fiction of "Toward the End of Time" (1997), the postmodernism of "Gertrude and Claudius" (2000), and the experimental fiction of "Seek My Face" (2002).
In the midst of these, he wrote what was for him a more conventional novel, "In the Beauty of the Lilies" (1996), a historical saga spanning several generations and exploring themes of religion and cinema in America. It is considered the most successful novel of Updike's late career. Some critics have predicted that posterity may consider the novel a "late masterpiece overlooked or praised by rote in its day, only to be rediscovered by another generation", while others thought it overlong and depressing. In "Villages" (2004), Updike returned to the familiar territory of infidelities in New England. His 22nd novel, "Terrorist" (2006), the story of a fervent young extremist Muslim in New Jersey, garnered media attention but little critical praise.
In 2003, Updike published "", a large collection of his short fiction spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. More than 800 pages long, with over one hundred stories, it has been called "a richly episodic and lyrical "Bildungsroman" ... in which Updike traces the trajectory from adolescence, college, married life, fatherhood, separation and divorce". It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2004. This lengthy volume nevertheless excluded several stories found in his short-story collections of the same period.
Updike worked in a wide array of genres, including fiction, poetry (most of it compiled in "Collected Poems: 1953–1993", 1993), essays (collected in nine separate volumes), a play ("Buchanan Dying", 1974), and a memoir ("Self-Consciousness", 1989).
Updike's array of awards includes two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Circle awards, the 1989 National Medal of Arts, the 2003 National Humanities Medal, and the Rea Award for the Short Story for outstanding achievement. The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Updike to present the 2008 Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. government's highest humanities honor; Updike's lecture was titled "The Clarity of Things: What Is American about American Art".
At the end of his life, Updike was working on a novel about St. Paul and early Christianity. Upon his death, "The New Yorker" published an appreciation by Adam Gopnik of Updike's lifetime association with the magazine, calling him "one of the greatest of all modern writers, the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing".
Updike married Mary E. Pennington, an art student at Radcliffe College, in 1953, while he was still a student at Harvard. She accompanied him to Oxford, England, where he attended art school and where their first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1955. The couple had three more children together: writer David (born 1957), artist Michael (born 1959) and Miranda (born 1960). They divorced in 1974. Updike had seven grandsons, Anoff, Kwame, Wesley, Trevor, Kai, Sawyer and Seneca.
In 1977 Updike married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, with whom he lived for more than thirty years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. He died of lung cancer at a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.
Updike published eight volumes of poetry over his career, including his first book "The Carpentered Hen" (1958), and one of his last, the posthumous "Endpoint" (2009). The "New Yorker" published excerpts of "Endpoint" in its March 16, 2009 issue. Much of Updike's poetical output was recollected in Knopf's "Collected Poems" (1993). He wrote that "I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the strictness and liveliness of the lesser form." The poet Thomas M. Disch noted that because Updike was such a well-known novelist, his poetry "could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible"; Disch saw Updike's light verse instead as a poetry of "epigrammatical lucidity". His poetry has been praised for its engagement with "a variety of forms and topics", its "wit and precision", and for its depiction of topics familiar to American readers.
British poet Gavin Ewart praised Updike for the metaphysical quality of his poetry and for his ability "to make the ordinary seem strange", and called him one of the few modern novelists capable of writing good poetry. Reading "Endpoint" aloud, the critic Charles McGrath claimed that he found "another, deeper music" in Updike's poetry, finding that Updike's wordplay "smooths and elides itself" and has many subtle "sound effects". John Keenan, who praised the collection "Endpoint" as "beautiful and poignant", noted that his poetry's engagement with "the everyday world in a technically accomplished manner seems to count against him".
Updike was also a critic of literature and art, one frequently cited as one of the best American critics of his generation. In the introduction to "Picked-Up Pieces," his 1975 collection of prose, he listed his personal rules for literary criticism:
1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give enough direct quotation—at least one extended passage—of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's œuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never ... try to put the author "in his place," making of him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
He reviewed "nearly every major writer of the 20th century and some 19th-century authors", typically in "The New Yorker", always trying to make his reviews "animated." He also championed young writers, comparing them to his own literary heroes including Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust. Good reviews from Updike were often seen as a significant achievement in terms of literary reputation and even sales; some of his positive reviews helped jump-start the careers of such younger writers as Erica Jong, Thomas Mallon and Jonathan Safran Foer.
Bad reviews by Updike sometimes caused controversy, as when in late 2008 he gave a "damning" review of Toni Morrison's novel "A Mercy".
Updike was praised for his literary criticism's conventional simplicity and profundity, for being an aestheticist critic who saw literature on its own terms, and for his longtime commitment to the practice of literary criticism.
Much of Updike's art criticism appeared in "The New York Review of Books", where he often wrote about American art. His art criticism involved an aestheticism like that of his literary criticism.
Updike's 2008 Jefferson Lecture, "The Clarity of Things: What's American About American Art?", dealt with the uniqueness of American art from the 18th century to the 20th. In the lecture he argued that American art, until the expressionist movement of the 20th century in which America declared its artistic "independence", is characterized by an insecurity not found in the artistic tradition of Europe."
In Updike's own words:
Two centuries after Jonathan Edwards sought a link with the divine in the beautiful clarity of things, William Carlos Williams wrote in introducing his long poem "Paterson" that "for the poet there are no ideas but in things." "No ideas but in things." The American artist, first born into a continent without museums and art schools, took Nature as his only instructor, and things as his principal study. A bias toward the empirical, toward the evidential object in the numinous fullness of its being, leads to a certain lininess, as the artist intently maps the visible in a New World that feels surrounded by chaos and emptiness.
Updike is considered one of the greatest American fiction writers of his generation. He was widely praised as America's "last true man of letters", with an immense and far-reaching influence on many writers. The excellence of his prose style is acknowledged even by critics skeptical of other aspects of Updike's work.
Several scholars have called attention to the importance of place, and especially of southeast Pennsylvania, in Updike's life and work. Bob Batchelor has described "Updike's Pennsylvania sensibility" as one with profound reaches that transcend time and place, such that in his writing, he used "Pennsylvania as a character" that went beyond geographic or political boundaries. SA Zylstra has compared Updike's Pennsylvania to Faulkner's Mississippi: "As with the Mississippi of Faulkner's novels, the world of Updike's novels is fictional (as are such towns as Olinger and Brewer), while at the same time it is recognizable as a particular American region." Sanford Pinsker observes that "Updike always felt a bit out of place" in places like "Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he lived for most of his life. In his heart—and, more important, in his imagination—Updike remained a staunchly Pennsylvania boy." Similarly, Sylvie Mathé maintains that "Updike's most memorable legacy appears to be his homage to Pennsylvania."
Critics emphasize his "inimitable prose style" and "rich description and language", often favorably compared to Proust and Nabokov. Some critics consider the fluency of his prose to be a fault, questioning the intellectual depth and thematic seriousness of his work given the polish of his language and the perceived lightness of his themes, while others criticized Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and sexual relationships.
Other critics argue that Updike's "dense vocabulary and syntax functions as a distancing technique to mediate the intellectual and emotional involvement of the reader". On the whole, however, Updike is extremely well regarded as a writer who mastered many genres, wrote with intellectual vigor and a powerful prose style, with "shrewd insight into the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life".
Updike's character Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist of the series of novels widely considered his "magnum opus", has been said to have "entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures", along with Huckleberry Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and others. A 2002 list by "Book" magazine of the 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900 listed Rabbit in the top five. The Rabbit novels, the Henry Bech stories, and the Maples stories have been canonized by Everyman's Library.
After Updike's death, Harvard's Houghton Library acquired his papers, manuscripts, and letters, naming the collection the John Updike Archive. 2009 also saw the founding of the John Updike Society, a group of scholars dedicated to "awakening and sustaining reader interest in the literature and life of John Updike, promoting literature written by Updike, and fostering and encouraging critical responses to Updike's literary works." The Society will begin publishing "The John Updike Review", a journal of critical scholarship in the field of Updike studies. The John Updike Society First Biennial Conference took place in 2010 at Alvernia University.
Eulogizing Updike in January 2009, the British novelist Ian McEwan wrote that Updike's "literary schemes and pretty conceits touched at points on the Shakespearean", and that Updike's death marked "the end of the golden age of the American novel in the 20th century's second half."
McEwan said the Rabbit series is Updike's "masterpiece and will surely be his monument", and concluded:
Jonathan Raban, highlighting many of the virtues that have been ascribed to Updike's prose, called "Rabbit at Rest" "one of the very few modern novels in English ... that one can set beside the work of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Joyce, and not feel the draft ... It is a book that works by a steady accumulation of a mass of brilliant details, of shades and nuances, of the byplay between one sentence and the next, and no short review can properly honor its intricacy and richness."
The novelist Philip Roth, considered one of Updike's chief literary rivals, wrote, "John Updike is our time's greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne."
The noted critic James Wood called Updike "a prose writer of great beauty, but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey". In a review of "Licks of Love" (2001), Wood concluded that Updike's "prose trusses things in very pretty ribbons" but that there often exists in his work a "hard, coarse, primitive, misogynistic worldview". Wood both praised and criticized Updike's language for having "an essayistic saunter; the language lifts itself up on pretty hydraulics, and hovers slightly above its subjects, generally a little too accomplished and a little too abstract". According to Wood, Updike is capable of writing "the perfect sentence" and his style is characterized by a "delicate deferral" of the sentence. Of the beauty of Updike's language and his faith in the power of language that floats above reality, Wood wrote:
For some time now Updike's language has seemed to encode an almost theological optimism about its capacity to refer. Updike is notably unmodern in his impermeability to silence and the interruptions of the abyss. For all his fabled Protestantism, both American Puritan and Lutheran-Barthian, with its cold glitter, its insistence on the aching gap between God and His creatures, Updike seems less like Hawthorne than Balzac, in his unstopping and limitless energy, and his cheerfully professional belief that stories can be continued; the very form of the Rabbit books—here extended a further instance—suggests continuance. Updike does not appear to believe that words ever fail us—'life's gallant, battered ongoingness ', indeed—and part of the difficulty he has run into, late in his career, is that he shows no willingness, verbally, to acknowledge silence, failure, interruption, loss of faith, despair and so on. Supremely, better than almost any other contemporary writer, he can always describe these feelings and states; but they are not inscribed in the language itself. Updike's language, for all that it gestures towards the usual range of human disappointment and collapse, testifies instead to its own uncanny success: to a belief that the world can always be brought out of its cloudiness and made clear in a fair season.
In direct contrast to Wood's evaluation, the Oxford critic Thomas Karshan asserted that Updike is "intensely intellectual", with a style that constitutes his "manner of thought" not merely "a set of dainty curlicues". Karshan calls Updike an inheritor of the "traditional role of the epic writer". According to Karshan, "Updike's writing picks up one voice, joins its cadence, and moves on to another, like Rabbit himself, driving south through radio zones on his flight away from his wife and child."
Disagreeing with Wood's critique of Updike's alleged over-stylization, Karshan evaluates Updike's language as convincingly naturalistic:
Updike's sentences at their frequent best are not a complacent expression of faith. Rather, like Proust's sentences in Updike's description, they "seek an essence so fine the search itself is an act of faith." Updike aspires to "this sense of self-qualification, the kind of timid reverence towards what exists that Cézanne shows when he grapples for the shape and shade of a fruit through a mist of delicate stabs." Their hesitancy and self-qualification arise as they meet obstacles, readjust and pass on. If life is bountiful in New England, it is also evasive and easily missed. In the stories Updike tells, marriages and homes are made only to be broken. His descriptiveness embodies a promiscuous love for everything in the world. But love is precarious, Updike is always saying, since it thrives on obstructions and makes them if it cannot find them.
Harold Bloom once called Updike "a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist ... He specializes in the easier pleasures." Bloom also edited an important collection of critical essays on Updike in 1987, in which he concluded that Updike possessed a major style and was capable of writing beautiful sentences which are "beyond praise"; nevertheless, Bloom went on, "the American sublime will never touch his pages".
On "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1981, the novelist and short-story writer John Cheever was asked why he did not write book reviews and what he would say if given the chance to review "Rabbit Is Rich". He replied:
The reason I didn't review the book is that it perhaps would have taken me three weeks. My appreciation of it is that diverse and that complicated ... John is perhaps the only contemporary writer who I know now who gives me the sense of the fact that life is—the life that we perform is in an environment that enjoys a grandeur that escapes us. Rabbit is very much possessed of a paradise lost, of a paradise known fleetingly perhaps through erotic love and a paradise that he pursues through his children. It's the vastness of John's scope that I would have described if I could through a review.
"The Fiction Circus", an online and multimedia literary magazine, called Updike one of the "four Great American Novelists" of his time along with Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo, each jokingly represented as a sign of the Zodiac. Furthermore, Updike was seen as the "best prose writer in the world", like Nabokov before him. But in contrast to many literati and establishment obituaries, the "Circus" asserted that nobody "thought of Updike as a "vital" writer."
Adam Gopnik of "The New Yorker" evaluated Updike as "the first American writer since Henry James to get himself fully expressed, the man who broke the curse of incompleteness that had haunted American writing ... He sang like Henry James, but he saw like Sinclair Lewis. The two sides of American fiction—the precise, realist, encyclopedic appetite to get it all in, and the exquisite urge to make writing out of sensation rendered exactly—were both alive in him."
The critic James Wolcott, in a review of Updike's last novel, "The Widows of Eastwick" (2008), noted that Updike's penchant for observing America's decline is coupled with an affirmation of America's ultimate merits: "Updike elegises entropy American-style with a resigned, paternal, disappointed affection that distinguishes his fiction from that of grimmer declinists: Don DeLillo, Gore Vidal, Philip Roth. America may have lost its looks and stature, but it was a beauty once, and worth every golden dab of sperm."
Gore Vidal, in a controversial essay in the "Times Literary Supplement", professed to have "never taken Updike seriously as a writer". He criticizes his political and aesthetic worldview for its "blandness and acceptance of authority in any form". He concludes that Updike "describes to no purpose". In reference to Updike's wide establishment acclaim, Vidal mockingly called him "our good child" and excoriated his alleged political conservatism. Vidal ultimately concluded, "Updike's work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up."
Robert B. Silvers, editor of "The New York Review of Books", called Updike "one of the most elegant and coolly observant writers of his generation".
The short-story writer Lorrie Moore, who once described Updike as "American literature's greatest short story writer ... and arguably our greatest writer", reviewed Updike's body of short stories in "The New York Review", praising their intricate detail and rich imagery: "his eye and his prose never falter, even when the world fails to send its more socially complicated revelations directly his story's way".
In a post commemorating his birthday in 2011, blogger and literary critic Christy Potter called Updike "... THE Writer, the kind of writer everyone has heard of, the one whose name you can bring up at a party and people who have never read one thing he wrote will still nod their heads knowingly and say, 'Oh yes, John Updike. The writer.'"
During November 2008 the editors of the UK's "Literary Review" magazine awarded Updike their Bad Sex in Fiction Lifetime Achievement Award, which celebrates "crude, tasteless or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature".
The principal themes in Updike's work are religion, sex, and America as well as death. Often he would combine them, frequently in his favored terrain of "the American small town, Protestant middle class", of which he once said, "I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."
For example, the decline of religion in America is chronicled in "In the Beauty of the Lilies" (1996) alongside the history of cinema, and Rabbit Angstrom contemplates the merits of sex with the wife of his friend Reverend Jack Eccles while the latter is giving his sermon in "Rabbit, Run" (1960).
Critics have often noted that Updike imbued language itself with a kind of faith in its efficacy, and that his tendency to construct narratives spanning many years and books—the Rabbit series, the Henry Bech series, Eastwick, the Maples stories—demonstrates a similar faith in the transcendent power of fiction and language. Updike's novels often act as dialectical theological debates between the book itself and the reader, the novel endowed with theological beliefs meant to challenge the reader as the plot runs its course. Rabbit Angstrom himself acts as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith.
Describing his purpose in writing prose, Updike himself, in the introduction to his "Early Stories: 1953–1975" (2004), wrote that his aim was always "to give the mundane its beautiful due." Elsewhere he famously said, "When I write, I aim my mind not towards New York City but towards a vague spot east of Kansas." Some have suggested that the "best statement of Updike's aesthetic comes in his early memoir 'The Dogwood Tree'" (1962): "Blankness is not emptiness; we may skate upon an intense radiance we do not see because we see nothing else. And in fact there is a color, a quiet but tireless goodness that things at rest, like a brick wall or a small stone, seem to affirm."
Sex in Updike's work is noted for its ubiquity and the reverence with which he described it:
The critic Edward Champion notes that Updike's prose heavily favors "external sexual imagery" rife with "explicit anatomical detail" rather than descriptions of "internal emotion" in descriptions of sex. In Champion's interview with Updike on "The Bat Segundo Show", Updike replied that he perhaps favored such imagery to concretize and make sex "real" in his prose. Another sexual theme commonly addressed in Updike is adultery, especially in a suburban, middle class setting, most famously in "Couples" (1968). The Updikean narrator is often "a man guilty of infidelity and abandonment of his family."
Similarly, Updike wrote about America with a certain nostalgia, reverence, and recognition and celebration of America's broad diversity. ZZ Packer wrote that in Updike, "there seemed a strange ability to harken both America the Beautiful as well as America the Plain Jane, and the lovely Protestant backbone in his fiction and essays, when he decided to show it off, was as progressive and enlightened as it was unapologetic."
The Rabbit novels in particular can be viewed, according to Julian Barnes, as "a distraction from, and a glittering confirmation of, the vast bustling ordinariness of American life." But as Updike celebrated ordinary America, he also alluded to its decline: at times, he was "so clearly disturbed by the downward spin of America." Adam Gopnik concludes that "Updike's great subject was the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. He documented how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation. For Updike, this effort was blessed, and very nearly successful."
Updike's novels about America almost always contain references to political events of the time. In this sense, they are artifacts of their historical eras, showing how national leaders shape and define their times. The lives of ordinary citizens take place against this wider background.
Updike often wrote about death, his characters providing a "mosaic of reactions" to mortality, ranging from terror to attempts at insulation. In "The Poorhouse Fair" (1959), the elderly John Hook intones, "There is no goodness without belief ... And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved, to take into the next", demonstrating a religious, metaphysical faith present in much of Updike's work.
For Rabbit Angstrom, with his constant musings on mortality, his near-witnessing of his daughter's death, and his often shaky faith, death is more frightening and less obvious in its ramifications. At the end of "Rabbit at Rest" (1990), though, Rabbit demonstrates a kind of certainty, telling his son Nelson on his deathbed, "... But enough. Maybe. Enough." In "The Centaur" (1963), George Caldwell has no religious faith and is afraid of his cancer. Death can also be a sort of unseen terror; it "occurs offstage but reverberates for survivors as an absent presence."
Updike himself also experienced a "crisis over the afterlife", and indeed
many of his heroes shared the same sort of existential fears the author acknowledged he had suffered as a young man: Henry Bech's concern that he was 'a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust,' or Colonel Ellelloû's lament that 'we will be forgotten, all of us forgotten.' Their fear of death threatens to make everything they do feel meaningless, and it also sends them running after God—looking for some reassurance that there is something beyond the familiar, everyday world with 'its signals and buildings and cars and bricks.'
Updike demonstrated his own fear in some of his more personal writings, including the poem "Perfection Wasted" (1990):
Rabbit novels
Bech books
Buchanan books
Eastwick books
"The Scarlet Letter" Trilogy
Other novels
Books edited by Updike
Short Story Collections
Poetry
Non-fiction, essays and criticism
"National Book Awards – 1964". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 11, 2012. (With acceptance speech by Updike and essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
"National Book Awards – 1982". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 11, 2012. (With essays by Amity Gaige and Nancy Werlin from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
"Distinguished Contribution to American Letters". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 11, 2012. (With acceptance speech by Updike and introduction by Paul LeClerc.)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15824
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John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American author. He won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception." He has been called "a giant of American letters," and many of his works are considered classics of Western literature.
During his writing career, he authored 33 books, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels "Tortilla Flat" (1935) and "Cannery Row" (1945), the multi-generation epic "East of Eden" (1952), and the novellas "The Red Pony" (1933) and "Of Mice and Men" (1937). The Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies.
Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists.
Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he immigrated to the United States. The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is still named "Großsteinbeck."
His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862–1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton (1867–1934), a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although Steinbeck later became agnostic. Steinbeck lived in a small rural valley (no more than a frontier settlement) set in some of the world's most fertile soil, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Coast. Both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in "Of Mice and Men". He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned.
Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English Literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving without a degree in 1925. He traveled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins.
When their money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crab that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market. Whatever food they had, they shared with their friends. Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel "Cannery Row".
In 1930, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade, teaching him a great deal about philosophy and biology. Ricketts, usually very quiet, yet likable, with an inner self-sufficiency and an encyclopedic knowledge of diverse subjects, became a focus of Steinbeck's attention. Ricketts had taken a college class from Warder Clyde Allee, a biologist and ecological theorist, who would go on to write a classic early textbook on ecology. Ricketts became a proponent of ecological thinking, in which man was only one part of a great chain of being, caught in a web of life too large for him to control or understand. Meanwhile, Ricketts operated a biological lab on the coast of Monterey, selling biological samples of small animals, fish, rays, starfish, turtles, and other marine forms to schools and colleges.
Between 1930 and 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as secretary-bookkeeper. Steinbeck helped on an informal basis. They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and John learned biology and Ricketts' ecological philosophy. When Steinbeck became emotionally upset, Ricketts sometimes played music for him.
Steinbeck's first novel, "", published in 1929, is loosely based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan. It centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of the city of Panama, sometimes referred to as the "Cup of Gold", and on the women, brighter than the sun, who were said to be found there.
Between 1930 and 1933, Steinbeck produced three shorter works. "The Pastures of Heaven", published in 1932, consists of twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, which was discovered by a Spanish corporal while chasing runaway Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published "The Red Pony", a 100-page, four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood. "To a God Unknown", named after a Vedic hymn, follows the life of a homesteader and his family in California, depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works. Although he had not achieved the status of a well-known writer, he never doubted that he would achieve greatness.
Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with "Tortilla Flat" (1935), a novel set in post-war Monterey, California, that won the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It portrays the adventures of a group of classless and usually homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest and reject nearly all the standard mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life devoted to wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. In presenting the 1962 Nobel Prize to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy cited "spicy and comic tales about a gang of "paisanos", asocial individuals who, in their wild revels, are almost caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. It has been said that in the United States this book came as a welcome antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing depression."
"Tortilla Flat" was adapted as a 1942 film of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck. With some of the proceeds, he built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos.
Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included "In Dubious Battle", "Of Mice and Men" and "The Grapes of Wrath". He also wrote an article series called "The Harvest Gypsies" for the "San Francisco News" about the plight of the migrant worker.
"Of Mice and Men" was a drama about the dreams of two migrant agricultural laborers in California. It was critically acclaimed and Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize citation called it a "little masterpiece".
Its stage production was a hit, starring Wallace Ford as George and Broderick Crawford as George's companion, the mentally childlike, but physically powerful itinerant farmhand Lennie. Steinbeck refused to travel from his home in California to attend any performance of the play during its New York run, telling director George S. Kaufman that the play as it existed in his own mind was "perfect" and that anything presented on stage would only be a disappointment. Steinbeck wrote two more stage plays ("The Moon Is Down" and "Burning Bright").
"Of Mice and Men" was also adapted as a 1939 Hollywood film, with Lon Chaney, Jr. as Lennie (he had filled the role in the Los Angeles stage production) and Burgess Meredith as George. Meredith and Steinbeck became close friends for the next two decades. Another film based on the novella was made in 1992 starring Gary Sinise as George and John Malkovich as Lennie.
Steinbeck followed this wave of success with "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco. It is commonly considered his greatest work. According to "The New York Times", it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month, it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later that year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted as a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award.
"Grapes" was controversial. Steinbeck's New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the author, especially close to home. Claiming the book was both obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.
Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy."
The film versions of "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men" (by two different movie studios) were in production simultaneously, allowing Steinbeck to spend a full day on the set of "The Grapes of Wrath" and the next day on the set of "Of Mice and Men."
In the 1930s and 1940s, Ed Ricketts strongly influenced Steinbeck's writing. Steinbeck frequently took small trips with Ricketts along the California coast to give himself time off from his writing and to collect biological specimens, which Ricketts sold for a living. Their joint book about a collecting expedition to the Gulf of California in 1940, which was part travelogue and part natural history, published just as the U.S. entered World War II, never found an audience and did not sell well. However, in 1951, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion of the book as "The Log from the Sea of Cortez", under his name only (though Ricketts had written some of it). This work remains in print today.
Although Carol accompanied Steinbeck on the trip, their marriage was beginning to suffer, and ended a year later, in 1941, even as Steinbeck worked on the manuscript for the book. In 1942, after his divorce from Carol he married Gwyndolyn "Gwyn" Conger. With his second wife Steinbeck had two sons, Thomas ("Thom") Myles Steinbeck (1944–2016) and John Steinbeck IV (1946–1991).
Ricketts was Steinbeck's model for the character of "Doc" in "Cannery Row" (1945) and "Sweet Thursday" (1954), "Friend Ed" in "Burning Bright", and characters in "In Dubious Battle" (1936) and "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939). Ecological themes recur in Steinbeck's novels of the period.
Steinbeck's close relations with Ricketts ended in 1941 when Steinbeck moved away from Pacific Grove and divorced his wife Carol. Ricketts' biographer Eric Enno Tamm notes that, except for "East of Eden" (1952), Steinbeck's writing declined after Ricketts' untimely death in 1948.
Steinbeck's novel "The Moon Is Down" (1942), about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway and the occupiers the Nazis. In 1945, Steinbeck received the King Haakon VII Freedom Cross for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement.
In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent for the "New York Herald Tribune" and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). It was at that time he became friends with Will Lang, Jr. of "Time"/"Life" magazine. During the war, Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. At one point, he accompanied Fairbanks on an invasion of an island off the coast of Italy and helped capture Italian and German prisoners, using a Tommy Gun. Some of his writings from this period were incorporated in the documentary "Once There Was a War" (1958).
Steinbeck returned from the war with a number of wounds from shrapnel and some psychological trauma. He treated himself, as ever, by writing. He wrote Alfred Hitchcock's movie, "Lifeboat" (1944), and the film, "A Medal for Benny" (1945), with screenwriter Jack Wagner about paisanos from "Tortilla Flat" going to war. He later requested that his name be removed from the credits of "Lifeboat," because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones. In 1944, suffering from homesickness for his Pacific Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s, he wrote "Cannery Row" (1945), which became so famous that in 1958 Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, the setting of the book, was renamed Cannery Row.
After the war, he wrote "The Pearl" (1947), knowing it would be filmed eventually. The story first appeared in the December 1945 issue of Woman's Home Companion magazine as "The Pearl of the World." It was illustrated by John Alan Maxwell. The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in "The Log From the Sea of Cortez", which he described in Chapter 11 as being "so much like a parable that it almost can't be". Steinbeck traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico for the filming with Wagner who helped with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a film script ("Viva Zapata!") directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn.
In 1947, Steinbeck made the first of many trips to the Soviet Union, this one with photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad, some of the first Americans to visit many parts of the USSR since the communist revolution. Steinbeck's 1948 book about their experiences, "A Russian Journal", was illustrated with Capa's photos. In 1948, the year the book was published, Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1952 Steinbeck's longest novel, "East of Eden", was published. According to his third wife, Elaine, he considered it his "magnum opus", his greatest novel.
In 1952, John Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of 20th Century Fox's film, "O. Henry's Full House". Although Steinbeck later admitted he was uncomfortable before the camera, he provided interesting introductions to several filmed adaptations of short stories by the legendary writer O. Henry. About the same time, Steinbeck recorded readings of several of his short stories for Columbia Records; the recordings provide a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice.
Following the success of "Viva Zapata!", Steinbeck collaborated with Kazan on "East of Eden", James Dean's film debut.
"" is a travelogue of his 1960 road trip with his poodle Charley. Steinbeck bemoans his lost youth and roots, while dispensing both criticism and praise for America. According to Steinbeck's son Thom, Steinbeck made the journey because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country one last time.
Steinbeck's last novel, "The Winter of Our Discontent" (1961), examines moral decline in America. The protagonist Ethan grows discontented with his own moral decline and that of those around him. The book has a very different tone from Steinbeck's amoral and ecological stance in earlier works like "Tortilla Flat" and "Cannery Row". It was not a critical success. Many reviewers recognized the importance of the novel, but were disappointed that it was not another "Grapes of Wrath".
In the Nobel Prize presentation speech next year, however, the Swedish Academy cited it most favorably: "Here he attained the same standard which he set in The Grapes of Wrath. Again he holds his position as an independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad."
Apparently taken aback by the critical reception of this novel, and the critical outcry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, Steinbeck published no more fiction in the remaining six years before his death.
In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception." The selection was heavily criticized, and described as "one of the Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper. The reaction of American literary critics was also harsh. The "New York Times" asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising", noting that "[T]he international character of the award and the weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of American writing. ... [W]e think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age". Steinbeck, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: "Frankly, no." Biographer Jackson Benson notes, "[T]his honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was precisely because the committee made its judgment ... on its own criteria, rather than plugging into 'the main currents of American writing' as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had value." In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said:
Fifty years later, in 2012, the Nobel Prize opened its archives and it was revealed that Steinbeck was a "compromise choice" among a shortlist consisting of Steinbeck, British authors Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell, French dramatist Jean Anouilh and Danish author Karen Blixen. The declassified documents showed that he was chosen as the best of a bad lot. "There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation," wrote committee member Henry Olsson. Although the committee believed Steinbeck's best work was behind him by 1962, committee member Anders Österling believed the release of his novel "The Winter of Our Discontent" showed that "after some signs of slowing down in recent years, [Steinbeck has] regained his position as a social truth-teller [and is an] authentic realist fully equal to his predecessors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway."
Although modest about his own talent as a writer, Steinbeck talked openly of his own admiration of certain writers. In 1953, he wrote that he considered cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the satirical "Li'l Abner", "possibly the best writer in the world today." At his own first Nobel Prize press conference he was asked his favorite authors and works and replied: "Hemingway's short stories and nearly everything Faulkner wrote."
In September 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Steinbeck the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
In 1967, at the behest of "Newsday" magazine, Steinbeck went to Vietnam to report on the war. He thought of the Vietnam War as a heroic venture and was considered a hawk for his position on the war. His sons served in Vietnam before his death, and Steinbeck visited one son in the battlefield. At one point he was allowed to man a machine-gun watch position at night at a firebase while his son and other members of his platoon slept.
In May 1948, Steinbeck returned to California on an emergency trip to be with his friend Ed Ricketts, who had been seriously injured when a train struck his car. Ricketts died hours before Steinbeck arrived. Upon returning home, Steinbeck was confronted by Gwyn, who asked for a divorce, which became final in August. Steinbeck spent the year after Ricketts' death in deep depression.
In June 1949, Steinbeck met stage-manager Elaine Scott at a restaurant in Carmel, California. Steinbeck and Scott eventually began a relationship and in December 1950 Steinbeck and Scott married, within a week of the finalizing of Scott's own divorce from actor Zachary Scott. This third marriage for Steinbeck lasted until his death in 1968.
In 1962, Steinbeck began acting as friend and mentor to the young writer and naturalist Jack Rudloe, who was trying to establish his own biological supply company, now Gulf Specimen Marine Laboratory in Florida. Their correspondence continued until Steinbeck's death.
In 1966, Steinbeck traveled to Tel Aviv to visit the site of Mount Hope, a farm community established in Israel by his grandfather, whose brother, Friedrich Großsteinbeck, was murdered by Arab marauders in 1858 in what became known as the Outrages at Jaffa.
John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968, of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries.
In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred on March 4, 1969 at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. He had written to his doctor that he felt deeply "in his flesh" that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological end of his life was the final end to it.
The day after Steinbeck's death in New York City, reviewer Charles Poore wrote in "The New York Times": "John Steinbeck's first great book was his last great book. But Good Lord, what a book that was and is: "The Grapes of Wrath"." Poore noted a "preachiness" in Steinbeck's work, "as if half his literary inheritance came from the best of Mark Twain—and the other half from the worst of Cotton Mather." But he asserted that "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize—the Nobel judges needed him."
Steinbeck's incomplete novel based on the King Arthur legends of Malory and others, "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights", was published in 1976.
Many of Steinbeck's works are required reading in American high schools. In the United Kingdom, "Of Mice and Men" is one of the key texts used by the examining body AQA for its English Literature GCSE. A study by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature in the United States found that "Of Mice and Men" was one of the ten most frequently read books in public high schools. Contrariwise, Steinbeck's works have been frequently banned in the United States. "The Grapes of Wrath" was banned by school boards: in August 1939, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries. It was burned in Salinas on two different occasions. In 2003, a school board in Mississippi banned it on the grounds of profanity. According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the ten most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with "Of Mice and Men" ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.
Steinbeck grew up in California's Salinas Valley, a culturally diverse place with a rich migratory and immigrant history. This upbringing imparted a regionalistic flavor to his writing, giving many of his works a distinct sense of place.
Salinas, Monterey and parts of the San Joaquin Valley were the setting for many of his stories. The area is now sometimes referred to as "Steinbeck Country". Most of his early work dealt with subjects familiar to him from his formative years. An exception was his first novel, "", which concerns the pirate Henry Morgan, whose adventures had captured Steinbeck's imagination as a child.
In his subsequent novels, Steinbeck found a more authentic voice by drawing upon direct memories of his life in California. His childhood friend, Max Wagner, a brother of Jack Wagner and who later became a film actor, served as inspiration for "The Red Pony". Later he used actual American conditions and events in the first half of the 20th century, which he had experienced first-hand as a reporter. Steinbeck often populated his stories with struggling characters; his works examined the lives of the working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.
His later work reflected his wide range of interests, including marine biology, politics, religion, history and mythology. One of his last published works was "Travels with Charley", a travelogue of a road trip he took in 1960 to rediscover America.
Steinbeck's boyhood home, a turreted Victorian building in downtown Salinas, has been preserved and restored by the Valley Guild, a nonprofit organization. Fixed menu lunches are served Monday through Saturday, and the house is open for tours on Sunday afternoons during the summer.
The National Steinbeck Center, two blocks away at 1 Main Street is the only museum in the U.S. dedicated to a single author. Dana Gioia (chair of the National Endowment for the Arts) told an audience at the center, "This is really the best modern literary shrine in the country, and I've seen them all." Its "Steinbeckiana" includes "Rocinante", the camper-truck in which Steinbeck made the cross-country trip described in "Travels with Charley".
His father's cottage on Eleventh Street in Pacific Grove, where Steinbeck wrote some of his earliest books, also survives.
In Monterey, Ed Ricketts' laboratory survives (though it is not yet open to the public) and at the corner which Steinbeck describes in "Cannery Row", also the store which once belonged to Lee Chong, and the adjacent vacant lot frequented by the hobos of Cannery Row. The site of the Hovden Sardine Cannery next to Doc's laboratory is now occupied by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. In 1958 the street that Steinbeck described as "Cannery Row" in the novel, once named Ocean View Avenue, was renamed Cannery Row in honor of the novel. The town of Monterey has commemorated Steinbeck's work with an avenue of flags depicting characters from "Cannery Row", historical plaques, and sculptured busts depicting Steinbeck and Ricketts.
On February 27, 1979 (the 77th anniversary of the writer's birth), the United States Postal Service issued a stamp featuring Steinbeck, starting the Postal Service's Literary Arts series honoring American writers.
Steinbeck was inducted in to the DeMolay International Hall of Fame in 1995.
On December 5, 2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Steinbeck into the California Hall of Fame, located at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. His son, author Thomas Steinbeck, accepted the award on his behalf.
To commemorate the 112th anniversary of Steinbeck's birthday on February 27, 2014, Google displayed an interactive doodle utilizing animation which included illustrations portraying scenes and quotes from several novels by the author.
Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts appear as fictionalized characters in the 2016 novel, "Monterey Bay" about the founding of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, by Lindsay Hatton (Penguin Press).
Steinbeck was affiliated to the St. Paul's Episcopal Church and he stayed attached throughout his life to Episcopalianism. Especially in his works of fiction, Steinbeck was highly conscious of religion and incorporated it into his style and themes. The shaping of his characters often drew on the Bible and the theology of Anglicanism, combining elements of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.
Steinbeck distanced himself from religious views when he left Salinas for Stanford. However, the work he produced still reflected the language of his childhood at Salinas, and his beliefs remained a powerful influence within his fiction and non-fiction work. William Ray considered his Episcopal views are prominently displayed in "The Grapes of Wrath", in which themes of conversion and self-sacrifice play a major part in the characters Casy and Tom who achieve spiritual transcendence through conversion.
Steinbeck's contacts with leftist authors, journalists, and labor union figures may have influenced his writing. He joined the League of American Writers, a Communist organization, in 1935. Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. Through Francis Whitaker, a member of the Communist Party USA's John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union. In 1939, he signed a letter with some other writers in support of the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviet-established puppet government.
Documents released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2012 indicate that Steinbeck offered his services to the Agency in 1952, while planning a European tour, and the Director of Central Intelligence, Walter Bedell Smith, was eager to take him up on the offer. What work, if any, Steinbeck may have performed for the CIA during the Cold War is unknown.
Steinbeck was a close associate of playwright Arthur Miller. In June 1957, Steinbeck took a personal and professional risk by supporting him when Miller refused to name names in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials. Steinbeck called the period one of the "strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced."
In 1967, when he was sent to Vietnam to report on the war, his sympathetic portrayal of the United States Army led the "New York Post" to denounce him for betraying his liberal past. Steinbeck's biographer, Jay Parini, says Steinbeck's friendship with President Lyndon B. Johnson influenced his views on Vietnam. Steinbeck may also have been concerned about the safety of his son serving in Vietnam.
Steinbeck complained publicly about government harassment. Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, said that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI at the time, could find no basis for prosecuting Steinbeck and therefore used his power to encourage the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to audit Steinbeck's taxes every single year of his life, just to annoy him. According to Thomas, a true artist is one who "without a thought for self, stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls of government. By doing so, these people will naturally become the enemies of the political status quo."
In a 1942 letter to United States Attorney General Francis Biddle, John Steinbeck wrote: "Do you suppose you could ask Edgar's boys to stop stepping on my heels? They think I am an enemy alien. It is getting tiresome." The FBI denied that Steinbeck was under investigation.
In 1936, Steinbeck published the first of what came to be known as his Dustbowl trilogy, which included "Of Mice and Men" and "The Grapes of Wrath". This first novel tells the story of a fruit pickers' strike in California which is both aided and damaged by the help of "the Party," generally taken to be the Communist Party, although this is never spelled out in the book.
"Of Mice and Men" is a tragedy that was written as a play in 1937. The story is about two traveling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to earn enough money to buy their own farm/ranch. As it is set in 1930s America, it provides an insight into The Great Depression, encompassing themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence. Along with "The Grapes of Wrath", "East of Eden", and "The Pearl", "Of Mice and Men" is one of Steinbeck's best known works. It was made into a movie three times, in 1939 starring Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., and Betty Field, in 1982 starring Randy Quaid, Robert Blake and Ted Neeley, and in 1992 starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.
The "Grapes of Wrath" is set in the Great Depression and describes a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land due to the dust storms of the Dust Bowl. The title is a reference to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Some critics found it too sympathetic to the workers' plight and too critical of capitalism, but it found a large audience of its own. It won both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction (novels) and was adapted as a film starring Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell and directed by John Ford.
Steinbeck deals with the nature of good and evil in this Salinas Valley saga. The story follows two families: the Hamiltons – based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry – and the Trasks, reprising stories about the Biblical Adam and his progeny. The book was published in 1952. It was made into a 1955 movie directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean.
In 1960, Steinbeck bought a pickup truck and had it modified with a custom-built camper top – which was rare at the time – and drove across the United States with his faithful 'blue' standard poodle, Charley. Steinbeck nicknamed his truck "Rocinante" after Don Quixote's "noble steed". In this sometimes comical, sometimes melancholic book, Steinbeck describes what he sees from Maine to Montana to California, and from there to Texas and Louisiana and back to his home on Long Island. The restored camper truck is on exhibit in the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15825
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Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter, specialising in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealization of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and was knighted by George III in 1769.
Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723 the third son of the Rev. Samuel Reynolds, master of the Plympton Free Grammar School in the town. His father had been a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, but did not send any of his sons to the university.
One of his sisters was Mary Palmer (1716–1794), seven years his senior, author of "Devonshire Dialogue", whose fondness for drawing is said to have had much influence on him when a boy. In 1740 she provided £60, half of the premium paid to Thomas Hudson the portrait-painter, for Joshua's pupilage, and nine years later advanced money for his expenses in Italy. His other siblings included Frances Reynolds and Elizabeth Johnson.
As a boy, he came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life. Reynolds made extracts in his commonplace book from Theophrastus, Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Antonius, Ovid, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Aphra Behn, and passages on art theory by Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, and André Félibien. The work that came to have the most influential impact on Reynolds was Jonathan Richardson's "An Essay on the Theory of Painting" (1715). Reynolds' annotated copy was lost for nearly two hundred years until it appeared in a Cambridge bookshop, inscribed with the signature ‘J. Reynolds Pictor’, and is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.
Having shown an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable London portrait painter Thomas Hudson, who had been born in Devon. Hudson had a collection of Old Master drawings, including some by Guercino, of which Reynolds made copies. Although apprenticed to Hudson for four years, Reynolds remained with him only until summer 1743. Having left Hudson, Reynolds worked for some time as a portrait-painter in Plymouth Dock (now Devonport). He returned to London before the end of 1744, but following his father's death in late 1745 he shared a house in Plymouth Dock with his sisters.
In 1749, Reynolds met Commodore Augustus Keppel, who invited him to join HMS "Centurion", of which he had command, on a voyage to the Mediterranean. While with the ship he visited Lisbon, Cadiz, Algiers, and Minorca. From Minorca he travelled to Livorno in Italy, and then to Rome, where he spent two years, studying the Old Masters and acquiring a taste for the "Grand Style". Lord Edgcumbe, who had known Reynolds as a boy and introduced him to Keppel, suggested he should study with Pompeo Batoni, the leading painter in Rome, but Reynolds replied that he had nothing to learn from him. While in Rome he suffered a severe cold, which left him partially deaf, and, as a result, he began to carry a small ear trumpet with which he is often pictured.
Reynolds travelled homeward overland via Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Paris. He was accompanied by Giuseppe Marchi, then aged about 17. Apart from a brief interlude in 1770, Marchi remained in Reynolds' employment as a studio assistant for the rest of the artist's career. Following his arrival in England in October 1752, Reynolds spent three months in Devon, before establishing himself in London, where he remained for the rest of his life. He took rooms in St Martin's Lane, before moving to Great Newport Street, his sister Frances acted as his housekeeper. He achieved success rapidly, and was extremely prolific. Lord Edgecumbe recommended the Duke of Devonshire and Duke of Grafton to sit for him, and other peers followed, including the Duke of Cumberland, third son of George II, in whose portrait, according to Nicholas Penny "bulk is brilliantly converted into power". In 1760 Reynolds moved into a large house, with space to show his works and accommodate his assistants, on the west side of Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square).
Alongside ambitious full-length portraits, Reynolds painted large numbers of smaller works. In the late 1750s, at the height of the social season, he received five or six sitters a day, each for an hour. By 1761 Reynolds could command a fee of 80 guineas for a full-length portrait; in 1764 he was paid 100 guineas for a portrait of Lord Burghersh.
The clothing of Reynolds' sitters was usually painted by either one of his pupils, his studio assistant Giuseppe Marchi, or the specialist drapery painter Peter Toms. James Northcote, his pupil, wrote of this arrangement that "the imitation of particular stuffs is not the work of genius, but is to be acquired easily by practice, and this was what his pupils could do by care and time more than he himself chose to bestow; but his own slight and masterly work was still the best." Lay figures were used to model the clothes.
Reynolds often adapted the poses of his subjects from the works of earlier artists, a practice mocked by Nathaniel Hone in a painting called "The Conjuror" submitted to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1775, and now in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. It shows a figure representing, though not resembling, Reynolds, seated in front of a cascade of prints from which Reynolds had borrowed with varying degrees of subtlety.
Although not known principally for his landscapes, Reynolds did paint in this genre. He had an excellent vantage from his house, Wick House, on Richmond Hill, and painted the view in about 1780.
Reynolds also was recognized for his portraits of children. He emphasized the innocence and natural grace of children when depicting them. His 1788 portrait, "Age of Innocence", is his best known character study of a child. The subject of the painting is not known, although conjecture includes Theophila Gwatkin, his great niece, and Lady Anne Spencer, the youngest daughter of the fourth Duke of Marlborough.
Reynolds worked long hours in his studio, rarely taking a holiday. He was gregarious and keenly intellectual, with many friends from London's intelligentsia, numbered amongst whom were Dr Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Giuseppe Baretti, Henry Thrale, David Garrick, and artist Angelica Kauffman. Johnson said in 1778: "Reynolds is too much under [Charles James] Fox and Burke at present. He is under the "Fox star" and the "Irish constellation" [meaning Burke]. He is always under some planet".
Because of his popularity as a portrait painter, Reynolds enjoyed constant interaction with the wealthy and famous men and women of the day, and it was he who brought together the figures of "The" Club. It was founded in 1764 and met in a suite of rooms on the first floor of the Turks Head at 9 Gerrard Street, now marked by a plaque. Original members included Burke, Bennet Langton, Topham Beauclerk, Goldsmith, Anthony Chamier, Thomas Hawkins, and Nugent, to be joined by Garrick, Boswell, and Sheridan. In ten years the membership had risen to 35. The Club met every Monday evening for supper and conversation and continued into the early hours of Tuesday morning. In later years, it met fortnightly during Parliamentary sessions. When in 1783 the landlord of the Turks Head died and the property was sold, The Club moved to Sackville Street.
Reynolds was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts, helped found the Society of Artists of Great Britain, and in 1768 became the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, a position he was to hold until his death. In 1769, he was knighted by George III, only the second artist to be so honored. His "Discourses", a series of lectures delivered at the Academy between 1769 and 1790, are remembered for their sensitivity and perception. In one lecture he expressed the opinion that "invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory." William Jackson in his contemporary essays said of Reynolds ' there is much ingenuity and originality in all his academic discourses, replete with classical knowledge of his art, acute remarks on the works of others, and general taste and discernment'.
Reynolds and the Royal Academy received a mixed reception. Critics included William Blake who published the vitriolic "Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses" in 1808. J. M. W. Turner and James Northcote were fervent acolytes: Turner requested he be laid to rest at Reynolds' side, and Northcote, who spent four years as Reynolds' pupil, wrote to his family "I know him thoroughly, and all his faults, I am sure, and yet almost worship him."
The Royal Academy of Art in London celebrated their 250th anniversary in 2018, since their opening in 1768. This became an impetus for galleries and museums across the UK to celebrate "the making, debating and exhibiting art at the Royal Academy". Waddedson manor was amongst the historic houses that supported Sir Joshua Reynolds's influence at the academy, acknowledging how:
[He] transformed British painting with portraits and subject pictures that engaged their audience's knowledge, imagination, memory and emotions... As an eloquent teacher and art theorist, he used his role at the head of the Royal Academy to raise the status of art and artists of Britain.
In the Battle of Ushant against the French in 1778, Lord Keppel commanded the Channel Fleet and the outcome resulted in no clear winner; Keppel ordered the attack be renewed and was obeyed except by Sir Hugh Palliser, who commanded the rear, and the French escaped bombardment. A dispute between Keppel and Palliser arose and Palliser brought charges of misconduct and neglect of duty against Keppel and the Admiralty decided to court-martial him. On 11 February 1779 Keppel was acquitted of all charges and became a national hero. One of Keppel's lawyers commissioned Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland to paint a portrait of Keppel but Keppel redirected it to Reynolds. Reynolds alluded to Keppel's trial in the painting by painting his hand on his sword, reflecting the presiding officer's words at the court-martial: "In delivering to you your sword, I am to congratulate you on its being restored to you with so much honour".
On 10 August 1784 Allan Ramsay died and the office of Principal Painter in Ordinary to King George III became vacant. Gainsborough felt that he had a good chance of securing it, but Reynolds felt he deserved it and threatened to resign the presidency of the Royal Academy if he did not receive it. Reynolds noted in his pocket book: "Sept. 1, 2½, to attend at the Lord Chancellor's Office to be sworn in painter to the King". It did not make Reynolds happy, however, as he wrote to Boswell: "If I had known what a shabby miserable place it is, I would not have asked for it; besides as things have turned out I think a certain person is not worth speaking to, nor speaking of", presumably meaning the king. Reynolds wrote to Jonathan Shipley, Bishop of St Asaph, a few weeks later: "Your Lordship congratulation on my succeeding Mr. Ramsay I take very kindly, but it is a most miserable office, it is reduced from two hundred to thirty-eight pounds per annum, the Kings Rat catcher I believe is a better place, and I am to be paid only a fourth part of what I have from other people, so that the Portraits of their Majesties are not likely to be better done now, than they used to be, I should be ruined if I was to paint them myself".
In 1787 Reynolds painted the portrait of Lord Heathfield, who became a national hero for the successful defence of Gibraltar in the Great Siege from 1779 to 1783 against the combined forces of France and Spain. Heathfield is depicted against a background of clouds and cannon smoke, wearing the uniform of the 15th Light Dragoons and clasping the key of the Rock, its chain wrapped twice around his right hand. John Constable said in the 1830s that it was "almost a history of the defence of Gibraltar". Desmond Shawe-Taylor has claimed that the portrait may have a religious meaning, Heathfield holding the key similar to St. Peter (Jesus' "rock") possessing the keys to Heaven, Heathfield "the rock upon which Britannia builds her military interests".
In 1789, Reynolds lost the sight of his left eye, which forced him into retirement. In 1791 James Boswell dedicated his "Life of Samuel Johnson" to Reynolds. Reynolds agreed with Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France" and, writing in early 1791, expressed his belief that the "ancien régime" of France had fallen due to spending too much time tending, as he puts it, to the splendor of the foliage, to the neglect of the stirring the earth about the roots. They cultivated only those arts which could add splendor to the nation, to the neglect of those which supported it – They neglected Trade & substantial Manufacture ... but does it follow that a total revolution is necessary that because we have given ourselves up too much to the ornaments of life, we will now have none at all. When attending a dinner at Holland House, Fox's niece Caroline was sat next to Reynolds and "burst out into glorification of the Revolution – and was grievously chilled and checked by her neighbour's cautious and unsympathetic tone".
On 4 June 1791 at a dinner at the Freemasons' Tavern to mark the king's birthday, Reynolds drank to the toasts "GOD "save the" KING!" and "May our glorious Constitution under which the arts flourish, be immortal!", in what was reported by the "Public Advertiser" as "a fervour truly patriotick". Reynolds "filled the chair with a most convivial glee". He returned to town from Burke's house in Beaconsfield and Edmond Malone wrote that "we left his carriage at the Inn at Hayes, and walked five miles on the road, in a warm day, without his complaining of any fatigue".
Later that month Reynolds suffered from a swelling over his left eye and had to be purged by a surgeon. In October he was too ill to take the president's chair and in November Fanny Burney recorded that I had long languished to see that kindly zealous friend, but his ill health had intimidated me from making the attempt": "He had a bandage over one eye, and the other shaded with a green half-bonnet. He seemed serious even to sadness, though extremely kind. 'I am very glad,' he said, in a meek voice and dejected accent, 'to see you again, and I wish I could see you better! but I have only one eye now, and hardly that.' I was really quite touched. On 5 November Reynolds, fearing he might not have an opportunity to write a will, wrote a memorandum intended to be his last will and testament, with Edmund Burke, Edmond Malone, and Philip Metcalfe named as executors. On 10 November Reynolds wrote to Benjamin West to resign the presidency, but the General Assembly agreed he should be re-elected, with Sir William Chambers and West to deputise for him.
Doctors Richard Warren and Sir George Baker believed Reynolds' illness to be psychological and they bled his neck "with a view of drawing the humour from his eyes" but the effect, in the view of his niece, was that it seemed "as if the 'principle of life' were gone" from Reynolds. On New Year's Day 1792 Reynolds became "seized with sickness" and from that point could not keep down food.
Reynolds died on 23 February 1792 at his house in Leicester Fields in London between eight and nine in the evening.
Burke was present on the night Reynolds died, and was moved within hours to write a eulogy of Reynolds starting with the following sentiments: "Sir Joshua Reynolds was on very many accounts one of the most memorable men of his Time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant Arts to the other Glories of his Country. In Taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and Harmony of colouring, he was equal to the great masters of the renowned Ages." Burke's tribute was well received and one journalist called it "the eulogium of Apelles pronounced by Pericles".
Reynolds was buried at St Paul's Cathedral. In 1903, a statue, by Alfred Drury, was erected in his honour in Annenberg Courtyard of Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy. Around the statue are fountains and lights, installed in 2000, arranged in the pattern of a star chart at midnight on the night of Reynolds' birth. The planets are marked by granite discs, and the Moon by a water recess.
In appearance Reynolds was not striking. Slight, he was about 5'6" with dark brown curls, a florid complexion and features that James Boswell thought were "rather too largely and strongly limned." He had a broad face and a cleft chin, and the bridge of his nose was slightly dented; his skin was scarred by smallpox and his upper lip disfigured as a result of falling from a horse as a young man. Edmond Malone asserted that "his appearance at first sight impressed the spectator with the idea of a well-born and well-bred English gentleman."
In his mature years he suffered from deafness, as recorded by Fanny Burney, although this did not impede his lively social life (he used an ear trumpet).
Renowned for his placidity, Reynolds often claimed that he "hated nobody". Never quite losing his Devonshire accent, he was not only an amiable and original conversationalist, but a friendly and generous host, so that Fanny Burney recorded in her diary that he had "a suavity of disposition that set everybody at their ease in his society", and William Makepeace Thackeray believed "of all the polite men of that age, Joshua Reynolds was the finest gentleman." Dr. Johnson commented on the "inoffensiveness" of his nature; Edmund Burke noted his "strong turn for humor". Thomas Bernard, who later became Bishop of Killaloe, wrote in his closing verses on Reynolds stating:
Thou say'st not only skill is gained
But genius too may be attained
By studious imitation;
Thy temper mild, thy genius fine
I'll copy till I make them mine
By constant application.
Some, such as Hester Lynch Piozzi, construed Reynolds' equable calm as cool and unfeeling.
It is to this lukewarm temperament that Frederick W. Hilles, Bodman Professor of English Literature at Yale attributes Reynolds' never having married. In the editorial notes of his compendium "Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds", Hilles theorizes that "as a corollary one might say that he [Reynolds] was somewhat lacking in a capacity for love", and cites Boswell's notary papers: "He said the reason he would never marry was that every woman whom he liked had grown indifferent to him, and he had been glad he did not marry her." Reynolds' own sister, Frances, who lived with him as housekeeper, took her own negative opinion further still, thinking him "a gloomy tyrant". The presence of family compensated Reynolds for the absence of a wife; he wrote on one occasion to his friend Bennet Langton, that both his sister and niece were away from home "so that I am quite a bachelor".
Biographer Ian McIntyre discusses the possibility of Reynolds having enjoyed sexual rendezvous with certain clients, such as Nelly O'Brien (or "My Lady O'Brien", as he playfully dubbed her) and Kitty Fisher, who visited his house for more sittings than were strictly necessary. Dan Cruickshank in his book "London's Sinful Secret" summarized Reynolds as having visited and re-visited various reputed red light districts in London after his return from Italy as a possible contributor to his medical condition and appearance due to commonly contracted disease in those areas of London.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15826
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Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter (; 8 February 1883 – 8 January 1950) was an Austrian political economist. He later emigrated to the US and, in 1939, he obtained American citizenship. He was born in Moravia, and briefly served as Finance Minister of German-Austria in 1919. In 1932, he became a professor at Harvard University where he remained until the end of his career.
Schumpeter was one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century, and popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics.
Schumpeter was born in Triesch, Habsburg Moravia (now Třešť in the Czech Republic, then part of Austria-Hungary) in 1883 to Catholic German-speaking parents. Both of his grandmothers were Czech. Schumpeter did not acknowledge his Czech ancestry; he considered himself an ethnic German. His father owned a factory, but he died when Joseph was only four years old. In 1893, Joseph and his mother moved to Vienna. Schumpeter was a loyal supporter of Franz Joseph I of Austria.
After attending school at the Theresianum, Schumpeter began his career studying law at the University of Vienna under the Austrian capital theorist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, taking his PhD in 1906. In 1909, after some study trips, he became a professor of economics and government at the University of Czernowitz in modern-day Ukraine. In 1911, he joined the University of Graz, where he remained until World War I.
In 1918, Schumpeter was a member of the Socialization Commission established by the Council of the People's Deputies in Germany. In March 1919, he was invited to take office as Minister of Finance in the Republic of German-Austria. He proposed a capital levy as a way to tackle the war debt and opposed the socialization of the Alpine Mountain plant. In 1921, he became president of the private Biedermann Bank. He was also a board member at the Kaufmann Bank. Problems at those banks left Schumpeter in debt. His resignation was a condition of the takeover of the Biedermann Bank in September 1924.
From 1925 to 1932, Schumpeter held a chair at the University of Bonn, Germany. He lectured at Harvard in 1927–1928 and 1930. In 1931, he was a visiting professor at The Tokyo College of Commerce. In 1932, Schumpeter moved to the United States, and soon began what would become extensive efforts to help central European economist colleagues displaced by Nazism. Schumpeter also became known for his opposition to Marxism and socialism that he thought would lead to dictatorship, and even criticized President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1939, Schumpeter became a US citizen. In the beginning of World War II, the FBI investigated him and his wife, Elizabeth Boody (a prominent scholar of Japanese economics) for pro-Nazi leanings, but found no evidence of Nazi sympathies.
At Harvard, Schumpeter was considered a memorable character, erudite and even showy in the classroom. He became known for his heavy teaching load and his personal and painstaking interest in his students. He served as the faculty advisor of the Graduate Economics Club and organized private seminars and discussion groups. Some colleagues thought his views outdated by Keynesianism which was fashionable; others resented his criticisms, particularly of their failure to offer an assistant professorship to Paul Samuelson, but recanted when they thought him likely to accept a position at Yale University. This period of his life was characterized by hard work and comparatively little recognition of his massive 2-volume book "Business Cycles." However, the Schumpeters persevered, and in 1942 published what became the most popular of all his works, "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy", reprinted many times and in many languages in the following decades, as well as cited thousands of times.
The source of Schumpeter's dynamic, change-oriented, and innovation-based economics was the Historical School of economics. Although his writings could be critical of the School, Schumpeter's work on the role of innovation and entrepreneurship can be seen as a continuation of ideas originated by the Historical School, especially the work of Gustav von Schmoller and Werner Sombart.
In a 2012 paper, Fabrice Dannequin showed that Schumpeter's writings displayed the influence of Francis Galton's work.
According to Christopher Freeman (2009), a scholar who devoted much time researching Schumpeter's work: "the central point of his whole life work [is]: that capitalism can only be understood as an evolutionary process of continuous innovation and 'creative destruction'".
Schumpeter's scholarship is apparent in his posthumous "History of Economic Analysis", although some of his judgments seem idiosyncratic and sometimes cavalier. For instance, Schumpeter thought that the greatest 18th century economist was Turgot, not Adam Smith, as many consider, and he considered Léon Walras to be the "greatest of all economists", beside whom other economists' theories were "like inadequate attempts to catch some particular aspects of Walrasian truth". Schumpeter criticized John Maynard Keynes and David Ricardo for the "Ricardian vice." According to Schumpeter, Ricardo and Keynes reasoned in terms of abstract models, where they would freeze all but a few variables. Then they could argue that one caused the other in a simple monotonic fashion. This led to the belief that one could easily deduce policy conclusions directly from a highly abstract theoretical model.
In this book, Joseph Schumpeter recognized the implication of a gold monetary standard compared to a fiat monetary standard. In "History of Economic Analysis", Schumpeter stated the following: "An 'automatic' gold currency is part and parcel of a laissez-faire and free-trade economy. It links every nation's money rates and price levels with the money-rates and price levels of all the other nations that are 'on gold.' However, gold is extremely sensitive to government expenditure and even to attitudes or policies that do not involve expenditure directly, for example, to foreign policy, to certain policies of taxation, and, in general, to precisely all those policies that violate the principles of [classical] liberalism. "This" is the reason why gold is so unpopular now and also why it was so popular in a bourgeois era."
Schumpeter's relationships with the ideas of other economists were quite complex in his most important contributions to economic analysis – the theory of business cycles and development. Following neither Walras nor Keynes, Schumpeter starts in "The Theory of Economic Development" with a treatise of circular flow which, excluding any innovations and innovative activities, leads to a stationary state. The stationary state is, according to Schumpeter, described by Walrasian equilibrium. The hero of his story is the entrepreneur.
The entrepreneur disturbs this equilibrium and is the prime cause of economic development, which proceeds in cyclic fashion along several time scales. In fashioning this theory connecting innovations, cycles, and development, Schumpeter kept alive the Russian Nikolai Kondratiev's ideas on 50-year cycles, Kondratiev waves.
Schumpeter suggested a model in which the four main cycles, Kondratiev (54 years), Kuznets (18 years), Juglar (9 years) and Kitchin (about 4 years) can be added together to form a composite waveform. Actually there was considerable professional rivalry between Schumpeter and Kuznets. The wave form suggested here did not include the Kuznets Cycle simply because Schumpeter did not recognize it as a valid cycle. See "business cycle" for further information. A Kondratiev wave could consist of three lower degree Kuznets waves. Each Kuznets wave could, itself, be made up of two Juglar waves. Similarly two (or three) Kitchin waves could form a higher degree Juglar wave. If each of these were in phase, more importantly if the downward arc of each was simultaneous so that the nadir of each was coincident, it would explain disastrous slumps and consequent depressions. As far as the segmentation of the Kondratiev Wave, Schumpeter never proposed such a fixed model. He saw these cycles varying in time – although in a tight time frame by coincidence – and for each to serve a specific purpose.
In Schumpeter's theory, Walrasian equilibrium is not adequate to capture the key mechanisms of economic development. Schumpeter also thought that the institution enabling the entrepreneur to buy the resources needed to realize his vision was a well-developed capitalist financial system, including a whole range of institutions for granting credit. One could divide economists among (1) those who emphasized "real" analysis and regarded money as merely a "veil" and (2) those who thought monetary institutions are important and money could be a separate driving force. Both Schumpeter and Keynes were among the latter.
Schumpeter's most popular book in English is probably "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy". While he agrees with Karl Marx that capitalism will collapse and be replaced by socialism, Schumpeter predicts a different way this will come about. While Marx predicted that capitalism would be overthrown by a violent proletarian revolution, which actually occurred in the least capitalist countries, Schumpeter believed that capitalism would gradually weaken by itself and eventually collapse. Specifically, the success of capitalism would lead to corporatism and to values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals.
"Intellectuals" are a social class in a position to critique societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and to stand up for the interests of other classes. Intellectuals tend to have a negative outlook of capitalism, even while relying on it for prestige, because their professions rely on antagonism toward it. The growing number of people with higher education is a great advantage of capitalism, according to Schumpeter. Yet, unemployment and a lack of fulfilling work will lead to intellectual critique, discontent and protests.
Parliaments will increasingly elect social democratic parties, and democratic majorities will vote for restrictions on entrepreneurship. Increasing workers' self-management, industrial democracy and regulatory institutions would evolve non-politically into "liberal capitalism". Thus, the intellectual and social climate needed for thriving entrepreneurship will be replaced by some form of "laborism". This will exacerbate "creative destruction" (a borrowed phrase to denote an endogenous replacement of old ways of doing things by new ways), which will ultimately undermine and destroy the capitalist structure.
Schumpeter emphasizes throughout this book that he is analyzing trends, not engaging in political advocacy.
William Fellner, in the book "Schumpeter’s Vision: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy After 40 Years", noted that Schumpeter saw any political system in which the power was fully monopolized as fascist.
In the same book, Schumpeter expounded a theory of democracy which sought to challenge what he called the "classical doctrine". He disputed the idea that democracy was a process by which the electorate identified the common good, and politicians carried this out for them. He argued this was unrealistic, and that people's ignorance and superficiality meant that in fact they were largely manipulated by politicians, who set the agenda. Furthermore, he claimed that even if the common good was possible to find, it would still not make clear the means needed to reach its end, since citizens do not have the requisite knowledge to design government policy. This made a 'rule by the people' concept both unlikely and undesirable. Instead he advocated a minimalist model, much influenced by Max Weber, whereby democracy is the mechanism for competition between leaders, much like a market structure. Although periodic votes by the general public legitimize governments and keep them accountable, the policy program is very much seen as their own and not that of the people, and the participatory role for individuals is usually severely limited.
Schumpeter defined democracy as the method by which people elected representatives in competitive elections to carry out their will. This definition has been described as simple, elegant and parsimonious, making it clearer to distinguish political systems that either fulfill or fail these characteristics. This minimalist definition stands in contrast to broader definitions of democracy, which may emphasize aspects such as "representation, accountability, equality, participation, justice, dignity, rationality, security, freedom." Within such a minimalist definition, states which other scholars say have experienced democratic backsliding and which lack civil liberties, a free press, the rule of law and a constrained executive, would still be considered democracies. For Schumpeter, the formation of a government is the endpoint of the democratic process, which means that for the purposes of his democratic theory, he has no comment on what kinds of decisions that the government can take in order to be a democracy. Schumpeter faced pushback on his theory from other democratic theorists, such as Robert Dahl, who argued that there is more to democracy than simply the formation of government through competitive elections.
Schumpeter's view of democracy has been described as "elitist", as he criticizes the rationality and knowledge of voters, and expresses a preference for politicians taking decisions. Democracy is therefore in a sense a means to ensure circulation among elites. However, studies by Natasha Piano (of the University of Chicago) emphasize that Schumpeter had substantial disdain for elites.
Schumpeter was probably the first scholar to theorize about entrepreneurship, and the field owed much to his contributions. His fundamental theories are often referred to as Mark I and Mark II. In Mark I, Schumpeter argued that the innovation and technological change of a nation come from the entrepreneurs, or wild spirits. He coined the word "Unternehmergeist", German for "entrepreneur-spirit", and asserted that "... the doing of new things or the doing of things that are already being done in a new way" stemmed directly from the efforts of entrepreneurs.
Schumpeter developed Mark II while a professor at Harvard. Many social economists and popular authors of the day argued that large businesses had a negative effect on the standard of living of ordinary people. Contrary to this prevailing opinion, Schumpeter argued that the agents that drive innovation and the economy are large companies which have the capital to invest in research and development of new products and services and to deliver them to customers more cheaply, thus raising their standard of living. In one of his seminal works, "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy", Schumpeter wrote:
Schumpeter was the most influential thinker to argue that long cycles are caused by innovation, and are an incident of it. His treatise on business cycles developed were based on Kondratiev's ideas which attributed the causes very differently. Schumpeter's treatise brought Kondratiev's ideas to the attention of English-speaking economists. Kondratiev fused important elements that Schumpeter missed. Yet, the Schumpeterian variant of long-cycles hypothesis, stressing the initiating role of innovations, commands the widest attention today.
In Schumpeter's view, technological innovation is at the cause of both cyclical instability and economic growth. Fluctuations in innovation cause fluctuation in investment and those cause cycles in economic growth. Schumpeter sees innovations as clustering around certain points in time periods that he refers to as "neighborhoods of equilibrium", when entrepreneurs perceive that risk and returns warrant innovative commitments. These clusters lead to long cycles by generating periods of acceleration in aggregate growth.
The technological view of change needs to demonstrate that changes in the rate of innovation governs changes in the rate of new investments, and that the combined impact of innovation clusters takes the form of fluctuation in aggregate output or employment. The process of technological innovation involves extremely complex relations among a set of key variables: inventions, innovations, diffusion paths and investment activities. The impact of technological innovation on aggregate output is mediated through a succession of relationships that have yet to be explored systematically in the context of long wave. New inventions are typically primitive, their performance is usually poorer than existing technologies and the cost of their production is high. A production technology may not yet exist, as is often the case in major chemical inventions, pharmaceutical inventions. The speed with which inventions are transformed into innovations and diffused depends on actual and expected trajectory of performance improvement and cost reduction.
Schumpeter identified innovation as the critical dimension of economic change. He argued that economic change revolves around innovation, entrepreneurial activities, and market power. He sought to prove that innovation-originated market power can provide better results than the invisible hand and price competition. He argued that technological innovation often creates temporary monopolies, allowing abnormal profits that would soon be competed away by rivals and imitators. These temporary monopolies were necessary to provide the incentive for firms to develop new products and processes.
He was married three times. His first wife was Gladys Ricarde Seaver, an Englishwoman nearly 12 years his senior (married 1907, separated 1913, divorced 1925). His best man at his wedding was his friend and Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen. His second was Anna Reisinger, 20 years his junior and daughter of the concierge of the apartment where he grew up. As a divorced man, he and his bride converted to Lutheranism in order to marry. They married in 1925, but within a year, she died in childbirth. The loss of his wife and newborn son came only weeks after Schumpeter's mother had died. In 1937, Schumpeter married the American economic historian Elizabeth Boody (1898-1953), who helped him popularize his work and edited what became their magnum opus, the posthumously published "History of Economic Analysis".
Schumpeter claimed that he had set himself three goals in life: to be the greatest economist in the world, to be the best horseman in all of Austria and the greatest lover in all of Vienna. He said he had reached two of his goals, but he never said which two, although he is reported to have said that there were too many fine horsemen in Austria for him to succeed in all his aspirations.
Schumpeter died in his home in Taconic, Connecticut, at the age of 66, on the night of 7 January 1950.
For some time after his death, Schumpeter's views were most influential among various heterodox economists, especially European, who were interested in industrial organization, evolutionary theory, and economic development, and who tended to be on the other end of the political spectrum from Schumpeter and were also often influenced by Keynes, Karl Marx, and Thorstein Veblen. Robert Heilbroner was one of Schumpeter's most renowned pupils, who wrote extensively about him in "The Worldly Philosophers". In the journal "Monthly Review", John Bellamy Foster wrote of that journal's founder Paul Sweezy, one of the leading Marxist economists in the United States and a graduate assistant of Schumpeter's at Harvard, that Schumpeter "played a formative role in his development as a thinker". Other outstanding students of Schumpeter's include the economists Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and Hyman Minsky and John Kenneth Galbraith and former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Future Nobel Laureate Robert Solow was his student at Harvard, and he expanded on Schumpeter's theory.
Today, Schumpeter has a following outside standard textbook economics, in areas such as economic policy, management studies, industrial policy, and the study of innovation. Schumpeter was probably the first scholar to develop theories about entrepreneurship. For instance, the European Union's innovation program, and its main development plan, the Lisbon Strategy, are influenced by Schumpeter. The International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society awards the Schumpeter Prize.
The Schumpeter School of Business and Economics opened in October 2008 at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. According to University President Professor Lambert T. Koch, "Schumpeter will not only be the name of the Faculty of Management and Economics, but this is also a research and teaching programme related to Joseph A. Schumpeter."
On 17 September 2009, "The Economist" inaugurated a column on business and management named "Schumpeter." The publication has a history of naming columns after significant figures or symbols in the covered field, including naming its British affairs column after former editor Walter Bagehot and its European affairs column after Charlemagne. The initial Schumpeter column praised him as a "champion of innovation and entrepreneurship" whose writing showed an understanding of the benefits and dangers of business that proved to be far ahead of its time.
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John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1912 or 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi Hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie. Hooker was ranked 35 in "Rolling Stone"s 2015 list of 100 greatest guitarists.
Some of his best known songs include "Boogie Chillen'" (1948), "Crawling King Snake" (1949), "Dimples" (1956), "Boom Boom" (1962), and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (1966). Several of his later albums, including "The Healer" (1989), "Mr. Lucky" (1991), "Chill Out" (1995), and "Don't Look Back" (1997), were album chart successes in the U.S. and UK. "The Healer" (for the song "I'm In The Mood") and "Chill Out" (for the album) both earned him Grammy wins as well as "Don't Look Back", which went on to earn him a double-Grammy win for Best Traditional Blues Recording and Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals (with Van Morrison).
Hooker's date of birth is a subject of debate; the years 1912, 1915, 1917, 1920, and 1923 have been suggested. Most sources give 1917, though at times Hooker stated he was born in 1920. Information in the 1920 and 1930 censuses indicates that he was born in 1912. In 2017, a series of events took place to celebrate the purported centenary of his birth. In the 1920 federal census, John Hooker is seven years old and one of nine children living with William and Minnie Hooker in Tutwiler Mississippi.
It is believed that he was born in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in Tallahatchie County, although some sources say his birthplace was near Clarksdale, in Coahoma County. He was the youngest of the 11 children of William Hooker (born 1871, died after 1923), a sharecropper and Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (born c. 1880, date of death unknown). In the 1920 federal census, William and Minnie were recorded as being 48 and 39 years old, respectively, which implies that Minnie was born about 1880, not 1875. She was said to have been a "decade or so younger" than her husband ("Boogie Man", p. 23), which gives additional credibility to this census record as evidence of Hooker's origins.
The Hooker children were homeschooled. They were permitted to listen only to religious songs; the spirituals sung in church were their earliest exposure to music. In 1921, their parents separated. The next year, their mother married William Moore, a blues singer, who provided John Lee with an introduction to the guitar (and whom he would later credit for his distinctive playing style).
Moore was his first significant blues influence. He was a local blues guitarist who, in Shreveport, Louisiana, learned to play a droning, one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta blues of the time.
Another influence was Tony Hollins, who dated Hooker's sister Alice, helped teach Hooker to play, and gave him his first guitar. For the rest of his life, Hooker regarded Hollins as a formative influence on his style of playing and his career as a musician. Among the songs that Hollins reputedly taught Hooker were versions of "Crawlin' King Snake" and "Catfish Blues".
At the age of 14, Hooker ran away from home, reportedly never seeing his mother or stepfather again. In the mid-1930s, he lived in Memphis, Tennessee, where he performed on Beale Street, at the New Daisy Theatre and occasionally at house parties.
He worked in factories in various cities during World War II, eventually getting a job with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit in 1943. He frequented the blues clubs and bars on Hastings Street, the heart of the black entertainment district, on Detroit's east side. In a city noted for its pianists, guitar players were scarce. Hooker's popularity grew quickly as he performed in Detroit clubs, and, seeking an instrument louder than his acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar.
Hooker was working as janitor in a Detroit steel mill when his recording career began in 1948, when Modern Records, based in Los Angeles, released a demo he had recorded for Bernie Besman in Detroit. The single, "Boogie Chillen', became a hit and the best-selling race record of 1949. Despite being illiterate, Hooker was a prolific lyricist. In addition to adapting traditional blues lyrics, he composed original songs. In the 1950s, like many black musicians, Hooker earned little from record sales, and so he often recorded variations of his songs for different studios for an up-front fee. To evade his recording contract, he used various pseudonyms, including John Lee Booker (for Chess Records and Chance Records in 1951–1952), Johnny Lee (for De Luxe Records in 1953–1954), John Lee, John Lee Cooker, Texas Slim, Delta John, Birmingham Sam and his Magic Guitar, Johnny Williams, and the Boogie Man.
His early solo songs were recorded by Bernie Besman. Hooker rarely played with a standard beat, but instead he changed tempo to fit the needs of the song. This often made it difficult to use backing musicians, who were not accustomed to Hooker's musical vagaries. As a result, Besman recorded Hooker playing guitar, singing and stomping on a wooden pallet in time with the music.
For much of this period he recorded and toured with Eddie Kirkland. In Hooker's later sessions for Vee-Jay Records in Chicago, studio musicians accompanied him on most of his recordings, including Eddie Taylor, who could handle his musical idiosyncrasies. "Boom Boom" (1962) and "Dimples", two popular songs by Hooker, were originally released by Vee-Jay.
Beginning in 1962, Hooker gained greater exposure when he toured Europe in the annual American Folk Blues Festival. His "Dimples" became a successful single on the UK Singles Charts in 1964, eight years after its first US release. Hooker began to perform and record with rock musicians. One of his earliest collaborations was with British blues rock band the Groundhogs. In 1970, he recorded the joint album "Hooker 'n Heat", with the American blues and boogie rock group Canned Heat, whose repertoire included adaptations of Hooker songs. It became the first of Hooker's albums to reach the "Billboard" charts, peaking at number 78 on the Billboard 200. Other collaboration albums soon followed, including "Endless Boogie" (1971) and "Never Get Out of These Blues Alive" (1972), which included Steve Miller, Elvin Bishop, Van Morrison, and others.
Hooker appeared in the 1980 film "The Blues Brothers". He performed "Boom Boom" in the role of a street musician. In 1989, he recorded the album "The Healer" with Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, and others. The 1990s saw additional collaboration albums: "Mr. Lucky" (1991), "Chill Out" (1995), and "Don't Look Back" (1997) with Morrison, Santana, Los Lobos, and additional guest musicians. His re-recording of "Boom Boom" (the title track for his 1992 album) with guitarist Jimmie Vaughan became Hooker's highest charting single (number 16) in the UK. "Come See About Me", a 2004 DVD, includes performances filmed between 1960 and 1994 and interviews with several of the musicians.
Hooker owned five houses in his later life, including houses located in Los Altos, California; Redwood City, California, Long Beach, California, and Gilroy, California.
Hooker died in his sleep on June 21, 2001, in Los Altos, California in his home. He is interred at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, California. He was survived by eight children, 19 grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren.
On June 25, 2019, "The New York Times Magazine" listed John Lee Hooker among hundreds of artists whose recordings were reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.
Among his many awards, Hooker was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991. He was a recipient of a 1983 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He is also inducted into the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame.
Two of his songs, "Boogie Chillen" and "Boom Boom", are included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll. "Boogie Chillen" is also included in the Recording Industry Association of America's list of the "Songs of the Century".
In 2007, John Lee Hooker was voted into the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends Hall of Fame.
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Satires (Juvenal)
The Satires are a collection of satirical poems by the Latin author Juvenal written in the early 2nd century AD.
Juvenal is credited with sixteen known poems divided among five books; all are in the Roman genre of satire, which, at its most basic in the time of the author, comprised a wide-ranging discussion of society and social "mores" in dactylic hexameter. The sixth and tenth satires are some of the most renowned works in the collection. The poems are not individually titled, but translators have often added titles for the convenience of readers.
Roman "Satura" was a formal literary genre rather than being simply clever, humorous critique in no particular format. Juvenal wrote in this tradition, which originated with Lucilius and included the Sermones of Horace and the Satires of Persius. In a tone and manner ranging from irony to apparent rage, Juvenal criticizes the actions and beliefs of many of his contemporaries, providing insight more into value systems and questions of morality and less into the realities of Roman life. The author employs outright obscenity less frequently than Martial or Catullus, but the scenes painted in his text are no less vivid or lurid for that discretion.
The author makes constant allusion to history and myth as a source of object lessons or exemplars of particular vices and virtues. Coupled with his dense and elliptical Latin, these tangential references indicate that the intended reader of the "Satires" was highly educated. The "Satires" are concerned with perceived threats to the social continuity of the Roman citizens: social-climbing foreigners, unfaithfulness, and other more extreme excesses of their own class. The intended audience of the "Satires" constituted a subset of the Roman elite, primarily adult males of a more conservative social stance.
Scholarly estimates for the dating of the individual books have varied. It is generally accepted that the fifth book must date to a point after 127 A.D., because of a reference to the Roman consul Iuncus in Satire 15. A recent scholar has argued that the first book should be dated to 100 or 101. Juvenal's works are contemporary with those of Martial, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger.
The controversies concerning the surviving texts of the Satires have been extensive and heated. Many manuscripts survive, but only P (the Codex Pithoeanus Montepessulanus), a 9th-century manuscript based on an edition prepared in the 4th century by a pupil of Servius Honoratus, the grammarian, is reasonably reliable. At the same time as the Servian text was produced, however, other and lesser scholars also created their editions of Juvenal: it is these on which most medieval manuscripts of Juvenal are based. It did not help matters that P disappeared sometime during the Renaissance and was only rediscovered around 1840. It is not, however, uncommon for the generally inferior manuscripts to supply a better reading in cases when P is imperfect. In addition, modern scholarly debate has also raged around the authenticity of the text which has survived, as various editors have argued that considerable portions are not, in fact, authentically Juvenalian and represent interpolations from early editors of the text. Jachmann (1943) argued that up to one-third of what survives is non-authentic: Ulrick Knoche (1950) deleted about hundred lines, Clausen about forty, Courtney (1975) a similar number. Willis (1997) italicizes 297 lines as being potentially suspect. On the other hand, Vahlen, Housman, Duff, Griffith, Ferguson and Green believe the surviving text to be largely authentic: indeed Green regards the main problem as being not interpolations but lacunae.
In recent times debate has focused on the authenticity of the "O Passage" of Satire VI, 36 lines (34 of which are continuous) discovered by E. O. Winstedt in an 11th-century manuscript in Oxford's Bodleian Library. These lines occur in no other manuscript of Juvenal, and when discovered were considerably corrupted. Ever since Housman translated and emended the "O Passage" there has been considerable controversy over whether the fragment is in fact a forgery: the field is currently split between those (Green, Ferguson, Courtney) who believe it is not, and those (Willis, Anderson), who believe it is.
This so-called "Programmatic Satire" lays out for the reader a catalogue of ills and annoyances that prompt the narrator to write satire. Some examples cited by Juvenal include eunuchs getting married, elite women performing in a beast hunt, and the dregs of society suddenly becoming wealthy by gross acts of sycophancy. To the extent that it is programmatic, this satire concerns the first book rather than the satires of the other four known books. The narrator explicitly marks the writings of Lucilius as the model for his book of poems (lines 19–20), although he claims that to attack the living as his model did incur great risk (lines 165–67). The narrator contends that traditional Roman virtues, such as fides and virtus, had disappeared from society to the extent that "Rome was no longer Roman":
170 lines. The narrator claims to want to flee civilization (i.e. "Roma") to beyond the world's end when confronted by moral hypocrisy. Although the broad theme of this poem is the process of gender inversion, it would be an error to take it as simple invective against pathic men. Juvenal is concerned with gender deviance
322 lines. In the place where Numa Pompilius (the legendary second king of Rome) received a nymph's advice on creating Roman law, the narrator has a final conversation with his Roman friend Umbricius, who is emigrating to Cumae. Umbricius claims that slick and immoral foreigners have shut a real Roman out of all opportunity to prosper. Only the first 20 lines are in the voice of the narrator; the remainder of the poem is cast as the words of Umbricius.
In 1738, Samuel Johnson was inspired by this text to write his "London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal". The archetypal question of whether an urban life of hectic ambition is to be preferred to a pastoral fantasy retreat to the country is posed by the narrator:
154 lines. The narrator makes the emperor Domitian and his court the objects of his ridicule in this mock-epic tale of a fish so prodigious that it was fit for the emperor alone. The council of state is called to deal with the crisis of how to cook it, where the fish can neither be cooked by conventional means due to its size, nor can it be cut into pieces. The main themes of this poem are the corruption and incompetence of sycophantic courtiers and the inability or unwillingness to speak truth to power.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau's motto, "vitam impendere vero" (to pay his life for the truth), is taken from the passage below, a description of the qualifications of an imperial courtier in the reign of Domitian:
173 lines. The narrative frame of this poem is a dinner party where many potential dysfunctions in the ideal of the patron-client relationship are put on display. Rather than being a performance of faux-equality, the patron (Virro as in 9.35) emphasizes the superiority of himself and his peers ("amici") over his clients ("viles amici") by offering food and drink of unequal quality to each. Juvenal concludes with the observation that the clients who put up with this treatment deserve it.
c. 695 lines. For the discussion and synopsis, see Satire VI.
243 lines. Juvenal returns to his theme of distorted economic values among the Roman elite – in this instance centered on their unwillingness to provide appropriate support for poets, lawyers, and teachers. It is the capricious whims of fate that determine the variables of a human life.
275 lines. The narrator takes issue with the idea that pedigree ought to be taken as evidence of a person's worth.
150 lines. This satire is in the form of a dialogue between the narrator and Naevolus – a male prostitute, the disgruntled client of a pathic patron.
366 lines. The theme of this poem encompasses the myriad objects of prayer unwisely sought from the gods: wealth, power, beauty, children, long life, et cetera. The narrator argues that each of these is a false Good; each desired thing is shown to be not good in itself, but only good so long as other factors do not intervene. This satire is the source of the well-known phrase "mens sana in corpore sano" (a healthy mind in a healthy body), which appears in the passage above. It is also the source of the phrase "panem et circenses" (bread and circuses) – the only remaining cares of a Roman populace which has given up its birthright of political freedom (10.81).
208 lines. The main themes of this poem are self-awareness and moderation. The poem explicitly mentions one apothegm γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself) from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, while its theme calls to mind another μηδέν ἄγαν (nothing in excess). The subject, in this instance, is the role of food and the "cena" (formal dinner) in Roman society. The narrator contrasts the ruinous spending habits of gourmands with the moderation of a simple meal of home-grown foods in the manner of the mythical ancient Romans.
130 lines. The narrator describes to his addressee Corvinus the sacrificial vows that he has made for the salvation of his friend Catullus from shipwreck. These vows are to the primary Roman gods – Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva (the Capitoline Triad)- but other shipwrecked sailors are said to make offerings to Isis. In the passage quoted above, the narrator asserts that his sacrifices are not to curry favor or gain an inheritance, common reasons for making vows among those who would not hesitate to sacrifice their slaves or even children if it would bring them an inheritance.
249 lines. This poem is a dissuasion from excessive rage and the desire for revenge when one is defrauded. The narrator recommends a philosophical moderation and the perspective that comes from realizing that there are many things worse than financial loss.
331 lines. The narrator stresses that children most readily learn all forms of vice from their parents. Avarice must actually be taught since it runs counter to nature. This vice is particularly pernicious, since it has the appearance of a virtue and is the source of a myriad of crimes and cruelties.
174 lines. The narrator discusses the centrality of compassion for other people to the preservation of civilization. While severe circumstances have at times called for desperate measures to preserve life, even the most savage tribes have refrained from cannibalism. We were given minds to allow us to live together in mutual assistance and security. Without limits on rage against our enemies, we are worse than animals.
60 lines preserved. The primary theme of the preserved lines is the advantages of soldiers over mere citizens.
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Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (, , ; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic.
Jean Cocteau insisted in calling himself a poet, classifying the great variety of his works – poems, novels, plays, essays, drawings, films – as "poésie", "poésie de roman", "poésie de thêatre", "poésie critique", "poésie graphique" and "poésie cinématographique".
He is best known for his novels "Le Grand Écart" (1923), "Le Livre Blanc" (1928), and "Les Enfants Terribles" (1929); the stage plays "La Voix Humaine" (1930), "La Machine Infernale" (1934), "Les Parents terribles" (1938), "La Machine à écrire" (1941), and "L'Aigle à deux têtes" (1946); and the films "The Blood of a Poet" (1930), "Les Parents Terribles" (1948), from his own eponymous "piéce", "Beauty and the Beast" (1946), "Orpheus" (1949), and "Testament of Orpheus" (1960), which alongside "Blood of a Poet" and "Orpheus" constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy. He was described as "one of [the] avant-garde's most successful and influential filmmakers" by AllMovie.
Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a town near Paris, to Georges Cocteau and his wife, Eugénie Lecomte; a socially prominent Parisian family. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. From 1900–1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a physical relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos who would later reappear throughout Cocteau's oeuvre. He left home at fifteen. He published his first volume of poems, "Aladdin's Lamp", at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as "The Frivolous Prince", the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on "Le Dieu bleu" for the Ballets Russes; the principal dancers being Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky. During World War I Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in "Parade" in 1917. It was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire and the music by Erik Satie. The piece was later expanded into a full opera, with music by Satie, Francis Poulenc and Maurice Ravel. "If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins." He denied being a Surrealist or being in any way attached to the movement.
An important exponent of avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a group of composers known as Les six. In the early twenties, he and other members of Les six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking. The popularity was due in no small measure to the presence of Cocteau and his friends.
In 1918 he met the French poet Raymond Radiguet. They collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau also got Radiguet exempted from military service. Admiring of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and arranged for the publication by Grasset of "Le Diable au corps" (a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man), exerting his influence to have the novel awarded the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize. Some contemporaries and later commentators thought there might have been a romantic component to their friendship. Cocteau himself was aware of this perception, and worked earnestly to dispel the notion that their relationship was sexual in nature.
There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned, despondent and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral (he generally did not attend funerals) and immediately left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of "Les noces" ("The Wedding") by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself much later characterised his reaction as one of "stupor and disgust." His opium addiction at the time, Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style. His most notable book, "Les Enfants Terribles", was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning. In "", he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929. His account, which includes vivid pen-and-ink illustrations, alternates between his moment-to-moment experiences of drug withdrawal and his current thoughts about people and events in his world. Cocteau was supported throughout his recovery by his friend and correspondent, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Under Maritain's influence Cocteau made a temporary return to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. He again returned to the Church later in life and undertook a number of religious art projects.
On June 15, 1926 Cocteau's play "Orphée" was staged in Paris. It was quickly followed by an exhibition of drawings and "constructions" called "Poésie plastique–objets, dessins". Cocteau wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio "Oedipus rex", which had its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on 30 May 1927. In 1929 one of his most celebrated and well known works, the novel "Les Enfants terribles" was published.
In 1930 Cocteau made his first film "The Blood of a Poet", publicly shown in 1932. Though now generally accepted as a surrealist film, the surrealists themselves did not accept it as a truly surrealist work. Although one of Cocteau's best known works the 1930's is notable rather for a number of stage plays. Most notably "La Voix humaine" and "Les Parents terribles", which was a popular success. His 1934 play "La Machine infernal" was Cocteau's stage version of the Oedipus legend and is considered to be his greatest work for the theater. During this period Cocteau also published two volumes of journalism, including "Mon Premier Voyage: Tour du Monde en 80 jours", a neo-Jules Verne around the world travel reportage he made for the newspaper Paris-Soir.
Biographer James S. Williams describes Cocteau's politics as "naturally Right-leaning." During the Nazi occupation of France, he
was in a ""round-table"" of French and German intellectuals who met at the Georges V Hotel in Paris, including Cocteau, the writers Ernst Junger, Paul Morand and Henry Millon de Montherlant, the publisher Gaston Gallimard and the Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt.
His friend Arno Breker convinced him that Adolf Hitler was a pacifist and patron of the arts with France's best interests in mind. In his diary, Cocteau accused France of disrespect towards Hitler and speculated on the Führer's sexuality. Cocteau effusively praised Breker's sculptures in an article entitled 'Salut à Breker' published in 1942. This piece caused him to be arraigned on charges of collaboration after the war, though he was cleared of any wrongdoing and had used his contacts to his failed attempt to save friends such as Max Jacob.
In 1940, "Le Bel Indifférent", Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful.
Cocteau's later years is mostly associated with his films. Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing the avant-garde into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.
Following "The Blood of a Poet" (1930), his best known films include "Beauty and the Beast" (1946), "Les Parents terribles" (1948), and "Orpheus" (1949). His final film, "Le Testament d'Orphée" ("The Testament of Orpheus") (1960), featured appearances by Picasso and matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, along with Yul Brynner, who also helped finance the film.
In 1945 Cocteau was one of several designers who created sets for the Théâtre de la Mode. He drew inspiration from filmmaker René Clair while making "Tribute to René Clair: I Married a Witch". The maquette is described in his "Journal 1942–1945," in his entry for 12 February 1945:
In 1956 Cocteau decorated the "Chapelle Saint-Pierre" in Villefranche-sur-Mer with mural paintings. The following year he also decorated the marriage hall at the Hôtel de Ville in Menton.
Jean Cocteau never hid his homosexuality. He was the author of the mildly homoerotic and semi-autobiographical "Le livre blanc" (translated as "The White Paper" or "The White Book"), published anonymously in 1928. He never repudiated its authorship and a later edition of the novel features his foreword and drawings. The novel begins:
Frequently his work, either literary ("Les enfants terribles"), graphic (erotic drawings, book illustration, paintings) or cinematographic ("The Blood of a Poet", "Orpheus", "Beauty and the Beast"), is pervaded with homosexual undertones, homoerotic imagery/symbolism or outright camp. In 1947 Paul Morihien published a clandestine edition of "Querelle de Brest" by Jean Genet, featuring 29 very explicit erotic drawings by Cocteau. In recent years several albums of Cocteau's homoerotica have been available to the general public.
It is widely believed that Cocteau had affairs with Raymond Radiguet, Jean Desbordes, Marcel Khill, and Panama Al Brown.
In the 1930s, Cocteau is rumoured to have had a very brief affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the daughter of a Romanov Grand Duke and herself a sometime actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong.
Cocteau's longest-lasting relationships were with French actors Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, whom Cocteau formally adopted. Cocteau cast Marais in "The Eternal Return" (1943), "Beauty and the Beast" (1946), "Ruy Blas" (1947), and "Orpheus" (1949).
Cocteau died of a heart attack at his château in Milly-la-Forêt, Essonne, France, on 11 October 1963 at the age of 74. His friend, French singer Édith Piaf, died the day before but that was announced on the morning of Cocteau's day of death; it has been said that his heart failed upon hearing of Piaf's death. Actually, according to author Roger Peyrefitte, since early that year Cocteau had been devastated after a breach with his longtime friend and extremely wealthy and generous patroness Francine Weisweiller: since 1960 she was having an affair with a minor writer, which cooled her off towards Cocteau. He had a very severe heart attack on April 22.
According to his wishes Cocteau is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the chapel reads: "I stay with you" ("Je reste avec vous").
In 1955, Cocteau was made a member of the Académie française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.
During his life, Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.A) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes Film Festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the Jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15837
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John Donne
John Donne ( ; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a Catholic family, a remnant of the Catholic Revival, who reluctantly became a cleric in the Church of England. He was Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621-1631). He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and satires. He is also known for his sermons.
Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorized. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.
Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In 1615 he was ordained deacon and then Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Holy Orders and only did so because the king ordered it. He also served as a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614.
Donne was born in London in 1571 or 1572, into a recusant Roman Catholic family when practice of that religion was illegal in England. Donne was the third of six children. His father, also named John Donne, was of Welsh descent and a warden of the Ironmongers Company in the City of London. However, he avoided unwelcome government attention out of fear of persecution.
His father died in 1576, when Donne was four years old, leaving his mother, Elizabeth Heywood, with the responsibility of raising the children alone. Heywood was also from a recusant Roman Catholic family, the daughter of John Heywood, the playwright, and sister of the Reverend Jasper Heywood, a Jesuit priest and translator. She was also a great-niece of Thomas More. A few months after her husband died, Donne's mother married Dr. John Syminges, a wealthy widower with three children of his own.
Donne was educated privately; however, there is no evidence to support the popular claim that he was taught by Jesuits. In 1583, at the age of 11, he began studies at Hart Hall, now Hertford College, Oxford. After three years of studies there, Donne was admitted to the University of Cambridge, where he studied for another three years. Donne, however, could not obtain a degree from either institution because of his Catholicism, since he refused to take the Oath of Supremacy required to graduate. In 1591 he was accepted as a student at the Thavies Inn legal school, one of the Inns of Chancery in London. On 6 May 1592 he was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court.
In 1593, five years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and during the intermittent Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), Queen Elizabeth issued the first English statute against sectarian dissent from the Church of England, titled "An Act for restraining Popish recusants". It defined "Popish recusants" as those "convicted for not repairing to some Church, Chapel, or usual place of Common Prayer to hear Divine Service there, but forbearing the same contrary to the tenor of the laws and statutes heretofore made and provided in that behalf". Donne's brother Henry was also a university student prior to his arrest in 1593 for harbouring a Catholic priest, William Harrington, and died in Newgate Prison of bubonic plague, leading Donne to begin questioning his Catholic faith.
During and after his education, Donne spent much of his considerable inheritance on women, literature, pastimes and travel. Although no record details precisely where Donne travelled, he did cross Europe and later fought alongside the Earl of Essex and Sir Walter Raleigh against the Spanish at Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597), and witnessed the loss of the Spanish flagship, the "San Felipe". According to his earliest biographer,
By the age of 25 he was well prepared for the diplomatic career he appeared to be seeking. He was appointed chief secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton, and was established at Egerton's London home, York House, Strand close to the Palace of Whitehall, then the most influential social centre in England.
During the next four years Donne fell in love with Egerton's niece Anne More, and they were secretly married just before Christmas in 1601, against the wishes of both Egerton and George More, who was Lieutenant of the Tower and Anne's father. Upon discovery, this wedding ruined Donne's career, getting him dismissed and put in Fleet Prison, along with the Church of England priest Samuel Brooke, who married them, and the man who acted as a witness to the wedding. Donne was released shortly thereafter when the marriage was proved to be valid, and he soon secured the release of the other two. Walton tells us that when Donne wrote to his wife to tell her about losing his post, he wrote after his name: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done." It was not until 1609 that Donne was reconciled with his father-in-law and received his wife's dowry.
After his release, Donne had to accept a retired country life in a small house in Pyrford, Surrey, owned by Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, where they resided until the end of 1604. In spring 1605 they moved to another small house in Mitcham, London, where he scraped a meager living as a lawyer, while Anne Donne bore a new baby almost every year. Though he also worked as an assistant pamphleteer to Thomas Morton writing anti-Catholic pamphlets, Donne was in a constant state of financial insecurity.
Anne gave birth to 12 children in 16 years of marriage, (including two stillbirths—their eighth and then, in 1617, their last child); indeed, she spent most of her married life either pregnant or nursing. The 10 surviving children were Constance, John, George, Francis, Lucy (named after Donne's patron Lucy, Countess of Bedford, her godmother), Bridget, Mary, Nicholas, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Three (Francis, Nicholas, and Mary) died before they were ten. In a state of despair that almost drove him to kill himself, Donne noted that the death of a child would mean one mouth fewer to feed, but he could not afford the burial expenses. During this time, Donne wrote but did not publish "Biathanatos", his defence of suicide. His wife died on 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, a still-born baby. Donne mourned her deeply, and wrote of his love and loss in his Holy Sonnet.
In 1602 John Donne was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for the constituency of Brackley, but membership was not a paid position. Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, being succeeded by King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England. The fashion for coterie poetry of the period gave Donne a means to seek patronage, and many of his poems were written for wealthy friends or patrons, especially for MP Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted (1575–1615), whom he met in 1610 and who became Donne's chief patron, furnishing him and his family an apartment in his large house in Drury Lane.
In 1610 and 1611 Donne wrote two anti-Catholic polemics: "Pseudo-Martyr" and "Ignatius His Conclave" for Morton. He then wrote two Anniversaries, "" (1611) and "Of the Progress of the Soul" (1612) for Drury.
Donne sat as an MP again, for Taunton, in the Addled Parliament of 1614 but though he attracted five appointments within its business he made no recorded speech.
Although James was pleased with Donne's work, he refused to reinstate him at court and instead urged him to take holy orders. At length, Donne acceded to the king's wishes, and in 1615 was ordained priest in the Church of England.
In 1615 Donne was awarded an honorary doctorate in divinity from Cambridge University, and became a Royal Chaplain in the same year, and a Reader of Divinity at Lincoln's Inn in 1616, where he served in the chapel as minister until 1622. In 1618 he became chaplain to Viscount Doncaster, who was on an embassy to the . Donne did not return to England until 1620. In 1621 Donne was made Dean of St Paul's, a leading and well-paid position in the Church of England, which he held until his death in 1631. At the same time he became Rector of a number of parishes, including Blunham, in Bedfordshire. Blunham Parish Church has an imposing stained glass window commemorating Donne, designed by Derek Hunt. During his period as dean his daughter Lucy died, aged eighteen. In late November and early December 1623 he suffered a nearly fatal illness, thought to be either typhus or a combination of a cold followed by a period of fever. During his convalescence he wrote a series of meditations and prayers on health, pain, and sickness that were published as a book in 1624 under the title of "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions". One of these meditations, , contains the well known phrases "No man is an "Iland"" (often modernised as "No man is an island") and "...for whom the "bell" tolls". In 1624 he became vicar of St Dunstan-in-the-West, and 1625 a prolocutor to Charles I. He earned a reputation as an eloquent preacher and 160 of his sermons have survived, including Death's Duel, his famous delivered at the Palace of Whitehall before King Charles I in February 1631.
Donne died on 31 March 1631 and was buried in old St Paul's Cathedral, where a memorial statue of him by Nicholas Stone was erected with a Latin epigraph probably composed by himself. The memorial was one of the few to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666 and is now in St Paul's Cathedral. The statue was said by Izaac Walton in his biography to have been modelled from the life by Donne in order to suggest his appearance at the resurrection; it was to start a vogue in such monuments during the course of the 17th century. In 2012 a bust of the poet by Nigel Boonham was unveiled outside in the cathedral churchyard.
Donne's earliest poems showed a developed knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets, and pompous courtiers. His images of sickness, vomit, manure, and plague reflected his strongly satiric view of a society populated by fools and knaves. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great importance to Donne. He argued that it was better to examine carefully one's religious convictions than blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment, by claiming "A Harry, or a Martin taught [them] this."
Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphors, such as a flea biting two lovers being compared to sex. Donne did not publish these poems, although they circulated widely in manuscript form. One such, a previously unknown manuscript that is believed to be one of the largest contemporary collections of Donne's work (among that of others), was found at Melford Hall in November 2018.
Some have speculated that Donne's numerous illnesses, financial strain, and the deaths of his friends all contributed to the development of a more somber and pious tone in his later poems. The change can be clearly seen in "" (1611), a poem that Donne wrote in memory of Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron, Sir Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk. This poem treats Elizabeth's demise with extreme gloominess, using it as a symbol for the Fall of Man and the destruction of the universe.
The increasing gloominess of Donne's tone may also be observed in the religious works that he began writing during the same period. Having converted to the Anglican Church, Donne quickly became noted for his sermons and religious poems. Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death, and the fear that it inspired in many men, on the grounds of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to live eternally. One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, "Death Be Not Proud". Even as he lay dying during Lent in 1631, he rose from his sickbed and delivered the Death's Duel sermon, which was later described as his own funeral sermon. Death's Duel portrays life as a steady descent to suffering and death; death becomes merely another process of life, in which the 'winding sheet' of the womb is the same as that of the grave. Hope is seen in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the Resurrection.
His work has received much criticism over the years, especially concerning his metaphysical form. Donne is generally considered the most prominent member of the metaphysical poets, a phrase coined in 1781 by Samuel Johnson, following a comment on Donne by John Dryden. Dryden had written of Donne in 1693: "He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love." In "Life of Cowley" (from Samuel Johnson's 1781 work of biography and criticism "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets"), Johnson refers to the beginning of the seventeenth century in which there "appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets". Donne's immediate successors in poetry therefore tended to regard his works with ambivalence, with the Neoclassical poets regarding his conceits as abuse of the metaphor. However he was revived by Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Browning, though his more recent revival in the early twentieth century by poets such as T. S. Eliot and critics like F R Leavis tended to portray him, with approval, as an anti-Romantic.
Donne is considered a master of the metaphysical conceit, an extended metaphor that combines two vastly different ideas into a single idea, often using imagery. An example of this is his equation of lovers with saints in "The Canonization". Unlike the conceits found in other Elizabethan poetry, most notably Petrarchan conceits, which formed clichéd comparisons between more closely related objects (such as a rose and love), metaphysical conceits go to a greater depth in comparing two completely unlike objects. One of the most famous of Donne's conceits is found in "" where he compares the apartness of two separated lovers to the working of the legs of a compass.
Donne's works are also witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet remarkable analogies. His pieces are often ironic and cynical, especially regarding love and human motives. Common subjects of Donne's poems are love (especially in his early life), death (especially after his wife's death), and religion.
John Donne's poetry represented a shift from classical forms to more personal poetry. Donne is noted for his poetic metre, which was structured with changing and jagged rhythms that closely resemble casual speech (it was for this that the more classical-minded Ben Jonson commented that "Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging").
Some scholars believe that Donne's literary works reflect the changing trends of his life, with love poetry and satires from his youth and religious sermons during his later years. Other scholars, such as Helen Gardner, question the validity of this dating—most of his poems were published posthumously (1633). The exception to these is his "Anniversaries", which were published in 1612 and "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" published in 1624. His sermons are also dated, sometimes specifically by date and year.
Donne is commemorated as a priest in the calendar of the Church of England and in the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on 31 March.
During his lifetime several likenesses were made of the poet. The earliest was the anonymous portrait of 1594 now in the National Portrait Gallery, London which has been recently restored. One of the earliest Elizabethan portraits of an author, the fashionably dressed poet is shown darkly brooding on his love. The portrait was described in Donne's will as "that picture of myne wych is taken in the shaddowes", and bequeathed by him to Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram. Other paintings include a 1616 head and shoulders after Isaac Oliver, also in the National Portrait Gallery, and a 1622 head and shoulders in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1911 the young Stanley Spencer devoted a visionary painting to "John Donne arriving in heaven" (1911) which is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.
After Donne's death, a number of poetical tributes were paid to him, of which one of the principal (and most difficult to follow) was his friend Lord Herbert of Cherbury's "Elegy for Doctor Donne". Posthumous editions of Donne's poems were accompanied by several "Elegies upon the Author" over the course of the next two centuries. Six of these were written by fellow churchmen, others by such courtly writers as Thomas Carew, Sidney Godolphin and Endymion Porter. In 1963 came Joseph Brodsky's "The Great Elegy for John Donne".
Beginning in the 20th century, several historical novels appeared taking as their subject various episodes in Donne's life. His courtship of Anne More is the subject of Elizabeth Gray Vining's "Take Heed of Loving Me: A novel about John Donne" (1963) and Maeve Haran's "The Lady and the Poet" (2010). Both characters also make interspersed appearances in Mary Novik's "Conceit" (2007), where the main focus is on their rebellious daughter Pegge. English treatments include Garry O'Connor's "Death's Duel: a novel of John Donne" (2015), which deals with the poet as a young man. He also plays a significant role in Christie Dickason's "The Noble Assassin" (2012), a novel based on the life of Donne's patron and (the author claims) his lover, Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford. Finally there is Bryan Crockett's "Love's Alchemy: a John Donne Mystery" (2015), in which the poet, blackmailed into service in Robert Cecil's network of spies, attempts to avert political disaster and at the same time outwit Cecil.
There were musical settings of Donne's lyrics even during his lifetime and in the century following his death. These included Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger's ("So, so, leave off this last lamenting kisse" in his 1609 Ayres); John Cooper's ("The Message"); Henry Lawes' ("Break of Day"); John Dowland's ("Break of Day" and "To ask for all thy love"); and settings of "A Hymn to God the Father" by John Hilton the younger and Pelham Humfrey (published 1688). After the 17th century there were no more until the start of the 20th century with Havergal Brian ("A nocturnal on St Lucy's Day", first performed in 1905), Eleanor Everest Freer ("Break of Day, published in 1905) and Walford Davies ("The Cross", 1909) among the earliest. In 1916–18, the composer Hubert Parry set Donne's "Holy Sonnet 7" ("At the round earth's imagined corners") to music in his choral work, "Songs of Farewell". In 1945, Benjamin Britten set nine of Donne's Holy Sonnets in his song cycle for voice and piano "The Holy Sonnets of John Donne". Among them is also the choral setting of "Negative Love" that opens "Harmonium" (1981), as well as the aria setting of "Holy Sonnet XIV" at the end of the 1st act of "Doctor Atomic", both by John Adams.
There have been settings in popular music as well. One is the version of the song "Go and Catch a Falling Star" on John Renbourn's debut album "John Renbourn" (1966), in which the last line is altered to "False, ere I count one, two, three". On their 1992 album "Duality", the English Neoclassical Dark Wave band In The Nursery used a recitation of the entirety of Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" for the track "Mecciano" and an augmented version of "A Fever" for the track "Corruption."
Prose texts by Donne have also been set to music. In 1954, Priaulx Rainier set some in her "Cycle for Declamation" for solo voice. In 2009, the American Jennifer Higdon composed the choral piece "On the Death of the Righteous", based on Donne's sermons. Still more recent is the Russian minimalist Anton Batagov's " I Fear No More, selected songs and meditations of John Donne" (2015).
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15838
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Joey Ramone
Jeffrey Ross Hyman (May 19, 1951 – April 15, 2001), known professionally as Joey Ramone, was an American musician, singer, composer, and lead vocalist of the punk rock band the Ramones. Joey Ramone's image, voice, and tenure as frontman of the Ramones made him a countercultural icon.
Jeffrey Ross Hyman was born on May 19, 1951, in Queens, New York City, New York to a Jewish family. His parents were Charlotte ("née" Mandell) and Noel Hyman. He was born with a parasitic twin growing out of his back, which was incompletely formed and surgically removed. The family resided in Forest Hills, Queens, where Hyman and his future Ramones bandmates attended Forest Hills High School. He grew up with his brother Mickey Leigh. Though happy, Hyman was something of an outcast, diagnosed at 18 with obsessive–compulsive disorder. His mother, Charlotte Lesher, divorced her first husband, Noel Hyman. She married a second time but was widowed by a car accident while she was on vacation.
Hyman was a fan of the Beatles, the Who, David Bowie, and the Stooges among other bands, particularly oldies and the Phil Spector-produced "girl groups". His idol was Pete Townshend of the Who, with whom he shared a birthday. Hyman took up the drums at 13, and played them throughout his teen years before picking up an acoustic guitar at age 17.
In 1972 Hyman joined the glam punk band Sniper. Sniper played at the Mercer Arts Center, Max's Kansas City and the Coventry, alongside the New York Dolls, Suicide, and Queen Elizabeth III. Hyman played with Sniper under the name Jeff Starship.
Hyman continued playing with Sniper until early 1974, when he was replaced by Alan Turner.
In 1974, Jeffrey Hyman co-founded the punk rock band the Ramones with friends John Cummings and Douglas Colvin. Colvin was already using the pseudonym "Dee Dee Ramone" and the others also adopted stage names using "Ramone" as their surname: Cummings became Johnny Ramone and Hyman became Joey Ramone. The name "Ramone" stems from Paul McCartney: he briefly used the stage name "Paul Ramon" during 1960/1961, when the Beatles, still an unknown five-piece band called the Silver Beetles, did a tour of Scotland and all took up pseudonyms; and again on the 1969 Steve Miller album "Brave New World", where he played the drums on one song using that name.
Joey initially served as the group's drummer while Dee Dee Ramone was the original vocalist. However, when Dee Dee's vocal cords proved unable to sustain the demands of consistent live performances, Ramones manager Thomas Erdelyi suggested Joey switch to vocals. Mickey Leigh: "I was shocked when the band came out. Joey was the lead singer and I couldn't believe how good he was. Because he'd been sitting in my house with my acoustic guitar, writing these songs like 'I Don't Care', fucking up my guitar, and suddenly he's this guy on stage who you can't take your eyes off of." After a series of unsuccessful auditions in search of a new drummer, Erdelyi took over on drums, assuming the name Tommy Ramone.
The Ramones were a major influence on the punk rock movement in the United States, though they achieved only minor commercial success. Their only record with enough U.S. sales to be certified gold in Joey's lifetime was the compilation album "Ramones Mania". Recognition of the band's importance built over the years, and they are now regularly represented in many assessments of all-time great rock music, such as the "Rolling Stone" lists of the 50 Greatest Artists of All Time and 25 Greatest Live Albums of All Time, VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock, and Mojo's 100 Greatest Albums. In 2002, the Ramones were voted the second greatest rock and roll band ever in "Spin", behind the Beatles.
In 1996, after a tour with the Lollapalooza music festival, the band played their final show and then disbanded.
Ramone's signature cracks, hiccups, snarls, crooning and youthful voice made his one of punk rock's most recognizable voices. Allmusic.com claims that "Joey Ramone's signature bleat was the voice of punk rock in America." As his vocals matured and deepened through his career, so did the Ramones' songwriting, leaving a notable difference from his initial melodic and callow style—two notable tracks serving as examples are "Somebody Put Something in My Drink" and "Mama's Boy". Dee Dee Ramone was quoted as saying "All the other singers [in New York] were copying David Johansen (of the New York Dolls), who was copying Mick Jagger... But Joey was unique, totally unique."
In 1985, Ramone joined Steven Van Zandt's music industry activist group Artists United Against Apartheid, which campaigned against the Sun City resort in South Africa. Ramone and 49 other recording artists – including Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, Lou Reed and Run DMC — collaborated on the song "Sun City", in which they pledged they would never perform at the resort.
In 1994, Ramone appeared on the Helen Love album "Love and Glitter, Hot Days and Music", singing the track "Punk Boy". Helen Love returned the favor, singing on Ramone's song "Mr. Punchy".
In October 1996, Ramone headlined the "Rock the Reservation" alternative rock festival in Tuba City, Arizona. 'Joey Ramone & the Resistance' (Daniel Rey on guitar, John Connor on bass guitar and Roger Murdock on drums) debuted Ramone's interpretation of Louis Armstrong's "Wonderful World' live, as well as Ramone's choice of Ramones classics and some of his other favorite songs; The Dave Clark Five's "Any Way You Want It", The Who's "The Kids are Alright" and The Stooges' "No Fun."
Ramone co-wrote and recorded the song "Meatball Sandwich" with Youth Gone Mad. For a short time before his death, he took the role of manager and producer for the punk rock band the Independents.
His last recording as a vocalist was backup vocals on the CD "One Nation Under" by the Dine Navajo rock group Blackfire. He appeared on two tracks, "What Do You See" and "Lying to Myself". The 2002 CD won "Best Pop/Rock Album of the Year" at the 2002 Native American Music Awards.
Ramone produced the Ronnie Spector album "She Talks to Rainbows" in 1999. It was critically acclaimed but was not very commercially successful. The title track was previously on the Ramones' final studio album, "¡Adios Amigos!".
Joey Ramone died at the age of 49 following a seven-year battle with lymphoma at New York-Presbyterian Hospital on April 15, 2001, a month before he would have turned 50. He was reportedly listening to the song "In a Little While" by U2 when he died. In an interview in 2014 for Radio 538, U2 lead singer Bono confirmed that Joey Ramone's family told him that Ramone listened to the song before he died, which Andy Shernoff (The Dictators) also confirmed.
His solo album "Don't Worry About Me" was released posthumously in 2002, and features the single "What a Wonderful World", a cover of the Louis Armstrong standard. MTV News claimed: "With his trademark rose-colored shades, black leather jacket, shoulder-length hair, ripped jeans and alternately snarling and crooning vocals, Joey was the iconic godfather of punk."
On November 30, 2003, a block of East 2nd Street in New York City was officially renamed Joey Ramone Place. It is the block where Hyman once lived with bandmate Dee Dee Ramone and is near the former site of the music club CBGB, where the Ramones began their career. Hyman's birthday is celebrated annually by rock 'n' roll nightclubs, hosted in New York City by his brother and, until 2007, his mother, Charlotte. Joey Ramone is interred at Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.
The Ramones were named as inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the class of 2002.
Several songs have been written in tribute to Joey Ramone. Tommy, CJ and Marky Ramone and Daniel Rey came together in 2002 to record Jed Davis' Joey Ramone tribute album, "The Bowery Electric". Other tributes include "Hello Joe" by Blondie from the album "The Curse of Blondie", "You Can't Kill Joey Ramone" by Sloppy Seconds, "Joey" by Raimundos, "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" by Sleater-Kinney, "Red and White Stripes" by Moler and "Joey" by the Corin Tucker Band, "I Heard Ramona Sing" by Frank Black, and Amy Rigby's "Dancin' With Joey Ramone". Rammstein ended several shows of their Mutter tour in 2001 with a cover of "Pet Sematary" in honor of the passing of Joey Ramone. "The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)" by U2.
In September 2010, the Associated Press reported that "Joey Ramone Place," a sign at the corner of Bowery and East Second Street, was New York City's most stolen sign. Later, the sign was moved to above ground level. Drummer Marky Ramone thought Joey would appreciate that his sign would be the most stolen, adding "Now you have to be an NBA player to see it."
After several years in development, Ramone's second posthumous album was released on May 22, 2012. Titled "...Ya Know?", it was preceded on Record Store Day by a 7" single re-release of "Blitzkrieg Bop"/"Havana Affair".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15839
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John Lennon
John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon, 9 October 19408 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter and peace activist who gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist, and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in musical history. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, Yoko Ono. After the Beatles disbanded in 1970, Lennon continued as a solo artist and as Ono's collaborator.
Born in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1956, he formed his first band, the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. He was initially the group's de facto leader, a role gradually ceded to McCartney. Lennon was characterised for the rebellious nature and acerbic wit in his music, writing, drawings, on film and in interviews. In the mid-1960s, he had two books published: "In His Own Write" and "A Spaniard in the Works", both collections of nonsensical writings and line drawings. Starting with 1967's "All You Need Is Love", his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture.
From 1968 to 1972, Lennon produced more than a dozen records with Ono, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums, his first solo LP "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band", and the international top 10 singles "Give Peace a Chance", "Instant Karma!", "Imagine" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)". Controversial through his political and peace activism, after moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-year attempt by the Nixon administration to deport him. In 1975, Lennon disengaged from the music business to raise his infant son Sean, and in 1980, returned with the Ono collaboration "Double Fantasy". He was shot and killed in the archway of his Manhattan apartment building by a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album's release.
In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, and in 2008, "Rolling Stone" ranked him the fifth-greatest singer of all time. In 1987, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Lennon was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1994.
Lennon was born on 9 October 1940 at Liverpool Maternity Hospital to Julia (née Stanley) (1914–1958) and Alfred Lennon (1912–1976). Alfred was a merchant seaman of Irish descent who was away at the time of his son's birth. His parents named him John Winston Lennon after his paternal grandfather, John "Jack" Lennon, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. His father was often away from home but sent regular pay cheques to 9Newcastle Road, Liverpool, where Lennon lived with his mother; the cheques stopped when he went absent without leave in February 1944. When he eventually came home six months later, he offered to look after the family, but Julia, by then pregnant with another man's child, rejected the idea. After her sister Mimi complained to Liverpool's Social Services twice, Julia gave her custody of Lennon. In July 1946, Lennon's father visited her and took his son to Blackpool, secretly intending to emigrate to New Zealand with him. Julia followed them – with her partner at the time, Bobby Dykins – and after a heated argument, his father forced the five-year-old to choose between them. In one account of this incident, Lennon twice chose his father, but as his mother walked away, he began to cry and followed her. According to author Mark Lewisohn, however, Lennon's parents agreed that Julia should take him and give him a home. A witness who was there that day, Billy Hall, has said that the dramatic portrayal of a young John Lennon being forced to make a decision between his parents is inaccurate. Lennon had no further contact with Alf for close to 20 years.
Throughout the rest of his childhood and adolescence, Lennon lived at Mendips, 251Menlove Avenue, Woolton, with Mimi and her husband George Toogood Smith, who had no children of their own. His aunt purchased volumes of short stories for him, and his uncle, a dairyman at his family's farm, bought him a mouth organ and engaged him in solving puzzles. Julia visited Mendips on a regular basis, and when John was 11 years old, he often visited her at 1 Blomfield Road, Liverpool, where she played him Elvis Presley records, taught him the banjo, and showed him how to play "Ain't That a Shame" by Fats Domino. In September 1980, Lennon commented about his family and his rebellious nature:
He regularly visited his cousin, Stanley Parkes, who lived in Fleetwood and took him on trips to local cinemas. During the school holidays Parkes often visited Lennon with Leila Harvey, another cousin, and the threesome often travelled to Blackpool two or three times a week to watch shows. They would visit the Blackpool Tower Circus and see artists such as Dickie Valentine, Arthur Askey, Max Bygraves and Joe Loss, with Parkes recalling that Lennon particularly liked George Formby. After Parkes's family moved to Scotland, the three cousins often spent their school holidays together there. Parkes recalled, "John, cousin Leila and I were very close. From Edinburgh we would drive up to the family croft at Durness, which was from about the time John was nine years old until he was about 16." Lennon's uncle George died of a liver haemorrhage on 5 June 1955, aged 52.
Lennon was raised as an Anglican and attended Dovedale Primary School. After passing his eleven-plus exam, he attended Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool from September 1952 to 1957, and was described by Harvey at the time as a "happy-go-lucky, good-humoured, easy going, lively lad". He often drew comical cartoons that appeared in his own, self-made school magazine called the "Daily Howl".
In 1956, Julia bought John his first guitar. The instrument was an inexpensive Gallotone Champion acoustic for which she lent her son five pounds and ten shillings on the condition that the guitar be delivered to her own house and not Mimi's, knowing well that her sister was not supportive of her son's musical aspirations. Mimi was sceptical of his claim that he would be famous one day, and she hoped that he would grow bored with music, often telling him, "The guitar's all very well, John, but you'll never make a living out of it." On 15 July 1958, Lennon's mother was struck and killed by a car while she was walking home after visiting the Smiths' house.
Lennon's senior school years were marked by a shift in his behaviour. Teachers at Quarry Bank High School described him thus: "He has too many wrong ambitions and his energy is often misplaced", and "His work always lacks effort. He is content to “drift” instead of using his abilities." Lennon's misbehaviour created a rift in his relationship with his aunt.
Lennon failed his O-level examinations, and was accepted into the Liverpool College of Art after his aunt and headmaster intervened. At the college he began wearing Teddy Boy clothes and was threatened with expulsion for his behaviour. In the description of Cynthia Powell, Lennon's fellow student and subsequently his wife, he was "thrown out of the college before his final year".
At the age of 15, Lennon formed a skiffle group, the Quarrymen. Named after Quarry Bank High School, the group was established by Lennon in September 1956. By the summer of 1957, the Quarrymen played a "spirited set of songs" made up of half-skiffle and half-rock and roll. Lennon first met Paul McCartney at the Quarrymen's second performance, which was held in Woolton on 6 July at the St Peter's Church garden fête. Lennon then asked McCartney to join the band.
McCartney said that Aunt Mimi "was very aware that John's friends were lower class", and would often patronise him when he arrived to visit Lennon. According to McCartney's brother Mike, their father similarly disapproved of Lennon, declaring that Lennon would get his son "into trouble". McCartney's father nevertheless allowed the fledgling band to rehearse in the family's front room at 20Forthlin Road. During this time Lennon wrote his first song, "Hello Little Girl", which became a UK top 10 hit for the Fourmost in 1963.
McCartney recommended his friend George Harrison to be the lead guitarist. Lennon thought that Harrison, then 14 years old, was too young. McCartney engineered an audition on the upper deck of a Liverpool bus, where Harrison played "Raunchy" for Lennon and was asked to join. Stuart Sutcliffe, Lennon's friend from art school, later joined as bassist. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Sutcliffe became "The Beatles" in early 1960. In August that year, the Beatles were engaged for a 48-night residency in Hamburg, in West Germany, and were desperately in need of a drummer. They asked Pete Best to join them. Lennon's aunt, horrified when he told her about the trip, pleaded with Lennon to continue his art studies instead. After the first Hamburg residency, the band accepted another in April 1961, and a third in April 1962. As with the other band members, Lennon was introduced to Preludin while in Hamburg, and regularly took the drug as a stimulant during their long, overnight performances.
Brian Epstein managed the Beatles from 1962 until his death in 1967. He had no previous experience managing artists, but he had a strong influence on the group's dress code and attitude on stage. Lennon initially resisted his attempts to encourage the band to present a professional appearance, but eventually complied, saying "I'll wear a bloody balloon if somebody's going to pay me." McCartney took over on bass after Sutcliffe decided to stay in Hamburg, and Best was replaced with drummer Ringo Starr; this completed the four-piece line-up that would remain until the group's break-up in 1970. The band's first single, "Love Me Do", was released in October 1962 and reached No. 17 on the British charts. They recorded their debut album, "Please Please Me", in under 10 hours on 11 February 1963, a day when Lennon was suffering the effects of a cold, which is evident in the vocal on the last song to be recorded that day, "Twist and Shout". The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership yielded eight of its fourteen tracks. With a few exceptions, one being the album title itself, Lennon had yet to bring his love of wordplay to bear on his song lyrics, saying: "We were just writing songs... pop songs with no more thought of them than that – to create a sound. And the words were almost irrelevant". In a 1987 interview, McCartney said that the other Beatles idolised Lennon: "He was like our own little Elvis... We all looked up to John. He was older and he was very much the leader; he was the quickest wit and the smartest."
The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the UK early in 1963. Lennon was on tour when his first son, Julian, was born in April. During their Royal Variety Show performance, which was attended by the Queen Mother and other British royalty, Lennon poked fun at the audience: "For our next song, I'd like to ask for your help. For the people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands... and the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewellery." After a year of Beatlemania in the UK, the group's historic February 1964 US debut appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" marked their breakthrough to international stardom. A two-year period of constant touring, filmmaking, and songwriting followed, during which Lennon wrote two books, "In His Own Write" and "A Spaniard in the Works". The Beatles received recognition from the British establishment when they were appointed Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 1965 Queen's Birthday Honours.
Lennon grew concerned that fans who attended Beatles concerts were unable to hear the music above the screaming of fans, and that the band's musicianship was beginning to suffer as a result. Lennon's "Help!" expressed his own feelings in 1965: "I "meant" it... It was me singing 'help'". He had put on weight (he would later refer to this as his "Fat Elvis" period), and felt he was subconsciously seeking change. In March that year he and Harrison were unknowingly introduced to LSD when a dentist, hosting a dinner party attended by the two musicians and their wives, spiked the guests' coffee with the drug. When they wanted to leave, their host revealed what they had taken, and strongly advised them not to leave the house because of the likely effects. Later, in a lift at a nightclub, they all believed it was on fire; Lennon recalled: "We were all screaming... hot and hysterical."
After the band's final concert on 29 August 1966, Lennon filmed the anti-war black comedy "How I Won the War" – his only appearance in a non-Beatles feature film – before rejoining his bandmates for an extended period of recording, beginning in November. Lennon had increased his use of LSD and, according to author Ian MacDonald, his continuous use of the drug in 1967 brought him "close to erasing his identity". The year 1967 saw the release of "Strawberry Fields Forever", hailed by "Time" magazine for its "astonishing inventiveness", and the group's landmark album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", which revealed lyrics by Lennon that contrasted strongly with the simple love songs of the group's early years. In late June, the Beatles performed Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" as Britain's contribution to the "Our World" satellite broadcast, before an international audience estimated at up to 400 million. Intentionally simplistic in its message, the song formalised his pacifist stance and provided an anthem for the Summer of Love.
After the Beatles were introduced to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the group attended an August weekend of personal instruction at his Transcendental Meditation seminar in Bangor, Wales. During the seminar, they were informed of Epstein's death. "I knew we were in trouble then", Lennon said later. "I didn't have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. I was scared – I thought, 'We've fucking had it now.'" McCartney organised the group's first post-Epstein project, the self-written, -produced and -directed television film "Magical Mystery Tour", which was released in December that year. While the film itself proved to be their first critical flop, its soundtrack release, featuring Lennon's Lewis Carroll-inspired "I Am the Walrus", was a success.
Led by Harrison and Lennon's interest, the Beatles travelled to the Maharishi's ashram in India in February 1968 for further guidance. While there, they composed most of the songs for their double album "The Beatles", but the band members' mixed experience with Transcendental Meditation signalled a sharp divergence in the group's camaraderie. On their return to London, they became increasingly involved in business activities with the formation of Apple Corps, a multimedia corporation composed of Apple Records and several other subsidiary companies. Lennon described the venture as an attempt to achieve "artistic freedom within a business structure". Released amid a period of civic unrest and protests, the band's debut single for the Apple label included Lennon's B-side "Revolution", in which he called for a "plan" rather than committing to Maoist revolution. The song's pacifist message led to ridicule from political radicals in the New Left press. Adding to the tensions at the Beatles' recording sessions that year, Lennon insisted on having his new girlfriend, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, beside him, thereby contravening the band's policy regarding wives and girlfriends in the studio. He was especially pleased with his songwriting contributions to the double album and identified it as a superior work to "Sgt. Pepper". At the end of 1968, Lennon participated in "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus", a television special that was not broadcast. Lennon performed with the Dirty Mac, a supergroup composed of Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Mitch Mitchell. The group also backed a vocal performance by Ono. A film version was released 1996.
By late 1968, Lennon's increased drug use and growing preoccupation with Ono, combined with the Beatles' inability to agree on how the company should be run, left Apple in need of professional management. Lennon asked Lord Beeching to take on the role, but he declined, advising Lennon to go back to making records. Lennon was approached by Allen Klein, who had managed the Rolling Stones and other bands during the British Invasion. In early 1969, Klein was appointed as Apple's chief executive by Lennon, Harrison and Starr, but McCartney never signed the management contract. Lennon and Ono were married on 20 March 1969, and soon released a series of 14 lithographs called "Bag One" depicting scenes from their honeymoon, eight of which were deemed indecent and most of which were banned and confiscated. Lennon's creative focus continued to move beyond the Beatles, and between 1968 and 1969 he and Ono recorded three albums of experimental music together: "" (known more for its cover than for its music), "" and "Wedding Album". In 1969, they formed the Plastic Ono Band, releasing "Live Peace in Toronto 1969". Between 1969 and 1970, Lennon released the singles "Give Peace a Chance", which was widely adopted as an anti-Vietnam War anthem, "Cold Turkey", which documented his withdrawal symptoms after he became addicted to heroin, and "Instant Karma!".
In protest at Britain's involvement in "the Nigeria-Biafra thing" (namely, the Nigerian Civil War), its support of America in the Vietnam War and (perhaps jokingly) against "Cold Turkey" slipping down the charts, Lennon returned his MBE medal to the Queen. This gesture had no effect on his MBE status, which could not be renounced. The medal, together with Lennon's letter, is held at the Central Chancery of the Orders of Knighthood.
Lennon left the Beatles in September 1969, but agreed not to inform the media while the group renegotiated their recording contract. He was outraged that McCartney publicised his own departure on releasing his debut solo album in April 1970. Lennon's reaction was, "Jesus Christ! He gets all the credit for it!" He later wrote, "I started the band. I disbanded it. It's as simple as that." In a December 1970 interview with Jann Wenner of "Rolling Stone" magazine, he revealed his bitterness towards McCartney, saying, "I was a fool not to do what Paul did, which was use it to sell a record." Lennon also spoke of the hostility he perceived the other members had towards Ono, and of how he, Harrison and Starr "got fed up with being sidemen for Paul ... After Brian Epstein died we collapsed. Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us when we went round in circles?"
In 1970, Lennon and Ono went through primal therapy with Arthur Janov in Los Angeles, California. Designed to release emotional pain from early childhood, the therapy entailed two half-days a week with Janov for four months; he had wanted to treat the couple for longer, but they felt no need to continue and returned to London. Lennon's debut solo album, "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" (1970), was received with praise by many music critics, but its highly personal lyrics and stark sound limited its commercial performance. Critic Greil Marcus remarked, "John's singing in the last verse of 'God' may be the finest in all of rock." The album featured the song "Mother", in which Lennon confronted his feelings of childhood rejection, and the Dylanesque "Working Class Hero", a bitter attack against the bourgeois social system which, due to the lyric "you're still fucking peasants", fell foul of broadcasters. In January 1971, Tariq Ali expressed his revolutionary political views when he interviewed Lennon, who immediately responded by writing "Power to the People". In his lyrics to the song, Lennon reversed the non-confrontational approach he had espoused in "Revolution", although he later disowned "Power to the People", saying that it was borne out of guilt and a desire for approval from radicals such as Ali. Lennon became involved with Ali in a protest against the prosecution of "Oz" magazine for alleged obscenity. Lennon denounced the proceedings as "disgusting fascism", and he and Ono (as Elastic Oz Band) released the single "God Save Us/Do the Oz" and joined marches in support of the magazine.
Eager for a major commercial success, Lennon adopted a more accessible sound for his next album, "Imagine" (1971). "Rolling Stone" reported that "it contains a substantial portion of good music" but warned of the possibility that "his posturings will soon seem not merely dull but irrelevant". The album's title track later became an anthem for anti-war movements, while the song "How Do You Sleep?" was a musical attack on McCartney in response to lyrics on "Ram" that Lennon felt, and McCartney later confirmed, were directed at him and Ono. In "Jealous Guy", Lennon addressed his demeaning treatment of women, acknowledging that his past behaviour was the result of long-held insecurity. In gratitude for his guitar contributions to "Imagine", Lennon initially agreed to perform at Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh benefit shows in New York. Harrison refused to allow Ono to participate at the concerts, however, which resulted in the couple having a heated argument and Lennon pulling out of the event.
Lennon and Ono moved to New York in August 1971 and immediately embraced US radical left politics. The couple released their "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" single in December. During the new year, the Nixon administration took what it called a "strategic counter-measure" against Lennon's anti-war and anti-Nixon propaganda. The administration embarked on what would be a four-year attempt to deport him. Lennon was embroiled in a continuing legal battle with the immigration authorities, and he was denied permanent residency in the US; the issue would not be resolved until 1976.
"Some Time in New York City" was recorded as a collaboration with Ono and was released in 1972 with backing from the New York band Elephant's Memory. A double LP, it contained songs about women's rights, race relations, Britain's role in Northern Ireland and Lennon's difficulties in obtaining a green card. The album was a commercial failure and was maligned by critics, who found its political sloganeering heavy-handed and relentless. The "NME"s review took the form of an open letter in which Tony Tyler derided Lennon as a "pathetic, ageing revolutionary". In the US, "Woman Is the Nigger of the World" was released as a single from the album and was televised on 11 May, on "The Dick Cavett Show". Many radio stations refused to broadcast the song because of the word "nigger". Lennon and Ono gave two benefit concerts with Elephant's Memory and guests in New York in aid of patients at the Willowbrook State School mental facility. Staged at Madison Square Garden on 30 August 1972, they were his last full-length concert appearances. After George McGovern lost the 1972 presidential election to Richard Nixon, Lennon and Ono attended a post-election wake held in the New York home of activist Jerry Rubin. Lennon was depressed and got intoxicated; he left Ono embarrassed after he had sex with a female guest. Ono's song "Death of Samantha" was inspired by the incident.
While Lennon was recording "Mind Games" in 1973, he and Ono decided to separate. The ensuing 18-month period apart, which he later called his "lost weekend", was spent in Los Angeles and New York City in the company of May Pang. "Mind Games", credited to the "Plastic U.F.Ono Band", was released in November 1973. Lennon also contributed "I'm the Greatest" to Starr's album "Ringo" (1973), released the same month. With Harrison joining Starr and Lennon at the recording session for the song, it marked the only occasion when three former Beatles recorded together between the band's break-up and Lennon's death.
In early 1974, Lennon was drinking heavily and his alcohol-fuelled antics with Harry Nilsson made headlines. In March, two widely publicised incidents occurred at The Troubadour club. In the first incident, Lennon stuck an unused menstrual pad on his forehead and scuffled with a waitress. The second incident occurred two weeks later, when Lennon and Nilsson were ejected from the same club after heckling the Smothers Brothers. Lennon decided to produce Nilsson's album "Pussy Cats", and Pang rented a Los Angeles beach house for all the musicians. After a month of further debauchery, the recording sessions were in chaos, and Lennon returned to New York with Pang to finish work on the album. In April, Lennon had produced the Mick Jagger song "Too Many Cooks (Spoil the Soup)" which was, for contractual reasons, to remain unreleased for more than 30 years. Pang supplied the recording for its eventual inclusion on "The Very Best of Mick Jagger" (2007).
Lennon had settled back in New York when he recorded the album "Walls and Bridges". Released in October 1974, it included "Whatever Gets You thru the Night", which featured Elton John on backing vocals and piano, and became Lennon's only single as a solo artist to top the US "Billboard" Hot 100 chart during his lifetime. A second single from the album, "#9 Dream", followed before the end of the year. Starr's "Goodnight Vienna" (1974) again saw assistance from Lennon, who wrote the title track and played piano. On 28 November, Lennon made a surprise guest appearance at Elton John's Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden, in fulfilment of his promise to join the singer in a live show if "Whatever Gets You thru the Night", a song whose commercial potential Lennon had doubted, reached number one. Lennon performed the song along with "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Saw Her Standing There", which he introduced as "a song by an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul".
Lennon co-wrote "Fame", David Bowie's first US number one, and provided guitar and backing vocals for the January 1975 recording. In the same month, Elton John topped the charts with his cover of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", featuring Lennon on guitar and back-up vocals; Lennon is credited on the single under the moniker of "Dr. Winston O'Boogie". He and Ono were reunited shortly afterwards. Lennon released "Rock 'n' Roll" (1975), an album of cover songs, in February. "Stand by Me", taken from the album and a US and UK hit, became his last single for five years. He made what would be his final stage appearance in the ATV special "A Salute to Lew Grade", recorded on 18 April and televised in June. Playing acoustic guitar and backed by an eight-piece band, Lennon performed two songs from "Rock 'n' Roll" ("Stand by Me", which was not broadcast, and "Slippin' and Slidin'") followed by "Imagine". The band, known as Etc., wore masks behind their heads, a dig by Lennon, who thought Grade was two-faced.
Sean was Lennon's only child with Ono. Sean was born on 9 October 1975 (Lennon's thirty-fifth birthday), and John took on the role of househusband. Lennon began what would be a five-year hiatus from the music industry, during which time, he later said, he "baked bread" and "looked after the baby". He devoted himself to Sean, rising at 6am daily to plan and prepare his meals and to spend time with him. He wrote "Cookin' (In the Kitchen of Love)" for Starr's "Ringo's Rotogravure" (1976), performing on the track in June in what would be his last recording session until 1980. He formally announced his break from music in Tokyo in 1977, saying, "we have basically decided, without any great decision, to be with our baby as much as we can until we feel we can take time off to indulge ourselves in creating things outside of the family." During his career break he created several series of drawings, and drafted a book containing a mix of autobiographical material and what he termed "mad stuff", all of which would be published posthumously.
Lennon emerged from his five-year interruption in music recording in October 1980, when he released the single "(Just Like) Starting Over". The following month saw the release of "Double Fantasy", which contained songs written during the summer of 1980, spent in Bermuda. Lennon sailed a 43-foot sailing boat with his younger son in June 1980 journey to the British colony, where they briefly lived at Knapton Hill before local businessman Rolf Oskar Luthi vacated his "Undercliff", his home at Fairylands, to enable the Lennons to take up temporary residence.
The music reflected Lennon's fulfilment in his new-found stable family life. Sufficient additional material was recorded for a planned follow-up album "Milk and Honey", which was released posthumously, in 1984. "Double Fantasy" was jointly released by Lennon and Ono very shortly before his death; the album was not well received and drew comments such as "Melody Maker"'s "indulgent sterility... a godawful yawn".
At approximately 5:00 p.m. on 8 December 1980, Lennon autographed a copy of "Double Fantasy" for fan Mark David Chapman before leaving The Dakota with Yoko for a recording session at the Record Plant. After the session, Lennon and Ono returned to their Manhattan apartment in a limousine at around 10:50p.m. EST. They exited the vehicle and walked through the archway of the building when Chapman shot Lennon four times in the back at close range. Lennon was rushed in a police cruiser to the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival at 11:00p.m. (EST).
Ono issued a statement the next day, saying "There is no funeral for John", ending it with the words, "John loved and prayed for the human race. Please do the same for him." His remains were cremated at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Ono scattered his ashes in New York's Central Park, where the Strawberry Fields memorial was later created. Chapman avoided going to trial when he ignored his attorney's advice and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20-years-to-life.
In the weeks following the murder, "(Just Like) Starting Over" and "Double Fantasy" topped the charts in the UK and the US. In a further example of the public outpouring of grief, "Imagine" hit number one in the UK in January 1981 and "Happy Xmas" peaked at number two. Later that year, Roxy Music's cover version of "Jealous Guy", recorded as a tribute to Lennon, was also a UK number-one.
Lennon met Cynthia Powell (1939–2015) in 1957, when they were fellow students at the Liverpool College of Art. Although Powell was intimidated by Lennon's attitude and appearance, she heard that he was obsessed with the French actress Brigitte Bardot, so she dyed her hair blonde. Lennon asked her out, but when she said that she was engaged, he screamed out, "I didn't ask you to fuckin' marry me, did I?" She often accompanied him to Quarrymen gigs and travelled to Hamburg with McCartney's girlfriend to visit him. Lennon was jealous by nature and eventually grew possessive, often terrifying Powell with his anger and physical violence. Lennon later said that until he met Ono, he had never questioned his chauvinistic attitude towards women. He said that the Beatles song "Getting Better" told his own story, "I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically – any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace."
Recalling his July 1962 reaction when he learned that Cynthia was pregnant, Lennon said, "There's only one thing for it Cyn. We'll have to get married." The couple wed on 23 August at the Mount Pleasant Register Office in Liverpool, with Brian Epstein serving as best man. His marriage began just as Beatlemania was taking off across the UK. He performed on the evening of his wedding day and would continue to do so almost daily from then on. Epstein feared that fans would be alienated by the idea of a married Beatle, and he asked the Lennons to keep their marriage secret. Julian was born on 8 April 1963; Lennon was on tour at the time and did not see his infant son until three days later.
Cynthia attributed the start of the marriage breakdown to Lennon's use of LSD, and she felt that he slowly lost interest in her as a result of his use of the drug. When the group travelled by train to Bangor, Wales in 1967 for the Maharishi Yogi's Transcendental Meditation seminar, a policeman did not recognise her and stopped her from boarding. She later recalled how the incident seemed to symbolise the end of their marriage. After Cynthia arrived home at Kenwood, she found Lennon with Ono and left the house to stay with friends. Alexis Mardas later claimed to have had sex with her that night, and a few weeks later he informed her that Lennon was seeking a divorce and custody of Julian on the grounds of her adultery with him. After negotiations, Lennon capitulated and agreed to let her divorce him on the same grounds. The case was settled out of court in November 1968, with Lennon giving her £100,000 ($240,000 in US dollars at the time), a small annual payment and custody of Julian.
The Beatles were performing at Liverpool's Cavern Club in November 1961 when they were introduced to Brian Epstein after a midday concert. Epstein was homosexual, and according to biographer Philip Norman, one of Epstein's reasons for wanting to manage the group was that he was attracted to Lennon. Almost as soon as Julian was born, Lennon went on holiday to Spain with Epstein, which led to speculation about their relationship. When he was later questioned about it, Lennon said, "Well, it was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was a pretty intense relationship. It was my first experience with a homosexual that I was conscious was homosexual. We used to sit in a café in Torremolinos looking at all the boys and I'd say, 'Do you like that one? Do you like this one?' I was rather enjoying the experience, thinking like a writer all the time: I am experiencing this." Soon after their return from Spain, at McCartney's twenty-first birthday party in June 1963, Lennon physically attacked Cavern Club master of ceremonies Bob Wooler for saying "How was your honeymoon, John?" The MC, known for his wordplay and affectionate but cutting remarks, was making a joke, but ten months had passed since Lennon's marriage, and the deferred honeymoon was still two months in the future. Lennon was drunk at the time and the matter was simple: "He called me a queer so I battered his bloody ribs in."
Lennon delighted in mocking Epstein for his homosexuality and for the fact that he was Jewish. When Epstein invited suggestions for the title of his autobiography, Lennon offered "Queer Jew"; on learning of the eventual title, "A Cellarful of Noise", he parodied, "More like "A Cellarful of Boys"". He demanded of a visitor to Epstein's flat, "Have you come to blackmail him? If not, you're the only bugger in London who hasn't." During the recording of "Baby, You're a Rich Man", he sang altered choruses of "Baby, you're a rich fag Jew".
During his marriage to Cynthia, Lennon's first son Julian was born at the same time that his commitments with the Beatles were intensifying at the height of Beatlemania. Lennon was touring with the Beatles when Julian was born on 8 April 1963. Julian's birth, like his mother Cynthia's marriage to Lennon, was kept secret because Epstein was convinced that public knowledge of such things would threaten the Beatles' commercial success. Julian recalled that as a small child in Weybridge some four years later, "I was trundled home from school and came walking up with one of my watercolour paintings. It was just a bunch of stars and this blonde girl I knew at school. And Dad said, 'What's this?' I said, 'It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds.'" Lennon used it as the title of a Beatles song, and though it was later reported to have been derived from the initials LSD, Lennon insisted, "It's not an acid song." Lennon was distant from Julian, who felt closer to McCartney than to his father. During a car journey to visit Cynthia and Julian during Lennon's divorce, McCartney composed a song, "Hey Jules", to comfort him. It would evolve into the Beatles song "Hey Jude". Lennon later said, "That's his best song. It started off as a song about my son Julian ... he turned it into 'Hey Jude'. I always thought it was about me and Yoko but he said it wasn't."
Lennon's relationship with Julian was already strained, and after Lennon and Ono moved to New York in 1971, Julian did not see his father again until 1973. With Pang's encouragement, arrangements were made for Julian and his mother to visit Lennon in Los Angeles, where they went to Disneyland. Julian started to see his father regularly, and Lennon gave him a drumming part on a "Walls and Bridges" track. He bought Julian a Gibson Les Paul guitar and other instruments, and encouraged his interest in music by demonstrating guitar chord techniques. Julian recalls that he and his father "got on a great deal better" during the time he spent in New York: "We had a lot of fun, laughed a lot and had a great time in general."
In a "Playboy" interview with David Sheff shortly before his death, Lennon said, "Sean is a planned child, and therein lies the difference. I don't love Julian any less as a child. He's still my son, whether he came from a bottle of whiskey or because they didn't have pills in those days. He's here, he belongs to me, and he always will." He said he was trying to reestablish a connection with the then 17-year-old, and confidently predicted, "Julian and I will have a relationship in the future." After his death it was revealed that he had left Julian very little in his will.
Lennon first met Yoko Ono on 9 November 1966 at the Indica Gallery in London, where Ono was preparing her conceptual art exhibit. They were introduced by gallery owner John Dunbar. Lennon was intrigued by Ono's "Hammer A Nail": patrons hammered a nail into a wooden board, creating the art piece. Although the exhibition had not yet begun, Lennon wanted to hammer a nail into the clean board, but Ono stopped him. Dunbar asked her, "Don't you know who this is? He's a millionaire! He might buy it." According to Lennon's recollection in 1980, Ono had not heard of the Beatles, but she relented on condition that Lennon pay her five shillings, to which Lennon said he replied, "I'll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in." Ono subsequently related that Lennon had taken a bite out of the apple on display in her work "Apple", much to her fury.
Ono began to telephone and visit Lennon at his home. When Cynthia asked him for an explanation, Lennon explained that Ono was only trying to obtain money for her "avant-garde bullshit". While his wife was on holiday in Greece in May 1968, Lennon invited Ono to visit. They spent the night recording what would become the "Two Virgins" album, after which, he said, they "made love at dawn". When Lennon's wife returned home she found Ono wearing her bathrobe and drinking tea with Lennon who simply said, "Oh, hi." Ono became pregnant in 1968 and miscarried a male child on 21 November 1968, a few weeks after Lennon's divorce from Cynthia was granted.
Two years before the Beatles disbanded, Lennon and Ono began public protests against the Vietnam War. They were married in Gibraltar on 20 March 1969, and spent their honeymoon at the Hilton Amsterdam, campaigning with a week-long Bed-In for Peace. They planned another Bed-In in the United States, but were denied entry, so held one instead at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, where they recorded "Give Peace a Chance". They often combined advocacy with performance art, as in their "Bagism", first introduced during a Vienna press conference. Lennon detailed this period in the Beatles song "The Ballad of John and Yoko". Lennon changed his name by deed poll on 22 April 1969, adding "Ono" as a middle name. The brief ceremony took place on the roof of the Apple Corps building, where the Beatles had performed their rooftop concert three months earlier. Although he used the name John Ono Lennon thereafter, official documents referred to him as John Winston Ono Lennon, since he was not permitted to revoke a name given at birth. The couple settled at Tittenhurst Park at Sunninghill in Berkshire. After Ono was injured in a car accident, Lennon arranged for a king-size bed to be brought to the recording studio as he worked on the Beatles' last album, "Abbey Road".
Ono and Lennon moved to New York, to a flat on Bank Street, Greenwich Village. Looking for somewhere with better security, they relocated in 1973 to the more secure Dakota overlooking Central Park at 1West72nd Street.
ABKCO Industries was formed in 1968 by Allen Klein as an umbrella company to ABKCO Records. Klein hired May Pang as a receptionist in 1969. Through involvement in a project with ABKCO, Lennon and Ono met her the following year. She became their personal assistant. In 1973, after she had been working with the couple for three years, Ono confided that she and Lennon were becoming estranged. She went on to suggest that Pang should begin a physical relationship with Lennon, telling her, "He likes you a lot." Astounded by Ono's proposition, Pang nevertheless agreed to become Lennon's companion. The pair soon left for Los Angeles, beginning an 18-month period he later called his "lost weekend". In Los Angeles, Pang encouraged Lennon to develop regular contact with Julian, whom he had not seen for two years. He also rekindled friendships with Starr, McCartney, Beatles roadie Mal Evans, and Harry Nilsson. While Lennon was drinking with Nilsson, he misunderstood something that Pang had said and attempted to strangle her. Lennon relented only after he was physically restrained by Nilsson.
In June, Lennon and Pang returned to Manhattan in their newly rented penthouse apartment where they prepared a spare room for Julian when he visited them. Lennon, who had been inhibited by Ono in this regard, began to reestablish contact with other relatives and friends. By December, he and Pang were considering a house purchase, and he refused to accept Ono's telephone calls. In January 1975, he agreed to meet Ono, who claimed to have found a cure for smoking. After the meeting, he failed to return home or call Pang. When Pang telephoned the next day, Ono told her that Lennon was unavailable because he was exhausted after a hypnotherapy session. Two days later, Lennon reappeared at a joint dental appointment; he was stupefied and confused to such an extent that Pang believed he had been brainwashed. Lennon told Pang that his separation from Ono was now over, although Ono would allow him to continue seeing her as his mistress.
Ono had previously suffered three miscarriages in her attempt to have a child with Lennon. When Ono and Lennon were reunited, she became pregnant again. She initially said that she wanted to have an abortion but changed her mind and agreed to allow the pregnancy to continue on condition that Lennon adopt the role of househusband, which he agreed to do.
Following Sean's birth, Lennon's subsequent hiatus from the music industry would span five years. He had a photographer take pictures of Sean every day of his first year and created numerous drawings for him, which were posthumously published as "Real Love: The Drawings for Sean". Lennon later proudly declared, "He didn't come out of my belly but, by God, I made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and to how he sleeps, and to the fact that he swims like a fish."
While Lennon and Starr remained consistently friendly during the years that followed the Beatles' break-up in 1970, his relationships with McCartney and Harrison varied. He was initially close to Harrison, but the two drifted apart after Lennon moved to the US in 1971. When Harrison was in New York for his December 1974 "Dark Horse" tour, Lennon agreed to join him on stage, but failed to appear after an argument over Lennon's refusal to sign an agreement that would finally dissolve the Beatles' legal partnership. Harrison later said that when he visited Lennon during his five years away from music, he sensed that Lennon was trying to communicate, but his bond with Ono prevented him. Harrison offended Lennon in 1980 when he published an autobiography that made little mention of him. Lennon told "Playboy", "I was hurt by it. By glaring omission... my influence on his life is absolutely zilch... he remembers every two-bit sax player or guitarist he met in subsequent years. I'm not in the book."
Lennon's most intense feelings were reserved for McCartney. In addition to attacking him with the lyrics of "How Do You Sleep?", Lennon argued with him through the press for three years after the group split. The two later began to reestablish something of the close friendship they had once known, and in 1974, they even played music together again before eventually growing apart once more. During McCartney's final visit in April 1976, Lennon said that they watched the episode of "Saturday Night Live" in which Lorne Michaels made a $3,000 offer to get the Beatles to reunite on the show. According to Lennon, the pair considered going to the studio to make a joke appearance, attempting to claim their share of the money, but were too tired. Lennon summarised his feelings towards McCartney in an interview three days before his death: "Throughout my career, I've selected to work with... only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono... That ain't bad picking."
Along with his estrangement from McCartney, Lennon always felt a musical competitiveness with him and kept an ear on his music. During his career break from 1975 until shortly before his death, according to Fred Seaman, Lennon and Ono's assistant at the time, Lennon was content to sit back as long as McCartney was producing what Lennon saw as mediocre material. Lennon took notice when McCartney released "Coming Up" in 1980, which was the year Lennon returned to the studio. "It's driving me crackers!" he jokingly complained, because he could not get the tune out of his head. That same year, Lennon was asked whether the group were dreaded enemies or the best of friends, and he replied that they were neither, and that he had not seen any of them in a long time. But he also said, "I still love those guys. The Beatles are over, but John, Paul, George and Ringo go on."
Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon as a Bed-In for Peace at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel; the March 1969 event attracted worldwide media ridicule. During a second Bed-In three months later at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Lennon wrote and recorded "Give Peace a Chance". Released as a single, the song was quickly interpreted as an anti-war anthem and sung by a quarter of a million demonstrators against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC, on 15 November, the second Vietnam Moratorium Day. In December, they paid for billboards in 10 cities around the world which declared, in the national language, "War Is Over! If You Want It".
During the year, Lennon and Ono began to support efforts by the family of James Hanratty to prove his innocence. Hanratty had been hanged in 1962. According to Lennon, those who had condemned Hanratty were "the same people who are running guns to South Africa and killing blacks in the streets ... The same bastards are in control, the same people are running everything, it's the whole bullshit bourgeois scene." In London, Lennon and Ono staged a "Britain Murdered Hanratty" banner march and a "Silent Protest For James Hanratty", and produced a 40-minute documentary on the case. At an appeal hearing more than thirty years later, Hanratty's conviction was upheld after DNA evidence was found to match.
Lennon and Ono showed their solidarity with the Clydeside UCS workers' work-in of 1971 by sending a bouquet of red roses and a cheque for £5,000. On moving to New York City in August that year, they befriended two of the Chicago Seven, Yippie peace activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Another political activist, John Sinclair, poet and co-founder of the White Panther Party, was serving ten years in prison for selling two joints of marijuana after previous convictions for possession of the drug. In December 1971 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, 15,000 people attended the "John Sinclair Freedom Rally", a protest and benefit concert with contributions from Lennon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Seger, Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party, and others. Lennon and Ono, backed by David Peel and Jerry Rubin, performed an acoustic set of four songs from their forthcoming "Some Time in New York City" album including "John Sinclair", whose lyrics called for his release. The day before the rally, the Michigan Senate passed a bill that significantly reduced the penalties for possession of marijuana and four days later Sinclair was released on an appeal bond. The performance was recorded and two of the tracks later appeared on "John Lennon Anthology" (1998).
Following the Bloody Sunday incident in Northern Ireland in 1972, in which fourteen unarmed civil rights protesters were shot dead by the British Army, Lennon said that given the choice between the army and the IRA (who were not involved in the incident) he would side with the latter. Lennon and Ono wrote two songs protesting British presence and actions in Ireland for their "Some Time in New York City" album: "The Luck of the Irish" and "Sunday Bloody Sunday". In 2000, David Shayler, a former member of Britain's domestic security service MI5, suggested that Lennon had given money to the IRA, though this was swiftly denied by Ono. Biographer Bill Harry records that following Bloody Sunday, Lennon and Ono financially supported the production of the film "The Irish Tapes", a political documentary with a Irish Republican slant.
According to FBI surveillance reports, and confirmed by Tariq Ali in 2006, Lennon was sympathetic to the International Marxist Group, a Trotskyist group formed in Britain in 1968. However, the FBI considered Lennon to have limited effectiveness as a revolutionary, as he was "constantly under the influence of narcotics".
In 1973, Lennon contributed a limerick called "Why Make It Sad to Be Gay?" to Len Richmond's "The Gay Liberation Book". Lennon's last act of political activism was a statement in support of the striking minority sanitation workers in San Francisco on 5 December 1980. He and Ono planned to join the workers' protest on 14 December.
Following the impact of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" on the anti-war movement, the Nixon administration heard rumours of Lennon's involvement in a concert to be held in San Diego at the same time as the Republican National Convention and tried to have him deported. Nixon believed that Lennon's anti-war activities could cost him his reelection; Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a February 1972 memo that "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure" against Lennon. The next month the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deportation proceedings, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanour conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the United States. Lennon spent the next three-and-a-half years in and out of deportation hearings until 8 October 1975, when a court of appeals barred the deportation attempt, stating "the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds". While the legal battle continued, Lennon attended rallies and made television appearances. He and Ono co-hosted "The Mike Douglas Show" for a week in February 1972, introducing guests such as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to mid-America. In 1972, Bob Dylan wrote a letter to the INS defending Lennon, stating:
John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country's so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!
On 23 March 1973, Lennon was ordered to leave the US within 60 days. Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York City Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people". Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. The press conference was filmed, and appeared in a 2006 documentary, "The US vs. John Lennon". Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. In December 1974, when he and members of his tour entourage visited the White House, Harrison asked Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor, to intercede in the matter. Ford's administration showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. The following year, Lennon received his "green card" certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.
After Lennon's death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files that documented the Bureau's role in the deportation attempt. The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on Lennon, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages. The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991. The Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case. In 1997, respecting President Bill Clinton's newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm", the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents.
Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files" contained facsimiles of the documents, including "lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges". The story is told in the documentary "The US vs. John Lennon". The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality", were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped Lennon would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.
Beatles biographer Bill Harry wrote that Lennon began drawing and writing creatively at an early age with the encouragement of his uncle. He collected his stories, poetry, cartoons and caricatures in a Quarry Bank High School exercise book that he called the "Daily Howl". The drawings were often of crippled people, and the writings satirical, and throughout the book was an abundance of wordplay. According to classmate Bill Turner, Lennon created the "Daily Howl" to amuse his best friend and later Quarrymen bandmate Pete Shotton, to whom he would show his work before he let anyone else see it. Turner said that Lennon "had an obsession for Wigan Pier. It kept cropping up", and in Lennon's story "A Carrot in a Potato Mine", "the mine was at the end of Wigan Pier." Turner described how one of Lennon's cartoons depicted a bus stop sign annotated with the question, "Why?" Above was a flying pancake, and below, "a blind man wearing glasses leading along a blind dog – also wearing glasses".
Lennon's love of wordplay and nonsense with a twist found a wider audience when he was 24. Harry writes that "In His Own Write" (1964) was published after "Some journalist who was hanging around the Beatles came to me and I ended up showing him the stuff. They said, 'Write a book' and that's how the first one came about". Like the "Daily Howl" it contained a mix of formats including short stories, poetry, plays and drawings. One story, "Good Dog Nigel", tells the tale of "a happy dog, urinating on a lamp post, barking, wagging his tail – until he suddenly hears a message that he will be killed at three o'clock". "The Times Literary Supplement" considered the poems and stories "remarkable ... also very funny ... the nonsense runs on, words and images prompting one another in a chain of pure fantasy". "Book Week" reported, "This is nonsense writing, but one has only to review the literature of nonsense to see how well Lennon has brought it off. While some of his homonyms are gratuitous word play, many others have not only double meaning but a double edge." Lennon was not only surprised by the positive reception, but that the book was reviewed at all, and suggested that readers "took the book more seriously than I did myself. It just began as a laugh for me".
In combination with "A Spaniard in the Works" (1965), "In His Own Write" formed the basis of the stage play "The John Lennon Play: In His Own Write", co-adapted by Victor Spinetti and Adrienne Kennedy. After negotiations between Lennon, Spinetti and the artistic director of the National Theatre, Sir Laurence Olivier, the play opened at The Old Vic in 1968. Lennon and Ono attended the opening night performance, their second public appearance together. In 1969, Lennon wrote "Four in Hand", a skit based on his teenage experiences of group masturbation, for Kenneth Tynan's play "Oh! Calcutta!" After Lennon's death, further works were published, including "Skywriting by Word of Mouth" (1986), "Ai: Japan Through John Lennon's Eyes: A Personal Sketchbook" (1992), with Lennon's illustrations of the definitions of Japanese words, and "Real Love: The Drawings for Sean" (1999). "The Beatles Anthology" (2000) also presented examples of his writings and drawings.
Lennon played a mouth organ during a bus journey to visit his cousin in Scotland; the music caught the driver's ear. Impressed, the driver told Lennon of a harmonica he could have if he came to Edinburgh the following day, where one had been stored in the bus depot since a passenger had left it on a bus. The professional instrument quickly replaced Lennon's toy. He would continue to play the harmonica, often using the instrument during the Beatles' Hamburg years, and it became a signature sound in the group's early recordings. His mother taught him how to play the banjo, later buying him an acoustic guitar. At 16, he played rhythm guitar with the Quarrymen.
As his career progressed, he played a variety of electric guitars, predominantly the Rickenbacker 325, Epiphone Casino and Gibson J-160E, and, from the start of his solo career, the Gibson Les Paul Junior. "Double Fantasy" producer Jack Douglas claimed that since his Beatle days Lennon habitually tuned his D-string slightly flat, so his Aunt Mimi could tell which guitar was his on recordings. Occasionally he played a six-string bass guitar, the Fender Bass VI, providing bass on some Beatles numbers ("Back in the U.S.S.R.", "The Long and Winding Road", "Helter Skelter") that occupied McCartney with another instrument. His other instrument of choice was the piano, on which he composed many songs, including "Imagine", described as his best-known solo work. His jamming on a piano with McCartney in 1963 led to the creation of the Beatles' first US number one, "I Want to Hold Your Hand". In 1964, he became one of the first British musicians to acquire a Mellotron keyboard, though it was not heard on a Beatles recording until "Strawberry Fields Forever" in 1967.
When the Beatles recorded "Twist and Shout", the final track during the mammoth one-day session that produced the band's 1963 debut album, "Please Please Me", Lennon's voice, already compromised by a cold, came close to giving out. Lennon said, "I couldn't sing the damn thing, I was just screaming." In the words of biographer Barry Miles, "Lennon simply shredded his vocal cords in the interests of rock 'n' roll." The Beatles' producer, George Martin, tells how Lennon "had an inborn dislike of his own voice which I could never understand. He was always saying to me: 'DO something with my voice! ... put something on it... Make it "different".'" Martin obliged, often using double-tracking and other techniques.
As his Beatles era segued into his solo career, his singing voice found a widening range of expression. Biographer Chris Gregory writes of Lennon "tentatively beginning to expose his insecurities in a number of acoustic-led 'confessional' ballads, so beginning the process of 'public therapy' that will eventually culminate in the primal screams of 'Cold Turkey' and the cathartic "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band"." Music critic Robert Christgau calls this Lennon's "greatest vocal performance... from scream to whine, is modulated electronically... echoed, filtered, and double tracked." David Stuart Ryan notes Lennon's vocal delivery to range from "extreme vulnerability, sensitivity and even naivety" to a hard "rasping" style. Wiener too describes contrasts, saying the singer's voice can be "at first subdued; soon it almost cracks with despair". Music historian Ben Urish recalls hearing the Beatles' "Ed Sullivan Show" performance of "This Boy" played on the radio a few days after Lennon's murder: "As Lennon's vocals reached their peak... it hurt too much to hear him scream with such anguish and emotion. But it was my emotions I heard in his voice. Just like I always had."
Music historians Schinder and Schwartz wrote of the transformation in popular music styles that took place between the 1950s and the 1960s. They said that the Beatles' influence cannot be overstated: having "revolutionised the sound, style, and attitude of popular music and opened rock and roll's doors to a tidal wave of British rock acts", the group then "spent the rest of the 1960s expanding rock's stylistic frontiers". Liam Gallagher and his group Oasis were among the many who acknowledged the band's influence; he identified Lennon as a hero. In 1999, he named his first son Lennon Gallagher in tribute. On National Poetry Day in 1999, the BBC conducted a poll to identify the UK's favourite song lyric and announced "Imagine" as the winner.
In 1997, Yoko Ono and the BMI Foundation established an annual music competition programme for songwriters of contemporary musical genres to honour John Lennon's memory and his large creative legacy. Over $400,000 have been given through BMI Foundation's "John Lennon Scholarships" to talented young musicians in the United States.
In a 2006 "Guardian" article, Jon Wiener wrote: "For young people in 1972, it was thrilling to see Lennon's courage in standing up to [US President] Nixon. That willingness to take risks with his career, and his life, is one reason why people still admire him today." For music historians Urish and Bielen, Lennon's most significant effort was "the self-portraits ... in his songs [which] spoke to, for, and about, the human condition."
In 2013, Downtown Music Publishing signed a publishing administration agreement for the US with Lenono Music and Ono Music, home to the song catalogues of John Lennon and Yoko Ono respectively. Under the terms of the agreement, Downtown represents Lennon's solo works, including "Imagine", "Instant Karma (We All Shine On)", "Power to the People", "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", "Jealous Guy", "(Just Like) Starting Over" and others.
Lennon continues to be mourned throughout the world and has been the subject of numerous memorials and tributes. In 2002, the airport in Lennon's home town was renamed the Liverpool John Lennon Airport. On what would have been Lennon's 70th birthday in 2010, Cynthia and Julian Lennon unveiled the John Lennon Peace Monument in Chavasse Park, Liverpool. The sculpture, entitled "Peace & Harmony", exhibits peace symbols and carries the inscription "Peace on Earth for the Conservation of Life · In Honour of John Lennon 1940–1980". In December 2013, the International Astronomical Union named one of the craters on Mercury after Lennon.
The Lennon–McCartney songwriting partnership is regarded as one of the most influential and successful of the 20th century. As performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number one singles in the US Hot 100 chart. His album sales in the US stand at 14 million units. "Double Fantasy" was his best-selling solo album, at three million shipments in the US. Released shortly before his death, it won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. The following year, the BRIT Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music was given to Lennon.
Participants in a 2002 BBC poll voted him eighth of "100 Greatest Britons". Between 2003 and 2008, "Rolling Stone" recognised Lennon in several reviews of artists and music, ranking him fifth of "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and 38th of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time", and his albums "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band" and "Imagine", 22nd and 76th respectively of "Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". He was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) with the other Beatles in 1965 (returned in 1969). Lennon was posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1987 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
All releases after his death in 1980 use archival footage.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15852
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John Cleese
John Marwood Cleese (; born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, screenwriter, and producer. He achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on "The Frost Report". In the late 1960s, he co-founded Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Along with his Python co-stars Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman, Cleese starred in Monty Python films, which include "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975), "Life of Brian" (1979) and "The Meaning of Life" (1983).
In the mid-1970s, Cleese and his first wife, Connie Booth, co-wrote the sitcom "Fawlty Towers", and he starred in it as Basil Fawlty. The series resulted in Cleese receiving the 1980 BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance, and in 2000 the show topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. In a 2001 Channel 4 poll, Basil was ranked second on their list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters. Cleese co-starred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and former Python colleague Michael Palin in "A Fish Called Wanda" (1989) and "Fierce Creatures" (1997), both of which he also wrote; for "A Fish Called Wanda", he was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He has also starred in "Time Bandits" (1981) and "Rat Race" (2001) and has appeared in many other films, including "Silverado" (1985), "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994), two "James Bond" films (as R and Q), two "Harry Potter" films (as Nearly Headless Nick), and the last three "Shrek" films.
Emerging from the Cambridge Footlights in the 1960s, Cleese specialises in satire, black comedy, sketch comedy and surreal humour. With "Yes Minister" writer Antony Jay, he co-founded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films. In 1976, Cleese co-founded "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit shows to raise funds for the human rights organisation Amnesty International. Although a long-running supporter of the Liberal Democrats, in 1999 he turned down a life peerage offer from the party.
Cleese was born in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, the only child of Reginald Francis Cleese (1893–1972), an insurance salesman, and his wife Muriel Evelyn ("née" Cross, 1899–2000, the daughter of an auctioneer). His family's surname was originally Cheese, but his father had thought it was embarrassing and used the name 'Cleese' when he enlisted in the Army during the First World War; he changed it officially by deed poll in 1923. As a child, Cleese supported Bristol City FC and Somerset County Cricket Club. Cleese was educated at St Peter's Preparatory School (paid for by money his mother inherited), where he received a prize for English and did well at cricket and boxing. When he was 13, he was awarded an exhibition at Clifton College, an English public school in Bristol. He was already more than 6 feet (1.83 m) tall by then.
Cleese allegedly defaced the school grounds, as a prank, by painting footprints to suggest that the statue of Field Marshal Earl Haig had got down from his plinth and gone to the toilet. Cleese played cricket in the First XI and did well academically, passing eight O-Levels and three A-Levels in mathematics, physics and chemistry. In his autobiography "So, Anyway", he says that discovering, aged 17, he had not been made a house prefect by his housemaster affected his outlook: "It was not fair and therefore it was unworthy of my respect ... I believe that this moment changed my perspective on the world."
Cleese could not go straight to Cambridge, as the ending of National Service meant there were twice the usual number of applicants for places, so he returned to his prep school for two years to teach science, English, geography, history, and Latin (he drew on his Latin teaching experience later for a scene in "Life of Brian", in which he corrects Brian's badly written Latin graffiti). He then took up a place he had won at Downing College, Cambridge, to read Law. He also joined the Cambridge Footlights. He recalled that he went to the Cambridge Guildhall, where each university society had a stall, and went up to the Footlights stall where he was asked if he could sing or dance. He replied "no" as he was not allowed to sing at his school because he was so bad, and if there was anything worse than his singing, it was his dancing. He was then asked "Well, what do you do?" to which he replied, "I make people laugh."
At the Footlights theatrical club, Cleese spent a lot of time with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie and met his future writing partner Graham Chapman. Cleese wrote extra material for the 1961 Footlights Revue "I Thought I Saw It Move", and was registrar for the Footlights Club during 1962. He was also in the cast of the 1962 Footlights Revue "Double Take!" Cleese graduated from Cambridge in 1963 with an upper second. Despite his successes on "The Frost Report", his father sent him cuttings from "The Daily Telegraph" offering management jobs in places like Marks & Spencer.
Cleese was a scriptwriter, as well as a cast member, for the 1963 Footlights Revue "A Clump of Plinths". The revue was so successful at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe that it was renamed "Cambridge Circus" and taken to the West End in London and then on a tour of New Zealand and Broadway, with the cast also appearing in some of the revue's sketches on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in October 1964.
After "Cambridge Circus", Cleese briefly stayed in America, performing on and off-Broadway. While performing in the musical "Half a Sixpence", Cleese met future Python Terry Gilliam, as well as American actress Connie Booth, whom he married on 20 February 1968. At their wedding at a Unitarian Church in Manhattan, the couple attempted to ensure an absence of any theistic language. "The only moment of disappointment," Cleese recalled, "came at the very end of the service when I discovered that I'd failed to excise one particular mention of the word 'God.'" Later, Booth became a writing partner.
He was soon offered work as a writer with BBC Radio, where he worked on several programmes, most notably as a sketch writer for "The Dick Emery Show". The success of the Footlights Revue led to the recording of a short series of half-hour radio programmes, called "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again", which were so popular that the BBC commissioned a regular series with the same title that ran from 1965 to 1974. Cleese returned to Britain and joined the cast. In many episodes, he is credited as "John Otto Cleese" (according to Jem Roberts, this may have been due to the embarrassment of his actual middle name Marwood).
Also in 1965, Cleese and Chapman began writing on "The Frost Report". The writing staff chosen for "The Frost Report" consisted of a number of writers and performers who went on to make names for themselves in comedy. They included co-performers from "I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again" and future Goodies Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor, and also Frank Muir, Barry Cryer, Marty Feldman, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Dick Vosburgh and future Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. While working on "The Frost Report", the future Pythons developed the writing styles that would make their collaboration significant. Cleese's and Chapman's sketches often involved authority figures, some of whom were performed by Cleese, while Jones and Palin were both infatuated with filmed scenes that opened with idyllic countryside panoramas. Idle was one of those charged with writing David Frost's monologue. During this period Cleese met and befriended influential British comedian Peter Cook.
It was as a performer on "The Frost Report" that Cleese achieved his breakthrough on British television as a comedy actor, appearing as the tall, "upper class" patrician figure in the classic "Class" sketch (screened on 7 April 1966), contrasting comically in a line-up with the shorter, "middle class" Ronnie Barker and the even shorter, "working class" Ronnie Corbett. The British Film Institute commented, "Its twinning of height and social position, combined with a minimal script, created a classic TV moment." This series was so popular that in 1966 Cleese and Chapman were invited to work as writers and performers with Brooke-Taylor and Feldman on "At Last the 1948 Show", during which time the "Four Yorkshiremen sketch" was written by all four writers/performers (the Four Yorkshiremen sketch is now better known as a Monty Python sketch). Cleese and Chapman also wrote episodes for the first series of "Doctor in the House" (and later Cleese wrote six episodes of "Doctor at Large" on his own in 1971). These series were successful, and in 1969 Cleese and Chapman were offered their very own series. However, owing to Chapman's alcoholism, Cleese found himself bearing an increasing workload in the partnership and was, therefore, unenthusiastic about doing a series with just the two of them. He had found working with Palin on "The Frost Report" an enjoyable experience and invited him to join the series. Palin had previously been working on "Do Not Adjust Your Set" with Idle and Jones, with Terry Gilliam creating the animations. The four of them had, on the back of the success of "Do Not Adjust Your Set", been offered a series for Thames Television, which they were waiting to begin when Cleese's offer arrived. Palin agreed to work with Cleese and Chapman in the meantime, bringing with him Gilliam, Jones, and Idle.
"Monty Python's Flying Circus" ran for four seasons from October 1969 to December 1974 on BBC Television, though Cleese quit the show after the third. Cleese's two primary characterisations were as a sophisticated and a stressed-out loony. He portrayed the former as a series of announcers, TV show hosts, and government officials (for example, "The Ministry of Silly Walks"). The latter is perhaps best represented in the "Cheese Shop" and by Cleese's Mr Praline character, the man with a dead Norwegian Blue parrot and a menagerie of other animals all named "Eric". He was also known for his working class "Sergeant Major" character, who worked as a Police Sergeant, Roman Centurion, etc. Cleese also appeared during some abrupt scene changes as a radio commentator (usually outfitted in a dinner suit) where, in a rather pompous manner, he would make the formal and determined announcement "And now for something completely different", which later became the title of the first Monty Python film.
Along with Gilliam's animations, Cleese's work with Graham Chapman provided Python with its darkest and angriest moments, and many of his characters display the seething suppressed rage that later characterised his portrayal of Basil Fawlty.
Unlike Palin and Jones, Cleese and Chapman wrote together in the same room; Cleese claims that their writing partnership involved him doing most of the work, while Chapman sat back, not speaking for long periods before suddenly coming out with an idea that often elevated the sketch to a new level. A classic example of this is the "Dead Parrot sketch", envisaged by Cleese as a satire on poor customer service, which was originally to have involved a broken toaster and later a broken car (this version was actually performed and broadcast on the pre-Python special "How to Irritate People"). It was Chapman's suggestion to change the faulty item into a dead parrot, and he also suggested that the parrot be specifically a "Norwegian Blue", giving the sketch a surreal air which made it far more memorable.
Their humour often involved ordinary people in ordinary situations behaving absurdly for no obvious reason. Like Chapman, Cleese's poker face, clipped middle class accent, and intimidating height allowed him to appear convincingly as a variety of authority figures, such as policemen, detectives, Nazi officers or government officials, which he then proceeded to undermine. In the "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch (written by Palin and Jones), for example, Cleese exploits his stature as the crane-legged civil servant performing a grotesquely elaborate walk to his office. On the Silly Walks sketch, Ben Beaumont-Thomas in "The Guardian" writes, “Cleese is utterly deadpan as he takes the stereotypical bowler-hatted political drone and ruthlessly skewers him. All the self-importance, bureaucratic inefficiency and laughable circuitousness of Whitehall is summed up in one balletic extension of his slender leg.”
Chapman and Cleese also specialised in sketches where two characters conducted highly articulate arguments over completely arbitrary subjects, such as in the "cheese shop", the "dead parrot" sketch and "Argument Clinic", where Cleese plays a stone-faced bureaucrat employed to sit behind a desk and engage people in pointless, trivial bickering. All of these roles were opposite Palin (who Cleese often claims is his favourite Python to work with)—the comic contrast between the towering Cleese's crazed aggression and the shorter Palin's shuffling inoffensiveness is a common feature in the series. Occasionally, the typical Cleese–Palin dynamic is reversed, as in "Fish Licence", wherein Palin plays the bureaucrat with whom Cleese is trying to work.
Though "Flying Circus" lasted four series, by the start of series 3, Cleese was growing tired of dealing with Chapman's alcoholism. He felt, too, that the show's scripts had declined in quality. For these reasons, he became restless and decided to move on. Though he stayed for the third series, he officially left the group before the fourth season. Cleese received a credit on three episodes of the fourth series which used material from these sessions, though he was officially unconnected with the fourth series. He remained friendly with the group, and all six began writing "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". Much of his work on "Holy Grail" remains widely quoted, including the Black Knight scene. Cleese returned to the troupe to co-write and co-star in two further Monty Python films, "Monty Python's Life of Brian" and "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life". His attack on Roman rule in "Life of Brian" – where he asks "What have the Romans ever done for us?", before being met with a string of benefits including sanitation, roads and public order – was ranked the seventh funniest line in film in a 2002 poll. Since the last Python film ("Meaning of Life" in 1983) Cleese has participated in various live performances with the group over the years.
From 1970 to 1973, Cleese served as rector of the University of St Andrews. His election proved a milestone for the university, revolutionising and modernising the post. For instance, the rector was traditionally entitled to appoint an "Assessor", a deputy to sit in his place at important meetings in his absence. Cleese changed this into a position for a student, elected across campus by the student body, resulting in direct access and representation for the student body.
Around this time, Cleese worked with comedian Les Dawson on his sketch/stand-up show "Sez Les". The differences between the two physically (the tall, lean Cleese and the short, stout Dawson) and socially (the public school, and then Cambridge-educated Cleese and the working class, self-educated Mancunian Dawson) were marked, but both worked well together from series 8 onwards until the series ended in 1976.
Cleese starred in the low-budget spoof of the Sherlock Holmes detective series, "The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It" (1977), as the grandson of the world's greatest consulting detective. In December 1977, Cleese appeared as a guest star on "The Muppet Show". Ranked one of the best guest stars to appear on the show, Cleese was a fan of "The Muppet Show" and co-wrote much of the episode. In it he is "kidnapped" before the show begins, complains about the number of pigs, and gets roped into doing a closing number with Kermit the Frog, Sweetums, pigs, chickens and monsters. Cleese also made a cameo appearance in their 1981 film "The Great Muppet Caper" and won the "TV Times" award for Funniest Man on TV – 1978–79. In 1979, he starred in a TV special, "To Norway, Home of Giants", produced by Johnny Bergh.
Throughout the 1970s, Cleese also produced and acted in a number of successful business training films, including "Meetings, Bloody Meetings," and "More Bloody Meetings". These were produced by his company Video Arts.
Cleese achieved greater prominence in the United Kingdom as the neurotic hotel manager Basil Fawlty in "Fawlty Towers", which he co-wrote with his wife Connie Booth. The series won three BAFTA awards when produced and in 2000, it topped the British Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes. In a 2001 poll conducted by Channel 4 Basil Fawlty was ranked second (behind Homer Simpson) on their list of the 100 Greatest TV Characters. The series also featured Prunella Scales as Basil's acerbic wife Sybil, Andrew Sachs as the much abused Spanish waiter Manuel, and Booth as waitress Polly, the series' voice of sanity. Cleese based Basil Fawlty on a real person, Donald Sinclair, whom he had encountered in 1970 while the Monty Python team were staying at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay while filming inserts for their television series. Reportedly, Cleese was inspired by Sinclair's mantra, "I could run this hotel just fine if it weren't for the guests." He later described Sinclair as "the most wonderfully rude man I have ever met," although Sinclair's widow has said her husband was totally misrepresented in the series. During the Pythons' stay, Sinclair allegedly threw Idle's briefcase out of the hotel "in case it contained a bomb," complained about Gilliam's "American" table manners, and threw a bus timetable at another guest after they dared to ask the time of the next bus to town.
The first series was screened from 19 September 1975 on BBC 2, initially to poor reviews, but gained momentum when repeated on BBC 1 the following year. Despite this, a second series did not air until 1979, by which time Cleese's marriage to Booth had ended, but they revived their collaboration for the second series. "Fawlty Towers" consisted of two seasons, each of only six episodes; Cleese and Booth both maintain that this was to avoid compromising the quality of the series. The popularity of "Fawlty Towers" has endured, and in addition to featuring high in greatest ever television show polls it is often re-broadcast. In a 2002 poll, Basil's "don't mention the war" comment (said to the waitress Polly about the German guests) was ranked the second funniest line in television.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Cleese focused on film, though he did work with Peter Cook in his one-off TV special "Peter Cook and Co." in 1980. In the same year, Cleese played Petruchio, in Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" in the BBC Television Shakespeare series. In 1981 he appeared in the Terry Gilliam-directed "Time Bandits" as Robin Hood. He also participated in "Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl" (filmed 1980, released 1982) and starred in "The Secret Policeman's Ball" for Amnesty International. In 1985, Cleese had a small dramatic role as a sheriff in "Silverado", which had an all-star cast that included Kevin Kline, with whom he starred in "A Fish Called Wanda" three years later. In 1986, he starred in "Clockwise" as an uptight school headmaster obsessed with punctuality and constantly getting into trouble during a journey to speak at the Headmasters' Conference. Timed with the 1987 UK elections, he appeared in a video promoting proportional representation.
In 1988, he wrote and starred in "A Fish Called Wanda" as the lead, Archie Leach, along with Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin. "Wanda" was a commercial and critical success, and Cleese was nominated for an Academy Award for his script. Cynthia Cleese starred as Leach's daughter. Graham Chapman was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1989; Cleese, Michael Palin, Peter Cook, and Chapman's partner David Sherlock, witnessed Chapman's death. Chapman's death occurred a day before the 20th anniversary of the first broadcast of "Flying Circus", with Jones commenting, "the worst case of party-pooping in all history." Cleese gave a eulogy at Chapman's memorial service.
Cleese later played a supporting role in Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" (1994) alongside Branagh himself and Robert De Niro. With Robin Skynner, the group analyst and family therapist, Cleese wrote two books on relationships: "Families and How to Survive Them", and "Life and How to Survive It". The books are presented as a dialogue between Skynner and Cleese.
The follow-up to "A Fish Called Wanda", "Fierce Creatures"—which again starred Cleese alongside Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin—was released in 1997, but was greeted with mixed reception by critics and audiences. Cleese has since often stated that making the second film had been a mistake. When asked by his friend, director and restaurant critic Michael Winner, what he would do differently if he could live his life again, Cleese responded, "I wouldn't have married Alyce Faye Eichelberger and I wouldn't have made "Fierce Creatures"."
In 1999, Cleese appeared in the James Bond film, "The World Is Not Enough" as Q's assistant, referred to by Bond as "R". In 2002, when Cleese reprised his role in "Die Another Day", the character was promoted, making Cleese the new quartermaster (Q) of MI6. In 2004, Cleese was featured as Q in the video game "", featuring his likeness and voice. Cleese did not appear in the subsequent Bond films, "Casino Royale", "Quantum of Solace" and "Skyfall"; in the latter film, Ben Whishaw was cast in the role of Q.
Cleese is Provost's Visiting Professor at Cornell University, after having been Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large from 1999 to 2006. He makes occasional well-received appearances on the Cornell campus. In 2001, Cleese was cast in the comedy "Rat Race" as the eccentric hotel owner Donald P. Sinclair, the name of the Torquay hotel owner on whom he had based the character of Basil Fawlty. In 2002, Cleese made a cameo appearance in the film "The Adventures of Pluto Nash" in which he played "James", a computerised chauffeur of a hover car stolen by the title character (played by Eddie Murphy). The vehicle is subsequently destroyed in a chase, leaving the chauffeur stranded in a remote place on the moon. In 2003, Cleese appeared as Lyle Finster on the US sitcom "Will & Grace". His character's daughter, Lorraine, was played by Minnie Driver. In the series, Lyle Finster briefly marries Karen Walker (Megan Mullally). In 2004, Cleese was credited as co-writer of a DC Comics graphic novel titled "". Part of DC's "Elseworlds" line of imaginary stories, "True Brit", mostly written by Kim Howard Johnson, suggests what might have happened had Superman's rocket ship landed in Britain, not America.
From 10 November to 9 December 2005, Cleese toured New Zealand with his stage show, "John Cleese—His Life, Times and Current Medical Problems". Cleese described it as "a one-man show with several people in it, which pushes the envelope of acceptable behaviour in new and disgusting ways". The show was developed in New York City with William Goldman and includes Cleese's daughter Camilla as a writer and actor (the shows were directed by Australian Bille Brown). His assistant of many years, Garry Scott-Irvine, also appeared and was listed as a co-producer. The show then played in universities in California and Arizona from 10 January to 25 March 2006 under the title "Seven Ways to Skin an Ocelot". His voice can be downloaded for directional guidance purposes as a downloadable option on some personal GPS-navigation device models by company TomTom.
In a 2005 poll of comedians and comedy insiders, "The Comedians' Comedian", Cleese was voted second to Peter Cook. Also in 2005, a long-standing piece of Internet humour, "The Revocation of Independence of the United States", was wrongly attributed to Cleese. In 2006, Cleese hosted a television special of football's greatest kicks, goals, saves, bloopers, plays, and penalties, as well as football's influence on culture (including the Monty Python sketch "Philosophy Football"), featuring interviews with pop culture icons Dave Stewart, Dennis Hopper, and Henry Kissinger, as well as eminent footballers including Pelé, Mia Hamm, and Thierry Henry. "The Art of Soccer with John Cleese" was released in North America on DVD in January 2009 by BFS Entertainment & Multimedia. Also in 2006, Cleese released the song "Don't Mention the World Cup".
Cleese lent his voice to the BioWare video game "Jade Empire". His role was that of an "outlander" named Sir Roderick Ponce von Fontlebottom the Magnificent Bastard, stranded in the Imperial City of the Jade Empire. His character is essentially a British colonialist stereotype who refers to the people of the Jade Empire as "savages in need of enlightenment". His armour has the design of a fork stuck in a piece of cheese. In 2007, Cleese appeared in ads for Titleist as a golf course designer named "Ian MacCallister", who represents "Golf Designers Against Distance". Also in 2007, he started filming the sequel to "The Pink Panther", titled "The Pink Panther 2", with Steve Martin and Aishwarya Rai.
Cleese collaborated with Los Angeles Guitar Quartet member William Kanengiser in 2008 on the text to the performance piece "The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha". Cleese, as narrator, and the LAGQ premiered the work in Santa Barbara. 2008 also saw reports of Cleese working on a musical version of "A Fish Called Wanda" with his daughter Camilla.
At the end of March 2009, Cleese published his first article as "Contributing Editor" to "The Spectator": "The real reason I had to join "The Spectator"". Cleese has also hosted comedy galas at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival in 2006, and again in 2009. Towards the end of 2009 and into 2010, Cleese appeared in a series of television adverts for the Norwegian electric goods shop chain, Elkjøp. In March 2010 it was announced that Cleese would be playing Jasper in the video game "Fable III".
In 2009 and 2010, Cleese toured Scandinavia and the US with his Alimony Tour Year One and Year Two. In May 2010, it was announced that this tour would extend to the UK (his first tour in the UK), set for May 2011. The show is dubbed the "Alimony Tour" in reference to the financial implications of Cleese's divorce. The UK tour started in Cambridge on 3 May, visiting Birmingham, Nottingham, Salford, York, Liverpool, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Oxford, Bristol and Bath (the Alimony Tour DVD was recorded on 2 July, the final Bath date). Later in 2011 John took his Alimony Tour to South Africa. He played Cape Town on the 21 & 22 October before moving over to Johannesburg where he played from 25 to 30 October. In January 2012 he took his one-man show to Australia, starting in Perth on 22 Jan and throughout the next 4 months visited Adelaide, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Newcastle, New South Wales, Melbourne, Sydney, and finished up during April in Canberra.
In October 2010, Cleese was featured in the launch of an advertising campaign by The Automobile Association for a new home emergency response product. He appeared as a man who believed the AA could not help him during a series of disasters, including water pouring through his ceiling, with the line "The AA? For faulty showers?" During 2010, Cleese appeared in a series of radio advertisements for the Canadian insurance company Pacific Blue Cross, in which he plays a character called "Dr. Nigel Bilkington, Chief of Medicine for American General Hospital".
In 2012, Cleese was cast in "Hunting Elephants", a heist comedy by Israeli filmmaker Reshef Levi. Cleese had to quit just prior to filming due to heart trouble and was replaced by Patrick Stewart. Between September and October 2013, Cleese embarked on his first-ever cross-Canada comedy tour. Entitled "John Cleese: Last Time to See Me Before I Die tour", he visited Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Victoria and finished in Vancouver, performing to mostly sold-out venues. Cleese returned to the stage in Dubai in November 2013, where he performed to a sold-out theatre.
Cleese was interviewed and appears as himself in filmmaker Gracie Otto's 2013 documentary film "The Last Impresario", about Cleese's longtime friend and colleague Michael White. White produced "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and Cleese's pre-Python comedy production "Cambridge Circus". At a comic press conference in November 2013, Cleese and other surviving members of the Monty Python comedy group announced a reuniting performance to be held in July 2014.
Cleese joined with Eric Idle in 2015 and 2016 for a tour of North America, Canada and the ANZUS nations, "John Cleese & Eric Idle: Together Again At Last . . . For The Very First Time," playing small theatres and including interaction with audiences as well as sketches and reminisces. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything interview, Cleese expressed regret that he had turned down the role played by Robin Williams in "The Birdcage", the butler played by Anthony Hopkins in "The Remains of the Day", and the clergyman played by Peter Cook in "The Princess Bride".
In 2017, he wrote "Bang Bang!" a new adaptation of Georges Feydeau's French play "Monsieur Chasse!" for the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, before making its American premiere at the Shadowland Stages in Ellenville, New York in 2018, and will tour the UK in spring 2020.
In his "Alimony Tour" Cleese explained the origin of his fondness for black humour, the only thing that he inherited from his mother. Examples of it are the Dead Parrot sketch, "The Kipper and the Corpse" episode of "Fawlty Towers", his clip for the 1992 BBC2 mockumentary "A Question of Taste", the Undertakers sketch, and his eulogy at Graham Chapman's memorial service which included the line, "Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard! I hope he fries." On his attitude to life he states, “I can take almost nothing seriously“.
In 2020, following a controversy over the content of the "Fawlty Towers" episode "The Germans", Cleese criticised the BBC, saying "The BBC is now run by a mixture of marketing people and petty bureaucrats. It used to have a large sprinkling of people who'd actually made programmes. Not any more. So BBC decisions are made by persons whose main concern is not losing their jobs... That's why they're so cowardly and gutless and contemptible." He likened the style of humour in "Fawlty Towers" to the representation of Alf Garnett from another BBC sitcom, "Till Death Us Do Part", saying "We laughed at Alf's reactionary views. Thus we discredited them, by laughing at him. Of course, there were people—very stupid people—who said 'Thank God someone is saying these things at last'. We laughed at these people too. Now they're taking decisions about BBC comedy."
Cleese (and the other members of Python) have contributed their services to charitable endeavours and causes—sometimes as an ensemble, at other times as individuals. The cause that has been the most frequent and consistent beneficiary has been the human rights work of Amnesty International via the "Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit shows. The idea of the "Ball" was conceived by Cleese, with "Huffington Post" stating “in 1976 he “friended” the then-struggling Amnesty International (according to Martin Lewis, the very notion of Human Rights was then not the domain of hipsters and students, but just of foreign-policy wonks) first with a cheque signed “J. Cleese” — and then by rounding up “a few friends” to put on a show.” Many musicians have publicly attributed their activism—and the organisation of their own benefit events—to the inspiration of the work in this field of Cleese and the rest of Python, such as Bob Geldof (organiser of Live Aid), U2, Pete Townshend, and Sting. On the impact of the Ball on Geldof, Sting states, “he took the ‘Ball’ and ran with it.”
Cleese is a long-standing supporter of the Liberal Democrats. Having previously been a Labour Party voter, Cleese switched to the SDP after their formation in 1981. During the 1987 general election, Cleese recorded a nine-minute party political broadcast for the SDP–Liberal Alliance, which spoke about the similarities and failures of the other two parties in a more humorous tone than standard political broadcasts. Cleese has since appeared in broadcasts for the Liberal Democrats, in the 1997 general election and narrating a radio election broadcast for the party during the 2001 general election.
In 2008, Cleese expressed support for Barack Obama and his presidential candidacy, offering his services as a speech writer. He was an outspoken critic of Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, saying that "Michael Palin is no longer the funniest Palin". The same year, he wrote a satirical poem about Fox News commentator Sean Hannity for "Countdown with Keith Olbermann".
In 2011, Cleese declared his appreciation for Britain's coalition government between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, saying: "I think what's happening at the moment is rather interesting. The Coalition has made everything a little more courteous and a little more flexible. I think it was quite good that the Liberal Democrats had to compromise a bit with the Tories." He also criticised the previous Labour government, commenting: "Although my inclinations are slightly left-of-centre, I was terribly disappointed with the last Labour government. Gordon Brown lacked emotional intelligence and was never a leader." Cleese also declared his support for proportional representation.
In April 2011, Cleese said that he had declined a life peerage for political services in 1999. Outgoing leader of the Liberal Democrats Paddy Ashdown had put forward the suggestion shortly before stepping down, with the idea that Cleese would take the party whip and sit as a working peer, but the actor quipped that he "realised this involved being in England in the winter and I thought that was too much of a price to pay." Cleese also declined a CBE title in 1996 as he thought, "they were silly."
In an interview with "The Daily Telegraph" in 2014, Cleese expressed political interest about the UK Independence Party, saying that although he was in doubt as to whether he was prepared to vote for it, he was attracted to its challenge to the established political order and the radicalism of its policies on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union. He expressed support for immigration, but also concern about the integration of immigrants into British culture.
Talking to "Der Spiegel" in 2015, Cleese expressed a critical view on what he saw as a plutocracy that was unhealthily developing control of the governance of the First World's societies, stating that he had reached a point when he "saw that our existence here is absolutely hopeless. I see the rich have got a stranglehold on us. If somebody had said that to me when I was 20, I would have regarded him as a left-wing loony."
In 2016, Cleese publicly supported Brexit in the 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union. He tweeted: "If I thought there was any chance of major reform in the EU, I'd vote to stay in. But there isn't. Sad." Cleese said that "EU bureaucrats" had taken away "any trace of democratic accountability" and suggested they should "give up the euro, introduce accountability." In July 2018, Cleese said that he was leaving the UK to relocate to the Caribbean island of Nevis, partly over frustration around the standard of the Brexit debate, including "dreadful lies" by "the right" and a lack of reform regarding the press and the voting system. He emigrated to Nevis on 1 November 2018.
During then-Republican nominee Donald Trump's run for the US Presidency in 2016, Cleese described Trump as "a narcissist, with no attention span, who doesn't have clear ideas about anything and makes it all up as he goes along". He had previously described the leadership of the Republican Party as "the most cynical, most disgracefully immoral people I've ever come across in a Western civilisation".
In May 2019, Cleese repeated his previous statement that London was no longer an English city, saying "virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it... I note also that London was the UK city that voted most strongly to remain in the EU." London Mayor Sadiq Khan responded, "These comments make John Cleese sound like he's in character as Basil Fawlty. Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength. We are proudly the English capital, a European city and a global hub." Cleese added, "I suspect I should apologise for my affection for the Englishness of my upbringing, but in some ways I found it calmer, more polite, more humorous, less tabloid, and less money-oriented than the one that is replacing it."
Cleese also opposed the BBC's removal of "Fawlty Towers"' famed "The Germans" episode from the UKTV streaming service after protests over the death of George Floyd, stating that the program was mocking prejudice with its use of a character who uttered racial slurs. "If they can't see that, if people are too stupid to see that, what can one say," asked Cleese. UKTV later restored the episode with a disclaimer about its content.
In 1992, the UK Health Education Authority (subsequently the Health Development Agency, now merged into the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) recruited Cleese—an ex-smoker—to star in a series of anti-smoking public service announcements (PSAs) on British television, which took the form of sketches rife with morbid humor about smoking and were designed to encourage adult smokers to quit. In a controlled study of regions of central and northern England, one region received no intervention, the PSAs were broadcast in two regions, and one region received both the PSAs plus locally organised anti-tobacco campaigning. The study found that smokers in regions where the PSAs were broadcast were about half again as likely to have quit at the 18-month follow-up point as those who did not see them, irrespective of the local anti-tobacco campaign.
Cleese met Connie Booth in the US and they married in 1968. In 1971, Booth gave birth to Cynthia Cleese, their only child. With Booth, Cleese wrote the scripts for and co-starred in both series of "Fawlty Towers", even though the two were actually divorced before the second series was finished and aired. Cleese and Booth are said to have remained close friends since. Cleese has two grandchildren, Evan and Olivia, through his eldest daughter's marriage to the writer and director Ed Solomon.
Cleese married American actress Barbara Trentham in 1981. Their daughter Camilla, Cleese's second child, was born in 1984. He and Trentham divorced in 1990. During this time, Cleese moved to Los Angeles.
In 1992, he married American psychotherapist Alyce Faye Eichelberger. They divorced in 2008. The divorce settlement left Eichelberger with £12 million in finance and assets, including £600,000 a year for seven years. Cleese said, "What I find so unfair is that if we both died today, her children would get much more than mine ... I got off lightly. Think what I'd have had to pay Alyce if she had contributed anything to the relationship – such as children, or a conversation."
Less than a year later, he returned to the UK, where he has property in London and a home on the Royal Crescent in Bath, Somerset. In August 2012, Cleese married English jewellery designer and former model Jennifer Wade in a ceremony on the Caribbean island of Mustique.
In an interview in 2014, Cleese blamed his mother, who lived to the age of 101, for his problems in relationships with women, saying: "It cannot be a coincidence that I spent such a large part of my life in some form of therapy and that the vast majority of the problems I was dealing with involved relationships with women."
In March 2015, in an interview with "Der Spiegel", he was asked if he was religious. Cleese stated that he did not think much of organised religion and said he was not committed to "anything except the vague feeling that there is something more going on than the materialist reductionist people think".
Cleese has a passion for lemurs. Following the 1997 comedy film "Fierce Creatures", in which the ring-tailed lemur played a key role, he hosted the 1998 BBC documentary "In the Wild: Operation Lemur with John Cleese", which tracked the progress of a reintroduction of black-and-white ruffed lemurs back into the Betampona Reserve in Madagascar. The project had been partly funded by Cleese's donation of the proceeds from the London premier of "Fierce Creatures". Cleese is quoted as saying, "I adore lemurs. They're extremely gentle, well-mannered, pretty and yet great fun ... I should have married one."
The Bemaraha woolly lemur ("Avahi cleesei"), also known as Cleese's woolly lemur, is native to western Madagascar. The scientist who discovered the species named it after Cleese, mainly because of Cleese's fondness for lemurs and his efforts at protecting and preserving them. The species was first discovered in 1990 by a team of scientists from Zurich University led by Urs Thalmann, but was not formally described as a species until 11 November 2005.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15858
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July 7
The terms 7th July, July 7th, and 7/7 (pronounced "Seven-seven") have been widely used in the Western media as a shorthand for the 7 July 2005 bombings on London's transport system. In the Chinese language, this term is used to denote the Battle of Lugou Bridge started on July 7, 1937, marking the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15863
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Intelligent design
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15295
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Integrin
Integrins are transmembrane receptors that facilitate cell-extracellular matrix (ECM) adhesion. Upon ligand binding, integrins activate signal transduction pathways that mediate cellular signals such as regulation of the cell cycle, organization of the intracellular cytoskeleton, and movement of new receptors to the cell membrane. The presence of integrins allows rapid and flexible responses to events at the cell surface ("e.g". signal platelets to initiate an interaction with coagulation factors).
Several types of integrins exist, and one cell may have multiple different types on its surface. Integrins are found in all animals while integrin-like receptors are found in plant cells.
Integrins work alongside other proteins such as cadherins, the immunoglobulin superfamily cell adhesion molecules, selectins and syndecans, to mediate cell–cell and cell–matrix interaction. Ligands for integrins include fibronectin, vitronectin, collagen and laminin.
Integrins are obligate heterodimers, meaning that they have two subunits: α (alpha) and β (beta). Integrins in mammals have eighteen α and eight β subunits, in "Drosophila" five α and two β subunits, and in "Caenorhabditis" nematodes two α subunits and one β subunit. The α and β subunits each penetrate the plasma membrane and possess several cytoplasmic domains.
Variants of some subunits are formed by differential RNA splicing; for example, four variants of the beta-1 subunit exist. Through different combinations of the α and β subunits, around 24 unique integrins are generated.
Integrin subunits span the cell membrane and have short cytoplasmic domains of 40–70 amino acids. The exception is the beta-4 subunit, which has a cytoplasmic domain of 1,088 amino acids, one of the largest of any membrane protein. Outside the cell membrane, the α and β chains lie close together along a length of about 23 nm; the final 5 nm N-termini of each chain forms a ligand-binding region for the ECM. They have been compared to lobster claws, although they don't actually "pinch" their ligand, they chemically interact with it at the insides of the "tips" of their "pinchers".
The molecular mass of the integrin subunits can vary from 90 kDa to 160 kDa. Beta subunits have four cysteine-rich repeated sequences. Both α and β subunits bind several divalent cations. The role of divalent cations in the α subunit is unknown, but may stabilize the folds of the protein. The cations in the β subunits are more interesting: they are directly involved in coordinating at least some of the ligands that integrins bind.
Integrins can be categorized in multiple ways. For example, some α chains have an additional structural element (or "domain") inserted toward the N-terminal, the alpha-A domain (so called because it has a similar structure to the A-domains found in the protein von Willebrand factor; it is also termed the α-I domain). Integrins carrying this domain either bind to collagens (e.g. integrins α1 β1, and α2 β1), or act as cell-cell adhesion molecules (integrins of the β2 family). This α-I domain is the binding site for ligands of such integrins. Those integrins that don't carry this inserted domain also have an A-domain in their ligand binding site, but "this" A-domain is found on the β subunit.
In both cases, the A-domains carry up to three divalent cation binding sites. One is permanently occupied in physiological concentrations of divalent cations, and carries either a calcium or magnesium ion, the principal divalent cations in blood at median concentrations of 1.4 mM (calcium) and 0.8 mM (magnesium). The other two sites become occupied by cations when ligands bind—at least for those ligands involving an acidic amino acid in their interaction sites. An acidic amino acid features in the integrin-interaction site of many ECM proteins, for example as part of the amino acid sequence Arginine-Glycine-Aspartic acid ("RGD" in the one-letter amino acid code).
Despite many years of effort, discovering the high-resolution structure of integrins proved to be challenging, as membrane proteins are classically difficult to purify, and as integrins are large, complex and linked to many sugar trees ("highly glycosylated"). Low-resolution images of detergent extracts of intact integrin GPIIbIIIa, obtained using electron microscopy, and even data from indirect techniques that investigate the solution properties of integrins using ultracentrifugation and light scattering, were combined with fragmentary high-resolution crystallographic or NMR data from single or paired domains of single integrin chains, and molecular models postulated for the rest of the chains.
The X-ray crystal structure obtained for the complete extracellular region of one integrin, αvβ3, shows the molecule to be folded into an inverted V-shape that potentially brings the ligand-binding sites close to the cell membrane. Perhaps more importantly, the crystal structure was also obtained for the same integrin bound to a small ligand containing the RGD-sequence, the drug cilengitide. As detailed above, this finally revealed why divalent cations (in the A-domains) are critical for RGD-ligand binding to integrins. The interaction of such sequences with integrins is believed to be a primary switch by which ECM exerts its effects on cell behaviour.
The structure poses many questions, especially regarding ligand binding and signal transduction. The ligand binding site is directed towards the C-terminal of the integrin, the region where the molecule emerges from the cell membrane. If it emerges orthogonally from the membrane, the ligand binding site would apparently be obstructed, especially as integrin ligands are typically massive and well cross-linked components of the ECM. In fact, little is known about the angle that membrane proteins subtend to the plane of the membrane; this is a problem difficult to address with available technologies. The default assumption is that they emerge rather like little lollipops, but the evidence for this sweet supposition is noticeable by its absence. The integrin structure has drawn attention to this problem, which may have general implications for how membrane proteins work. It appears that the integrin transmembrane helices are tilted (see "Activation" below), which hints that the extracellular chains may also not be orthogonal with respect to the membrane surface.
Although the crystal structure changed surprisingly little after binding to cilengitide, the current hypothesis is that integrin function involves changes in shape to move the ligand-binding site into a more accessible position, away from the cell surface, and this shape change also triggers intracellular signaling. There is a wide body of cell-biological and biochemical literature that supports this view. Perhaps the most convincing evidence involves the use of antibodies that only recognize integrins when they have bound to their ligands, or are activated. As the "footprint" that an antibody makes on its binding target is roughly a circle about 3 nm in diameter, the resolution of this technique is low. Nevertheless, these so-called LIBS (Ligand-Induced-Binding-Sites) antibodies unequivocally show that dramatic changes in integrin shape routinely occur. However, how the changes detected with antibodies look on the structure is still unknown.
When released into the cell membrane, newly synthesized integrin dimers are speculated to be found in the same "bent" conformation revealed by the structural studies described above. One school of thought claims that this bent form prevents them from interacting with their ligands, although bent forms can predominate in high-resolution EM structures of integrin bound to an ECM ligand. Therefore, at least in biochemical experiments, integrin dimers must apparently not be 'unbent' in order to prime them and allow their binding to the ECM. In cells, the priming is accomplished by a protein talin, which binds to the β tail of the integrin dimer and changes its conformation. The α and β integrin chains are both class-I transmembrane proteins: they pass the plasma membrane as single transmembrane alpha-helices. Unfortunately, the helices are too long, and recent studies suggest that, for integrin gpIIbIIIa, they are tilted with respect both to one another and to the plane of the membrane. Talin binding alters the angle of tilt of the β3 chain transmembrane helix in model systems and this may reflect a stage in the process of inside-out signalling which primes integrins. Moreover, talin proteins are able to dimerize and thus are thought to intervene in the clustering of integrin dimers which leads to the formation of a focal adhesion. Recently, the Kindlin-1 and Kindlin-2 proteins have also been found to interact with integrin and activate it.
Integrins have two main functions, attachment of the cells to the ECM and signal transduction from the ECM to the cells. They are also involved in a wide range of other biological activities, including extravasation, cell-to-cell adhesion, cell migration, and as receptors for certain viruses, such as adenovirus, echovirus, hantavirus, and foot-and-mouth disease viruses.
A prominent function of the integrins is seen in the molecule GpIIb/IIIa, an integrin on the surface of blood platelets (thrombocytes) responsible for attachment to fibrin within a developing blood clot. This molecule dramatically increases its binding affinity for fibrin/fibrinogen through association of platelets with exposed collagens in the wound site. Upon association of platelets with collagen, GPIIb/IIIa changes shape, allowing it to bind to fibrin and other blood components to form the clot matrix and stop blood loss.
Integrins couple the ECM outside a cell to the cytoskeleton (in particular, the microfilaments) inside the cell. Which ligand in the ECM the integrin can bind to is defined by which α and β subunits the integrin is made of. Among the ligands of integrins are fibronectin, vitronectin, collagen, and laminin. The connection between the cell and the ECM may help the cell to endure pulling forces without being ripped out of the ECM. The ability of a cell to create this kind of bond is also of vital importance in ontogeny.
Cell attachment to the ECM is a basic requirement to build a multicellular organism. Integrins are not simply hooks, but give the cell critical signals about the nature of its surroundings. Together with signals arising from receptors for soluble growth factors like VEGF, EGF, and many others, they enforce a cellular decision on what biological action to take, be it attachment, movement, death, or differentiation. Thus integrins lie at the heart of many cellular biological processes. The attachment of the cell takes place through formation of cell adhesion complexes, which consist of integrins and many cytoplasmic proteins, such as talin, vinculin, paxillin, and alpha-actinin. These act by regulating kinases such as FAK (focal adhesion kinase) and Src kinase family members to phosphorylate substrates such as p130CAS thereby recruiting signaling adaptors such as CRK. These adhesion complexes attach to the actin cytoskeleton. The integrins thus serve to link two networks across the plasma membrane: the extracellular ECM and the intracellular actin filamentous system. Integrin α6β4 is an exception: it links to the keratin intermediate filament system in epithelial cells.
Focal adhesions are large molecular complexes, which are generated following interaction of integrins with ECM, then their clustering. The clusters likely provide sufficient intracellular binding sites to permit the formation of stable signaling complexes on the cytoplasmic side of the cell membrane. So the focal adhesions contain integrin ligand, integrin molecule, and associate plaque proteins. Binding is propelled by changes in free energy. As previously stated, these complexes connect the extracellular matrix to actin bundles. Cryo-electron tomography reveals that the adhesion contains particles on the cell membrane with diameter of 25 +/- 5 nm and spaced at approximately 45 nm. Treatment with Rho-kinase inhibitor Y-27632 reduces the size of the particle, and it is extremely mechanosensitive.
One important function of integrins on cells in tissue culture is their role in cell migration. Cells adhere to a substrate through their integrins. During movement, the cell makes new attachments to the substrate at its front and concurrently releases those at its rear. When released from the substrate, integrin molecules are taken back into the cell by endocytosis; they are transported through the cell to its front by the endocytic cycle, where they are added back to the surface. In this way they are cycled for reuse, enabling the cell to make fresh attachments at its leading front. The cycle of integrin endocytosis and recycling back to the cell surface is important also for not migrating cells and during animal development.
Integrins play an important role in cell signaling by modulating the cell signaling pathways of transmembrane protein kinases such as receptor tyrosine kinases (RTK). While the interaction between integrin and receptor tyrosine kinases originally was thought of as uni-directional and supportive, recent studies indicate that integrins have additional, multi-faceted roles in cell signaling.
Integrins can regulate the receptor tyrosine kinase signaling by recruiting specific adaptors to the plasma membrane. For example, β1c integrin recruits Gab1/Shp2 and presents Shp2 to IGF1R, resulting in dephosphorylation of the receptor. In a reverse direction, when a receptor tyrosine kinase is activated, integrins co-localise at focal adhesion with the receptor tyrosine kinases and their associated signaling molecules.
The repertoire of integrins expressed on a particular cell can specify the signaling pathway due to the differential binding affinity of ECM ligands for the integrins. The tissue stiffness and matrix composition can initiate specific signaling pathways regulating cell behavior. Clustering and activation of the integrins/actin complexes strengthen the focal adhesion interaction and initiate the framework for cell signaling through assembly of adhesomes.
Depending on the integrin's regulatory impact on specific receptor tyrosine kinases, the cell can experience:
Knowledge of the relationship between integrins and receptor tyrosine kinase has laid a foundation for new approaches to cancer therapy. Specifically, targeting integrins associated with RTKs is an emerging approach for inhibiting angiogenesis.
Integrins have an important function in neuroregeneration after injury of the peripheral nervous system (PNS). Integrins are present at the growth cone of damaged PNS neurons and attach to ligands in the ECM to promote axon regeneration. It is unclear whether integrins can promote axon regeneration in the adult central nervous system (CNS). There are two obstacles that prevent integrin-mediated regeneration in the CNS: 1) integrins are not localised in the axon of most adult CNS neurons and 2) integrins become inactivated by molecules in the scar tissue after injury.
The following are 16 of the ~24 integrins found in vertebrates:
Beta-1 integrins interact with many alpha integrin chains. Gene knockouts of integrins in mice are not always lethal, which suggests that during embryonal development, one integrin may substitute its function for another in order to allow survival. Some integrins are on the cell surface in an inactive state, and can be rapidly primed, or put into a state capable of binding their ligands, by cytokines. Integrins can assume several different well-defined shapes or "conformational states". Once primed, the conformational state changes to stimulate ligand binding, which then activates the receptors — also by inducing a shape change — to trigger outside-in signal transduction.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15302
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Ion channel
Ion channels are pore-forming membrane proteins that allow ions to pass through the channel pore. Their functions include establishing a resting membrane potential, shaping action potentials and other electrical signals by gating the flow of ions across the cell membrane, controlling the flow of ions across secretory and epithelial cells, and regulating cell volume. Ion channels are present in the membranes of all cells. Ion channels are one of the two classes of ionophoric proteins, the other being ion transporters.
The study of ion channels often involves biophysics, electrophysiology, and pharmacology, while using techniques including voltage clamp, patch clamp, immunohistochemistry, X-ray crystallography, fluoroscopy, and RT-PCR. Their classification as molecules is referred to as channelomics.
There are two distinctive features of ion channels that differentiate them from other types of ion transporter proteins:
Ion channels are located within the membrane of all excitable cells, and of many intracellular organelles. They are often described as narrow, water-filled tunnels that allow only ions of a certain size and/or charge to pass through. This characteristic is called selective permeability. The archetypal channel pore is just one or two atoms wide at its narrowest point and is selective for specific species of ion, such as sodium or potassium. However, some channels may be permeable to the passage of more than one type of ion, typically sharing a common charge: positive (cations) or negative (anions). Ions often move through the segments of the channel pore in single file nearly as quickly as the ions move through free solution. In many ion channels, passage through the pore is governed by a "gate", which may be opened or closed in response to chemical or electrical signals, temperature, or mechanical force.
Ion channels are integral membrane proteins, typically formed as assemblies of several individual proteins. Such "multi-subunit" assemblies usually involve a circular arrangement of identical or homologous proteins closely packed around a water-filled pore through the plane of the membrane or lipid bilayer. For most voltage-gated ion channels, the pore-forming subunit(s) are called the α subunit, while the auxiliary subunits are denoted β, γ, and so on.
Because channels underlie the nerve impulse and because "transmitter-activated" channels mediate conduction across the synapses, channels are especially prominent components of the nervous system. Indeed, numerous toxins that organisms have evolved for shutting down the nervous systems of predators and prey (e.g., the venoms produced by spiders, scorpions, snakes, fish, bees, sea snails, and others) work by modulating ion channel conductance and/or kinetics. In addition, ion channels are key components in a wide variety of biological processes that involve rapid changes in cells, such as cardiac, skeletal, and smooth muscle contraction, epithelial transport of nutrients and ions, T-cell activation and pancreatic beta-cell insulin release. In the search for new drugs, ion channels are a frequent target.
There are over 300 types of ion channels just in the cells of the inner ear. Ion channels may be classified by the nature of their gating, the species of ions passing through those gates, the number of gates (pores) and localization of proteins.
Further heterogeneity of ion channels arises when channels with different constitutive subunits give rise to a specific kind of current. Absence or mutation of one or more of the contributing types of channel subunits can result in loss of function and, potentially, underlie neurologic diseases.
Ion channels may be classified by gating, i.e. what opens and closes the channels. For example, voltage-gated ion channels open or close depending on the voltage gradient across the plasma membrane, while ligand-gated ion channels open or close depending on binding of ligands to the channel.
Voltage-gated ion channels open and close in response to membrane potential.
Also known as ionotropic receptors, this group of channels open in response to specific ligand molecules binding to the extracellular domain of the receptor protein. Ligand binding causes a conformational change in the structure of the channel protein that ultimately leads to the opening of the channel gate and subsequent ion flux across the plasma membrane. Examples of such channels include the cation-permeable "nicotinic" Acetylcholine receptor, ionotropic glutamate-gated receptors, acid sensing ion channels (ASICs), ATP-gated P2X receptors, and the anion-permeable γ-aminobutyric acid-gated GABAA receptor.
Ion channels activated by second messengers may also be categorized in this group, although ligands and second messengers are otherwise distinguished from each other.
This group of channels opens in response to specific lipid molecules binding to the channel's transmembrane domain typically near the inner leaflet of the plasma membrane. Phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2) and phosphatidic acid (PA) are the best-characterized lipids to gate these channels. Many of the leak potassium channels are gated by lipids including the inward-rectifier potassium channels and two pore domain potassium channels TREK-1 and TRAAK. KCNQ potassium channel family are gated by PIP2. The voltage activated potassium channel (Kv) is regulated by PA. Its midpoint of activation shifts +50 mV upon PA hydrolysis, near resting membrane potentials. This suggests Kv could be opened by lipid hydrolysis independent of voltage and may qualify this channel as dual lipid and voltage gated channel.
Gating also includes activation and inactivation by second messengers from the inside of the cell membrane – rather than from outside the cell, as in the case for ligands.
Ion channels are also classified according to their subcellular localization. The plasma membrane accounts for around 2% of the total membrane in the cell, whereas intracellular organelles contain 98% of the cell's membrane. The major intracellular compartments are endoplasmic reticulum, Golgi apparatus, and mitochondria. On the basis of localization, ion channels are classified as:
Some ion channels are classified by the duration of their response to stimuli:
Channels differ with respect to the ion they let pass (for example, Na+, K+, Cl−), the ways in which they may be regulated, the number of subunits of which they are composed and other aspects of structure. Channels belonging to the largest class, which includes the voltage-gated channels that underlie the nerve impulse, consists of four subunits with six transmembrane helices each. On activation, these helices move about and open the pore. Two of these six helices are separated by a loop that lines the pore and is the primary determinant of ion selectivity and conductance in this channel class and some others. The existence and mechanism for ion selectivity was first postulated in the late 1960s by Bertil Hille and Clay Armstrong. The idea of the ionic selectivity for potassium channels was that the carbonyl oxygens of the protein backbones of the "selectivity filter" (named by Bertil Hille) could efficiently replace the water molecules that normally shield potassium ions, but that sodium ions were smaller and cannot be completely dehydrated to allow such shielding, and therefore could not pass through. This mechanism was finally confirmed when the first structure of an ion channel was elucidated. A bacterial potassium channel KcsA, consisting of just the selectivity filter, "P" loop and two transmembrane helices was used as a model to study the permeability and the selectivity of ion channels in the Mackinnon lab. The determination of the molecular structure of KcsA by Roderick MacKinnon using X-ray crystallography won a share of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Because of their small size and the difficulty of crystallizing integral membrane proteins for X-ray analysis, it is only very recently that scientists have been able to directly examine what channels "look like." Particularly in cases where the crystallography required removing channels from their membranes with detergent, many researchers regard images that have been obtained as tentative. An example is the long-awaited crystal structure of a voltage-gated potassium channel, which was reported in May 2003. One inevitable ambiguity about these structures relates to the strong evidence that channels change conformation as they operate (they open and close, for example), such that the structure in the crystal could represent any one of these operational states. Most of what researchers have deduced about channel operation so far they have established through electrophysiology, biochemistry, gene sequence comparison and mutagenesis.
Channels can have single (CLICs) to multiple transmembrane (K channels, P2X receptors, Na channels) domains which span plasma membrane to form pores. Pore can determine the selectivity of the channel. Gate can be formed either inside or outside the pore region.
Chemical substances can modulate the activity of ion channels, for example by blocking or activating them.
A variety of ion channel blockers (inorganic and organic molecules) can modulate ion channel activity and conductance.
Some commonly used blockers include:
There are a number of disorders which disrupt normal functioning of ion channels and have disastrous consequences for the organism. Genetic and autoimmune disorders of ion channels and their modifiers are known as channelopathies. See for a full list.
The fundamental properties of currents mediated by ion channels were analyzed by the British biophysicists Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley as part of their Nobel Prize-winning research on the action potential, published in 1952. They built on the work of other physiologists, such as Cole and Baker's research into voltage-gated membrane pores from 1941. The existence of ion channels was confirmed in the 1970s by Bernard Katz and Ricardo Miledi using noise analysis. It was then shown more directly with an electrical recording technique known as the "patch clamp", which led to a Nobel Prize to Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann, the technique's inventors. Hundreds if not thousands of researchers continue to pursue a more detailed understanding of how these proteins work. In recent years the development of automated patch clamp devices helped to increase significantly the throughput in ion channel screening.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2003 was awarded to Roderick MacKinnon for his studies on the physico-chemical properties of ion channel structure and function, including x-ray crystallographic structure studies.
Roderick MacKinnon commissioned "Birth of an Idea", a tall sculpture based on the KcsA potassium channel. The artwork contains a wire object representing the channel's interior with a blown glass object representing the main cavity of the channel structure.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15303
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Integrated development environment
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools and a debugger. Some IDEs, such as NetBeans and Eclipse, contain the necessary compiler, interpreter, or both; others, such as SharpDevelop and Lazarus, do not.
The boundary between an IDE and other parts of the broader software development environment is not well-defined; sometimes a version control system or various tools to simplify the construction of a graphical user interface (GUI) are integrated. Many modern IDEs also have a class browser, an object browser, and a class hierarchy diagram for use in object-oriented software development.
Integrated development environments are designed to maximize programmer productivity by providing tight-knit components with similar user interfaces. IDEs present a single program in which all development is done. This program typically provides many features for authoring, modifying, compiling, deploying and debugging software. This contrasts with software development using unrelated tools, such as vi, GCC or make.
One aim of the IDE is to reduce the configuration necessary to piece together multiple development utilities, instead it provides the same set of capabilities as one cohesive unit. Reducing setup time can increase developer productivity, especially in cases where learning to use the IDE is faster than manually integrating and learning all of the individual tools. Tighter integration of all development tasks has the potential to improve overall productivity beyond just helping with setup tasks. For example, code can be continuously parsed while it is being edited, providing instant feedback when syntax errors are introduced, thus allowing developers to debug code much faster and more easily with an IDE.
Some IDEs are dedicated to a specific programming language, allowing a feature set that most closely matches the programming paradigms of the language. However, there are many multiple-language IDEs.
While most modern IDEs are graphical, text-based IDEs such as Turbo Pascal were in popular use before the availability of windowing systems like Microsoft Windows and the X Window System (X11). They commonly use function keys or hotkeys to execute frequently used commands or macros.
IDEs initially became possible when developing via a console or terminal. Early systems could not support one, since programs were prepared using flowcharts, entering programs with punched cards (or paper tape, etc.) before submitting them to a compiler. Dartmouth BASIC was the first language to be created with an IDE (and was also the first to be designed for use while sitting in front of a console or terminal). Its IDE (part of the Dartmouth Time Sharing System) was command-based, and therefore did not look much like the menu-driven, graphical IDEs popular after the advent of the Graphical User Interface. However it integrated editing, file management, compilation, debugging and execution in a manner consistent with a modern IDE.
See also Structured Programming Facility from IBM (1974).
Maestro I is a product from Softlab Munich and was the world's first integrated development environment for software. Maestro I was installed for 22,000 programmers worldwide. Until 1989, 6,000 installations existed in the Federal Republic of Germany. Maestro was arguably the world leader in this field during the 1970s and 1980s. Today one of the last Maestro I can be found in the Museum of Information Technology at Arlington.
One of the first IDEs with a plug-in concept was Softbench. In 1995 "Computerwoche" commented that the use of an IDE was not well received by developers since it would fence in their creativity.
As of December 2019, the three IDEs whose download pages are most commonly searched for are Eclipse, Android Studio and Visual Studio.
The IDE editor usually provides syntax highlighting, it can show both the structures, the language keywords and the syntax errors with visually distinct colors and font effects.
Code completion is an important IDE feature, intended to speed up programming. Modern IDEs even have intelligent code completion.
Advanced IDEs provide support for automated refactoring.
An IDE is expected to provide integrated version control, in order to interact with source repositories.
IDEs are also used for debugging, using an integrated debugger, with support for setting breakpoints in the editor, visual rendering of steps, etc.
IDEs may provide advanced support for code search: in order to find class and function declarations, usages, variable and field read/write, etc. IDEs can use different kinds of user interface for code search, for example form-based widgets and natural-language based interfaces.
Visual programming is a usage scenario in which an IDE is generally required. Visual Basic allows users to create new applications by moving programming, building blocks, or code nodes to create flowcharts or structure diagrams that are then compiled or interpreted. These flowcharts often are based on the Unified Modeling Language.
This interface has been popularized with the Lego Mindstorms system, and is being actively perused by a number of companies wishing to capitalize on the power of custom browsers like those found at Mozilla. KTechlab supports flowcode and is a popular opensource IDE and Simulator for developing software for microcontrollers. Visual programming is also responsible for the power of distributed programming (cf. LabVIEW and EICASLAB software). An early visual programming system, Max, was modeled after analog synthesizer design and has been used to develop real-time music performance software since the 1980s. Another early example was Prograph, a dataflow-based system originally developed for the Macintosh. The graphical programming environment "Grape" is used to program qfix robot kits.
This approach is also used in specialist software such as Openlab, where the end users want the flexibility of a full programming language, without the traditional learning curve associated with one.
Some IDEs support multiple languages, such as GNU Emacs based on C and Emacs Lisp, and IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, MyEclipse or NetBeans, all based on Java, or MonoDevelop, based on C#, or PlayCode.
Support for alternative languages is often provided by plugins, allowing them to be installed on the same IDE at the same time. For example, Flycheck is a modern on-the-fly syntax checking extension for GNU Emacs 24 with support for 39 languages. Eclipse, and Netbeans have plugins for C/C++, Ada, GNAT (for example AdaGIDE), Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP, which are selected between automatically based on file extension, environment or project settings.
Unix programmers can combine command-line POSIX tools into a complete development environment, capable of developing large programs such as the Linux kernel and its environment. In this sense, the entire Unix system functions as an IDE. The free software GNU tools (GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Debugger (GDB), and GNU make) are available on many platforms, including Windows. The pervasive Unix philosophy of "everything is a text stream" enables developers who favor command-line oriented tools to use editors with support for many of the standard Unix and GNU build tools, building an IDE with programs like
Emacs
or Vim. Data Display Debugger is intended to be an advanced graphical front-end for many text-based debugger standard tools. Some programmers prefer managing makefiles and their derivatives to the similar code building tools included in a full IDE. For example, most contributors to the PostgreSQL database use make and GDB directly to develop new features. Even when building PostgreSQL for Microsoft Windows using Visual C++, Perl scripts are used as a replacement for make rather than relying on any IDE features. Some Linux IDEs such as Geany attempt to provide a graphical front end to traditional build operations.
On the various Microsoft Windows platforms, command-line tools for development are seldom used. Accordingly, there are many commercial and non-commercial products. However, each has a different design commonly creating incompatibilities. Most major compiler vendors for Windows still provide free copies of their command-line tools, including Microsoft (Visual C++, Platform SDK, .NET Framework SDK, nmake utility).
IDEs have always been popular on the Apple Macintosh's classic Mac OS and macOS, dating back to Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, Turbo Pascal, THINK Pascal and THINK C environments of the mid-1980s. Currently macOS programmers can choose between native IDEs like Xcode and open-source tools such as Eclipse and Netbeans. ActiveState Komodo is a proprietary multilanguage IDE supported on macOS.
Some features of IDEs can benefit from advances in AI. In particular, one can collect information from IDE actions across developers in order to augment IDE features. For instance, a data-driven approach to code completion results in intelligent code completion.
An web integrated development environment (Web IDE), also known as an Online IDE or Cloud IDE, is a browser based IDE that allows for software development or web development. A web IDE can be accessed from a web browser, such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox, allowing for a portable work environment. A web IDE does not usually contain all of the same features as a traditional, or desktop, IDE, although all of the basic IDE features, such as syntax highlighting, are typically present.
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Ian McKellen
Sir Ian Murray McKellen (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. His career spans genres ranging from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction.
He is the recipient of six Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a BIF Award, two Saturn Awards, four Drama Desk Awards, and two Critics' Choice Awards. He has also received nominations for two Academy Awards, five Primetime Emmy Awards, and four BAFTAs.
He achieved worldwide fame for his film roles, including the titular King in "Richard III" (1995), James Whale in "Gods and Monsters" (1998), Magneto in the "X-Men" films, and Gandalf in "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" trilogies.
The BBC states that his "performances have guaranteed him a place in the canon of English stage and film actors". A recipient of every major theatrical award in the UK, McKellen is regarded as a British cultural icon. He started his professional career in 1961 at the Belgrade Theatre as a member of their highly regarded repertory company. In 1965, McKellen made his first West End appearance. In 1969, he was invited to join the Prospect Theatre Company to play the lead parts in Shakespeare's "Richard II" and Marlowe's "Edward II", and he firmly established himself as one of the country's foremost classical actors. In the 1970s, McKellen became a stalwart of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre of Great Britain.
McKellen was knighted in the 1991 New Year Honours for services to the performing arts, and made a Companion of Honour for services to drama and to equality in the 2008 New Year Honours. He has been openly gay since 1988, and continues to be a champion for LGBT social movements worldwide. He was awarded Freedom of the City of London in October 2014.
McKellen was born on 25 May 1939 in Burnley, Lancashire, the son of Margery Lois (née Sutcliffe) and Denis Murray McKellen. He was their second child, with a sister, Jean, five years his senior. Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, his family moved to Wigan. They lived there until Ian was twelve years old, before relocating to Bolton in 1951, after his father had been promoted. The experience of living through the war as a young child had a lasting impact on him, and he later said that "only after peace resumed ... did I realise that war wasn't normal." When an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, McKellen said: "Well, darling, you forget—I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old.”
McKellen's father was a civil engineer and lay preacher, and was of Protestant Irish and Scottish descent. Both of McKellen's grandfathers were preachers, and his great-great-grandfather, James McKellen, was a "strict, evangelical Protestant minister" in Ballymena, County Antrim. His home environment was strongly Christian, but non-orthodox. "My upbringing was of low nonconformist Christians who felt that you led the Christian life in part by behaving in a Christian manner to everybody you met." When he was 12, his mother died of breast cancer; his father died when he was 24. After his coming out as gay to his stepmother, Gladys McKellen, who was a member of the Religious Society of Friends, he said, "Not only was she not fazed, but as a member of a society which declared its indifference to people's sexuality years back, I think she was just glad for my sake that I wasn't lying anymore." His great-great-grandfather Robert J. Lowes was an activist and campaigner in the ultimately successful campaign for a Saturday half-holiday in Manchester, the forerunner to the modern five-day work week, thus making Lowes a "grandfather of the modern weekend".
McKellen attended Bolton School (Boys' Division), of which he is still a supporter, attending regularly to talk to pupils. McKellen's acting career started at Bolton Little Theatre, of which he is now the patron. An early fascination with the theatre was encouraged by his parents, who took him on a family outing to "Peter Pan" at the Opera House in Manchester when he was three. When he was nine, his main Christmas present was a fold-away wood and bakelite Victorian theatre from Pollocks Toy Theatres, with cardboard scenery and wires to push on the cut-outs of Cinderella and of Laurence Olivier's Hamlet.
His sister took him to his first Shakespeare play, "Twelfth Night", by the amateurs of Wigan's Little Theatre, shortly followed by their "Macbeth" and Wigan High School for Girls' production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", with music by Mendelssohn, with the role of Bottom played by Jean McKellen, who continued to act, direct, and produce amateur theatre until her death.
In 1958, McKellen, at the age of 18, won a scholarship to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, where he read English literature. He has since been made an Honorary Fellow of the College. While at Cambridge, McKellen was a member of the Marlowe Society, where he appeared in 23 plays over the course of 3 years. At that young age he was already giving performances that have since become legendary such as his Justice Shallow in "Henry IV" alongside Trevor Nunn and Derek Jacobi (March 1959), "Cymbeline" (as Posthumus, opposite Margaret Drabble as Imogen) and "Doctor Faustus". During this period McKellen had already been directed by Peter Hall, John Barton and Dadie Rylands, all of whom would have a huge impact on McKellen's future career.
McKellen made his first professional appearance in 1961 at the Belgrade Theatre, as Roper in "A Man for All Seasons", although an audio recording of the Marlowe Society's "Cymbeline" had gone on commercial sale as part of the Argo Shakespeare series.
After four years in regional repertory theatres he made his first West End appearance, in "A Scent of Flowers", regarded as a "notable success". In 1965 he was a member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company at the Old Vic, which led to roles at the Chichester Festival. With the Prospect Theatre Company, McKellen made his breakthrough performances of Richard II (directed by Richard Cottrell) and Marlowe's Edward II (directed by Toby Robertson) at the Edinburgh festival in 1969, the latter causing a storm of protest over the enactment of the homosexual Edward's lurid death.
In the 1970s and 1980s McKellen became a well-known figure in British theatre, performing frequently at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, where he played several leading Shakespearean roles, including the title role in "Macbeth" (which he had first played for Trevor Nunn in a "gripping...out of the ordinary" production, with Judi Dench, at Stratford in 1976), and Iago in "Othello", in award-winning productions directed by Nunn. Both of these productions were adapted into television films, also directed by Nunn.
In 2007 he returned to the Royal Shakespeare Company, in productions of "King Lear" and "The Seagull", both directed by Trevor Nunn. In 2009 he appeared in a very popular revival of "Waiting for Godot" at London's Haymarket Theatre, directed by Sean Mathias, and playing opposite Patrick Stewart. He is Patron of English Touring Theatre and also President and Patron of the Little Theatre Guild of Great Britain, an association of amateur theatre organisations throughout the UK. In late August 2012, he took part in the opening ceremony of the London Paralympics, portraying Prospero from "The Tempest".
In October 2017, McKellen played King Lear at Chichester Festival Theatre, a role which he said was likely to be his "last big Shakespearean part". He performed the play at the Duke of York's Theatre in London's West End during the summer of 2018.
To celebrate his 80th birthday, in 2019 McKellen performed in a one man stage show titled "" celebrating the various performances throughout his career. The show toured across the UK and Ireland (raising money for each venue and organisation's charity) before a West End run at the Harold Pinter Theatre and was performed for one night only on Broadway at the Hudson Theatre.
McKellen had taken film roles throughout his career—beginning in 1969 with his role of George Matthews in "A Touch of Love", and his first leading role was in 1980 as D. H. Lawrence in "Priest of Love", but it was not until the 1990s that he became more widely recognised in this medium after several roles in blockbuster Hollywood films. In 1993, he had a supporting role as a South African tycoon in the critically acclaimed "Six Degrees of Separation", in which he starred with Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland, and Will Smith. In the same year, he appeared in minor roles in the television miniseries "Tales of the City", based on the novel by his friend Armistead Maupin, and the film "Last Action Hero", in which he briefly played Death opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charles Dance.
Later in 1993, McKellen appeared in the television film "And the Band Played On" about the discovery of the AIDS virus for which McKellen won a CableACE Award for Supporting Actor in a Movie or Miniseries and was nominated for the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie. In 1995, he played the title role in "Richard III", which transported the setting into an alternative 1930s in which England is ruled by fascists. The film was a critical success. McKellen co-produced and co-wrote the film, adapting the play for the screen based on a stage production of Shakespeare's play directed by Richard Eyre for the Royal National Theatre in which McKellen had appeared. As executive producer he returned his £50,000 fee to complete the filming of the final battle. In his review of the film, "The Washington Post" film critic Hal Hinson called McKellen's performance a "lethally flamboyant incarnation" and said his "florid mastery ... dominates everything". His performance in the title role garnered BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor and won the European Film Award for Best Actor. His screenplay was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
He appeared in the modestly acclaimed film "Apt Pupil", which was directed by Bryan Singer and based on a story by Stephen King. McKellen portrayed a fugitive Nazi officer living under a false name in the US who is befriended by a curious teenager (Brad Renfro) who threatens to expose him unless he tells his story in detail. He was subsequently nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in the 1998 film "Gods and Monsters", wherein he played James Whale, the director of "Show Boat" (1936) and "Frankenstein".
In 1999 McKellen was cast, again under the direction of Bryan Singer, to play the comic book supervillain Magneto in the 2000 film "X-Men" and its sequels "X2: X-Men United" (2003) and "" (2006). He later reprised his role of Magneto in 2014's "", sharing the role with Michael Fassbender, who played a younger version of the character in 2011's "".
While filming the first "X-Men" film in 1999, McKellen was cast as the wizard Gandalf in Peter Jackson's three-film adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings" (consisting of "" (2001), "" (2002), and "" (2003) ). He received honors from the Screen Actors Guild for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for his work in "The Fellowship of the Ring" and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the same role. He provided the voice of Gandalf for several video game adaptations of the "Lord of the Rings" films, then reprised the role on screen in Jackson's film adaptation of "The Hobbit", which was released in three parts from 2012 to 2014.
On 16 March 2002, he hosted "Saturday Night Live". In 2003, McKellen made a guest appearance as himself on the American cartoon show "The Simpsons" in a special British-themed episode entitled "The Regina Monologues", along with the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and author J. K. Rowling. In April and May 2005, he played the role of Mel Hutchwright in Granada Television's long running British soap opera, "Coronation Street", fulfilling a lifelong ambition. He narrated Richard Bell's film "Eighteen" as a grandfather who leaves his World War II memoirs on audio-cassette for his teenage grandson.
McKellen has appeared in limited release films, such as "Emile" (which was shot in three weeks following the "X2" shoot), "Neverwas" and "Asylum". He appeared as Sir Leigh Teabing in "The Da Vinci Code". During a 17 May 2006 interview on "The Today Show" with the "Da Vinci Code" cast and director, Matt Lauer posed a question to the group about how they would have felt if the film had borne a prominent disclaimer that it is a work of fiction, as some religious groups wanted. McKellen responded, "I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying 'This is fiction.' I mean, walking on water? It takes... an act of faith. And I have faith in this movie—not that it's true, not that it's factual, but that it's a jolly good story." He continued, "And I think audiences are clever enough and bright enough to separate out fact and fiction, and discuss the thing when they've seen it". McKellen appeared in the 2006 BBC series of Ricky Gervais' comedy series "Extras", where he played himself directing Gervais' character Andy Millman in a play about gay lovers. McKellen received a 2007 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor – Comedy Series nomination for his performance. In 2009 he portrayed Number Two in "The Prisoner", a remake of the 1967 cult series "The Prisoner". In 2013, McKellen co-starred in the ITV sitcom "Vicious" as Freddie Thornhill, alongside Derek Jacobi. The series revolves around an elderly gay couple who have been together for 50 years. On 23 August 2013 the show was renewed for a six-episode second series which began airing in June 2015.
In November 2013, McKellen appeared in the "Doctor Who" 50th anniversary comedy homage "The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot". In October 2015, McKellen appeared as Norman to Anthony Hopkins' Sir in a BBC Two production of Ronald Harwood's "The Dresser", alongside Edward Fox and Emily Watson. In 2017, McKellen portrayed Cogsworth in the live-action adaptation of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast", directed by Bill Condon (which marked the third collaboration between Condon and McKellen, after "Gods and Monsters" and "Mr. Holmes") and co-starred alongside Emma Watson and Dan Stevens. Also that year, McKellen appeared in the documentary "McKellen: Playing the Part", directed by director Joe Stephenson. The documentary explores McKellen's life and career as an actor.
In 2019, McKellen starred in "The Good Liar" with Helen Mirren, and additionally played Gus the Theatre Cat in "Cats", an adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical, directed by Tom Hooper, and also featuring Jennifer Hudson, James Corden, Idris Elba, and Judi Dench. In June 2020, at the age of 81, McKellen announced that he would play Hamlet again at the Theatre Royal Windsor.
McKellen and his first partner, Brian Taylor, a history teacher from Bolton, began their relationship in 1964. Their relationship lasted for eight years, ending in 1972. They lived in London, where McKellen continued to pursue his career as an actor. For over a decade, he has lived in a five-storey Victorian conversion in Narrow Street, Limehouse. In 1978 he met his second partner, Sean Mathias, at the Edinburgh Festival. This relationship lasted until 1988, and according to Mathias, was tempestuous, with conflicts over McKellen's success in acting versus Mathias's somewhat less-successful career. The two remained friends, with Mathias later directing McKellen in "Waiting for Godot" at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in 2009. The pair entered into a business partnership with Evgeny Lebedev, purchasing the lease of The Grapes public house in Narrow Street.
McKellen is an atheist. In the late 1980s, McKellen lost his appetite for meat except for fish, and has since followed a mainly pescetarian diet. In 2001, Ian McKellen received the Artist Citizen of the World Award (France).
He has a tattoo of the Elvish number nine, written using J. R. R. Tolkien's constructed script of Tengwar, on his shoulder in reference to his involvement in the "Lord of the Rings" and the fact that his character was one of the original nine companions of the Fellowship of the Ring. The other actors of "The Fellowship" (Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Orlando Bloom, Billy Boyd, Sean Bean, Dominic Monaghan and Viggo Mortensen) have the same tattoo. John Rhys-Davies, whose character was also one of the original nine companions, arranged for his stunt double to get the tattoo instead.
He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006. In 2012, McKellen stated on his blog that "There is no cause for alarm. I am examined regularly and the cancer is contained. I've not needed any treatment."
He became an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church in early 2013 in order to preside over the marriage of his friend and "X-Men" co-star Patrick Stewart to the singer Sunny Ozell.
McKellen was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by Cambridge University on 18 June 2014. He was made a Freeman of the city of London on Thursday 30 October 2014. The ceremony took place at Guildhall in London. McKellen was nominated by London's Lord Mayor Fiona Woolf, who said he was chosen as he was an "exceptional actor" and "tireless campaigner for equality". He is also an Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford.
While McKellen had made his sexual orientation known to fellow actors early on in his stage career, it was not until 1988 that he came out to the general public, in a programme on BBC Radio. The context that prompted McKellen's decision—overriding any concerns about a possible negative effect on his career—was that the controversial Section 28 of the Local Government Bill, known simply as Section 28, was then under consideration in the British Parliament. Section 28 proposed prohibiting local authorities from promoting homosexuality "... as a kind of pretended family relationship". McKellen became active in fighting the proposed law, and, during a BBC Radio 3 programme where he debated Section 28 with the conservative journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, declared himself gay. McKellen has stated that he was influenced in his decision by the advice and support of his friends, among them noted gay author Armistead Maupin. In a 1998 interview that discusses the 29th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, McKellen commented, I have many regrets about not having come out earlier, but one of them might be that I didn't engage myself in the politicking. He has said of this period: My own participating in that campaign was a focus for people [to] take comfort that if Ian McKellen was on board for this, perhaps it would be all right for other people to be as well, gay and straight. Section 28 was, however, enacted and remained on the statute books until 2000 in Scotland and 2003 in England and Wales. Section 28 never applied in Northern Ireland.
In 2003, during an appearance on "Have I Got News For You", McKellen claimed when he visited Michael Howard, then Environment Secretary (responsible for local government), in 1988 to lobby against Section 28, Howard refused to change his position but did ask him to leave an autograph for his children. McKellen agreed, but wrote, "Fuck off, I'm gay." McKellen described Howard's junior ministers, Conservatives David Wilshire and Dame Jill Knight, who were the architects of Section 28, as the 'ugly sisters' of a political pantomime.
McKellen has continued to be very active in LGBT rights efforts. In a statement on his website regarding his activism, the actor commented that:
McKellen is a co-founder of Stonewall, an LGBT rights lobby group in the United Kingdom, named after the Stonewall riots. McKellen is also patron of LGBT History Month, Pride London, Oxford Pride, GAY-GLOS, LGBT Foundation, and FFLAG where he appears in their video "Parents Talking".
In 1994, at the closing ceremony of the Gay Games, he briefly took the stage to address the crowd, saying, "I'm Sir Ian McKellen, but you can call me Serena": This nickname, given to him by Stephen Fry, had been circulating within the gay community since McKellen's knighthood was conferred. In 2002, he was the Celebrity Grand Marshal of the San Francisco Pride Parade and he attended the Academy Awards with his then-boyfriend, New Zealander Nick Cuthell. In 2006, McKellen spoke at the pre-launch of the 2007 LGBT History Month in the UK, lending his support to the organisation and its founder, Sue Sanders. In 2007, he became a patron of The Albert Kennedy Trust, an organisation that provides support to young, homeless and troubled LGBT people.
In 2006, he became a patron of Oxford Pride, stating:I send my love to all members of Oxford Pride, their sponsors and supporters, of which I am proud to be one... Onlookers can be impressed by our confidence and determination to be ourselves and gay people, of whatever age, can be comforted by the occasion to take the first steps towards coming out and leaving the closet forever behind.
McKellen has taken his activism internationally, and caused a major stir in Singapore, where he was invited to do an interview on a morning show and shocked the interviewer by asking if they could recommend him a gay bar; the programme immediately ended. In December 2008, he was named in "Out" annual Out 100 list.
In 2010, McKellen extended his support for Liverpool's Homotopia festival in which a group of gay and lesbian Merseyside teenagers helped to produce an anti-homophobia campaign pack for schools and youth centres across the city. In May 2011, he called Sergey Sobyanin, Moscow's mayor, a "coward" for refusing to allow gay parades in the city.
In 2014, he was named in the top 10 on the World Pride Power list.
In April 2010, along with actors Brian Cox and Eleanor Bron, McKellen appeared in a series of TV advertisements to support Age UK, the charity recently formed from the merger of Age Concern and Help the Aged. All three actors gave their time free of charge.
A cricket fan since childhood, McKellen umpired in March 2011 for a charity cricket match in New Zealand to support earthquake victims of the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake.
McKellen is an honorary board member for the New York- and Washington, D.C.-based organization Only Make Believe. Only Make Believe creates and performs interactive plays in children's hospitals and care facilities. He was honoured by the organisation in 2012 and hosted their annual Make Believe on Broadway Gala in November 2013. He garnered publicity for the organisation by stripping down to his Lord of the Rings underwear on stage.
McKellen also has a history of supporting individual theatres. While in New Zealand filming "The Hobbit" in 2012, he announced a special New Zealand tour "Shakespeare, Tolkien, and You!", with proceeds going to help save the Isaac Theatre Royal, which suffered extensive damage during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. McKellen said he opted to help save the building as it was the last theatre he played in New Zealand ("Waiting for Godot" in 2010) and the locals' love for it made it a place worth supporting. In July 2017, he performed a new one-man show for a week at Park Theatre (London), donating the proceeds to the theatre.
Together with a number of his "Lord of the Rings" co-stars (plus writer Philippa Boyens and director Peter Jackson), on 1 June 2020 McKellen joined Josh Gad's YouTube series "Reunited Apart" which reunites the cast of popular movies through video-conferencing, and promotes donations to non-profit charities.
A friend of Ian Charleson and an admirer of his work, McKellen contributed an entire chapter to "For Ian Charleson: A Tribute". A recording of McKellen's voice is heard before performances at the Royal Festival Hall, reminding patrons to ensure their mobile phones and watch alarms are switched off and to keep coughing to a minimum. He also took part in the 2012 Summer Paralympics opening ceremony in London as Prospero from Shakespeare's "The Tempest".
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Intellivision
The Intellivision is a home video game console released by Mattel Electronics in 1979. The name "Intellivision" is a portmanteau of "intelligent television". Development of the console began in 1977, the same year as the introduction of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. In 1984 Mattel sold their video game assets to a former Mattel Electronics executive and investors that would become INTV Corporation. Games development started in 1978 and continued until 1990 when the Intellivision was discontinued. From 1980 to 1983 over 3 million Intellivision units were sold.
In 2009, video game website IGN named the Intellivision the No. 14 greatest video game console of all time. It remained Mattel's only video game console until the release of the HyperScan in 2006.
The Intellivision was developed at Mattel in Hawthorne, California along with their Mattel Electronics line of handheld electronic games. Mattel's Design and Development group began investigating a home video game system in 1977. It was to have rich graphics and long lasting gameplay to distinguish itself from its competitors. Mattel identified a new but expensive chipset from National Semiconductor and negotiated better pricing for a simpler design. Their consultant, APh Technological Consulting, suggested a General Instrument chipset, listed as the Gimini programmable set in the GI 1977 catalog. The GI chipset lacked reprogrammable graphics and Mattel worked with GI to implement changes. GI published an updated chipset in its 1978 catalog. After initially choosing National in August 1977, Mattel waited for two months before ultimately going with the proposed GI chipset in the fall of 1977. A team at Mattel, headed by David Chandler, began engineering the hardware, including the famous hand controllers. In 1978, David Rolfe of APh developed the executive control software (Exec) and, with a group of Caltech summer student hires, programmed the first games. Graphics were designed by a group of artists at Mattel led by Dave James.
The Intellivision was test marketed in Fresno, California in 1979 with a total of four games available. It was released nationwide in 1980 with a price tag of US$299, a pack-in game ("Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack"), and a library of ten cartridges. Mattel Electronics would become a subsidiary in 1981.
Though the Intellivision was not the first system to challenge Warner Communications's Atari, it was the first to pose a serious threat to the market leader. A series of advertisements featuring George Plimpton were produced that demonstrated the superiority of the Intellivision's graphics and sound to those of the Atari 2600, using side-by-side game comparisons. One of the slogans of the television advertisements stated that Intellivision was "the closest thing to the real thing"; one example in an advertisement compared golf games. The other console's games had a blip sound and cruder graphics, while the Intellivision featured a realistic swing sound and striking of the ball, and graphics that suggested a more 3D look. There was also an advertisement comparing the Atari 2600 to it, featuring the slogan "I didn't know". In its first year, Mattel sold out its initial 175,000 production run of Intellivision "Master Components". In 1981, over one million Intellivision consoles were sold, five times as many as in 1980.
The Intellivision Master Component was branded and distributed by various companies. Before Mattel shifted manufacturing to Hong Kong, Mattel Intellivisions were manufactured by GTE Sylvania. "GTE Sylvania" Intellivisions were produced along with Mattel's, with the brand name the only differentiation. The Sears "Super Video Arcade", manufactured by Mattel in Hong Kong, has a restyled beige top cover and detachable controllers. The Sears Intellivision modified the default title screen by removing the "Mattel Electronics" captioning. In 1982 Radio Shack marketed the "Tandyvision One", similar to the original Intellivision but with the gold plates replaced with more wood trim. In Japan Intellivisions were branded by Bandai in 1982, and in Brazil there were Digimed and Digiplay Intellivisions manufactured by Sharp in 1983.
Inside every Intellivision is 4K of ROM containing the Exec software. It provides two benefits: reusable code that can effectively make a 4K cartridge an 8K game, and a software framework for new programmers to develop games more easily and quickly. It also allows other programmers to more easily review and continue another's project. Under the supervision of David Rolfe (APh) and graphics supplied by Mattel artist Dave James, APh was able to quickly create the Intellivision launch title library using mostly summer students. The drawback is that to be flexible and handle many different types of games the Exec runs less efficiently than a dedicated program. Intellivision games that leverage the Exec run at a 20 Hz frame rate instead of the 60 Hz frame rate for which the Intellivision was designed. Using the Exec framework is optional, but almost all Intellivision games released by Mattel Electronics are 20 Hz. The limited ROM space also meant there was no room for computer artificial intelligence and many early games required two players.
Initially, all Intellivision games were programmed by an outside firm, APh Technological Consulting, with 19 cartridges produced before Christmas 1980. Once the Intellivision project became successful, software development was brought in-house. Mattel formed its own software development group and began hiring programmers. The original five members of that Intellivision team were Mike Minkoff, Rick Levine, John Sohl, Don Daglow, and manager Gabriel Baum. Levine and Minkoff, a long-time Mattel Toys veteran, both came over from the hand-held Mattel games engineering team. During 1981 Mattel hired programmers as fast it could. Early in 1982 Mattel Electronics relocated from Mattel headquarters to an unused industrial building. Office renovation work happened as new staff moved in. To keep these programmers from being hired away by rival Atari, their identity and work location was kept a closely guarded secret. In public, the programmers were referred to collectively as the Blue Sky Rangers.
Most of the early games were based on traditional real-world concepts such as sports, with an emphasis on realism and depth of play within the technology of the day. The Intellivision was not marketed as a toy; as such, games such as "Sea Battle" and "B-17 Bomber" are not made in a pick-up-and-play format which arcade style games are. Reading the instructions is often a prerequisite to play. Every cartridge produced by Mattel Electronics included two plastic controller "overlays" to help navigate the 12 keypad buttons, although not every game made use of the keypad. Mattel organized its games into networks: "Major League Sports, Action, Strategy, Gaming, Children's Learning" and later "Space Action" and "Arcade". The network concept was dropped in 1983, as were the convenient gate-fold style boxes for storing the cartridge, instructions, and overlays.
Starting in 1981 programmers looking for credit and royalties on sales began leaving both APh and Mattel Electronics to create Intellivision cartridges for third-party publishers. They helped form Imagic in 1981 and in 1982 others joined Activision and Atari. Cheshire Engineering was formed by a few senior APh programmers including David Rolfe (author of the Exec) and Tom Loughry, who had created one of the most popular Intellivision games ""; Cheshire created Intellivision games for Activision. Third-party developers Activision, Imagic, and Coleco started producing Intellivision cartridges in 1982, and Atari, Parker Brothers, Sega, and Interphase followed in 1983. The third-party developers, not having legal access to Exec knowledge, often bypassed the Exec framework to create smooth 30 Hz and 60 Hz Intellivision games such as "The Dreadnaught Factor". Cheaper ROM prices also allowed for larger games as 8K, 12K, and then 16K cartridges became common. The first Mattel Electronics Intellivision game to run at 60 Hz was "Masters of the Universe" in 1983. Marketing dubbed the term "Super Graphics" on the game's packaging and marketing.
Mattel Electronics' team of programmers was diverse in experience and talent, which proved to be an advantage. As competitors often depended on licensing well known trademarks to sell video games, Mattel focused on original ideas. Don Daglow was a key early programmer at Mattel and became director of Intellivision game development. Daglow created "Utopia", a precursor to the sim genre and, with Eddie Dombrower, the ground breaking sports simulation "World Series Major League Baseball". Daglow was also involved with the popular Intellivision games "Tron Deadly Discs" and "Shark! Shark!". After Mattel Electronics closed in 1984, their programmers would go on to make significant contributions to the video game industry. Don Daglow and Eddie Dombrower went on to Electronic Arts to create "Earl Weaver Baseball", and Don Daglow founded Stormfront Studios. Bill Fisher, Steve Roney and Mike Breen founded Quicksilver Software and David Warhol founded Realtime Associates.
From the beginning, Intellivision's packaging and promotional materials, as well as television commercials, promised the addition of a soon-to-be-available accessory called the "Keyboard Component". The Intellivision was designed as a modular home computer. The "Master Component" could be purchased as a stand-alone video game system and the "Keyboard Component" could be added, providing the computer keyboard and tape drive. Not meant to be a hobbyist or business computer, the Intellivision home computer was meant to run pre-programmed software and bring "data flow" (Videotex) into the home.
The Keyboard Component added an 8-bit 6502 processor making the Intellivision a dual processor computer. It had 16K 10-bit shared RAM that could load and execute both Intellivision CP1610 and 6502 program code from tape; a large amount as typical cartridges of the day were 4K. The cassettes have two tracks of digital data and two tracks of analog audio completely controlled by the computer. Two tracks are read only for the software, and two tracks for user data. The tape-drive was block addressed with high speed indexing. A high resolution 40x24 monochrome text display could overlay regular Intellivision graphics. There was an input for a microphone and two additional expansion ports for peripherals and RAM expansion. The Microsoft BASIC programming cartridge used one of these ports. Expanded memory cartridges could support 1000 8KB pages. A third pass-through cartridge port was for regular Intellivision cartridges. It uses the Intellivision's power supply. A 40-column thermal printer was available, and a telephone modem was planned along with voice synthesis and voice recognition.
David Rolfe of APh wrote a control program for the Keyboard Component called "PicSe" (Picture Sequencer) specifically for the development of multimedia applications. PicSe synchronized the graphics and analog audio while concurrently saving/loading data to/from tape. Productivity software for home finances, personal improvement, and self education were planned. Subject experts were consulted and their voices recorded and used in the software.
Three applications using the PicSe system were released on cassette tape:
Five BASIC applications were released on tape: "Programs written in BASIC did not have access to Intellivision graphics and were sold at a lower price."
While the Keyboard Component was an ambitious piece of engineering for its time it was repeatedly delayed as the engineers tried to reduce manufacturing costs. In August 1979 the Intellivision Keyboard Component, in breadboard form, was successfully entered into the Sears Market Research Program. In December 1979 Mattel had production design working units but decided on a significant internal design change to consolidate circuit boards. In September 1980 it was test marketed in Fresno, California but without software, except for the BASIC programming cartridge. In the fall of 1981 design changes were finally implemented and the "Keyboard Component" was released at $600 in Seattle and New Orleans only. Those that complained in writing could buy a Keyboard Component directly from Mattel. The printer, a rebadged Alphacom Sprinter 40, was only available by mail order.
The keyboard component's repeated delays became so notorious around Mattel headquarters that comedian Jay Leno, when performing at Mattel's 1981 Christmas party, got his biggest titter of the evening with the line: "You know what the three big lies are, don't you? 'The check is in the mail,' 'I'll still respect you in the morning,' and 'The keyboard will be out in spring.'"
Complaints from consumers who had chosen to buy the Intellivision specifically on the promise of a "coming soon" personal-computer upgrade, eventually caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), who started investigating Mattel Electronics for fraud and false advertising. In mid-1982 the FTC ordered Mattel to pay a monthly fine (said to be $10,000) until the promised computer upgrade was in full retail distribution. To protect themselves from the ongoing fines, the Keyboard Component was officially canceled in August 1982 and the Entertainment Computer System (ECS) module offered up in its place. Part of Mattel's settlement with the FTC involved offering to buy back all of the existing Keyboard Components from customers. Mattel provided a full refund but without a receipt paid $550 for the Keyboard Component, $60 for the BASIC cartridge, and $30 for each cassette software. Any customer who opted to keep theirs was required to sign a waiver with the understanding that no more software would be written for the system and absolved Mattel of any future responsibility for technical support. They were also compensated with $1000 worth of Mattel Electronics products.
While approximately 4,000 Keyboard Components were manufactured, it is not clear how many of them actually found their way into the hands of Intellivision customers. Today, very few of them still exist. Many of the units were dismantled for parts. Others were used by Mattel Electronics programmers as part of their development system. A Keyboard Component could be interfaced with an Intellivision development system in place of the hand-built Magus board RAM cartridge. Data transfer to the Keyboard Component RAM had to be done serially and was slower compared with the Magus board parallel interface.
The keyboard component debacle was ranked as No. 11 on "GameSpy"s "25 dumbest moments in gaming".
In mid-1981, Mattel's upper management was becoming concerned that the keyboard component division would never be able to produce a sellable product. As a result, Mattel Electronics set up a competing internal engineering team whose stated mission was to produce an inexpensive add-on called the "Basic Development System", or BDS, to be sold as an educational device to introduce kids to the concepts of computer programming.
The rival BDS engineering group, who had to keep the project's real purpose a secret among themselves, fearing that if David Chandler, the head of the keyboard component team, found out about it he would use his influence to end the project, eventually came up with a much less expensive alternative. Originally dubbed the "Lucky", from LUCKI: Low User-Cost Keyboard Interface, it lacked many of the sophisticated features envisioned for the original keyboard component. Gone, for example, was the 16K (8MB max) of RAM, the secondary CPU, and high resolution text; instead, the ECS offered a mere 2KB RAM expansion, a built-in BASIC that was marginally functional, plus a much-simplified cassette and printer interface.
Ultimately, this fulfilled the original promises of turning the Intellivision into a computer, making it possible to write programs and store them to tape, and interfacing with a printer well enough to allow Mattel to claim that they had delivered the promised computer upgrade and stop the FTC's mounting fines. It even offered, via an additional sound chip (AY-3-8917) inside the ECS module and an optional 49-key music synthesizer keyboard, the possibility of turning the Intellivision into a multi-voice synthesizer which could be used to play or learn music.
In the fall of 1982, the LUCKI, now renamed the Entertainment Computer System (ECS), was presented at the annual sales meeting, officially ending the ill-fated keyboard component project. A new advertising campaign was aired in time for the 1982 Christmas season, and the ECS itself was shown to the public at the January 1983 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. A few months later, the ECS hit the market, and the FTC agreed to drop the $10K per day fines.
By the time the ECS made its retail debut as the Intellivision Computer Module, an internal shake-up at the top levels of Mattel Electronics' management had caused the company's focus to shift away from hardware add-ons in favor of software, and the ECS received very little in terms of furthering the marketing push. Further hardware developments, including a planned Program Expander that would have added another 16K of RAM and a more intricate, fully featured Extended-BASIC to the system, were halted. In the end a half-dozen software titles were released for the ECS; a few more were completed but not released.
The ECS also offered four player game-play with the optional addition of two extra hand controllers. Four player games were in development when Mattel Electronics closed in 1984. "World Cup Soccer" was later completed and released in 1985 by Dextel in Europe and then INTV Corporation in North America. The documentation does not mention it but when the ECS Computer Adapter is used, "World Cup Soccer" can be played with one to four players, or two players cooperatively against the computer.
In 1982 Mattel introduced a new peripheral for the Intellivision: the "Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module". A speech synthesizer which produces speech with compatible cartridges. The Intellivoice was original in two respects: human sounding male and female voices with distinct accents, and the speech-supporting games were designed with speech being an integral part of the game-play.
Like the Intellivision chip-set, the Intellivoice chip-set was developed by General Instrument. The SP0256-012 orator chip has 2KB ROM inside, and is used to store the speech for numerical digits, some common words, and the phrase "Mattel Electronics presents". Speech can also be processed from the Intellivoice's SP650 buffer chip, stored and loaded from cartridge memory. That buffer chip has its own I/O and the Intellivoice has a 30-pin expansion port under a removable top plate. Mattel Electronics planned to use that connector for wireless hand controllers.
Mattel Electronics built a state of the art voice processing lab to produce the phrases used in Intellivoice games. However, the amount of speech that could be compressed into an 8K or 12K cartridge and still leave room for a game was limited. Intellivoice cartridges "Space Spartans" and "B-17 Bomber" did sell about 300,000 copies each, priced a few dollars more than regular Intellivision cartridges. However, at $79 the Intellivoice did not sell as well as Mattel expected, and Intellivoices were later offered free with the purchase of a Master Component. In August 1983 the Intellivoice system was quietly phased out. A children's title called "Magic Carousel", and foreign language versions of "Space Spartans" were completed but shelved. Additional games "Woody Woodpecker" and "Space Shuttle" went unfinished with the voice recordings unused.
The four titles available for the Intellivoice system, in order of their release, were:
A fifth title, "Intellivision World Series Major League Baseball", developed as part of the Entertainment Computer System series, also supports the Intellivoice if both the ECS and Intellivoice are connected concurrently. Unlike the Intellivoice-specific games, however, "World Series Major League Baseball" is also playable without the Intellivoice module (but not without the ECS).
In the spring of 1983, Mattel introduced the "Intellivision II". It was not the technology upgrade that was expected, but a cheaper, compact replacement to the original. The Intellivision II was designed to be inexpensive to manufacture and service, with updated styling. It also had longer controller cords. The Intellivision II was initially released without a pack-in game but was later packaged with BurgerTime in the United States and Lock'N'Chase in Canada. In 1984 the Digiplay Intellivision II was introduced in Brazil. Brazil was the only country outside North America to have the redesigned Intellivision II.
Using an external AC Adapter (16.2VAC), consolidating some ICs, and taking advantage of relaxed FCC emission standards, the Intellivision II has a significantly smaller footprint than the original. The controllers, now detachable, have a different feel, with plastic rather than rubber side buttons and a flat membrane keypad. Users of the original Intellivision missed the ability to find keypad buttons by the tactile feel of the original controller bubble keypad.
One functional difference was the addition of a video input to the cartridge port, added specifically to support the System Changer. The System Changer, also released in 1983 by Mattel, is an Intellivision peripheral that plays Atari 2600 cartridges through the Intellivision. The Intellivision hand controllers can be used to play Atari 2600 games. The System Changer also has two controller ports compatible with Atari joysticks. The original Intellivision requires a hardware modification in order to work with the "System Changer"; a service provided by Mattel. Otherwise the Intellivision II was promoted to be compatible with the original.
It was discovered that a few Coleco Intellivision games did not work on the Intellivision II. Mattel secretly changed the Intellivision's internal ROM program (Exec) in an attempt to lock out 3rd party titles. A few of Coleco's early games were affected but the 3rd party developers quickly figured out how to get around it. Mattel's own "Electric Company Word Fun", however, will not run on the Intellivision II due to this change. In an unrelated issue but also due to Exec changes, Super Pro Football experiences a minor glitch where the quarterback does not appear until after the ball is hiked. There were also some minor changes to the sound chip (AY-3-8914A/AY-3-8916) affecting sound effects in some games. Programmers at Mattel discovered the audio differences and avoided the problem in future games.
Dave Chandler's group began designing Mattel's next generation console in 1981 codenamed "Decade", now referred to as the "Intellivision IV". It was based on the 32-bit MC68000 processor and a 16-bit custom designed advanced graphic interface chip. Specifications called for dual display support, 240x192 bitmap resolution, 16 programmable 12-bit colors (4096 colors), antialiasing, 40x24 tiled graphics modes, four colors per tile (16 with shading), text layer and indepdendent scrolling, 16 multicolored 16x16 sprites per scan-line, 32 level hardware sprite scaling. Line interrupts for reprogramming sprite and color registers allow for many more sprites and colors on screen at the same time. A machine that could lead Mattel Electronics into the 1990s, however on August 4, 1983 most hardware people at Mattel Electronics had been laid off.
In 1982, with new machines introduced by competitors, Mattel marketing wanted to bring an upgraded system to market sooner. The "Intellivision III" was to be an upgraded but backward compatible system; based on a similar CP1610 processor and with an improved graphics STIC chip producing double the resolution with more sprites and colors. The Intellivision III existed in the lab and a new EXEC was written for it but little else. It was cancelled in mid-1983. A Mattel document called "Target Specification Intellivision III" has the following.
According to the company's 1982 Form 10-K, Mattel had almost 20% of the domestic video-game market. Mattel Electronics provided 25% of revenue and 50% of operating income in fiscal 1982. Although the Atari 2600 had more third-party development, "Creative Computing Video & Arcade Games" reported after visiting the summer 1982 Consumer Electronics Show that "The momentum is tremendous". Activision and Imagic began releasing games for the Intellivision, as did hardware rival Coleco. Mattel created "M Network" branded games for Atari's system. The company's advertisement budget increased to over $20 million for the year. In its October 1982 stockholders' report Mattel announced that "Electronics" had, so far that year, posted a nearly $100 million profit on nearly $500 million sales; a threefold increase over October 1981.
However, the same report predicted a loss for the upcoming quarter. Still hiring continued, and optimism that the investment in software and hardware development will payoff. The "M Network" brand expanded to personal computers. An office in Taiwan was opened to handle Apple II programming. The original five-person Mattel game development team had grown to 110 people under new vice president Baum, while Daglow led Intellivision development and top engineer Minkoff directed all work on all other platforms. In February 1983, Mattel Electronics opened an office in the south of France to provide European input to Intellivision games and develop games for the ColecoVision. At its peak Mattel Electronics employed 1800 people.
Amid the flurry of new hardware and software development, there was trouble for the Intellivision. New game systems (ColecoVision and Atari 5200) introduced in 1982 took advantage of falling RAM prices to offer graphics closer to arcade quality. In 1983 the price of home computers, particularly the Commodore 64, came down drastically to compete with video game system sales. The market became flooded with hardware and software, and retailers were ill-equipped to cope. In spring 1983 hiring at Mattel Electronics came to a halt.
At the June 1983 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, Mattel Electronics had the opportunity to show off all their new products. The response was underwhelming. Amidst massive losses, top management was replaced. On July 12, 1983, Mattel Electronics President Josh Denham was replaced with outsider Mack Morris. Morris brought in former Mattel Electronics president and marketing director Jeff Rochlis as a consultant and all projects were under review. The Intellivision III was cancelled and then all new hardware development was stopped when 660 jobs were cut on August 4. The price of the Intellivision II (which launched at $150 earlier that year) was lowered to $69, Mattel Electronics was to be a software company. However, by October 1983 "Electronics"' losses were over $280 million for the year and one third of the programming staff were laid off. In November another third were gone, and on January 20, 1984 the remaining programming staff were laid-off. The Taiwan and French offices continued a little while longer due to contract and legal obligations. On February 4, 1984 Mattel sold the Intellivision business for $20 million. In 1983, 750,000 Intellivision Master Components were sold, more than three million units from 1980 to 1983.
Former Mattel Electronics Senior Vice President of Marketing, Terrence Valeski, understood that although losses were huge, the demand for video games increased in 1983. Valeski found investors and purchased the rights to Intellivision, the games, and inventory from Mattel. A new company, Intellivision Inc, was formed and by the end of 1984 Valeski bought out the other investors and changed the name to INTV Corporation. They continued to supply the large toy stores and sold games through direct mail order. At first they sold the existing inventory of games and Intellivision II systems. When the inventory of games sold out they produced more, but without the Mattel name or unnecessary licenses on the printed materials. To lower costs, the boxes, instructions, and overlays were produced at lower quality compared to Mattel.
In France, the Mattel Electronics office found investors and became Nice Ideas in April 1984. They continued to work on Intellivision, Colecovision, and other computer games. They produced Intellivision "World Cup Soccer" and "Championship Tennis", both released in 1985 by European publisher Dextel.
In 1985 INTV Corporation introduced the "INTV System III", also branded as the "Intellivision Super Pro System", using the same design as the original Intellivision model but in black and silver. That same year INTV Corp introduced two new games that were completed at Mattel but not released: "Thunder Castle" and "World Championship Baseball". With their early success INTV Corp decided to produce new games and in 1986 introduced "Super Pro Football", an update of Mattel "NFL Football". INTV Corp continued a relationship that Mattel had with Data East and produced all new titles such as "Commando" in 1987 and "Body Slam Wrestling" in 1988. Also in 1987 INTV Corp released "Dig Dug", purchased from Atari where the game was completed but not released in 1984. They also got into producing next generation games with the production of "Monster Truck Rally" for Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1991, also released as "Stadium Mud Buggies" for Intellivision in 1989.
Licensing agreements with Nintendo and Sega required INTV Corporation to discontinue the Intellivision in 1990. INTV Corporation did publish 21 new Intellivision cartridges bringing the Intellivision library to a total of 124 cartridges plus one compilation cartridge.
In 1989 INTV Corp and World Book Encyclopedia entered into an agreement to manufacture an educational video game system called Tutorvision. It is a modified Intellivision, the case molded in light beige with gold and blue trim. The Exec ROM expanded, system RAM increased to 1.75K, and graphics RAM increased to 2KB. That is enough graphics RAM to define unique graphic tiles for the entire screen.
Games were designed by World Book, "J. Hakansson Associates", and programmed by Realtime Associates. Sixteen titles were in production, plus one Canadian variation. However, the cartridges and the Tutorvision were never released; instead World Book and INTV Corporation sued each other. In 1990 INTV Corporation filed for bankruptcy protection and closed in 1991.
An unknown number of later Intellivision SuperPro systems have Tutorvision hardware inside. A subset of these units contain the full Tutorvision EXEC and can play Tutorvision games.
Intellivision games became readily available again when Keith Robinson and Stephen Roney, both former Intellivision programmers at Mattel Electronics, obtained exclusive rights to the Intellivision and games in 1997. That year they formed "Intellivision Productions" and made "Intellivision for PC Volume 1" available as a free download. Intellivision games could be played on a modern computer for the first time. That download includes three Intellivision games and an MS-DOS Intellivision emulator that plays original game code. It was followed by "Volume 2" and another three games including "Deep Pockets Super Pro Pool & Billiards"; a game completed in 1990 but never released until this download in 1997. In 2000 the "Intellipack 3" download was available with another four Intellivision games and emulators for Windows or Macintosh.
Intellivision Productions released "Intellivision Lives!" and "Intellivision Rocks" on compact disc in 1998 and 2001. These compilation CDs play the original game code through emulators for MS-DOS, Windows, and Macintosh computers. Together they have over 100 Intellivision games including never before released "King of the Mountain, Takeover, Robot Rubble", "League of Light", and others. Intellivision Rocks includes Intellivision games made by Activision and Imagic. Some games could not be included due to licensing, others simply used different titles to avoid trademarked names. The CDs are also a resource for development history, box art, hidden features, programmer biographies, video interviews, and original commercials.
Also in 1997 Intellivision Productions announced they would sell development tools allowing customers to program their own Intellivision games. They were to provide documentation, PC compatible cross-assemblers, and the "Magus II" PC Intellivision cartridge interface. Unfortunately, the project was cancelled but they did provide copies of "Your Friend the EXEC", the programmers guide to the Intellivision Executive control software. By 2000 Intellivision hobbyists ultimately created their own development tools, including Intellivision memory cartridges.
In 2005 Intellivision Productions announced that new Intellivision cartridges were to be produced. "Deep Pockets and Illusions will be the first two releases in a series of new cartridges for the Intellivision. The printed circuit boards, the cartridge casings, the boxes are all being custom manufactured for this special series." "Illusions" was completed at Mattel Electronics' French office in 1983 but never released. "Deep Pockets Super Pro Pool & Billiards" was programmed for INTV Corporation in 1990 and only released as a ROM file in 1998. However, no cartridges were produced. Previously, in 2000, Intellivision Productions did release new cartridges for the Atari 2600 and Colecovision. "Sea Battle" and "Swordfight" were Atari 2600 games created by Mattel Electronics in the early 1980s but not previously released. "Steamroller" (Colecovision) was developed for Activision in 1984 and not previously released.
Also in 1999, Activision released "A Collection of Intellivision Classic Games" for PlayStation. Also known as "Intellivision Classics", it has 30 emulated Intellivision games as well as video interviews of some of the original programmers. All of the games were licensed from Intellivision Productions and none of the Activision or Imagic Intellivision games were included. In 2003, Crave Entertainment released a PlayStation 2 version of Intellivision Lives! and then Xbox and GameCube version in 2004. In 2010 Virtual Play Games released Intellivision Lives! for the Nintendo DS including one never before released game, "Blow Out". In 2008 Microsoft made Intellivision Lives! an available download on the Xbox Live Marketplace as an Xbox Original and playable on the Xbox 360.
In 2003, the Intellivision 25 and Intellivision 15 direct-to-TV systems were released by Techno Source Ltd. These are an all-in-one single controller design that plugs directly into a television. One includes 25 games the other ten. These Intellivision games were not emulated but rewritten for the native processor (Nintendo NES compatible) and adapted to a contemporary controller. As such they look and play differently than Intellivision. In 2005 they were updated for two-player play as the Intellivision X2 with 15 games. They were commercially very successful altogether selling about 4 million units by end of 2006.
Several licensed Intellivision games became available to Windows computers through the GameTap subscription gaming service in 2005 including "Astrosmash, Buzz Bombers, Hover Force, Night Stalker, Pinball, Shark! Shark!, Skiing and Snafu". Installation of the GameTap Player software was required to access the emulator and games. The VH1 Online Arcade made nine Intellivision games available in 2007. Using a Shockwave emulator these Intellivision games could be played directly through a web browser with Shockwave Player. In 2010 VH1 Classic and MTV Networks released 6 Intellivision games to iOS. Intellivision games were first adapted to mobile phones and published by THQ Wireless in 2001. On March 24, 2010, Microsoft launched the Game Room service for Xbox Live and Games for Windows Live. This service includes support for Intellivision titles and allows players to compete against one another for high scores via online leaderboards. At the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft announced a version of Game Room for Windows Phone, promising a catalog of 44 Intellivision titles. AtGames and their Direct2Drive digital store has Windows compatible Intellivision compilations available for download purchase.
The number of Intellivision games that can be played effectively with contemporary game controllers is limited. On October 1, 2014, AtGames Digital Media, Inc., under license from Intellivision Productions, Inc., released the Intellivision Flashback classic game console. It is a miniature sized Intellivision console with two original sized Intellivision controllers. While adapters have been available to interface original Intellivision controllers to personal computers, the Intellivision Flashback includes two new Intellivision controllers identical in layout and function to the originals. It comes with 60 emulated Intellivision games built into ROM and a sample set of plastic overlays for 10 games. The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games were included as "Crown of Kings" and "Minotaur". As with many of the other Intellivision compilations, no games requiring third party licensing were included.
In May 2018, Tommy Tallarico announced that he acquired the rights to the Intellivision brand and games with plans to launch a new home video game console. A new company, "Intellivision Entertainment", was formed with Tallarico serving as president. "Intellivision Productions" has been renamed "Blue Sky Rangers Inc." and their video game intellectual property has been transferred to "Intellivision Entertainment". At the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, in October 2018, the Intellivision Amico was officially revealed.
Ken Uston published "Ken Uston's Guide to Buying and Beating the Home Video Games" in 1982 as a guide to potential buyers of console systems/cartridges, as well as a brief strategy guide to numerous cartridge games then in existence. He described Intellivision as "the most mechanically reliable of the systems… The controller (used during "many hours of experimentation") worked with perfect consistency. The unit never had overheating problems, nor were loose wires or other connections encountered." However, Uston rated the controls and control system as "below average" and the worst of the consoles he tested (including Atari 2600, Magnavox Odyssey², Astrovision, and Fairchild Channel F).
Jeff Rovin lists "Intellivision" as one of the seven major suppliers of videogames in 1982, and mentions it as "the unchallenged king of graphics", however stating that the controllers can be "difficult to operate", the fact that if a controller breaks the entire unit must be shipped off for repairs (since they did not detach at first), and that the overlays "are sometimes so stubborn as to tempt one's patience" .
A 1996 article in "Next Generation" said the Intellivision "had greater graphics power than the dominant Atari 2600. It was slower than the 2600 and had less software available, but it was known for its superior sports titles." A year later "Electronic Gaming Monthly" assessed the Intellivision in an overview of older gaming consoles, remarking that the controllers "were as comfortable as they were practical. The unique disk-shaped directional pad provided unprecedented control for the time, and the numeric keypad opened up new options previously unavailable in console gaming." They praised the breadth of the software library but said there was a lack of genuinely stand-out games.
"Intellivision, Super Video Arcade, Tandyvision One, Intellivision II, INTV System III, Super Pro System"
The Intellivision controller features:
The directional pad was called a "control disc" and marketed as having the "functionality of both a joystick and a paddle". The controller was ranked the fourth worst video game controller by IGN editor Craig Harris.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15309
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Imperialism
Imperialism is a policy or ideology of extending the rule or authority of a country over other countries and peoples, often by military force or by gaining political and economic control. In this sense imperialism is not a form of government of a state headed by an emperor.
Expansionism and centralisation has been pursued throughout recorded history, the earliest examples dating from the mid-third millennium BC. Though only in modern times the distinct form and concept of imperialism developed, closely associated with many European powers towards the 20th century and New Imperialism. Since then the concept has been used and developed further in a broad way, to identify, as well as criticise a range of policies and states, even occasionally anti-imperialist states.
Colonialism is a typical expansionist element of imperialism, but does not need to be a part of a particular case of imperialism.
The word "imperialism" originated from the Latin word "imperium", which means supreme power, "'sovereignty', or simply 'rule'". It first became common with its current sense in Great Britain, during the 1870s and was used with a negative connotation. Previously the word imperialism had been used to describe to what was perceived as Napoleon III's attempts of obtaining political support through foreign military interventions. The term was and is mainly applied to Western and Japanese political and economic dominance especially in Asia and Africa, in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its precise meaning continues to be debated by scholars. Some writers, such as Edward Said, use the term more broadly to describe any system of domination and subordination organised with an imperial center and a periphery. This definition encompasses both nominal empires and neocolonialism.
The term "imperialism" is often conflated with "colonialism"; however, many scholars have argued that each have their own distinct definition. Imperialism and colonialism have been used in order to describe one's perceived superiority, domination and influence upon a person or group of people. Robert Young writes that while imperialism operates from the center, is a state policy and is developed for ideological as well as financial reasons, colonialism is simply the development for settlement or commercial intentions. However, colonialism still includes invasion. Colonialism in modern usage also tends to imply a degree of geographic separation between the colony and the imperial power. Particularly, Edward Said distinguishes the difference between imperialism and colonialism by stating; "imperialism involved 'the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory', while colonialism refers to the 'implanting of settlements on a distant territory.' Contiguous land empires such as the Russian or Ottoman have traditionally been excluded from discussions of colonialism, though this is beginning to change, since it is accepted that they also sent populations into the territories they ruled.
Imperialism and colonialism both dictate the political and economic advantage over a land and the indigenous populations they control, yet scholars sometimes find it difficult to illustrate the difference between the two. Although imperialism and colonialism focus on the suppression of "another", if colonialism refers to the process of a country taking physical control of another, imperialism refers to the political and monetary dominance, either formally or informally. Colonialism is seen to be the architect deciding how to start dominating areas and then imperialism can be seen as creating the idea behind conquest cooperating with colonialism. Colonialism is when the imperial nation begins a conquest over an area and then eventually is able to rule over the areas the previous nation had controlled. Colonialism's core meaning is the exploitation of the valuable assets and supplies of the nation that was conquered and the conquering nation then gaining the benefits from the spoils of the war. The meaning of imperialism is to create an empire, by conquering the other state's lands and therefore increasing its own dominance. Colonialism is the builder and preserver of the colonial possessions in an area by a population coming from a foreign region. Colonialism can completely change the existing social structure, physical structure, and economics of an area; it is not unusual that the characteristics of the conquering peoples are inherited by the conquered indigenous populations. Few colonies remain remote from their mother country. Thus, most will eventually establish a separate nationality or remain under complete control of their mother colony.
The Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin suggested that "imperialism was the highest form of capitalism, claiming that imperialism developed after colonialism, and was distinguished from colonialism by monopoly capitalism". This idea from Lenin stresses how important new political world order has become in the modern era. Geopolitics now focuses on states becoming major economic players in the market; some states today are viewed as empires due to their political and economic authority over other nations.
Empires are distincted through the amount of land that it has conquered and expanded. Its political power grows from conquering land; however, cultural and economic aspects flourished through sea and trade routes. A distinction about empires is "that although political empires were built mostly by expansion overland, economic and cultural influences spread at least as much by sea". Some of the main aspects of trade that went overseas consisted of animals and plant products. European empires in Asia and Africa "have come to be seen as the classic forms of imperialism: and indeed most books on the subject confine themselves to the European seaborne empires".
European expansion caused the world to be divided by how developed and developing nation are portrayed through the world systems theory. The two main regions are the core and the periphery. The core consists of areas of high income and profit; the periphery is on the opposing side of the spectrum consisting of areas of low income and profit. These critical theories of geo-politics have led to increased discussion of the meaning and impact of imperialism on the modern post-colonial world.
The Age of Imperialism, a time period beginning around 1760, saw European industrializing nations, engaging in the process of colonizing, influencing, and annexing other parts of the world. 19th century episodes included the "Scramble for Africa."
In the 1970s British historians John Gallagher (1919–1980) and Ronald Robinson (1920–1999) argued that European leaders rejected the notion that "imperialism" required formal, legal control by one government over a colonial region. Much more important was informal control of independent areas. According to Wm. Roger Louis, "In their view, historians have been mesmerized by formal empire and maps of the world with regions colored red. The bulk of British emigration, trade, and capital went to areas outside the formal British Empire. Key to their thinking is the idea of empire 'informally if possible and formally if necessary.'" Oron Hale says that Gallagher and Robinson looked at the British involvement in Africa where they "found few capitalists, less capital, and not much pressure from the alleged traditional promoters of colonial expansion. Cabinet decisions to annex or not to annex were made, usually on the basis of political or geopolitical considerations."
Looking at the main empires from 1875–1914, historians estimate a mixed record in terms of profitability. At first planners expected that colonies would provide an excellent captive market for manufactured items. Apart from the Indian subcontinent, this was seldom true. By the 1890s, imperialists saw the economic benefit primarily in the production of inexpensive raw materials to feed the domestic manufacturing sector. Overall, Great Britain did very well in terms of profits from India, especially Mughal Bengal, but not from most of the rest of its empire. The Netherlands did very well in the East Indies. Germany and Italy got very little trade or raw materials from their empires. France did slightly better. The Belgian Congo was notoriously profitable when it was a capitalistic rubber plantation owned and operated by King Leopold II as a private enterprise. However, scandal after scandal regarding very badly mistreated labour led the international community to force the government of Belgium to take it over in 1908, and it became much less profitable. The Philippines cost the United States much more than expected because of military action against rebels.
Because of the resources made available by imperialism, the world's economy grew significantly and became much more interconnected in the decades before World War I, making the many imperial powers rich and prosperous.
Europe's expansion into territorial imperialism was largely focused on economic growth by collecting resources from colonies, in combination with assuming political control by military and political means. The colonization of India in the mid-18th century offers an example of this focus: there, the "British exploited the political weakness of the Mughal state, and, while military activity was important at various times, the economic and administrative incorporation of local elites was also of crucial significance" for the establishment of control over the subcontinent's resources, markets, and manpower. Although a substantial number of colonies had been designed to provide economic profit and to ship resources to home ports in the 17th and 18th centuries, Fieldhouse suggests that in the 19th and 20th centuries in places such as Africa and Asia, this idea is not necessarily valid:
During this time, European merchants had the ability to "roam the high seas and appropriate surpluses from around the world (sometimes peaceably, sometimes violently) and to concentrate them in Europe".
European expansion greatly accelerated in the 19th century. To obtain raw materials, Europe expanded imports from other countries and from the colonies. European industrialists sought raw materials such as dyes, cotton, vegetable oils, and metal ores from overseas. Concurrently, industrialization was quickly making Europe the center of manufacturing and economic growth, driving resource needs.
Communication became much more advanced during European expansion. With the invention of railroads and telegraphs, it became easier to communicate with other countries and to extend the administrative control of a home nation over its colonies. Steam railroads and steam-driven ocean shipping made possible the fast, cheap transport of massive amounts of goods to and from colonies.
Along with advancements in communication, Europe also continued to advance in military technology. European chemists made new explosives that made artillery much more deadly. By the 1880s, the machine gun had become a reliable battlefield weapon. This technology gave European armies an advantage over their opponents, as armies in less-developed countries were still fighting with arrows, swords, and leather shields (e.g. the Zulus in Southern Africa during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879). Some exceptions of armies that managed to get nearly on par with the European expeditions and standards include the Ethiopian armies at the Battle of Adwa, the Chinese Ever Victorious Army and the Japanese Imperial Army of Japan, but these still relied heavily on weapon imports from Europe and often on European military advisors and adventurers.
Anglophone academic studies often base their theories regarding imperialism on the British experience of Empire. The term "imperialism" was originally introduced into English in its present sense in the late 1870s by opponents of the allegedly aggressive and ostentatious imperial policies of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Supporters of "imperialism" such as Joseph Chamberlain quickly appropriated the concept. For some, imperialism designated a policy of idealism and philanthropy; others alleged that it was characterized by political self-interest, and a growing number associated it with capitalist greed.
John A. Hobson developed a highly influential interpretation of "Imperialism: A Study" (1902) that expanded on his belief that free enterprise capitalism had a negative impact on the majority of the population. In "Imperialism" he argued that the financing of overseas empires drained money that was needed at home. It was invested abroad because of lower wages paid to the workers overseas made for higher profits and higher rates of return, compared to domestic wages. So although domestic wages remained higher, they did not grow nearly as fast as they might have otherwise. Exporting capital, he concluded, put a lid on the growth of domestic wages in the domestic standard of living. By the 1970s, historians such as David K. Fieldhouse and Oron Hale could argue that "the Hobsonian foundation has been almost completely demolished." The British experience failed to support it. However, European Socialists picked up Hobson's ideas and made it into their own theory of imperialism, most notably in Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" (1916). Lenin portrayed Imperialism as the closure of the world market and the end of capitalist free-competition that arose from the need for capitalist economies to constantly expand investment, material resources and manpower in such a way that necessitated colonial expansion. Later Marxist theoreticians echo this conception of imperialism as a structural feature of capitalism, which explained the World War as the battle between imperialists for control of external markets. Lenin's treatise became a standard textbook that flourished until the collapse of communism in 1989–91.
Some theoreticians on the non-Communist left have emphasized the structural or systemic character of "imperialism". Such writers have expanded the period associated with the term so that it now designates neither a policy, nor a short space of decades in the late 19th century, but a world system extending over a period of centuries, often going back to Christopher Columbus and, in some accounts, to the Crusades. As the application of the term has expanded, its meaning has shifted along five distinct but often parallel axes: the moral, the economic, the systemic, the cultural, and the temporal. Those changes reflect—among other shifts in sensibility—a growing unease, even great distaste, with the pervasiveness of such power, specifically, Western power.
Historians and political theorists have long debated the correlation between capitalism, class and imperialism. Much of the debate was pioneered by such theorists as J. A. Hobson (1858–1940), Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950), Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), and Norman Angell (1872–1967). While these non-Marxist writers were at their most prolific before World War I, they remained active in the interwar years. Their combined work informed the study of imperialism and its impact on Europe, as well as contributing to reflections on the rise of the military-political complex in the United States from the 1950s. Hobson argued that domestic social reforms could cure the international disease of imperialism by removing its economic foundation. Hobson theorized that state intervention through taxation could boost broader consumption, create wealth, and encourage a peaceful, tolerant, multipolar world order.
Walter Rodney, in his 1972 classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, proposes the idea that imperialism is a phase of capitalism "in which Western European capitalist countries, the US, and Japan established political, economic, military and cultural hegemony over other parts of the world which were initially at a lower level and therefore could not resist domination." As a result, Imperialism "for many years embraced the whole world – one part being the exploiters and the other the exploited, one part being dominated and the other acting as overlords, one part making policy and the other being dependent."
Imperialism has also been identified in newer phenomena like space development and its governing context.
Imperial control, territorial and cultural, is justified through discourses about the imperialists' understanding of different spaces. Conceptually, imagined geographies explain the limitations of the imperialist understanding of the societies (human reality) of the different spaces inhabited by the non–European Other.
In "Orientalism" (1978), Edward Said said that the West developed the concept of The Orient—an imagined geography of the Eastern world—which functions as an essentializing discourse that represents neither the ethnic diversity nor the social reality of the Eastern world. That by reducing the East into cultural essences, the imperial discourse uses place-based identities to create cultural difference and psychologic distance between "We, the West" and "They, the East" and between "Here, in the West" and "There, in the East".
That cultural differentiation was especially noticeable in the books and paintings of early Oriental studies, the European examinations of the Orient, which misrepresented the East as irrational and backward, the opposite of the rational and progressive West. Defining the East as a negative vision of the Western world, as its inferior, not only increased the sense-of-self of the West, but also was a way of ordering the East, and making it known to the West, so that it could be dominated and controlled. Therefore, Orientalism was the ideological justification of early Western imperialism—a body of knowledge and ideas that rationalized social, cultural, political, and economic control of other, non-white peoples.
One of the main tools used by imperialists was cartography. Cartography is "the art, science and technology of making maps" but this definition is problematic. It implies that maps are objective representations of the world when in reality they serve very political means. For Harley, maps serve as an example of Foucault's power and knowledge concept.
To better illustrate this idea, Bassett focuses his analysis of the role of 19th-century maps during the "scramble for Africa". He states that maps "contributed to empire by promoting, assisting, and legitimizing the extension of French and British power into West Africa". During his analysis of 19th-century cartographic techniques, he highlights the use of blank space to denote unknown or unexplored territory. This provided incentives for imperial and colonial powers to obtain "information to fill in blank spaces on contemporary maps".
Although cartographic processes advanced through imperialism, further analysis of their progress reveals many biases linked to eurocentrism. According to Bassett, "[n]ineteenth-century explorers commonly requested Africans to sketch maps of unknown areas on the ground. Many of those maps were highly regarded for their accuracy" but were not printed in Europe unless Europeans verified them.
Imperialism in ancient times is clear in the history of China and in the history of western Asia and the Mediterranean—an unending succession of empires. The tyrannical empire of the Assyrians was replaced (6th–4th century BCE) by that of the Persians, in strong contrast to the Assyrian in its liberal treatment of subjected peoples, assuring it long duration. It eventually gave way to the imperialism of Greece. When Greek imperialism reached an apex under Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), a union of the eastern Mediterranean with western Asia was achieved. But the cosmopolis, in which all citizens of the world would live harmoniously together in equality, remained a dream of Alexander. It was partially realized when the Romans built their empire from Britain to Egypt.
The concept of cultural imperialism refers to the cultural influence of one dominant culture over others, i.e. a form of soft power, which changes the moral, cultural, and societal worldview of the subordinate country. This means more than just "foreign" music, television or film becoming popular with young people; rather that a populace changes its own expectations of life, desiring for their own country to become more like the foreign country depicted. For example, depictions of opulent American lifestyles in the soap opera Dallas during the Cold War changed the expectations of Romanians; a more recent example is the influence of smuggled South Korean drama series in North Korea. The importance of soft power is not lost on authoritarian regimes, fighting such influence with bans on foreign popular culture, control of the internet and unauthorised satellite dishes etc. Nor is such a usage of culture recent, as part of Roman imperialism local elites would be exposed to the benefits and luxuries of Roman culture and lifestyle, with the aim that they would then become willing participants.
Imperialism has been subject to moral or immoral censure by its critics, and thus the term is frequently used in international propaganda as a pejorative for expansionist and aggressive foreign policy.
Stephen Howe has summarized his view on the beneficial effects of the colonial empires:
A controversial aspect of imperialism is the defense and justification of empire-building based on seemingly rational grounds. In ancient China, Tianxia denoted the lands, space, and area divinely appointed to the Emperor by universal and well-defined principles of order. The center of this land was directly apportioned to the Imperial court, forming the center of a world view that centered on the Imperial court and went concentrically outward to major and minor officials and then the common citizens, tributary states, and finally ending with the fringe "barbarians". Tianxia's idea of hierarchy gave Chinese a privileged position and was justified through the promise of order and peace. J. A. Hobson identifies this justification on general grounds as: "It is desirable that the earth should be peopled, governed, and developed, as far as possible, by the races which can do this work best, i.e. by the races of highest 'social efficiency'". Many others argued that imperialism is justified for several different reasons. Friedrich Ratzel believed that in order for a state to survive, imperialism was needed. Halford Mackinder felt that Great Britain needed to be one of the greatest imperialists and therefore justified imperialism. The purportedly scientific nature of "Social Darwinism" and a theory of races formed a supposedly rational justification for imperialism. Under this doctrine, the French politician Jules Ferry could declare in 1883 that "Superior races have a right, because they have a duty. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races." The rhetoric of colonizers being racially superior appears to have achieved its purpose, for example throughout Latin America "whiteness" is still prized today and various forms of blanqueamiento (whitening) are common.
The Royal Geographical Society of London and other geographical societies in Europe had great influence and were able to fund travelers who would come back with tales of their discoveries. These societies also served as a space for travellers to share these stories. Political geographers such as Friedrich Ratzel of Germany and Halford Mackinder of Britain also supported imperialism. Ratzel believed expansion was necessary for a state's survival while Mackinder supported Britain's imperial expansion; these two arguments dominated the discipline for decades.
Geographical theories such as environmental determinism also suggested that tropical environments created uncivilized people in need of European guidance. For instance, American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple argued that even though human beings originated in the tropics they were only able to become fully human in the temperate zone. Tropicality can be paralleled with Edward Said's Orientalism as the west's construction of the east as the "other". According to Said, orientalism allowed Europe to establish itself as the superior and the norm, which justified its dominance over the essentialized Orient.
Technology and economic efficiency were often improved in territories subjected to imperialism through the building of roads, other infrastructure and introduction of new technologies.
The principles of imperialism are often generalizable to the policies and practices of the British Empire "during the last generation, and proceeds rather by diagnosis than by historical description". British imperialism in some sparsely-inhabited regions appears to have applied a principle now termed Terra nullius (Latin expression which stems from Roman law meaning 'no man's land'). The country of Australia serves as a case study in relation to British settlement and colonial rule of the continent in the 18th century, that was arguably premised on "terra nullius", as its settlers considered it unused by its original inhabitants.
The concept of environmental determinism served as a moral justification for the domination of certain territories and peoples. The environmental determinist school of thought held that the environment in which certain people lived determined those persons' behaviours; and thus validated their domination. For example, the Western world saw people living in tropical environments as "less civilized", therefore justifying colonial control as a civilizing mission. Across the three major waves of European colonialism (the first in the Americas, the second in Asia and the last in Africa), environmental determinism served to place categorically indigenous people in a racial hierarchy. This takes two forms, orientalism and tropicality.
Some geographic scholars under colonizing empires divided the world into climatic zones. These scholars believed that Northern Europe and the Mid-Atlantic temperate climate produced a hard-working, moral, and upstanding human being. In contrast, tropical climates allegedly yielded lazy attitudes, sexual promiscuity, exotic culture, and moral degeneracy. The people of these climates were believed to be in need of guidance and intervention from a European empire to aid in the governing of a more evolved social structure; they were seen as incapable of such a feat. Similarly, orientalism could promote a view of a people based on their geographical location.
Anti-imperialism gained a wide currency after the Second World War and at the onset of the Cold War as political movements in colonies of European powers promoted national sovereignty. Some anti-imperialist groups who opposed the United States supported the power of the Soviet Union, such as in Guevarism, while in Maoism this was criticized as social imperialism.
England
England's imperialist ambitions can be seen as early as the 16th century as the Tudor conquest of Ireland began in the 1530s. In 1599 the British East India Company was established and was chartered by Queen Elizabeth in the following year. With the establishment of trading posts in India, the British were able to maintain strength relative to other empires such as the Portuguese who already had set up trading posts in India.
Scotland
Between 1621 and 1699, the Kingdom of Scotland authorised several colonies in the Americas. Most of these colonies were either aborted or collapsed quickly for various reasons.
Great Britain
Under the Acts of Union 1707, the English and Scottish kingdoms were merged, and their colonies collectively became subject to Great Britain (alos known as the United Kingdom).
In 1767, the Anglo-Mysore Wars and other political activity caused exploitation of the East India Company causing the plundering of the local economy, almost bringing the company into bankruptcy. By the year 1670 Britain's imperialist ambitions were well off as she had colonies in Virginia, Massachusetts, Bermuda, Honduras, Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica and Nova Scotia.
Due to the vast imperialist ambitions of European countries, Britain had several clashes with France. This competition was evident in the colonization of what is now known as Canada. John Cabot claimed Newfoundland for the British while the French established colonies along the St. Lawrence River and claiming it as "New France". Britain continued to expand by colonizing countries such as New Zealand and Australia, both of which were not empty land as they had their own locals and cultures. Britain's nationalistic movements were evident with the creation of the commonwealth countries where there was a shared nature of national identity.
Following the proto-industrialization, the "First" British Empire was based on mercantilism, and involved colonies and holdings primarily in North America, the Caribbean, and India. Its growth was reversed by the loss of the American colonies in 1776. Britain made compensating gains in India, Australia, and in constructing an informal economic empire through control of trade and finance in Latin America after the independence of Spanish and Portuguese colonies in about 1820. By the 1840s, Britain had adopted a highly successful policy of free trade that gave it dominance in the trade of much of the world. After losing its first Empire to the Americans, Britain then turned its attention towards Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Following the defeat of Napoleonic France in 1815, Britain enjoyed a century of almost unchallenged dominance and expanded its imperial holdings around the globe. Unchallenged at sea, British dominance was later described as "Pax Britannica" ("British Peace"), a period of relative peace in Europe and the world (1815–1914) during which the British Empire became the global hegemon and adopted the role of global policeman. However, this peace was mostly a perceived one from Europe, and the period was still an almost uninterrupted series of colonial wars and disputes. The British Conquest of India, its intervention against Mehemet Ali, the Anglo-Burmese Wars, the Crimean War, the Opium Wars and the Scramble for Africa to name the most notable conflicts mobilised ample military means to press Britain's lead in the global conquest Europe led across the century.
In the early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution began to transform Britain; by the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851 the country was described as the "workshop of the world". The British Empire expanded to include India, large parts of Africa and many other territories throughout the world. Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, British dominance of much of world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many regions, such as Asia and Latin America. Domestically, political attitudes favoured free trade and laissez-faire policies and a gradual widening of the voting franchise. During this century, the population increased at a dramatic rate, accompanied by rapid urbanisation, causing significant social and economic stresses. To seek new markets and sources of raw materials, the Conservative Party under Disraeli launched a period of imperialist expansion in Egypt, South Africa, and elsewhere. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand became self-governing dominions.
A resurgence came in the late 19th century with the Scramble for Africa and major additions in Asia and the Middle East. The British spirit of imperialism was expressed by Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Rosebury, and implemented in Africa by Cecil Rhodes. The pseudo-sciences of Social Darwinism and theories of race formed an ideological underpinning and legitimation during this time. Other influential spokesmen included Lord Cromer, Lord Curzon, General Kitchener, Lord Milner, and the writer Rudyard Kipling. The British Empire was the largest Empire that the world has ever seen both in terms of landmass and population. Its power, both military and economic, remained unmatched for a few decades. After the First Boer War, the South African Republic and Orange Free State were recognised by Britain but eventually re-annexed after the Second Boer War. But British power was fading, as the reunited German state founded by the Kingdom of Prussia posed a growing threat to Britain's dominance. As of 1913, Britain was the world's fourth economy, behind the U.S, Russia and Germany.
Irish War of Independence in 1919-1921 led to the сreation of the Irish Free State. But Britain gained control of former German and Ottoman colonies with the League of Nations mandate. Britain now had a practically continuous line of controlled territories from Egypt to Burma and another one from Cairo to Cape Town. However, this period was also the one of the emergence of independence movements based on nationalism and new experiences the colonists had gained in the war.
World War II decisively weakened Britain's position in the world, especially financially. Decolonization movements arose nearly everywhere in the Empire, resulting in Indian independence and partition in 1947 and the establishment of independent states in the 1950s. British imperialism showed its frailty in Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956. However, with the United States and Soviet Union emerging from World War II as the sole superpowers, Britain's role as a worldwide power declined significantly and rapidly.
China was one of the world's oldest empires. Due to its long history of imperialist expansion, China has been seen by its neighboring countries as a threat due to its large population, giant economy, large military force as well as its territorial evolution throughout history. Starting with the unification of China under the Qin dynasty, later Chinese dynasties continued to follow its form of expansions.
The most successful Chinese imperial dynasties in terms of territorial expansion were the Han, Tang, Yuan, and Qing dynasties. According to the historian Eric Setzekorn examining the 1850-1877 period, China's imperialism was brutal, and "resulted in the deaths of millions...[Chinese leaders] radically shifted the ethnic balance in favor of Han colonists. This was accomplished through the mass expulsion of ethnic communities and, more directly, the killing of unwanted minority groups, i.e. ethnic cleansing."
Danish overseas colonies that Denmark–Norway (Denmark after 1814) possessed from 1536 until 1953. At its apex there were colonies on four continents: Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. In the 17th century, following territorial losses on the Scandinavian Peninsula, Denmark-Norway began to develop colonies, forts, and trading posts in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent. Christian IV first initiated the policy of expanding Denmark-Norway's overseas trade, as part of the mercantilist wave that was sweeping Europe. Denmark-Norway's first colony was established at Tranquebar on India's southern coast in 1620. Admiral Ove Gjedde led the expedition that established the colony. After 1814, when Norway was ceded to Sweden, Denmark retained what remained of Norway's great medieval colonial holdings. One by one the smaller colonies were lost or sold. Tranquebar was sold to the British in 1845. The United States purchased the Danish West Indies in 1917. Iceland became independent in 1944. Today, the only remaining vestiges are two originally Norwegian colonies that are currently within the Danish Realm, the Faroe Islands and Greenland; the Faroes were a Danish county until 1948, while Greenland's colonial status ceased in 1953. They are now autonomous territories.
During the 16th century, the French colonization of the Americas began with the creation of New France. It was followed by French East India Company's trading posts in Africa and Asia in the 17th century. France had its "First colonial empire" from 1534 until 1814, including New France (Canada, Acadia, Newfoundland and Louisiana), French West Indies (Saint-Domingue, Guadeloupe, Martinique), French Guiana, Senegal (Gorée), Mascarene Islands (Mauritius Island, Réunion) and French India.
Its "Second colonial empire" began with the conquest of Algiers in 1830 and came for the most part to an end with the granting of independence to Algeria in 1962. The French imperial history was marked by numerous wars, large and small, and also by significant help to France itself from the colonials in the world wars. France took control of Algeria in 1830 but began in earnest to rebuild its worldwide empire after 1850, concentrating chiefly in North and West Africa (French North Africa, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa), as well as South-East Asia (French Indochina), with other conquests in the South Pacific (New Caledonia, French Polynesia). France also twice attempted to make Mexico a colony in 1838–39 and in 1861-67 (see Pastry War and Second French intervention in Mexico).
French Republicans, at first hostile to empire, only became supportive when Germany started to build her own colonial empire. As it developed, the new empire took on roles of trade with France, supplying raw materials and purchasing manufactured items, as well as lending prestige to the motherland and spreading French civilization and language as well as Catholicism. It also provided crucial manpower in both World Wars. It became a moral justification to lift the world up to French standards by bringing Christianity and French culture. In 1884 the leading exponent of colonialism, Jules Ferry declared France had a civilising mission: "The higher races have a right over the lower races, they have a duty to civilize the inferior". Full citizenship rights – "assimilation" – were offered, although in reality assimilation was always on the distant horizon. Contrasting from Britain, France sent small numbers of settlers to its colonies, with the only notable exception of Algeria, where French settlers nevertheless always remained a small minority.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the French colonial empire was the second-largest colonial empire in the world behind the British Empire, extending over 13,500,000 km2 (5,212,000 sq. miles) at its height in the 1920s and 1930s. France controlled 1/10th of the Earth's land area, with a population of 150 million people on the eve of World War II (8% of the world's population at the time).
In World War II, Charles de Gaulle and the Free French used the overseas colonies as bases from which they fought to liberate France. However, after 1945 anti-colonial movements began to challenge the Empire. France fought and lost a bitter war in Vietnam in the 1950s. Whereas they won the war in Algeria, de Gaulle decided to grant Algeria independence anyway in 1962. French settlers and many local supporters relocated to France. Nearly all of France's colonies gained independence by 1960, but France retained great financial and diplomatic influence. It has repeatedly sent troops to assist its former colonies in Africa in suppressing insurrections and coups d'état.
French colonial officials, influenced by the revolutionary ideal of equality, standardized schools, curricula, and teaching methods as much as possible. They did not establish colonial school systems with the idea of furthering the ambitions of the local people, but rather simply exported the systems and methods in vogue in the mother nation. Having a moderately trained lower bureaucracy was of great use to colonial officials. The emerging French-educated indigenous elite saw little value in educating rural peoples. After 1946 the policy was to bring the best students to Paris for advanced training. The result was to immerse the next generation of leaders in the growing anti-colonial diaspora centered in Paris. Impressionistic colonials could mingle with studious scholars or radical revolutionaries or so everything in between. Ho Chi Minh and other young radicals in Paris formed the French Communist party in 1920.
Tunisia was exceptional. The colony was administered by Paul Cambon, who built an educational system for colonists and indigenous people alike that was closely modeled on mainland France. He emphasized female and vocational education. By independence, the quality of Tunisian education nearly equalled that in France.
African nationalists rejected such a public education system, which they perceived as an attempt to retard African development and maintain colonial superiority. One of the first demands of the emerging nationalist movement after World War II was the introduction of full metropolitan-style education in French West Africa with its promise of equality with Europeans.
In Algeria, the debate was polarized. The French set up schools based on the scientific method and French culture. The Pied-Noir (Catholic migrants from Europe) welcomed this. Those goals were rejected by the Moslem Arabs, who prized mental agility and their distinctive religious tradition. The Arabs refused to become patriotic and cultured Frenchmen and a unified educational system was impossible until the Pied-Noir and their Arab allies went into exile after 1962.
In South Vietnam from 1955 to 1975 there were two competing colonial powers in education, as the French continued their work and the Americans moved in. They sharply disagreed on goals. The French educators sought to preserving French culture among the Vietnamese elites and relied on the Mission Culturelle – the heir of the colonial Direction of Education – and its prestigious high schools. The Americans looked at the great mass of people and sought to make South Vietnam a nation strong enough to stop communism. The Americans had far more money, as USAID coordinated and funded the activities of expert teams, and particularly of academic missions. The French deeply resented the American invasion of their historical zone of cultural imperialism.
German expansion into Slavic lands begins in the 12th-13th-century (see Drang Nach Osten). The concept of Drang Nach Osten was a core element of German nationalism and a major element of Nazi ideology. However, the German involvement in the seizure of overseas territories was negligible until the end of the 19th century. Prussia unified the other states into the second German Empire in 1871. Its Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (1862–90), long opposed colonial acquisitions, arguing that the burden of obtaining, maintaining, and defending such possessions would outweigh any potential benefits. He felt that colonies did not pay for themselves, that the German bureaucratic system would not work well in the tropics and the diplomatic disputes over colonies would distract Germany from its central interest, Europe itself.
However, public opinion and elite opinion in Germany demanded colonies for reasons of international prestige, so Bismarck was forced to oblige. In 1883–84 Germany began to build a colonial empire in Africa and the South Pacific. The establishment of the German colonial empire started with German New Guinea in 1884.
German colonies included the present territories of in Africa: Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Namibia, Cameroon, Ghana and Togo; in Oceania: New Guinea, Solomon islands, Nauru, Marshall Islands, Mariana Islands, Caroline Islands and Samoa; and in Asia: Tsingtao, Chefoo and the Jiaozhou Bay. The Treaty of Versailles made them mandates temporarily operated by the Allied victors.
Germany also lost part of the Eastern territories that became part of independent Poland as a result of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Finally, the Eastern territories captured in the Middle ages were torn from Germany and became part of Poland and the USSR as a result of the territorial reorganization established by the Potsdam conference of the great powers in 1945.
The Italian Empire ("Impero italiano") comprised the overseas possessions of the Kingdom of Italy primarily in northeast Africa. It began with the purchase in 1869 of Assab Bay on the Red Sea by an Italian navigation company which intended to establish a coaling station at the time the Suez Canal was being opened to navigation. This was taken over by the Italian government in 1882, becoming modern Italy's first overseas territory. By the start of the First World War in 1914, Italy had acquired in Africa the colony of Eritrea on the Red Sea coast, a large protectorate and later colony in Somalia, and authority in formerly Ottoman Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (gained after the Italo-Turkish War) which were later unified in the colony of Libya.
Outside Africa, Italy possessed the Dodecanese Islands off the coast of Turkey (following the Italo-Turkish War) and a small concession in Tianjin in China following the Boxer War of 1900. During the First World War, Italy occupied southern Albania to prevent it from falling to Austria-Hungary. In 1917, it established a protectorate over Albania, which remained in place until 1920. The Fascist government that came to power with Benito Mussolini in 1922 sought to increase the size of the Italian empire and to satisfy the claims of Italian irredentists.
In its second invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–36, Italy was successful and it merged its new conquest with its older east African colonies to create Italian East Africa. In 1939, Italy invaded Albania and incorporated it into the Fascist state. During the Second World War (1939–1945), Italy occupied British Somaliland, parts of south-eastern France, western Egypt and most of Greece, but then lost those conquests and its African colonies, including Ethiopia, to the invading allied forces by 1943. It was forced in the peace treaty of 1947 to relinquish sovereignty over all its colonies. It was granted a trust to administer former Italian Somaliland under United Nations supervision in 1950. When Somalia became independent in 1960, Italy's eight-decade experiment with colonialism ended.
For over 200 years, Japan maintained a feudal society during a period of relative isolation from the rest of the world. However, in the 1850s, military pressure from the United States and other world powers coerced Japan to open itself to the global market, resulting in an end to the country's isolation. A period of conflicts and political revolutions followed due to socioeconomic uncertainty, ending in 1868 with the reunification of political power under the Japanese Emperor during the Meiji Restoration. This sparked a period of rapid industrialization driven in part by a Japanese desire for self-sufficiency. By the early 1900s, Japan was a naval power that could hold its own against an established European power as it defeated Russia.
Despite its rising population and increasingly industrialized economy, Japan had relatively little territory and lacked significant natural resources. As a result, the country turned to imperialism and expansionism in part as a means of compensating for these shortcomings, adopting the national motto ""Fukoku kyōhei"" (富国強兵, "Enrich the state, strengthen the military").
And Japan was eager to take every opportunity. In 1869 they took advantage of the defeat of the rebels of the Republic of Ezo to incorporate definitely the island of Hokkaido to Japan. For centuries, Japan viewed the Ryukyu Islands as one of its provinces. In 1871 the Mudan incident happened: Taiwanese aborigines murdered 54 Ryūkyūan sailors that had their ship shipwrecked. At that time the Ryukyu Islands were claimed by both Qing China and Japan, and the Japanese interpreted the incident as an attack on their citizens. They took steps to bring the islands in their jurisdiction: in 1872 the Japanese Ryukyu Domain was declared, and in 1874 a retaliatory incursion to Taiwan was sent, which was a success. The success of this expedition emboldened the Japanese: not even the Americans could defeat the Taiwanese in the Formosa Expedition of 1867. Very few gave it much thought at the time, but this was the first move in the Japanese expansionism series. Japan occupied Taiwan for the rest of 1874 and then left owing to Chinese pressures, but in 1879 it finally annexed the Ryukyu Islands. In 1875 Qing China sent a 300-men force to subdue the Taiwanese, but unlike the Japanese the Chinese were routed, ambushed and 250 of their men were killed; the failure of this expedition exposed once more the failure of Qing China to exert effective control in Taiwan, and acted as another incentive for the Japanese to annex Taiwan. Eventually, the spoils for winning the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894 included Taiwan.
In 1875 Japan took its first operation against Joseon Korea, another territory that for centuries it coveted; the Ganghwa Island incident made Korea open to international trade. Korea was annexed in 1910. As a result of winning the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, Japan took part of Sakhalin Island from Russia. Precisely, the victory against the Russian Empire shook the world: never before an Asian nation defeated a European power, and in Japan it was seen as a feat. Japan's victory against Russia would act as an antecedent for Asian countries in the fight against the Western powers for Decolonization. During World War I, Japan took German-leased territories in China's Shandong Province, as well as the Mariana, Caroline, and Marshall Islands, and kept the islands as League of nations mandates. At first, Japan was in good standing with the victorious Allied powers of World War I, but different discrepancies and dissatisfaction with the rewards of the treaties cooled the relations with them, for example American pressure forced it to return the Shandong area. By the '30s, economic depression, urgency of resources and a growing distrust in the Allied powers made Japan lean to a hardened militaristic stance. Through the decade, it would grow closer to Germany and Italy, forming together the Axis alliance. In 1931 Japan took Manchuria from China. International reactions condemned this move, but Japan's already strong skepticism against Allied nations meant that it nevertheless carried on.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Japan's military invaded central China. Also, in 1938-1939 Japan made an attempt to seize the territory of Soviet Russia and Mongolia, but suffered a serious defeats (see Battle of Lake Khasan, Battles of Khalkhin Gol). By now, relations with the Allied powers were at the bottom, and an international boycott against Japan to deprive it of natural resources was enforced. Thus a military move to gain access to them was needed, and so Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States to World War II. Using its superior technological advances in naval aviation and its modern doctrines of amphibious and naval warfare, Japan achieved one of the fastest maritime expansions in history. By 1942 Japan had conquered much of East Asia and the Pacific, including the east of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma (Myanmar), Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, part of New Guinea and many islands of the Pacific Ocean. Just as Japan's late industrialization success and victory against the Russian Empire was seen as an example among underdeveloped Asia-Pacific nations, the Japanese took advantage of this and promoted among its conquered the goal to jointly create an anti-European "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". This plan helped the Japanese gain support from native populations during its conquests, especially in Indonesia. However, the United States had a vastly stronger military and industrial base and defeated Japan, stripping it of conquests and returning its settlers back to Japan.
The Ottoman Empire was an imperial state that lasted from 1299 to 1922. In 1453, Mehmed the Conqueror besieged the capital of the Byzantine Empire, resulting in the Fall of Constantinople after 1,500 years of Roman rule, thereafter making it the capital of the empire. During the 16th and 17th centuries, in particular at the height of its power under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire was a powerful multinational, multilingual empire, which invaded and colonized much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa. Its repeated invasions, and brutal treatment of Slavs led to the Great Migrations of the Serbs to escape persecution. At the beginning of the 17th century the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states. Some of these were later absorbed into the empire, while others were granted various types of autonomy during the course of centuries.
With Constantinople as its capital and control of lands around the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire was at the center of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for six centuries. Following a long period of military setbacks against European powers, the Ottoman Empire gradually declined in its ability to remain sovereign against competing powers in the late 19th century.
The Rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire eventually caused the breakdown of the Ottoman millet concept. An understanding of the concept of the nationhood prevalent in the Ottoman Empire, which was different from the current one as it was centered on religion, was a key factor in the decline of the Ottoman Empire. In 1821-1829 the Greeks in the Greek War of Independence were assisted by the Russian Empire, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Kingdom of France.
Later in fact, the Ottoman Empire could exist only in the conditions of acute rivalry of the great powers. Russia's attempt to negotiate with Britain on the partition of the Ottoman Empire failed. Britain after the conclusion of Treaty of Balta Liman in 1838 was interested in preserving the Ottoman Empire and in Crimean war 1853–1856, the great powers of Britain and France opposed Russia, as a result of the Ottoman Empire existed until 1922. As result of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro gained independence in the European part of the Empire, at the same time Britain achieved colonial possession of Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina was occupied and annexed by Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908.
The empire allied with Germany in the early 20th century, with the imperial ambition of recovering its lost territories, but it dissolved in the aftermath of its defeat in the First World War. The partition of the Ottoman Empire was finalized under the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres. The Treaty of Sèvres was never ratified. The Kemalist national movement, supported by Soviet Russia, achieved victory in the course of the Turkish War of Independence, and the parties signed and ratified the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and 1924. The Republic of Turkey was established. The residue was the new state of Turkey in the Ottoman Anatolian heartland, as well as the creation of modern Balkan and Middle Eastern states, thus ending Turkish colonial ambitions.
By the 18th century, the Russian Empire extended its control to the Pacific, peacefully forming a common border with the Qing Empire and Empire of Japan. This took place in a large number of military invasions of the lands east, west, and south of it. The Polish–Russian War of 1792 took place after Polish nobility from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth wrote the Constitution of 3 May 1791. The war resulted in eastern Poland being conquered by Imperial Russia as a colony until 1918. The southern campaigns involved a series of Russo-Persian Wars, which began with the Persian Expedition of 1796, resulting in the acquisition of Georgia (country) as a protectorate. Between 1800 and 1864, Imperial armies invaded south in the Russian conquest of the Caucasus, the Murid War, and the Russo-Circassian War. This last conflict led to the ethnic cleansing of Circassians from their lands. The Russian conquest of Siberia over the Khanate of Sibir took place in the 16th and 17th centuries, and resulted in the slaughter of various indigenous tribes by Russians, including the Daur, the Koryaks, the Itelmens, Mansi people and the Chukchi. The Russian colonization of Central and Eastern Europe and Siberia and treatment of the resident indigenous peoples has been compared to European colonization of the Americas, with similar negative impacts on the indigenous Siberians as upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The extermination of indigenous Siberian tribes was so complete that a relatively small population of only 180,000 are said to exist today. The Russian Empire exploited and suppressed Cossacks hosts during this period, before turning them into the special military estate Sosloviye in the late 18th century. Cossacks were then used in Imperial Russian campaigns against other tribes.
But it would be a strong simplification to reduce expansion of Russia only to military conquests. The reunification of Ukraine with Russia took place in 1654, when Polish rule brought the population of Ukraine to revolts (see Pereyaslav Council). Another example is Georgia's accession to Russia in 1783. Given Georgia's history of invasions from the south, an alliance with Russia may have been seen as the only way to discourage or resist Persian and Ottoman aggression, while also establishing a link to Western Europe (see Treaty of Georgievsk). Russia's support helped establish independent Mongolia (independent from China) (see Mongolian Revolution of 1911).
Bolshevik leaders had effectively reestablished a polity with roughly the same extent as that empire by 1921, however with an internationalist ideology: Lenin in particular asserted the right to limited self-determination for national minorities within the new territory. Beginning in 1923, the policy of "Indigenization" [korenizatsiya] was intended to support non-Russians develop their national cultures within a socialist framework. Never formally revoked, it stopped being implemented after 1932. After World War II, the Soviet Union installed socialist regimes modeled on those it had installed in 1919–20 in the old Russian Empire, in areas its forces occupied in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union and later the People's Republic of China supported revolutionary and communist movements in foreign nations and colonies to advance their own interests, but were not always successful. The USSR provided great assistance to Kuomintang in 1926–1928 in the formation of a unified Chinese government (see Northern Expedition). Although then relations with the USSR deteriorated, but the USSR was the only world power that provided military assistance to China against Japanese aggression in 1937-1941 (see Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact). The victory of the Chinese Communists in the civil war of 1946-1949 relied on the great help of the USSR (see Chinese Civil War).
Trotsky, and others, believed that the revolution could only succeed in Russia as part of a world revolution. Lenin wrote extensively on the matter and famously declared that Imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. However, after Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin established 'socialism in one country' for the Soviet Union, creating the model for subsequent inward looking Stalinist states and purging the early Internationalist elements. The internationalist tendencies of the early revolution would be abandoned until they returned in the framework of a client state in competition with the Americans during the Cold War. In the post-Stalin period in the late 1950s, the new political leader Nikita Khrushchev put pressure on the Soviet-American relations starting a new wave of anti-imperialist propaganda. In his speech on the UN conference in 1960, he announced the continuation of the war on imperialism, stating that soon the people of different countries will come together and overthrow their imperialist leaders. Although the Soviet Union declared itself anti-imperialist, critics argue that it exhibited traits common to historic empires. Some scholars hold that the Soviet Union was a hybrid entity containing elements common to both multinational empires and nation states. Some also argued that the USSR practiced colonialism as did other imperial powers and was carrying on the old Russian tradition of expansion and control. Mao Zedong once argued that the Soviet Union had itself become an imperialist power while maintaining a socialist façade. Moreover, the ideas of imperialism were widely spread in action on the higher levels of government. Some Marxists within the Russian Empire and later the USSR, like Sultan Galiev and Vasyl Shakhrai, considered the Soviet regime a renewed version of the Russian imperialism and colonialism.
Soviet imperialism involved invasion of Hungary in 1956 to destroy democratic forces. Soviet imperialism was roundly condemned In 1979 when the USSR invaded Afghanistan to keep a friendly government in power. The invasion "alerted the Third World, as no earlier Soviet in intervention a done, to the nature of Soviet imperialism. It must be said that the USSR never called itself an "Empire" unlike other world powers and the use of such a name carries a negative connotation.
Made up of former colonies itself, the early United States expressed its opposition to Imperialism, at least in a form distinct from its own Manifest Destiny, through policies such as the Monroe Doctrine. However the US may have unsuccessfully attempted to capture Canada in the War of 1812. The United States achieved very significant territorial concessions from Mexico during the Mexican-American War. Beginning in the late 19th and early 20th century, policies such as Theodore Roosevelt’s interventionism in Central America and Woodrow Wilson’s mission to "make the world safe for democracy" changed all this. They were often backed by military force, but were more often affected from behind the scenes. This is consistent with the general notion of hegemony and imperium of historical empires. In 1898, Americans who opposed imperialism created the Anti-Imperialist League to oppose the US annexation of the Philippines and Cuba. One year later, a war erupted in the Philippines causing business, labor and government leaders in the US to condemn America's occupation in the Philippines as they also denounced them for causing the deaths of many Filipinos. American foreign policy was denounced as a "racket" by Smedley Butler, a former American general who had become a spokesman for the far left.
At the start of World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was opposed to European colonialism, especially in India. He pulled back when Britain's Winston Churchill demanded that victory in the war be the first priority. Roosevelt expected that the United Nations would take up the problem of decolonization.
Some have described the internal strife between various people groups as a form of imperialism or colonialism. This internal form is distinct from informal U.S. imperialism in the form of political and financial hegemony. This internal form of imperialism is also distinct from the United States' formation of "colonies" abroad. Through the treatment of its indigenous peoples during westward expansion, the United States took on the form of an imperial power prior to any attempts at external imperialism. This internal form of empire has been referred to as "internal colonialism". Participation in the African slave trade and the subsequent treatment of its 12 to 15 million Africans is viewed by some to be a more modern extension of America's "internal colonialism". However, this internal colonialism faced resistance, as external colonialism did, but the anti-colonial presence was far less prominent due to the nearly complete dominance that the United States was able to assert over both indigenous peoples and African-Americans. In his lecture on April 16, 2003, Edward Said made a bold statement on modern imperialism in the United States, whom he described as using aggressive means of attack towards the contemporary Orient, "due to their backward living, lack of democracy and the violation of women’s rights. The western world forgets during this process of converting the other that enlightenment and democracy are concepts that not all will agree upon".
Spanish imperialism in the colonial era corresponds with the rise and decline of the Spanish Empire, conventionally recognized as emerging in 1402 with the conquest of the Canary Islands. Following the successes of exploratory maritime voyages conducted during the Age of Discovery, such as those undertaken by Christopher Columbus, Spain committed considerable financial and military resources towards developing a robust navy capable of conducting large-scale, transatlantic expeditionary operations in order to establish and solidify a firm imperial presence across large portions of North America, South America, and the geographic regions comprising the Caribbean basin. Concomitant with Spanish endorsement and sponsorship of transatlantic expeditionary voyages was the deployment of "Conquistadors", which further expanded Spanish imperial boundaries through the acquisition and development of territories and colonies.
In congruence with the colonialist activities of competing European imperial powers throughout the 15th – 19th centuries, the Spanish were equally engrossed in extending geopolitical power. The Caribbean basin functioned as a key geographic focal point for advancing Spanish imperialism. Similar to the strategic prioritization Spain placed towards achieving victory in the conquests of the Aztec Empire and Inca Empire, Spain placed equal strategic emphasis on expanding the nation's imperial footprint within the Caribbean basin.
Echoing the prevailing ideological perspectives regarding colonialism and imperialism embraced by Spain's European rivals during the colonial era, including the English, French, and the Dutch, the Spanish utilized colonialism as a means of expanding imperial geopolitical borders and securing the defense of maritime trade routes in the Caribbean basin.
While leveraging colonialism in the same geographic operating theater as its imperial rivals, Spain maintained distinct imperial objectives and instituted a unique form of colonialism in support of its imperial agenda. Spain placed significant strategic emphasis on the acquisition, extraction, and exportation of precious metals (primarily gold and silver). A second objective was the evangelization of subjugated indigenous populations residing in mineral-rich and strategically favorable locations. Notable examples of these indigenous groups include the Taίno populations inhabiting Puerto Rico and segments of Cuba. Compulsory labor and slavery were widely institutionalized across Spanish-occupied territories and colonies, with an initial emphasis on directing labor towards mining activity and related methods of procuring semi-precious metals. The emergence of the "Encomienda" system during the 16th–17th centuries in occupied colonies within the Caribbean basin reflects a gradual shift in imperial prioritization, increasingly focusing on large-scale production and exportation of agricultural commodities.
The scope and scale of Spanish participation in imperialism within the Caribbean basin remains a subject of scholarly debate among historians. A fundamental source of contention stems from the inadvertent conflation of theoretical conceptions of imperialism and colonialism. Furthermore, significant variation exists in the definition and interpretation of these terms as expounded by historians, anthropologists, philosophers, and political scientists.
Among historians, there is substantial support in favor of approaching imperialism as a conceptual theory emerging during the 18th–19th centuries, particularly within Britain, propagated by key exponents such as Joseph Chamberlain and Benjamin Disraeli. In accordance with this theoretical perspective, the activities of the Spanish in the Caribbean are not components of a preeminent, ideologically-driven form of imperialism. Rather, these activities are more accurately classified as representing a form of colonialism.
Further divergence among historians can be attributed to varying theoretical perspectives regarding imperialism that are proposed by emerging academic schools of thought. Noteworthy examples include cultural imperialism, whereby proponents such as John Downing and Annabelle Sreberny-Modammadi define imperialism as ""...the conquest and control of one country by a more powerful one."" Cultural imperialism signifies the dimensions of the process that go beyond economic exploitation or military force." Moreover, colonialism is understood as ""...the form of imperialism in which the government of the colony is run directly by foreigners.""
In spite of diverging perspectives and the absence of a unilateral scholarly consensus regarding imperialism among historians, within the context of Spanish expansion in the Caribbean basin during the colonial era, imperialism can be interpreted as an overarching ideological agenda that is perpetuated through the institution of colonialism. In this context, colonialism functions as an instrument designed to achieve specific imperialist objectives.
Venezuela has had a history of expansionist actions to add to its territory and regional influence. In the 20th century, Venezuela's national interests included obtaining the Guayana Esequiba and maritime territory in the Caribbean. Due to these interests, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago feared Venezuelan expansionist actions due to its authority in the Caribbean and its actions regarding the Guayana Esequiba.
On 12 November 1962 the Venezuelan foreign relations minister, , denounced the validity of the 1899 Arbitral Award of Paris, which was favourable to the United Kingdom, in the United Nations General Assembly Fourth Committee after the Mallet-Prevost Memorandum was published, arguing that Venezuela considered the Award null due to "acts contrary to the good faith" by the British government and the members of the Award's tribunal. Such complaints led to the 1966 Geneva Agreement shortly after Guyana's independence and to the renewal of Venezuela's claim to two-thirds of Guyana's western territory, known as the Guayana Esequiba.
According to Guyana, the 1969 Rupununi Uprising was a plot by Venezuela to reclaim a portion of the Esequiba territory and that the Venezuelan government had armed rebels. Valerie Hart, who had led the uprising, had met with Venezuelan ministers at the time and was granted Venezuelan citizenship by birth. The Peoples Temple Agricultural Project's location, better known as Jonestown, also stood not far from the disputed Guyana–Venezuela border, with Guyanese officials hoping that the presence of American citizens would deter a potential military incursion.
During the administration of Venezuelan president Luis Herrera Campins, Venezuela attempted to benefit on the geopolitical stage by utilizing oil politics and pursued territorial expansion. In the 1980s, Guyana encouraged the purchase of defense bonds with Guyanese President Forbes Burnham stating "Every bond we buy is a nail in the coffin of Venezuelan imperialism and aggression" during a speech on 1 May 1982. Days later on 10 May 1982, Venezuelan troops entered Guyana by crossing the Cuyuni River and were intercepted by Guyanese troops who fired gunshots into the air, with the Venezuelan troops later leaving hours after the confrontation. The Guyanese government would continue to repel Venezuelan intervention, arresting some of their own officials stating they were working for the Venezuelan government.
Following the election of Jaime Lusinchi as President of Venezuela in 1984, the country faced economic difficulties and Venezuela's influence in the region waned. The support of Guyana by their larger neighbor Brazil also helped deter Venezuela from making further territorial claims.
During the tenure of President Hugo Chávez, it was stated that Venezuela's "imperialism" was beginning in Latin America, with Venezuela attempting to establish "a sort of hegemony" over smaller nations in the region. Venezuela's geopolitical ambitions grew as oil profits increased with much of the country's foreign policy involving oil politics. Critics described the presidencies of Bolivia's Evo Morales and Ecuador's Rafael Correa as results of "Venezuelan imperialism".
In 2001, "Current History" stated that Chávez began "tensions with his neighbors [and] reopened the old Venezuelan claim to half of Guyana's territory and insulted Colombian President Andrés Pastrana Arango by verbally supporting [FARC] fighting against his Colombian government", noting allegations that Chávez offered "substantial assistance to radical elements in the hemisphere, raising questions about Venezuelan expansionism". The United States Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Peter F. Romero stated in 2001 that "Bolivarian propaganda" used by Chávez and then-Secretary of Defense José Vicente Rangel was not only just rhetoric, but that there were "indications that the government of Chávez has supported violent indigenous movements in Bolivia, and in the case of Ecuador, military coup members" with both officials being described as "professional agitators".
The Independent Institute described Chávez as a "populist caudillo [that] has embarked on an adventure of continental expansionism" and that at the time "Venezuela’s expansionism ... seems unstoppable because of the economic power crude oil has brought that country". Noam Chomsky described Chávez's oil subsidies to Caribbean and South American countries as "buying influence, undoubtedly" and called Venezuela's social programs in neighboring countries as "just another example of Venezuelan imperialism". The Caribbean Community feared "Venezuelan expansionism especially the Hugo Chavez variety" when the Bolivarian Navy of Venezuela established a base on Isla Aves, stating that Venezuela would attempt to expand its exclusive economic zone further into Caribbean waters.
Under the administration of President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's foreign policy grew even more aggressive as the country faced a socioeconomic crisis. On 11 May 2015, Guyana announced the discovery of promising oil deposits, though days later the Maduro government decreed that they controlled much of Guyana's maritime territory distancing all the way into Suriname waters. The decree was reversed shortly afterwards. Former Venezuelan general and high-level official Pedro Carreño stated on 9 July 2018 that if the United States were to attack Venezuela, the Venezuelan military would immediately fire on targets in Colombia. Carreño stated that Venezuelan Sukhoi fighter jets would destroy the seven bridges crossing the Magdalena River in order to virtually divide Colombia in two. A month later on 12 August 2018, former Foreign Minister of Venezuela, Roy Chaderton, stated that Venezuelans are "more civilized" than Colombians and that he was "part of the Pedro Carreño command" of the Bolivarian government, believing that Venezuelan troops must conquer Colombia and "reach the Pacific, because at last and finally we liberate the countries whose coasts are bathed by the Pacific Ocean ... I believe that we ... have military superiority".
Primary sources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15316
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IPv4
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is the fourth version of the Internet Protocol (IP). It is one of the core protocols of standards-based internetworking methods in the Internet and other packet-switched networks. IPv4 was the first version deployed for production in the ARPANET in 1983. It still routes most Internet traffic today, despite the ongoing deployment of a successor protocol, IPv6. IPv4 is described in IETF publication RFC 791 (September 1981), replacing an earlier definition (RFC 760, January 1980).
IPv4 uses a 32-bit address space which provides 4,294,967,296 (232) unique addresses, but large blocks are reserved for special networking methods.
The Internet Protocol is the protocol that defines and enables internetworking at the internet layer of the Internet Protocol Suite. In essence it forms the Internet. It uses a logical addressing system and performs "routing", which is the forwarding of packets from a source host to the next router that is one hop closer to the intended destination host on another network.
IPv4 is a connectionless protocol, and operates on a best effort delivery model, in that it does not guarantee delivery, nor does it assure proper sequencing or avoidance of duplicate delivery. These aspects, including data integrity, are addressed by an upper layer transport protocol, such as the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses which limits the address space to (232) addresses.
IPv4 reserves special address blocks for private networks (~18 million addresses) and multicast addresses (~270 million addresses).
IPv4 addresses may be represented in any notation expressing a 32-bit integer value. They are most often written in dot-decimal notation, which consists of four octets of the address expressed individually in decimal numbers and separated by periods.
For example, the quad-dotted IP address "192.0.2.235" represents the 32-bit decimal number 3221226219, which in hexadecimal format is 0xC00002EB. This may also be expressed in dotted hex format as 0xC0.0x00.0x02.0xEB, or with octal byte values as 0300.0000.0002.0353.
CIDR notation combines the address with its routing prefix in a compact format, in which the address is followed by a slash character (/) and the count of consecutive "1" bits in the routing prefix (subnet mask).
Other address representations were in common use when classful networking was practiced. For example, the loopback address "127.0.0.1" is commonly written as "127.1", given that it belongs to a class-A network with eight bits for the network mask and 24 bits for the host number. When fewer than four numbers are specified in the address in dotted notation, the last value is treated as an integer of as many bytes as are required to fill out the address to four octets. Thus, the address "127.65530" is equivalent to "127.0.255.250".
In the original design of IPv4, an IP address was divided into two parts: the network identifier was the most significant octet of the address, and the host identifier was the rest of the address. The latter was also called the "rest field". This structure permitted a maximum of 256 network identifiers, which was quickly found to be inadequate.
To overcome this limit, the most-significant address octet was redefined in 1981 to create "network classes", in a system which later became known as classful networking. The revised system defined five classes. Classes A, B, and C had different bit lengths for network identification. The rest of the address was used as previously to identify a host within a network. Because of the different sizes of fields in different classes, each network class had a different capacity for addressing hosts. In addition to the three classes for addressing hosts, Class D was defined for multicast addressing and Class E was reserved for future applications.
Dividing existing classful networks into subnets began in 1985 with the publication of . This division was made more flexible with the introduction of variable-length subnet masks (VLSM) in in 1987. In 1993, based on this work, introduced Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), which expressed the number of bits (from the most significant) as, for instance, /24, and the class-based scheme was dubbed "classful", by contrast. CIDR was designed to permit repartitioning of any address space so that smaller or larger blocks of addresses could be allocated to users. The hierarchical structure created by CIDR is managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the regional Internet registries (RIRs). Each RIR maintains a publicly searchable WHOIS database that provides information about IP address assignments.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and IANA have restricted from general use various reserved IP addresses for special purposes. Notably these addresses are used for multicast traffic and to provide addressing space for unrestricted uses on private networks.
Of the approximately four billion addresses defined in IPv4, about 18 million addresses in three ranges are reserved for use in private networks. Packets addresses in these ranges are not routable in the public Internet; they are ignored by all public routers. Therefore, private hosts cannot directly communicate with public networks, but require network address translation at a routing gateway for this purpose.
Since two private networks, e.g., two branch offices, cannot directly interoperate via the public Internet, the two networks must be bridged across the Internet via a virtual private network (VPN) or an IP tunnel, which encapsulates packets, including their headers containing the private addresses, in a protocol layer during transmission across the public network. Additionally, encapsulated packets may be encrypted for transmission across public networks to secure the data.
RFC 3927 defines the special address block 169.254.0.0/16 for link-local addressing. These addresses are only valid on the link (such as a local network segment or point-to-point connection) directly connected to a host that uses them. These addresses are not routable. Like private addresses, these addresses cannot be the source or destination of packets traversing the internet. These addresses are primarily used for address autoconfiguration (Zeroconf) when a host cannot obtain an IP address from a DHCP server or other internal configuration methods.
When the address block was reserved, no standards existed for address autoconfiguration. Microsoft created an implementation called Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA), which was deployed on millions of machines and became a de facto standard. Many years later, in May 2005, the IETF defined a formal standard in RFC 3927, entitled "Dynamic Configuration of IPv4 Link-Local Addresses".
The class A network 127.0.0.0 (classless network 127.0.0.0/8) is reserved for loopback. IP packets whose source addresses belong to this network should never appear outside a host. Packets received on a non-loopback interface with a loopback source or destination address must be dropped.
The first address in a subnet is used to identify the subnet itself. In this address all host bits are "0". To avoid ambiguity in representation, this address is reserved. The last address has all host bits set to "1". It is used as a local broadcast address for sending messages to all devices on the subnet simultaneously. For networks of size /24 or larger, the broadcast address always ends in 255.
For example, in the subnet 192.168.5.0/24 (subnet mask 255.255.255.0) the identifier 192.168.5.0 is used to refer to the entire subnet. The broadcast address of the network is 192.168.5.255.
However, this does not mean that every address ending in 0 or 255 cannot be used as a host address. For example, in the /16 subnet 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0, which is equivalent to the address range 192.168.0.0–192.168.255.255, the broadcast address is 192.168.255.255. One can use the following addresses for hosts, even though they end with 255: 192.168.1.255, 192.168.2.255, etc. Also, 192.168.0.0 is the network identifier and must not be assigned to an interface. The addresses 192.168.1.0, 192.168.2.0, etc., may be assigned, despite ending with 0.
In the past, conflict between network addresses and broadcast addresses arose because some software used non-standard broadcast addresses with zeros instead of ones.
In networks smaller than /24, broadcast addresses do not necessarily end with 255. For example, a CIDR subnet 203.0.113.16/28 has the broadcast address 203.0.113.31.
As a special case, a /31 network has capacity for just two hosts. These networks are typically used for point-to-point connections. There is no network identifier or broadcast address for these networks.
Hosts on the Internet are usually known by names, e.g., www.example.com, not primarily by their IP address, which is used for routing and network interface identification. The use of domain names requires translating, called "resolving", them to addresses and vice versa. This is analogous to looking up a phone number in a phone book using the recipient's name.
The translation between addresses and domain names is performed by the Domain Name System (DNS), a hierarchical, distributed naming system that allows for the subdelegation of namespaces to other DNS servers.
Since the 1980s, it was apparent that the pool of available IPv4 addresses was depleting at a rate that was not initially anticipated in the original design of the network. The main market forces that accelerated address depletion included the rapidly growing number of Internet users, who increasingly used mobile computing devices, such as laptop computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and smart phones with IP data services. In addition, high-speed Internet access was based on always-on devices. The threat of exhaustion motivated the introduction of a number of remedial technologies, such as Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) methods by the mid-1990s, pervasive use of network address translation (NAT) in network access provider systems, and strict usage-based allocation policies at the regional and local Internet registries.
The primary address pool of the Internet, maintained by IANA, was exhausted on 3 February 2011, when the last five blocks were allocated to the five RIRs. APNIC was the first RIR to exhaust its regional pool on 15 April 2011, except for a small amount of address space reserved for the transition technologies to IPv6, which is to be allocated under a restricted policy.
The long-term solution to address exhaustion was the 1998 specification of a new version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6. It provides a vastly increased address space, but also allows improved route aggregation across the Internet, and offers large subnetwork allocations of a minimum of 264 host addresses to end users. However, IPv4 is not directly interoperable with IPv6, so that IPv4-only hosts cannot directly communicate with IPv6-only hosts. With the phase-out of the 6bone experimental network starting in 2004, permanent formal deployment of IPv6 commenced in 2006. Completion of IPv6 deployment is expected to take considerable time, so that intermediate transition technologies are necessary to permit hosts to participate in the Internet using both versions of the protocol.
An IP packet consists of a header section and a data section. An IP packet has no data checksum or any other footer after the data section.
Typically the link layer encapsulates IP packets in frames with a CRC footer that detects most errors, many transport-layer protocols carried by IP also have their own error checking.
The IPv4 packet header consists of 14 fields, of which 13 are required. The 14th field is optional and aptly named: options. The fields in the header are packed with the most significant byte first (big endian), and for the diagram and discussion, the most significant bits are considered to come first (MSB 0 bit numbering). The most significant bit is numbered 0, so the version field is actually found in the four most significant bits of the first byte, for example.
The IPv4 header is variable in size due to the optional 14th field (options). The IHL field contains the size of the IPv4 header, it has 4 bits that specify the number of 32-bit words in the header. The minimum value for this field is 5, which indicates a length of 5 × 32 bits = 160 bits = 20 bytes. As a 4-bit field, the maximum value is 15, this means that the maximum size of the IPv4 header is 15 × 32 bits, or 480 bits = 60 bytes.
The fragment offset field is measured in units of eight-byte blocks. It is 13 bits long and specifies the offset of a particular fragment relative to the beginning of the original unfragmented IP datagram. The first fragment has an offset of zero. This allows a maximum offset of (213 – 1) × 8 = 65,528 bytes, which would exceed the maximum IP packet length of 65,535 bytes with the header length included (65,528 + 20 = 65,548 bytes).
The options field is not often used. Note that the value in the IHL field must include enough extra 32-bit words to hold all the options (plus any padding needed to ensure that the header contains an integer number of 32-bit words). The list of options may be terminated with an EOL (End of Options List, 0x00) option; this is only necessary if the end of the options would not otherwise coincide with the end of the header. The possible options that can be put in the header are as follows:
Packets containing some options may be considered as dangerous by some routers and be blocked.
The table below shows the defined options for IPv4. Strictly speaking, the column labeled "Option Number" is actually the "Option Value" that is derived from the Copied, Option Class, and Option Number bits as defined above. However, since most people today refer to this combined bit set as the "option number," this table shows that common usage. The table shows both the decimal and the hexadecimal option numbers.
The packet payload is not included in the checksum. Its contents are interpreted based on the value of the Protocol header field.
Some of the common payload protocols are:
See List of IP protocol numbers for a complete list.
The Internet Protocol enables traffic between networks. The design accommodates networks of diverse physical nature; it is independent of the underlying transmission technology used in the link layer. Networks with different hardware usually vary not only in transmission speed, but also in the maximum transmission unit (MTU). When one network wants to transmit datagrams to a network with a smaller MTU, it may fragment its datagrams. In IPv4, this function was placed at the Internet Layer, and is performed in IPv4 routers, which thus require no implementation of any higher layers for the function of routing IP packets.
In contrast, IPv6, the next generation of the Internet Protocol, does not allow routers to perform fragmentation; hosts must determine the path MTU before sending datagrams.
When a router receives a packet, it examines the destination address and determines the outgoing interface to use and that interface's MTU. If the packet size is bigger than the MTU, and the Do not Fragment (DF) bit in the packet's header is set to 0, then the router may fragment the packet.
The router divides the packet into fragments. The max size of each fragment is the MTU minus the IP header size (20 bytes minimum; 60 bytes maximum). The router puts each fragment into its own packet, each fragment packet having following changes:
For example, for an MTU of 1,500 bytes and a header size of 20 bytes, the fragment offsets would be multiples of
formula_1.
These multiples are 0, 185, 370, 555, 740, ...
It is possible that a packet is fragmented at one router, and that the fragments are further fragmented at another router. For example, a packet of 4,520 bytes, including the 20 bytes of the IP header (without options) is fragmented to two packets on a link with an MTU of 2,500 bytes:
The total data size is preserved: 2480 bytes + 2020 bytes = 4500 bytes.
The offsets are
formula_2
and
formula_3.
On a link with an MTU of 1,500 bytes, each fragment results in two fragments:
Again, the data size is preserved: 1480 + 1000 = 2480, and 1480 + 540 = 2020.
Also in this case, the "More Fragments" bit remains 1 for all the fragments that came with 1 in them and for the last fragment that arrives, it works as usual, that is the MF bit is set to 0 only in the last one. And of course, the Identification field continues to have the same value in all re-fragmented fragments. This way, even if fragments are re-fragmented, the receiver knows they have initially all started from the same packet.
The last offset and last data size are used to calculate the total data size:
formula_4.
A receiver knows that a packet is a fragment, if at least one of the following conditions is true:
The receiver identifies matching fragments using the foreign and local address, the protocol ID, and the identification field. The receiver reassembles the data from fragments with the same ID using both the fragment offset and the more fragments flag. When the receiver receives the last fragment, which has the "more fragments" flag set to 0, it can calculate the size of the original data payload, by multiplying the last fragment's offset by eight, and adding the last fragment's data size. In the given example, this calculation was 495*8 + 540 = 4500 bytes.
When the receiver has all fragments, they can be reassembled in the correct sequence according to the offsets, to form the original datagram.
IP addresses are not tied in any permanent manner to hardware identifications and, indeed, a network interface can have multiple IP addresses in modern operating systems. Hosts and routers need additional mechanisms to identify the relationship between device interfaces and IP addresses, in order to properly deliver an IP packet to the destination host on a link. The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) performs this IP-address-to-hardware-address translation for IPv4. (A hardware address is also called a MAC address.) In addition, the reverse correlation is often necessary. For example, when an IP host is booted or connected to a network it needs to determine its IP address, unless an address is preconfigured by an administrator. Protocols for such inverse correlations exist in the Internet Protocol Suite. Currently used methods are Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Bootstrap Protocol (BOOTP) and, infrequently, reverse ARP.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15317
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IPv6
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion. IPv6 is intended to replace IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, who subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.
Devices on the Internet are assigned a unique IP address for identification and location definition. With the rapid growth of the Internet after commercialization in the 1990s, it became evident that far more addresses would be needed to connect devices than the IPv4 address space had available. By 1998, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) had formalized the successor protocol. IPv6 uses a 128-bit address, theoretically allowing 2128, or approximately addresses. The actual number is slightly smaller, as multiple ranges are reserved for special use or completely excluded from use. The two protocols are not designed to be interoperable, and thus direct communication between them is impossible, complicating the move to IPv6. However, several transition mechanisms have been devised to rectify this.
IPv6 provides other technical benefits in addition to a larger addressing space. In particular, it permits hierarchical address allocation methods that facilitate route aggregation across the Internet, and thus limit the expansion of routing tables. The use of multicast addressing is expanded and simplified, and provides additional optimization for the delivery of services. Device mobility, security, and configuration aspects have been considered in the design of the protocol.
IPv6 addresses are represented as eight groups, separated by colons, of four hexadecimal digits. The full representation may be simplified by several methods of notation; for example, "2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334" becomes "2001:db8::8a2e:370:7334".
IPv6 is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworking and provides end-to-end datagram transmission across multiple IP networks, closely adhering to the design principles developed in the previous version of the protocol, Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4).
In addition to offering more addresses, IPv6 also implements features not present in IPv4. It simplifies aspects of address configuration, network renumbering, and router announcements when changing network connectivity providers. It simplifies processing of packets in routers by placing the responsibility for packet fragmentation into the end points. The IPv6 subnet size is standardized by fixing the size of the host identifier portion of an address to 64 bits.
The addressing architecture of IPv6 is defined in and allows three different types of transmission: unicast, anycast and multicast.
Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) was the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol. IPv4 was developed as a research project by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a United States Department of Defense agency, before becoming the foundation for the Internet and the World Wide Web. IPv4 includes an addressing system that uses numerical identifiers consisting of 32 bits. These addresses are typically displayed in quad-dotted notation as decimal values of four octets, each in the range 0 to 255, or 8 bits per number. Thus, IPv4 provides an addressing capability of 232 or approximately 4.3 billion addresses. Address exhaustion was not initially a concern in IPv4 as this version was originally presumed to be a test of DARPA's networking concepts. During the first decade of operation of the Internet, it became apparent that methods had to be developed to conserve address space. In the early 1990s, even after the redesign of the addressing system using a classless network model, it became clear that this would not suffice to prevent IPv4 address exhaustion, and that further changes to the Internet infrastructure were needed.
The last unassigned top-level address blocks of 16 million IPv4 addresses were allocated in February 2011 by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to the five regional Internet registries (RIRs). However, each RIR still has available address pools and is expected to continue with standard address allocation policies until one /8 Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block remains. After that, only blocks of 1024 addresses (/22) will be provided from the RIRs to a local Internet registry (LIR). As of September 2015, all of Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE_NCC), Latin America and Caribbean Network Information Centre (LACNIC), and American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) have reached this stage. This leaves African Network Information Center (AFRINIC) as the sole regional internet registry that is still using the normal protocol for distributing IPv4 addresses. As of November 2018, AFRINIC's minimum allocation is /22 or 1024 IPv4 addresses. A LIR may receive additional allocation when about 80% of all the address space has been utilized.
RIPE NCC announced that it had fully run out of IPv4 addresses on November 25, 2019, and called for greater progress on the adoption of IPv6.
It is widely expected that the Internet will use IPv4 alongside IPv6 for the foreseeable future.
On the Internet, data is transmitted in the form of network packets. IPv6 specifies a new packet format, designed to minimize packet header processing by routers. Because the headers of IPv4 packets and IPv6 packets are significantly different, the two protocols are not interoperable. However, most transport and application-layer protocols need little or no change to operate over IPv6; exceptions are application protocols that embed Internet-layer addresses, such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP), where the new address format may cause conflicts with existing protocol syntax.
The main advantage of IPv6 over IPv4 is its larger address space. The size of an IPv6 address is 128 bits, compared to 32 bits in IPv4. The address space therefore has 2128 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (approximately ). Some blocks of this space and some specific addresses are reserved for special uses.
While this address space is very large, it was not the intent of the designers of IPv6 to assure geographical saturation with usable addresses. Rather, the longer addresses simplify allocation of addresses, enable efficient route aggregation, and allow implementation of special addressing features. In IPv4, complex Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) methods were developed to make the best use of the small address space. The standard size of a subnet in IPv6 is 264 addresses, the square of the size of the entire IPv4 address space, or about four billion times larger. Thus, actual address space utilization will be small in IPv6, but network management and routing efficiency are improved by the large subnet space and hierarchical route aggregation.
Multicasting, the transmission of a packet to multiple destinations in a single send operation, is part of the base specification in IPv6. In IPv4 this is an optional (although commonly implemented) feature. IPv6 multicast addressing has features and protocols in common with IPv4 multicast, but also provides changes and improvements by eliminating the need for certain protocols. IPv6 does not implement traditional IP broadcast, i.e. the transmission of a packet to all hosts on the attached link using a special "broadcast address", and therefore does not define broadcast addresses. In IPv6, the same result is achieved by sending a packet to the link-local "all nodes" multicast group at address ff02::1, which is analogous to IPv4 multicasting to address 224.0.0.1. IPv6 also provides for new multicast implementations, including embedding rendezvous point addresses in an IPv6 multicast group address, which simplifies the deployment of inter-domain solutions.
In IPv4 it is very difficult for an organization to get even one globally routable multicast group assignment, and the implementation of inter-domain solutions is arcane. Unicast address assignments by a local Internet registry for IPv6 have at least a 64-bit routing prefix, yielding the smallest subnet size available in IPv6 (also 64 bits). With such an assignment it is possible to embed the unicast address prefix into the IPv6 multicast address format, while still providing a 32-bit block, the least significant bits of the address, or approximately 4.2 billion multicast group identifiers. Thus each user of an IPv6 subnet automatically has available a set of globally routable source-specific multicast groups for multicast applications.
IPv6 hosts configure themselves automatically. Every interface has a self-generated link-local address and, when connected to a network, conflict resolution is performed and routers provide network prefixes via router advertisements. Stateless configuration of routers can be achieved with a special router renumbering protocol. When necessary, hosts may configure additional stateful addresses via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol version 6 (DHCPv6) or static addresses manually.
Like IPv4, IPv6 supports globally unique IP addresses. The design of IPv6 intended to re-emphasize the end-to-end principle of network design that was originally conceived during the establishment of the early Internet by rendering network address translation obsolete. Therefore, every device on the network is globally addressable directly from any other device.
A stable, unique, globally addressable IP address would facilitate tracking a device across networks. Therefore, such addresses are a particular privacy concern for mobile devices, such as laptops and cell phones.
To address these privacy concerns, the SLAAC protocol includes what are typically called "privacy addresses" or, more correctly, "temporary addresses", codified in RFC 4941, "Privacy Extensions for Stateless Address Autoconfiguration in IPv6". Temporary addresses are random and unstable. A typical consumer device generates a new temporary address daily and will ignore traffic addressed to an old address after one week. Temporary addresses are used by default by Windows since XP SP1, OS X since 10.7, Android since 4.0, and iOS since version 4.3. Use of temporary addresses by Linux distributions varies.
Renumbering an existing network for a new connectivity provider with different routing prefixes is a major effort with IPv4. With IPv6, however, changing the prefix announced by a few routers can in principle renumber an entire network, since the host identifiers (the least-significant 64 bits of an address) can be independently self-configured by a host.
The SLAAC address generation method is implementation-dependent. IETF recommends that addresses are deterministic but semantically opaque.
Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) was originally developed for IPv6, but found widespread deployment first in IPv4, for which it was re-engineered. IPsec was a mandatory part of all IPv6 protocol implementations, and Internet Key Exchange (IKE) was recommended, but with RFC 6434 the inclusion of IPsec in IPv6 implementations was downgraded to a recommendation because it was considered impractical to require full IPsec implementation for all types of devices that may use IPv6. However, as of RFC 4301 IPv6 protocol implementations that do implement IPsec need to implement IKEv2 and need to support a minimum set of cryptographic algorithms. This requirement will help to make IPsec implementations more interoperable between devices from different vendors. The IPsec Authentication Header (AH) and the Encapsulating Security Payload header (ESP) are implemented as IPv6 extension headers.
The packet header in IPv6 is simpler than the IPv4 header. Many rarely used fields have been moved to optional header extensions. With the simplified IPv6 packet header the process of packet forwarding by routers has been simplified. Although IPv6 packet headers are at least twice the size of IPv4 packet headers, processing of packets that only contain the base IPv6 header by routers may, in some case, be more efficient, because less processing is required in routers due to the headers being aligned to match common word sizes. However, many devices implement IPv6 support in software (as opposed to hardware), thus resulting in very bad packet processing performance. Additionally, for many implementations, the use of Extension Headers causes packets to be processed by a router's CPU, leading to poor performance or even security issues.
Moreover, an IPv6 header does not include a checksum. The IPv4 header checksum is calculated for the IPv4 header, and has to be recalculated by routers every time the time to live (called hop limit in the IPv6 protocol) is reduced by one. The absence of a checksum in the IPv6 header furthers the end-to-end principle of Internet design, which envisioned that most processing in the network occurs in the leaf nodes. Integrity protection for the data that is encapsulated in the IPv6 packet is assumed to be assured by both the link layer or error detection in higher-layer protocols, namely the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) on the transport layer. Thus, while IPv4 allowed UDP datagram headers to have no checksum (indicated by 0 in the header field), IPv6 requires a checksum in UDP headers.
IPv6 routers do not perform IP fragmentation. IPv6 hosts are required to either perform path MTU discovery, perform end-to-end fragmentation, or to send packets no larger than the default Maximum transmission unit (MTU), which is 1280 octets.
Unlike mobile IPv4, mobile IPv6 avoids triangular routing and is therefore as efficient as native IPv6. IPv6 routers may also allow entire subnets to move to a new router connection point without renumbering.
The IPv6 packet header has a minimum size of 40 octets (320 bits). Options are implemented as extensions. This provides the opportunity to extend the protocol in the future without affecting the core packet structure. However, RFC 7872 notes that some network operators drop IPv6 packets with extension headers when they traverse transit autonomous systems.
IPv4 limits packets to 65,535 (216−1) octets of payload. An IPv6 node can optionally handle packets over this limit, referred to as jumbograms, which can be as large as 4,294,967,295 (232−1) octets. The use of jumbograms may improve performance over high-MTU links. The use of jumbograms is indicated by the Jumbo Payload Option extension header.
An IPv6 packet has two parts: a header and payload.
The header consists of a fixed portion with minimal functionality required for all packets and may be followed by optional extensions to implement special features.
The fixed header occupies the first 40 octets (320 bits) of the IPv6 packet. It contains the source and destination addresses, traffic classification options, a hop counter, and the type of the optional extension or payload which follows the header. This "Next Header" field tells the receiver how to interpret the data which follows the header. If the packet contains options, this field contains the option type of the next option. The "Next Header" field of the last option points to the upper-layer protocol that is carried in the packet's payload.
Extension headers carry options that are used for special treatment of a packet in the network, e.g., for routing, fragmentation, and for security using the IPsec framework.
Without special options, a payload must be less than . With a Jumbo Payload option (in a "Hop-By-Hop Options" extension header), the payload must be less than 4 GB.
Unlike with IPv4, routers never fragment a packet. Hosts are expected to use Path MTU Discovery to make their packets small enough to reach the destination without needing to be fragmented. See IPv6 packet fragmentation.
IPv6 addresses have 128 bits. The design of the IPv6 address space implements a different design philosophy than in IPv4, in which subnetting was used to improve the efficiency of utilization of the small address space. In IPv6, the address space is deemed large enough for the foreseeable future, and a local area subnet always uses 64 bits for the host portion of the address, designated as the interface identifier, while the most-significant 64 bits are used as the routing prefix. While the myth has existed regarding IPv6 subnets being impossible to scan, RFC 7707 notes that patterns resulting from some IPv6 address configuration techniques and algorithms allow for address scanning in many real-world scenarios.
The 128 bits of an IPv6 address are represented in 8 groups of 16 bits each. Each group is written as four hexadecimal digits (sometimes called hextets or more formally hexadectets and informally a quibble or quad-nibble ) and the groups are separated by colons (:). An example of this representation is .
For convenience and clarity, the representation of an IPv6 address may be shortened with the following rules.
An example of application of these rules:
The loopback address is defined in and is abbreviated to by using both rules.
As an IPv6 address may have more than one representation, the IETF has issued a proposed standard for representing them in text.
All interfaces of IPv6 hosts require a link-local address. IPv6 link-local addresses have the prefix . This prefix is combined with a 64 bit suffix, which the host can compute and/or assign by itself—without configuration and without the presence or cooperation of an external network component like a DHCP server.
The lower 64 bits of the link local address (the suffix) were originally derived from the MAC address of the underlying network interface card. As this method of assigning addresses would cause undesirable address changes when faulty network cards were replaced, and as it also suffered from a number of security and privacy issues, RFC 8064 has replaced the original MAC-based method with the hash-based method specified in RFC 7217.
IPv6 uses a new mechanism for mapping IP addresses to link layer addresses (MAC addresses), because it does not support the broadcast addressing method, on which the functionality of the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) in IPv4 is based. IPv6 implements the Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP, ND) in the link layer, which relies on ICMPv6 and multicast transmission. IPv6 hosts verify the uniqueness of their IPv6 addresses in a local area network (LAN) by sending a neighbor solicitation message asking for the link layer address of the IP address. If any other host in the LAN is using that address, it responds.
A host bringing up a new IPv6 interface first generates a unique link-local address using one of several mechanisms designed to generate a unique address. Should a non unique address be detected, the host can try again with a newly generated address. Once a unique link-local address is established, the IPv6 host determines if the LAN is connected on this link to any router interface that supports IPv6. It does so by sending out an ICMPv6 router solicitation message to the all-routers multicast group with its link-local address as source. If there is no answer after a predetermined number of attempts, the host concludes that no routers are connected. If it does get a response, known as a router advertisement, from a router, the response includes the network configuration information to allow establishment of a globally unique address with an appropriate unicast network prefix. There are also two flag bits that tell the host whether it should use DHCP to get further information and addresses:
The assignment procedure for global addresses is similar to local address construction. The prefix is supplied from router advertisements on the network. Multiple prefix announcements cause multiple addresses to be configured.
Stateless address autoconfiguration (SLAAC) requires a address block, as defined in . Local Internet registries are assigned at least blocks, which they divide among subordinate networks. The initial recommendation stated assignment of a subnet to end-consumer sites (). This was replaced by , which "recommends giving home sites significantly more than a single , but does not recommend that every home site be given a either". s are specifically considered. It remains to be seen if ISPs will honor this recommendation. For example, during initial trials, Comcast customers were given a single network.
In the Domain Name System (DNS), hostnames are mapped to IPv6 addresses by AAAA ("quad-A") resource records. For reverse resolution, the IETF reserved the domain ip6.arpa, where the name space is hierarchically divided by the 1-digit hexadecimal representation of nibble units (4 bits) of the IPv6 address. This scheme is defined in .
When a dual-stack host queries a DNS server to resolve a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), the DNS client of the host sends two DNS requests, one querying A records and the other querying AAAA records. The host operating system may be configured with a preference for address selection rules .
An alternate record type was used in early DNS implementations for IPv6, designed to facilitate network renumbering, the "A6" records for the forward lookup and a number of other innovations such as "bit-string labels" and "DNAME" records. It is defined in and its references (with further discussion of the pros and cons of both schemes in ), but has been deprecated to experimental status ().
IPv6 is not foreseen to supplant IPv4 instantaneously. Both protocols will continue to operate simultaneously for some time. Therefore, IPv6 transition mechanisms are needed to enable IPv6 hosts to reach IPv4 services and to allow isolated IPv6 hosts and networks to reach each other over IPv4 infrastructure.
According to Silvia Hagen, a dual-stack implementation of the IPv4 and IPv6 on devices is the easiest way to migrate to IPv6. Many other transition mechanisms use tunneling to encapsulate IPv6 traffic within IPv4 networks and vice versa. This is an imperfect solution, which reduces the maximum transmission unit (MTU) of a link and therefore complicates Path MTU Discovery, and may increase latency.
Dual-stack IP implementations provide complete IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks in the operating system of a computer or network device on top of the common physical layer implementation, such as Ethernet. This permits dual-stack hosts to participate in IPv6 and IPv4 networks simultaneously. The method is defined in .
A device with dual-stack implementation in the operating system has an IPv4 and IPv6 address, and can communicate with other nodes in the LAN or the Internet using either IPv4 or IPv6. The Domain Name System (DNS) protocol is used by both IP protocols to resolve fully qualified domain names (FQDN) and IP addresses, but dual stack requires that the resolving DNS server can resolve both types of addresses. Such a dual stack DNS server would hold IPv4 addresses in the A records, and IPv6 addresses in the AAAA records. Depending on the destination that is to be resolved, a DNS name server may return an IPv4 or IPv6 IP address, or both. A default address selection mechanism, or preferred protocol, needs to be configured either on hosts or the DNS server. The IETF has published Happy Eyeballs to assist dual stack applications, so that they can connect using both IPv4 and IPv6, but prefer an IPv6 connection if it is available. However, dual-stack also needs to be implemented on all routers between the host and the service for which the DNS server has returned an IPv6 address. Dual-stack clients should only be configured to prefer IPv6, if the network is able to forward IPv6 packets using the IPv6 versions of routing protocols. When dual stack networks protocols are in place the application layer can be migrated to IPv6.
While dual-stack is supported by major operating system and network device vendors, legacy networking hardware and servers don't support IPv6.
Internet service providers (ISPs) are increasingly providing their business and private customers with public-facing IPv6 global unicast addresses. However, if in the local area network (LAN) IPv4 is still used, and the ISP can only provide a public facing IPv6, the IPv4 LAN addresses are translated into the public facing IPv6 address using NAT64, a network address translation (NAT) mechanism. Some ISPs cannot provide their customers with public-facing IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, thus supporting dual stack networking, because some ISPs have exhausted their globally routable IPv4 address pool. Meanwhile, ISP customers are still trying to reach IPv4 web servers and other destinations.
A significant percentage of ISPs in all regional Internet registry (RIR) zones have obtained IPv6 address space. This includes many of the world's major ISPs and mobile network operators, such as Verizon Wireless, StarHub Cable, Chubu Telecommunications, Kabel Deutschland, Swisscom, T-Mobile, Internode and Telefonica.
While some ISPs still allocate customers only IPv4 addresses, many ISPs allocate their customers only an IPv6 or dual stack IPv4 and IPv6. ISPs report the share of IPv6 traffic from customers over their network to be anything between 20% and 40%, but by mid-2017 IPv6 traffic still only accounted for a fraction of total traffic at several large Internet exchange points (IXPs). AMS-IX reported it to be 2% and SeattleIX reported 7%. A 2017 survey found that many DSL customers that were served by a dual stack ISP did not request DNS servers to resolve fully qualified domain names into IPv6 addresses. The survey also found that the majority of traffic from IPv6-ready webserver resources were still requested and served over IPv4, mostly due to ISP customers that did not use the dual stack facility provided by their ISP and to a lesser extent due to customers of IPv4-only ISPs.
The technical basis for tunneling, or encapsulating IPv6 packets in IPv4 packets, is outlined in RFC 4213. When the Internet backbone was IPv4-only, one of the frequently used tunneling protocols was 6to4. Teredo tunneling was also frequently used for integrating IPv6 LANs with the IPv4 Internet backbone. Teredo is outlined in RFC 4380 and allows IPv6 local area networks to tunnel over IPv4 networks, by encapsulating IPv6 packets within UDP. The Teredo relay is an IPv6 router that mediates between a Teredo server and the native IPv6 network. It was expected that 6to4 and Teredo would be widely deployed until ISP networks would switch to native IPv6, but by 2014 Google Statistics showed that the use of both mechanisms had dropped to almost 0.
Hybrid dual-stack IPv6/IPv4 implementations recognize a special class of addresses, the IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses. These addresses are typically written with a 96-bit prefix in the standard IPv6 format, and the remaining 32 bits written in the customary dot-decimal notation of IPv4.
Addresses in this group consist of an 80-bit prefix of zeros, the next 16 bits are ones, and the remaining, least-significant 32 bits contain the IPv4 address. For example, ::ffff:192.0.2.128 represents the IPv4 address 192.0.2.128. Another format, called "IPv4-compatible IPv6 address", is ::192.0.2.128; however, this method is deprecated.
Because of the significant internal differences between IPv4 and IPv6 protocol stacks, some of the lower-level functionality available to programmers in the IPv6 stack does not work the same when used with IPv4-mapped addresses. Some common IPv6 stacks do not implement the IPv4-mapped address feature, either because the IPv6 and IPv4 stacks are separate implementations (e.g., Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003), or because of security concerns (OpenBSD). On these operating systems, a program must open a separate socket for each IP protocol it uses. On some systems, e.g., the Linux kernel, NetBSD, and FreeBSD, this feature is controlled by the socket option IPV6_V6ONLY, as specified in .
A number of security implications may arise from the use of IPv6. Some of them may be related with the IPv6 protocols themselves, while others may be related with implementations flaws.
The addition of nodes having IPv6 enabled by default by the software manufacturer, may result in the inadvertent creation of "shadow networks", causing IPv6 traffic flowing into networks having only IPv4 security management in place. This may also occur with operating system upgrades, when the newer operating system enables IPv6 by default, while the older one did not. Failing to update the security infrastructure to accommodate IPv6 can lead to IPv6 traffic bypassing it. Shadow networks have occurred on business networks in which enterprises are replacing Windows XP systems that do not have an IPv6 stack enabled by default, with Windows 7 systems, that do. Some IPv6 stack implementors have therefore recommended disabling IPv4 mapped addresses and instead using a dual-stack network where supporting both IPv4 and IPv6 is necessary.
Research has shown that the use of fragmentation can be leveraged to evade network security controls, similar to IPv4. As a result, requires that the first fragment of an IPv6 packet contains the entire IPv6 header chain, such that some very pathological fragmentation cases are forbidden. Additionally, as a result of research on the evasion of RA-Guard in , has deprecated the use of fragmentation with Neighbor Discovery, and discouraged the use of fragmentation with Secure Neighbor Discovery (SEND).
Due to the anticipated global growth of the Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the early 1990s started an effort to develop a next generation IP protocol. By the beginning of 1992, several proposals appeared for an expanded Internet addressing system and by the end of 1992 the IETF announced a call for white papers. In September 1993, the IETF created a temporary, ad-hoc "IP Next Generation" (IPng) area to deal specifically with such issues. The new area was led by Allison Mankin and Scott Bradner, and had a directorate with 15 engineers from diverse backgrounds for direction-setting and preliminary document review: The working-group members were J. Allard (Microsoft), Steve Bellovin (AT&T), Jim Bound (Digital Equipment Corporation), Ross Callon (Wellfleet), Brian Carpenter (CERN), Dave Clark (MIT), John Curran (NEARNET), Steve Deering (Xerox), Dino Farinacci (Cisco), Paul Francis (NTT), Eric Fleischmann (Boeing), Mark Knopper (Ameritech), Greg Minshall (Novell), Rob Ullmann (Lotus), and Lixia Zhang (Xerox).
The Internet Engineering Task Force adopted the IPng model on 25 July 1994, with the formation of several IPng working groups. By 1996, a series of RFCs was released defining Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), starting with . (Version 5 was used by the experimental Internet Stream Protocol.)
The first RFC to standardize IPv6 was the in 1995, which became obsoleted by in 1998. In July 2017 this RFC was obsoleted by , which elevated IPv6 to "Internet Standard" (the highest maturity level for IETF protocols).
The 1993 introduction of Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) in the routing and IP address allocation for the Internet, and the extensive use of network address translation (NAT), delayed IPv4 address exhaustion to allow for IPv6 deployment, which began in the mid-2000s.
Universities were among the early adopters of IPv6. Virginia Tech deployed IPv6 at a trial location in 2004 and later expanded IPv6 deployment across the campus network. By 2016, 82% of the traffic on their network used IPv6. Imperial College London began experimental IPv6 deployment in 2003 and by 2016 the IPv6 traffic on their networks averaged between 20% and 40%. A significant portion of this IPv6 traffic was generated through their high energy physics collaboration with CERN, which relies entirely on IPv6.
The Domain Name System (DNS) has supported IPv6 since 2008. In the same year, IPv6 was first used in a major world event during the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics.
By 2011, all major operating systems in use on personal computers and server systems had production-quality IPv6 implementations. Cellular telephone systems presented a large deployment field for Internet Protocol devices as mobile telephone service made the transition from 3G to 4G technologies, in which voice is provisioned as a voice over IP (VoIP) service that would leverage IPv6 enhancements. In 2009, the US cellular operator Verizon released technical specifications for devices to operate on its "next-generation" networks. The specification mandated IPv6 operation according to the "3GPP Release 8 Specifications (March 2009)", and deprecated IPv4 as an optional capability.
The deployment of IPv6 in the Internet backbone continued. In 2018 only 25.3% of the about 54,000 autonomous systems advertised both IPv4 and IPv6 prefixes in the global Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing database. A further 243 networks advertised only an IPv6 prefix. Internet backbone transit networks offering IPv6 support existed in every country globally, except in parts of Africa, the Middle East and China. By mid-2018 some major European broadband ISPs had deployed IPv6 for the majority of their customers. British Sky Broadcasting provided over 86% of its customers with IPv6, Deutsche Telekom had 56% deployment of IPv6, XS4ALL in the Netherlands had 73% deployment and in Belgium the broadband ISPs VOO and Telenet had 73% and 63% IPv6 deployment respectively. In the United States the broadband ISP Comcast had an IPv6 deployment of about 66%. In 2018 Comcast reported an estimated 36.1 million IPv6 users, while AT&T reported 22.3 million IPv6 users.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15318
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Inca Empire
The Inca Empire (, "The Four Regions"), also known as the Incan Empire and the Inka Empire, was the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. The administrative, political and military center of the empire was located in the city of Cusco. The Inca civilization arose from the Peruvian highlands sometime in the early 13th century. Its last stronghold was conquered by the Spanish in 1572.
From 1438 to 1533, the Incas incorporated a large portion of western South America, centered on the Andean Mountains, using conquest and peaceful assimilation, among other methods. At its largest, the empire joined Peru, western Ecuador, western and south central Bolivia, northwest Argentina, a large portion of what is today Chile, and the southwesternmost tip of Colombia into a state comparable to the historical empires of Eurasia. Its official language was Quechua. Many local forms of worship persisted in the empire, most of them concerning local sacred "Huacas", but the Inca leadership encouraged the sun worship of Inti – their sun god – and imposed its sovereignty above other cults such as that of Pachamama. The Incas considered their king, the Sapa Inca, to be the "son of the sun."
The Inca Empire was unusual in that it lacked many features associated with civilization in the Old World. Anthropologist Gordon McEwan wrote that:
The Incan economy has been described in contradictory ways by scholars:
The Inca Empire functioned largely without money and without markets. Instead, exchange of goods and services was based on reciprocity between individuals and among individuals, groups, and Inca rulers. "Taxes" consisted of a labour obligation of a person to the Empire. The Inca rulers (who theoretically owned all the means of production) reciprocated by granting access to land and goods and providing food and drink in celebratory feasts for their subjects.
The Inca referred to their empire as "Tawantinsuyu", "the four "suyu"". In Quechua, "tawa" is four and "-ntin" is a suffix naming a group, so that a "tawantin" is a quartet, a group of four things taken together, in this case representing the four "suyu" ("regions" or "provinces") whose corners met at the capital. The four "suyu" were: Chinchaysuyu (north), Antisuyu (east; the Amazon jungle), Qullasuyu (south) and Kuntisuyu (west). The name "Tawantinsuyu" was, therefore, a descriptive term indicating a union of provinces. The Spanish transliterated the name as "Tahuatinsuyo" or "Tahuatinsuyu".
The term "Inka" means "ruler" or "lord" in Quechua and was used to refer to the ruling class or the ruling family. The Incas were a very small percentage of the total population of the empire, probably numbering only 15,000 to 40,000, but ruling a population of around 10 million people. The Spanish adopted the term (transliterated as "Inca" in Spanish) as an ethnic term referring to all subjects of the empire rather than simply the ruling class. As such, the name "Imperio inca" ("Inca Empire") referred to the nation that they encountered and subsequently conquered.
The Inca Empire was the last chapter of thousands of years of Andean civilizations. The Andean civilization was one of five civilizations in the world deemed by scholars to be "pristine", that is indigenous and not derivative from other civilizations.
The Inca Empire was preceded by two large-scale empires in the Andes: the Tiwanaku (c. 300–1100 AD), based around Lake Titicaca and the Wari or Huari (c. 600–1100 AD) centered near the city of Ayacucho. The Wari occupied the Cuzco area for about 400 years. Thus, many of the characteristics of the Inca Empire derived from earlier multi-ethnic and expansive Andean cultures.
Carl Troll has argued that the development of the Inca state in the central Andes was aided by conditions that allow for the elaboration of the staple food chuño. Chuño, which can be stored for long periods, is made of potato dried at the freezing temperatures that are common at nighttime in the southern Peruvian highlands. Such a link between the Inca state and chuño may be questioned, as potatoes and other crops such as maize can also be dried with only sunlight. Troll did also argue that llamas, the Inca's pack animal, can be found in its largest numbers in this very same region. It is worth considering the maximum extent of the Inca Empire roughly coincided with the greatest distribution of llamas and alpacas in Pre-Hispanic America. The link between the Andean biomes of puna and páramo, pastoralism and the Inca state is a matter of research. As a third point Troll pointed out irrigation technology as advantageous to the Inca state-building. While Troll theorized environmental influences on the Inca Empire, he opposed environmental determinism, arguing that culture lay at the core of the Inca civilization.
The Inca people were a pastoral tribe in the Cusco area around the 12th century. Incan oral history tells an origin story of three caves. The center cave at Tampu T'uqu "(Tambo Tocco)" was named Qhapaq T'uqu ("principal niche", also spelled "Capac Tocco"). The other caves were Maras T'uqu "(Maras Tocco)" and Sutiq T'uqu "(Sutic Tocco)". Four brothers and four sisters stepped out of the middle cave. They were: Ayar Manco, Ayar Cachi, Ayar Awqa "(Ayar Auca)" and Ayar Uchu; and Mama Ocllo, Mama Raua, Mama Huaco and Mama Qura "(Mama Cora)". Out of the side caves came the people who were to be the ancestors of all the Inca clans.
Ayar Manco carried a magic staff made of the finest gold. Where this staff landed, the people would live. They traveled for a long time. On the way, Ayar Cachi boasted about his strength and power. His siblings tricked him into returning to the cave to get a sacred llama. When he went into the cave, they trapped him inside to get rid of him.
Ayar Uchu decided to stay on the top of the cave to look over the Inca people. The minute he proclaimed that, he turned to stone. They built a shrine around the stone and it became a sacred object. Ayar Auca grew tired of all this and decided to travel alone. Only Ayar Manco and his four sisters remained.
Finally, they reached Cusco. The staff sank into the ground. Before they arrived, Mama Ocllo had already borne Ayar Manco a child, Sinchi Roca. The people who were already living in Cusco fought hard to keep their land, but Mama Huaca was a good fighter. When the enemy attacked, she threw her bolas (several stones tied together that spun through the air when thrown) at a soldier (gualla) and killed him instantly. The other people became afraid and ran away.
After that, Ayar Manco became known as Manco Cápac, the founder of the Inca. It is said that he and his sisters built the first Inca homes in the valley with their own hands. When the time came, Manco Cápac turned to stone like his brothers before him. His son, Sinchi Roca, became the second emperor of the Inca.
Under the leadership of Manco Cápac, the Inca formed the small city-state Kingdom of Cusco (Quechua "Qusqu', Qosqo"). In 1438, they began a far-reaching expansion under the command of Sapa Inca (paramount leader) Pachacuti-Cusi Yupanqui, whose name literally meant "earth-shaker". The name of Pachacuti was given to him after he conquered the Tribe of Chancas (modern Apurímac). During his reign, he and his son Tupac Yupanqui brought much of the modern-day territory of Peru under Inca control.
Pachacuti reorganized the kingdom of Cusco into the Tahuantinsuyu, which consisted of a central government with the Inca at its head and four provincial governments with strong leaders: Chinchasuyu (NW), Antisuyu (NE), Kuntisuyu (SW) and Qullasuyu (SE). Pachacuti is thought to have built Machu Picchu, either as a family home or summer retreat, although it may have been an agricultural station.
Pachacuti sent spies to regions he wanted in his empire and they brought to him reports on political organization, military strength and wealth. He then sent messages to their leaders extolling the benefits of joining his empire, offering them presents of luxury goods such as high quality textiles and promising that they would be materially richer as his subjects.
Most accepted the rule of the Inca as a "fait accompli" and acquiesced peacefully. Refusal to accept Inca rule resulted in military conquest. Following conquest the local rulers were executed. The ruler's children were brought to Cusco to learn about Inca administration systems, then return to rule their native lands. This allowed the Inca to indoctrinate them into the Inca nobility and, with luck, marry their daughters into families at various corners of the empire.
Traditionally the son of the Inca ruler led the army. Pachacuti's son Túpac Inca Yupanqui began conquests to the north in 1463 and continued them as Inca ruler after Pachacuti's death in 1471. Túpac Inca's most important conquest was the Kingdom of Chimor, the Inca's only serious rival for the Peruvian coast. Túpac Inca's empire then stretched north into modern-day Ecuador and Colombia.
Túpac Inca's son Huayna Cápac added a small portion of land to the north in modern-day Ecuador. At its height, the Inca Empire included Peru, western and south central Bolivia, southwest Ecuador and a large portion of what is today Chile, north of the Maule River. Traditional historiography claims the advance south halted after the Battle of the Maule where they met determined resistance from the Mapuche. This view is challenged by historian Osvaldo Silva who argues instead that it was the social and political framework of the Mapuche that posed the main difficulty in imposing imperial rule. Silva does accept that the battle of the Maule was a stalemate, but argues the Incas lacked incentives for conquest they had had when fighting more complex societies such as the Chimú Empire. Silva also disputes the date given by traditional historiography for the battle: the late 15th century during the reign of Topa Inca Yupanqui (1471–93). Instead, he places it in 1532 during the Inca Civil War. Nevertheless, Silva agrees on the claim that the bulk of the Incan conquests were made during the late 15th century. At the time of the Incan Civil War an Inca army was, according to Diego de Rosales, subduing a revolt among the Diaguitas of Copiapó and Coquimbo.
The empire's push into the Amazon Basin near the Chinchipe River was stopped by the Shuar in 1527. The empire extended into corners of Argentina and Colombia. However, most of the southern portion of the Inca empire, the portion denominated as Qullasuyu, was located in the Altiplano.
The Inca Empire was an amalgamation of languages, cultures and peoples. The components of the empire were not all uniformly loyal, nor were the local cultures all fully integrated. The Inca empire as a whole had an economy based on exchange and taxation of luxury goods and labour. The following quote describes a method of taxation:
For as is well known to all, not a single village of the highlands or the plains failed to pay the tribute levied on it by those who were in charge of these matters. There were even provinces where, when the natives alleged that they were unable to pay their tribute, the Inca ordered that each inhabitant should be obliged to turn in every four months a large quill full of live lice, which was the Inca's way of teaching and accustoming them to pay tribute.
Spanish conquistadors led by Francisco Pizarro and his brothers explored south from what is today Panama, reaching Inca territory by 1526. It was clear that they had reached a wealthy land with prospects of great treasure, and after another expedition in 1529 Pizarro traveled to Spain and received royal approval to conquer the region and be its viceroy. This approval was received as detailed in the following quote: "In July 1529 the Queen of Spain signed a charter allowing Pizarro to conquer the Incas. Pizarro was named governor and captain of all conquests in Peru, or New Castile, as the Spanish now called the land."
When the conquistadors returned to Peru in 1532, a war of succession between the sons of Sapa Inca Huayna Capac, Huáscar and Atahualpa, and unrest among newly conquered territories weakened the empire. Perhaps more importantly, smallpox, influenza, typhus and measles had spread from Central America.
The forces led by Pizarro consisted of 168 men, one cannon, and 27 horses. Conquistadors ported lances, arquebuses, steel armor and long swords. In contrast, the Inca used weapons made out of wood, stone, copper and bronze, while using an Alpaca fiber based armor, putting them at significant technological disadvantage—none of their weapons could pierce the Spanish steel armor. In addition, due to the absence of horses in the Americas, the Inca did not develop tactics to fight cavalry. However, the Inca were still effective warriors, being able to successfully fight the Mapuche, which later would strategically defeat the Spanish as they expanded further south.
The first engagement between the Inca and the Spanish was the Battle of Puná, near present-day Guayaquil, Ecuador, on the Pacific Coast; Pizarro then founded the city of Piura in July 1532. Hernando de Soto was sent inland to explore the interior and returned with an invitation to meet the Inca, Atahualpa, who had defeated his brother in the civil war and was resting at Cajamarca with his army of 80,000 troops, that were at the moment armed only with hunting tools (knives and lassos for hunting llamas).
Pizarro and some of his men, most notably a friar named Vincente de Valverde, met with the Inca, who had brought only a small retinue. The Inca offered them ceremonial chicha in a golden cup, which the Spanish rejected. The Spanish interpreter, Friar Vincente, read the "Requerimiento" that demanded that he and his empire accept the rule of King Charles I of Spain and convert to Christianity. Atahualpa dismissed the message and asked them to leave. After this, the Spanish began their attack against the mostly unarmed Inca, captured Atahualpa as hostage, and forced the Inca to collaborate.
Atahualpa offered the Spaniards enough gold to fill the room he was imprisoned in and twice that amount of silver. The Inca fulfilled this ransom, but Pizarro deceived them, refusing to release the Inca afterwards. During Atahualpa's imprisonment Huáscar was assassinated elsewhere. The Spaniards maintained that this was at Atahualpa's orders; this was used as one of the charges against Atahualpa when the Spaniards finally executed him, in August 1533.
Although "defeat" often implies an unwanted loss in battle, much of the Inca elite "actually welcomed the Spanish invaders as liberators and willingly settled down with them to share rule of Andean farmers and miners."
The Spanish installed Atahualpa's brother Manco Inca Yupanqui in power; for some time Manco cooperated with the Spanish while they fought to put down resistance in the north. Meanwhile, an associate of Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, attempted to claim Cusco. Manco tried to use this intra-Spanish feud to his advantage, recapturing Cusco in 1536, but the Spanish retook the city afterwards. Manco Inca then retreated to the mountains of Vilcabamba and established the small Neo-Inca State, where he and his successors ruled for another 36 years, sometimes raiding the Spanish or inciting revolts against them. In 1572 the last Inca stronghold was conquered and the last ruler, Túpac Amaru, Manco's son, was captured and executed. This ended resistance to the Spanish conquest under the political authority of the Inca state.
After the fall of the Inca Empire many aspects of Inca culture were systematically destroyed, including their sophisticated farming system, known as the vertical archipelago model of agriculture. Spanish colonial officials used the Inca mita corvée labor system for colonial aims, sometimes brutally. One member of each family was forced to work in the gold and silver mines, the foremost of which was the titanic silver mine at Potosí. When a family member died, which would usually happen within a year or two, the family was required to send a replacement.
The effects of smallpox on the Inca empire were even more devastating. Beginning in Colombia, smallpox spread rapidly before the Spanish invaders first arrived in the empire. The spread was probably aided by the efficient Inca road system. Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Other diseases, including a probable Typhus outbreak in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, and measles in 1618, all ravaged the Inca people.
The number of people inhabiting Tawantinsuyu at its peak is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 4–37 million. Most population estimates are in the range of 6 to 14 million. In spite of the fact that the Inca kept excellent census records using their quipus, knowledge of how to read them was lost as almost all fell into disuse and disintegrated over time or were destroyed by the Spaniards.
The empire was extremely linguistically diverse. Some of the most important languages were Quechua, Aymara, Puquina and Mochica, respectively mainly spoken in the Central Andes, the Altiplano or (Qullasuyu), the south Peruvian coast (Kuntisuyu), and the area of the north Peruvian coast (Chinchaysuyu) around Chan Chan, today Trujillo. Other languages included Quignam, Jaqaru, Leco, Uru-Chipaya languages, Kunza, Humahuaca, Cacán, Mapudungun, Culle, Chachapoya, Catacao languages, Manta, and Barbacoan languages, as well as numerous Amazonian languages on the frontier regions. The exact linguistic topography of the pre-Columbian and early colonial Andes remains incompletely understood, owing to the extinction of several languages and the loss of historical records.
In order to manage this diversity, the Inca lords promoted the usage of Quechua, especially the variety of modern-day Lima as the Qhapaq Runasimi ("great language of the people"), or the official language/lingua franca. Defined by mutual intelligibility, Quechua is actually a family of languages rather than one single language, parallel to the Romance or Slavic languages in Europe. Most communities within the empire, even those resistant to Inca rule, learned to speak a variety of Quechua (forming new regional varieties with distinct phonetics) in order to communicate with the Inca lords and mitma colonists, as well as the wider integrating society, but largely retained their native languages as well. The Incas also had their own ethnic language, referred to as Qhapaq simi ("royal language"), which is thought to have been closely related to or a dialect of Puquina, which appears to have been the official language of the former Tiwanaku Empire, from which the Incas claimed descent, making Qhapaq simi a source of prestige for them. The split between Qhapaq simi and Qhapaq Runasimi also exemplifies the larger split between hatun and hunin (high and low) society in general.
There are several common misconceptions about the history of Quechua, as it is frequently identified as the "Inca language". Quechua did not originate with the Incas, had been a lingua franca in multiple areas before the Inca expansions, was diverse before the rise of the Incas, and it was not the native or original language of the Incas. In addition, the main official language of the Inca Empire was the coastal Quechua variety, native to modern Lima, not the Cusco dialect. The pre-Inca Chincha Kingdom, with whom the Incas struck an alliance, had made this variety into a local prestige language by their extensive trading activities. The Peruvian coast was also the most populous and economically active region of the Inca Empire, and employing coastal Quechua offered an alternative to neighboring Mochica, the language of the rival state of Chimu. Trade had also been spreading Quechua northwards before the Inca expansions, towards Cajamarca and Ecuador, and was likely the official language of the older Wari Empire. However, the Incas have left an impressive linguistic legacy, in that they introduced Quechua to many areas where it is still widely spoken today, including Ecuador, southern Bolivia, southern Colombia, and parts of the Amazon basin. The Spanish conquerors continued the official usage of Quechua during the early colonial period, and transformed it into a literary language.
The Incas were not known to develop a written form of language; however, they visually recorded narratives through paintings on vases and cups (qirus). These paintings are usually accompanied by geometric patterns known as toqapu, which are also found in textiles. Researchers have speculated that toqapu patterns could have served as a form of written communication (e.g.: heraldry, or glyphs), however this remains unclear. The Incas also kept records by using quipus.
The high infant mortality rates that plagued the Inca Empire caused all newborn infants to be given the term ‘wawa’ when they were born. Most families did not invest very much into their child until they reached the age of two or three years old. Once the child reached the age of three, a "coming of age" ceremony occurred, called the "rutuchikuy". For the Incas, this ceremony indicated that the child had entered the stage of "ignorance". During this ceremony, the family would invite all relatives to their house for food and dance, and then each member of the family would receive a lock of hair from the child. After each family member had received a lock, the father would shave the child's head. This stage of life was categorized by a stage of "ignorance, inexperience, and lack of reason, a condition that the child would overcome with time." For Incan society, in order to advance from the stage of ignorance to development the child must learn the roles associated with their gender.
The next important ritual was to celebrate the maturity of a child. Unlike the coming of age ceremony, the celebration of maturity signified the child's sexual potency. This celebration of puberty was called "warachikuy" for boys and "qikuchikuy" for girls. The "warachikuy" ceremony included dancing, fasting, tasks to display strength, and family ceremonies. The boy would also be given new clothes and taught how to act as an unmarried man. The "qikuchikuy" signified the onset of menstruation, upon which the girl would go into the forest alone and return only once the bleeding had ended. In the forest she would fast, and, once returned, the girl would be given a new name, adult clothing, and advice. This "folly" stage of life was the time young adults were allowed to have sex without being a parent.
Between the ages of 20 and 30, people were considered young adults, "ripe for serious thought and labor." Young adults were able to retain their youthful status by living at home and assisting in their home community. Young adults only reached full maturity and independence once they had married.
At the end of life, the terms for men and women denote loss of sexual vitality and humanity. Specifically, the "decrepitude" stage signifies the loss of mental well-being and further physical decline.
In the Incan Empire, the age of marriage differed for men and women: men typically married at the age of 20, while women usually got married about four years earlier at the age of 16. Men who were highly ranked in society could have multiple wives, but those lower in the ranks could only take a single wife. Marriages were typically within classes and resembled a more business-like agreement. Once married, the women were expected to cook, collect food and watch over the children and livestock. Girls and mothers would also work around the house to keep it orderly to please the public inspectors. These duties remained the same even after wives became pregnant and with the added responsibility of praying and making offerings to Kanopa, who was the god of pregnancy. It was typical for marriages to begin on a trial basis with both men and women having a say in the longevity of the marriage. If the man felt that it wouldn't work out or if the woman wanted to return to her parents’ home the marriage would end. Once the marriage was final, the only way the two could be divorced was if they did not have a child together. Marriage within the Empire was crucial for survival. A family was considered disadvantaged if there was not a married couple at the center because everyday life centered around the balance of male and female tasks.
According to some historians, such as Terence N. D'Altroy, male and female roles were considered equal in Inca society. The "indigenous cultures saw the two genders as complementary parts of a whole." In other words, there was not a hierarchical structure in the domestic sphere for the Incas. Within the domestic sphere, women were known as the weavers. Women's everyday tasks included: spinning, watching the children, weaving cloth, cooking, brewing chichi, preparing fields for cultivation, planting seeds, bearing children, harvesting, weeding, hoeing, herding, and carrying water. Men on the other hand, "weeded, plowed, participated in combat, helped in the harvest, carried firewood, built houses, herded llama and alpaca, and spun and wove when necessary". This relationship between the genders may have been complementary. Unsurprisingly, onlooking Spaniards believed women were treated like slaves, because women did not work in Spanish society to the same extent, and certainly did not work in fields. Women were sometimes allowed to own land and herds because inheritance was passed down from both the mother's and father's side of the family. Kinship within the Inca society followed a parallel line of descent. In other words, women ascended from women and men ascended from men. Due to the parallel descent, a woman had access to land and other necessities through her mother.
Inca myths were transmitted orally until early Spanish colonists recorded them; however, some scholars claim that they were recorded on quipus, Andean knotted string records.
The Inca believed in reincarnation. After death, the passage to the next world was fraught with difficulties. The spirit of the dead, "camaquen," would need to follow a long road and during the trip the assistance of a black dog that could see in the dark was required. Most Incas imagined the after world to be like an earthly paradise with flower-covered fields and snow-capped mountains.
It was important to the Inca that they not die as a result of burning or that the body of the deceased not be incinerated. Burning would cause their vital force to disappear and threaten their passage to the after world. Those who obeyed the Inca moral code – "ama suwa, ama llulla, ama quella" (do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy) – "went to live in the Sun's warmth while others spent their eternal days in the cold earth". The Inca nobility practiced cranial deformation. They wrapped tight cloth straps around the heads of newborns to shape their soft skulls into a more conical form, thus distinguishing the nobility from other social classes.
The Incas made human sacrifices. As many as 4,000 servants, court officials, favorites and concubines were killed upon the death of the Inca Huayna Capac in 1527. The Incas performed child sacrifices around important events, such as the death of the Sapa Inca or during a famine. These sacrifices were known as "qhapaq hucha".
The Incas were polytheists who worshipped many gods. These included:
The Inca Empire employed central planning. The Inca Empire traded with outside regions, although they did not operate a substantial internal market economy. While axe-monies were used along the northern coast, presumably by the provincial "mindaláe" trading class, most households in the empire lived in a traditional economy in which households were required to pay taxes, usually in the form of the "mit'a" corvée labor, and military obligations, though barter (or "trueque") was present in some areas. In return, the state provided security, food in times of hardship through the supply of emergency resources, agricultural projects (e.g. aqueducts and terraces) to increase productivity and occasional feasts. While "mit'a" was used by the state to obtain labor, individual villages had a pre-inca system of communal work, known as mink'a. This system survives to the modern day, known as "mink'a" or "faena". The economy rested on the material foundations of the vertical archipelago, a system of ecological complementarity in accessing resources and the cultural foundation of "ayni", or reciprocal exchange.
The Sapa Inca was conceptualized as divine and was effectively head of the state religion. The "Willaq Umu" (or Chief Priest) was second to the emperor. Local religious traditions continued and in some cases such as the Oracle at Pachacamac on the Peruvian coast, were officially venerated. Following Pachacuti, the Sapa Inca claimed descent from Inti, who placed a high value on imperial blood; by the end of the empire, it was common to incestuously wed brother and sister. He was "son of the sun," and his people the "intip churin", or "children of the sun," and both his right to rule and mission to conquer derived from his holy ancestor. The Sapa Inca also presided over ideologically important festivals, notably during the "Inti Raymi", or "Sunfest" attended by soldiers, mummified rulers, nobles, clerics and the general population of Cusco beginning on the June solstice and culminating nine days later with the ritual breaking of the earth using a foot plow by the Inca. Moreover, Cusco was considered cosmologically central, loaded as it was with "huacas" and radiating "ceque" lines and geographic center of the Four-Quarters; Inca Garcilaso de la Vega called it "the navel of the universe".
The Inca Empire was a federalist system consisting of a central government with the Inca at its head and four-quarters, or "suyu": Chinchay Suyu (NW), Anti Suyu (NE), Kunti Suyu (SW) and Qulla Suyu (SE). The four corners of these quarters met at the center, Cusco. These "suyu" were likely created around 1460 during the reign of Pachacuti before the empire reached its largest territorial extent. At the time the "suyu" were established they were roughly of equal size and only later changed their proportions as the empire expanded north and south along the Andes.
Cusco was likely not organized as a "wamani", or province. Rather, it was probably somewhat akin to a modern federal district, like Washington, DC or Mexico City. The city sat at the center of the four "suyu" and served as the preeminent center of politics and religion. While Cusco was essentially governed by the Sapa Inca, his relatives and the royal "panaqa" lineages, each "suyu" was governed by an "Apu", a term of esteem used for men of high status and for venerated mountains. Both Cusco as a district and the four "suyu" as administrative regions were grouped into upper "hanan" and lower "hurin" divisions. As the Inca did not have written records, it is impossible to exhaustively list the constituent "wamani". However, colonial records allow us to reconstruct a partial list. There were likely more than 86 "wamani", with more than 48 in the highlands and more than 38 on the coast.
The most populous "suyu" was Chinchaysuyu, which encompassed the former Chimu empire and much of the northern Andes. At its largest extent, it extended through much of modern Ecuador and into modern Colombia.
The largest "suyu" by area was Qullasuyu, named after the Aymara-speaking Qulla people. It encompassed the Bolivian Altiplano and much of the southern Andes, reaching Argentina and as far south as the Maipo or Maule river in Central Chile. Historian José Bengoa singled out Quillota as likely being the foremost Inca settlement in Chile.
The second smallest "suyu", Antisuyu, was northwest of Cusco in the high Andes. Its name is the root of the word "Andes."
Kuntisuyu was the smallest "suyu", located along the southern coast of modern Peru, extending into the highlands towards Cusco.
The Inca state had no separate judiciary or codified laws. Customs, expectations and traditional local power holders governed behavior. The state had legal force, such as through "tokoyrikoq" (lit. "he who sees all"), or inspectors. The highest such inspector, typically a blood relative to the Sapa Inca, acted independently of the conventional hierarchy, providing a point of view for the Sapa Inca free of bureaucratic influence.
The Inca had three moral precepts that governed their behavior:
Colonial sources are not entirely clear or in agreement about Inca government structure, such as exact duties and functions of government positions. But the basic structure can be broadly described. The top was the "Sapa Inca". Below that may have been the "Willaq Umu", literally the "priest who recounts", the High Priest of the Sun. However, beneath the "Sapa Inca" also sat the "Inkap rantin", who was a confidant and assistant to the "Sapa Inca", perhaps similar to a Prime Minister. Starting with Topa Inca Yupanqui, a "Council of the Realm" was composed of 16 nobles: 2 from "hanan" Cusco; 2 from "hurin" Cusco; 4 from Chinchaysuyu; 2 from Cuntisuyu; 4 from Collasuyu; and 2 from Antisuyu. This weighting of representation balanced the "hanan" and "hurin" divisions of the empire, both within Cusco and within the Quarters ("hanan suyukuna" and "hurin suyukuna").
While provincial bureaucracy and government varied greatly, the basic organization was decimal. Taxpayers – male heads of household of a certain age range – were organized into corvée labor units (often doubling as military units) that formed the state's muscle as part of mit'a service. Each unit of more than 100 tax-payers were headed by a "kuraka", while smaller units were headed by a "kamayuq", a lower, non-hereditary status. However, while "kuraka" status was hereditary and typically served for life, the position of a "kuraka" in the hierarchy was subject to change based on the privileges of superiors in the hierarchy; a "pachaka kuraka" could be appointed to the position by a "waranqa kuraka". Furthermore, one "kuraka" in each decimal level could serve as the head of one of the nine groups at a lower level, so that a "pachaka kuraka" might also be a "waranqa kuraka", in effect directly responsible for one unit of 100 tax-payers and less directly responsible for nine other such units.
Architecture was the most important of the Incan arts, with textiles reflecting architectural motifs. The most notable example is Machu Picchu, which was constructed by Inca engineers. The prime Inca structures were made of stone blocks that fit together so well that a knife could not be fitted through the stonework. These constructs have survived for centuries, with no use of mortar to sustain them.
This process was first used on a large scale by the Pucara (c. 300 BC–AD 300) peoples to the south in Lake Titicaca and later in the city of Tiwanaku (c. AD 400–1100) in present-day Bolivia. The rocks were sculpted to fit together exactly by repeatedly lowering a rock onto another and carving away any sections on the lower rock where the dust was compressed. The tight fit and the concavity on the lower rocks made them extraordinarily stable, despite the ongoing challenge of earthquakes and volcanic activity.
Physical measures used by the Inca were based on human body parts. Units included fingers, the distance from thumb to forefinger, palms, cubits and wingspans. The most basic distance unit was "thatkiy" or "thatki", or one pace. The next largest unit was reported by Cobo to be the "topo" or "tupu", measuring 6,000 "thatkiy"s, or about ; careful study has shown that a range of is likely. Next was the "wamani", composed of 30 "topo"s (roughly ). To measure area, 25 by 50 wingspans were used, reckoned in "topo"s (roughly ). It seems likely that distance was often interpreted as one day's walk; the distance between "tambo" way-stations varies widely in terms of distance, but far less in terms of time to walk that distance.
Inca calendars were strongly tied to astronomy. Inca astronomers understood equinoxes, solstices and zenith passages, along with the Venus cycle. They could not, however, predict eclipses. The Inca calendar was essentially lunisolar, as two calendars were maintained in parallel, one solar and one lunar. As 12 lunar months fall 11 days short of a full 365-day solar year, those in charge of the calendar had to adjust every winter solstice. Each lunar month was marked with festivals and rituals. Apparently, the days of the week were not named and days were not grouped into weeks. Similarly, months were not grouped into seasons. Time during a day was not measured in hours or minutes, but in terms of how far the sun had travelled or in how long it had taken to perform a task.
The sophistication of Inca administration, calendrics and engineering required facility with numbers. Numerical information was stored in the knots of "quipu" strings, allowing for compact storage of large numbers. These numbers were stored in base-10 digits, the same base used by the Quechua language and in administrative and military units. These numbers, stored in "quipu", could be calculated on "yupanas", grids with squares of positionally varying mathematical values, perhaps functioning as an abacus. Calculation was facilitated by moving piles of tokens, seeds or pebbles between compartments of the "yupana". It is likely that Inca mathematics at least allowed division of integers into integers or fractions and multiplication of integers and fractions.
According to mid-17th-century Jesuit chronicler Bernabé Cobo, the Inca designated officials to perform accounting-related tasks. These officials were called quipo camayos. Study of khipu sample VA 42527 (Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin) revealed that the numbers arranged in calendrically significant patterns were used for agricultural purposes in the "farm account books" kept by the khipukamayuq (accountant or warehouse keeper) to facilitate the closing of accounting books.
Ceramics were painted using the polychrome technique portraying numerous motifs including animals, birds, waves, felines (popular in the Chavin culture) and geometric patterns found in the Nazca style of ceramics. In a culture without a written language, ceramics portrayed the basic scenes of everyday life, including the smelting of metals, relationships and scenes of tribal warfare. The most distinctive Inca ceramic objects are the Cusco bottles or "aryballos". Many of these pieces are on display in Lima in the Larco Archaeological Museum and the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History.
Almost all of the gold and silver work of the Incan empire was melted down by the conquistadors, and shipped back to Spain.
The Inca recorded information on assemblages of knotted strings, known as Quipu, although they can no longer be decoded. Originally it was thought that Quipu were used only as mnemonic devices or to record numerical data. Quipus are also believed to record history and literature.
The Inca made many discoveries in medicine. They performed successful skull surgery, by cutting holes in the skull to alleviate fluid buildup and inflammation caused by head wounds. Many skull surgeries performed by Inca surgeons were successful. Survival rates were 80–90%, compared to about 30% before Inca times.
The Incas revered the coca plant as sacred/magical. Its leaves were used in moderate amounts to lessen hunger and pain during work, but were mostly used for religious and health purposes. The Spaniards took advantage of the effects of chewing coca leaves. The Chasqui, messengers who ran throughout the empire to deliver messages, chewed coca leaves for extra energy. Coca leaves were also used as an anaesthetic during surgeries.
The Inca army was the most powerful at that time, because any ordinary villager or farmer could be recruited as a soldier as part of the "mit'a" system of mandatory public service. Every able bodied male Inca of fighting age had to take part in war in some capacity at least once and to prepare for warfare again when needed. By the time the empire reached its largest size, every section of the empire contributed in setting up an army for war.
The Incas had no iron or steel and their weapons were not much more effective than those of their opponents so they often defeated opponents by sheer force of numbers, or else by persuading them to surrender beforehand by offering generous terms. Inca weaponry included "hardwood spears launched using throwers, arrows, javelins, slings, the bolas, clubs, and maces with star-shaped heads made of copper or bronze." Rolling rocks downhill onto the enemy was a common strategy, taking advantage of the hilly terrain. Fighting was sometimes accompanied by drums and trumpets made of wood, shell or bone. Armor included:
Roads allowed quick movement (on foot) for the Inca army and shelters called "tambo" and storage silos called qullqas were built one day's travelling distance from each other, so that an army on campaign could always be fed and rested. This can be seen in names of ruins such as "Ollantay Tambo", or My Lord's Storehouse. These were set up so the Inca and his entourage would always have supplies (and possibly shelter) ready as they traveled.
Chronicles and references from the 16th and 17th centuries support the idea of a banner. However, it represented the Inca (emperor), not the empire.
Francisco López de Jerez wrote in 1534:
Chronicler Bernabé Cobo wrote:
()-Bernabé Cobo, "Historia del Nuevo Mundo" (1653)
Guaman Poma's 1615 book, "El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno", shows numerous line drawings of Inca flags. In his 1847 book "A History of the Conquest of Peru", "William H. Prescott ... says that in the Inca army each company had its particular banner and that the imperial standard, high above all, displayed the glittering device of the rainbow, the armorial ensign of the Incas." A 1917 world flags book says the Inca "heir-apparent ... was entitled to display the royal standard of the rainbow in his military campaigns."
In modern times the rainbow flag has been wrongly associated with the Tawantinsuyu and displayed as a symbol of Inca heritage by some groups in Peru and Bolivia. The city of Cusco also flies the Rainbow Flag, but as an official flag of the city. The Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo (2001–2006) flew the Rainbow Flag in Lima's presidential palace. However, according to Peruvian historiography, the Inca Empire never had a flag. Peruvian historian María Rostworowski said, "I bet my life, the Inca never had that flag, it never existed, no chronicler mentioned it". Also, to the Peruvian newspaper "El Comercio", the flag dates to the first decades of the 20th century, and even the Congress of the Republic of Peru has determined that flag is a fake by citing the conclusion of National Academy of Peruvian History:
"The official use of the wrongly called 'Tawantinsuyu flag' is a mistake. In the Pre-Hispanic Andean World there did not exist the concept of a flag, it did not belong to their historic context".
National Academy of Peruvian History
Incas were able to adapt to their high-altitude living through successful acclimatization, which is characterized by increasing oxygen supply to the blood tissues. For the native Inca living in the Andean highlands, this was achieved through the development of a larger lung capacity, and an increase in red blood cell counts, hemoglobin concentration, and capillary beds.
Compared to other humans, the Incas had slower heart rates, almost one-third larger lung capacity, about 2 L (4 pints) more blood volume and double the amount of hemoglobin, which transfers oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. While the Conquistadors may have been slightly taller, the Inca had the advantage of coping with the extraordinary altitude.
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Internet Protocol
The Internet Protocol (IP) is the principal communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet.
IP has the task of delivering packets from the source host to the destination host solely based on the IP addresses in the packet headers. For this purpose, IP defines packet structures that encapsulate the data to be delivered. It also defines addressing methods that are used to label the datagram with source and destination information.
Historically, IP was the connectionless datagram service in the original Transmission Control Program introduced by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974, which was complemented by a connection-oriented service that became the basis for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The Internet protocol suite is therefore often referred to as "TCP/IP".
The first major version of IP, Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4), is the dominant protocol of the Internet. Its successor is Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), which has been in increasing deployment on the public Internet since c. 2006.
The Internet Protocol is responsible for addressing host interfaces, encapsulating data into datagrams (including fragmentation and reassembly) and routing datagrams from a source host interface to a destination host interface across one or more IP networks. For these purposes, the Internet Protocol defines the format of packets and provides an addressing system.
Each datagram has two components: a header and a payload. The IP header includes source IP address, destination IP address, and other metadata needed to route and deliver the datagram. The payload is the data that is transported. This method of nesting the data payload in a packet with a header is called encapsulation.
IP addressing entails the assignment of IP addresses and associated parameters to host interfaces. The address space is divided into subnetworks, involving the designation of network prefixes. IP routing is performed by all hosts, as well as routers, whose main function is to transport packets across network boundaries. Routers communicate with one another via specially designed routing protocols, either interior gateway protocols or exterior gateway protocols, as needed for the topology of the network.
In May 1974, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published a paper entitled "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication". The paper's authors, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, described an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet switching among network nodes. A central control component of this model was the "Transmission Control Program" that incorporated both connection-oriented links and datagram services between hosts. The monolithic Transmission Control Program was later divided into a modular architecture consisting of the Transmission Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol at the transport layer and the Internet Protocol at the internet layer. The model became known as the "Department of Defense (DoD) Internet Model" and "Internet protocol suite", and informally as "TCP/IP".
IP versions 0 to 3 were experimental versions, used between 1973 and 1978. The following Internet Experiment Note (IEN) documents describe versions of the Internet Protocol prior to the modern version of IPv4:
The dominant internetworking protocol in the Internet Layer in use is IPv4; the number 4 is the protocol version number carried in every IP datagram. IPv4 is described in (1981).
Version number 5 was used by the Internet Stream Protocol, an experimental streaming protocol.
The successor to IPv4 is IPv6. IPv6 was a result of several years of experimentation and dialog during which various protocol models were proposed, such as TP/IX (), PIP () and TUBA (TCP and UDP with Bigger Addresses, ). Its most prominent difference from version 4 is the size of the addresses. While IPv4 uses 32 bits for addressing, yielding c. 4.3 billion () addresses, IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses providing ca. addresses. Although adoption of IPv6 has been slow, , all United States government systems have demonstrated basic infrastructure support for IPv6.
The assignment of the new protocol as IPv6 was uncertain until due diligence revealed that IPv6 had not yet been used previously. Other Internet Layer protocols have been assigned version numbers, such as 7 ("IP/TX"), 8 and 9 ("historic"). Notably, on April 1, 1994, the IETF published an April Fools' Day joke about IPv9. IPv9 was also used in an alternate proposed address space expansion called TUBA.
The design of the Internet protocol suite adheres to the end-to-end principle, a concept adapted from the CYCLADES project. Under the end-to-end principle, the network infrastructure is considered inherently unreliable at any single network element or transmission medium and is dynamic in terms of the availability of links and nodes. No central monitoring or performance measurement facility exists that tracks or maintains the state of the network. For the benefit of reducing network complexity, the intelligence in the network is purposely located in the end nodes.
As a consequence of this design, the Internet Protocol only provides best-effort delivery and its service is characterized as unreliable. In network architectural language, it is a connectionless protocol, in contrast to connection-oriented communication. Various error conditions may occur, such as data corruption, packet loss and duplication. Because routing is dynamic, meaning every packet is treated independently, and because the network maintains no state based on the path of prior packets, different packets may be routed to the same destination via different paths, resulting in out-of-order delivery to the receiver.
All error conditions in the network must be detected and compensated by the participating end nodes. The upper layer protocols of the Internet protocol suite are responsible for resolving reliability issues. For example, a host may buffer network data to ensure correct ordering before the data is delivered to an application.
IPv4 provides safeguards to ensure that the header of an IP packet is error-free. A routing node discards packets that fail a header checksum test. Although the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) provides notification of errors, a routing node is not required to notify either end node of errors. IPv6, by contrast, operates without header checksums, since current link layer technology is assumed to provide sufficient error detection.
The dynamic nature of the Internet and the diversity of its components provide no guarantee that any particular path is actually capable of, or suitable for, performing the data transmission requested. One of the technical constraints is the size of data packets allowed on a given link. Facilities exist to examine the maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of the local link and Path MTU Discovery can be used for the entire intended path to the destination.
The IPv4 internetworking layer has the ability to automatically fragment the original datagram into smaller units for transmission. In this case, IP provides re-ordering of fragments delivered out of order. An IPv6 network does not perform fragmentation or reassembly, and as per the end-to-end principle, requires end stations and higher-layer protocols to avoid exceeding the network's MTU.
The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is an example of a protocol that adjusts its segment size to be smaller than the MTU. The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and ICMP disregard MTU size, thereby forcing IP to fragment oversized datagrams.
During the design phase of the ARPANET and the early Internet, the security aspects and needs of a public, international network could not be adequately anticipated. Consequently, many Internet protocols exhibited vulnerabilities highlighted by network attacks and later security assessments. In 2008, a thorough security assessment and proposed mitigation of problems was published. The IETF has been pursuing further studies.
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Impeachment
Impeachment is the process by which a legislative body levels charges against a government official. Impeachment does not in itself remove the official definitively from office; it is similar to an indictment in criminal law, and thus it is essentially the statement of charges against the official. In some countries, the impeached official is provisionally removed, while in others, he remains in office during the trial. An impeached official must face the possibility of conviction — in many jurisdictions, by another legislative vote — and a judgment that convicts the official on the articles of impeachment generally entails the official's definitive removal from office.
Because impeachment and conviction of officials involve an overturning of the normal constitutional procedures by which individuals achieve high office (election, ratification, or appointment) and because it generally requires a supermajority, they are usually reserved for those deemed to have committed serious abuses of their office. In the United States, for example, impeachment at the federal level is limited to those who may have committed "Treason, Bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors".
Impeachment exists under constitutional law in many countries around the world, including Brazil, France, India, Ireland, the Philippines, Russia, South Korea, and the United States.
The word "impeachment" likely derives from Old French "empeechier" from Latin word "impedīre" expressing the idea of catching or ensnaring by the 'foot' ("pes, pedis"), and has analogues in the modern French verb "empêcher" (to prevent) and the modern English "impede". Medieval popular etymology also associated it (wrongly) with derivations from the Latin "impetere" (to attack). Some contend that the word comes from the Latin "impicare" (through the late-Latin "impiciare", "impiciamentum"), that is the punishment that in Latin antiquity they gave to parricides, consisting in throwing them into the sea confined in a "culleus", namely a sac made of esparto or hide and covered with pitch or bitumen on the outside, so that the water delayed in entering; they sometimes confined some aggressive beasts with the convict so to increase his last torments (""Culleus, tunica ex sparto im modum crumenae facta, quae liniebatur a populo pice et bitumine, in qua imcludebantur parricidae cum simia, serpente, et gallo; insuta mittebatur in mare et, contendentibus inter se animantibus, homo maioribus poenis afficiebatur"").
The process was first used by the English "Good Parliament" against Baron Latimer in the second half of the 14th century. Following the British example, the constitutions of Virginia (1776), Massachusetts (1780) and other states thereafter adopted the impeachment mechanism, but they restricted the punishment to removal of the official from office.
The Austrian Federal president can be impeached by the Federal Assembly ("Bundesversammlung") before the Constitutional Court. The constitution also provides for the recall of the president by a referendum. Neither of these courses has ever been taken. This is likely because while Austrian presidents are vested with considerable powers on paper, they act as a largely ceremonial figurehead in practice, and are thus unlikely to abuse their powers.
The president of the Federative Republic of Brazil may be impeached by the Chamber of Deputies and tried and removed from office by the Federal Senate. The Brazilian Constitution requires that two-thirds of the Deputies vote in favor of the impeachment of the President and two-thirds of the Senators vote for conviction in the subsequent trial for removal from office. State governors and municipal mayors can also be impeached, tried and removed by the respective legislative bodies. Upon conviction, the officeholder has their political rights revoked for eight years—which bars them from running for any office during that time.
Fernando Collor de Mello, the 32nd President of Brazil, resigned in 1992 amidst impeachment proceedings. Despite his resignation, the Senate nonetheless voted to convict him and bar him from holding any office for eight years, due to evidence of bribery and misappropriation.
In 2016, the Chamber of Deputies initiated an impeachment case against President Dilma Rousseff on allegations of budgetary mismanagement. Following her impeachment by the Chamber of Deputies and her conviction by trial in the Senate, she was definitively replaced by Vice President Michel Temer, who had served as acting president while Rousseff's case was pending in the Senate.
The president of Bulgaria can be removed only for high treason or violation of the constitution. The process is started by a two-thirds majority vote of the Parliament to impeach the president, whereupon the Constitutional Court decides whether the President is guilty of the crime of which he is charged. If he is found guilty, he is removed from power. No Bulgarian President has ever been impeached. The same procedure can be used to remove the vice president of Bulgaria, which has also never happened.
The process of impeaching the president of Croatia can be initiated by a two-thirds majority vote in favor in the Sabor and is thereafter referred to the Constitutional Court, which must accept such a proposal with a two-thirds majority vote in favor in order for the president to be removed from office. This has never occurred in the history of the Republic of Croatia. In case of a successful impeachment motion a president's constitutional term of five years would be terminated and an election called within 60 days of the vacancy occurring. During the period of vacancy the presidential powers and duties would be carried out by the speaker of the Croatian Parliament in his/her capacity as Acting President of the Republic.
In 2013, the constitution was changed. Since 2013, the process can be started by at least three-fifths of present senators, and must be approved by at least
three-fifths of all members of Parliament. Also, the President can be impeached for high treason (newly defined in the Constitution) or any serious infringement of the Constitution.
The process starts in the Senate of the Czech Republic which has the right to only impeach the president, and the Senate passes the case to the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic, which has to decide the verdict against the president. If the Court finds the President guilty, then the President is removed from office and is permanently barred from being elected President of the Czech Republic again.
No Czech president has ever been impeached, though members of the Senate sought to impeach President Vaclav Klaus in 2013. This case was dismissed by the court, which reasoned that his mandate had expired.
In France the comparable procedure is called "destitution". The president of France can be impeached by the French Parliament for willfully violating the Constitution or the national laws. The process of impeachment is written in the 68th article of the French Constitution. A group of senators or a group of members of the National Assembly can begin the process. Then, both the National Assembly and the Senate must acknowledge the impeachment. After the upper and lower houses' agreement, they unite to form the High Court. Finally, the High Court must decide to declare the impeachment of the president of France—or not.
The federal president of Germany can be impeached both by the Bundestag and by the Bundesrat for willfully violating federal law. Once the Bundestag or the Bundesrat impeaches the president, the Federal Constitutional Court decides whether the President is guilty as charged and, if this is the case, whether to remove him or her from office. The Federal Constitutional Court also has the power to remove federal judges from office for willfully violating core principles of the federal constitution or a state constitution. The impeachment procedure is regulated in Article 61 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany.
There is no formal impeachment process for the chancellor of Germany, however the Bundestag can replace the chancellor at any time by voting for a new chancellor (constructive vote of no confidence, Article 67 of the Basic Law).
There has never been an impeachment against the President so far. Constructive votes of no confidence against the chancellor occurred in 1972 and 1982, with only the second one being successful.
The chief executive of Hong Kong can be impeached by the Legislative Council. A motion for investigation, initiated jointly by at least one-fourth of all the legislators charging the Chief Executive with "serious breach of law or dereliction of duty" and refusing to resign, shall first be passed by the Council. An independent investigation committee, chaired by the chief justice of the Court of Final Appeal, will then carry out the investigation and report back to the Council. If the Council find the evidence sufficient to substantiate the charges, it may pass a motion of impeachment by a two-thirds majority.
However, the Legislative Council does not have the power to actually remove the chief executive from office, as the chief executive is appointed by the Central People's Government (State Council of China). The Council can only report the result to the Central People's Government for its decision.
Article 13 of Hungary's Fundamental Law (constitution) provides for the process of impeaching and removing the president. The president enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution while in office, but may be charged with crimes committed during his term afterwards. Should the president violate the constitution while discharging his duties or commit a willful criminal offense, he may be removed from office. Removal proceedings may be proposed by the concurring recommendation of one-fifth of the 199 members of the country's unicameral Parliament. Parliament votes on the proposal by secret ballot, and if two thirds of all representatives agree, the president is impeached. Once impeached, the president's powers are suspended, and the Constitutional Court decides whether or not the President should be removed from office.
The Constitution of Iceland does not provide a process to impeach the president of Iceland. The president can be removed from office by a three-fourths majority in Parliament and a subsequent majority in a referendum. Cabinet ministers can be impeached by Parliament and their cases are adjudicated by the National Court. Since cabinet ministers can be relieved of duty only by the president, a guilty verdict can result in only a fine or imprisonment.
The president and judges, including the chief justice of the supreme court and high courts, can be impeached by the parliament before the expiry of the term for violation of the Constitution. Other than impeachment, no other penalty can be given to a president in position for the violation of the Constitution under of the constitution. However a president after his/her term/removal can be punished for his already proven unlawful activity under disrespecting the constitution, etc. No president has faced impeachment proceedings. Hence, the provisions for impeachment have never been tested. The sitting president cannot be charged and needs to step down in order for that to happen.
The Assembly of Experts can impeach the supreme leader of Iran and appoint a new one.
The president of Iran can be impeached jointly by the members of the Assembly (Majlis) and the supreme leader. A new presidential election is then triggered. Abolhassan Banisadr, Iran's first president, was impeached in June 1981 and removed from the office. Mohammad-Ali Rajai was elected as the new president.
Cabinet ministers can be impeached by the members of the Assembly. Presidential appointment of a new minister is subject to a parliamentary vote of confidence. Impeachment of ministers has been a fairly commonly used tactic in the power struggle between the president and the assembly during the last several governments.
In the Republic of Ireland formal impeachment applies only to the Irish president. Article 12 of the Irish Constitution provides that, unless judged to be "permanently incapacitated" by the Supreme Court, the president can be removed from office only by the houses of the Oireachtas (parliament) and only for the commission of "stated misbehaviour". Either house of the Oireachtas may impeach the president, but only by a resolution approved by a majority of at least two thirds of its total number of members; and a house may not consider a proposal for impeachment unless requested to do so by at least thirty of its number.
Where one house impeaches the president, the remaining house either investigates the charge or commissions another body or committee to do so. The investigating house can remove the president if it decides, by at least a two-thirds majority of its members, both that the president is guilty of the charge and that the charge is sufficiently serious as to warrant the president's removal. To date no impeachment of an Irish president has ever taken place. The president holds a largely ceremonial office, the dignity of which is considered important, so it is likely that a president would resign from office long before undergoing formal conviction or impeachment.
In Italy, according to Article 90 of the Constitution, the President of the Republic can be impeached through a majority vote of the Parliament in joint session for high treason and for attempting to overthrow the Constitution. If impeached, the president of the Republic is then tried by the Constitutional Court integrated with sixteen citizens older than forty chosen by lot from a list compiled by the Parliament every nine years.
Italian press and political forces made use of the term "impeachment" for the attempt by some members of parliamentary opposition to initiate the procedure provided for in Article 90 against Presidents Francesco Cossiga (1991), Giorgio Napolitano (2014) and Sergio Mattarella (2018).
Members of the Liechtenstein Government can be impeached before the State Court for breaches of the Constitution or of other laws. As a hereditary monarchy the Sovereign Prince can not be impeached as he "is not subject to the jurisdiction of the courts and does not have legal responsibility". The same is true of any member of the Princely House who exercises the function of head of state should the Prince be temporarily prevented or in preparation for the Succession.
In the Republic of Lithuania, the president may be impeached by a three-fifths majority in the Seimas. President Rolandas Paksas was removed from office by impeachment on 6 April 2004 after the Constitutional Court of Lithuania found him guilty of having violated his oath and the constitution. He was the first European head of state to have been impeached.
Members of government, representatives of the national assembly (Stortinget) and Supreme Court judges can be impeached for criminal offenses tied to their duties and committed in office, according to the Constitution of 1814, §§ 86 and 87. The procedural rules were modeled after the U.S. rules and are quite similar to them. Impeachment has been used eight times since 1814, last in 1927. Many argue that impeachment has fallen into desuetude. In cases of impeachment, an appointed court (Riksrett) takes effect.
The country's ruling coalition said on 7 August 2008, that it would seek the impeachment of President Pervez Musharraf, alleging the U.S.-backed former general had "eroded the trust of the nation" and increasing pressure on him to resign. He resigned on 18 August 2008. Another kind of impeachment in Pakistan is known as the vote of less-confidence or vote of mis-understanding and has been practiced by provincial assemblies to weaken the national assembly.
Impeaching a president requires a two-thirds majority support of lawmakers in a joint session of both houses of Parliament.
Impeachment in the Philippines follows procedures similar to the United States. Under Sections2 and 3, Article XI, Constitution of the Philippines, the House of Representatives of the Philippines has the exclusive power to initiate all cases of impeachment against the president, vice president, members of the Supreme Court, members of the Constitutional Commissions (Commission on Elections, Civil Service Commission and the Commission on Audit), and the ombudsman. When a third of its membership has endorsed the impeachment articles, it is then transmitted to the Senate of the Philippines which tries and decide, as impeachment tribunal, the impeachment case.
A main difference from U.S. proceedings however is that only one third of House members are required to approve the motion to impeach the president (as opposed to a simple majority of those present and voting in their U.S. counterpart). In the Senate, selected members of the House of Representatives act as the prosecutors and the senators act as judges with the Senate president presiding over the proceedings (the chief justice jointly presides with the Senate president if the president is on trial). Like the United States, to convict the official in question requires that a minimum of two thirds (i.e. 16 of 24 members) of all the members of the Senate vote in favor of conviction. If an impeachment attempt is unsuccessful or the official is acquitted, no new cases can be filed against that impeachable official for at least one full year.
The 1987 Philippine Constitution says the grounds for impeachment include culpable violation of the Constitution, bribery, graft and corruption, and betrayal of public trust. These offenses are considered "high crimes and misdemeanors" under the Philippine Constitution.
The president, vice president, Supreme Court justices, and members of the Constitutional Commission and ombudsman are all considered impeachable officials under the Constitution.
President Joseph Estrada was the first official impeached by the House in 2000, but the trial ended prematurely due to outrage over a vote to open an envelope where that motion was narrowly defeated by his allies. Estrada was deposed days later during the 2001 EDSA Revolution.
In 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, impeachment complaints were filed against President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, but none of the cases reached the required endorsement of of the members for transmittal to, and trial by, the Senate.
In March 2011, the House of Representatives impeached Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez, becoming the second person to be impeached. In April, Gutierrez resigned prior to the Senate's convening as an impeachment court.
In December 2011, in what was described as "blitzkrieg fashion", 188 of the 285 members of the House of Representatives voted to transmit the 56-page Articles of Impeachment against Supreme Court chief justice Renato Corona.
To date, three officials had been successfully impeached by the House of Representatives, and two were not convicted. The latter, Chief Justice Renato C. Corona, was convicted on 29 May 2012, by the Senate under Article II of the Articles of Impeachment (for betraying public trust), with 20–3 votes from the Senator Judges.
In Polish law there is no impeachment procedure defined, as it is present in the other countries. Infringements of the law can be investigated only by special Parliament's Committee or (if accusations involve people holding the highest offices of state) by the State Tribunal. The State Tribunal is empowered to rule for the removal of individuals from public office but it is not a common practice.
The president can be impeached by Parliament and is then suspended. A referendum then follows to determine whether the suspended President should be removed from office. President Traian Băsescu was impeached twice by the Parliament: in 2007 and more recently in July 2012. A referendum was held on 19 May 2007 and a large majority of the electorate voted against removing the president from office. For the most recent suspension a referendum was held on July 29, 2012; the results were heavily against the president, but the referendum was invalidated due to low turnout.
The president of Russia can be impeached if both the State Duma (which initiates the impeachment process through the formation of a special investigation committee) and the Federation Council of Russia vote by a two-thirds majority in favor of impeachment and, additionally, the Supreme Court finds the president guilty of treason or a similarly heavy crime against the nation and the Constitutional Court confirms that the constitutional procedure of the impeachment process was correctly observed.
In 1993, during the Russian constitutional crisis, the Supreme Soviet formally impeached then-President Boris Yeltsin, who previously dissolved the parliament by his decree. Yeltsin and most of his ministers ignored the vote. After several days of violence, leaders of the Supreme Soviet surrendered and were arrested, and their decisions were annulled by Yeltsin.
In 1995–1999, the State Duma made several attempts to impeach Yeltsin, but they never had a sufficient number of votes for the process to reach the Federation Council.
Previously, in 1964, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was relieved from his duties by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, a procedure similar to impeachment.
The Constitution of Singapore allows the impeachment of a sitting president on charges of treason, violation of the Constitution, corruption, or attempting to mislead the Presidential Elections Committee for the purpose of demonstrating eligibility to be elected as President. The prime minister or at least one-quarter of all members of Parliament (MPs) can pass an impeachment motion, which can succeed only if at least half of all MPs (excluding nominated members) vote in favor, whereupon the chief justice of the Supreme Court will appoint a tribunal to investigate allegations against the president. If the tribunal finds the president guilty, or otherwise declares that the president is "permanently incapable of discharging the functions of his office by reason of mental or physical infirmity", Parliament will hold a vote on a resolution to remove the president from office, which requires a three-quarters majority to succeed. No president has ever been removed from office in this fashion.
According to the Article 65 Clause 1 of Constitution of South Korea, if President, Prime Minister, or other state council members including Supreme Court and Constitutional court members, violate the Constitution or other laws of official duty, the National Assembly can impeach them. Clause2 states the impeachment bill may be proposed by one third or more of the total members of the National Assembly, and shall require majority voting and approved by two thirds or more of the total members of the National Assembly. This article also states that any person against whom a motion for impeachment has been passed shall be suspended from exercising his power until the impeachment has been adjudicated and shall not extend further than removal from public office. Provided, that it shall not exempt the person impeached from civil or criminal liability.
Two presidents have been impeached since the foundation of the Sixth Republic of Korea and adoption of the new Constitution of South Korea in 1987. Roh Moo-hyun in 2004 was impeached by the National Assembly but was overturned by the Constitutional Court. Park Geun-hye in 2016 was impeached by the National Assembly, and the impeachment was confirmed by the Constitutional Court on March 10, 2017.
In Taiwan, according to the Additional Articles of the Constitution of the Republic of China, impeachment of the president or the vice president by the Legislative Yuan shall be initiated upon the proposal of more than one-half of the total members of the Legislative Yuan and passed by more than two-thirds of the total members of the Legislative Yuan, whereupon it shall be presented to the grand justices of the Judicial Yuan for adjudication.
In Turkey, according to the Constitution, the Grand National Assembly may initiate an investigation of the president, the vice president or any member of the Cabinet upon the proposal of simple majority of its total members, and within a period less than a month, the approval of three-fifths of the total members. The investigation would be carried out by a commission of fifteen members of the Assembly, each nominated by the political parties in proportion to their representation therein. The Commission would submit its report indicating the outcome of the investigation to the speaker within two months. If the investigation is not completed within this period, the Commission's time may be renewed for another month. Within ten days of its submission to the speaker, the report would be distributed to all members of the Assembly, and ten days after its distribution, the report would be discussed on the floor. Upon the approval of two thirds of the total number of the Assembly by secret vote, the person or persons, about whom the investigation was conducted, may be tried before the Constitutional Court. The trial would be finalized within three months, and if not, a one-time additional period of three months shall be granted.
The president, about whom an investigation has been initiated, may not call for an election. The president, who is convicted by the Court, would be removed from office.
The provision of this article shall also apply to the offenses for which the president allegedly worked during his term of office.
During the crisis which started in November 2013, the increasing political stress of the face-down between the protestors occupying Independence Square in Kiev and the State Security forces under the control of President Yanukovych led to deadly armed force being used on the protestors. Following the negotiated return of Kiev's City Hall on 16 February 2014, occupied by the protesters since November 2013, the security forces thought they could also retake "Maidan", Independence Square. The ensuing fighting from 17 through 21 February 2014 resulted in a considerable number of deaths and a more generalised alienation of the population, and the withdrawal of President Yanukovych to his support area in the East of Ukraine.
In the wake of the president's departure, Parliament convened on 22 February; it reinstated the 2004 Constitution, which reduced presidential authority, and voted impeachment of President Yanukovych as "de facto" recognition of his departure from office as President of an integrated Ukraine. The president riposted that Parliament's acts were illegal as they could pass into law only by presidential signature.
In the United Kingdom, in principle anybody may be prosecuted and tried by the two Houses of Parliament for any crime. The first recorded impeachment is that of William Latimer, 4th Baron Latimer during the Good Parliament of 1376. The last was that of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville in 1806. Over the centuries, the procedure has been supplemented by other forms of oversight including select committees, confidence motions, and judicial review, while the privilege of peers to trial only in the House of Lords was abolished in 1948, and thus impeachment, which has not kept up with modern norms of democracy or procedural fairness, is generally considered obsolete.
Article One of the United States Constitution gives the House of Representatives the sole power of impeachment and the Senate the sole power to try impeachments of officers of the U.S. federal government. (Various state constitutions include similar measures, allowing the state legislature to impeach the governor or other officials of the state government.) In the United States, impeachment is only the first of two stages, and conviction during the second stage requires "the concurrence of two thirds of the members present". Impeachment does not necessarily result in removal from office; it is only a legal statement of charges, parallel to an indictment in criminal law. An official who is impeached faces a second legislative vote (whether by the same body or another), which determines conviction, or failure to convict, on the charges embodied by the impeachment. Most constitutions require a supermajority to convict. Even if the subject of the charge is criminal action, it does not constitute a criminal trial; the only question under consideration is the removal of the individual from office, and the possibilities of a subsequent vote preventing the removed official from ever again holding political office in the jurisdiction where they were removed.
The article on Impeachment in the United States discusses the following topics:
Three United States presidents have been impeached by the House of Representatives: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Bill Clinton in 1998, and Donald Trump in 2019. All three were acquitted and not removed from office by the Senate. Clinton's trial in the Senate began on 7 January 1999 and ended on February 12, 1999. Trump's trial in the Senate began on 16 January 2020 and ended on February 5, 2020. An impeachment process was also commenced against Richard Nixon, but he resigned in 1974 to avoid likely impeachment.
Additionally, the House has impeached 15 federal judges, one Cabinet secretary, and one senator. Eight officials have been convicted and removed from office, all of whom were judges.
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Ibizan Hound
The Ibizan Hound (, ) is a lean, agile dog of the hound family. There are two hair types of the breed: smooth and wire. The more commonly seen type is the smooth. Some consider there to be a third type, long, but the longhair is most likely a variation of the wire.
The Ibizan Hound is an elegant and agile breed, with an athletic and attractive outline and a ground-covering springy trot. Though graceful in appearance, it has good bone girth and is a rugged/hardy breed. Its large upright ears - a hallmark of the breed - are broad at the base and frame a long and elegant headpiece. The neck is long and lean. It has a unique front assembly with well laid-back shoulders and relatively straight upper arm. Coming in both smooth and wire-coated varieties, their coat is a combination of red and white with the nose, ears, eye rims, and pads of feet being a light tan color. Its eyes are a striking amber color and have an alert and intelligent expression. The Ibizan may range in height, depending on which Standard you follow, from and weigh from , males being larger than females.
Ibizan Hounds are intelligent, active, and engaging by nature. They rank 53rd in Stanley Coren's The Intelligence of Dogs, being of average working/obedience intelligence, but many Ibizan owners will enjoy recounting a multitude of examples of their problem-solving abilities. They are true "clowns" of the dog world, delighting in entertaining their people with their antics. Though somewhat independent and stubborn at times, they do take well to training if positive methods are used, but will balk at punitive training methods. They are generally quiet, but will alarm bark if necessary, so they make good watch dogs. They are sensitive hounds, and very good around children and other dogs alike. They generally make good house dogs, but are active and athletic, therefore need a lot of daily exercise. They do not make good kennel dogs. Ibizan hounds are sweet, but they are very stubborn and independent.
Ibizan Hounds are "escapologists": they are able to jump incredible heights from a standstill, so they need very tall fences. They also have been known to climb, and many can escape from crates, open baby gates and even locks. They have a strong prey drive, therefore they cannot be trusted off leash unless in a safely enclosed area. Once off the leash, they might not come back for a long time. A hound that knows where its home is and the surrounding area will usually return unscathed.
The Ibizan Hound is typical of the Hound Group in that it rarely suffers from hereditary illness. Minor health concerns for the breed include seizures and allergies; very rarely, one will see axonal dystrophy, cataract, retinal dysplasia and deafness in the breed. Ibizan Hound owners should have their dogs' eyes tested by a veterinarian before breeding. CERF and BAER testing is recommended for the breed. Ibizan Hounds are sensitive to barbiturate anesthesia, and typically live between 12 and 14 years.
This breed originates in the island of Eivissa and has been traditionally used in the Catalan-speaking areas of Spain, and France where it was known under the name of "le charnigue", to hunt rabbits and other small game. The Ibizan Hound is a fast dog that can hunt on all types of terrain, working by scent, sound and sight. Hunters run these dogs in mostly female packs, with perhaps a male or two, as the female is considered the better hunter.
Traditionally a farmer may have one dog and a very well off farmer two dogs to catch rabbits for food. However, in the last twenty years it is seen as a sport where between five and fifteen dogs can be seen in the chase of one rabbit.
The Ibizan Hound authority Miquel Rosselló has provided a detailed description of a working trial which characterises their typical hunting technique and action, strikingly illustrated with action photos by Charles Camberoque which demonstrate hunt behaviour and typical hunt terrain.
While local hunters will at times use one dog or a brace, and frequently packs of six to eight or as many as fifteen, the working trial requires an evaluation of one or two braces. A brace is called a "colla". The couples should be tested on at least two to five rabbits (not hares), without the use of any other hunting aid. An inspection and evaluation of the exterior, fitness, character and obedience of the dogs is recommended prior to the hunt.
The trial is qualified as having 5 parts. The dogs should show: (1) careful tracking and scenting of the rabbit, without being distracted in the least, 0-30 points; (2) correct signalling of the game, patient stand, strong jump into the air, obedience 0-10 points; (3) chase, giving tongue, speed, sureness, anticipation 0-30 points; (4) putting the game to cover at close quarters, listening, waiting, obedience, correct attack 0-10 point; and (5) good catch, or correct indication of the game's location, retrieval, obedience 0-20 points.
Individual dogs are expected to show a great degree of discipline, obedience and co-operation. They should be extremely agile, have good speed and a powerful vertical jump from a stationary position in rough and often heavily covered ground. They should have excellent scent-tracking abilities, give tongue at the right time when approaching the game closely, and otherwise be silent so that they can locate the game by sound.
The Ibizan Hound is similar in function and type to several breeds, such as the Pharaoh Hound, the Cirneco dell'Etna, the Portuguese Podengo, and the Podenco Canario. The Ibizan Hound is the largest of these breeds, classified by the Fédération Cynologique Internationale as primitive types.
It is believed the Ibizan Hound evolves from the "tesem", the ancient Egyptian hunting dog. Representations of this dog on the walls of ancient tombs show a striking similarity to the modern Ibizan Hound. These dogs would have been brought to the island of Eivissa by the Phoenicians, who founded settlements there as early as the 8th century BC. A recent DNA analysis found that the breed was formed recently from other breeds.
A more recent article
argues that continued trait selective breeding may be behind this lack of support.
In the United States, the Ibizan Hound is frequently competed in lure coursing through the AKC and ASFA, and also competes in LGRA straight racing and NOTRA oval track racing. Some parts of the country also use them for coursing live prey, generally jackrabbits.
The Ibizan Hound breed is recognized by the Fédération Cynologique Internationale, Continental Kennel Club, American Kennel Club, United Kennel Club, Kennel Club of Great Britain, Canadian Kennel Club, National Kennel Club, New Zealand Kennel Club, Australian National Kennel Council, America's Pet Registry, and American Canine Registry. It was fully recognized by the American Kennel Club in 1979.
According to journalist Norman Lewis, when an owner no longer wants to own one of these dogs (having too much of an appetite, for instance), it is considered very bad luck to kill the dog. Instead, they release the dog on the other side of the island, so that someone else might 'adopt' the animal.
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Into the Woods
Into the Woods is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine. The musical intertwines the plots of several Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault fairy tales, exploring the consequences of the characters' wishes and quests. The main characters are taken from "Little Red Riding Hood", "Jack and the Beanstalk", "Rapunzel", and "Cinderella", as well as several others. The musical is tied together by a story involving a childless baker and his wife and their quest to begin a family (the original beginning of The Grimm Brothers' "Rapunzel"), their interaction with a witch who has placed a curse on them, and their interaction with other storybook characters during their journey.
The musical debuted in San Diego at the Old Globe Theatre in 1986 and premiered on Broadway on November 5, 1987, where it won several Tony Awards, including Best Score, Best Book, and Best Actress in a Musical (Joanna Gleason), in a year dominated by "The Phantom of the Opera" (1988). The musical has since been produced many times, with a 1988 US national tour, a 1990 West End production, a 1997 tenth anniversary concert, a 2002 Broadway revival, a 2010 London revival, and in 2012 as part of New York City's outdoor Shakespeare in the Park series.
A Disney film adaptation directed by Rob Marshall and starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Tracey Ullman, Christine Baranski and Johnny Depp was released in 2014. The film grossed over $213 million worldwide, and received three nominations each for Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards.
A Narrator introduces four characters: Cinderella, who wishes to attend the King's festival; Jack who wishes his cow, Milky White, would give milk; a Baker; and his Wife, both of whom wish to have a child. Cinderella's step-family mocks her wish while Jack's mother condemns Jack for never listening and how she wishes to be wealthy. Little Red Ridinghood appears at the bakery wishing for bread and sweets to bring to her grandmother's house. They give her a loaf of bread and allow her to take some sweets; she ends up taking more than they offered. Cinderella's stepmother puts a pot of lentils into the fireplace for Cinderella to clean up, promising that only then, they will let her go to the festival. She calls birds from the skies to help her clean up which they do. Meanwhile, an ugly old witch appears at the bakery revealing to the baker and his wife that they are infertile because of a spell she placed on the baker's father many years ago. She tells them that when the baker's mother was pregnant, she craved vegetables so his father stole them from witch's garden. He stole supposedly normal beans which turned out to be magic. Because she had lost the beans, the witch's mother turned her ugly and in return, the witch stole their daughter, Rapunzel, and placed the spell. She explains that the only way to lift the spell is to find four ingredients in the woods: a cow as white as milk, a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn, and a slipper as pure as gold and bring them to her in three days before midnight. She hurries off and Cinderella's step-family prepares to leave for the festival. Cinderella asks if she can go, but her stepmother points out that, while she picked up the lentils, she is dirty from the ashes. They leave and even Cinderella's father does not acknowledge her existence. All begin the journey into the woods: Jack to sell his beloved cow; Cinderella to her mother's grave; Little Red to her grandmother's house; and the Baker, refusing his Wife's help, to find the ingredients ("Prologue").
Cinderella receives a gown and golden slippers from her mother's spirit after wishing she could live a life in the palace ("Cinderella at the Grave"). A Mysterious Man mocks Jack for valuing his cow more than a "sack of beans". Little Red meets a hungry Wolf who persuades her to take a longer path and admire the beauty, with his own thoughts of eating both her and her grandmother ("Hello Little Girl"). The Baker, secretly followed by his Wife, meets Jack. They convince Jack that the beans found in the Baker's father's jacket are magic, trade them for the cow and Jack bids Milky White a tearful farewell ("I Guess This Is Goodbye"). The Baker feels guilty about their deceit, but his wife reassures him ("Maybe They're Magic").
The Witch has raised Rapunzel in a tall tower accessible only by climbing Rapunzel's long, golden hair ("Our Little World"); a Prince spies Rapunzel and plans to meet her. The Baker, in pursuit of the red cape, slays the Wolf and rescues Little Red and her grandmother. In return, Little Red gives him her cape, and reflects on her experiences ("I Know Things Now"). Jack's Mother tosses his beans aside, which grow into an enormous stalk, and sends him to bed without food. Cinderella flees the Festival, pursued by another Prince, and the Baker's Wife hides her; asked about the ball, Cinderella is unimpressed ("A Very Nice Prince"). Spotting Cinderella's gold slippers, the Baker's Wife chases her and loses Milky White. The characters recite morals as the day ends ("First Midnight"). Jack describes his adventure climbing the beanstalk ("Giants in the Sky"). He gives the Baker gold stolen from the giants to buy back his cow, and returns up the beanstalk to find more; the Mysterious Man steals the money. Cinderella's Prince and Rapunzel's Prince, who are brothers, compare their unobtainable amours ("Agony"). The Baker's Wife overhears their talk of a girl with golden hair. She fools Rapunzel and takes a piece of her hair. The Mysterious Man returns Milky White to the Baker.
The Baker's Wife again fails to seize Cinderella's slippers. The Baker admits they must work together ("It Takes Two"). Jack arrives with a hen that lays golden eggs, but Milky White keels over dead as midnight chimes ("Second Midnight"). The Witch discovers the Prince's visits and demands Rapunzel stay sheltered from the world ("Stay with Me"). She refuses, and the Witch cuts off Rapunzel's hair and banishes her. The Mysterious Man gives the Baker money for another cow. Jack meets Little Red, now sporting a wolf skin cape and knife. She goads him into returning to the Giant's home to retrieve the Giant's harp.
Cinderella, torn between staying with her Prince or escaping, leaves him a slipper as a clue ("On the Steps of the Palace"), and trades shoes with the Baker's Wife. The Baker arrives with another cow; they now have all four items. A great crash is heard, and Jack's mother reports a dead Giant in her backyard, which no one seems to care about. Jack returns with a magic harp. The Witch discovers the new cow is useless, and resurrects Milky White, who is fed the ingredients but fails to give milk. The Witch explains Rapunzel's hair will not work, and the Mysterious Man offers corn silk instead; Milky White produces the potion. The Witch reveals the Mysterious Man is the Baker's father, and she drinks – he falls dead, the curse is broken, and the Witch regains her youth and beauty.
Cinderella's Prince seeks the girl who fits the slipper; the desperate stepsisters mutilate their feet ("Careful My Toe"). Cinderella succeeds and becomes his bride. Rapunzel bears twins and is found by her Prince. The Witch finds her, and attempts to claim her back, but the Witch's powers are gone. At Cinderella's wedding, her stepsisters are blinded by birds, and the Baker's Wife, very pregnant, thanks Cinderella for her help. Congratulating themselves on living happily ("Ever After"), the characters fail to notice another beanstalk growing.
The Narrator continues, "Once Upon a Time... Later." Everyone still has wishes: The Baker and his Wife face new frustrations with their infant son; newly rich Jack misses the kingdom in the sky; Cinderella is bored with life in the palace ("So Happy"), but are still relatively content. With a tremendous crash, a Giant's foot destroys the Witch's garden, and damages the Baker's home. The Baker travels to the palace, but his warning is ignored by the Prince's Steward, and by Jack's Mother. Returning home, he finds Little Red on her way to Granny's; he and his Wife escort her. Jack decides to slay the Giant and Cinderella investigates her mother's disturbed grave. Everyone returns to the woods, but now "the skies are strange, the winds are strong" ("Into the Woods" Reprise). Rapunzel, driven mad, also flees to the woods. Her Prince follows and meets his brother; they confess their lust for two new women, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty ("Agony" Reprise).
The Baker, his Wife, and Little Red find Cinderella's family and the Steward, who reveal the castle was set upon by the Giant. The Witch brings news that the Giant destroyed the village and the Baker's house. The Giantess – widow of the Giant Jack killed – appears, seeking revenge. As a sacrifice, the group offer up the Narrator, who is killed. Jack's mother defends her son, angering the Giantess, and the Steward silences Jack's mother, inadvertently killing her. As the Giantess leaves in search of Jack, Rapunzel is trampled ("Witch's Lament"). The Royal Family flee despite the Baker's pleas to stay and fight. The Witch vows to find Jack and give him to the Giant, and the Baker and his Wife split up to find him first. Cinderella's Prince seduces the Baker's Wife ("Any Moment"). The Baker finds and convinces Cinderella to join their group. The Baker's Wife reflects on her adventure and tryst with the Prince ("Moments in the Woods"), but stumbles into the path of the Giant and is killed.
The Baker, Little Red, and Cinderella await the return of the Baker's Wife when the Witch arrives with Jack, found weeping over the Baker's Wife's body. The Baker turns against Jack, and the two, along with Cinderella and Little Red start to blame each other before the four turn on the Witch ("Your Fault"). Chastising their inability to accept the consequences of their own actions, the Witch is struck by another curse and vanishes ("Last Midnight"). Grief-stricken, the Baker flees, but is convinced by his father's un-dead spirit to face his responsibilities ("No More"). He returns and lays out a plan to kill the Giantess. Cinderella stays behind with the Baker's child and confronts her Prince over his infidelity; he explains his feelings of unfulfillment and that he wasn't raised to be sincere, and she asks him to leave.
Little Red discovers her grandmother has been killed by the Giantess, as the Baker tells Jack that his mother is dead. Jack vows to kill the Steward but the Baker dissuades him, while Cinderella comforts Little Red. The Baker and Cinderella explain that choices have consequences, and everyone is connected ("No One Is Alone"). The four together slay the Giant, and the other characters – including the Royal Family, who have starved to death, and the Princes with their new paramours (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) – return to share one last set of morals. The survivors band together, and the spirit of the Baker's Wife comforts her mourning husband, encouraging him to tell their child their story. The Baker begins to tell his son the tale, while the Witch offers a final lesson: "Careful the things you say, Children Will Listen" ("Finale").
"Into the Woods" premiered at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California, on December 4, 1986, and ran for 50 performances, under the direction of James Lapine. Many of the performers from that production appeared in the Broadway cast, but John Cunningham, who played the Narrator, Wolf and Steward, and George Coe, as the Mysterious Man and Cinderella's Father, were replaced by Tom Aldredge, among others. Kenneth Marshall as Cinderella's Prince was replaced by Robert Westenberg (who also played the Wolf), LuAnne Ponce, who played Little Red Ridinghood, was replaced by Danielle Ferland, Ellen Foley, the Witch, was replaced by Bernadette Peters. Kay McClelland, who played both Rapunzel and the Stepsister Florinda, stayed with the cast but only played Florinda, with Rapunzel being played by Pamela Winslow.
The show evolved, and the most notable change was the addition of the song "No One Is Alone" in the middle of the run.
"Into The Woods" opened on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre on November 5, 1987, and closed on September 3, 1989, after 765 performances. It starred Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, Chip Zien, Kim Crosby, Ben Wright, Danielle Ferland, Chuck Wagner, Merle Louise, Tom Aldredge, and Robert Westenberg. The musical was directed by James Lapine, with musical staging by Lar Lubovitch, settings by Tony Straiges, lighting by Richard Nelson, costumes by Ann Hould-Ward (based on original concepts by Patricia Zipprodt and Ann Hould-Ward), and makeup by Jeff Raum. The original production won the 1988 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Drama Desk Award for Best Musical, and the original cast recording won a Grammy Award. The show was nominated for ten Tony Awards, and won three: Best Score (Stephen Sondheim), Best Book (James Lapine) and Best Actress in a Musical (Joanna Gleason).
Peters left the show after almost five months due to a prior commitment to film the movie "Slaves of New York". The Witch was then played by: Betsy Joslyn (from March 30, 1988); Phylicia Rashad (from April 14, 1988); Betsy Joslyn (from July 5, 1988); Nancy Dussault (from December 13, 1988); and Ellen Foley (from August 1, 1989, until the closing).
Other cast replacements included Dick Cavett as the Narrator (as of July 19, 1988) (for a temporary engagement after which Tom Aldredge returned), Edmund Lyndeck as the Mysterious Man, Patricia Ben Peterson as Cinderella, LuAnne Ponce returning to the role of Little Red Ridinghood, Jeff Blumenkrantz as Jack, Marin Mazzie as Rapunzel (as of March 7, 1989), Dean Butler as Rapunzel's Prince and Kay McClelland, Lauren Mitchell, Cynthia Sikes and Mary Gordon Murray as the Baker's Wife.
In 1989, from May 23 to May 25 the full original cast (with the exception of Cindy Robinson as Snow White instead of Jean Kelly) reunited for three performances to tape the musical in its entirety for the Season 10 premiere episode of PBS’s "American Playhouse", which first aired on March 15, 1991. The show was filmed professionally with seven cameras on the set of the Martin Beck Theater in front of an audience with certain elements changed from its standard production only slightly for the recording in order to better fit the screen rather than the stage such as the lighting, minor costume differences, and others. There were also pick up shots not filmed in front of an audience for various purposes. This video has since been released on Tape and DVD and on occasion, remastered and re-released.
Tenth Anniversary benefit performances were held on November 9, 1997, at The Broadway Theatre (New York), with most of the original cast. Original cast understudies Chuck Wagner and Jeff Blumenkrantz played Cinderella's Prince/Wolf and The Steward in place of Robert Westenberg and Philip Hoffmann, while Jonathan Dokuchitz (who joined the Broadway production as an understudy in 1989) played Rapunzel's Prince in place of Wagner. This concert featured the duet "Our Little World," written for the first London production of the show.
On November 9, 2014, most of the original cast reunited for two reunion concerts and discussion in Costa Mesa, California. Mo Rocca hosted the reunion and interviewed Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine as well as each cast member. Appearing were Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, Chip Zien, Danielle Ferland, Ben Wright and real life husband and wife, Robert Westenberg and Kim Crosby. The same group presented this discussion/concert on June 21, 2015, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York City.
A United States tour began on November 22, 1988, with Cleo Laine playing the Witch, replaced by Betsy Joslyn in May 1989. Rex Robbins played the Narrator and Mysterious Man, Charlotte Rae played Jack's Mother, and the Princes were played by Chuck Wagner and Douglas Sills. The set was almost completely reconstructed, and there were certain changes to the script, changing certain story elements. The 10-month tour played cities around the country, such as Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. The tour ran at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts from June 1989 to July 16, 1989, with the reviewer for "The Washington Post" writing: "his lovely score -- poised between melody and dissonance -- is the perfect measure of our tenuous condition. The songs invariably follow the characters' thinking patterns, as they weigh their options and digest their experience. Needless to say, that doesn't make for traditional show-stoppers. But it does make for vivacity of another kind. And Sondheim's lyrics...are brilliant... I think you'll find these cast members alert and engaging."
The original West End production opened on September 25, 1990 at the Phoenix Theatre and closed on February 23, 1991 after 197 performances. It was directed by Richard Jones, and produced by David Mirvish, with set design by Richard Hudson, choreography by Anthony Van Laast, costumes by Sue Blane and orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick. The cast featured Julia McKenzie as the Witch, Ian Bartholomew as the Baker, Imelda Staunton as the Baker's Wife and Clive Carter as the Wolf/Cinderella's Prince. The show received seven Olivier Award nominations in 1991, winning for Best Actress in a Musical (Staunton) and Best Director of a Musical (Jones).
The song "Our Little World" was added. This song was a duet sung between the Witch and Rapunzel giving further insight into the care the Witch has for her self-proclaimed daughter and the desire Rapunzel has to see the world outside of her tower. The overall feel of the show was a lot darker than that of the original Broadway production. Critic Michael Billington wrote, "But the evening's triumph belongs also to director Richard Jones, set designer Richard Hudson and costume designer Sue Blane who evoke exactly the right mood of haunted theatricality. Old-fashioned footlights give the faces a sinister glow. The woods themselves are a semi-circular, black-and-silver screen punctuated with nine doors and a crazy clock: they achieve exactly the 'agreeable terror' of Gustave Dore's children's illustrations. And the effects are terrific: doors open to reveal the rotating magnified eyeball or the admonitory finger of the predatory giant."
A new intimate production of the show opened (billed as the first London revival) at the Donmar Warehouse on 16 November 1998, closing on 13 February 1999. This revival was directed by John Crowley and designed by his brother, Bob Crowley. The cast included Clare Burt as the Witch, Nick Holder as the Baker, Sophie Thompson as the Baker's Wife, Jenna Russell as Cinderella, Sheridan Smith as Little Red Ridinghood and Frank Middlemass as the Narrator/Mysterious Man. Russell later appeared as the Baker's Wife in the 2010 Regent's Park production. Thompson won the 1999 Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance, while the production itself was nominated for Outstanding Musical Production.
A revival opened at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, running from February 1, 2002 to March 24, 2002. This production was directed and choreographed with the same principal cast that later ran on Broadway.
The 2002 Broadway revival, directed by James Lapine and choreographed by John Carrafa, began previews on April 13, 2002 and opened April 30, 2002 at the Broadhurst Theatre, closing on December 29 after a run of 18 previews and 279 regular performances. It starred Vanessa L. Williams as the Witch, John McMartin as the Narrator, Stephen DeRosa as the Baker, Kerry O'Malley as the Baker's Wife, Gregg Edelman as Cinderella's Prince/Wolf, Christopher Sieber as Rapunzel's Prince/Wolf, Molly Ephraim as Little Red Ridinghood, Adam Wylie as Jack, and Laura Benanti as Cinderella. Judi Dench provided the pre-recorded voice of the Giant.
Lapine revised the script slightly for this production, with a cameo appearance of the "Three Little Pigs" restored from the earlier San Diego production. Other changes, apart from numerous small dialogue changes, included the addition of the song "Our Little World," a duet for the Witch and Rapunzel written for the first London production, the addition of a second wolf in the song "Hello Little Girl" who competes for Little Red's attention with the first Wolf, the portrayal of Jack's cow by a live performer (Chad Kimball) in an intricate costume and new lyrics were written for "The Last Midnight," now sung by the Witch as a menacing lullaby to the Baker's baby.
This production featured scenic design by Douglas W. Schmidt, costume design by Susan Hilferty, lighting design by Brian MacDevitt, sound design by Dan Moses Schreier and projection design by Elaine J. McCarthy. The revival won the Tony Awards for the Best Revival of a Musical and Best Lighting Design. This Broadway revival wardrobe is on display at the Costume World in South Florida.
A revival at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio in Covent Garden had a limited run from June 14 through June 30, 2007 followed by a short stint at The Lowry theatre, Salford Quays, Manchester between 4–7 July. The production mixed Opera singers, Musical Theatre actors as well as Film and television actors; including Anne Reid as Jack's Mother and Gary Waldhorn as the Narrator. The production itself, directed by Will Tuckett, was met with mixed reviews; although there were clear stand out performances.
The production completely sold out three weeks before opening. As this was an 'opera' production, the show and its performers were overlooked for the 'musical' nominations in the 2008 Olivier Awards. This production featured Suzie Toase (Little Red), Peter Caulfield (Jack), Beverley Klein (Witch), Anna Francolini (Baker's Wife), Clive Rowe (Baker), Nicholas Garrett (Wolf), and Lara Pulver (Lucinda). This was the second Sondheim musical to be staged by the Opera House, following 2003's "Sweeney Todd".
The Olivier Award-winning Regent's Park Open Air Theatre production, directed by Timothy Sheader and choreographed by Liam Steel, ran for a six-week limited season from 6 August to 11 September 2010. The cast included Hannah Waddingham as the Witch, Mark Hadfield as the Baker, Jenna Russell as the Baker's wife, Helen Dallimore as Cinderella, and Judi Dench as the recorded voice of the Giant. Gareth Valentine was the Musical Director. The musical was performed outdoors in a wooded area. Whilst the book remained mostly unchanged, the subtext of the plot was dramatically altered by casting the role of the Narrator as a young school boy lost in the woods following a family argument – a device used to further illustrate the musical's themes of parenting and adolescence.
The production opened to wide critical acclaim, much of the press commenting on the effectiveness of the open air setting. The "Telegraph" reviewer, for example, wrote: "It is an inspired idea to stage this show in the magical, sylvan surroundings of Regent's Park, and designer Soutra Gilmour has come up with a marvellously rickety, adventure playground of a set, all ladders, stairs and elevated walkways, with Rapunzel discovered high up in a tree." "The New York Times" reviewer commented: "The natural environment makes for something genuinely haunting and mysterious as night falls on the audience..." Stephen Sondheim attended twice, reportedly extremely pleased with the production. The production also won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical Revival and Michael Xavier, who played Cinderella's Prince and the Wolf, was nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Musical.
The production was recorded in its entirety, available to download and watch from Digital Theatre.
The Regent's Park Open Air Theatre production transferred to the Public Theater's 2012 summer series of free performances Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, New York, with an American cast as well as new designers. Sheader again was the director and Steel served as co-director and choreographer. Performances were originally to run from July 24 (delayed from July 23 due to the weather) to August 25, 2012, but the show was extended till September 1, 2012. The cast included Amy Adams as The Baker's Wife, Donna Murphy as The Witch, Denis O'Hare as The Baker, Chip Zien as the Mysterious Man/Cinderella's Father, Jack Broderick as the young Narrator, Gideon Glick as Jack, Cooper Grodin as Rapunzel's Prince, Ivan Hernandez as Cinderella's Prince/Wolf, Tina Johnson as Granny, Josh Lamon as the Steward, Jessie Mueller as Cinderella, Laura Shoop as Cinderella's Mother, Tess Soltau as Rapunzel, and Glenn Close as the Voice of the Giant. The set was a "collaboration between original Open Air Theatre designer Soutra Gilmour and...John Lee Beatty, [and] rises over 50 feet in the air, with a series of tree-covered catwalks and pathways." The production was dedicated to Nora Ephron, who died earlier in 2012. In February 2012 and in May 2012, reports of a possible Broadway transfer surfaced with the production's principal actors in negotiations to reprise their roles. In January 2013, it was announced that the production will not transfer to Broadway due to scheduling conflicts.
For its annual fully staged musical event, the Hollywood Bowl produced a limited run of "Into the Woods" from July 26–28, 2019, directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom. The cast included Skylar Astin as The Baker, Sierra Boggess as Cinderella, Chris Carmack as Rapunzel's Prince, Anthony Crivello as The Mysterious Man, Sutton Foster as The Baker's Wife, Edward Hibbert as The Narrator, Cheyenne Jackson as Cinderella's Prince and The Wolf, Hailey Kilgore as Rapunzel, Gaten Matarazzo as Jack, Patina Miller as The Witch, Rebecca Spencer as Jack's Mother, Shanice Williams as Little Red Ridinghood, and Whoopi Goldberg as the voice of The Giant.
A production played in Sydney from 19 March 1993 to 5 June 1993 at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House. It starred Judi Connelli, Geraldine Turner, Tony Sheldon, Philip Quast, Pippa Grandison, and DJ Foster. A Melbourne Theatre Company played from 17 January 1998 to 21 February 1998 at the Playhouse, Victorian Arts Centre. It starred Rhonda Burchmore, John McTernan, Gina Riley, Lisa McCune, Peter Carroll, Tamsin Carroll and Robert Grubb.
The first professional Spanish language production, "Dentro del Bosque", was produced by University of Puerto Rico Repertory Theatre and premiered in San Juan at Teatro de la Universidad (University Theatre) on March 14, 2013. The cast included Víctor Santiago as Baker, Ana Isabelle as Baker's Wife and Lourdes Robles as the Witch
The Roundabout Theatre production, directed by Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld, began performances Off-Broadway at the Laura Pels Theatre on December 19, 2014 in previews, officially on January 22, 2015, and closed on April 12, 2015. Like the original Broadway production 28 years prior, this production had a try-out run at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, California from July 12, 2014 – August 17, 2014 with the opening night taking place on July 17. This new version is completely minimalistically reimagined by the Fiasco Theater Company, featuring only ten actors playing multiple parts, and one piano accompanist.
The DreamCatcher Theatre production opened in January 2015 and played a sold-out run at the Adrienne Arsht Center in Miami, Florida. Tituss Burgess starred as The Witch, the first male actor to do so. The cast also included Arielle Jacobs as The Bakers Wife. The musical had a production at The Muny in Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri running from July 21 through 28 2015. The cast included Heather Headley (Witch), Erin Dilly (Baker's Wife), Rob McClure (Baker), Ken Page (Narrator), Elena Shaddow (Cinderella). The Hart House Theatre production in Toronto, Ontario from January 15, 2016 to January 30, 2016. A production ran at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds in a collaboration with Opera North from 2 June 2016 to 25 June 2016.
The Israeli premiere, אל תוך היער (El Toch Ha-ya-ar), opened in Tel Aviv on August 2016 for a limited run produced by The Tramp Productions and Stuff Like That, starring Roi Dolev as The Witch, the second male actor to do so.
The principal original casts of notable stage productions of "Into the Woods."
The Witch: Phylicia Rashad, Betsy Joslyn, Nancy Dussault, Ellen Foley
The Baker's Wife: Cynthia Sikes Yorkin
The Narrator/Mysterious Man: Dick Cavett
Cinderella: Patricia Ben Peterson
Jack: Jeff Blumenkrantz
Rapunzel: Marin Mazzie
Rapunzel's Prince: Dean Butler
Snow White: Cindy Robinson
Cinderella: Erin Dilly
Cinderella's Mother/Stepmother: Joy Franz
The musical has been adapted into a child-friendly version for use by schools and young companies, with the second act completely removed, as well as almost half the material from the first. The show is shortened from the original 2 and a half hours to fit in a 50-minute range, and the music transposed into keys that more easily fit young voices. It is licensed through Music Theatre International Broadway Junior musicals.
A theatrical film adaptation of the musical was produced by Walt Disney Pictures, directed by Rob Marshall, and starring Meryl Streep, Emily Blunt, James Corden, Anna Kendrick, Chris Pine, Tracey Ullman, Christine Baranski, Lilla Crawford, Daniel Huttlestone, MacKenzie Mauzy, Billy Magnussen, and Johnny Depp. The film was released on December 25, 2014. It was a critical and commercial hit, grossing over $213 million worldwide. For her performance as the Witch, Streep was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The film also received Academy Award nominations for Best Production Design and Best Costume Design.
In most productions of "Into the Woods", including the original Broadway production, several parts are doubled. Cinderella's Prince and the Wolf, who share the characteristic of being unable to control their appetites, are usually played by the same actor. Similarly, the Narrator and the Mysterious Man, who share the characteristic of commenting on the story while avoiding any personal involvement or responsibility. Granny and Cinderella's Mother, who are both matriarchal characters in the story, are also typically played by the same person, who also gives voice to the nurturing but later murderous Giant's Wife.
The show covers multiple themes: growing up, parents and children, accepting responsibility, morality, and finally, wish fulfillment and its consequences. The "Time Magazine" reviewers wrote that the play's "basic insight... is at heart, most fairy tales are about the loving yet embattled relationship between parents and children. Almost everything that goes wrong—which is to say, almost everything that can—arises from a failure of parental or filial duty, despite the best intentions." Stephen Holden wrote that the themes of the show include parent-child relationships and the individual's responsibility to the community. The witch isn't just a scowling old hag, but a key symbol of moral ambivalence. James Lapine said that the most unpleasant person (the Witch) would have the truest things to say and the "nicer" people would be less honest. In the Witch's words: "I'm not good; I'm not nice; I'm just right."
Given the show's debut during the 1980s, the height of the US AIDS crisis, the work has been interpreted to be a parable about AIDS. In this interpretation, the Giant's Wife serves as a metaphor for HIV/AIDS, killing good and bad characters indiscriminately and forcing the survivors to band together to stop the threat and move on from the devastation, reflecting the devastation to many communities during the AIDS crisis. When asked about the thematic connection, Sondheim acknowledged that initial audiences interpreted it as an AIDS metaphor, but stated that the work was not intended to be specific.
The score is also notable in Sondheim's output, because of its intricate reworking and development of small musical motifs. In particular, the opening words, "I wish", are set to the interval of a rising major second and this small unit is both repeated and developed throughout the show, just as Lapine's book explores the consequences of self-interest and "wishing." The dialogue in the show is characterized by the heavy use of syncopated speech. In many instances, the characters' lines are delivered with a fixed beat that follows natural speech rhythms, but is also purposely composed in eighth, sixteenth, and quarter note rhythms as part of a spoken song. Like many Sondheim/Lapine productions, the songs contain thought-process narrative, where characters converse or think aloud.
Sondheim drew on parts of his troubled childhood when writing the show. In 1987, he told "Time Magazine" that the "father uncomfortable with babies [was] his father, and [the] mother who regrets having had children [was] his mother."
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15341
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Intron
An intron (for "intragenic region") is any nucleotide sequence within a gene that is removed by RNA splicing during maturation of the final RNA product. In other words, introns are non-coding regions of an RNA transcript, or the DNA encoding it, that are eliminated by splicing before translation. The word "intron" is derived from the term "intragenic region", i.e. a region inside a gene. The term "intron" refers to both the DNA sequence within a gene and the corresponding sequence in RNA transcripts. Sequences that are joined together in the final mature RNA after RNA splicing are exons.
Introns are found in the genes of most organisms and many viruses and can be located in a wide range of genes, including those that generate proteins, ribosomal RNA (rRNA) and transfer RNA (tRNA). When proteins are generated from intron-containing genes, RNA splicing takes place as part of the RNA processing pathway that follows transcription and precedes translation.
Introns were first discovered in protein-coding genes of adenovirus, and were subsequently identified in genes encoding transfer RNA and ribosomal RNA genes. Introns are now known to occur within a wide variety of genes throughout organisms and viruses within all of the biological kingdoms.
The fact that genes were split or interrupted by introns was discovered independently in 1977 by Phillip Allen Sharp and Richard J. Roberts, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1993. The term "intron" was introduced by American biochemist Walter Gilbert:
"The notion of the cistron [i.e., gene] ... must be replaced by that of a transcription unit containing regions which will be lost from the mature messenger – which I suggest we call introns (for intragenic regions) – alternating with regions which will be expressed – exons." (Gilbert 1978)
The term "intron" also refers to "intracistron", i.e., an additional piece of DNA that arises within a cistron.
Although introns are sometimes called "intervening sequences", the term "intervening sequence" can refer to any of several families of internal nucleic acid sequences that are not present in the final gene product, including inteins, untranslated sequences (UTR), and nucleotides removed by RNA editing, in addition to introns.
The frequency of introns within different genomes is observed to vary widely across the spectrum of biological organisms. For example, introns are extremely common within the nuclear genome of jawed vertebrates (e.g. humans and mice), where protein-coding genes almost always contain multiple introns, while introns are rare within the nuclear genes of some eukaryotic microorganisms, for example baker's/brewer's yeast ("Saccharomyces cerevisiae"). In contrast, the mitochondrial genomes of vertebrates are entirely devoid of introns, while those of eukaryotic microorganisms may contain many introns.
A particularly extreme case is the "Drosophila dhc7" gene containing a ≥3.6 megabase (Mb) intron, which takes roughly three days to transcribe. On the other extreme, a recent study suggests that the shortest known eukaryotic intron length is 30 base pairs (bp) belonging to the human "MST1L" gene.
Splicing of all intron-containing RNA molecules is superficially similar, as described above. However, different types of introns were identified through the examination of intron structure by DNA sequence analysis, together with genetic and biochemical analysis of RNA splicing reactions.
At least four distinct classes of introns have been identified:
Group III introns are proposed to be a fifth family, but little is known about the biochemical apparatus that mediates their splicing. They appear to be related to group II introns, and possibly to spliceosomal introns.
Nuclear pre-mRNA introns (spliceosomal introns) are characterized by specific intron sequences located at the boundaries between introns and exons. These sequences are recognized by spliceosomal RNA molecules when the splicing reactions are initiated. In addition, they contain a branch point, a particular nucleotide sequence near the 3' end of the intron that becomes covalently linked to the 5' end of the intron during the splicing process, generating a branched ("lariat") intron. Apart from these three short conserved elements, nuclear pre-mRNA intron sequences are highly variable. Nuclear pre-mRNA introns are often much longer than their surrounding exons.
Transfer RNA introns that depend upon proteins for removal occur at a specific location within the anticodon loop of unspliced tRNA precursors, and are removed by a tRNA splicing endonuclease. The exons are then linked together by a second protein, the tRNA splicing ligase. Note that self-splicing introns are also sometimes found within tRNA genes.
Group I and group II introns are found in genes encoding proteins (messenger RNA), transfer RNA and ribosomal RNA in a very wide range of living organisms., Following transcription into RNA, group I and group II introns also make extensive internal interactions that allow them to fold into a specific, complex three-dimensional architecture. These complex architectures allow some group I and group II introns to be "self-splicing", that is, the intron-containing RNA molecule can rearrange its own covalent structure so as to precisely remove the intron and link the exons together in the correct order. In some cases, particular intron-binding proteins are involved in splicing, acting in such a way that they assist the intron in folding into the three-dimensional structure that is necessary for self-splicing activity. Group I and group II introns are distinguished by different sets of internal conserved sequences and folded structures, and by the fact that splicing of RNA molecules containing group II introns generates branched introns (like those of spliceosomal RNAs), while group I introns use a non-encoded guanosine nucleotide (typically GTP) to initiate splicing, adding it on to the 5'-end of the excised intron.
While introns do not encode protein products, they are integral to gene expression regulation. Some introns themselves encode functional RNAs through further processing after splicing to generate noncoding RNA molecules. Alternative splicing is widely used to generate multiple proteins from a single gene. Furthermore, some introns play essential roles in a wide range of gene expression regulatory functions such as Nonsense-mediated decay and mRNA export.
The biological origins of introns are obscure. After the initial discovery of introns in protein-coding genes of the eukaryotic nucleus, there was significant debate as to whether introns in modern-day organisms were inherited from a common ancient ancestor (termed the introns-early hypothesis), or whether they appeared in genes rather recently in the evolutionary process (termed the introns-late hypothesis). Another theory is that the spliceosome and the intron-exon structure of genes is a relic of the RNA world (the introns-first hypothesis). There is still considerable debate about the extent to which of these hypotheses is most correct. The popular consensus at the moment is that introns arose within the eukaryote lineage as selfish elements.
Early studies of genomic DNA sequences from a wide range of organisms show that the intron-exon structure of homologous genes in different organisms can vary widely. More recent studies of entire eukaryotic genomes have now shown that the lengths and density (introns/gene) of introns varies considerably between related species. For example, while the human genome contains an average of 8.4 introns/gene (139,418 in the genome), the unicellular fungus "Encephalitozoon cuniculi" contains only 0.0075 introns/gene (15 introns in the genome). Since eukaryotes arose from a common ancestor (common descent), there must have been extensive gain or loss of introns during evolutionary time. This process is thought to be subject to selection, with a tendency towards intron gain in larger species due to their smaller population sizes, and the converse in smaller (particularly unicellular) species. Biological factors also influence which genes in a genome lose or accumulate introns.
Alternative splicing of exons within a gene after intron excision acts to introduce greater variability of protein sequences translated from a single gene, allowing multiple related proteins to be generated from a single gene and a single precursor mRNA transcript. The control of alternative RNA splicing is performed by a complex network of signaling molecules that respond to a wide range of intracellular and extracellular signals.
Introns contain several short sequences that are important for efficient splicing, such as acceptor and donor sites at either end of the intron as well as a branch point site, which are required for proper splicing by the spliceosome. Some introns are known to enhance the expression of the gene that they are contained in by a process known as intron-mediated enhancement (IME).
Actively transcribed regions of DNA frequently form R-loops that are vulnerable to DNA damage. In highly expressed yeast genes, introns inhibit R-loop formation and the occurrence of DNA damage. Genome-wide analysis in both yeast and humans revealed that intron-containing genes have decreased R-loop levels and decreased DNA damage compared to intronless genes of similar expression. Insertion of an intron within an R-loop prone gene can also suppress R-loop formation and recombination. Bonnet et al. (2017) speculated that the function of introns in maintaining genetic stability may explain their evolutionary maintenance at certain locations, particularly in highly expressed genes.
The physical presence of introns promotes cellular resistance to starvation via intron enhanced repression of ribosomal protein genes of nutrient-sensing pathways.
Introns may be lost or gained over evolutionary time, as shown by many comparative studies of orthologous genes. Subsequent analyses have identified thousands of examples of intron loss and gain events, and it has been proposed that the emergence of eukaryotes, or the initial stages of eukaryotic evolution, involved an intron invasion. Two definitive mechanisms of intron loss, Reverse Transcriptase-Mediated Intron Loss (RTMIL) and genomic deletions, have been identified, and are known to occur. The definitive mechanisms of intron gain, however, remain elusive and controversial. At least seven mechanisms of intron gain have been reported thus far: Intron Transposition, Transposon Insertion, Tandem Genomic Duplication, Intron Transfer, Intron Gain during Double-Strand Break Repair (DSBR), Insertion of a Group II Intron, and Intronization. In theory it should be easiest to deduce the origin of recently gained introns due to the lack of host-induced mutations, yet even introns gained recently did not arise from any of the aforementioned mechanisms. These findings thus raise the question of whether or not the proposed mechanisms of intron gain fail to describe the mechanistic origin of many novel introns because they are not accurate mechanisms of intron gain, or if there are other, yet to be discovered, processes generating novel introns.
In intron transposition, the most commonly purported intron gain mechanism, a spliced intron is thought to reverse splice into either its own mRNA or another mRNA at a previously intron-less position. This intron-containing mRNA is then reverse transcribed and the resulting intron-containing cDNA may then cause intron gain via complete or partial recombination with its original genomic locus. Transposon insertions can also result in intron creation. Such an insertion could intronize the transposon without disrupting the coding sequence when a transposon inserts into the sequence AGGT, resulting in the duplication of this sequence on each side of the transposon. It is not yet understood why these elements are spliced, whether by chance, or by some preferential action by the transposon. In tandem genomic duplication, due to the similarity between consensus donor and acceptor splice sites, which both closely resemble AGGT, the tandem genomic duplication of an exonic segment harboring an AGGT sequence generates two potential splice sites. When recognized by the spliceosome, the sequence between the original and duplicated AGGT will be spliced, resulting in the creation of an intron without alteration of the coding sequence of the gene. Double-stranded break repair via non-homologous end joining was recently identified as a source of intron gain when researchers identified short direct repeats flanking 43% of gained introns in Daphnia. These numbers must be compared to the number of conserved introns flanked by repeats in other organisms, though, for statistical relevance. For group II intron insertion, the retrohoming of a group II intron into a nuclear gene was proposed to cause recent spliceosomal intron gain.
Intron transfer has been hypothesized to result in intron gain when a paralog or pseudogene gains an intron and then transfers this intron via recombination to an intron-absent location in its sister paralog. Intronization is the process by which mutations create novel introns from formerly exonic sequence. Thus, unlike other proposed mechanisms of intron gain, this mechanism does not require the insertion or generation of DNA to create a novel intron.
The only hypothesized mechanism of recent intron gain lacking any direct evidence is that of group II intron insertion, which when demonstrated in vivo, abolishes gene expression. Group II introns are therefore likely the presumed ancestors of spliceosomal introns, acting as site-specific retroelements, and are no longer responsible for intron gain. Tandem genomic duplication is the only proposed mechanism with supporting in vivo experimental evidence: a short intragenic tandem duplication can insert a novel intron into a protein-coding gene, leaving the corresponding peptide sequence unchanged. This mechanism also has extensive indirect evidence lending support to the idea that tandem genomic duplication is a prevalent mechanism for intron gain. The testing of other proposed mechanisms in vivo, particularly intron gain during DSBR, intron transfer, and intronization, is possible, although these mechanisms must be demonstrated in vivo to solidify them as actual mechanisms of intron gain. Further genomic analyses, especially when executed at the population level, may then quantify the relative contribution of each mechanism, possibly identifying species-specific biases that may shed light on varied rates of intron gain amongst different species.
Structure:
Splicing:
Function
Others:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15343
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Institute of National Remembrance
The Institute of National Remembrance – Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (; IPN) is a Polish government institution in charge of prosecution, archives, education, and, since 2007, lustration, in relation to crimes against the Polish nation. The "IPN" investigates Nazi and communist crimes committed between 1917 and 1990, documents its findings, and disseminates them to the public.
The Institute was established by the Polish Parliament on 18 December 1998 and incorporated the earlier, 1991-established Main Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (which had replaced a 1945-established body on Nazi crimes). It began its activities on 1 July 2000. The "IPN" is a founding member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.
IPN's main areas of activity, in line with its original mission statement, include researching and documenting the losses which were suffered by the Polish Nation as a result of World War II and during the post-war totalitarian period. The Institute informs about the patriotic traditions of resistance against the occupational forces, and the Polish citizens' fight for sovereignty of the nation, including their efforts in defence of freedom and human dignity in general. IPN investigates crimes committed on Polish soil against Polish citizens as well as people of other citizenships wronged in the country. War crimes which are not affected by statute of limitations according to Polish law include:
It is the IPN's duty to prosecute crimes against peace and humanity, as much as war crimes. Its mission includes the need to compensate for damages which were suffered by the repressed and harmed people at a time when human rights were disobeyed by the state,
and educate the public about recent history of Poland. IPN collects, organises and archives all documents about the Polish communist security apparatus active from 22 July 1944 to 31 December 1989.
Following the election of the Law and Justice party, the nationalist government formulated in 2016 a new IPN law. The 2016 law stipulates that the IPN should oppose publications that dishonor or harm the Polish nation and that history should be popularized as "an element of patriotic education". The new law also removed the influence of academia and the judiciary on the IPN, and four Law and Justice candidates were appointed to the IPN kolegium replacing the former independent members.
A 2018 amendment to the law, often referred to as the "Holocaust Law", added an article 55a that attempts to defend the "good name" of Poland and its people against any accusation of complicity in the Holocaust. Initially conceived as a criminal offense (3 years and jail) with an exemption for arts and research, following an international outcry, the article was modified to a civil offense that may be tried in civil courts and the exemption was deleted. Defamation charges under the act may be made by the IPN as well as by accredited NGOs such as the Polish League Against Defamation.
IPN was created by special legislation on 18 December 1998. The IPN is divided into:
On 29 April 2010, acting president Bronislaw Komorowski signed into law a parliamentary act that reformed the Institute of National Remembrance.
IPN is governed by the director, who has a sovereign position that is independent of the Polish state hierarchy. The director may not be dismissed during his term, unless he commits a harmful act. Prior to 2016, the election of the director was a complex procedure, which involves the selection of a panel of candidates by the IPN Collegium (members appointed by the Polish Parliament and judiciary). The Polish Parliament (Sejm) then elects one of the candidates, with a required supermajority (60%). The director has a 5-year term of office. Following 2016 legislation in the PiS controlled parliament, the former pluralist Collegium was replaced with a nine-member Collegium composed of PiS supporters, and the Sejm appoints the director after consulting with the College without an election between candidates.
The first director of the IPN was Leon Kieres, elected by the Sejm for five years on 8 June 2000 (term 30 June 2000 – 29 December 2005). The IPN granted some 6,500 people the "victim of communism" status and gathered significant archive material. The institute faced difficulties since it was new and also since the Democratic Left Alliance (containing former communists) attempted to close the institute. The publication of by Jan T. Gross, proved to be a lifeline for the IPN as Polish president Aleksander Kwaśniewski intervened to save the IPN since he deemed the IPN's research to be important as part of Jewish-Polish reconciliation and "apology diplomacy".
The second director was Janusz Kurtyka, elected on 9 December 2005 with a term that started 29 December 2005 until his death in the Smolensk airplane crash on 10 April 2010. The elections were controversial, as during the elections a leak against Andrzej Przewoźnik accusing him of collaboration with Służba Bezpieczeństwa caused him to withdraw his candidacy.. Przewoźnik was cleared of the accusations only after he had lost the election.
In 2006, the IPN opened a "Lustration Bureau" that increased the director's power. The bureau was assigned the task of examining the past of all candidates to public office. Kurtyka widened archive access to the public, and shifted focus from compensating victims to researching collaboration.
Franciszek Gryciuk was acting director from 2010 to 2011.
Łukasz Kamiński, was elected by the Sejm in 2011 following the death of his predecessor. Kamiński headed the Wroclaw Regional Bureau of Public Education prior to his election. During his term the IPN faced a wide array of criticism calling for an overhaul or even replacement. Critics founds fault in the IPN being a state institution, the lack of historical knowledge of its prosecutors, a relatively high number of microhistories with a debatable methodology, overuse of the martyrology motif, research methodology, and isolationism from the wider research community. In response, Kamiński implemented several changes, including organizing public debates with outside historians to counter the charge of isolationism and has suggested refocusing on victims as opposed to agents.
Jarosław Szarek was appointed to head the IPN on 22 July 2016. Szarek is affiliated with PiS, and in his campaign to be elected said that "Germans were the executors of the Jedwabne crime and that they had coerced a small group of Poles to become involved". Following his appointment, Szarek dismissed Krzysztof Persak who was the coauthor of the two-volume 2002 IPN study on the Jedwabne pogrom. In subsequent months, the IPN was featured in media headlines for releasing controversial documents, additional Wałęsa documents, memory politics in schools and efforts to change communist street names, and legislation efforts. According to historian Idesbald Goddeeris, this marks a return of politics to the IPN.
Following the public debate on Jan T. Gross's book "Neighbors", the IPN conducted an in-depth investigation into the Jedwabne pogrom. The investigation was politicized, and the IPN's director was involved in defending Poland's good name outside of Poland during the investigation.
The IPN's Public Education Office (BEP) vaguely defined role in the IPN act is to inform society of communist and Nazi crimes and institutions. This vaguely defined role allowed Paweł Machcewicz, BEP's director in 2000, freedom to create a wide range of activities.
Researchers at the IPN conduct not only research, but are required to take part in public outreach. BEP has published music CDs, DVDs, and serials. It has founded "historical clubs" for debates and lectures. It has also organized outdoor historical fairs, picnic, and games.
The "IPN Bulletin" () is a high circulation popular-scientific journal, intended for lay readers and youth. Some 12,000 of 15,000 copies of the "Bulletin" are distributed free of charge to secondary schools in Poland, and the rest are sold in bookstores. The "Bulletin" contains: popular-scientific and academic articles, polemics, manifestos, appeals to readers, promotional material on the IPN and BEP, denials and commentary on reports in the news, as well as multimedia supplements.
The IPN also publishes the "Remembrance and Justice" () scientific journal.
The Institution of National Remembrance has created several board games to help educate people about recent Polish history:
One of the most controversial aspects of IPN is a by-product of its role in collecting and publishing previously secret archives from the Polish communist security apparatus, the Służba Bezpieczeństwa: revealing secret agents and collaborators (a process called "lustration"). Following the election of a Law and Justice government in 2005, in a series of legislative amendments during 2006 and the beginning of 2007 file access and lustration powers were radically expanded. However, several articles of the 2006-7 amendments were judged unconstitutional by Poland's Constitutional Court on 11 May 2007. Following the court ruling the IPN's lustration power was still wider in relation to the original 1997 law, and include loss of position for those who submitted false lustration declarations as well as a lustration process of candidates for senior office as well as .
An incident which caused controversy involved the "Wildstein list", a partial list of persons who allegedly worked for the communist-era Polish intelligence service, copied in 2004 from IPN archives (without IPN permission) by journalist Bronisław Wildstein and published on the Internet in 2005. The list gained much attention in Polish media and politics, and IPN security procedures and handling of the matter came under criticism.
Individuals opposed by neo-"Endeks" (modern-day adherents of National Democracy principles), such as liberal clergy, independent journalists, Jacek Kuroń, and Zygmunt Bauman, have been targeted with "leaks" from the IPN archives about their alleged past communist ties.
In 2008 two IPN employees, Sławomir Cenckiewicz and Piotr Gontarczyk, published a book, "SB a Lech Wałęsa. Przyczynek do biografii" (The Security Service and Lech Wałęsa: A Contribution to a Biography) which caused a major controversy. The book's premise was that in the 1970s the Solidarity leader and later President of Poland Lech Wałęsa was a secret informant of the Polish communist Security Service. Michael Szporer writes that the book should have been more nuanced in its judgment of anti-communist leaders, and that it unfairly singled out Wałęsa.
As of 2012 some 10% of IPN's personnel (215 workers of which 26 are prosecutors) work in the Lustration office. Between 2007 and 2012, prepared four internet catalogs of: former Communist officials, security officers, those targeted by Security, and of people presently holding public office. In the same period, the IPN handled nearly 150,000 "vetting declaration.
According to , common criticisms of the IPN include: its dominance in the Polish research field, which is guaranteed by a budget that far supersedes that of any similar academic institution; the low quality of its research, and its emphasis on "quantity over quality"; its focus on "martyrology"; and various criticisms of methodology and ethics. Some of these criticisms have been addressed by Director Łukasz Kamiński during his tenure; however according to Mink, the changes to the electoral process and the election of Jarosław Szarek as director virtually guarantee the politicization of the institute.
In 2005, after Law and Justice's ("PiS") electoral victory, the "IPN" focused on crimes against the Polish nation. Part of PiS's platform was "historical policy" () on the national and international level to promote the Polish point of view. During PiS's control of the government between 2005 and 2007, the "IPN" was the focus of heated public controversies, in particular in regard to the past of Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa. As a result, in scholarly literature the "IPN" has been referred to as a "Ministry of Memory" or as an institution involved in "memory games".
Several scholars have criticized the "IPN" for turning in recent years, with the rise of the and the 2018 amendment to the "IPN" law, from objective historical research towards historical revisionism.
Following the disruption of the 2019 New Polish School of Holocaust Scholarship conference in Paris, the "IPN" was criticized by French higher-education minister Frédérique Vidal, who said the disturbances had been "highly regrettable" and "anti-Semitic", and that the disturbances organized by "Gazeta Polska" activists appeared to have been condoned by the "IPN", whose representative did not condemn the disruption and which criticized the conference in social-media remarks that were re-tweeted by the Polish Embassy in Paris.
Concerns have been raised with the institution's approach to historical research, which tends towards historical positivism and a claim of objectivity. According to Wiktoria Śliwowska, the IPN's historiographic approach is more broadly concerned with assigning blame than with understanding of historical processes.
Historian Dariusz Stola concludes that the "IPN" is a "Ministry of Memory", but bureaucratic in nature rather than Orwellian. This combination of traits limits the pluralism and quality of research the institute can produce. Stola notes that IPN is a "regular continental European bureaucracy, with usual deficiencies of its kind", and concludes that in this aspect the IPN resembles the communist institutions it is supposed to deal with, equally "bureaucratic, centralist, heavy, inclined to extensive growth and quantity rather than quality of production". Stola also suggests that the IPN shows a "tendency for a questionable vision of interpretations of the past", and that its treatment of Poland's Communist history is meant to give "an orientation to the authors and the readers, probably a moral orientation they desire."
In March 1944, the Armia Krajowa and Peasant Battalion units attacked the Ukrainian-populated village Sahryn. Between 800 and 1250 Ukrainians, including about 100 children, were killed by Peasant Battalions and units of the Armia Krajowa in Sahryn. The IPN investigation on this matter was discontinued in 2010, and the IPN found that there was no crime in Sahryń.
The IPN dismissed historian of Ukrainian origin Grigory Kupriyanovich on August 23, 2018. Kupriyanovich stated that, "It seems that the leader of the IPN decided that there was no place a representative of the Ukrainian minority in the committee. I perceive this as an expression of discrimination." Polish authorities had opened criminal proceedings against Kupriyanovich because of a speech he made on 10 August 2018 marking the opening of a memorial in Sahryn about local Ukrainians who were victims of punitive actions conducted by Armia Krajowa in 1944. Kupriyanovich compared killings of Poles by Ukrainians with killings of Ukrainians by Poles
In March 2019, a diplomatic incident occurred between the governments of Belarus and Poland owing to IPN activities aimed at rehabilitating a former member of the Polish Home Army, Romuald Rajs, executed in 1949 by a sentence of a Polish court for banditry and organizing killings in 1946 on ethnic and religious grounds of 79 Belarusian peasants. The IPN claimed on 11 March 2019 that Rajs "did not act with the intention of destroying the Belarusian or Orthodox community living in the current territory of Poland."
IPN declared Rajs not guilty based on a law of February 23, 1991 " invalidating decisions made against persons repressed for activities in favor of the independent existence of the Polish state."
On March 12, 2019, the press secretary of the Belarusian Foreign Ministry told reporters that the Belarusian government demanded from Warsaw public official explanations regarding the rehabilitation of Rajs. The Polish ambassador to Belarus was called to the Belarusian ministry to give explanations.
On March 25, 2019, a spokesman for the Belarusian Foreign Ministry commented on the IPN, stating “it’s impossible to justify criminals like Rajs".
In September 2017, a historian in charge of education in Lublin for the IPN, wrote in a column in "Gazeta Polska" that "after the aggression of Germany into Poland, the situation of the Jews did not look very bad" and "although the [Nazi] occupation authorities took over, they ordered the wearing of armbands with the star of David, charged them heavy taxes, began to designate Jews-only zones only for the Jews, but at the same time permitted the creation of Judenrat, that is, organs of self-government." In 2014, the same historian said in an expert opinion to a Polish court that the Nazi party was a leftist party and that the swastika is an ambiguous symbol. These statements were widely criticized by other historians including Dariusz Libionka, and the IPN issued a statement saying that the "In connection with the thesis in the article by Tomasz Panfil in the Gazeta Polska, the Institute of National Remembrance declares that position presented there is in no way compatible with the historical knowledge about the situation of the Jewish population in Poland after September 1, 1939." and that it expects the historian "will, in his scientific and journalistic activities, show diligence and respect to the principles of historical and research reliability." In October 2017, education minister Anna Zalewska presented the historian with a medal for "special merits for education".
In October 2017, the Simon Wiesenthal Center urged the IPN to fire the deputy director of its publishing office because he had published several books by Holocaust denier David Irving. The IPN responded that the official "is not a Holocaust denier himself so there is no reason to dismiss him".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15346
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Identical particles
In quantum mechanics, identical particles (also called indistinguishable or indiscernible particles) are particles that cannot be distinguished from one another, even in principle. Species of identical particles include, but are not limited to, elementary particles (such as electrons), composite subatomic particles (such as atomic nuclei), as well as atoms and molecules. Quasiparticles also behave in this way. Although all known indistinguishable particles only exist at the quantum scale, there is no exhaustive list of all possible sorts of particles nor a clear-cut limit of applicability, as explored in quantum statistics.
There are two main categories of identical particles: bosons, which can share quantum states, and fermions, which cannot (as described by the Pauli exclusion principle). Examples of bosons are photons, gluons, phonons, helium-4 nuclei and all mesons. Examples of fermions are electrons, neutrinos, quarks, protons, neutrons, and helium-3 nuclei.
The fact that particles can be identical has important consequences in statistical mechanics, where calculations rely on probabilistic arguments, which are sensitive to whether or not the objects being studied are identical. As a result, identical particles exhibit markedly different statistical behaviour from distinguishable particles. For example, the indistinguishability of particles has been proposed as a solution to Gibbs' mixing paradox.
There are two methods for distinguishing between particles. The first method relies on differences in the intrinsic physical properties of the particles, such as mass, electric charge, and spin. If differences exist, it is possible to distinguish between the particles by measuring the relevant properties. However, it is an empirical fact that microscopic particles of the same species have completely equivalent physical properties. For instance, every electron in the universe has exactly the same electric charge; this is why it is possible to speak of such a thing as "the charge of the electron".
Even if the particles have equivalent physical properties, there remains a second method for distinguishing between particles, which is to track the trajectory of each particle. As long as the position of each particle can be measured with infinite precision (even when the particles collide), then there would be no ambiguity about which particle is which.
The problem with the second approach is that it contradicts the principles of quantum mechanics. According to quantum theory, the particles do not possess definite positions during the periods between measurements. Instead, they are governed by wavefunctions that give the probability of finding a particle at each position. As time passes, the wavefunctions tend to spread out and overlap. Once this happens, it becomes impossible to determine, in a subsequent measurement, which of the particle positions correspond to those measured earlier. The particles are then said to be indistinguishable.
What follows is an example to make the above discussion concrete, using the formalism developed in the article on the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics.
Let "n" denote a complete set of (discrete) quantum numbers for specifying single-particle states (for example, for the particle in a box problem, take "n" to be the quantized wave vector of the wavefunction.) For simplicity, consider a system composed of two particles that are not interacting with each other. Suppose that one particle is in the state "n"1, and the other is in the state "n"2. Intuitively, the quantum state of the system is written as
where the state writing order matters such as the firstly written state is for the particle 1 and the secondly written state is for the particle 2 (so, if formula_2, then the particle 1 occupies the state "n"2 while the particle 2 occupies the state "n"1). This is simply the canonical way of constructing a basis for a tensor product space formula_3 of the combined system from the individual spaces. This expression is valid for distinguishable particles, however, it is not appropriate for indistinguishable particles since formula_4 and formula_5 as a result of exchanging the particles are generally different states.
Two states are physically equivalent only if they differ at most by a complex phase factor. For two indistinguishable particles, a state before the particle exchange must be physically equivalent to the state after the exchange, so these two state differ at most by a complex phase factor. This fact suggests that a state for two indistinguishable (and non-interacting) particles is given by following two possibilities:
States where it is a sum are known as symmetric, while states involving the difference are called antisymmetric. More completely, symmetric states have the form
while antisymmetric states have the form
Note that if "n"1 and "n"2 are the same, the antisymmetric expression gives zero, which cannot be a state vector since it cannot be normalized. In other words, more than one identical particle cannot occupy an antisymmetric state (one antisymmetric state can be occupied only by one particle). This is known as the Pauli exclusion principle, and it is the fundamental reason behind the chemical properties of atoms and the stability of matter.
The importance of symmetric and antisymmetric states is ultimately based on empirical evidence. It appears to be a fact of nature that identical particles do not occupy states of a mixed symmetry, such as
There is actually an exception to this rule, which will be discussed later. On the other hand, it can be shown that the symmetric and antisymmetric states are in a sense special, by examining a particular symmetry of the multiple-particle states known as exchange symmetry.
Define a linear operator "P", called the exchange operator. When it acts on a tensor product of two state vectors, it exchanges the values of the state vectors:
"P" is both Hermitian and unitary. Because it is unitary, it can be regarded as a symmetry operator. This symmetry may be described as the symmetry under the exchange of labels attached to the particles (i.e., to the single-particle Hilbert spaces).
Clearly, formula_11 (the identity operator), so the eigenvalues of "P" are +1 and −1. The corresponding eigenvectors are the symmetric and antisymmetric states:
In other words, symmetric and antisymmetric states are essentially unchanged under the exchange of particle labels: they are only multiplied by a factor of +1 or −1, rather than being "rotated" somewhere else in the Hilbert space. This indicates that the particle labels have no physical meaning, in agreement with the earlier discussion on indistinguishability.
It will be recalled that "P" is Hermitian. As a result, it can be regarded as an observable of the system, which means that, in principle, a measurement can be performed to find out if a state is symmetric or antisymmetric. Furthermore, the equivalence of the particles indicates that the Hamiltonian can be written in a symmetrical form, such as
It is possible to show that such Hamiltonians satisfy the commutation relation
According to the Heisenberg equation, this means that the value of "P" is a constant of motion. If the quantum state is initially symmetric (antisymmetric), it will remain symmetric (antisymmetric) as the system evolves. Mathematically, this says that the state vector is confined to one of the two eigenspaces of "P", and is not allowed to range over the entire Hilbert space. Thus, that eigenspace might as well be treated as the actual Hilbert space of the system. This is the idea behind the definition of Fock space.
The choice of symmetry or antisymmetry is determined by the species of particle. For example, symmetric states must always be used when describing photons or helium-4 atoms, and antisymmetric states when describing electrons or protons.
Particles which exhibit symmetric states are called bosons. The nature of symmetric states has important consequences for the statistical properties of systems composed of many identical bosons. These statistical properties are described as Bose–Einstein statistics.
Particles which exhibit antisymmetric states are called fermions. Antisymmetry gives rise to the Pauli exclusion principle, which forbids identical fermions from sharing the same quantum state. Systems of many identical fermions are described by Fermi–Dirac statistics.
Parastatistics are also possible.
In certain two-dimensional systems, mixed symmetry can occur. These exotic particles are known as anyons, and they obey fractional statistics. Experimental evidence for the existence of anyons exists in the fractional quantum Hall effect, a phenomenon observed in the two-dimensional electron gases that form the inversion layer of MOSFETs. There is another type of statistic, known as braid statistics, which are associated with particles known as plektons.
The spin-statistics theorem relates the exchange symmetry of identical particles to their spin. It states that bosons have integer spin, and fermions have half-integer spin. Anyons possess fractional spin.
The above discussion generalizes readily to the case of "N" particles. Suppose there are "N" particles with quantum numbers "n"1, "n"2, ..., nN. If the particles are bosons, they occupy a totally symmetric state, which is symmetric under the exchange of "any two" particle labels:
Here, the sum is taken over all different states under permutations "p" acting on "N" elements. The square root left to the sum is a normalizing constant. The quantity "mn" stands for the number of times each of the single-particle states "n" appears in the "N"-particle state. Note that "∑n mn = N".
In the same vein, fermions occupy totally antisymmetric states:
Here, is the sign of each permutation (i.e.formula_18 if formula_19 is composed of an even number of transpositions, and formula_20 if odd). Note that there is no formula_21 term, because each single-particle state can appear only once in a fermionic state. Otherwise the sum would again be zero due to the antisymmetry, thus representing a physically impossible state. This is the Pauli exclusion principle for many particles.
These states have been normalized so that
Suppose there is a system of "N" bosons (fermions) in the symmetric (antisymmetric) state
and a measurement is performed on some other set of discrete observables, "m". In general, this yields some result "m1" for one particle, "m2" for another particle, and so forth. If the particles are bosons (fermions), the state after the measurement must remain symmetric (antisymmetric), i.e.
The probability of obtaining a particular result for the "m" measurement is
It can be shown that
which verifies that the total probability is 1. The sum has to be restricted to "ordered" values of "m1", ..., "mN" to ensure that each multi-particle state is not counted more than once.
So far, the discussion has included only discrete observables. It can be extended to continuous observables, such as the position "x".
Recall that an eigenstate of a continuous observable represents an infinitesimal "range" of values of the observable, not a single value as with discrete observables. For instance, if a particle is in a state |"ψ"⟩, the probability of finding it in a region of volume "d"3"x" surrounding some position "x" is
As a result, the continuous eigenstates |"x"⟩ are normalized to the delta function instead of unity:
Symmetric and antisymmetric multi-particle states can be constructed from continuous eigenstates in the same way as before. However, it is customary to use a different normalizing constant:
A many-body wavefunction can be written,
where the single-particle wavefunctions are defined, as usual, by
The most important property of these wavefunctions is that exchanging any two of the coordinate variables changes the wavefunction by only a plus or minus sign. This is the manifestation of symmetry and antisymmetry in the wavefunction representation:
The many-body wavefunction has the following significance: if the system is initially in a state with quantum numbers "n"1, ..., nN, and a position measurement is performed, the probability of finding particles in infinitesimal volumes near "x"1, "x"2, ..., "x"N is
The factor of "N"! comes from our normalizing constant, which has been chosen so that, by analogy with single-particle wavefunctions,
Because each integral runs over all possible values of "x", each multi-particle state appears "N"! times in the integral. In other words, the probability associated with each event is evenly distributed across "N"! equivalent points in the integral space. Because it is usually more convenient to work with unrestricted integrals than restricted ones, the normalizing constant has been chosen to reflect this.
Finally, antisymmetric wavefunction can be written as the determinant of a matrix, known as a Slater determinant:
The Hilbert space for formula_39 particles is given by the tensor product formula_40. The permutation group of formula_41 acts on this space by permuting the entries. By definition the expectation values for an observable formula_42 of formula_39 indistinguishable particles should be invariant under these permutation. This means that for all formula_44 and formula_45
or equivalently for each formula_45
Two states are equivalent whenever their expectation values coincide for all observables. If we restrict to observables of formula_49 identical particles, and hence observables satisfying the equation above, we find that the following states (after normalization) are equivalent
The equivalence classes are in bijective relation with irreducible subspaces of formula_40 under formula_41.
Two obvious irreducible subspaces are the one dimensional symmetric/bosonic subspace and anti-symmetric/fermionic subspace. There are however more types of irreducible subspaces. States associated with these other irreducible subspaces are called parastatistic states. Young tableaux provide a way to classify all of these irreducible subspaces.
The indistinguishability of particles has a profound effect on their statistical properties. To illustrate this, consider a system of "N" distinguishable, non-interacting particles. Once again, let "n""j" denote the state (i.e. quantum numbers) of particle "j". If the particles have the same physical properties, the "n""j"'s run over the same range of values. Let "ε"("n") denote the energy of a particle in state "n". As the particles do not interact, the total energy of the system is the sum of the single-particle energies. The partition function of the system is
where "k" is Boltzmann's constant and "T" is the temperature. This expression can be factored to obtain
where
If the particles are identical, this equation is incorrect. Consider a state of the system, described by the single particle states ["n"1, ..., "n""N"]. In the equation for "Z", every possible permutation of the "n"'s occurs once in the sum, even though each of these permutations is describing the same multi-particle state. Thus, the number of states has been over-counted.
If the possibility of overlapping states is neglected, which is valid if the temperature is high, then the number of times each state is counted is approximately "N"!. The correct partition function is
Note that this "high temperature" approximation does not distinguish between fermions and bosons.
The discrepancy in the partition functions of distinguishable and indistinguishable particles was known as far back as the 19th century, before the advent of quantum mechanics. It leads to a difficulty known as the Gibbs paradox. Gibbs showed that in the equation "Z" = "ξ""N", the entropy of a classical ideal gas is
where "V" is the volume of the gas and "f" is some function of "T" alone. The problem with this result is that "S" is not extensive – if "N" and "V" are doubled, "S" does not double accordingly. Such a system does not obey the postulates of thermodynamics.
Gibbs also showed that using "Z" = "ξ""N"/"N"! alters the result to
which is perfectly extensive. However, the reason for this correction to the partition function remained obscure until the discovery of quantum mechanics.
There are important differences between the statistical behavior of bosons and fermions, which are described by Bose–Einstein statistics and Fermi–Dirac statistics respectively. Roughly speaking, bosons have a tendency to clump into the same quantum state, which underlies phenomena such as the laser, Bose–Einstein condensation, and superfluidity. Fermions, on the other hand, are forbidden from sharing quantum states, giving rise to systems such as the Fermi gas. This is known as the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and is responsible for much of chemistry, since the electrons in an atom (fermions) successively fill the many states within shells rather than all lying in the same lowest energy state.
The differences between the statistical behavior of fermions, bosons, and distinguishable particles can be illustrated using a system of two particles. The particles are designated A and B. Each particle can exist in two possible states, labelled formula_59 and formula_60, which have the same energy.
The composite system can evolve in time, interacting with a noisy environment. Because the formula_59 and formula_60 states are energetically equivalent, neither state is favored, so this process has the effect of randomizing the states. (This is discussed in the article on quantum entanglement.) After some time, the composite system will have an equal probability of occupying each of the states available to it. The particle states are then measured.
If A and B are distinguishable particles, then the composite system has four distinct states: formula_63, formula_64, formula_65, and formula_66. The probability of obtaining two particles in the formula_59 state is 0.25; the probability of obtaining two particles in the formula_60 state is 0.25; and the probability of obtaining one particle in the formula_59 state and the other in the formula_60 state is 0.5.
If A and B are identical bosons, then the composite system has only three distinct states: formula_63, formula_64, and formula_73. When the experiment is performed, the probability of obtaining two particles in the formula_59 state is now 0.33; the probability of obtaining two particles in the formula_60 state is 0.33; and the probability of obtaining one particle in the formula_59 state and the other in the formula_60 state is 0.33. Note that the probability of finding particles in the same state is relatively larger than in the distinguishable case. This demonstrates the tendency of bosons to "clump."
If A and B are identical fermions, there is only one state available to the composite system: the totally antisymmetric state formula_78. When the experiment is performed, one particle is always in the formula_59 state and the other is in the formula_60 state.
The results are summarized in Table 1:
As can be seen, even a system of two particles exhibits different statistical behaviors between distinguishable particles, bosons, and fermions. In the articles on Fermi–Dirac statistics and Bose–Einstein statistics, these principles are extended to large number of particles, with qualitatively similar results.
To understand why particle statistics work the way that they do, note first that particles are point-localized excitations and that particles that are spacelike separated do not interact. In a flat "d"-dimensional space "M", at any given time, the configuration of two identical particles can be specified as an element of "M" × "M". If there is no overlap between the particles, so that they do not interact directly, then their locations must belong to the space the subspace with coincident points removed. The element describes the configuration with particle I at x and particle II at y, while describes the interchanged configuration. With identical particles, the state described by ought to be indistinguishable from the state described by . Now consider the homotopy class of continuous paths from to , within the space . If "M" is R"d" where , then this homotopy class only has one element. If "M" is R2, then this homotopy class has countably many elements (i.e. a counterclockwise interchange by half a turn, a counterclockwise interchange by one and a half turns, two and a half turns, etc., a clockwise interchange by half a turn, etc.). In particular, a counterclockwise interchange by half a turn is "not" homotopic to a clockwise interchange by half a turn. Lastly, if "M" is R, then this homotopy class is empty.
Suppose first that . The universal covering space of which is none other than itself, only has two points which are physically indistinguishable from , namely itself and . So, the only permissible interchange is to swap both particles. This interchange is an involution, so its only effect is to multiply the phase by a square root of 1. If the root is +1, then the points have Bose statistics, and if the root is −1, the points have Fermi statistics.
In the case "M" = R2, the universal covering space of has infinitely many points that are physically indistinguishable from . This is described by the infinite cyclic group generated by making a counterclockwise half-turn interchange. Unlike the previous case, performing this interchange twice in a row does not recover the original state; so such an interchange can generically result in a multiplication by exp("iθ") for any real "θ" (by unitarity, the absolute value of the multiplication must be 1). This is called anyonic statistics. In fact, even with two "distinguishable" particles, even though is now physically distinguishable from , the universal covering space still contains infinitely many points which are physically indistinguishable from the original point, now generated by a counterclockwise rotation by one full turn. This generator, then, results in a multiplication by exp("iφ"). This phase factor here is called the mutual statistics.
Finally, in the case "M" = R, the space is not connected, so even if particle I and particle II are identical, they can still be distinguished via labels such as "the particle on the left" and "the particle on the right". There is no interchange symmetry here.
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Interstitial cystitis
Interstitial cystitis (IC), also known as bladder pain syndrome (BPS), is a type of chronic pain that affects the bladder. Symptoms include feeling the need to urinate right away, needing to urinate often, and pain with sex. IC/BPS is associated with depression and lower quality of life. Many of those affected also have irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia.
The cause of IC/BPS is unknown. While it can, it does not typically run in a family. The diagnosis is usually based on the symptoms after ruling out other conditions. Typically the urine culture is negative. Ulceration or inflammation may be seen on cystoscopy. Other conditions which can produce similar symptoms include urinary tract infection (UTI), overactive bladder, sexually transmitted infections, endometriosis, bladder cancer, and prostatitis.
There is no cure for interstitial cystitis. Treatments that may improve symptoms include lifestyle changes, medications, or procedures. Lifestyle changes may include stopping smoking and reducing stress. Medications may include ibuprofen, pentosan polysulfate, or amitriptyline. Procedures may include bladder distention, nerve stimulation, or surgery. Pelvic floor exercises and long term antibiotics are not recommended.
In the United States and Europe, it is estimated that around 0.5% of people are affected. Women are affected about five times as often as men. Onset is typically in middle age. The term "interstitial cystitis" first came into use in 1887.
The most common symptoms of IC/BPS are suprapubic pain, urinary frequency, painful sexual intercourse, and waking up from sleep to urinate.
In general, symptoms may include painful urination described as a burning sensation in the urethra during urination, pelvic pain that is worsened with the consumption of certain foods or drinks, urinary urgency, and pressure in the bladder or pelvis. Other frequently described symptoms are urinary hesitancy (needing to wait for the urinary stream to begin, often caused by pelvic floor dysfunction and tension), and discomfort and difficulty driving, working, exercising, or traveling. Pelvic pain experienced by those with IC typically worsens with filling of the urinary bladder and may improve with urination.
During cystoscopy, 5–10% of people with IC are found to have Hunner's ulcers. A person with IC may have discomfort only in the urethra, while another might struggle with pain in the entire pelvis. Interstitial cystitis symptoms usually fall into one of two patterns: significant suprapubic pain with little frequency or a lesser amount of suprapubic pain but with increased urinary frequency.
Some people with IC/BPS have been diagnosed with other conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, allergies, Sjögren syndrome, which raises the possibility that interstitial cystitis may be caused by mechanisms that cause these other conditions. There is also some evidence of an association between urologic pain syndromes, such as IC/BPS and CP/CPPS, with non-celiac gluten sensitivity in some people.
In addition, men with IC/PBS are frequently diagnosed as having chronic nonbacterial prostatitis, and there is an extensive overlap of symptoms and treatment between the two conditions, leading researchers to posit that the conditions may share the same cause and pathology.
The cause of IC/BPS is currently unknown. However, several explanations have been proposed and include the following: autoimmune theory, nerve theory, mast cell theory, leaky lining theory, infection theory, and a theory of production of a toxic substance in the urine. Other suggested etiological causes are neurologic, allergic, genetic, and stress-psychological. In addition, recent research shows that those with IC may have a substance in the urine that inhibits the growth of cells in the bladder epithelium. An infection may then predispose those people to develop IC. Current evidence from clinical and laboratory studies confirms that mast cells play a central role in IC/BPS possibly due to their ability to release histamine and cause pain, swelling, scarring, and interfere with healing. Research has shown a proliferation of nerve fibers is present in the bladders of people with IC which is absent in the bladders of people who have not been diagnosed with IC.
Regardless of the origin, most people with IC/BPS struggle with a damaged urothelium, or bladder lining. When the surface glycosaminoglycan (GAG) layer is damaged (via a urinary tract infection (UTI), excessive consumption of coffee or sodas, traumatic injury, etc.), urinary chemicals can "leak" into surrounding tissues, causing pain, inflammation, and urinary symptoms. Oral medications like pentosan polysulfate and medications placed directly into the bladder via a catheter sometimes work to repair and rebuild this damaged/wounded lining, allowing for a reduction in symptoms. Most literature supports the belief that IC's symptoms are associated with a defect in the bladder epithelium lining, allowing irritating substances in the urine to penetrate into the bladder—essentially, a breakdown of the bladder lining (also known as the adherence theory). Deficiency in this glycosaminoglycan layer on the surface of the bladder results in increased permeability of the underlying submucosal tissues.
GP51 has been identified as a possible urinary biomarker for IC with significant variations in GP51 levels in those with IC when compared to individuals without interstitial cystitis.
Numerous studies have noted the link between IC, anxiety, stress, hyper-responsiveness, and panic. Another proposed cause for interstitial cystitis is that the body's immune system attacks the bladder. Biopsies on the bladder walls of people with IC usually contain mast cells. Mast cells containing histamine packets gather when an allergic reaction is occurring. The body identifies the bladder wall as a foreign agent, and the histamine packets burst open and attack. The body attacks itself, which is the basis of autoimmune disorders. Additionally, IC may be triggered by an unknown toxin or stimulus which causes nerves in the bladder wall to fire uncontrollably. When they fire, they release substances called neuropeptides that induce a cascade of reactions that cause pain in the bladder wall.
Some genetic subtypes, in some people, have been linked to the disorder.
A diagnosis of IC/BPS is one of exclusion, as well as a review of clinical symptoms. The AUA Guidelines recommend starting with a careful history of the person, physical examination and laboratory tests to assess and document symptoms of IC, as well as other potential disorders.
The KCl test, also known as the "potassium sensitivity test", is no longer recommended. The test uses a mild potassium solution to evaluate the integrity of the bladder wall. Though the latter is not specific for IC/BPS, it has been determined to be helpful in predicting the use of compounds, such as pentosan polysulphate, which are designed to help repair the GAG layer.
For complicated cases, the use of hydrodistention with cystoscopy may be helpful. Researchers, however, determined that this visual examination of the bladder wall after stretching the bladder was not specific for IC/BPS and that the test, itself, can contribute to the development of small glomerulations (petechial hemorrhages) often found in IC/BPS. Thus, a diagnosis of IC/BPS is one of exclusion, as well as a review of clinical symptoms.
In 2006, the ESSIC society proposed more rigorous and demanding diagnostic methods with specific classification criteria so that it cannot be confused with other, similar conditions. Specifically, they require that a person must have pain associated with the bladder, accompanied by one other urinary symptom. Thus, a person with just frequency or urgency would be excluded from a diagnosis. Secondly, they strongly encourage the exclusion of confusable diseases through an extensive and expensive series of tests including (A) a medical history and physical exam, (B) a dipstick urinalysis, various urine cultures, and a serum PSA in men over 40, (C) flowmetry and post-void residual urine volume by ultrasound scanning and (D) cystoscopy. A diagnosis of IC/BPS would be confirmed with a hydrodistention during cystoscopy with biopsy.
They also propose a ranking system based upon the physical findings in the bladder. People would receive a numeric and letter based score based upon the severity of their disease as found during the hydrodistention. A score of 1–3 would relate to the severity of the disease and a rating of A–C represents biopsy findings. Thus, a person with 1A would have very mild symptoms and disease while a person with 3C would have the worst possible symptoms. Widely recognized scoring systems such as the O'Leary Sant symptom and problem score have emerged to evaluate the severity of IC symptoms such as pain and urinary symptoms.
The symptoms of IC/BPS are often misdiagnosed as a urinary tract infection. However, IC/BPS has not been shown to be caused by a bacterial infection and antibiotics are an ineffective treatment. IC/BPS is commonly misdiagnosed as chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS) in men, and endometriosis and uterine fibroids (in women).
In 2011, the American Urological Association released consensus-based guideline for the diagnosis and treatment of IC.
They include treatments ranging from conservative to more invasive:
The AUA guidelines also listed several discontinued treatments, including long-term oral antibiotics, intravesical bacillus Calmette Guerin, intravesical resiniferatoxin), high-pressure and long-duration hydrodistention, and systemic glucocorticoids.
Bladder distension while under general anesthesia, also known as hydrodistention (a procedure which stretches the bladder capacity), has shown some success in reducing urinary frequency and giving short-term pain relief to those with IC. However, it is unknown exactly how this procedure causes pain relief. Recent studies show pressure on pelvic trigger points can relieve symptoms. The relief achieved by bladder distensions is only temporary (weeks or months), so is not viable as a long-term treatment for IC/BPS. The proportion of people with IC/BPS who experience relief from hydrodistention is currently unknown and evidence for this modality is limited by a lack of properly controlled studies. Bladder rupture and sepsis may be associated with prolonged, high-pressure hydrodistention.
Bladder instillation of medication is one of the main forms of treatment of interstitial cystitis, but evidence for its effectiveness is currently limited. Advantages of this treatment approach include direct contact of the medication with the bladder and low systemic side effects due to poor absorption of the medication. Single medications or a mixture of medications are commonly used in bladder instillation preparations. DMSO is the only approved bladder instillation for IC/BPS yet it is much less frequently used in urology clinics.
A 50% solution of DMSO had the potential to create irreversible muscle contraction. However, a lesser solution of 25% was found to be reversible. Long-term use of DMSO is questionable, as its mechanism of action is not fully understood though DMSO is thought to inhibit mast cells and may have anti-inflammatory, muscle-relaxing, and analgesic effects. Other agents used for bladder instillations to treat interstitial cystitis include: heparin, lidocaine, chondroitin sulfate, hyaluronic acid, pentosan polysulfate, oxybutynin, and botulinum toxin A. Preliminary evidence suggests these agents are efficacious in reducing symptoms of interstitial cystitis, but further study with larger, randomized, controlled clinical trials is needed.
Diet modification is often recommended as a first-line method of self-treatment for interstitial cystitis, though rigorous controlled studies examining the impact diet has on interstitial cystitis signs and symptoms are currently lacking. Individuals with interstitial cystitis often experience an increase in symptoms when they consume certain foods and beverages. Avoidance of these potential trigger foods and beverages such as caffeine-containing beverages including coffee, tea, and soda, alcoholic beverages, chocolate, citrus fruits, hot peppers, and artificial sweeteners may be helpful in alleviating symptoms. Diet triggers vary between individuals with IC; the best way for a person to discover his or her own triggers is to use an elimination diet. Sensitivity to trigger foods may be reduced if calcium glycerophosphate and/or sodium bicarbonate is consumed. The foundation of therapy is a modification of diet to help people avoid those foods which can further irritate the damaged bladder wall.
The mechanism by which dietary modification benefits people with IC is unclear. Integration of neural signals from pelvic organs may mediate the effects of diet on symptoms of IC.
The antihistamine hydroxyzine failed to demonstrate superiority over placebo in treatment of people with IC in a randomized, controlled, clinical trial.
Amitriptyline has been shown to be effective in reducing symptoms such as chronic pelvic pain and nocturia in many people with IC/BPS with a median dose of 75 mg daily. In one study, the antidepressant duloxetine was found to be ineffective as a treatment, although a patent exists for use of duloxetine in the context of IC, and is known to relieve neuropathic pain. The calcineurin inhibitor cyclosporine A has been studied as a treatment for interstitial cystitis due to its immunosuppressive properties. A prospective randomized study found cyclosporine A to be more effective at treating IC symptoms than pentosan polysulfate, but also had more adverse effects.
Oral pentosan polysulfate is believed to repair the protective glycosaminoglycan coating of the bladder, but studies have encountered mixed results when attempting to determine if the effect is statistically significant compared to placebo.
Urologic pelvic pain syndromes, such as IC/BPS and CP/CPPS, are characterized by pelvic muscle tenderness, and symptoms may be reduced with pelvic myofascial physical therapy.
This may leave the pelvic area in a sensitized condition, resulting in a loop of muscle tension and heightened neurological feedback (neural wind-up), a form of myofascial pain syndrome. Current protocols, such as the Wise–Anderson Protocol, largely focus on stretches to release overtensed muscles in the pelvic or anal area (commonly referred to as trigger points), physical therapy to the area, and progressive relaxation therapy to reduce causative stress.
Pelvic floor dysfunction is a fairly new area of specialty for physical therapists worldwide. The goal of therapy is to relax and lengthen the pelvic floor muscles, rather than to tighten and/or strengthen them as is the goal of therapy for people with urinary incontinence. Thus, traditional exercises such as Kegel exercises, which are used to strengthen pelvic muscles, can provoke pain and additional muscle tension. A specially trained physical therapist can provide direct, hands on evaluation of the muscles, both externally and internally.
Surgery is rarely used for IC/BPS. Surgical intervention is very unpredictable, and is considered a treatment of last resort for severe refractory cases of interstitial cystitis. Some people who opt for surgical intervention continue to experience pain after surgery. Typical surgical interventions for refractory cases of IC/BPS include: bladder augmentation, urinary diversion, transurethral fulguration and resection of ulcers, and bladder removal (cystectomy).
Neuromodulation can be successful in treating IC/BPS symptoms, including pain. One electronic pain-killing option is TENS. Percutaneous tibial nerve stimulation stimulators have also been used, with varying degrees of success. Percutaneous sacral nerve root stimulation was able to produce statistically significant improvements in several parameters, including pain.
There is little evidence looking at the effects of alternative medicine though their use is common. There is tentative evidence that acupuncture may help pain associated with IC/BPS as part of other treatments. Despite a scarcity of controlled studies on alternative medicine and IC/BPS, "rather good results have been obtained" when acupuncture is combined with other treatments.
Biofeedback, a relaxation technique aimed at helping people control functions of the autonomic nervous system, has shown some benefit in controlling pain associated with IC/BPS as part of a multimodal approach that may also include medication or hydrodistention of the bladder.
IC/BPS has a profound impact on quality of life. A 2007 Finnish epidemiologic study showed that two-thirds of women at moderate to high risk of having interstitial cystitis reported impairment in their quality of life and 35% of people with IC reported an impact on their sexual life. A 2012 survey showed that among a group of adult women with symptoms of interstitial cystitis, 11% reported suicidal thoughts in the past two weeks. Other research has shown that the impact of IC/BPS on quality of life is severe and may be comparable to the quality of life experienced in end-stage kidney disease or rheumatoid arthritis.
International recognition of interstitial cystitis has grown and international urology conferences to address the heterogeneity in diagnostic criteria have recently been held. IC/PBS is now recognized with an official disability code in the United States of America.
IC/BPS affects men and women of all cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, and ages. Although the disease was previously believed to be a condition of menopausal women, growing numbers of men and women are being diagnosed in their twenties and younger. IC/BPS is not a rare condition. Early research suggested that the number of IC/BPS cases ranged from 1 in 100,000 to 5.1 in 1,000 of the general population. In recent years, the scientific community has achieved a much deeper understanding of the epidemiology of interstitial cystitis. Recent studies have revealed that between 2.7 and 6.53 million women in the USA have symptoms of IC and up to 12% of women may have early symptoms of IC/BPS. Further study has estimated that the condition is far more prevalent in men than previously thought ranging from 1.8 to 4.2 million men having symptoms of interstitial cystitis.
The condition is officially recognized as a disability in the United States.
Philadelphia surgeon Joseph Parrish published the earliest record of interstitial cystitis in 1836 describing three cases of severe lower urinary tract symptoms without the presence of a bladder stone. The term "interstitial cystitis" was coined by Dr. Alexander Skene in 1887 to describe the disease. In 2002, the United States amended the Social Security Act to include interstitial cystitis as a disability. The first guideline for diagnosis and treatment of interstitial cystitis is released by a Japanese research team in 2009. The American Urological Association released the first American clinical practice guideline for diagnosing and treating IC/BPS in 2011.
Originally called "interstitial cystitis", this disorder was renamed to "interstitial cystitis/bladder pain syndrome" (IC/BPS) in the 2002–2010 timeframe. In 2007, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) began using the umbrella term urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome (UCPPS) to refer to pelvic pain syndromes associated with the bladder (e.g., interstitial cystitis/bladder pain syndrome) and with the prostate gland or pelvis (e.g., chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome).
In 2008, terms currently in use in addition to IC/BPS include "painful bladder syndrome", "bladder pain syndrome" and "hypersensitive bladder syndrome", alone and in a variety of combinations. These different terms are being used in different parts of the world. The term "interstitial cystitis" is the primary term used in ICD-10 and MeSH. Grover et al. said, "The International Continence Society named the disease interstitial cystitis/painful bladder syndrome (IC/PBS) in 2002 [Abrams et al. 2002], while the Multinational Interstitial Cystitis Association have labeled it as painful bladder syndrome/interstitial cystitis (PBS/IC) [Hanno et al. 2005]. Recently, the European Society for the study of Interstitial Cystitis (ESSIC) proposed the moniker, ‘bladder pain syndrome’ (BPS) [van de Merwe et al. 2008]."
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Imperial Chemical Industries
Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was a British chemical company. It was, for much of its history, the largest manufacturer in Britain.
It was formed by the merger of four leading British chemical companies in 1926.
Its headquarters were at Millbank in London. ICI was a constituent of the FT 30 and later the FTSE 100 indices.
ICI made general chemicals, plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals and speciality products, including food ingredients, speciality polymers, electronic materials, fragrances and flavourings.
In 2008, it was acquired by AkzoNobel,
which immediately sold parts of ICI to Henkel, and integrated ICI's remaining operations within its existing organisation.
The company was founded in December 1926 from the merger of four companies: Brunner Mond, Nobel Explosives, the United Alkali Company, and British Dyestuffs Corporation. It established its head office at Millbank in London in 1928.
Competing with DuPont and IG Farben, the new company produced chemicals, explosives, fertilisers, insecticides, dyestuffs, non-ferrous metals, and paints.
In its first year turnover was £27 million.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the company played a key role in the development of new chemical products, including the dyestuff phthalocyanine (1929), the acrylic plastic Perspex (1932), Dulux paints (1932, co-developed with DuPont), polyethylene (1937), and polyethylene terephthalate fibre known as Terylene (1941).
In 1940, ICI started British Nylon Spinners as a joint venture with Courtaulds.
ICI also owned the Sunbeam motorcycle business, which had come with Nobel Industries, and continued to build motorcycles until 1937.
During the Second World War, ICI was involved with the United Kingdom's nuclear weapons programme codenamed Tube Alloys.
In the 1940s and 1950s, the company established its pharmaceutical business and developed a number of key products, including Paludrine (1940s, an anti-malarial drug), halothane (1951, an anaesthetic agent), Inderal (1965, a beta-blocker), tamoxifen (1978, a frequently used drug for breast cancer),
and PEEK (1979, a high performance thermoplastic). ICI formed ICI Pharmaceuticals in 1957.
ICI developed a fabric in the 1950s known as Crimplene, a thick polyester yarn used to make a fabric of the same name.
The resulting cloth is heavy and wrinkle-resistant, and retains its shape well.
The California-based fashion designer Edith Flagg was the first to import this fabric from Britain to the United States.
During the first two years, ICI gave Flagg a large advertising budget to popularise the fabric across America.
In 1960, Paul Chambers became the first chairman appointed from outside the company.
Chambers employed the consultancy firm McKinsey to help with reorganising the company.
His eight-year tenure saw export sales double, but his reputation was severely damaged by a failed takeover bid for Courtaulds in 1961–62. In 1962, ICI developed the controversial herbicide, paraquat.
ICI was confronted with the nationalisation of its operations in Burma on 1 August 1962 as a consequence of the military coup.
In 1964, ICI acquired British Nylon Spinners (BNS), the company it had jointly set up in 1940 with Courtaulds.
ICI surrendered its 37.5 per cent holding in Courtaulds and paid Courtaulds £2 million a year for five years, "to take account of the future development expenditure of Courtaulds in the nylon field."
In return, Courtaulds transferred to ICI their 50 per cent holding in BNS.
BNS was absorbed into ICI's existing polyester operation, ICI Fibres.
The acquisition included BNS production plants in Pontypool, Gloucester and Doncaster, together with research and development in Pontypool.
Early pesticide development included Gramoxone (1962, a herbicide), the insecticides pirimiphos-methyl in 1967 and pirimicarb in 1970, brodifacoum (a rodenticide) was developed in 1974; in the late 1970s, ICI was involved in the early development of synthetic pyrethroid insecticides such as lambda-cyhalothrin.
Peter Allen was appointed chairman between 1968 and 1971.
He presided over the purchase of Viyella.
Profits shrank under his tenure. During his tenure, ICI created the wholly owned subsidiary Cleveland Potash Ltd, for the construction of Boulby Mine in Redcar and Cleveland, North Yorkshire. The first shaft was dug in 1968, with full production from 1976. ICI jointly owned the mine with Anglo American, and then with De Beers, before complete ownership was transferred to Israel Chemicals Ltd in 2002.
Jack Callard was appointed chairman from 1971 to 1975.
He almost doubled company profits between 1972 and 1974, and made ICI Britain's largest exporter.
In 1971, the company acquired Atlas Chemical Industries Inc., a major American competitor.
In 1977, Imperial Metal Industries was divested as an independent quoted company.
From 1982 to 1987, the company was led by the charismatic John Harvey-Jones.
Under his leadership, the company acquired the Beatrice Chemical Division in 1985 and Glidden Coatings & Resins, a leading paints business, in 1986.
In 1991, ICI sold the agricultural and merchandising operations of BritAg and Scottish Agricultural Industries to Norsk Hydro,
and fought off a hostile takeover bid from Hanson, who had acquired 2.8 percent of the company.
It also divested its soda ash products arm to Brunner Mond, ending an association with the trade that had existed since the company's inception, one that had been inherited from the original Brunner, Mond & Co. Ltd.
In 1992, the company sold its nylon business to DuPont.
In 1993, the company de-merged its pharmaceutical bio-science businesses: pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, specialities, seeds and biological products were all transferred into a new and independent company called Zeneca. Zeneca subsequently merged with Astra AB to form AstraZeneca.
Charles Miller Smith was appointed CEO in 1994, one of the few times that someone from outside ICI had been appointed to lead the company, Smith having previously been a director at Unilever.
Shortly afterwards, the company acquired a number of former Unilever businesses in an attempt to move away from its historical reliance on commodity chemicals.
In 1995, ICI acquired the American paint company Grow Group. In 1997, ICI acquired National Starch & Chemical, Quest International, Unichema, and Crosfield, the speciality chemicals businesses of Unilever for $8 billion.
This step was part of a strategy to move away from cyclical bulk chemicals and to progress up the value chain to become a higher growth, higher margin business.
Later that year it went on to buy Rutz & Huber, a Swiss paints business.
Having taken on some £4 billion of debt to finance these acquisitions, the company had to sell off its commodity chemicals businesses:
Having sold much of its historically profitable commodities businesses, and many of the new speciality businesses which it had failed to integrate, the company consisted mainly of the Dulux paints business, which quickly found itself the subject of a takeover by AkzoNobel.
Dutch firm AkzoNobel (owner of Crown Berger paints) bid £7.2 billion (€10.66 billion or $14.5 billion) for ICI in June 2007.
An area of concern about a potential deal was ICI's British pension fund, which had future liabilities of more than £9 billion at the time.
Regulatory issues in the UK and other markets where Dulux and Crown Paints brands each have significant market share were also a cause for concern for the boards of ICI and AkzoNobel.
In the UK, any combined operation without divestments would have seen AkzoNobel have a 54 per cent market share in the paint market.
The initial bid was rejected by the ICI board and the majority of shareholders.
However, a subsequent bid for £8 billion (€11.82 billion) was accepted by ICI in August 2007, pending approval by regulators.
At 8a.m. on 2 January 2008, completion of the takeover of ICI plc by AkzoNobel was announced.
Shareholders of ICI received either £6.70 in cash or AkzoNobel loan notes to the value of £6.70 per one nominal ICI share.
The adhesives business of ICI was transferred to Henkel as a result of the deal,
while AkzoNobel agreed to sell its Crown Paints subsidiary to satisfy the concerns of the European Commissioner for Competition.
The areas of concern regarding the ICI UK pension scheme were addressed by ICI and AkzoNobel.
ICI operated a number of chemical sites around the world.
In the UK, the main plants were as follows:
An ICI subsidiary called Duperial operated in Argentine from 1928 to 1995, when it was renamed ICI.
Established in the city of San Lorenzo, Santa Fe,
it operates an integrated production site with commercial offices in Buenos Aires. Since 2009 it has made sulphuric acid with ISO certification under the company name Akzo Nobel Functional Chemicals S.A.
The subsidiary ICI Australia Ltd established the Dry Creek Saltfields at Dry Creek north of Adelaide, South Australia, in 1940, with an associated soda ash plant at nearby Osborne.
In 1989, these operations were sold to Penrice Soda Products.
An ICI plant was built at Botany Bay in New South Wales in the 1940s and was sold to Orica in 1997.
The plant once manufactured paints, plastics and industrial chemicals such as solvents. It was responsible for the Botany Bay Groundwater Plume contamination of a local aquifer.
The subsidiary ICI New Zealand provided substantial quantities of chemical products - including swimming pool chemicals, commercial healthcare products, herbicides and pesticides for use within New Zealand and the neighboring Pacific Islands.
A fire at the ICI New Zealand store in Mount Wellington, Auckland, on 21 December 1984, killed an ICI employee and caused major health concerns. Over 200 firefighters were exposed to toxic smoke and effluents during the firefighting efforts. Six firefighters retired for medical reasons as a result of the fire. This incident was a major event in the history of the New Zealand Fire Service and subject to a formal investigation, led by future Chief Justice Sian Elias. The fire was a trigger for major reforms of the service; direct consequences included improved protective clothing for firefighters, a standard safety protocol for major incidents, the introduction of dedicated fireground safety officers, and changes to occupational health regulations.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15356
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Imperial Airways
Imperial Airways was the early British commercial long-range airline, operating from 1924 to 1939 and principally serving the British Empire routes to South Africa, India and the Far East, including Australia, Malaya and Hong Kong. The airplanes provided seats for about 20 passengers, typically businessman or colonial administrators. Accidents were frequent: in the first six years, 32 people died in seven incidents. Imperial Airways never achieved the levels of technological innovation of its competitors, and was merged into the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) in 1939. BOAC in turn merged with the British European Airways (BEA) in 1974 to form British Airways.
The establishment of Imperial Airways occurred in the context of facilitating overseas settlement by making travel to and from the colonies quicker, and that flight would also speed up colonial government and trade that was until then dependent upon ships. The launch of the airline followed a burst of air route surveying in the British Empire after the First World War, and after some experimental (and often dangerous) long-distance flying to the margins of Empire.
Imperial Airways was created against a background of stiff competition from French and German airlines that enjoyed heavy government subsidies and following the advice of the government's Hambling Committee (formally known as the C.A.T Subsidies Committee) under Sir Herbert Hambling. The committee, set up on 2 January 1923, produced a report on 15 February 1923 recommending that four of the largest existing airlines, the Instone Air Line Company, owned by shipping magnate Samuel Instone, Noel Pemberton Billing's British Marine Air Navigation (part of the Supermarine flying-boat company), the Daimler Airway, under the management of George Edward Woods, and Handley Page Transport Co Ltd., should be merged.
It was hoped that this would create a company which could compete against French and German competition and would be strong enough to develop Britain's external air services while minimizing government subsidies for duplicated services. With this in view, a £1m subsidy over ten years was offered to encourage the merger. Agreement was made between the President of the Air Council and the British, Foreign and Colonial Corporation on 3 December 1923 for the company, under the title of the 'Imperial Air Transport Company' to acquire existing air transport services in the UK. The agreement set out the government subsidies for the new company: £137,000 in the first year diminishing to £32,000 in the tenth year as well as minimum mileages to be achieved and penalties if these weren't met.
Imperial Airways Limited was formed on 31 March 1924 with equipment from each contributing concern: British Marine Air Navigation Company Ltd, the Daimler Airway, Handley Page Transport Ltd and the Instone Air Line Ltd. Sir Eric Geddes was appointed the chairman of the board with one director from each of the merged companies. The government had appointed two directors, Hambling (who was also President of the Institute of Bankers) and Major John Hills, a former Treasury Financial Secretary.
The land operations were based at Croydon Airport to the south of London. IAL immediately discontinued its predecessors' service to points north of London, the airline being focused on international and imperial service rather than domestic. Thereafter the only IAL aircraft operating 'North of Watford' were charter flights.
Industrial troubles with the pilots delayed the start of services until 26 April 1924, when a daily London–Paris route was opened with a de Havilland DH.34. Thereafter the task of expanding the routes between England and the Continent began, with Southampton–Guernsey on 1 May 1924, London-Brussels–Cologne on 3 May, London–Amsterdam on 2 June 1924, and a summer service from London–Paris–Basel–Zürich on 17 June 1924. The first new airliner ordered by Imperial Airways, was the Handley Page W8f "City of Washington", delivered on 3 November 1924. In the first year of operation the company carried 11,395 passengers and 212,380 letters. In April 1925, the film "The Lost World" became the first film to be screened for passengers on a scheduled airliner flight when it was shown on the London-Paris route.
Between 16 November 1925 and 13 March 1926, Alan Cobham made an Imperial Airways' route survey flight from the UK to Cape Town and back in the Armstrong Siddeley Jaguar–powered de Havilland DH.50J floatplane "G-EBFO". The outward route was London–Paris–Marseille–Pisa–Taranto–Athens–Sollum–Cairo–Luxor–Aswan–Wadi Halfa–Atbara–Khartoum–Malakal–Mongalla–Jinja–Kisumu–Tabora–Abercorn–Ndola–Broken Hill–Livingstone–Bulawayo–Pretoria–Johannesburg–Kimberley–Blomfontein–Cape Town. On his return Cobham was awarded the Air Force Cross for his services to aviation.
On 30 June 1926, Cobham took off from the River Medway at Rochester in "G-EBFO" to make an Imperial Airways route survey for a service to Melbourne, arriving on 15 August 1926. He left Melbourne on 29 August 1926, and, after completing in 320 hours flying time over 78 days, he alighted on the Thames at Westminster on 1 October 1926. Cobham was met by the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Samuel Hoare, and was subsequently knighted by HM King George V.
On 27 December 1926, Imperial Airways de Havilland DH.66 Hercules "G-EBMX City of Delhi" left Croydon for a survey flight to India. The flight reached Karachi on 6 January 1927 and Delhi on 8 January 1927. The aircraft was named by Lady Irwin, wife of the Viceroy, on 10 January 1927. The return flight left on 1 February 1927 and arrived at Heliopolis, Cairo on 7 February 1927. The flying time from Croydon to Delhi was 62 hours 27 minutes and Delhi to Heliopolis 32 hours 50 minutes.
Regular services on the Cairo to Basra route began on 12 January 1927 using DH.66 aircraft, replacing the previous RAF mail flight. Following 2 years of negotiations with the Persian authorities regarding overflight rights, a London to Karachi service started on 30 March 1929, taking 7 days and consisting of a flight from London to Basle, a train to Genoa and a Short S.8 Calcutta flying boats to Alexandria, a train to Cairo and finally a DH.66 flight to Karachi. The route was extended as far as Delhi on 29 December 1929. The route across Europe and the Mediterranean changed many times over the next few years but almost always involved a rail journey.
In April 1931 an experimental London-Australia air mail flight took place; the mail was transferred at the Dutch East Indies, and took 26 days in total to reach Sydney. For the passenger flight leaving London on 1 October 1932, the Eastern route was switched from the Persian to the Arabian side of the Persian Gulf, and Handley Page HP 42 airliners were introduced on the Cairo to Karachi sector. The move saw the establishment of an airport and rest house, Al Mahatta Fort, in the Trucial State of Sharjah now part of the United Arab Emirates.
On 29 May 1933 an England to Australia survey flight took off, operated by Imperial Airways Armstrong Whitworth Atalanta G-ABTL "Astraea". Major H G Brackley, Imperial Airways' Air Superintendent, was in charge of the flight. "Astraea" flew Croydon-Paris-Lyon-Rome-Brindisi-Athens-Alexandria-Cairo where it followed the normal route to Karachi then onwards to Jodhpur-Delhi-Calcutta-Akyab-Rangoon-Bangkok-Prachuab-Alor Setar-Singapore-Palembang-Batavia-Sourabaya-Bima-Koepang-Bathurst Island-Darwin-Newcastle Waters-Camooweal-Cloncurry-Longreach-Roma-Toowoomba reaching Eagle Farm, Brisbane on 23 June. Sydney was visited on 26 June, Canberra on 28 June and Melbourne on 29 June.
There followed a rapid eastern extension. The first London to Calcutta service departed on 1 July 1933, the first London to Rangoon service on 23 September 1933, the first London to Singapore service on 9 December 1933, and the first London to Brisbane service on 8 December 1934, with Qantas responsible for the Singapore to Brisbane sector. (The 1934 start was for mail; passenger flights to Brisbane began the following April.) The first London to Hong Kong passengers departed London on 14 March 1936 following the establishment of a branch from Penang to Hong Kong.
On 28 February 1931 a weekly service began between London and Mwanza on Lake Victoria in Tanganyika as part of the proposed route to Cape Town. On 9 December 1931 the Imperial Airways' service for Central Africa was extended experimentally to Cape Town for the carriage of Christmas mail. The aircraft used on the last sector, DH66 G-AARY "City of Karachi" arrived in Cape Town on 21 December 1931. On 20 January 1932 a mail-only route to London to Cape Town was opened. On 27 April this route was opened to passengers and took 10 days. In early 1933 Atalantas replaced the DH.66s on the Kisumu to Cape Town sector of the London to Cape Town route. On 9 February 1936 the trans-Africa route was opened by Imperial Airways between Khartoum and Kano in Nigeria. This route was extended to Lagos on 15 October 1936.
In 1937 with the introduction of Short Empire flying boats built at Short Brothers, Imperial Airways could offer a through-service from Southampton to the Empire. The journey to the Cape was via Marseille, Rome, Brindisi, Athens, Alexandria, Khartoum, Port Bell, Kisumu and onwards by land-based craft to Nairobi, Mbeya and eventually Cape Town. Survey flights were also made across the Atlantic and to New Zealand. By mid-1937 Imperial had completed its thousandth service to the Empire. Starting in 1938 Empire flying boats also flew between Britain and Australia via India and the Middle East.
In March 1939 three Shorts a week left Southampton for Australia, reaching Sydney after ten days of flying and nine overnight stops. Three more left for South Africa, taking six flying days to Durban.
Imperial's aircraft were small, most seating fewer than twenty passengers; about 50,000 passengers used Imperial Airways in the 1930s. Most passengers on intercontinental routes or on services within and between British colonies were men doing colonial administration, business or research. To begin with only the wealthy could afford to fly, but passenger lists gradually diversified. Travel experiences related to flying low and slow, and were reported enthusiastically in newspapers, magazines and books. There was opportunity for sightseeing from the air and at stops.
Imperial Airways stationed its all-male flight deck crew, cabin crew and ground crew along the length of its routes. Specialist engineers and inspectors – and ground crew on rotation or leave – travelled on the airline without generating any seat revenue. Several air crew lost their lives in accidents. At the end of the 1930s crew numbers approximated 3,000. All crew were expected to be ambassadors for Britain and the British Empire.
In 1934 the Government began negotiations with Imperial Airways to establish a service (Empire Air Mail Scheme) to carry mail by air on routes served by the airline. Indirectly these negotiations led to the dismissal in 1936 of Sir Christopher Bullock, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Air Ministry, who was found by a Board of Inquiry to have abused his position in seeking a position on the board of the company while these negotiations were in train. The Government, including the Prime Minister, regretted the decision to dismiss him, later finding that, in fact, no corruption was alleged and sought Bullock's reinstatement which he declined.
The Empire Air Mail Programme started in July 1937, delivering anywhere for 1 d./oz. By mid-1938 a hundred tons of mail had been delivered to India and a similar amount to Africa. In the same year, construction was started on the Empire Terminal in Victoria, London, designed by A. Lakeman and with a statue by Eric Broadbent, "Speed Wings Over the World" gracing the portal above the main entrance. From the terminal there were train connections to Imperial's flying boats at Southampton and coaches to its landplane base at Croydon Airport. The terminal operated as recently as 1980.
To help promote use of the Air Mail service, in June and July 1939, Imperial Airways participated with Pan American Airways in providing a special "around the world" service; Imperial carried the souvenir mail from Foynes, Ireland, to Hong Kong, out of the eastbound New York to New York route. Pan American provided service from New York to Foynes (departing 24 June, via the first flight of Northern FAM 18) and Hong Kong to San Francisco (via FAM 14), and United Airlines carried it on the final leg from San Francisco to New York, arriving on 28 July.
Captain H.W.C. Alger was the pilot for the inaugural air mail flight carrying mail from England to Australia for the first time on the Short Empire flyingboat "Castor" for Imperial Airways' Empires Air Routes, in 1937.
In November 2016, 80 years later, the Crete2Cape Vintage Air Rally flew this old route with fifteen vintage aeroplanes - a celebration of the skill and determination of these early aviators.
Before the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939, the British government had already implemented the Air Navigation (Restriction in Time of War) Order 1939. That ordered military takeover of most civilian airfields in the UK, cessation of all private flying without individual flight permits, and other emergency measures. It was administered by a statutory department of the Air Ministry titled National Air Communications (NAC). By 1 September 1939, the aircraft and administrations of Imperial Airways and British Airways Ltd were physically transferred to Bristol (Whitchurch) Airport, to be operated jointly by NAC. On 1 April 1940, Imperial Airways Ltd and British Airways Ltd were officially combined into a new company, British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), that had already been formed on 24 November 1939 with retrospective financial arrangements.
Imperial Airways operated many types of aircraft from its formation on 1 April 1924 until 1 April 1940 when all aircraft still in service were transferred to BOAC.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15357
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Insanity defense
The insanity defense, also known as the mental disorder defense, is an affirmative defense by excuse in a criminal case, arguing that the defendant is not responsible for his or her actions due to an episodic or persistent psychiatric disease at the time of the criminal act. This is contrasted with an excuse of provocation, in which the defendant is responsible, but the responsibility is lessened due to a temporary mental state. It is also contrasted with a finding that a defendant cannot stand trial in a criminal case because a mental disease prevents them from effectively assisting counsel, from a civil finding in trusts and estates where a will is nullified because it was made when a mental disorder prevented a testator from recognizing the natural objects of their bounty, and from involuntary civil commitment to a mental institution, when anyone is found to be gravely disabled or to be a danger to themselves or to others.
Exemption from full criminal punishment on such grounds dates back to at least the Code of Hammurabi. Legal definitions of insanity or mental disorder are varied, and include the M'Naghten Rule, the Durham rule, the 1953 British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment report, the ALI rule (American Legal Institute Model Penal Code rule), and other provisions, often relating to a lack of "mens rea" ("guilty mind"). In the criminal laws of Australia and Canada, statutory legislation enshrines the "M'Naghten Rules", with the terms defense of mental disorder, defense of mental illness or not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder employed. Being incapable of distinguishing right from wrong is one basis for being found to be legally insane as a criminal defense. It originated in the "M'Naghten Rule", and has been reinterpreted and modernized through more recent cases, such as "People v. Serravo".
In the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States, use of the defense is rare; however, since the Criminal Procedure (Insanity and Unfitness to Plead) Act 1991, insanity pleas have steadily increased in the UK. Mitigating factors, including things not eligible for the insanity defense such as intoxication (or, more frequently, diminished capacity), may lead to reduced charges or reduced sentences.
The defense is based on evaluations by forensic mental health professionals with the appropriate test according to the jurisdiction. Their testimony guides the jury, but they are not allowed to testify to the accused's criminal responsibility, as this is a matter for the jury to decide. Similarly, mental health practitioners are restrained from making a judgment on the "ultimate issue"—whether the defendant is insane.
Some jurisdictions require the evaluation to address the defendant's ability to control their behavior at the time of the offense (the volitional limb). A defendant claiming the defense is pleading "not guilty by reason of insanity" (NGRI) or "guilty but insane or mentally ill" in some jurisdictions which, if successful, may result in the defendant being committed to a psychiatric facility for an indeterminate period.
The United States Supreme Court (in "Penry v. Lynaugh") and the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (in "Bigby v. Dretke") have been clear in their decisions that jury instructions in death penalty cases that do not ask about mitigating factors regarding the defendant's mental health violate the defendant's Eighth Amendment rights, saying that the jury is to be instructed to consider mitigating factors when answering unrelated questions. This ruling suggests specific explanations to the jury are necessary to weigh mitigating factors.
Diminished responsibility or diminished capacity can be employed as a mitigating factor or partial defense to crimes and, in the United States, is applicable to more circumstances than the insanity defense. The Homicide Act 1957 is the statutory basis for the defense of diminished responsibility in England and Wales, whereas in Scotland it is a product of case law. The number of findings of diminished responsibility has been matched by a fall in unfitness to plead and insanity findings (Walker, 1968). A plea of diminished capacity is different from a plea of insanity in that "reason of insanity" is a full defense while "diminished capacity" is merely a plea to a lesser crime.
"Non compos mentis" (Latin) is a legal term meaning "not of sound mind". "Non compos mentis" derives from the Latin "non" meaning "not", "compos" meaning "having command" or "composed", and "mentis" (genitive singular of "mens"), meaning "of mind". It is the direct opposite of "Compos mentis" (of a sound mind).
Although typically used in law, this term can also be used metaphorically or figuratively; e.g. when one is in a confused state, intoxicated, or not of sound mind. The term may be applied when a determination of competency needs to be made by a physician for purposes of obtaining informed consent for treatments and, if necessary, assigning a surrogate to make health care decisions. While the proper sphere for this determination is in a court of law, this is practically, and most frequently, made by physicians in the clinical setting.
In English law, the rule of "non compos mentis" was most commonly used when the defendant invoked religious or magical explanations for behaviour.
Several cases have ruled that persons found not guilty by reason of insanity may not withdraw the defense in a habeas petition to pursue an alternative, although there have been exceptions in other rulings. In Colorado v. Connelly, 700 A.2d 694 (Conn. App. Ct. 1997), the petitioner who had originally been found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed for ten years to the jurisdiction of a Psychiatric Security Review Board, filed a pro se writ of "habeas corpus" and the court vacated his insanity acquittal. He was granted a new trial and found guilty of the original charges, receiving a prison sentence of 40 years.
In the landmark case of "Frendak v. United States" in 1979, the court ruled that the insanity defense cannot be imposed upon an unwilling defendant if an intelligent defendant voluntarily wishes to forgo the defense.
Those found to have been not guilty by reason of mental disorder or insanity are generally then required to undergo psychiatric treatment in a mental institution, except in the case of temporary insanity (see below). In England and Wales, under the Criminal Procedure (Insanity and Unfitness to Plead) Act of 1991 (amended by the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act, 2004 to remove the option of a guardianship order), the court can mandate a hospital order, a restriction order (where release from hospital requires the permission of the Home Secretary), a "supervision and treatment" order, or an absolute discharge. Unlike defendants who are found guilty of a crime, they are not institutionalized for a fixed period, but rather held in the institution until they are determined not to be a threat. Authorities making this decision tend to be cautious, and as a result, defendants can often be institutionalized for longer than they would have been incarcerated in prison.
In "Foucha v. Louisiana" (1992) the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a person could not be held "indefinitely".
So far, in the United States, those acquitted of a federal offense by reason of insanity have not been able to challenge their psychiatric confinement through a writ of habeas corpus or other remedies. In "Archuleta v. Hedrick", 365 F.3d 644 (8th Cir. 2004), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit the court ruled persons found not guilty by reason of insanity and later want to challenge their confinement may not attack their initial successful insanity defense:
An important distinction to be made is the difference between competency and criminal responsibility.
Competency largely deals with the defendant's present condition, while criminal responsibility addresses the condition at the time the crime was committed.
In the United States, a trial in which the insanity defense is invoked typically involves the testimony of psychiatrists or psychologists who will, as expert witnesses, present opinions on the defendant's state of mind at the time of the offense.
Therefore, a person whose mental disorder is not in dispute is determined to be sane if the court decides that despite a "mental illness" the defendant was responsible for the acts committed and will be treated in court as a normal defendant. If the person has a mental illness and it is determined that the mental illness interfered with the person's ability to determine right from wrong (and other associated criteria a jurisdiction may have) and if the person is willing to plead guilty or is proven guilty in a court of law, some jurisdictions have an alternative option known as either a Guilty but Mentally Ill (GBMI) or a Guilty but Insane verdict. The GBMI verdict is available as an alternative to, rather than in lieu of, a "not guilty by reason of insanity" verdict. Michigan (1975) was the first state to create a GBMI verdict, after two prisoners released after being found NGRI committed violent crimes within a year of release, one raping two women and the other killing his wife.
The notion of temporary insanity argues that a defendant "was" insane during the commission of a crime, but they later regained their sanity after the criminal act was carried out. This legal defense is commonly used to defend individuals that have committed crimes of passion. The defense was first successfully used by U.S. Congressman Daniel Sickles of New York in 1859 after he had killed his wife's lover, Philip Barton Key.
The concept of defense by insanity has existed since ancient Greece and Rome. However, in colonial America a delusional Dorothy Talbye was hanged in 1638 for murdering her daughter, as at the time Massachusetts's common law made no distinction between insanity (or mental illness) and criminal behavior. Edward II, under English Common law, declared that a person was insane if their mental capacity was no more than that of a "wild beast" (in the sense of a dumb animal, rather than being frenzied). The first complete transcript of an insanity trial dates to 1724. It is likely that the insane, like those under 14, were spared trial by ordeal. When trial by jury replaced this, the jury members were expected to find the insane guilty but then refer the case to the King for a Royal Pardon. From 1500 onwards, juries could acquit the insane, and detention required a separate civil procedure (Walker, 1985). The Criminal Lunatics Act 1800, passed with retrospective effect following the acquittal of James Hadfield, mandated detention at the regent's pleasure (indefinitely) even for those who, although insane at the time of the offence, were now sane.
The M'Naghten Rules of 1843 were not a codification or definition of insanity but rather the responses of a panel of judges to hypothetical questions posed by Parliament in the wake of Daniel M'Naghten's acquittal for the homicide of Edward Drummond, whom he mistook for British Prime Minister Robert Peel. The rules define the defense as "at the time of committing the act the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or as not to know that what he was doing was wrong." The key is that the defendant could not appreciate the nature of his actions during the commission of the crime.
In "Ford v. Wainwright" 477 U.S. 399 (1986), the US Supreme Court upheld the common law rule that the insane cannot be executed. It further stated that a person under the death penalty is entitled to a competency evaluation and to an evidentiary hearing in court on the question of his competency to be executed.
In "Wainwright v. Greenfield", the Court ruled that it was fundamentally unfair for the prosecutor to comment during the court proceedings on the petitioner's silence invoked as a result of a Miranda warning. The prosecutor had argued that the respondent's silence after receiving Miranda warnings was evidence of his sanity.
In the United States, variances in the insanity defense between states, and in the federal court system, are attributable to differences with respect to three key issues:
In the United States, a criminal defendant may plead insanity in federal court, and in the state courts of every state except for Idaho, Kansas, Montana, and Utah. However, defendants in states that disallow the insanity defense may still be able to demonstrate that a defendant was not capable of forming intent to commit a crime as a result of mental illness.
In "Kahler v. Kansas" (2020), the U.S. Supreme Court held, in a 6–3 ruling, that a state does not violate the Due Process Clause by abolishing an insanity defense based on a defendant's incapacity to distinguish right from wrong. The Court emphasized that state governments have broad discretion to choose laws defining "the precise relationship between criminal culpability and mental illness."
Each state and the federal court system currently uses one of the following "tests" to define insanity for purposes of the insanity defense. Over its decades of use the definition of insanity has been modified by statute, with changes to the availability of the insanity defense, what constitutes legal insanity whether the prosecutor or defendant has the burden of proof, the standard of proof required at trial, trial procedures, and to commitment and release procedures for defendants who have been acquitted based on a finding of insanity.
The guidelines for the "M'Naghten Rules", state, "inter alia", and evaluating the criminal responsibility for defendants claiming to be insane were settled in the British courts in the case of Daniel M'Naghten in 1843. M'Naghten was a Scottish woodcutter who killed the secretary to the prime minister, Edward Drummond, in a botched attempt to assassinate the prime minister himself. M'Naghten apparently believed that the prime minister was the architect of the myriad of personal and financial misfortunes that had befallen him. During his trial, nine witnesses testified to the fact that he was insane, and the jury acquitted him, finding him "not guilty by reason of insanity."
The House of Lords asked the judges of the common law courts to answer five questions on insanity as a criminal defence, and the formulation that emerged from their review—that a defendant should not be held responsible for his actions only if, as a result of his mental disease or defect, he (i) did not know that his act would be wrong; or (ii) did not understand the nature and quality of his actions—became the basis of the law governing legal responsibility in cases of insanity in England. Under the rules, loss of control because of mental illness was no defense. The M'Naghten rule was embraced with almost no modification by American courts and legislatures for more than 100 years, until the mid-20th century.
The strict M'Naghten standard for the insanity defense was widely used until the 1950s and the case of "Durham v. United States" case. In the "Durham" case, the court ruled that a defendant is entitled to acquittal if the crime was the "product of" his mental illness (i.e., crime would not have been committed but for the disease). The test, also called the Product Test, is broader than either the M'Naghten test or the irresistible impulse test. The test has more lenient guidelines for the insanity defense, but it addressed the issue of convicting mentally ill defendants, which was allowed under the M'Naghten Rule. However, the Durham standard drew much criticism because of its expansive definition of legal insanity.
The Model Penal Code, published by the American Law Institute, provides a standard for legal insanity that serves as a compromise between the strict M'Naghten Rule, the lenient Durham ruling, and the irresistible impulse test. Under the MPC standard, which represents the modern trend, a defendant is not responsible for criminal conduct "if at the time of such conduct as a result of mental disease or defect he lacks "substantial capacity" either to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law." The test thus takes into account both the cognitive and volitional capacity of insanity.
After the perpetrator of President Reagan's assassination attempt was found not guilty by reason of insanity, Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984. Under this act, the burden of proof was shifted from the prosecution to the defense and the standard of evidence in federal trials was increased from a preponderance of evidence to clear and convincing evidence. The ALI test was discarded in favor of a new test that more closely resembled M'Naghten's. Under this new test only perpetrators suffering from severe mental illnesses at the time of the crime could successfully employ the insanity defense. The defendant's ability to control himself or herself was no longer a consideration.
The Act also curbed the scope of expert psychiatric testimony and adopted stricter procedures regarding the hospitalization and release of those found not guilty by reason of insanity.
As an alternative to the insanity defense, some jurisdictions permit a defendant to plead guilty but mentally ill. A defendant who is found guilty but mentally ill may be sentenced to mental health treatment, at the conclusion of which the defendant will serve the remainder of their sentence in the same manner as any other defendant.
In a majority of states, the burden of proving insanity is placed on the defendant, who must prove insanity by a preponderance of the evidence.
In a minority of states, the burden is placed on the prosecution, who must prove sanity beyond a reasonable doubt.
In federal court, and in Arizona, the burden is placed on the defendant, who must prove insanity by clear and convincing evidence. See 18 U.S.C.S. Sec. 17(b); see also A.R.S. Sec. 13-502(C).
The insanity plea is used in the U.S Criminal Justice System in less than 1% of all criminal cases. Little is known about the criminal justice system and the mentally ill:
Some U.S. states have begun to ban the use of the insanity defense, and in 1994 the Supreme Court denied a petition of certiorari seeking review of a Montana Supreme Court case that upheld Montana's abolition of the defense. Idaho, Kansas, and Utah have also banned the defense. However, a mentally ill defendant/patient can be found unfit to stand trial in these states. In 2001, the Nevada Supreme Court found that their state's abolition of the defense was unconstitutional as a violation of Federal due process. In 2006, the Supreme Court decided "Clark v. Arizona" upholding Arizona's limitations on the insanity defense. In that same ruling, the Court noted "We have never held that the Constitution mandates an insanity defense, nor have we held that the Constitution does not so require." In 2020, the Supreme Court decided "Kahler v. Kansas" upholding Kansas' abolition of the insanity defense, stating that the Constitution does not require Kansas to adopt an insanity test that turns on a defendant's ability to recognize that his crime was morally wrong.
The insanity defense is also complicated because of the underlying differences in philosophy between psychiatrists/psychologists and legal professionals. In the United States, a psychiatrist, psychologist or other mental health professional is often consulted as an expert witness in insanity cases, but the ultimate "legal" judgment of the defendant's sanity is determined by a jury, not by a psychologist. In other words, psychologists provide testimony and professional opinion but are not ultimately responsible for answering legal questions.
In Australia there are nine law units. All may have varying rules (see ). In South Australia, the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA) provides that:
269C—Mental competence
A person is mentally incompetent to commit an offence if, at the time of the conduct alleged to give rise to the offence, the person is suffering from a mental impairment and, in consequence of the mental impairment—
269H—Mental unfitness to stand trial
A person is mentally unfit to stand trial on a charge of an offence if the person's mental processes are so disordered or impaired that the person is—
In Victoria the current defence of mental impairment was introduced in the "Crimes (Mental Impairment and Unfitness to be Tried) Act" 1997 which replaced the common law defence of insanity and indefinite detention at the governor's pleasure with the following:
These requirements are almost identical to the M'Naghten Rules, substituting "mental impairment" for "disease of the mind".
In New South Wales, the defence has been renamed the 'Defence of Mental Illness' in Part 4 of the "Mental Health (Forensic Provisions) Act 1990". However, definitions of the defence are derived from M'Naghten's case and have not been codified. Whether a particular condition amounts to a disease of the mind is not a medical but a legal question to be decided in accordance with the ordinary rules of interpretation. This defence is an exception to the "Woolmington v DPP" (1935) 'golden thread', as the party raising the issue of the defence of mental illness bears the burden of proving this defence on the balance of probabilities. Generally, the defence will raise the issue of insanity. However, the prosecution can raise it in exceptional circumstances: "R v Ayoub (1984)."
Australian cases have further qualified and explained the "M'Naghten Rules". The NSW Supreme Court has held there are two limbs to the "M'Naghten Rules", that the accused did not know what he was doing, or that the accused did not appreciate that what he was doing was morally wrong, in both cases the accused must be operating under a 'defect of reason, from a disease of the mind'. The High Court in "R v Porter" stated that the condition of the accused's mind is relevant only at the time of the actus reus. In "Woodbridge v The Queen" the court stated that a symptom indicating a disease of the mind must be prone to recur and be the result of an underlying pathological infirmity. A ‘defect of reason’ is the inability to think rationally and pertains to incapacity to reason, rather than having unsound ideas or difficulty with such a task. Examples of disease of the mind include Arteriosclerosis (considered so because the hardening of the arteries affects the mind.
The defence of mental disorder is codified in section 16 of the "Criminal Code" which states, in part:
To establish a claim of mental disorder the party raising the issue must show on a balance of probabilities first that the person who committed the act was suffering from a "disease of the mind", and second, that at the time of the offence they were either 1) unable to appreciate the "nature and quality" of the act, or 2) did not know it was "wrong".
The meaning of the word "wrong" was determined in the Supreme Court case of "R. v. Chaulk" [1990] 3 S.C.R. which held that "wrong" was NOT restricted to "legally wrong" but to "morally wrong" as well.
The current legislative scheme was created by the Parliament of Canada after the previous scheme was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Canada in "R. v. Swain". The new provisions also replaced the old insanity defense with the current mental disorder defence.
Once a person is found not criminally responsible ("NCR"), they will have a hearing by a Review Board within 45 days (90 days if the court extends the delay). A Review Board is established under Part XX.1 of the "Criminal Code" and is composed of at least three members, a person who is a judge or eligible to be a judge, a psychiatrist and another expert in a relevant field, such as social work, criminology or psychology. Parties at a Review Board hearing are usually the accused, the Crown and the hospital responsible for the supervision or assessment of the accused. A Review Board is responsible for both accused persons found NCR or accused persons found unfit to stand trial on account of mental disorder. A Review Board dealing with an NCR offender must consider two questions: whether the accused is a "significant threat to the safety of the public" and, if so, what the "least onerous and least restrictive" restrictions on the liberty of the accused should be in order to mitigate such a threat. Proceedings before a Review Board are inquisitorial rather than adversarial. Often the Review Board will be active in conducting an inquiry. Where the Review Board is unable to conclude that the accused is a significant threat to the safety of the public, the review board must grant the accused an absolute discharge, an order essentially terminating the jurisdiction of the criminal law over the accused. Otherwise, the Review Board must order that the accused be either discharged subject to conditions or detained in a hospital, both subject to conditions. The conditions imposed must be the least onerous and least restrictive necessary to mitigate any danger the accused may pose to others.
Since the Review Board is empowered under criminal law powers under s. 91(27) of the "Constitution Act, 1867" the sole justification for its jurisdiction is public safety. Therefore, the nature of the inquiry is the danger the accused may pose to public safety rather than whether the accused is "cured." For instance, many "sick" accused persons are discharged absolutely on the basis that they are not a danger to the public while many "sane" accused are detained on the basis that they are dangerous. Moreover, the notion of "significant threat to the safety of the public" is a "criminal threat." This means that the Review Board must find that the threat posed by the accused is of a criminal nature.
While proceedings before a Review Board are less formal than in court, there are many procedural safeguards available to the accused given the potential indefinite nature of Part XX.1. Any party may appeal against the decision of a Review Board.
In 1992 when the new mental disorder provisions were enacted, Parliament included "capping" provisions which were to be enacted at a later date. These capping provisions limited the jurisdiction of a Review Board over an accused based on the maximum potential sentence had the accused been convicted (e.g. there would be a cap of 5 years if the maximum penalty for the index offence is 5 years). However, these provisions were never proclaimed into force and were subsequently repealed.
A Review Board must hold a hearing every 12 months (unless extended to 24 months) until the accused is discharged absolutely.
The issue of mental disorder may also come into play before a trial even begins if the accused's mental state prevents the accused from being able to appreciate the nature of a trial and to conduct a defence.
An accused who is found to be unfit to stand trial is subject to the jurisdiction a Review Board. While the considerations are essentially the same, there are a few provisions which apply only to unfit accused. A Review Board must determine whether the accused is fit to stand trial. Regardless of the determination, the Review Board must then determine what conditions should be imposed on the accused, considering both the protection of the public and the maintenance of the fitness of the accused (or conditions which would render the accused fit). Previously an absolute discharge was unavailable to an unfit accused. However, in R. v. Demers, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the provision restricting the availability of an absolute discharge to an accused person who is deemed both "permanently unfit" and not a significant threat to the safety of the public. Presently a Review Board may recommend a judicial stay of proceedings in the event that it finds the accused both "permanently unfit" and non-dangerous. The decision is left to the court having jurisdiction over the accused.
An additional requirement for an unfit accused is the holding of a "prima facie case" hearing every two years. The Crown must demonstrate to the court having jurisdiction over the accused that it still has sufficient evidence to try the accused. If the Crown fails to meet this burden then the accused is discharged and proceedings are terminated. The nature of the hearing is virtually identical to that of a preliminary hearing.
According to section 20 of the German criminal code, those who commit an illegal act because a mental disorder makes them unable to see the wrong of the act or to act on this insight is considered not guilty.
If the ability to recognize the right or wrong of action or the ability to act accordingly is lost due to a mental disorder, then the defendant cannot be pursued under Japanese criminal law so if this is recognized during a trial then an innocent judgment will be given. This is, however, rare, happening in only around 1 in 500,000 cases.
Insanity is determined through a judicial decision issued on the basis of expert opinions of psychiatrists and psychologists.
A forensic psychiatric examination is used to establish insanity. The result of the forensic examination is then subjected to a legal assessment, taking into account other circumstances of the case, from which a conclusion is drawn about the defendants sanity or insanity. The Criminal Code of Russia establishes that a person who during the commission of an illegal act was in a state of insanity, that is, could not be aware of the actual nature and social danger of their actions or was unable to control their actions due to a chronic mental disorder, a temporary mental disorder, or dementia is not subject to criminal liability.
The Scottish Law Commission, in its Discussion Paper No 122 on Insanity and Diminished Responsibility (2003), pp. 16/18, confirms that the law has not substantially changed from the position stated in Hume's Commentaries:
The phrase "absolute alienation of reason" is still regarded as at the core of the defense in the modern law (see "HM Advocate v Kidd" (1960) JC 61 and "Brennan v HM Advocate" (1977)
In the Nordic countries, insanity is not a defense; instead, it is the responsibility of the court system as such to consider whether the accused may have been psychotic or suffering from other severe mental defects when perpetrating the criminal act. This explains why, in Norway, the court considered the sanity of Anders Behring Breivik, even if he himself declared to be sane.
Rules differ between Nordic countries.
In Sweden, psychotic perpetrators are seen as accountable, but the sanction is, if they are psychotic at the time of the trial, forensic mental care.
In Denmark and Norway, psychotic perpetrators are declared guilty, but not punished. Instead of prison, they are sentenced to mandatory treatment. Still, important differences exist between Norway and Denmark.
In Norway, §44 of the penal code states specifically that "a person who at the time of the crime was insane or unconscious is not punished".
In Denmark, §16 of the penal code states that "Persons, who, at the time of the act, were irresponsible owing to mental illness or similar conditions or
to a pronounced mental deficiency, are not punishable". This means that in Denmark, 'insanity' is a legal term rather than a medical term and that the court retains the authority to decide whether an accused person is irresponsible.
In Finland, punishments can only be administered if the accused is "compos mentis", of sound mind; not if the accused is insane ("syyntakeeton", literally "unable to guarantee [shoulder the responsibility of] guilt"). Thus, an insane defendant may be found guilty based on the facts and his actions just as a sane defendant, but the insanity will only affect the punishment. The definition of insanity is similar to the M'Naught criterion above: "the accused is insane, if during the act, due to a mental illness, profound mental retardation or a severe disruption of mental health or consciousness, he cannot understand the actual nature of his act or its illegality, or that his ability to control his behavior is critically weakened". If an accused is suspected to be insane, the court must consult the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), which is obliged to place the accused in involuntary commitment if he is found insane. The offender receives no judicial punishment; he becomes a patient under the jurisdiction of THL, and must be released immediately once the conditions of involuntary commitment are no longer fulfilled. Diminished responsibility is also available, resulting in lighter sentences.
This increased coverage gives the impression that the defense is widely used, but this is not the case. According to an eight-state study, the insanity defense is used in less than 1% of all court cases and, when used, has only a 26% success rate. Of those cases that were successful, 90% of the defendants had been previously diagnosed with mental illness.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15358
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Ice age
An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages and greenhouse periods, during which there are no glaciers on the planet. Earth is currently in the Quaternary glaciation, known in popular terminology as the Ice Age. Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed "glacial periods" (or, alternatively, "glacials", "glaciations", "glacial stages", "stadials", "stades", or colloquially, "ice ages"), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called "interglacials" or "interstadials", with both climatic pulses part of the Quaternary or other periods in Earth's history.
In the terminology of glaciology, "ice age" implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in both northern and southern hemispheres. By this definition, we are in an interglacial period—the Holocene. The amount of heat-trapping gases emitted into Earth's oceans and atmosphere is predicted to prevent the next glacial period, which otherwise would begin in around 50,000 years, and likely more glacial cycles.
In 1742, Pierre Martel (1706–1767), an engineer and geographer living in Geneva, visited the valley of Chamonix in the Alps of Savoy. Two years later he published an account of his journey. He reported that the inhabitants of that valley attributed the dispersal of erratic boulders to the glaciers, saying that they had once extended much farther. Later similar explanations were reported from other regions of the Alps. In 1815 the carpenter and chamois hunter Jean-Pierre Perraudin (1767–1858) explained erratic boulders in the Val de Bagnes in the Swiss canton of Valais as being due to glaciers previously extending further. An unknown woodcutter from Meiringen in the Bernese Oberland advocated a similar idea in a discussion with the Swiss-German geologist Jean de Charpentier (1786–1855) in 1834. Comparable explanations are also known from the Val de Ferret in the Valais and the Seeland in western Switzerland and in Goethe's scientific work. Such explanations could also be found in other parts of the world. When the Bavarian naturalist Ernst von Bibra (1806–1878) visited the Chilean Andes in 1849–1850, the natives attributed fossil moraines to the former action of glaciers.
Meanwhile, European scholars had begun to wonder what had caused the dispersal of erratic material. From the middle of the 18th century, some discussed ice as a means of transport. The Swedish mining expert Daniel Tilas (1712–1772) was, in 1742, the first person to suggest drifting sea ice in order to explain the presence of erratic boulders in the Scandinavian and Baltic regions. In 1795, the Scottish philosopher and gentleman naturalist, James Hutton (1726–1797), explained erratic boulders in the Alps by the action of glaciers. Two decades later, in 1818, the Swedish botanist Göran Wahlenberg (1780–1851) published his theory of a glaciation of the Scandinavian peninsula. He regarded glaciation as a regional phenomenon.
Only a few years later, the Danish-Norwegian geologist Jens Esmark (1762–1839) argued a sequence of worldwide ice ages. In a paper published in 1824, Esmark proposed changes in climate as the cause of those glaciations. He attempted to show that they originated from changes in Earth's orbit. During the following years, Esmark's ideas were discussed and taken over in parts by Swedish, Scottish and German scientists. At the University of Edinburgh Robert Jameson (1774–1854) seemed to be relatively open to Esmark's ideas, as reviewed by Norwegian professor of glaciology Bjørn G. Andersen (1992). Jameson's remarks about ancient glaciers in Scotland were most probably prompted by Esmark. In Germany, Albrecht Reinhard Bernhardi (1797–1849), a geologist and professor of forestry at an academy in Dreissigacker, since incorporated in the southern Thuringian city of Meiningen, adopted Esmark's theory. In a paper published in 1832, Bernhardi speculated about former polar ice caps reaching as far as the temperate zones of the globe.
In 1829, independently of these debates, the Swiss civil engineer Ignaz Venetz (1788–1859) explained the dispersal of erratic boulders in the Alps, the nearby Jura Mountains, and the North German Plain as being due to huge glaciers. When he read his paper before the Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft, most scientists remained sceptical. Finally, Venetz convinced his friend Jean de Charpentier. De Charpentier transformed Venetz's idea into a theory with a glaciation limited to the Alps. His thoughts resembled Wahlenberg's theory. In fact, both men shared the same volcanistic, or in de Charpentier's case rather plutonistic assumptions, about the Earth's history. In 1834, de Charpentier presented his paper before the Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft. In the meantime, the German botanist Karl Friedrich Schimper (1803–1867) was studying mosses which were growing on erratic boulders in the alpine upland of Bavaria. He began to wonder where such masses of stone had come from. During the summer of 1835 he made some excursions to the Bavarian Alps. Schimper came to the conclusion that ice must have been the means of transport for the boulders in the alpine upland. In the winter of 1835 to 1836 he held some lectures in Munich. Schimper then assumed that there must have been global times of obliteration ("Verödungszeiten") with a cold climate and frozen water. Schimper spent the summer months of 1836 at Devens, near Bex, in the Swiss Alps with his former university friend Louis Agassiz (1801–1873) and Jean de Charpentier. Schimper, de Charpentier and possibly Venetz convinced Agassiz that there had been a time of glaciation. During the winter of 1836/37, Agassiz and Schimper developed the theory of a sequence of glaciations. They mainly drew upon the preceding works of Venetz, de Charpentier and on their own fieldwork. Agassiz appears to have been already familiar with Bernhardi's paper at that time. At the beginning of 1837, Schimper coined the term "ice age" (""Eiszeit"") for the period of the glaciers. In July 1837 Agassiz presented their synthesis before the annual meeting of the Schweizerische Naturforschende Gesellschaft at Neuchâtel. The audience was very critical and some opposed to the new theory because it contradicted the established opinions on climatic history. Most contemporary scientists thought that the Earth had been gradually cooling down since its birth as a molten globe.
In order to overcome this rejection, Agassiz embarked on geological fieldwork. He published his book "Study on Glaciers" ("Études sur les glaciers") in 1840. De Charpentier was put out by this, as he had also been preparing a book about the glaciation of the Alps. De Charpentier felt that Agassiz should have given him precedence as it was he who had introduced Agassiz to in-depth glacial research. Besides that, Agassiz had, as a result of personal quarrels, omitted any mention of Schimper in his book.
All together, it took several decades until the ice age theory was fully accepted by scientists. This happened on an international scale in the second half of the 1870s following the work of James Croll, including the publication of "Climate and Time, in Their Geological Relations" in 1875, which provided a credible explanation for the causes of ice ages.
There are three main types of evidence for ice ages: geological, chemical, and paleontological.
Geological evidence for ice ages comes in various forms, including rock scouring and scratching, glacial moraines, drumlins, valley cutting, and the deposition of till or tillites and glacial erratics. Successive glaciations tend to distort and erase the geological evidence, making it difficult to interpret. Furthermore, this evidence was difficult to date exactly; early theories assumed that the glacials were short compared to the long interglacials. The advent of sediment and ice cores revealed the true situation: glacials are long, interglacials short. It took some time for the current theory to be worked out.
The chemical evidence mainly consists of variations in the ratios of isotopes in fossils present in sediments and sedimentary rocks and ocean sediment cores. For the most recent glacial periods ice cores provide climate proxies from their ice, and atmospheric samples from included bubbles of air. Because water containing heavier isotopes has a higher heat of evaporation, its proportion decreases with colder conditions. This allows a temperature record to be constructed. This evidence can be confounded, however, by other factors recorded by isotope ratios.
The paleontological evidence consists of changes in the geographical distribution of fossils. During a glacial period cold-adapted organisms spread into lower latitudes, and organisms that prefer warmer conditions become extinct or are squeezed into lower latitudes. This evidence is also difficult to interpret because it requires (1) sequences of sediments covering a long period of time, over a wide range of latitudes and which are easily correlated; (2) ancient organisms which survive for several million years without change and whose temperature preferences are easily diagnosed; and (3) the finding of the relevant fossils.
Despite the difficulties, analysis of ice core and ocean sediment cores has shown periods of glacials and interglacials over the past few million years. These also confirm the linkage between ice ages and continental crust phenomena such as glacial moraines, drumlins, and glacial erratics. Hence the continental crust phenomena are accepted as good evidence of earlier ice ages when they are found in layers created much earlier than the time range for which ice cores and ocean sediment cores are available.
There have been at least five major ice ages in the Earth's history (the Huronian, Cryogenian, Andean-Saharan, late Paleozoic, and the latest Quaternary Ice Age). Outside these ages, the Earth seems to have been ice free even in high latitudes; such periods are known as greenhouse periods.
Rocks from the earliest well established ice age, called the Huronian, formed around 2.4 to 2.1 Ga (billion years) ago during the early Proterozoic Eon. Several hundreds of km of the Huronian Supergroup are exposed 10–100 km north of the north shore of Lake Huron extending from near Sault Ste. Marie to Sudbury, northeast of Lake Huron, with giant layers of now-lithified till beds, dropstones, varves, outwash, and scoured basement rocks. Correlative Huronian deposits have been found near Marquette, Michigan, and correlation has been made with Paleoproterozoic glacial deposits from Western Australia. The Huronian ice age was caused by the elimination of atmospheric methane, a greenhouse gas, during the Great Oxygenation Event.
The next well-documented ice age, and probably the most severe of the last billion years, occurred from 720 to 630 million years ago (the Cryogenian period) and may have produced a Snowball Earth in which glacial ice sheets reached the equator, possibly being ended by the accumulation of greenhouse gases such as produced by volcanoes. "The presence of ice on the continents and pack ice on the oceans would inhibit both silicate weathering and photosynthesis, which are the two major sinks for at present." It has been suggested that the end of this ice age was responsible for the subsequent Ediacaran and Cambrian explosion, though this model is recent and controversial.
The Andean-Saharan occurred from 460 to 420 million years ago, during the Late Ordovician and the Silurian period.
The evolution of land plants at the onset of the Devonian period caused a long term increase in planetary oxygen levels and reduction of levels, which resulted in the late Paleozoic icehouse. Its former name, the Karoo glaciation, was named after the glacial tills found in the Karoo region of South Africa. There were extensive polar ice caps at intervals from 360 to 260 million years ago in South Africa during the Carboniferous and early Permian Periods. Correlatives are known from Argentina, also in the center of the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland.
The Quaternary Glaciation / Quaternary Ice Age started about 2.58 million years ago at the beginning of the Quaternary Period when the spread of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere began. Since then, the world has seen cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000- and 100,000-year time scales called glacial periods, glacials or glacial advances, and interglacial periods, interglacials or glacial retreats. The earth is currently in an interglacial, and the last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. All that remains of the continental ice sheets are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and smaller glaciers such as on Baffin Island.
The definition of the Quaternary as beginning 2.58 Ma is based on the formation of the Arctic ice cap. The Antarctic ice sheet began to form earlier, at about 34 Ma, in the mid-Cenozoic (Eocene-Oligocene Boundary). The term Late Cenozoic Ice Age is used to include this early phase.
Ice ages can be further divided by location and time; for example, the names "Riss" (180,000–130,000 years bp) and "Würm" (70,000–10,000 years bp) refer specifically to glaciation in the Alpine region. The maximum extent of the ice is not maintained for the full interval. The scouring action of each glaciation tends to remove most of the evidence of prior ice sheets almost completely, except in regions where the later sheet does not achieve full coverage.
Within the ice ages (or at least within the current one), more temperate and more severe periods occur. The colder periods are called "glacial periods", the warmer periods "interglacials", such as the Eemian Stage.
Glacials are characterized by cooler and drier climates over most of the earth and large land and sea ice masses extending outward from the poles. Mountain glaciers in otherwise unglaciated areas extend to lower elevations due to a lower snow line. Sea levels drop due to the removal of large volumes of water above sea level in the icecaps. There is evidence that ocean circulation patterns are disrupted by glaciations. Since the earth has significant continental glaciation in the Arctic and Antarctic, we are currently in a glacial minimum of a glaciation. Such a period between glacial maxima is known as an "interglacial". The glacials and interglacials also coincided with changes in Earth's orbit called Milankovitch cycles.
The earth has been in an interglacial period known as the Holocene for around 11,700 years, and an article in "Nature" in 2004 argues that it might be most analogous to a previous interglacial that lasted 28,000 years. Predicted changes in orbital forcing suggest that the next glacial period would begin at least 50,000 years from now, due to the Milankovitch cycles. Moreover, anthropogenic forcing from increased greenhouse gases is estimated to potentially outweigh the orbital forcing of the Milankovitch cycles for hundreds of thousand of years.
Each glacial period is subject to positive feedback which makes it more severe, and negative feedback which mitigates and (in all cases so far) eventually ends it.
Ice and snow increase Earth's albedo, i.e. they make it reflect more of the sun's energy and absorb less. Hence, when the air temperature decreases, ice and snow fields grow, and this continues until competition with a negative feedback mechanism forces the system to an equilibrium. Also, the reduction in forests caused by the ice's expansion increases albedo.
Another theory proposed by Ewing and Donn in 1956 hypothesized that an ice-free Arctic Ocean leads to increased snowfall at high latitudes. When low-temperature ice covers the Arctic Ocean there is little evaporation or sublimation and the polar regions are quite dry in terms of precipitation, comparable to the amount found in mid-latitude deserts. This low precipitation allows high-latitude snowfalls to melt during the summer. An ice-free Arctic Ocean absorbs solar radiation during the long summer days, and evaporates more water into the Arctic atmosphere. With higher precipitation, portions of this snow may not melt during the summer and so glacial ice can form at lower altitudes "and" more southerly latitudes, reducing the temperatures over land by increased albedo as noted above. Furthermore, under this hypothesis the lack of oceanic pack ice allows increased exchange of waters between the Arctic and the North Atlantic Oceans, warming the Arctic and cooling the North Atlantic. (Current projected consequences of global warming include a largely ice-free Arctic Ocean within 5–20 years, see Arctic shrinkage.) Additional fresh water flowing into the North Atlantic during a warming cycle may also reduce the global ocean water circulation. Such a reduction (by reducing the effects of the Gulf Stream) would have a cooling effect on northern Europe, which in turn would lead to increased low-latitude snow retention during the summer. It has also been suggested that during an extensive glacial, glaciers may move through the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, extending into the North Atlantic Ocean far enough to block the Gulf Stream.
Ice sheets that form during glaciations cause erosion of the land beneath them. After some time, this will reduce land above sea level and thus diminish the amount of space on which ice sheets can form. This mitigates the albedo feedback, as does the lowering in sea level that accompanies the formation of ice sheets.
Another factor is the increased aridity occurring with glacial maxima, which reduces the precipitation available to maintain glaciation. The glacial retreat induced by this or any other process can be amplified by similar inverse positive feedbacks as for glacial advances.
According to research published in "Nature Geoscience", human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) will defer the next ice age. Researchers used data on Earth's orbit to find the historical warm interglacial period that looks most like the current one and from this have predicted that the next ice age would usually begin within 1,500 years. They go on to say that emissions have been so high that it will not.
The causes of ice ages are not fully understood for either the large-scale ice age periods or the smaller ebb and flow of glacial–interglacial periods within an ice age. The consensus is that several factors are important: atmospheric composition, such as the concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane (the specific levels of the previously mentioned gases are now able to be seen with the new ice core samples from EPICA Dome C in Antarctica over the past 800,000 years); changes in the earth's orbit around the Sun known as Milankovitch cycles; the motion of tectonic plates resulting in changes in the relative location and amount of continental and oceanic crust on the earth's surface, which affect wind and ocean currents; variations in solar output; the orbital dynamics of the Earth–Moon system; the impact of relatively large meteorites and volcanism including eruptions of supervolcanoes.
Some of these factors influence each other. For example, changes in Earth's atmospheric composition (especially the concentrations of greenhouse gases) may alter the climate, while climate change itself can change the atmospheric composition (for example by changing the rate at which weathering removes ).
Maureen Raymo, William Ruddiman and others propose that the Tibetan and Colorado Plateaus are immense "scrubbers" with a capacity to remove enough from the global atmosphere to be a significant causal factor of the 40 million year Cenozoic Cooling trend. They further claim that approximately half of their uplift (and "scrubbing" capacity) occurred in the past 10 million years.
There is evidence that greenhouse gas levels fell at the start of ice ages and rose during the retreat of the ice sheets, but it is difficult to establish cause and effect (see the notes above on the role of weathering). Greenhouse gas levels may also have been affected by other factors which have been proposed as causes of ice ages, such as the movement of continents and volcanism.
The Snowball Earth hypothesis maintains that the severe freezing in the late Proterozoic was ended by an increase in levels in the atmosphere, mainly from volcanoes, and some supporters of Snowball Earth argue that it was caused in the first place by a reduction in atmospheric . The hypothesis also warns of future Snowball Earths.
In 2009, further evidence was provided that changes in solar insolation provide the initial trigger for the earth to warm after an Ice Age, with secondary factors like increases in greenhouse gases accounting for the magnitude of the change.
There is considerable evidence that over the very recent period of the last 100–1000 years, the sharp increases in human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels, has caused the parallel sharp and accelerating increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases which trap the sun's heat. The consensus theory of the scientific community is that the resulting greenhouse effect is a principal cause of the increase in global warming which has occurred over the same period, and a chief contributor to the accelerated melting of the remaining glaciers and polar ice. A 2012 investigation finds that dinosaurs released methane through digestion in a similar amount to humanity's current methane release, which "could have been a key factor" to the very warm climate 150 million years ago.
William Ruddiman has proposed the early anthropocene hypothesis, according to which the anthropocene era, as some people call the most recent period in the earth's history when the activities of the human species first began to have a significant global impact on the earth's climate and ecosystems, did not begin in the 18th century with the advent of the Industrial Era, but dates back to 8,000 years ago, due to intense farming activities of our early agrarian ancestors. It was at that time that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations stopped following the periodic pattern of the Milankovitch cycles. In his overdue-glaciation hypothesis Ruddiman states that an incipient glacial would probably have begun several thousand years ago, but the arrival of that scheduled glacial was forestalled by the activities of early farmers.
At a meeting of the American Geophysical Union (December 17, 2008), scientists detailed evidence in support of the controversial idea that the introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe began to alter world climate by pumping significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the last 1,000 years. In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming, possibly forestalling the onset of a new glacial age.
The geological record appears to show that ice ages start when the continents are in positions which block or reduce the flow of warm water from the equator to the poles and thus allow ice sheets to form. The ice sheets increase Earth's reflectivity and thus reduce the absorption of solar radiation. With less radiation absorbed the atmosphere cools; the cooling allows the ice sheets to grow, which further increases reflectivity in a positive feedback loop. The ice age continues until the reduction in weathering causes an increase in the greenhouse effect.
There are three main contributors from the layout of the continents that obstruct the movement of warm water to the poles:
Since today's Earth has a continent over the South Pole and an almost land-locked ocean over the North Pole, geologists believe that Earth will continue to experience glacial periods in the geologically near future.
Some scientists believe that the Himalayas are a major factor in the current ice age, because these mountains have increased Earth's total rainfall and therefore the rate at which carbon dioxide is washed out of the atmosphere, decreasing the greenhouse effect. The Himalayas' formation started about 70 million years ago when the Indo-Australian Plate collided with the Eurasian Plate, and the Himalayas are still rising by about 5 mm per year because the Indo-Australian plate is still moving at 67 mm/year. The history of the Himalayas broadly fits the long-term decrease in Earth's average temperature since the mid-Eocene, 40 million years ago.
Another important contribution to ancient climate regimes is the variation of ocean currents, which are modified by continent position, sea levels and salinity, as well as other factors. They have the ability to cool (e.g. aiding the creation of Antarctic ice) and the ability to warm (e.g. giving the British Isles a temperate as opposed to a boreal climate). The closing of the Isthmus of Panama about 3 million years ago may have ushered in the present period of strong glaciation over North America by ending the exchange of water between the tropical Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Analyses suggest that ocean current fluctuations can adequately account for recent glacial oscillations. During the last glacial period the sea-level has fluctuated 20–30 m as water was sequestered, primarily in the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets. When ice collected and the sea level dropped sufficiently, flow through the Bering Strait (the narrow strait between Siberia and Alaska is about 50 m deep today) was reduced, resulting in increased flow from the North Atlantic. This realigned the thermohaline circulation in the Atlantic, increasing heat transport into the Arctic, which melted the polar ice accumulation and reduced other continental ice sheets. The release of water raised sea levels again, restoring the ingress of colder water from the Pacific with an accompanying shift to northern hemisphere ice accumulation.
Matthias Kuhle's geological theory of Ice Age development was suggested by the existence of an ice sheet covering the Tibetan Plateau during the Ice Ages (Last Glacial Maximum?). According to Kuhle, the plate-tectonic uplift of Tibet past the snow-line has led to a surface of c. 2,400,000 square kilometres (930,000 sq mi) changing from bare land to ice with a 70% greater albedo. The reflection of energy into space resulted in a global cooling, triggering the Pleistocene Ice Age. Because this highland is at a subtropical latitude, with 4 to 5 times the insolation of high-latitude areas, what would be Earth's strongest heating surface has turned into a cooling surface.
Kuhle explains the interglacial periods by the 100,000-year cycle of radiation changes due to variations in Earth's orbit. This comparatively insignificant warming, when combined with the lowering of the Nordic inland ice areas and Tibet due to the weight of the superimposed ice-load, has led to the repeated complete thawing of the inland ice areas.
The Milankovitch cycles are a set of cyclic variations in characteristics of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Each cycle has a different length, so at some times their effects reinforce each other and at other times they (partially) cancel each other.
There is strong evidence that the Milankovitch cycles affect the occurrence of glacial and interglacial periods within an ice age. The present ice age is the most studied and best understood, particularly the last 400,000 years, since this is the period covered by ice cores that record atmospheric composition and proxies for temperature and ice volume. Within this period, the match of glacial/interglacial frequencies to the Milanković orbital forcing periods is so close that orbital forcing is generally accepted. The combined effects of the changing distance to the Sun, the precession of the Earth's axis, and the changing tilt of the Earth's axis redistribute the sunlight received by the Earth. Of particular importance are changes in the tilt of the Earth's axis, which affect the intensity of seasons. For example, the amount of solar influx in July at 65 degrees north latitude varies by as much as 22% (from 450 W/m² to 550 W/m²). It is widely believed that ice sheets advance when summers become too cool to melt all of the accumulated snowfall from the previous winter. Some believe that the strength of the orbital forcing is too small to trigger glaciations, but feedback mechanisms like may explain this mismatch.
While Milankovitch forcing predicts that cyclic changes in the Earth's orbital elements can be expressed in the glaciation record, additional explanations are necessary to explain which cycles are observed to be most important in the timing of glacial–interglacial periods. In particular, during the last 800,000 years, the dominant period of glacial–interglacial oscillation has been 100,000 years, which corresponds to changes in Earth's orbital eccentricity and orbital inclination. Yet this is by far the weakest of the three frequencies predicted by Milankovitch. During the period 3.0–0.8 million years ago, the dominant pattern of glaciation corresponded to the 41,000-year period of changes in Earth's obliquity (tilt of the axis). The reasons for dominance of one frequency versus another are poorly understood and an active area of current research, but the answer probably relates to some form of resonance in the Earth's climate system. Recent work suggests that the 100K year cycle dominates due to increased southern-pole sea-ice increasing total solar reflectivity.
The "traditional" Milankovitch explanation struggles to explain the dominance of the 100,000-year cycle over the last 8 cycles. Richard A. Muller, Gordon J. F. MacDonald, and others have pointed out that those calculations are for a two-dimensional orbit of Earth but the three-dimensional orbit also has a 100,000-year cycle of orbital inclination. They proposed that these variations in orbital inclination lead to variations in insolation, as the Earth moves in and out of known dust bands in the solar system. Although this is a different mechanism to the traditional view, the "predicted" periods over the last 400,000 years are nearly the same. The Muller and MacDonald theory, in turn, has been challenged by Jose Antonio Rial.
Another worker, William Ruddiman, has suggested a model that explains the 100,000-year cycle by the modulating effect of eccentricity (weak 100,000-year cycle) on precession (26,000-year cycle) combined with greenhouse gas feedbacks in the 41,000- and 26,000-year cycles. Yet another theory has been advanced by Peter Huybers who argued that the 41,000-year cycle has always been dominant, but that the Earth has entered a mode of climate behavior where only the second or third cycle triggers an ice age. This would imply that the 100,000-year periodicity is really an illusion created by averaging together cycles lasting 80,000 and 120,000 years. This theory is consistent with a simple empirical multi-state model proposed by Didier Paillard. Paillard suggests that the late Pleistocene glacial cycles
can be seen as jumps between three quasi-stable climate states. The jumps are induced by the orbital forcing, while in the early Pleistocene the 41,000-year glacial cycles resulted from jumps between only two climate states. A dynamical
model explaining this behavior was proposed by Peter Ditlevsen. This is in support of the suggestion that the late Pleistocene glacial cycles are not due to the weak 100,000-year eccentricity cycle, but a non-linear response to mainly the 41,000-year obliquity cycle.
There are at least two types of variation in the Sun's energy output
The long-term increase in the Sun's output cannot be a cause of ice ages.
Volcanic eruptions may have contributed to the inception and/or the end of ice age periods. At times during the paleoclimate, carbon dioxide levels were two or three times greater than today. Volcanoes and movements in continental plates contributed to high amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide from volcanoes probably contributed to periods with highest overall temperatures. One suggested explanation of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is that undersea volcanoes released methane from clathrates and thus caused a large and rapid increase in the greenhouse effect. There appears to be no geological evidence for such eruptions at the right time, but this does not prove they did not happen.
The current geological period, the Quaternary, which began about 2.6 million years ago and extends into the present, is marked by warm and cold episodes, cold phases called glacials (Quaternary ice age) lasting about 100,000 years, and which are then interrupted by the warmer interglacials which lasted about 10,000–15,000 years. The last cold episode of the last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. Earth is currently in an interglacial period of the Quaternary, called the Holocene.
The major glacial stages of the current ice age in North America are the Illinoian, Eemian and Wisconsin glaciation. The use of the Nebraskan, Afton, Kansan, and Yarmouthian stages to subdivide the ice age in North America has been discontinued by Quaternary geologists and geomorphologists. These stages have all been merged into the Pre-Illinoian in the 1980s.
During the most recent North American glaciation, during the latter part of the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000 to 13,300 years ago), ice sheets extended to about 45th parallel north. These sheets were thick.
This Wisconsin glaciation left widespread impacts on the North American landscape. The Great Lakes and the Finger Lakes were carved by ice deepening old valleys. Most of the lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin were gouged out by glaciers and later filled with glacial meltwaters. The old Teays River drainage system was radically altered and largely reshaped into the Ohio River drainage system. Other rivers were dammed and diverted to new channels, such as Niagara Falls, which formed a dramatic waterfall and gorge, when the waterflow encountered a limestone escarpment. Another similar waterfall, at the present Clark Reservation State Park near Syracuse, New York, is now dry.
The area from Long Island to Nantucket, Massachusetts was formed from glacial till, and the plethora of lakes on the Canadian Shield in northern Canada can be almost entirely attributed to the action of the ice. As the ice retreated and the rock dust dried, winds carried the material hundreds of miles, forming beds of loess many dozens of feet thick in the Missouri Valley. Post-glacial rebound continues to reshape the Great Lakes and other areas formerly under the weight of the ice sheets.
The Driftless Area, a portion of western and southwestern Wisconsin along with parts of adjacent Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois, was not covered by glaciers.
A specially interesting climatic change during glacial times has taken place in the semi-arid Andes. Beside the expected cooling down in comparison with the current climate, a significant precipitation change happened here. So, researches in the presently semiarid subtropic Aconcagua-massif (6,962 m) have shown an unexpectedly extensive glacial glaciation of the type "ice stream network". The connected valley glaciers exceeding 100 km in length, flowed down on the East-side of this section of the Andes at 32–34°S and 69–71°W as far as a height of 2,060 m and on the western luff-side still clearly deeper. Where current glaciers scarcely reach 10 km in length, the snowline (ELA) runs at a height of 4,600 m and at that time was lowered to 3,200 m asl, i.e. about 1,400 m. From this follows that—beside of an annual depression of temperature about c. 8.4 °C— here was an increase in precipitation. Accordingly, at glacial times the humid climatic belt that today is situated several latitude degrees further to the S, was shifted much further to the N.
Although the last glacial period ended more than 8,000 years ago, its effects can still be felt today. For example, the moving ice carved out the landscape in Canada (See Canadian Arctic Archipelago), Greenland, northern Eurasia and Antarctica. The erratic boulders, till, drumlins, eskers, fjords, kettle lakes, moraines, cirques, horns, etc., are typical features left behind by the glaciers.
The weight of the ice sheets was so great that they deformed the Earth's crust and mantle. After the ice sheets melted, the ice-covered land rebounded. Due to the high viscosity of the Earth's mantle, the flow of mantle rocks which controls the rebound process is very slow—at a rate of about 1 cm/year near the center of rebound area today.
During glaciation, water was taken from the oceans to form the ice at high latitudes, thus global sea level dropped by about 110 meters, exposing the continental shelves and forming land-bridges between land-masses for animals to migrate. During deglaciation, the melted ice-water returned to the oceans, causing sea level to rise. This process can cause sudden shifts in coastlines and hydration systems resulting in newly submerged lands, emerging lands, collapsed ice dams resulting in salination of lakes, new ice dams creating vast areas of freshwater, and a general alteration in regional weather patterns on a large but temporary scale. It can even cause temporary reglaciation. This type of chaotic pattern of rapidly changing land, ice, saltwater and freshwater has been proposed as the likely model for the Baltic and Scandinavian regions, as well as much of central North America at the end of the last glacial maximum, with the present-day coastlines only being achieved in the last few millennia of prehistory. Also, the effect of elevation on Scandinavia submerged a vast continental plain that had existed under much of what is now the North Sea, connecting the British Isles to Continental Europe.
The redistribution of ice-water on the surface of the Earth and the flow of mantle rocks causes changes in the gravitational field as well as changes to the distribution of the moment of inertia of the Earth. These changes to the moment of inertia result in a change in the angular velocity, axis, and wobble of the Earth's rotation.
The weight of the redistributed surface mass loaded the lithosphere, caused it to flex and also induced stress within the Earth. The presence of the glaciers generally suppressed the movement of faults below. During deglaciation, the faults experience accelerated slip triggering earthquakes. Earthquakes triggered near the ice margin may in turn accelerate ice calving and may account for the Heinrich events. As more ice is removed near the ice margin, more intraplate earthquakes are induced and this positive feedback may explain the fast collapse of ice sheets.
In Europe, glacial erosion and isostatic sinking from weight of ice made the Baltic Sea, which before the Ice Age was all land drained by the Eridanos River.
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Irving Langmuir
Irving Langmuir (; 31 January 1881 – 16 August 1957) was an American chemist, physicist, and engineer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1932 for his work in surface chemistry.
Langmuir's most famous publication is the 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his "concentric theory of atomic structure". Langmuir became embroiled in a priority dispute with Lewis over this work; Langmuir's presentation skills were largely responsible for the popularization of the theory, although the credit for the theory itself belongs mostly to Lewis. While at General Electric from 1909 to 1950, Langmuir advanced several fields of physics and chemistry, invented the gas-filled incandescent lamp and the hydrogen welding technique. The Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research near Socorro, New Mexico, was named in his honor, as was the American Chemical Society journal for surface science called "Langmuir".
Irving Langmuir was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 31 January 1881. He was the third of the four children of Charles Langmuir and Sadie, Comings. During his childhood, Langmuir's parents encouraged him to carefully observe nature and to keep a detailed record of his various observations. When Irving was eleven, it was discovered that he had poor eyesight. When this problem was corrected, details that had previously eluded him were revealed, and his interest in the complications of nature was heightened.
During his childhood, Langmuir was influenced by his older brother, Arthur Langmuir. Arthur was a research chemist who encouraged Irving to be curious about nature and how things work. Arthur helped Irving set up his first chemistry lab in the corner of his bedroom, and he was content to answer the myriad questions that Irving would pose. Langmuir's hobbies included mountaineering, skiing, piloting his own plane, and classical music. In addition to his professional interest in the politics of atomic energy, he was concerned about wilderness conservation.
Langmuir attended several schools and institutes in America and Paris (1892–1895) before graduating high school from Chestnut Hill Academy (1898), an elite private school located in the affluent Chestnut Hill area in Philadelphia. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in metallurgical engineering (Met.E.) from the Columbia University School of Mines in 1903. He earned his PhD in 1906 under Friedrich Dolezalek in Göttingen, for research done using the "Nernst glower", an electric lamp invented by Nernst. His doctoral thesis was entitled "On the Partial Recombination of Dissolved Gases During Cooling." He later did postgraduate work in chemistry. Langmuir then taught at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, until 1909, when he began working at the General Electric research laboratory (Schenectady, New York).
His initial contributions to science came from his study of light bulbs (a continuation of his PhD work). His first major development was the improvement of the diffusion pump, which ultimately led to the invention of the high-vacuum rectifier and amplifier tubes. A year later, he and colleague Lewi Tonks discovered that the lifetime of a tungsten filament could be greatly lengthened by filling the bulb with an inert gas, such as argon, the critical factor (overlooked by other researchers) being the need for extreme cleanliness in all stages of the process. He also discovered that twisting the filament into a tight coil improved its efficiency. These were important developments in the history of the incandescent light bulb. His work in surface chemistry began at this point, when he discovered that molecular hydrogen introduced into a tungsten-filament bulb dissociated into atomic hydrogen and formed a layer one atom thick on the surface of the bulb.
His assistant in vacuum tube research was his cousin William Comings White.
As he continued to study filaments in vacuum and different gas environments, he began to study the emission of charged particles from hot filaments (thermionic emission). He was one of the first scientists to work with plasmas, and he was the first to call these ionized gases by that name because they reminded him of blood plasma. Langmuir and Tonks discovered electron density waves in plasmas that are now known as Langmuir waves.
He introduced the concept of electron temperature and in 1924 invented the diagnostic method for measuring both temperature and density with an electrostatic probe, now called a Langmuir probe and commonly used in plasma physics. The current of a biased probe tip is measured as a function of bias voltage to determine the local plasma temperature and density. He also discovered atomic hydrogen, which he put to use by inventing the atomic hydrogen welding process; the first plasma weld ever made. Plasma welding has since been developed into gas tungsten arc welding.
In 1917, he published a paper on the chemistry of oil films that later became the basis for the award of the 1932 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Langmuir theorized that oils consisting of an aliphatic chain with a hydrophilic end group (perhaps an alcohol or acid) were oriented as a film one molecule thick upon the surface of water, with the hydrophilic group down in the water and the hydrophobic chains clumped together on the surface. The thickness of the film could be easily determined from the known volume and area of the oil, which allowed investigation of the molecular configuration before spectroscopic techniques were available.
Following World War I Langmuir contributed to atomic theory and the understanding of atomic structure by defining the modern concept of valence shells and isotopes.
Langmuir was president of the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1923.
Based on his work at General Electric, John B. Taylor developed a detector ionizing beams of alkali metals, called nowadays the Langmuir-Taylor detector.
He joined Katharine B. Blodgett to study thin films and surface adsorption. They introduced the concept of a monolayer (a layer of material one molecule thick) and the two-dimensional physics which describe such a surface. In 1932 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry."
In 1938, Langmuir's scientific interests began to turn to atmospheric science and meteorology. One of his first ventures, although tangentially related, was a refutation of the claim of entomologist Charles H. T. Townsend that the deer botfly flew at speeds of over 800 miles per hour. Langmuir estimated the fly's speed at 25 miles per hour.
After observing windrows of drifting seaweed in the Sargasso Sea he discovered a wind-driven surface circulation in the sea. It is now called the Langmuir circulation.
During World War II, Langmuir worked on improving naval sonar for submarine detection, and later to develop protective smoke screens and methods for deicing aircraft wings. This research led him to theorize that the introduction of dry ice and iodide into a sufficiently moist cloud of low temperature could induce precipitation (cloud seeding); though in frequent practice, particularly in Australia and the People's Republic of China, the efficiency of this technique remains controversial today.
In 1953 Langmuir coined the term "pathological science", describing research conducted with accordance to the scientific method, but tainted by unconscious bias or subjective effects. This is in contrast to pseudoscience, which has no pretense of following the scientific method. In his original speech, he presented ESP and flying saucers as examples of pathological science; since then, the label has been applied to polywater and cold fusion.
His house in Schenectady, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
Langmuir was married to Marion Mersereau (1883-1971) in 1912 with whom he adopted two children: Kenneth and Barbara. After a short illness, he died in Woods Hole, Massachusetts from a heart attack on 16 August 1957. His obituary ran on the front page of "The New York Times".
On his religious views, Langmuir was an agnostic.
According to author Kurt Vonnegut, Langmuir was the inspiration for his fictional scientist Dr. Felix Hoenikker in the novel "Cat's Cradle". The character's invention of ice-nine eventually destroyed the world. Langmuir had worked with Vonnegut's brother, Bernard Vonnegut.
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International Association of Travel Agents Network
The International Airlines Travel Agent Network (IATAN) is an industry association in the USA designed to represent the interests of its member companies (airlines) and the U.S. travel distribution network (travel agencies). It is an independent department of the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
In addition, it (along with the IATA) is the body responsible for the standard international codes for airlines, airports, hotels, cities and car rental firms (for example, the three-character codes that designate London Heathrow Airport as LHR). These codes provide a method to link international travel network with international suppliers.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15365
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Insider trading
Insider trading is the trading of a public company's stock or other securities (such as bonds or stock options) based on material, nonpublic information about the company. In various countries, some kinds of trading based on insider information is illegal. This is because it is seen as unfair to other investors who do not have access to the information, as the investor with insider information could potentially make larger profits than a typical investor could make. The rules governing insider trading are complex and vary significantly from country to country. The extent of enforcement also varies from one country to another. The definition of insider in one jurisdiction can be broad, and may cover not only insiders themselves but also any persons related to them, such as brokers, associates, and even family members. A person who becomes aware of non-public information and trades on that basis may be guilty of a crime.
Trading by specific insiders, such as employees, is commonly permitted as long as it does not rely on material information not in the public domain. Many jurisdictions require that such trading be reported so that the transactions can be monitored. In the United States and several other jurisdictions, trading conducted by corporate officers, key employees, directors, or significant shareholders must be reported to the regulator or publicly disclosed, usually within a few business days of the trade. In these cases, insiders in the United States are required to file a Form 4 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when buying or selling shares of their own companies. The authors of one study claim that illegal insider trading raises the cost of capital for securities issuers, thus decreasing overall economic growth. However, some economists, such as Henry Manne, have argued that insider trading should be allowed and could, in fact, benefit markets.
There has long been "considerable academic debate" among business and legal scholars over whether or not insider trading should be illegal. Several arguments against outlawing insider trading have been identified: for example, although insider trading is illegal, most insider trading is never detected by law enforcement, and thus the illegality of insider trading might give the public the potentially misleading impression that "stock market trading is an unrigged game that anyone can play." Some legal analysis has questioned whether insider trading actually harms anyone in the legal sense, since some have questioned whether insider trading causes anyone to suffer an actual "loss," and whether anyone who suffers a loss is owed an actual legal duty by the insiders in question.
Rules prohibiting or criminalizing insider trading on material non-public information exist in most jurisdictions around the world (Bhattacharya and Daouk, 2002), but the details and the efforts to enforce them vary considerably. In the United States, Sections 16(b) and 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 directly and indirectly address insider trading. The U.S. Congress enacted this law after the stock market crash of 1929. While the United States is generally viewed as making the most serious efforts to enforce its insider trading laws, the broader scope of the European model legislation provides a stricter framework against illegal insider trading. In the European Union and the United Kingdom all trading on non-public information is, under the rubric of market abuse, subject at a minimum to civil penalties and to possible criminal penalties as well. UK's Financial Conduct Authority has the responsibility to investigate and prosecute insider dealing, defined by the Criminal Justice Act 1993.
In the United States, Canada, Australia and Germany, for mandatory reporting purposes, corporate insiders are defined as a company's officers, directors and any beneficial owners of more than 10% of a class of the company's equity securities. Trades made by these types of insiders in the company's own stock, based on material non-public information, are considered fraudulent since the insiders are violating the fiduciary duty that they owe to the shareholders. The corporate insider, simply by accepting employment, has undertaken a legal obligation to the shareholders to put the shareholders' interests before their own, in matters related to the corporation. When insiders buy or sell based upon company-owned information, they are said to be violating their obligation to the shareholders.
For example, illegal insider trading would occur if the chief executive officer of Company A learned (prior to a public announcement) that Company A will be taken over and then bought shares in Company A while knowing that the share price would likely rise.
In the United States and many other jurisdictions, however, "insiders" are not just limited to corporate officials and major shareholders where illegal insider trading is concerned but can include any individual who trades shares based on material non-public information in violation of some duty of trust. This duty may be imputed; for example, in many jurisdictions, in cases of where a corporate insider "tips" a friend about non-public information likely to have an effect on the company's share price, the duty the corporate insider owes the company is now imputed to the friend and the friend violates a duty to the company if he trades on the basis of this information.
Liability for inside trading violations generally cannot be avoided by passing on the information in an "I scratch your back; you scratch mine" or "quid pro quo" arrangement if the person receiving the information knew or should have known that the information was material non-public information. In the United States, at least one court has indicated that the insider who releases the non-public information must have done so for an improper purpose. In the case of a person who receives the insider information (called the "tippee"), the tippee must also have been aware that the insider released the information for an improper purpose.
One commentator has argued that if Company A's CEO did not trade on undisclosed takeover news, but instead passed the information on to his brother-in-law who traded on it, illegal insider trading would still have occurred (albeit by proxy, by passing it on to a "non-insider" so Company A's CEO would not get his hands dirty).
A newer view of insider trading, the misappropriation theory, is now accepted in U.S. law. It states that anyone who misappropriates material non-public information and trades on that information in any stock may be guilty of insider trading. This can include elucidating material non-public information from an insider with the intention of trading on it, or passing it on to someone who will.
Proving that someone has been responsible for a trade can be difficult because traders may try to hide behind nominees, offshore companies, and other proxies. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) prosecutes over 50 cases each year, with many being settled administratively out of court. The SEC and several stock exchanges actively monitor trading, looking for suspicious activity. The SEC does not have criminal enforcement authority, but can refer serious matters to the U.S. Attorney's Office for further investigation and prosecution.
In the United States and most non-European jurisdictions not all trading on non-public information is illegal insider trading. For example, a person in a restaurant who hears the CEO of Company A at the next table tell the CFO that the company's profits will be higher than expected and then buys the stock is not guilty of insider trading—unless he or she had some closer connection to the company or company officers. However, even where the tippee is not himself an insider, where the tippee knows that the information is non-public and the information is paid for, or the tipper receives a benefit for giving it, then in the broader-scope jurisdictions the subsequent trading is illegal.
Notwithstanding, information about a tender offer (usually regarding a merger or acquisition) is held to a higher standard. If this type of information is obtained (directly or indirectly) and there is reason to believe it is nonpublic, there is a duty to disclose it or abstain from trading.
In the United States in addition to civil penalties, the trader may also be subject to criminal prosecution for fraud or where SEC regulations have been broken, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) may be called to conduct an independent parallel investigation. If the DOJ finds criminal wrongdoing, the Department may file criminal charges.
Legal trades by insiders are common, as employees of publicly traded corporations often have stock or stock options. These trades are made public in the United States through Securities and Exchange Commission filings, mainly Form 4.
U.S. SEC Rule 10b5-1 clarified that the prohibition against insider trading does not require proof that an insider actually used material nonpublic information when conducting a trade; possession of such information alone is sufficient to violate the provision, and the SEC would infer that an insider in possession of material nonpublic information used this information when conducting a trade. However, SEC Rule 10b5-1 also created for insiders an affirmative defense if the insider can demonstrate that the trades conducted on behalf of the insider were conducted as part of a pre-existing contract or written binding plan for trading in the future.
For example, if an insider expects to retire after a specific period of time and, as part of retirement planning, the insider has adopted a written binding plan to sell a specific amount of the company's stock every month for two years, and the insider later comes into possession of material nonpublic information about the company, trades based on the original plan might not constitute prohibited insider trading.
Until the 21st century and the European Union's market abuse laws, the United States was the leading country in prohibiting insider trading made on the basis of material non-public information. Thomas Newkirk and Melissa Robertson of the SEC summarize the development of US insider trading laws. Insider trading has a base offense level of 8, which puts it in Zone A under the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. This means that first-time offenders are eligible to receive probation rather than incarceration.
U.S. insider trading prohibitions are based on English and American common law prohibitions against fraud. In 1909, well before the Securities Exchange Act was passed, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a corporate director who bought that company's stock when he knew the stock's price was about to increase committed fraud by buying but not disclosing his inside information.
Section 15 of the Securities Act of 1933 contained prohibitions of fraud in the sale of securities, later greatly strengthened by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
Section 16(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 prohibits short-swing profits (from any purchases and sales within any six-month period) made by corporate directors, officers, or stockholders owning more than 10% of a firm's shares. Under Section 10(b) of the 1934 Act, SEC Rule 10b-5, prohibits fraud related to securities trading.
The Insider Trading Sanctions Act of 1984 and the Insider Trading and Securities Fraud Enforcement Act of 1988 place penalties for illegal insider trading as high as three times the amount of profit gained or loss avoided from the illegal trading.
SEC regulation FD ("Fair Disclosure") requires that if a company intentionally discloses material non-public information to one person, it must simultaneously disclose that information to the public at large. In the case of an unintentional disclosure of material non-public information to one person, the company must make a public disclosure "promptly."
Insider trading, or similar practices, are also regulated by the SEC under its rules on takeovers and tender offers under the Williams Act.
Much of the development of insider trading law has resulted from court decisions.
In 1909, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in "Strong v. Repide" that a director who expects to act in a way that affects the value of shares cannot use that knowledge to acquire shares from those who do not know of the expected action. Even though, in general, ordinary relations between directors and shareholders in a business corporation are not of such a fiduciary nature as to make it the duty of a director to disclose to a shareholder general knowledge regarding the value of the shares of the company before he purchases any from a shareholder, some cases involve special facts that impose such duty.
In 1968, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals advanced a "level playing field" theory of insider trading in "SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co." The court stated that anyone in possession of inside information must either disclose the information or refrain from trading. Officers of the Texas Gulf Sulphur Company had used inside information about the discovery of the Kidd Mine to make profits by buying shares and call options on company stock.
In 1984, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in the case of "Dirks v. Securities and Exchange Commission" that tippees (receivers of second-hand information) are liable if they had reason to believe that the tipper had breached a fiduciary duty in disclosing confidential information. One such example would be if the tipper received any personal benefit from the disclosure, thereby breaching his or her duty of loyalty to the company. In "Dirks", the "tippee" received confidential information from an insider, a former employee of a company. The reason the insider disclosed the information to the tippee, and the reason the tippee disclosed the information to third parties, was to blow the whistle on massive fraud at the company. As a result of the tippee's efforts the fraud was uncovered, and the company went into bankruptcy. But, while the tippee had given the "inside" information to clients who made profits from the information, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the tippee could not be held liable under the federal securities laws—for the simple reason that the insider from whom he received the information was not releasing the information for an improper purpose (a personal benefit), but rather for the purpose of exposing the fraud. The Supreme Court ruled that the tippee could not have been aiding and abetting a securities law violation committed by the insider—for the simple reason that no securities law violation had been committed by the insider.
In "Dirks", the Supreme Court also defined the concept of "constructive insiders," who are lawyers, investment bankers, and others who receive confidential information from a corporation while providing services to the corporation. Constructive insiders are also liable for insider trading violations if the corporation expects the information to remain confidential, since they acquire the fiduciary duties of the true insider.
The next expansion of insider trading liability came in "SEC vs. Materia" 745 F.2d 197 (2d Cir. 1984), the case that first introduced the misappropriation theory of liability for insider trading. Materia, a financial printing firm proofreader, and clearly not an insider by any definition, was found to have determined the identity of takeover targets based on proofreading tender offer documents during his employment. After a two-week trial, the district court found him liable for insider trading, and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed holding that the theft of information from an employer, and the use of that information to purchase or sell securities in another entity, constituted a fraud in connection with the purchase or sale of a securities. The misappropriation theory of insider trading was born, and liability further expanded to encompass a larger group of outsiders.
In "United States v. Carpenter" (1986) the U.S. Supreme Court cited an earlier ruling while unanimously upholding mail and wire fraud convictions for a defendant who received his information from a journalist rather than from the company itself. The journalist R. Foster Winans was also convicted, on the grounds that he had misappropriated information belonging to his employer, the "Wall Street Journal". In that widely publicized case, Winans traded in advance of "Heard on the Street" columns appearing in the Journal.
The Court stated in "Carpenter": "It is well established, as a general proposition, that a person who acquires special knowledge or information by virtue of a confidential or fiduciary relationship with another is not free to exploit that knowledge or information for his own personal benefit but must account to his principal for any profits derived therefrom."
However, in upholding the securities fraud (insider trading) convictions, the justices were evenly split.
In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted the misappropriation theory of insider trading in "United States v. O'Hagan", 521 U.S. 642, 655 (1997). O'Hagan was a partner in a law firm representing Grand Metropolitan, while it was considering a tender offer for Pillsbury Company. O'Hagan used this inside information by buying call options on Pillsbury stock, resulting in profits of over $4.3 million. O'Hagan claimed that neither he nor his firm owed a fiduciary duty to Pillsbury, so he did not commit fraud by purchasing Pillsbury options.
The Court rejected O'Hagan's arguments and upheld his conviction.
The "misappropriation theory" holds that a person commits fraud "in connection with" a securities transaction and thereby violates 10(b) and Rule 10b-5, when he misappropriates confidential information for securities trading purposes, in breach of a duty owed to the source of the information. Under this theory, a fiduciary's undisclosed, self-serving use of a principal's information to purchase or sell securities, in breach of a duty of loyalty and confidentiality, defrauds the principal of the exclusive use of the information. In lieu of premising liability on a fiduciary relationship between company insider and purchaser or seller of the company's stock, the misappropriation theory premises liability on a fiduciary-turned-trader's deception of those who entrusted him with access to confidential information.
The Court specifically recognized that a corporation's information is its property: "A company's confidential information ... qualifies as property to which the company has a right of exclusive use. The undisclosed misappropriation of such information in violation of a fiduciary duty ... constitutes fraud akin to embezzlement – the fraudulent appropriation to one's own use of the money or goods entrusted to one's care by another."
In 2000, the SEC enacted SEC Rule 10b5-1, which defined trading "on the basis of" inside information as any time a person trades while aware of material nonpublic information. It is no longer a defense for one to say that one would have made the trade anyway. The rule also created an affirmative defense for pre-planned trades.
In "Morgan Stanley v. Skowron", 989 F. Supp. 2d 356 (S.D.N.Y. 2013), applying New York's faithless servant doctrine, the court held that a hedge fund's portfolio manager engaging in insider trading in violation of his company's code of conduct, which also required him to report his misconduct, must repay his employer the full $31 million his employer paid him as compensation during his period of faithlessness. The court called the insider trading the "ultimate abuse of a portfolio manager's position." The judge also wrote: "In addition to exposing Morgan Stanley to government investigations and direct financial losses, Skowron's behavior damaged the firm's reputation, a valuable corporate asset."
In 2014, in the case of "United States v. Newman", the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit cited the Supreme Court's decision in "Dirks", and ruled that for a "tippee" (a person who used information they received from an insider) to be guilty of insider trading, the tippee must have been aware not only that the information was insider information, but must also have been aware that the insider released the information for an improper purpose (such as a personal benefit). The Court concluded that the insider's breach of a fiduciary duty not to release confidential information—in the absence of an improper purpose on the part of the insider—is not enough to impose criminal liability on either the insider or the tippee.
In 2016, in the case of "Salman v. United States", the U.S. Supreme Court held that the benefit a tipper must receive as predicate for an insider-trader prosecution of a tippee need not be pecuniary, and that giving a 'gift' of a tip to a family member is presumptively an act for the personal though intangible benefit of the tipper.
Members of the US Congress are exempt from the laws that ban insider trading. Because they generally do not have a confidential relationship with the source of the information they receive, however, they do not meet the usual definition of an "insider." House of Representatives rules may however consider congressional insider trading unethical. A 2004 study found that stock sales and purchases by Senators outperformed the market by 12.3% per year. Peter Schweizer points out several examples of insider trading by members of Congress, including action taken by Spencer Bachus following a private, behind-the-doors meeting on the evening of September 18, 2008 when Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke informed members of Congress about the issues due to the financial crisis of 2007–2008, Bachus then shorted stocks the next morning and cashed in his profits within a week. Also attending the same meeting were Senator Dick Durbin and John Boehner; the same day (trade effective the next day), Durbin sold mutual-fund shares worth $42,696, and reinvested it all with Warren Buffett. Also the same day (trade effective the next day), Congressman Boehner cashed out of an equity mutual fund.
In May 2007, a bill entitled the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act was introduced that would hold congressional and federal employees liable for stock trades they made using information they gained through their jobs and also regulate analysts or political intelligence firms that research government activities. The STOCK Act was enacted on April 4, 2012.
Some economists and legal scholars (such as Henry Manne, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Daniel Fischel, and Frank H. Easterbrook) have argued that laws against insider trading should be repealed. They claim that insider trading based on material nonpublic information benefits investors, in general, by more quickly introducing new information into the market.
Friedman, laureate of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, said: "You want more insider trading, not less. You want to give the people most likely to have knowledge about deficiencies of the company an incentive to make the public aware of that." Friedman did not believe that the trader should be required to make his trade known to the public, because the buying or selling pressure itself is information for the market.
Other critics argue that insider trading is a victimless act: a willing buyer and a willing seller agree to trade property that the seller rightfully owns, with no prior contract (according to this view) having been made between the parties to refrain from trading if there is asymmetric information. "The Atlantic" has described the process as "arguably the closest thing that modern finance has to a victimless crime."
Legalization advocates also question why "trading" where one party has more information than the other is legal in other markets, such as real estate, but not in the stock market. For example, if a geologist knows there is a high likelihood of the discovery of petroleum under Farmer Smith's land, he may be entitled to make Smith an offer for the land, and buy it, without first telling Farmer Smith of the geological data.
Advocates of legalization make free speech arguments. Punishment for communicating about a development pertinent to the next day's stock price might seem an act of censorship. If the information being conveyed is proprietary information and the corporate insider has contracted to not expose it, he has no more right to communicate it than he would to tell others about the company's confidential new product designs, formulas, or bank account passwords.
Some authors have used these arguments to propose legalizing insider trading on negative information (but not on positive information). Since negative information is often withheld from the market, trading on such information has a higher value for the market than trading on positive information.
There are very limited laws against "insider trading" in the commodities markets if, for no other reason than that the concept of an "insider" is not immediately analogous to commodities themselves (corn, wheat, steel, etc.). However, analogous activities such as front running are illegal under US commodity and futures trading laws. For example, a commodity broker can be charged with fraud for receiving a large purchase order from a client (one likely to affect the price of that commodity) and then purchasing that commodity before executing the client's order to benefit from the anticipated price increase.
The advent of the Internet has provided a forum for the commercialisation of trading on insider information. In 2016 a number of dark web sites were identified as marketplaces where such non-public information was bought and sold. At least one such site used bitcoins to avoid currency restrictions and to impede tracking. Such sites also provide a place for soliciting for corporate informants, where non-public information may be used for purposes other than stock trading.
The US and the UK vary in the way the law is interpreted and applied with regard to insider trading. In the UK, the relevant laws are the Criminal Justice Act 1993, Part V, Schedule 1; the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, which defines an offence of "Market Abuse"; and the European Union Regulation No 596/2014. The principle is that it is illegal to trade on the basis of market-sensitive information that is not generally known. This is a much broader scope that under U.S. law. The key differences from U.S. law are that no relationship to either the issuer of the security or the tipster is required; all that is required is that the guilty party traded (or caused trading) whilst having inside information, and there is no "scienter" requirement under UK law.
Japan enacted its first law against insider trading in 1988. Roderick Seeman said, "Even today many Japanese do not understand why this is illegal. Indeed, previously it was regarded as common sense to make a profit from your knowledge."
In Malta the law follows the European broader scope model. The relevant statute is the Prevention of Financial Markets Abuse Act of 2005, as amended. Earlier acts included the Financial Markets Abuse Act in 2002, and the Insider Dealing and Market Abuse Act of 1994.
The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) paper on the "Objectives and Principles of Securities Regulation" (updated to 2003) states that the three objectives of good securities market regulation are investor protection, ensuring that markets are fair, efficient and transparent, and reducing systemic risk.
The discussion of these "Core Principles" state that "investor protection" in this context means "Investors should be protected from misleading, manipulative or fraudulent practices, including insider trading, front running or trading ahead of customers and the misuse of client assets." More than 85 percent of the world's securities and commodities market regulators are members of IOSCO and have signed on to these Core Principles.
The World Bank and International Monetary Fund now use the IOSCO Core Principles in reviewing the financial health of different country's regulatory systems as part of these organization's financial sector assessment program, so laws against insider trading based on non-public information are now expected by the international community. Enforcement of insider trading laws varies widely from country to country, but the vast majority of jurisdictions now outlaw the practice, at least in principle.
Larry Harris claims that differences in the effectiveness with which countries restrict insider trading help to explain the differences in executive compensation among those countries. The US, for example, has much higher CEO salaries than do Japan or Germany, where insider trading is less effectively restrained.
In 2014, the European Union (EU) adopted legislation (Criminal Sanctions for Market Abuse Directive) that harmonised criminal sanctions for insider dealing. All EU Member States agreed to introduce maximum prison sentences of at least four years for serious cases of market manipulation and insider dealing, and at least two years for improper disclosure of insider information.
In 2009, a journalist in Nettavisen (Thomas Gulbrandsen) was sentenced to 4 months in prison for insider trading.
The longest prison sentence in a Norwegian trial where the main charge was insider trading, was for eight years (two suspended) when Alain Angelil was convicted in a district court on December 9, 2011.
Although insider trading in the UK has been illegal since 1980, it proved difficult to successfully prosecute individuals accused of insider trading. There were a number of notorious cases where individuals were able to escape prosecution. Instead the UK regulators relied on a series of fines to punish market abuses.
These fines were widely perceived as an ineffective deterrent (Cole, 2007), and there was a statement of intent by the UK regulator (the Financial Services Authority) to use its powers to enforce the legislation (specifically the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000). Between 2009–2012 the FSA secured 14 convictions in relation to insider dealing.
Anil Kumar, a senior partner at management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, pleaded guilty in 2010 to insider trading in a "descent from the pinnacle of the business world."
Chip Skowron, a hedge fund co-portfolio manager of FrontPoint Partners LLC's health care funds, was convicted of insider trading in 2011, for which he served five years in prison. He had been tipped off by a consultant to a company that the company was about to make a negative announcement regarding its clinical trial for a drug. At first Skowron denied the charges against him, and his defense attorney said he would plead not guilty, saying "We look forward to responding to the allegations more fully in court at the appropriate time". However, after the consultant charged with tipping him off pleaded guilty, he changed his position, and admitted his guilt.
Rajat Gupta, who had been managing partner of McKinsey & Co. and a director at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co., was convicted by a federal jury in 2012 and sentence to two years in prison for leaking inside information to hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam who was sentenced to 11 years in prison. The case was prosecuted by the office of United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara.
Mathew Martoma, former hedge fund trader and portfolio manager at S.A.C. Capital Advisors, was accused of generating possibly the largest single insider trading transaction profit in history at a value of $276 million. He was convicted in February 2014, and is serving a nine-year prison sentence.
With the guilty plea by Perkins Hixon in 2014 for insider trading from 2010–2013 while at Evercore Partners, Bharara said in a press release that 250 defendants whom his office had charged since August 2009 had now been convicted.
On December 10, 2014, a federal appeals court overturned the insider trading convictions of two former hedge fund traders, Todd Newman and Anthony Chiasson, based on the "erroneous" instructions given to jurors by the trial judge. The decision was expected to affect the appeal of the separate insider-trading conviction of former SAC Capital portfolio manager Michael Steinberg and the U.S. Attorney and the SEC in 2015 did drop their cases against Steinberg and others.
In 2016, Sean Stewart, a former managing director at Perella Weinberg Partners LP and vice president at JPMorgan Chase, was convicted on allegations he tipped his father on pending health-care deals. The father, Robert Stewart, previously had pleaded guilty but didn't testify during his son's trial. It was argued that by way of compensation for the tip, the father had paid more than $10,000 for Sean's wedding photographer.
In 2017, Billy Walters, Las Vegas sports bettor, was convicted of making $40 million on private information of Dallas-based dairy processing company Dean Foods, and sentenced to five years in prison. Walters's source, company director Thomas C. Davis employing a prepaid cell phone and sometimes the code words "Dallas Cowboys" for Dean Foods, helped him from 2008 to 2014 realize profits and avoid losses in the stock, the federal jury found. Golfer Phil Mickelson "was also mentioned during the trial as someone who had traded in Dean Foods shares and once owed nearly $2 million in gambling debts to" Walters. Mickelson "made roughly $1 million trading Dean Foods shares; he agreed to forfeit those profits in a related civil case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission". Walters appealed the verdict, but in December 2018 his conviction was upheld by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan.
In 2008, police uncovered an insider trading conspiracy involving Bay Street and Wall Street lawyer Gil Cornblum who had worked at Sullivan & Cromwell and was working at Dorsey & Whitney, and a former lawyer, Stan Grmovsek, who were found to have gained over $10 million in illegal profits over a 14-year span. Cornblum committed suicide by jumping from a bridge as he was under investigation and shortly before he was to be arrested but before criminal charges were laid against him, one day before his alleged co-conspirator Grmovsek pled guilty. Grmovsek pleaded guilty to insider trading and was sentenced to 39 months in prison. This was the longest term ever imposed for insider trading in Canada. These crimes were explored in Mark Coakley's 2011 non-fiction book, "Tip and Trade".
The U.S. SEC alleged that in 2009 Kuwaiti trader Hazem Al-Braikan engaged in insider trading after misleading the public about possible takeover bids for two companies. Three days after Al-Braikan was sued by the SEC, he was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in his home in Kuwait City on July 26, 2009, in what Kuwaiti police called a suicide. The SEC later reached a $6.5 million settlement of civil insider trading charges, with his estate and others.
The majority of shares in China before 2005 were non-tradeable shares that were not sold on the stock exchange publicly but privately. To make shares more accessible, the China Securities Regulation Commission (CSRC) required the companies to convert the non-tradeable shares into tradeable shares. There was a deadline for companies to convert their shares and the deadline was short, due to this there was a massive amount of exchanges and in the midst of these exchanges many people committed insider trading knowing that the selling of these shares would affect prices. Chinese people did not fear insider trading as much as one may in the United States because there is no possibility of imprisonment. Punishment may include monetary fees or temporary relieving from a position in the company. The Chinese do not view insider trading as a crime worth prison time because generally the person has a clean record and a path of success with references to deter them from being viewed as a criminal. On October 1, 2015, Chinese fund manager Xu Xiang was arrested due to insider trading.
Insider trading in India is an offense according to Sections 12A, 15G of the Securities and Exchange Board of India Act, 1992. Insider trading is when one with access to non-public, price-sensitive information about the securities of the company subscribes, buys, sells, or deals, or agrees to do so or counsels another to do so as principal or agent. Price-sensitive information is information that materially affects the value of the securities. The penalty for insider trading is imprisonment, which may extend to five years, and a minimum of five lakh rupees (500,000) to 25 crore rupees (250 million) or three times the profit made, whichever is higher.
"The Wall Street Journal", in a 2014 article entitled "Why It’s Hard to Catch India’s Insider Trading," said that despite a widespread belief that insider trading takes place on a regular basis in India, there were few examples of insider traders being prosecuted in India. One former top regulator said that in India insider trading is deeply rooted and especially rampant because regulators don't have the tools to address it. In the few cases where prosecution has taken place, cases have sometimes taken more than a decade to reach trial, and punishments have been light; and despite SEBI by law having the ability to demand penalties of up to $4 million, the few fines that were levied for insider trading have usually been under $200,000.
The current Australian legislation arose out of the report of a 1989 parliamentary committee report which recommended removal of the requirement that the trader be ‘connected’ with the body corporate. This may have weakened the importance of the fiduciary duty rationale and possibly brought new potential offenders within its ambit. In Australia if a person possesses inside information and knows, or ought reasonably to know, that the information is not generally available and is materially price sensitive then the insider must not trade. Nor must she or he procure another to trade and must not tip another. Information will be considered generally available if it consists of readily observable matter or it has been made known to common investors and a reasonable period for it to be disseminated among such investors has elapsed.
Under Republic Act 8799 or the Securities Regulation Code, insider trading in the Philippines is illegal.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15368
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International Brigades
The International Brigades () were military units set up by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. The organization existed for two years, from 1936 until 1938. It is estimated that during the entire war, between 40,000 and 59,000 members served in the International Brigades, including 15,000 who died in combat.
The headquarters of the brigade was located at the Gran Hotel, Albacete, Castilla-La Mancha. They participated in the battles of Madrid, Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Belchite, Teruel, Aragon and the Ebro. Most of these ended in defeat. For the last year of its existence, the International Brigades were integrated into the Spanish Republican Army as part of the Spanish Foreign Legion. The organisation was dissolved on 23 September 1938 by Spanish Prime Minister, Juan Negrín, in a vain attempt to get more support from the liberal democracies on the Non-Intervention Committee.
The International Brigades was strongly supported by the Comintern and represented the Soviet Union's commitment to assisting the Spanish Republic (with arms, logistics, military advisers and the NKVD), just as Fascist Italy, Fascist Portugal and Nazi Germany were assisting the opposing Nationalist insurgency. The largest number of volunteers came from France (where the French Communist Party had many members) and communist exiles from Italy and Germany. Many Jews from the English-speaking world and Eastern Europe also participated.
Republican volunteers who were opposed to Stalinism did not join the Brigades but instead enlisted in the separate Popular Front, the POUM, formed from Trotskyist, Bukharinist and other anti-Stalinist groups, which did not separate Spaniards and foreign volunteers (such as George Orwell), or anarcho-syndicalist groups such as the Durruti Column, the IWA and the CNT.
Using foreign communist parties to recruit volunteers for Spain was first proposed in the Soviet Union in September 1936—apparently at the suggestion of Maurice Thorez—by Willi Münzenberg, chief of Comintern propaganda for Western Europe. As a security measure, non-communist volunteers would first be interviewed by an NKVD agent.
By the end of September, the Italian and French Communist Parties had decided to set up a column. Luigi Longo, ex-leader of the Italian Communist Youth, was charged to make the necessary arrangements with the Spanish government. The Soviet Ministry of Defense also helped, since they had an experience of dealing with corps of international volunteers during the Russian Civil War. The idea was initially opposed by Largo Caballero, but after the first setbacks of the war, he changed his mind and finally agreed to the operation on 22 October. However, the Soviet Union did not withdraw from the Non-Intervention Committee, probably to avoid diplomatic conflict with France and the United Kingdom.
The main recruitment center was in Paris, under the supervision of Soviet colonel Karol "Walter" Świerczewski. On 17 October 1936, an open letter by Joseph Stalin to José Díaz was published in "Mundo Obrero", arguing that victory for the Spanish second republic was a matter not only for Spaniards but also for the whole of "progressive humanity"; in short order, communist activists joined with moderate socialist and liberal groups to form anti-fascist "popular front" militias in several countries, most of them under the control of or influenced by the Comintern.
Entry to Spain was arranged for volunteers, for instance, a Yugoslav, Josip Broz, who would become famous as Marshal Josip Broz Tito, was in Paris to provide assistance, money, and passports for volunteers from Eastern Europe. Volunteers were sent by train or ship from France to Spain, and sent to the base at Albacete. Many of them also went by themselves to Spain. The volunteers were under no contract, nor defined engagement period, which would later prove a problem.
Also, many Italians, Germans, and people from other countries joined the movement, with the idea that combat in Spain was the first step to restore democracy or advance a revolutionary cause in their own country. There were also many unemployed workers (especially from France), and adventurers. Finally, some 500 communists who had been exiled to Russia were sent to Spain (among them, experienced military leaders from the First World War like "Kléber" Stern, "Gomez" Zaisser, "Lukacs" Zalka and "Gal" Galicz, who would prove invaluable in combat).
The operation was met with enthusiasm by communists, but by anarchists with skepticism, at best. At first, the anarchists, who controlled the borders with France, were told to refuse communist volunteers, but reluctantly allowed their passage after protests. A group of 500 volunteers (mainly French, with a few exiled Poles and Germans) arrived in Albacete on 14 October 1936. They were met by international volunteers who had already been fighting in Spain: Germans from the Thälmann Battalion, Italians from the Centuria Gastone Sozzi and French from the Commune de Paris Battalion. Among them was British poet John Cornford. Men were sorted according to their experience and origin and dispatched to units.
On 30 May 1937, the Spanish liner "Ciudad de Barcelona", carrying 200–250 volunteers from Marseille to Spain, was torpedoed by a Nationalist submarine off the coast of Malgrat de Mar. The ship sunk and up to 65 volunteers are estimated to have drowned.
Albacete soon became the International Brigades headquarters and its main depot. It was run by a "troika" of Comintern heavyweights: André Marty was commander; Luigi Longo ("Gallo") was Inspector-General; and Giuseppe Di Vittorio ("Nicoletti") was chief political commissar.
The French Communist Party provided uniforms for the Brigades. They were organized into mixed brigades, the basic military unit of the Republican People's Army. Discipline was severe. For several weeks, the Brigades were locked in their base while their strict military training was underway.
The battle of Madrid was a major success for the Republic, and staved off the prospect of a rapid defeat at the hands of Francisco Franco's forces. The role of the International Brigades in this victory was generally recognized but was exaggerated by Comintern propaganda so that the outside world heard only of their victories and not those of Spanish units. So successful was such propaganda that the British Ambassador, Sir Henry Chilton, declared that there were no Spaniards in the army which had defended Madrid. The International Brigade forces that fought in Madrid arrived after another successful Republican fighting. Of the 40,000 Republican troops in the city, the foreign troops numbered less than 3,000.
Even though the International Brigades did not win the battle by themselves, nor significantly change the situation, they certainly did provide an example by their determined fighting and improved the morale of the population by demonstrating the concern of other nations in the fight. Many of the older members of the International Brigades provided valuable combat experience, having fought during the First World War (Spain remained neutral in 1914–1918) and the Irish War of Independence (some had fought in the British Army while others had fought in the Irish Republican Army (IRA)).
One of the strategic positions in Madrid was the Casa de Campo. There the Nationalist troops were Moroccans, commanded by General José Enrique Varela. They were stopped by III and IV Brigades of the Spanish Republican Army.
On 9 November 1936, the XI International Brigade – comprising 1,900 men from the Edgar André Battalion, the Commune de Paris Battalion and the Dabrowski Battalion, together with a British machine-gun company — took up position at the Casa de Campo. In the evening, its commander, General Kléber, launched an assault on the Nationalist positions. This lasted for the whole night and part of the next morning. At the end of the fight, the Nationalist troops had been forced to retreat, abandoning all hopes of a direct assault on Madrid by Casa de Campo, while the XIth Brigade had lost a third of its personnel.
On 13 November, the 1,550-man strong XII International Brigade, made up of the Thälmann Battalion, the Garibaldi Battalion and the André Marty Battalion, deployed. Commanded by General "Lukacs", they assaulted Nationalist positions on the high ground of Cerro de Los Angeles. As a result of language and communication problems, command issues, lack of rest, poor coordination with armored units, and insufficient artillery support, the attack failed.
On 19 November, the anarchist militias were forced to retreat, and Nationalist troops — Moroccans and Spanish Foreign Legionnaires, covered by the Nazi Condor Legion — captured a foothold in the University City. The 11th Brigade was sent to drive the Nationalists out of the University City. The battle was extremely bloody, a mix of artillery and aerial bombardment, with bayonet and grenade fights, room by room. Anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti was shot there on 19 November 1936 and died the next day. The battle in the University went on until three-quarters of the University City was under Nationalist control. Both sides then started setting up trenches and fortifications. It was then clear that any assault from either side would be far too costly; the Nationalist leaders had to renounce the idea of a direct assault on Madrid, and prepare for a siege of the capital.
On 13 December 1936, 18,000 nationalist troops attempted an attack to close the encirclement of Madrid at Guadarrama — an engagement known as the Battle of the Corunna Road. The Republicans sent in a Soviet armored unit, under General Dmitry Pavlov, and both XI and XII International Brigades. Violent combat followed, and they stopped the Nationalist advance.
An attack was then launched by the Republic on the Córdoba front. The battle ended in a form of stalemate; a communique was issued, saying: "During the day the advance continued without the loss of any territory." Poets Ralph Winston Fox and John Cornford were killed. Eventually, the Nationalists advanced, taking the hydroelectric station at El Campo. André Marty accused the commander of the Marseillaise Battalion, Gaston Delasalle, of espionage and treason and had him executed. (It is doubtful that Delasalle would have been a spy for Francisco Franco; he was denounced by his second-in-command, André Heussler, who was subsequently executed for treason during World War II by the French Resistance.)
Further Nationalist attempts after Christmas to encircle Madrid met with failure, but not without extremely violent combat. On 6 January 1937, the Thälmann Battalion arrived at Las Rozas, and held its positions until it was destroyed as a fighting force. On 9 January, only 10 km had been lost to the Nationalists, when the XIII International Brigade and XIV International Brigade and the 1st British Company, arrived in Madrid. Violent Republican assaults were launched in an attempt to retake the land, with little success. On 15 January, trenches and fortifications were built by both sides, resulting in a stalemate.
The Nationalists did not take Madrid until the very end of the war, in March 1939, when they marched in unopposed. There were some pockets of resistance during the subsequent months.
On 6 February 1937, following the fall of Málaga, the nationalists launched an attack on the Madrid–Andalusia road, south of Madrid. The Nationalists quickly advanced on the little town of Ciempozuelos, held by the XV International Brigade. was composed of the British Battalion (British Commonwealth and Irish), the Dimitrov Battalion (miscellaneous Balkan nationalities), the Sixth February Battalion (Belgians and French), the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. An independent 80-men-strong (mainly) Irish unit, known afterward as the Connolly Column, also fought. Battalions were rarely composed entirely of one nationality, rather they were, for the most part, a mix of many.
On 11 February 1937, a Nationalist brigade launched a surprise attack on the André Marty Battalion (XIV International Brigade), killing its sentries silently and crossing the Jarama. The Garibaldi Battalion stopped the advance with heavy fire. At another point, the same tactic allowed the Nationalists to move their troops across the river. On 12 February, the British Battalion, XV International Brigade took the brunt of the attack, remaining under heavy fire for seven hours. The position became known as "Suicide Hill". At the end of the day, only 225 of the 600 members of the British battalion remained. One company was captured by ruse, when Nationalists advanced among their ranks singing "The Internationale".
On 17 February, the Republican Army counter-attacked. On 23 and 27 February, the International Brigades were engaged, but with little success. The Lincoln Battalion was put under great pressure, with no artillery support. It suffered 120 killed and 175 wounded. Amongst the dead was the Irish poet Charles Donnelly and Leo Greene.
There were heavy casualties on both sides, and although "both claimed victory ... both suffered defeats". The battle resulted in a stalemate, with both sides digging in and creating elaborate trench systems. On 22 February 1937, the League of Nations Non-Intervention Committee ban on foreign volunteers went into effect.
After the failed assault on the Jarama, the Nationalists attempted another assault on Madrid, this time from the northeast. The objective was the town of Guadalajara, 50 km from Madrid. The whole Italian expeditionary corps — 35,000 men, with 80 battle tanks and 200 field artillery — was deployed, as Benito Mussolini wanted the victory to be credited to Italy. On 9 March 1937, the Italians made a breach in the Republican lines but did not properly exploit the advance. However, the rest of the Nationalist army was advancing, and the situation appeared critical for the Republicans. A formation drawn from the best available units of the Republican army, including the XI and XII International Brigades, was quickly assembled.
At dawn on 10 March, the Nationalists closed in, and by noon, the Garibaldi Battalion counterattacked. Some confusion arose from the fact that the sides were not aware of each other's movements, and that both sides spoke Italian; this resulted in scouts from both sides exchanging information without realizing they were enemies. The Republican lines advanced and made contact with XI International Brigade. Nationalist tanks were shot at and infantry patrols came into action.
On 11 March, the Nationalist army broke the front of the Republican army. The Thälmann Battalion suffered heavy losses, but succeeded in holding the Trijueque–Torija road. The Garibaldi also held its positions. On 12 March, Republican planes and tanks attacked. The Thälmann Battalion attacked Trijuete in a bayonet charge and re-took the town, capturing numerous prisoners.
The International Brigades also saw combat in the Battle of Teruel in January 1938. The 35th International Division suffered heavily in this battle from aerial bombardment as well as shortages of food, winter clothing, and ammunition. The XIV International Brigade fought in the Battle of Ebro in July 1938, the last Republican offensive of the war.
Although exact figures are not available, an estimated 5,857 to 25,229 members of the International Brigades died in Spain, of an estimated 23,670 to 59,380 who served, with estimated death rates of 16.7% to 29.2%. These high casualty rates are blamed on lack of training, poor leadership and use as shock troops.
In October 1938, at the height of the Battle of the Ebro, the Non-Intervention Committee demanded the withdrawal of the International Brigades. The Republican government of Juan Negrín announced the decision in the League of Nations on 21 September 1938. The disbandment was part of an ill-advised effort to get the Nationalists' foreign backers to withdraw their troops and to persuade the Western democracies such as France and Britain to end their arms embargo on the Republic.
By this time there were about an estimated 10,000 foreign volunteers still serving in Spain for the Republican side, and about 50,000 foreign conscripts for the Nationalists (excluding another 30,000 Moroccans). Perhaps half of the International Brigadistas were exiles or refugees from Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or other countries, such as Hungary, which had authoritarian right-wing governments at the time. These men could not safely return home and some were instead given honorary Spanish citizenship and integrated into Spanish units of the Popular Army. The remainder were repatriated to their own countries. The Belgian and Dutch volunteers lost their citizenship because they had served in a foreign army.
The first brigades were composed mostly of French, Belgian, Italian, and German volunteers, backed by a sizeable contingent of Polish miners from Northern France and Belgium. The XIth, XIIth and XIIIth were the first brigades formed. Later, the XIVth and XVth Brigades were raised, mixing experienced soldiers with new volunteers. Smaller Brigades — the 86th, 129th and 150th - were formed in late 1937 and 1938, mostly for temporary tactical reasons.
About 32,000 foreigners volunteered to defend the Spanish Republic, the vast majority of them with the International Brigades. Many were veterans of World War I. Their early engagements in 1936 during the Siege of Madrid amply demonstrated their military and propaganda value.
The international volunteers were mainly socialists, communists, or others willing to accept communist authority, and a high proportion were Jewish. Some were involved in the Barcelona May Days fighting against leftist opponents of the Communists: the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) ("Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista", an anti-Stalinist Marxist party) and the anarchist CNT (CNT, Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) and FAI (FAI, Iberian Anarchist Federation), who had strong support in Catalonia. These libertarian groups attracted fewer foreign volunteers.
To simplify communication, the battalions usually concentrated on people of the same nationality or language group. The battalions were often (formally, at least) named after inspirational people or events. From spring 1937 onwards, many battalions contained one Spanish volunteer company of about 150 men.
Later in the war, military discipline tightened and learning Spanish became mandatory. By decree of 23 September 1937, the International Brigades formally became units of the Spanish Foreign Legion. This made them subject to the Spanish Code of Military Justice. However, the Spanish Foreign Legion itself sided with the Nationalists throughout the coup and the civil war. The same decree also specified that non-Spanish officers in the Brigades should not exceed Spanish ones by more than 50 percent.
After the Civil War was eventually won by the Nationalists, the brigaders were initially on the "wrong side" of history, especially as most of their home countries had right-wing governments (in France, for instance, the Popular Front was not in power anymore).
However, since most of these countries soon found themselves at war with the very powers which had been supporting the Nationalists, the brigadistas gained some prestige as the first guard of the democracies, as having foreseen the danger of fascism and gone to fight it. Retrospectively, it was clear that the war in Spain was as much a precursor of the Second World War as a Spanish civil war.
Some glory therefore accrued to the volunteers (a great many of the survivors also fought during World War II), but this soon faded in the fear that it would promote communism by association.
An exception is among some left-wingers, for example many anarchists. Among these, the Brigades, or at least their leadership, are criticized for their role in suppressing the Spanish Revolution. An example of a modern work that promotes this view is Ken Loach's film "Land and Freedom". A well-known contemporary account of the Spanish Civil War which also takes this view is George Orwell's book "Homage to Catalonia".
Germany was undivided until after the Second World War. At that time, the new communist state, the German Democratic Republic, began to create a national identity which was separate from and antithetical to the former Nazi Germany. The Spanish Civil War, and especially the role of the International Brigades, became a substantial part of East Germany's memorial rituals because of the substantial numbers of German communists who had served in the brigades. These showcased a commitment by many Germans to antifascism at a time when Germany and Nazism were often conflated.
Survivors of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion were often investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and denied employment when they returned to Canada. Some were prevented from serving in the military during the Second World War due to "political unreliability".
In 1995 a monument to veterans of the war was built near Ontario's provincial parliament. On 12 February 2000, a bronze statue "The Spirit of the Republic" based on an original poster from the Spanish Republic, by sculptor Jack Harman, was placed on the grounds of the British Columbia Legislature. And in 2001, the few remaining Canadian veterans of the Spanish Civil War dedicated a monument to Canadian members of the International Brigades in Ottawa's Green Island Park.
In Switzerland, public sympathy was high for the Republican cause, but the federal government banned all fundraising and recruiting activities a month after the start of the war so as to preserve Swiss neutrality. Around 800 Swiss volunteers joined the International Brigades, among them a small number of women. Sixty percent of Swiss volunteers identified as communists, while the others included socialists, anarchists and antifascists.
Some 170 Swiss volunteers were killed in the war. The survivors were tried by military courts upon their return to Switzerland for violating the criminal prohibition on foreign military service. The courts pronounced 420 sentences which ranged from around two weeks to four years in prison, and often also stripped the convicts of their political rights. In the judgment of Swiss historian Mauro Cerutti, volunteers were punished more harshly in Switzerland than in any other democratic country.
Motions to pardon the Swiss brigades on the account that they fought for a just cause have been repeatedly introduced in the Swiss federal parliament. A first such proposal was defeated in 1939 on neutrality grounds. In 2002, Parliament again rejected a pardon of the Swiss war volunteers, with a majority arguing that they did break a law that remains in effect to this day. In March 2009, Parliament adopted the third bill of pardon, retroactively rehabilitating Swiss brigades, only a handful of whom were still alive.
On disbandment, 305 British volunteers left Spain. They arrived at Victoria Station on 7 December, to be met by a crowd of supporters including Clement Attlee, Stafford Cripps, Willie Gallacher, and Will Lawther.
The last surviving British member of the International Brigades, Geoffrey Servante, died in April 2019 aged 99.
In the United States, the returned volunteers were labeled "premature anti-fascists" by the FBI, denied promotion during service in the U.S. military during World War II, and pursued by Congressional committees during the Red Scare of 1947–1957. However, threats of loss of citizenship were not carried out.
On 26 January 1996, the Spanish government gave Spanish citizenship to the Brigadistas. At that time, roughly 600 remained. At the end of 1938, Prime Minister Juan Negrín had promised Spanish citizenship to the Brigadistas, which was of course not recognized by the Nationalists who were about to take over the entire country.
In 1996, Jacques Chirac, then French President, granted the former French members of the International Brigades the legal status of former service personnel ("ancient combatants") following the request of two French communist Members of Parliament, Lefort and Asensi, both children of volunteers. Before 1996, the same request was turned down several times including by François Mitterrand, the former Socialist President.
The International Brigades were inheritors of a socialist aesthetic. The flags featured the colors of the Spanish Republic: red, yellow and purple, often along with socialist symbols (red flags, hammer and sickle, fist). The emblem of the brigades themselves was the three-pointed red star, which is often featured.
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Food irradiation
Food irradiation is the process of exposing food and food packaging to ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation, such as from gamma rays, x-rays, or electron beams, is energy that can be transmitted without direct contact to the source of the energy (radiation) capable of freeing electrons from their atomic bonds (ionization) in the targeted food. The radiation can be emitted by a radioactive substance or generated electrically. This treatment is used to improve food safety by extending product shelf-life (preservation), reducing the risk of foodborne illness, delaying or eliminating sprouting or ripening, by sterilization of foods, and as a means of controlling insects and invasive pests. Food irradiation primarily extends the shelf-life of irradiated foods by effectively destroying organisms responsible for spoilage and foodborne illness and inhibiting sprouting.
Consumer perception of foods treated with irradiation is more negative than those processed by other means. The food is never in contact with the ionizing source, but still kills the living bacteria in the food. All independent research, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) have performed studies that confirm irradiation to be safe. In order for a food to be irradiated in the US, the FDA will still require that the specific food be thoroughly tested for irradiation safety.
Food irradiation is permitted by over 60 countries, with about 500,000 metric tons of food annually processed worldwide. The regulations that dictate how food is to be irradiated, as well as the food allowed to be irradiated, vary greatly from country to country. In Austria, Germany, and many other countries of the European Union only dried herbs, spices, and seasonings can be processed with irradiation and only at a specific dose, while in Brazil all foods are allowed at any dose.
Irradiation is used to reduce or eliminate the risk of food-borne illnesses, prevent or slow down spoilage, arrest maturation or sprouting and as a treatment against pests. Depending on the dose, some or all of the pathogenic organisms, microorganisms, bacteria, and viruses present are destroyed, slowed down, or rendered incapable of reproduction. Irradiation cannot return spoiled or over-ripe food to a fresh state. If this food was processed by irradiation, further spoilage would cease and ripening would slow down, yet the irradiation would not destroy the toxins or repair the texture, color, or taste of the food. When targeting bacteria, most foods are irradiated to significantly reduce the number of active microbes, not to sterilize all microbes in the product. In this respect it is similar to pasteurization.
Irradiation is used to create safe foods for people at high risk of infection, or for conditions where food must be stored for long periods of time and proper storage conditions are not available. Foods that can tolerate irradiation at sufficient doses are treated to ensure that the product is completely sterilized. This is most commonly done with rations for astronauts, and special diets for hospital patients.
Irradiation is used to create shelf-stable products. Since irradiation reduces the populations of spoilage microorganisms, and because pre-packed food can be irradiated, the packaging prevents recontamination of the final product.
Irradiation is used to reduce post-harvest losses. It reduces populations of spoilage micro-organisms in the food and can slow down the speed at which enzymes change the food, and therefore slows spoilage and ripening, and inhibits sprouting (e.g., of potato, onion, and garlic).
Food is also irradiated to prevent the spread of invasive pest species through trade in fresh vegetables and fruits, either within countries, or trade across international boundaries. Pests such as insects could be transported to new habitats through trade in fresh produce which could significantly affect agricultural production and the environment were they to establish themselves. This "phytosanitary irradiation" aims to render any hitch-hiking pest incapable of breeding. The pests are sterilized when the food is treated by low doses of irradiation. In general, the higher doses required to destroy pests such as insects, mealybugs, mites, moths, and butterflies either affect the look or taste, or cannot be tolerated by fresh produce. Low dosage treatments (less than 1000 gray) enables trade across quarantine boundaries and may also help reduce spoilage.
Irradiation reduces the risk of infection and spoilage, does not make food radioactive, and the food is shown to be safe, but it does cause chemical reactions that alter the food and therefore alters the chemical makeup, nutritional content, and the sensory qualities of the food. Some of the potential secondary impacts of irradiation are hypothetical, while others are demonstrated. These effects include cumulative impacts to pathogens, people, and the environment due to the reduction of food quality, the transportation and storage of radioactive goods, and destruction of pathogens, changes in the way we relate to food and how irradiation changes the food production and shipping industries.
The radiation source supplies energetic particles or waves. As these waves/particles pass through a target material they collide with other particles. Around the sites of these collisions chemical bonds are broken, creating short lived radicals (e.g. the hydroxyl radical, the hydrogen atom and solvated electrons). These radicals cause further chemical changes by bonding with and or stripping particles from nearby molecules. When collisions damage DNA or RNA, effective reproduction becomes unlikely, also when collisions occur in cells, cell division is often suppressed.
Irradiation (within the accepted energy limits, as 10 MeV for electrons, 5 MeV for X-rays [US 7.5 MeV] and gamma rays from Cobalt-60) can not make food radioactive, but it does produce radiolytic products, and free radicals in the food. A few of these products are unique, but not considered dangerous.
Irradiation can also alter the nutritional content and flavor of foods, much like cooking. The scale of these chemical changes is not unique. Cooking, smoking, salting, and other less novel techniques, cause the food to be altered so drastically that its original nature is almost unrecognizable, and must be called by a different name. Storage of food also causes dramatic chemical changes, ones that eventually lead to deterioration and spoilage.
A major concern is that irradiation might cause chemical changes that are harmful to the consumer. Several national expert groups and two international expert groups evaluated the available data and concluded that any food at any dose is wholesome and safe to consume as long as it remains palatable and maintains its technical properties (e.g. feel, texture, or color).
Irradiated food does not become radioactive, only radiation sources that are incapable of causing induced radioactivity are used for food irradiation. Radioactivity is the ability of a substance to emit high energy particles. When particles hit the target materials they may free other highly energetic particles. This ends shortly after the end of the exposure, much like objects stop reflecting light when the source is turned off and warm objects emit heat until they cool down but do not continue to produce their own heat. To modify a material so that it keeps emitting radiation (induce radiation) the atomic cores (nucleus) of the atoms in the target material must be modified.
It is impossible for food irradiators to induce radiation in a product. Irradiators emit electrons or photons and the radiation is intrinsically radiated at precisely known strengths (wavelengths for photons, and speeds for electrons). These radiated particles at these strengths can never be strong enough to modify the nucleus of the targeted atom in the food, regardless of how many particles hit the target material, and radioactivity can not be induced without modifying the nucleus.
Compounds known as free radicals form when food is irradiated. Most of these are oxidizers (i.e., accept electrons) and some react very strongly. According to the free-radical theory of aging excessive amounts of these free radicals can lead to cell injury and cell death, which may contribute to many diseases. However, this generally relates to the free radicals generated in the body, not the free radicals consumed by the individual, as much of these are destroyed in the digestive process.
Most of the substances found in irradiated food are also found in food that has been subjected to other food processing treatments, and are therefore not unique. One family of chemicals (2ACB's) are uniquely formed by irradiation (unique radiolytic products), and this product is nontoxic. When fatty acids are irradiated, a family of compounds called 2-alkylcyclobutanones (2-ACBs) are produced. These are thought to be unique radiolytic products.
When irradiating food, all other chemicals occur in a lower or comparable frequency to other food processing techniques. Furthermore, the quantities in which they occur in irradiated food are lower or similar to the quantities formed in heat treatments.
The radiation doses to cause toxic changes are much higher than the doses used during irradiation, and taking into account the presence of 2-ACBs along with what is known of free radicals, these results lead to the conclusion that there is no significant risk from radiolytic products.
Ionizing radiation can change food quality but in general very high levels of radiation treatment (many thousands of gray) are necessary to adversely change nutritional content, as well as the sensory qualities (taste, appearance, and texture). Irradiation to the doses used commercially to treat food have very little negative impact on the sensory qualities and nutrient content in foods. When irradiation is used to maintain food quality for a longer period of time (improve the shelf stability of some sensory qualities and nutrients) the improvement means that more consumers have access to the original taste, texture, appearance, and nutrients. The changes in quality and nutrition depend on the degree of treatment and may vary greatly from food to food.
There has been low level gamma irradiation that has been attempted on arugula, spinach, cauliflower, ash gourd, bamboo shoots, coriander, parsley, and watercress. There has been limited information, however, regarding the physical, chemical and/or bioactive properties and the shelf life on these minimally processed vegetables.
There is some degradation of vitamins caused by irradiation, but is similar to or even less than the loss caused by other processes that achieve the same result. Other processes like chilling, freezing, drying, and heating also result in some vitamin loss.
The changes in the flavor of fatty foods like meats, nuts and oils are sometimes noticeable, while the changes in lean products like fruits and vegetables are less so. Some studies by the irradiation industry show that for some properly treated fruits and vegetables irradiation is seen by consumers to improve the sensory qualities of the product compared to untreated fruits and vegetables.
Watercress ("Nasturtium Officinale") is a rapidly growing aquatic or semi aquatic perennial plant. Because chemical agents do not provide efficient microbial reductions, watercress has been tested with gamma irradiation treatment in order to improve both safety and the shelf life of the product. It is traditionally used on horticultural products to prevent sprouting and post-packaging contamination, delay post-harvest ripening, maturation and senescence.
In a Food Chemistry food journal, scientists studied the suitability of gamma irradiation of 1, 2, and 5 kGy for preserving quality parameters of the fresh cut watercress at around 4 degrees Celsius for 7 days. They determined that a 2 kGy dose of irradiation was the dose that contained most similar qualities to non-stored control samples, which is one of the goals of irradiation. 2 kGy preserved high levels of reducing sugars and favoured polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA); while samples of the 5 kGy dose revealed high contents of sucrose and monounsaturated fat (MUFA). Both cases the watercress samples obtained healthier fatty acids profiles. However, a 5kGy dose better preserved the antioxidant activity and total flavonoids.
If the majority of food was irradiated at high-enough levels to significantly decrease its nutritional content, there would be an increased risk of developing nutritionally-based illnesses if additional steps, such as changes in eating habits, were not taken to mitigate this. Furthermore, for at least three studies on cats, the consumption of irradiated food was associated with a loss of tissue in the myelin sheath, leading to reversible paralysis. Researchers suspect that reduced levels of vitamin A and high levels of free radicals may be the cause. This effect is thought to be specific to cats and has not been reproduced in any other animal. To produce these effects, the cats were fed solely on food that was irradiated at a dose at least five times higher than the maximum allowable dose.
It may seem reasonable to assume that irradiating food might lead to radiation-tolerant strains, similar to the way that strains of bacteria have developed resistance to antibiotics. Bacteria develop a resistance to antibiotics after an individual uses antibiotics repeatedly. Much like pasteurization plants, products that pass through irradiation plants are processed once, and are not processed and reprocessed. Cycles of heat treatment have been shown to produce heat-tolerant bacteria, yet no problems have appeared so far in pasteurization plants. Furthermore, when the irradiation dose is chosen to target a specific species of microbe, it is calibrated to doses several times the value required to target the species. This ensures that the process randomly destroys all members of a target species. Therefore, the more irradiation-tolerant members of the target species are not given any evolutionary advantage. Without evolutionary advantage, selection does not occur. As to the irradiation process directly producing mutations that lead to more virulent, radiation-resistant strains, the European Commission's Scientific Committee on Food found that there is no evidence; on the contrary, irradiation has been found to cause loss of virulence and infectivity, as mutants are usually less competitive and less adapted.
Some who advocate against food irradiation argue the safety of irradiated food is not scientifically proven because there are a lack of long-term studies in spite of the fact that hundreds of animal feeding studies of irradiated food, including multigenerational studies, have been performed since 1950. Endpoints investigated have included subchronic and chronic changes in metabolism, histopathology, function of most systems, reproductive effects, growth, teratogenicity, and mutagenicity. A large number of studies have been performed; meta-studies have supported the safety of irradiated food.
The below experiments are cited by food irradiation opponents, but either could not be verified in later experiments, could not be clearly attributed to the radiation effect, or could be attributed to an inappropriate design of the experiment.
The indirect effects of irradiation are the concerns and benefits of irradiation that are related to how making food irradiation a common process will change the world, with emphasis on the system of food production.
If irradiation were to become common in the food handling process there would be a reduction of the prevalence of foodborne illness and potentially the eradication of specific pathogens. However, multiple studies suggest that an increased rate of pathogen growth may occur when irradiated food is cross-contaminated with a pathogen, as the competing spoilage organisms are no longer present. This being said, cross contamination itself becomes less prevalent with an increase in usage of irradiated foods.
The ability to remove bacterial contamination through post-processing by irradiation may reduce the fear of mishandling food which could cultivate a cavalier attitude toward hygiene and result in contaminants other than bacteria. However, concerns that the pasteurization of milk would lead to increased contamination of milk were prevalent when mandatory pasteurization was introduced, but these fears never materialized after adoption of this law. Therefore, it is unlikely for irradiation to cause an increase of illness due to nonbacteria-based contamination.
Up to the point where the food is processed by irradiation, the food is processed in the same way as all other food. To treat the food, they are exposed to a radioactive source, for a set period of time to achieve a desired dose. Radiation may be emitted by a radioactive substance, or by X-ray and electron beam accelerators. Special precautions are taken to ensure the food stuffs never come in contact with the radioactive substances and that the personnel and the environment are protected from exposure radiation.
Irradiation treatments are typically classified by dose (high, medium, and low), but are sometimes classified by the effects of the treatment (radappertization, radicidation and radurization). Food irradiation is sometimes referred to as "cold pasteurization" or "electronic pasteurization" because ionizing the food does not heat the food to high temperatures during the process, and the effect is similar to heat pasteurization. The term "cold pasteurization" is controversial because the term may be used to disguise the fact the food has been irradiated and pasteurization and irradiation are fundamentally different processes.
Treatment costs vary as a function of dose and facility usage. A pallet or tote is typically exposed for several minutes to hours depending on dose. Low-dose applications such as disinfestation of fruit range between US$0.01/lbs and US$0.08/lbs while higher-dose applications can cost as much as US$0.20/lbs.
Food processors and manufacturers today struggle with using affordable, efficient packaging materials for irradiation based processing. The implementation of irradiation on prepackaged foods has been found to impact foods by inducing specific chemical alterations to the food packaging material that migrates into the food. Cross-linking in various plastics can lead to physical and chemical modifications that can increase the overall molecular weight. On the other hand, chain scission is fragmentation of polymer chains that leads to a molecular weight reduction.
The radiation absorbed dose is the amount energy absorbed per unit weight of the target material. Dose is used because, when the same substance is given the same dose, similar changes are observed in the target material. The SI unit for dose is grays (Gy or J/kg). Dosimeters are used to measure dose, and are small components that, when exposed to ionizing radiation, change measurable physical attributes to a degree that can be correlated to the dose received. Measuring dose (dosimetry) involves exposing one or more dosimeters along with the target material.
For purposes of legislation doses are divided into low (up to 1 kGy), medium (1 kGy to 10 kGy), and high-dose applications (above 10 kGy). High-dose applications are above those currently permitted in the US for commercial food items by the FDA and other regulators around the world. Though these doses are approved for non commercial applications, such as sterilizing frozen meat for NASA astronauts (doses of 44 kGy) and food for hospital patients.
Gamma irradiation is produced from the radioisotopes cobalt-60 and caesium-137, which are derived by neutron bombardment of cobalt-59 and as a nuclear source by-product, respectively. Cobalt-60 is the most common source of gamma rays for food irradiation in commercial scale facilities as it is water insoluble and hence has little risk of environmental contamination by leakage into the water systems. As for transportation of the radiation source, cobalt-60 is transported in special trucks that prevent release of radiation and meet standards mentioned in the Regulations for Safe Transport of Radioactive Materials of the International Atomic Energy Act. The special trucks must meet high safety standards and pass extensive tests to be approved to ship radiation sources. Conversely, caesium-137, is water-soluble and poses a risk of environmental contamination. Insufficient quantities are available for large scale commercial use. An incident where water-soluble caesium-137 leaked into the source storage pool requiring NRC intervention has led to near elimination of this radioisotope.
Gamma irradiation is widely used due to its high penetration depth and dose uniformity, allowing for large-scale applications with high through puts. Additionally, gamma irradiation is significantly less expensive than using an X-ray source In most designs, the radioisotope, contained in stainless steel pencils, is stored in a water-filled storage pool which absorbs the radiation energy when not in use. For treatment, the source is lifted out of the storage tank, and product contained in totes is passed around the pencils to achieve required processing.
Treatment of electron beams is created as a result of high energy electrons in an accelerator that generates electrons accelerated to 99% the speed of light. This system uses electrical energy and can be powered on and off. The high power correlates with a higher throughput and lower unit cost, but electron beams have low dose uniformity and a penetration depth of centimeters. Therefore, electron beam treatment works for products that have low thickness.
X-rays are produced by bombardment of dense target material with high energy accelerated electrons(this process is known as bremsstrahlung-conversion), giving rise to a continuous energy spectrum. Heavy metals, such as tantalum and tungsten, are used because of their high atomic numbers and high melting temperatures.Tantalum is usually preferred versus tungsten for industrial, large-area, high-power targets because it is more workable than tungsten and has a higher threshold energy for induced reactions. Like electron beams, x-rays do not require the use of radioactive materials and can be turned off when not in use. X-rays have high penetration depths and high dose uniformity but they are a very expensive source of irradiation as only 8% of the incident energy is converted into X-rays.
The cost of food irradiation is influenced by dose requirements, the food's tolerance of radiation, handling conditions, i.e., packaging and stacking requirements, construction costs, financing arrangements, and other variables particular to the situation. Irradiation is a capital-intensive technology requiring a substantial initial investment, ranging from $1 million to $5 million. In the case of large research or contract irradiation facilities, major capital costs include a radiation source, hardware (irradiator, totes and conveyors, control systems, and other auxiliary equipment), land (1 to 1.5 acres), radiation shield, and warehouse. Operating costs include salaries (for fixed and variable labor), utilities, maintenance, taxes/insurance, cobalt-60 replenishment, general utilities, and miscellaneous operating costs. Perishable food items, like fruits, vegetables and meats would still require to be handled in the cold chain, so all other supply chain costs remain the same.
Negative connotations associated with the word "radiation" are thought to be responsible for low consumer acceptance. Several national expert groups and two international expert groups evaluated the available data and concluded that any food at any dose is wholesome and safe to consume.
Irradiation has been approved by many countries. For example, in the U.S. the FDA has approved food irradiation for over fifty years. However, in the past decade the major growth area is for fruits and vegetables that are irradiated to prevent the spread of pests. In the early 2000s in the US, irradiated meat was common at some grocery stores, but because of lack of consumer demand, it is no longer common. Because consumer demand for irradiated food is low, reducing the spoilage between manufacturer and consumer purchase and reducing the risk of food borne illness is currently not sufficient incentive for most manufacturers to supplement their process with irradiation. Nevertheless, food irradiation does take place commercially and volumes are in general increasing at a slow rate, even in the European Union where all member countries allow the irradiation of dried herbs spices and vegetable seasonings but only a few allow other foods to be sold as irradiated.
Although there are some consumers who choose not to purchase irradiated food, a sufficient market has existed for retailers to have continuously stocked irradiated products for years. When labeled irradiated food is offered for retail sale, these consumers buy it and re-purchase it, indicating that it is possible to successfully market irradiated foods, therefore retailers not stocking irradiated foods might be a major bottleneck to the wider adoption of irradiated foods. It is however, widely believed that consumer perception of foods treated with irradiation is more negative than those processed by other means and some industry studies indicate the number of consumers concerned about the safety of irradiated food decreased between 1985 and 1995 to levels comparable to those of people concerned about food additives and preservatives. Even though it is untrue, "People think the product is radioactive," said Harlan Clemmons, president of Sadex, a food irradiation company based in Sioux City, Iowa. Because of these concerns and the increased cost of irradiated foods, there is not a widespread public demand for the irradiation of foods for human consumption. Irradiated food does not become radioactive.
The Codex Alimentarius represents the global standard for irradiation of food, in particular under the WTO-agreement. Regardless of treatment source, all processing facilities must adhere to safety standards set by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Codex Code of Practice for the Radiation Processing of Food, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). More specifically, ISO 14470 and ISO 9001 provide in-depth information regarding safety in irradiation facilities.
All commercial irradiation facilities contain safety systems which are designed to prevent exposure of personnel to radiation. The radiation source is constantly shielded by water, concrete, or metal. Irradiation facilities are designed with overlapping layers of protection, interlocks, and safeguards to prevent accidental radiation exposure. Additionally, "melt-downs" do not occur in facilities because the radiation source gives off radiation and decay heat; however, the heat is not sufficient to melt any material.
The provisions of the Codex Alimentarius are that any "first generation" product must be labeled "irradiated" as any product derived directly from an irradiated raw material; for ingredients the provision is that even the last molecule of an irradiated ingredient must be listed with the ingredients even in cases where the unirradiated ingredient does not appear on the label. The RADURA-logo is optional; several countries use a graphical version that differs from the Codex-version. The suggested rules for labeling is published at CODEX-STAN – 1 (2005), and includes the usage of the Radura symbol for all products that contain irradiated foods. The Radura symbol is not a designator of quality. The amount of pathogens remaining is based upon dose and the original content and the dose applied can vary on a product by product basis.
The European Union follows the Codex's provision to label irradiated ingredients down to the last molecule of irradiated food. The European Community does not provide for the use of the Radura logo and relies exclusively on labeling by the appropriate phrases in the respective languages of the Member States. The European Union enforces its irradiation labeling laws by requiring its member countries to perform tests on a cross section of food items in the market-place and to report to the European Commission. The results are published annually in the OJ of the European Communities.
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Copper IUDs
Intrauterine device (IUD) with copper also known as intrauterine coil, is a type of intrauterine device which contains copper. It is used for birth control and emergency contraception within five days of unprotected sex. It is one of the most effective forms of birth control with a one-year failure rate around 0.7%. The device is placed in the uterus and lasts up to twelve years. It may be used by women of all ages regardless of whether or not they have had children. Following removal, fertility quickly returns.
Side effects include heavy menstrual periods, painful periods, or the device may come out. It is less recommended in people at high risk of sexually transmitted infections as it may increase the risk of pelvic inflammatory disease in the first three weeks after insertion. If a woman becomes pregnant with an IUD in place removal is recommended. Rarely, uterine perforation can occur during insertion. The copper IUD is a type of long-acting reversible birth control. It primarily works by killing the sperm.
The copper IUD came into medical use in the 1970s. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the safest and most effective medicines needed in a health system. The wholesale cost in the developing world is about US$0.37–3.00 per IUD. In the United Kingdom they cost the NHS about £10 GBP. In the United States they cost around $750. They are used by more than 170 million women globally.
Copper IUDs are a form of long-acting reversible contraception and are one of the most effective forms of birth control available. The type of frame and amount of copper can affect the effectiveness of different copper IUD models. The failure rates for different models vary between 0.1 and 2.2% after 1 year of use. The T-shaped models with a surface area of 380 mm² of copper have the lowest failure rates. The TCu 380A (ParaGard) has a one-year failure rate of 0.8% and a cumulative 12-year failure rate of 2.2%. Over 12 years of use, the models with less surface area of copper have higher failure rates. The TCu 220A has a 12-year failure rate of 5.8%. The frameless GyneFix also has a failure rate of less than 1% per year. Worldwide, older IUD models with lower effectiveness rates are no longer produced.
Unlike other forms of reversible contraception, the typical use failure rate and the perfect use failure rate for the copper IUDs are the same because the IUD does not depend on user action. A 2008 review of the available T-shaped copper IUDs recommended that the TCu 380A and the TCu 280S be used as the first choice for copper IUDs because those two models have the lowest failure rates and the longest lifespans. The effectiveness of the copper IUD (failure rate of 0.8%) is comparable to tubal sterilization (failure rate of 0.5%) for the first year. However, the effects of the copper IUD are reversible, which can be viewed as either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on a person's goals for contraception.
It was first discovered in 1976 that the copper IUD could be used as a form of emergency contraception (EC).
The copper IUD is the most effective form of emergency contraception. It is more effective than the hormonal EC pills currently available.
The pregnancy rate among those using the copper IUD for EC is 0.09%. It can be used for EC up to 5 days after the act of unprotected sex and does not decrease in effectiveness during the 5 days.
An additional advantage of using the copper IUD for emergency contraception is that it can be used as a form of birth control for 10–12 years after insertion.
Removal of the copper IUD should also be performed by a qualified medical practitioner. Fertility has been shown to return to previous levels quickly after removal of the device. One study found that the median amount of time from removal to planned pregnancy was three months for those women using the TCu 380Ag.
Expulsion: Sometimes the copper IUD can be spontaneously expelled from the uterus. Expulsion rates can range from 2.2% to 11.4% of users from the first year to the 10th year. The TCu380A may have lower rates of expulsion than other models. Unusual vaginal discharge, cramping or pain, spotting between periods, postcoital (after sex) spotting, dyspareunia, or the absence or lengthening of the strings can be signs of a possible expulsion. If expulsion occurs, the woman is not protected against pregnancy. If an IUD with copper is inserted after an expulsion has occurred, the risk of re-expulsion has been estimated in one study to be approximately one third of cases after one year. Magnetic resonance imaging may cause dislocation of a copper IUD, and it is therefore recommended to check the location of the IUD both before and after MRI.
Perforation: Very rarely, the IUD can move through the wall of the uterus. Risk of perforation is mostly determined by the skill of the practitioner performing the insertion. For experienced medical practitioners, the risk of perforation is 1 per 1,000 insertions or less. If perforation does occur it can damage the internal organs, and in some cases surgery is needed to remove the IUD.
Infection: The insertion of a copper IUD poses a transient risk of pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) in the first 21 days after insertion. However, it is a small risk and is attributable to preexisting gonorrhea or chlamydia infection at the time of insertion, and not to the IUD itself. Proper infection prevention procedures have little or no effect on the course of gonorrhea or chlamydia infections, but is important in helping protect both clients and providers from infection in general. Such infection prevention practices include washing hands and then putting on gloves, cleaning the cervix and vagina, making minimal contact with non-sterile surfaces (using a "no touch insertion technique") and, after the procedure, washing hands again and then processing instruments. The device itself carries no increased risk of PID beyond the time of insertion.
Cramping: Many women feel cramping or pain during the IUD insertion process and immediately after as a result of cervix dilation during insertion. Taking NSAIDS before the procedure can reduce discomfort, as can the use of a local anaesthetic. Misoprostol 6 to 12 hrs before insertion can help with cervical dilation. Some women may have cramps for 1 to 2 weeks following insertion. The copper IUD can also increase cramps during a woman's period. This symptom will clear up for some women in 3 to 6 months, but may not for others.
Heavier periods: The copper IUD increases the amount of blood flow during a woman's menstrual periods. On average, menstrual blood loss increases by 20–50% after insertion of a copper-T IUD; increased menstrual discomfort is the most common medical reason for IUD removal. This symptom may clear up for some women after 3 to 6 months, but may not for others.
Irregular bleeding and spotting: For the first 3 to 6 months after insertion, the copper IUD can cause irregular periods and spotting between periods.
String problems: A small portion of men report that they can feel the strings during intercourse. In this case, strings can be trimmed. However, very short strings can prevent the woman from checking the strings for expulsion. Medical ultrasonography may be required in such cases to check the location of the IUD.
Pregnancy: Although rare, if pregnancy does occur with the copper IUD in place there can be serious side effects. The risk of ectopic pregnancy to a woman using an IUD is lower than the risk of ectopic pregnancy to a woman using no form of birth control. However, of pregnancies that do occur during IUD use, a higher than expected percentage (3–4%) are ectopic. If a pregnancy occurs with the IUD in place there is a higher risk of miscarriage or early delivery. If this occurs and the IUD strings are visible, the IUD should be removed immediately by a clinician. Although the Dalkon Shield IUD was associated with septic abortions (infections associated with miscarriage), other brands of IUD are not. IUDs are also "not" associated with birth defects.
Some barrier contraceptives protect against STIs. Hormonal contraceptives reduce the risk of developing pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), a serious complication of certain STIs. IUDs, by contrast, do "not" protect against STIs or PID.
A category 3 condition indicates conditions where the theoretical or proven risks usually outweigh the advantages of inserting a copper IUD. A category 4 condition indicates conditions that represent an unacceptable health risk if a copper IUD is inserted.
Women should not use a copper IUD if they:
A full list of contraindications can be found in the World Health Organization (WHO) "Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use" and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) "United States Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use".
While nulliparous women (women who have never given birth) are somewhat more likely to have side effects, this is not a contraindication for IUD use. Overall, IUDs are safe and acceptable also in young nulliparous women. The same is likely the case for virgin women, unless there is a microperforate hymen that obstructs any insertion of the IUD.
There are a number of models of the copper IUD available around the world. Most copper devices consist of a plastic core that is wrapped in a copper wire.
Many of the devices have a T-shape similar to the hormonal IUD. However, there are "frameless" copper IUDs available around the world as well. ParaGard is the only model currently available in the United States. At least three copper IUD models are available in Canada, two of which are a slimmer T-shape version used for women who have not had children. Early copper IUDs had copper around only the vertical stem, but more recent models have copper sleeves wrapped around the horizontal arms as well, increasing effectiveness.
Some newer models also contain a silver core instead of a plastic core to delay copper fragmentation as well as increase the lifespan of the device. The lifespan of the devices range from 3 years to 10 years; however, some studies have demonstrated that the TCu 380A may be effective through 12 years.
Its ATC code is .
The copper IUD must be inserted by a qualified medical practitioner. A copper IUD can be inserted at any phase of the menstrual cycle, but the optimal time is right after the menstrual period, when the cervix is softest and the woman is least likely to be pregnant. The insertion process generally takes five minutes or less. The procedure can cause cramping or be painful for some women.
Before placement of an IUD, a medical history and physical examination by a medical professional is useful to check for any contraindications or concerns. It is also recommended by some clinicians that patients be tested for gonorrhea and chlamydia, as these two infections increase the risk of contracting pelvic inflammatory disease shortly after insertion.
Immediately prior to insertion, the clinician will perform a pelvic exam to determine the position of the uterus.
After the pelvic exam, the vagina is held open with a speculum. A tenaculum is used to steady the cervix and uterus. Uterine sounding may be used to measure the length and direction of the cervical canal and uterus in order to decrease the risk of uterine perforation. The IUD is placed using a narrow tube, which is inserted through the cervix into the uterus. Short monofilament plastic/nylon strings hang down from the uterus into the vagina. The clinician will trim the threads so that they only protrude 3 to 4 cm out of the cervix and remain in the upper vagina. The strings allow the patient or clinician to periodically check to ensure the IUD is still in place and to enable easy removal of the device.
The copper IUD can be inserted at any time in a woman's menstrual cycle as long as the woman is not pregnant. An IUD can also be inserted immediately postpartum and post-abortion as long as no infection has occurred. Breastfeeding is not a contraindication for the use of the copper IUD. The IUD can be inserted in women with HIV or AIDS as it does not increase the risk of transmission.
Although previously not recommended for nulliparous women (women who have not had children), the IUD is now recommended for most women who are past menarche (their first period), including adolescents.
After the insertion is finished, normal activities such as sex, exercise, and swimming can be performed as soon as it feels comfortable. Strenuous physical activity does not affect the position of the IUD.
Many different types of copper IUDs are currently manufactured worldwide, but availability varies by country. In the United States, only one type of copper IUD is approved for use, while in the United Kingdom, over ten varieties are available. One company, Mona Lisa N.V. offers generic versions of many existing IUDs.
The frameless IUD eliminates the use of the frame that gives conventional IUDs their signature T-shape. This change in design was made to reduce discomfort and expulsion associated with prior IUDs; without a solid frame, the frameless IUD should mold to the shape of the uterus. It may reduce expulsion and discontinuation rates compared to framed copper IUDs.
Gynefix is the only frameless IUD brand currently available. It consists of hollow copper tubes on a polypropylene thread. It is inserted through the cervix with a special applicator that sutures the thread to the fundus (top) of the uterus; the thread is then cut with a tail hanging outside of the cervix, similar to frame IUDs. When this tail is pulled, the suture comes undone and the device can be removed. This requires more force than removing a T-shaped IUD, but results in comparable discomfort during removal. Gynefix is not approved for use in the United States.
The copper IUD's primary mechanism of action is to prevent fertilization. Copper acts as a spermicide within the uterus. The presence of copper increases the levels of copper ions, prostaglandins, and white blood cells within the uterine and tubal fluids.
Although not a primary mechanism of action, some experts in human reproduction believe there is sufficient evidence to suggest that IUDs with copper can disrupt implantation, especially when used for emergency contraception. Despite this, there has been no definitive evidence that IUD users have higher rates of embryonic loss than women not using contraception. Therefore, the copper IUD is considered to be a true contraceptive and not an abortifacient.
Globally, the IUD is the most widely used method of reversible birth control. The most recent data indicates that there are 169 million IUD users around the world. This includes both the nonhormonal and hormonal IUDs. IUDs are most popular in Asia, where the prevalence is almost 30%. In Africa and Europe the prevalence is around 20%. As of 2009, levels of IUD use in the United States are estimated to be 5.5%. Data in the United States does not distinguish between hormonal and nonhormonal IUDs. In Europe, copper IUD prevalence ranges from under 5% in the United Kingdom to over 10% in Denmark in 2006.
According to popular legend, Arab traders inserted small stones into the uteruses of their camels to prevent pregnancy during long desert treks. The story was originally a tall tale to entertain delegates at a scientific conference on family planning; although it was later repeated as truth, it has no known historical basis.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15378
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Isle Royale National Park
Isle Royale National Park is an American national park consisting of Isle Royale and hundreds of adjacent islands, as well as the surrounding waters of Lake Superior, in the state of Michigan. Isle Royale National Park was established on April 3, 1940, then additionally protected from development by wilderness area designation in 1976, and declared a UNESCO International Biosphere Reserve in 1980. The park covers , with of land and of surrounding waters. The park's northern boundary lies adjacent to the Canadian Lake Superior National Marine Conservation Area along the international border.
Isle Royale, the largest island in Lake Superior, is over in length and wide at its widest point. The park is made up of Isle Royale itself and approximately 400 smaller islands, along with any submerged lands within of the surrounding islands (16USC408g).
According to the Köppen climate classification system, Isle Royale National Park has a mild summer Humid continental climate ("Dfb"). According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the Plant Hardiness zone is 4b at 1178 ft (359 m) elevation with an average annual extreme minimum temperature of -24.2 °F (-31.2 °C).
Large quantities of copper artifacts found in indian mounds and settlements, some dating back to 3000 B.C., were most likely mined on Isle Royale and the nearby Keweenaw Peninsula. The island has hundreds of pits from these indigenous peoples, with most in the McCargoe Cove area. Carbon-14 testing of a charred log found at one of these pits yielded an age of 1,500 B.C. The Jesuit missionary Dablon published an account in 1669-70 of "an island called "Menong", celebrated for its copper." "Menong", or "Minong", was the native term for the island, and is the basis for Minong Ridge. Prospecting began in earnest when the Chippewas relinquished their claims to the island in 1843, starting with many of the original native pits. This activity had ended by 1855, when no economic deposits were found. The Minong Mine and Island Mine were the result of renewed but short-lived activity from 1873 to 1881.
In "Prehistoric Copper Mining in the Lake Superior Region", published in 1961, Drier and Du Temple estimated that over 1.5 billion pounds (630,400 t) of copper had been mined from the region. However, David Johnson and Susan Martin contend that their estimate was based on exaggerated and inaccurate assumptions.
In the mid-1840s, a report by Douglass Houghton, Michigan's first state geologist, set off a copper boom in the state, and the first modern copper mines were opened on the island. Evidence of the earlier mining efforts was everywhere, in the form of many stone hammers, some copper artifacts, and places where copper had been partially worked out of the rock but left in place. The ancient pits and trenches led to the discovery of many of the copper deposits that were mined in the 19th century.
The island was once the site of a resort community. The fishing industry has declined considerably, but continues at Edisen Fishery. Because numerous small islands surround Isle Royale, ships were once guided through the area by lighthouses at Passage Island, Rock Harbor, Rock of Ages, and Isle Royale Lighthouse on Menagerie Island.
Within the waters of Isle Royale National Park are several shipwrecks. The area’s notoriously harsh weather, dramatic underwater topography, the island’s central location on historic shipping routes, and the cold, fresh water have resulted in largely intact, well preserved wrecks throughout the park. These were documented in the 1980s, with follow up occurring in 2009, by the National Park Service Submerged Resources Center.
According to the A. W. Kuchler U.S. Potential natural vegetation Types, Isle Royale National Park has a Great Lakes Spruce/Fir ("93") potential vegetation type and a Northern Conifer Forest ("22") potential vegetation form.
The predominant floral habitats of Isle Royale are within the Laurentian Mixed Forest Province. The area is a temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome transition zone between the true boreal forest to the north and Big Woods to the south, with characteristics of each. It has areas of both broadleaf and conifer forest cover, and bodies of water ranging from conifer bogs to swamps.
Conifers include jack pines ("Pinus banksiana"), black and white spruces ("Picea mariana" and "Picea glauca"), balsam firs ("Abies balsamea"), and eastern redcedars ("Juniperus virginiana").
Deciduous trees include quaking aspens ("Populus tremuloides"), red oaks ("Quercus rubra"), paper birches ("Betula papyrifera"), American mountain ash ("Sorbus americana"), red maples ("Acer rubrum"), sugar maples ("Acer saccharum"), and mountain maples ("Acer spicatum").
Isle Royale National Park is known for its timber wolf and moose populations which are studied by scientists investigating predator-prey relationships in a closed environment. This is made easier because Isle Royale has been colonized by roughly just one third of the mainland mammal species, because it is so remote. In addition, the environment is unique in that it is the only known place where wolves and moose coexist without the presence of bears.
Historically neither moose nor wolves inhabited Isle Royale. Just prior to becoming a national park the large mammals on Isle Royale were Canada lynx and the boreal woodland caribou. Archeological evidence indicates both of these species were present on Isle Royale for 3,500 years prior to being removed by direct human actions (hunting, trapping, mining, logging, fires, competition for resources from exotic species and possibly disease due to the introduction of invasive species). The last caribou documented on Isle Royale was in 1925. Though lynx were removed by the 1930s some have periodically crossed the ice bridge from neighboring Ontario, Canada, the most recent being an individual sighting in 1980. Although lynx are no longer present on
the island, their primary prey, snowshoe hares, remain. Before the appearance of wolves, coyotes were also predators on the island. Coyotes appeared around 1905 and disappeared shortly after wolves arrived in the 1950s.
Moose are believed to have colonized Isle Royale sometime between 1905 and 1912. It was initially believed that a small herd of moose (moose typically do not travel in herds) colonized the islands by crossing the ice from the adjacent mainland; later this theory was modified to a herd of moose swimming 20 miles across Lake Superior from the nearest mainland. The improbability of these theories received little scrutiny until recent years. Although no thorough scientific investigation to determine how moose arrived on Isle Royale has been carried out to date, both cultural and genetic evidence indicates they were likely introduced by humans to create a private hunting preserve in the early 1900s. The cultural evidence that moose were trapped in northwestern Minnesota and transported to Isle Royale sounded far fetched to many until decades later when genetic evidence revealed the moose on Isle Royale were more closely related to moose in the far northwestern Minnesota/Manitoba border area than the mainland adjacent to Isle Royale in far northeastern Minnesota bordering Ontario. Further evidence has also shown that the Washington Harbor Club, a group of well-to-do businessmen, owned various buildings on Isle Royale in addition to railroads that ran from Baudette to Duluth and Two Harbors and so had the means to transport moose from northwestern Minnesota to Two Harbors.
There are usually around 25 wolves and 1000 moose on the island, but the numbers change greatly year to year. In the 2006-2007 winter, 385 moose were counted, as well as 21 wolves, in three packs. In spring 2008, 23 wolves and approximately 650 moose were counted. However, recent reductions in winter pack ice had ended replenishment of the wolf population from the mainland. Due to genetic inbreeding, the wolf population had declined to two individuals in 2016, causing researchers to expect that the island's wolf population would eventually become extinct. At the same time, the island's moose population had exploded to an estimated 1600. By November 2017, the wolf population was down to one, a female.
In December 2016, the National Park Service (NPS) put forward an initial plan in which they would bring additional wolves to the island in order to prevent the pack from disappearing completely. As of June 7, 2018, the decision to relocate 20-30 wolves to the island has been approved and the NPS is actively developing specific implementation strategies. There was some debate as to whether or not the introduction was an unnatural intervention.
The two main rock assemblages found on the island include the Portage Lake Volcanics and the Copper Harbor Conglomerate, both Precambrian in age. The volcanics are mainly ophitic flood basalts, some 100 individual flows over an accumulated thickness of at least 10,000 feet. The conglomerate outcrops on the southwestern portion of the island and consists of sedimentary rock derived from volcanic rocks in present-day Minnesota. Glacial erosion accentuated the ridge and valley topography from pre-glacial stream erosion. Glacial striations indicate a generally westward movement of the glaciers as do the recessional moraines west of Lake Desor. Drumlins are found west of Siskiwit Lake.
Recent analyses by the USGS of both unmineralized basalt and copper-mineralized rock show that a small amount of naturally occurring mercury is associated with mineralization.
Native copper and chlorastrolite, the official state gem of Michigan, are secondary minerals filling pore spaces formed by vesicles and fractures within the volcanic rocks. Prehnite and agate amygdules are also plentiful island gemstones.
The Greenstone Ridge is a high ridge in the center of the island and carries the longest trail in the park, the Greenstone Ridge Trail, which runs from one end of the island to the other. This is generally done as a 4 or 5 day hike. A boat shuttle can carry hikers back to their starting point. In total there are of hiking trails. There are also canoe/kayak routes, many involving portages, along coastal bays and inland lakes.
The park has two developed areas:
Windigo, at the southwest end of the island (docking site for the ferries from Minnesota), with a campstore, showers, campsites, rustic camper cabins for those wanting to sleep off of the ground and a boat dock.
Rock Harbor on the south side of the northeast end (docking site for the ferries from Michigan), with a campstore, showers, restaurant, lodge, campsites, and a boat dock. Non-camping sleeping accommodations at the park are limited to the lodge at Rock Harbor and the camper cabins at Windigo.
The park has 36 designated wilderness campgrounds. Some campgrounds in the interior are accessible only by trail or by canoe/kayak on the island lakes. Other campgrounds are accessible only by private boat. The campsites vary in capacity but typically include a few three-sided wood shelters (the fourth wall is screened) with floors and roofs, and several individual sites suitable for pitching a small tent. Some tent sites with space for groups of up to 10 are available, and are used for overflow if all the individual sites are filled.
The only amenities at the campgrounds are pit toilets, picnic tables, and fire-rings at specific areas. Campfires are not permitted at most campgrounds; gas or alcohol camp stoves are recommended. Drinking and cooking water must be drawn from local water sources (Lake Superior and inland lakes) and filtered, treated, or boiled to avoid parasites. Hunting is not permitted, but fishing is, and edible berries (blueberries, thimbleberries) may be picked from the trail.
The park is accessible by ferries, floatplanes, and passenger ships during the summer months—from Houghton and Copper Harbor in Michigan; and Grand Portage in Minnesota. Private boats travel to the island from the coasts of Michigan, Minnesota, and Ontario. Isle Royale is quite popular with day-trippers in private boats, and day-trip ferry service is provided from Copper Harbor and Grand Portage to and from the park.
Isle Royale is the only American national park to entirely close in the winter months, from November 1 through April 15, due to extreme weather conditions and for the safety and protection of visitors. Isle Royale is the least-visited national park in the contiguous United States, due to the winter closing and the distance across Lake Superior to reach the park. The average annual visitation was about 19,000 in the period from 2009 to 2018, with 25,798 visiting in 2018. It is the least visited national park in the lower 48 states. Only three of the most remote Alaskan national parksLake Clark, Kobuk Valley and Gates of the Arcticreceive fewer visitors.
Scheduled ferry service operates from Grand Portage, Copper Harbor and Houghton.
The Grand Portage ferries reach the island in 1 1/2 hours, and stay 4 hours at the island, allowing time for hiking, a guided hike or program by the park staff, and picnics.
The "Isle Royale Queen" serves park visitors out of Copper Harbor, on the northern Upper Peninsula coast of Michigan. It arrives at Rock Harbor in the park in 3 to 3 1/2 hours, spends 3 1/2 hours before returning to Copper Harbor.
The "Sea Hunter" operates round-trips and offers day trips to the Windigo visitor center through much of the season, and less frequently in early summer and autumn; it will transport kayaks and canoes for visitors wanting to explore the park from the water. It is the fastest ferry serving the island and arrives in 1 1/2 hours, including some sightseeing points along the way out and back. Because of the relatively short boat ride, day visitors are able to get four hours on the island, and get back to the mainland earlier in the afternoon. This gives visitors on a tight schedule time to visit the Grand Portage National Monument or other attractions in the same day.
The "Ranger III" is a ship that serves park visitors from Houghton, Michigan to Rock Harbor. It is operated by the National Park Service, and is said to be the largest piece of equipment in the National Park system. It carries 125 passengers, along with canoes, kayaks, and even small powerboats. It is a six-hour voyage from Houghton to the park. The ship stays overnight at Rock Harbor before returning the next day, making two round trips each week from June to mid-September. Briefly in the 2008 season, the Ranger III carried visitors to and from Windigo. This was not continued after four trips, due to low interest and long crossing times. In 2012, Park Superintendent Phyllis Green required the "Ranger III" to purify its ballast water.
The "Voyageur II", out of Grand Portage, crosses up to three times a week, overnighting at Rock Harbor and providing transportation between popular lakeside campgrounds. In the fall season, in addition to carrying campers and hikers, it provides day-trip service to Windigo on weekends. The Voyageur transports kayaks and canoes for visitors wanting to explore the island from the water. The "Voyageur II" and other boat taxi services ferry hikers to points along the island, allowing a one-way hike back to Rock Harbor or Windigo. Visitors may land at Rock Harbor and depart from Windigo several days later, or vice versa. Hikers frequently ride it in one direction to do a cross-island hike and then get picked up at the other end.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15379
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NATO Integrated Air Defense System
The NATO Integrated Air Defense System (short: NATINADS) is a command and control network combining radars and other facilities spread throughout the NATO alliance's air defence forces. It formed in the mid-1950s and became operational in 1962 as NADGE. It has been constantly upgraded since its formation, notably with the integration of Airborne Early Warning aircraft in the 1970s. The United Kingdom maintained its own network, but was fully integrated with the network since the introduction of the Linesman/Mediator network in the 1970s. Similarly, the German network maintained an independent nature through GEADGE.
Development was approved by the NATO Military Committee in December 1955. The system was to be based on four air defense regions (ADRs) coordinated by SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander Europe). Starting from 1956 early warning coverage was extended across Western Europe using 18 radar stations. This part of the system was completed by 1962. Linked to existing national radar sites the coordinated system was called the NATO Air Defence Ground Environment (NADGE).
From 1960 NATO countries agreed to place all their air defence forces under the command of SACEUR in the event of war. These forces included command & control (C2) systems, radar installations, and Surface-to-Air (SAM) missile units as well as interceptor aircraft.
By 1972 NADGE was converted into NATINADS consisting of 84 radar sites and associated Control Reporting Centers (CRC) and in the 1980s the Airborne Early Warning / Ground Environment Integration Segment (AEGIS) upgraded the NATINADS with the possibility to integrate the AWACS radar picture and all of its information into its visual displays. (NOTE: This AEGIS is not to be confused with the U.S.Navy AEGIS, a shipboard fire control radar and weapons system.) AEGIS processed the information through Hughes H5118ME computers, which replaced the H3118M computers installed at NADGE sites in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
NATINADS ability to handle data increased with faster clock rates. The H5118M computer had a staggering 1 megabyte of memory and could handle 1.2 million instructions per second while the former model had a memory of only 256 kilobytes and a clock speed of 150,000 instructions per seconds.
NATINADS/AEGIS were complemented, in West Germany by the German Air Defence Ground Environment (GEADGE), an updated radar network adding the southern part of Germany to the European system and Coastal Radar Integration System (CRIS), adding data links from Danish coastal radars.
In order to counter the hardware obsolescence, during the mid-1990s NATO started the AEGIS Site Emulator (ASE) program allowing the NATINADS/AEGIS sites to replace the proprietary hardware (the 5118ME computer and the various operator consoles IDM-2, HMD-22, IDM-80) with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) servers and workstations.
In the first years 2000, the initial ASE capability was expanded with the possibility to run, thanks to the new hardware power, multiple site emulators on the same hardware, so the system was renamed into Multi-AEGIS Site Emulator (MASE). The NATO system designed to replace MASE in the near future is the Air Command and Control System (ACCS).
Because of changing politics, NATO expanding and financial crises most European (NATO) countries are trying to cut defence budgets; as a direct result, lots of obsolete and outdated NATINADS facilities are phased out earlier. Currently (2013) still operational NATO radar sites in Europe are these:
Allied Air Command (AIRCOM) is the central command of all NATO air forces on the European continent. The command is based at Ramstein Air Base in Germany and has two subordinate commands in Germany and Spain. The Royal Canadian Air Force and United States Air Force fall under command of the Canadian/American North American Aerospace Defense Command.
The Albanian Air Force does not possess any fixed radar installations. Its air space is monitored by Italian Air Force and Greek Air Force radars. The Albanian Air Force's Air Surveillance Centre at Tirana International Airport reports to CAOC Torrejón in Spain, while the Italian Air Force's 36th Wing at Gioia del Colle Air Base is responsible for the air defense of Albania. Albania is buying two mobile Lockheed Martin AN/TPS-77 radars to provide its Armed Forces with its own radar capability.
The Belgian Air Component's Control and Reporting Centre was based at Glons, where also its main radar was located. The radar was deactivated in 2015 and the Centre moved to Beauvechain Air Base in 2018. The Belgian Control and Reporting Centre reports to CAOC Uedem in Germany and is also responsible for guarding the airspace of Luxembourg. At the new location the Control and Reporting Centre uses digital radar data of the civilian radars of Belgocontrol and the Marconi S-723 radar of the Air Component's Air Traffic Control Centre in Semmerzake.
The Bulgarian Air Force's Air Sovereignty Operations Centre is located in Sofia and reports to CAOC Torrejón. The Bulgarian Air Force fields three control and surveillance zones, which operate obsolete Soviet-era radars. The Bulgarian Air Force intends to replace these radars with fewer, but more capable Western 3-D radars as soon as possible. The future locations of the new radars are as of 2018 unknown.
The Royal Canadian Air Force's control centres and radar stations are part of the Canadian/American North American Aerospace Defense Command.
The Croatian Air Force and Air Defense's Airspace Surveillance Centre is headquartered in Podvornica and reports to CAOC Torrejón.
The Czech Air Force's Control and Reporting Centre is located in Hlavenec and reports to CAOC Uedem.
The Royal Danish Air Force's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC 1) in Finderup was deactivated in 2008 and replaced at the same location by the Combined Air Operations Centre Finderup (CAOC F), which had responsibility for the airspaces of Iceland, Norway, Denmark and the United Kingdom. CAOC F was deactivated in 2013 and its responsibilities were transferred to CAOC Uedem in Germany. The national Danish Control and Reporting Centre is located at Karup Air Base and it reports to CAOC Uedem.
The Thule Air Base in Greenland is a United States Air Force installation and its radars are part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
The Estonian Air Force's Air Operations Control Centre is located at Ämari Air Base and reports to the Baltic Air Surveillance Network's Regional Airspace Surveillance Coordination Centre (RASCC) in Karmėlava, Lithuania, which in turn reports to CAOC Uedem.
The French Air Force's Air Operations Centre is located at Mont Verdun Air Base and reports to CAOC Uedem. Most French radar sites use the PALMIER radar, which is being taken out of service. By 2022 all PALMIER radars will have been replaced with new radar stations using the GM 403 radar.
Additionally the French Air Force fields a GM 406 radar at the Cayenne-Rochambeau Air Base in French Guiana to protect the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou.
The German Air Force's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC 2) in Uedem was deactivated in 2008 and reactivated as CAOC Uedem in 2013. CAOC Uedem is responsible for the NATO airspace North of the Alps. The HADR radars are a variant of the HR-3000 radar, while the RRP-117 radars are a variant of the AN/FPS-117.
1st Area Control Centre, inside Mount Chortiatis, with Marconi S-743D
2nd Area Control Centre, inside Mount Parnitha, with Marconi S-743D
9th Control and Warning Station Squadron, on Mount Pelion, with Marconi S-743D
10th Control and Warning Station Squadron, on Mount Chortiatis, with Marconi S-743D
The Hellenic Air Force's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC 7) at Larissa Air Base was deactivated in 2013 and its responsibilities transferred to the CAOC Torrejón in Spain. The Hellenic Air Force fields two HR-3000, four AR-327 and six Marconi S-743D radar systems, however as of 2018 the air force is in the process of replacing some of its older systems with three RAT-31DL radars.
The Hungarian Air Force's Air Operations Centre is located in Veszprém and reports to CAOC Uedem. There are additional three radar companies with Soviet-era equipment subordinate to the 54th Radar Regiment ""Veszprém"", however it is unclear if they will remain in service once Hungary's newest radar at Medina reaches full operational capability.
The Iceland Air Defense System, which is part of the Icelandic Coast Guard, monitors Iceland's airspace. Air Defense is provided by fighter jets from NATO allies, which rotate units for the Icelandic Air Policing mission to Keflavik Air Base.
The Iceland Air Defense System's Control and Reporting Centre is at Keflavik Air Base and reports to CAOC Uedem in Germany.
The Italian Air Force's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC 5) in Poggio Renatico was deactivated in 2013 and replaced with the Mobile Command and Control Regiment (RMCC) at Bari Air Base, while the Centre's responsibilities were transferred to the CAOC Torrejón in Spain.
The Latvian Air Force's Air Operations Centre is located at Lielvārde Air Base and reports to the Baltic Air Surveillance Network's Regional Airspace Surveillance Coordination Centre (RASCC) in Karmėlava, Lithuania, which in turn reports to CAOC Uedem.
The Lithuanian Air Force's Air Operations Control Centre is located in Karmėlava and reports to the Baltic Air Surveillance Network's Regional Airspace Surveillance Coordination Centre (RASCC) co-located in Karmėlava, which in turn reports to CAOC Uedem.
Luxembourg's airspace is monitored and guarded by the Belgian Air Component's Control and Reporting Centre at Beauvechain Air Base.
The Armed Forces of Montenegro do not possess a modern air defense radar and the country's airspace is monitored by Italian Air Force radar sites. The Armed Forces Air Surveillance and Reporting Centre is located at Podgorica Airport in Golubovci and reports to CAOC Torrejón in Spain.
The Royal Netherlands Air Force's Air Operations Centre is located at Nieuw-Milligen and reports to CAOC Uedem. The air force's main radars are being replaced with two modern SMART-L GB radars.
The Royal Norwegian Air Force's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC 3) in Reitan was deactivated in 2008 and its responsibilities were transferred to the Combined Air Operations Centre Finderup (CAOC F). After CAOC F was deactivated in 2013 the responsibility for the air defense of Norway was transferred to CAOC Uedem in Germany and the Royal Norwegian Air Force's Control and Reporting Centre in Sørreisa reports to it. Until 2016 the Royal Norwegian Air Force's radar installations were distributed between two CRCs. That year the CRC Mågerø was disbanded. In its place a wartime mobilization back-up CRC has been formed with a reduction in personnel from the around active 170 duty to about 50 air force home guardsmen. The SINDRE I radars are a variant of the HR-3000 radar, which is also used in the German HADR radars. The newer RAT-31SL/N radars are sometimes designated SINDRE II.
The Polish Armed Forces Operational Command's Air Operations Centre is located in the Warsaw-Pyry neighborhood and reports to CAOC Uedem. The 3rd "Wrocław" Radiotechnical Brigade is responsible for the operation of the armed forces' radar equipment and fields mainly obsolete Soviet-era radars. As of 2018 the Polish Air Force possesses three modern RAT-31DL radars, which are listed below.
The Portuguese Air Force's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC 10) in Lisbon was deactivated in 2013 and its responsibilities were transferred to CAOC Torrejón in Spain.
The Romanian Air Force's Air Operations Centre is headquartered in Bucharest and reports to CAOC Torrejón. The radar station in Bârnova is officially designated and operated as a civilian radar station, however its data is fed into the military air surveillance system.
The Slovak Air Force's Air Operations Centre is located at Sliač Air Base and reports to CAOC Uedem. The Slovak Air Force still operates obsolete Soviet-era radars, which it intends to replace with fewer, but more capable Western 3-D radars as soon as possible. The future locations of the new radars are as of 2018 unknown.
The Slovenian Air Force and Air Defense's Airspace Surveillance and Control Centre is headquartered in Brnik and reports to CAOC Torrejón.
The Italian Air Force's 4th Wing at Grosseto Air Base and 36th Wing at Gioia del Colle Air Base rotate a QRA flight of Eurofighter Typhoons to Istrana Air Base, which are responsible for the air defense of Northern Italy and Slovenia.
The Spanish Air Force's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC 8) at Torrejón Air Base was deactivated in 2013 and replaced at same location by CAOC Torrejon, which took over the functions of CAOC 5, CAOC 7, CAOC 8 and CAOC 10. CAOC Torrejón is responsible for the NATO airspace South of the Alps.
The Turkish Air Force's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC 6) in Eskisehir was deactivated in 2013 and its responsibilities were transferred to CAOC Torrejón in Spain. Turkey's Air Force fields a mix of HR-3000, AN/FPS-117, RAT-31SL and RAT-31DL radars, however the exact number of each of these radar and their location in the Turkish radar system is unknown.
The Royal Air Force's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC 9) at RAF High Wycombe was deactivated in 2008 and its responsibilities were transferred to the Combined Air Operations Centre Finderup (CAOC F). After CAOC F was deactivated in 2013 the responsibility for the air defense of the United Kingdom was transferred to CAOC Uedem in Germany. The Royal Air Force's Control and Reporting Centres report to it.
The United States Air Force's control centres and radar stations are part of the Canadian/American North American Aerospace Defense Command.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=15381
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