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1910 | Agarose gel electrophoresis | 200px|thumb|right|Digital image of 3 plasmid restriction digests run on a 1% w/v agarose gel, 3 volt/cm, stained with ethidium bromide. The DNA size marker is a commercial 1 kbp ladder. The position of the wells and direction of DNA migration is noted.
Agarose gel electrophoresis is a method of gel electrophoresis used in biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, and clinical chemistry to separate a mixed population of macromolecules such as DNA or proteins in a matrix of agarose, one of the two main components of agar. The proteins may be separated by charge and/or size (isoelectric focusing agarose electrophoresis is essentially size independent), and the DNA and RNA fragments by length. Biomolecules are separated by applying an electric field to move the charged molecules through an agarose matrix, and the biomolecules are separated by size in the agarose gel matrix.
Agarose gel is easy to cast, has relatively fewer charged groups, and is particularly suitable for separating DNA of size range most often encountered in laboratories, which accounts for the popularity of its use. The separated DNA may be viewed with stain, most commonly under UV light, and the DNA fragments can be extracted from the gel with relative ease. Most agarose gels used are between 0.7–2% dissolved in a suitable electrophoresis buffer.
Properties of agarose gel
right|thumb|An agarose gel cast in tray, to be used for gel electrophoresis
Agarose gel is a three-dimensional matrix formed of helical agarose molecules in supercoiled bundles that are aggregated into three-dimensional structures with channels and pores through which biomolecules can pass. The 3-D structure is held together with hydrogen bonds and can therefore be disrupted by heating back to a liquid state. The melting temperature is different from the gelling temperature, depending on the sources, agarose gel has a gelling temperature of and a melting temperature of . Low-melting and low-gelling agaroses made through chemical modifications are also available.
Agarose gel has large pore size and good gel strength, making it suitable as an anticonvection medium for the electrophoresis of DNA and large protein molecules. The pore size of a 1% gel has been estimated from 100 nm to 200–500 nm, and its gel strength allows gels as dilute as 0.15% to form a slab for gel electrophoresis. It can also be used to separate large proteins, and it is the preferred matrix for the gel electrophoresis of particles with effective radii larger than 5–10 nm. A 0.9% agarose gel has pores large enough for the entry of bacteriophage T4.
The agarose polymer contains charged groups, in particular pyruvate and sulfate. These negatively charged groups create a flow of water in the opposite direction to the movement of DNA in a process called electroendosmosis (EEO), and can therefore retard the movement of DNA and cause blurring of bands. Higher concentration gels would have higher electroendosmotic flow. Low EEO agarose is therefore generally preferred for use in agarose gel electrophoresis of nucleic acids, but high EEO agarose may be used for other purposes. The lower sulfate content of low EEO agarose, particularly low-melting point (LMP) agarose, is also beneficial in cases where the DNA extracted from gel is to be used for further manipulation as the presence of contaminating sulfates may affect some subsequent procedures, such as ligation and PCR. Zero EEO agaroses however are undesirable for some applications as they may be made by adding positively charged groups and such groups can affect subsequent enzyme reactions. Electroendosmosis is a reason agarose is used in preference to agar as the agaropectin component in agar contains a significant amount of negatively charged sulfate and carboxyl groups. The removal of agaropectin in agarose substantially reduces the EEO, as well as reducing the non-specific adsorption of biomolecules to the gel matrix. However, for some applications such as the electrophoresis of serum proteins, a high EEO may be desirable, and agaropectin may be added in the gel used.
Migration of nucleic acids in agarose gel
Factors affecting migration of nucleic acid in gel
thumb|280px|Gels of plasmid preparations usually show a major band of supercoiled DNA with other fainter bands in the same lane. Note that by convention DNA gel is displayed with smaller DNA fragments nearer to the bottom of the gel. This is because historically DNA gels were run vertically and the smaller DNA fragments move downwards faster.
A number of factors can affect the migration of nucleic acids: the dimension of the gel pores (gel concentration), size of DNA being electrophoresed, the voltage used, the ionic strength of the buffer, and the concentration of intercalating dye such as ethidium bromide if used during electrophoresis.
Smaller molecules travel faster than larger molecules in gel, and double-stranded DNA moves at a rate that is inversely proportional to the logarithm of the number of base pairs. This relationship however breaks down with very large DNA fragments, and separation of very large DNA fragments requires the use of pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), which applies alternating current from different directions and the large DNA fragments are separated as they reorient themselves with the changing field.
For standard agarose gel electrophoresis, larger molecules are resolved better using a low concentration gel while smaller molecules separate better at high concentration gel. Higher concentration gels, however, require longer run times (sometimes days).
The movement of the DNA may be affected by the conformation of the DNA molecule, for example, supercoiled DNA usually moves faster than relaxed DNA because it is tightly coiled and hence more compact. In a normal plasmid DNA preparation, multiple forms of DNA may be present. Gel electrophoresis of the plasmids would normally show the negatively supercoiled form as the main band, while nicked DNA (open circular form) and the relaxed closed circular form appears as minor bands. The rate at which the various forms move however can change using different electrophoresis conditions, and the mobility of larger circular DNA may be more strongly affected than linear DNA by the pore size of the gel.
Ethidium bromide which intercalates into circular DNA can change the charge, length, as well as the superhelicity of the DNA molecule, therefore its presence in gel during electrophoresis can affect its movement. For example, the positive charge of ethidium bromide can reduce the DNA movement by 15%.
DNA damage due to increased cross-linking will also reduce electrophoretic DNA migration in a dose-dependent way.
The rate of migration of the DNA is proportional to the voltage applied, i.e. the higher the voltage, the faster the DNA moves. The resolution of large DNA fragments however is lower at high voltage. The mobility of DNA may also change in an unsteady field – in a field that is periodically reversed, the mobility of DNA of a particular size may drop significantly at a particular cycling frequency. This phenomenon can result in band inversion in field inversion gel electrophoresis (FIGE), whereby larger DNA fragments move faster than smaller ones.
Migration anomalies
"Smiley" gels - this edge effect is caused when the voltage applied is too high for the gel concentration used.
Overloading of DNA - overloading of DNA slows down the migration of DNA fragments.
Contamination - presence of impurities, such as salts or proteins can affect the movement of the DNA.
Mechanism of migration and separation
The negative charge of its phosphate backbone moves the DNA towards the positively charged anode during electrophoresis. However, the migration of DNA molecules in solution, in the absence of a gel matrix, is independent of molecular weight during electrophoresis. The gel matrix is therefore responsible for the separation of DNA by size during electrophoresis, and a number of models exist to explain the mechanism of separation of biomolecules in gel matrix. A widely accepted one is the Ogston model which treats the polymer matrix as a sieve. A globular protein or a random coil DNA moves through the interconnected pores, and the movement of larger molecules is more likely to be impeded and slowed down by collisions with the gel matrix, and the molecules of different sizes can therefore be separated in this sieving process. Real-time fluorescence microscopy of stained molecules, however, showed more subtle dynamics during electrophoresis, with the DNA showing considerable elasticity as it alternately stretching in the direction of the applied field and then contracting into a ball, or becoming hooked into a U-shape when it gets caught on the polymer fibres.
General procedure
The details of an agarose gel electrophoresis experiment may vary depending on methods, but most follow a general procedure.
thumb|none|Video showing assembly of the rig and loading/running of the gel.
Casting of gel
thumb|180px|Loading DNA samples into the wells of an agarose gel using a multi-channel pipette.
The gel is prepared by dissolving the agarose powder in an appropriate buffer, such as TAE or TBE, to be used in electrophoresis. The concentration is measured in weight of agarose over volume of buffer used (g/ml). For a standard agarose gel electrophoresis, a 0.8% gel gives good separation or resolution of large 5–10kb DNA fragments, while 2% gel gives good resolution for small 0.2–1kb fragments. 1% gels is often used for a standard electrophoresis. High percentage gels are often brittle and may not set evenly, while low percentage gels (0.1-0.2%) are fragile and not easy to handle. Low-melting-point (LMP) agarose gels are also more fragile than normal agarose gel. Low-melting point agarose may be used on its own or simultaneously with standard agarose for the separation and isolation of DNA. PFGE and FIGE are often done with high percentage agarose gels.
Loading of samples
Once the gel has set, the comb is removed, leaving wells where DNA samples can be loaded. Loading buffer is mixed with the DNA sample before the mixture is loaded into the wells. The loading buffer contains a dense compound, which may be glycerol, sucrose, or Ficoll, that raises the density of the sample so that the DNA sample may sink to the bottom of the well. The buffer used in the gel is the same as the running buffer in the electrophoresis tank, which is why electrophoresis in the subaquaeous mode is possible with agarose gel.
For optimal resolution of DNA greater than 2kb in size in standard gel electrophoresis, 5 to 8 V/cm is recommended (the distance in cm refers to the distance between electrodes, therefore this recommended voltage would be 5 to 8 multiplied by the distance between the electrodes in cm).
Since DNA is not visible in natural light, the progress of the electrophoresis is monitored using colored dyes. Xylene cyanol (light blue color) comigrates large DNA fragments, while Bromophenol blue (dark blue) comigrates with the smaller fragments. Less commonly used dyes include Cresol Red and Orange G which migrate ahead of bromophenol blue. A DNA marker is also run together for the estimation of the molecular weight of the DNA fragments. Note however that the size of a circular DNA like plasmids cannot be accurately gauged using standard markers unless it has been linearized by restriction digest, alternatively a supercoiled DNA marker may be used.
Staining and visualization
thumb|Agarose gel with UV illumination: DNA stained with ethidium bromide appears as glowing orange bands.
DNA as well as RNA are normally visualized by staining with ethidium bromide, which intercalates into the major grooves of the DNA and fluoresces under UV light. The intercalation depends on the concentration of DNA and thus, a band with high intensity will indicate a higher amount of DNA compared to a band of less intensity. SYBR Green, GelRed and other similar commercial products are sold as safer alternatives to ethidium bromide as it has been shown to be mutagenic in Ames test, although the carcinogenicity of ethidium bromide has not actually been established. SYBR Green requires the use of a blue-light transilluminator. DNA stained with crystal violet can be viewed under natural light without the use of a UV transilluminator which is an advantage, however it may not produce a strong band.
When stained with ethidium bromide, the gel is viewed with an ultraviolet (UV) transilluminator. The UV light excites the electrons within the aromatic ring of ethidium bromide, and once they return to the ground state, light is released, making the DNA and ethidium bromide complex fluoresce. Exposure of DNA to UV radiation therefore should be limited. Using a higher wavelength of 365 nm (UV-A range) causes less damage to the DNA but also produces much weaker fluorescence with ethidium bromide. Where multiple wavelengths can be selected in the transilluminator, shorter wavelength can be used to capture images, while longer wavelength should be used if it is necessary to work on the gel for any extended period of time.
The transilluminator apparatus may also contain image capture devices, such as a digital or polaroid camera, that allow an image of the gel to be taken or printed.
For gel electrophoresis of protein, the bands may be visualised with Coomassie or silver stains.
thumb|Cutting out agarose gel slices. Protective equipment must be worn when using UV transilluminator.
Downstream procedures
The separated DNA bands are often used for further procedures, and a DNA band may be cut out of the gel as a slice, dissolved and purified. Contaminants however may affect some downstream procedures such as PCR, and low melting point agarose may be preferred in some cases as it contains fewer of the sulfates that can affect some enzymatic reactions. The gels may also be used for blotting techniques.
Buffers
In general, the ideal buffer should have good conductivity, produce less heat and have a long life. There are a number of buffers used for agarose electrophoresis; common ones for nucleic acids include tris/acetate/EDTA (TAE) and tris/borate/EDTA (TBE). The buffers used contain EDTA to inactivate many nucleases which require divalent cation for their function. The borate in TBE buffer can be problematic as borate can polymerize, and/or interact with cis diols such as those found in RNA. TAE has the lowest buffering capacity, but it provides the best resolution for larger DNA. This means a lower voltage and more time, but a better product.
Many other buffers have been proposed, e.g. lithium borate (LB), iso electric histidine, pK matched goods buffers, etc.; in most cases the purported rationale is lower current (less heat) and or matched ion mobilities, which leads to longer buffer life. Tris-phosphate buffer has high buffering capacity but cannot be used if DNA extracted is to be used in phosphate sensitive reaction. LB is relatively new and is ineffective in resolving fragments larger than 5 kbp; However, with its low conductivity, a much higher voltage could be used (up to 35 V/cm), which means a shorter analysis time for routine electrophoresis. As low as one base pair size difference could be resolved in 3% agarose gel with an extremely low conductivity medium (1 mM lithium borate).
Other buffering system may be used in specific applications, for example, barbituric acid-sodium barbiturate or tris-barbiturate buffers may be used for in agarose gel electrophoresis of proteins, for example in the detection of abnormal distribution of proteins.
Applications
Estimation of the size of DNA molecules following digestion with restriction enzymes, e.g., in restriction mapping of cloned DNA.
Estimation of the DNA concentration by comparing the intensity of the nucleic acid band with the corresponding band of the size marker.
Analysis of products of a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), e.g., in molecular genetic diagnosis or genetic fingerprinting
Separation of DNA fragments for extraction and purification.
Separation of restricted genomic DNA prior to Southern transfer, or of RNA prior to Northern transfer.
Separation of proteins, for example, screening of protein abnormalities in clinical chemistry.
Agarose gels are easily cast and handled compared to other matrices and nucleic acids are not chemically altered during electrophoresis. Samples are also easily recovered. After the experiment is finished, the resulting gel can be stored in a plastic bag in a refrigerator.
Electrophoresis is performed in buffer solutions to reduce pH changes due to the electric field, which is important because the charge of DNA and RNA depends on pH, but running for too long can exhaust the buffering capacity of the solution. Further, different preparations of genetic material may not migrate consistently with each other, for morphological or other reasons.
See also
Gel electrophoresis
Immunodiffusion, Immunoelectrophoresis
SDD-AGE
Northern blot
SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis
Southern blot
References
External links
How to run a DNA or RNA gel
Animation of gel analysis of DNA restriction fragments
Video and article of agarose gel electrophoresis
Step by step photos of running a gel and extracting DNA
Drinking straw electrophoresis!
A typical method from wikiversity
Building a gel electrophoresis chamber
Category:Biological techniques and tools
Category:Molecular biology
Category:Electrophoresis
Category:Polymerase chain reaction
Category:Articles containing video clips | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agarose_gel_electrophoresis | 2025-04-05T18:25:49.719295 |
1911 | Allele | An allele; modern formation from Greek ἄλλος állos, "other"}} is a variant of the sequence of nucleotides at a particular location, or locus, on a DNA molecule.
Alleles can differ at a single position through single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP), but they can also have insertions and deletions of up to several thousand base pairs.
Most alleles observed result in little or no change in the function or amount of the gene product(s) they code or regulate for. However, sometimes different alleles can result in different observable phenotypic traits, such as different pigmentation. A notable example of this is Gregor Mendel's discovery that the white and purple flower colors in pea plants were the result of a single gene with two alleles.
Nearly all multicellular organisms have two sets of chromosomes at some point in their biological life cycle; that is, they are diploid. For a given locus, if the two chromosomes contain the same allele, they, and the organism, are homozygous with respect to that allele. If the alleles are different, they, and the organism, are heterozygous with respect to those alleles.
Popular definitions of 'allele' typically refer only to different alleles within genes. For example, the ABO blood grouping is controlled by the ABO gene, which has six common alleles (variants). In population genetics, nearly every living human's phenotype for the ABO gene is some combination of just these six alleles.
Etymology
The word "allele" is a short form of "allelomorph" ("other form", a word coined by British geneticists William Bateson and Edith Rebecca Saunders) in the 1900s, which was used in the early days of genetics to describe variant forms of a gene detected in different phenotypes and identified to cause the differences between them. It derives from the Greek prefix ἀλληλο-, allelo-, meaning "mutual", "reciprocal", or "each other", which itself is related to the Greek adjective ἄλλος, allos (cognate with Latin alius), meaning "other".Alleles that lead to dominant or recessive phenotypes
In many cases, genotypic interactions between the two alleles at a locus can be described as dominant or recessive, according to which of the two homozygous phenotypes the heterozygote most resembles. Where the heterozygote is indistinguishable from one of the homozygotes, the allele expressed is the one that leads to the "dominant" phenotype, and the other allele is said to be "recessive". The degree and pattern of dominance varies among loci. This type of interaction was first formally-described by Gregor Mendel. However, many traits defy this simple categorization and the phenotypes are modelled by co-dominance and polygenic inheritance.
The term "wild type" allele is sometimes used to describe an allele that is thought to contribute to the typical phenotypic character as seen in "wild" populations of organisms, such as fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). Such a "wild type" allele was historically regarded as leading to a dominant (overpowering – always expressed), common, and normal phenotype, in contrast to "mutant" alleles that lead to recessive, rare, and frequently deleterious phenotypes. It was formerly thought that most individuals were homozygous for the "wild type" allele at most gene loci, and that any alternative "mutant" allele was found in homozygous form in a small minority of "affected" individuals, often as genetic diseases, and more frequently in heterozygous form in "carriers" for the mutant allele. It is now appreciated that most or all gene loci are highly polymorphic, with multiple alleles, whose frequencies vary from population to population, and that a great deal of genetic variation is hidden in the form of alleles that do not produce obvious phenotypic differences. Wild type alleles are often denoted by a superscript plus sign (i.e., p for an allele p).Multiple alleles
, a person with Type A blood displays A-antigens and may have a genotype I<sup>A</sup>I<sup>A</sup> or I<sup>A</sup>i. A person with Type B blood displays B-antigens and may have the genotype I<sup>B</sup>I<sup>B</sup> or I<sup>B</sup>i. A person with Type AB blood displays both A- and B-antigens and has the genotype I<sup>A</sup>I<sup>B</sup> and a person with Type O blood, displaying neither antigen, has the genotype ii.]]
A population or species of organisms typically includes multiple alleles at each locus among various individuals. Allelic variation at a locus is measurable as the number of alleles (polymorphism) present, or the proportion of heterozygotes in the population. A null allele is a gene variant that lacks the gene's normal function because it either is not expressed, or the expressed protein is inactive.
For example, at the gene locus for the ABO blood type carbohydrate antigens in humans, A specific class of epiallele, the metastable epialleles, has been discovered in mice and in humans which is characterized by stochastic (probabilistic) establishment of epigenetic state that can be mitotically inherited.
Idiomorph
The term "idiomorph", from Greek 'morphos' (form) and 'idio' (singular, unique), was introduced in 1990 in place of "allele" to denote sequences at the same locus in different strains that have no sequence similarity and probably do not share a common phylogenetic relationship. It is used mainly in the genetic research of mycology.
See also
References and notes
External links
* [http://alfred.med.yale.edu/alfred/index.asp ALFRED: The ALlele FREquency Database]
Category:Classical genetics
Category:Genetic genealogy | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allele | 2025-04-05T18:25:49.730500 |
1912 | Ampicillin | | MedlinePlus = a685002
| DailyMedID = Ampicillin
| pregnancy_AU = A
| pregnancy_AU_comment
| pregnancy_category | routes_of_administration By mouth, intravenous, intramuscular
| class = Aminopenicillins
| ATC_prefix = J01
| ATC_suffix = CA01
| ATC_supplemental =
<!-- Legal status -->
| legal_AU = S4
| legal_AU_comment | legal_BR <!-- OTC, A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, D1, D2, E, F-->
| legal_BR_comment | legal_CA Rx-only
| legal_CA_comment | legal_DE <!-- Anlage I, II, III or Unscheduled-->
| legal_DE_comment | legal_NZ <!-- Class A, B, C -->
| legal_NZ_comment | legal_UK POM
| legal_UK_comment | legal_US Rx-only
| legal_US_comment
<!-- Chemical and physical data -->
| IUPAC_name = (2S,5R,6R)-6-([(2R)-2-Amino-2-phenylacetyl]amino)-3,3-dimethyl-7-oxo-4-thia-1-azabicyclo[3.2.0]heptane-2-carboxylic acid
| C = 16
| H = 19
| N = 3
| O = 4
| S = 1
| SMILES CC1(C(N2C(S1)C(C2O)NC(O)C(C3CCCCC3)N)C(=O)O)C
| StdInChI_Ref =
| StdInChI = 1S/C16H19N3O4S/c1-16(2)11(15(22)23)19-13(21)10(14(19)24-16)18-12(20)9(17)8-6-4-3-5-7-8/h3-7,9-11,14H,17H2,1-2H3,(H,18,20)(H,22,23)/t9-,10-,11+,14-/m1/s1
| StdInChI_comment | StdInChIKey_Ref
| StdInChIKey = AVKUERGKIZMTKX-NJBDSQKTSA-N
| density | density_notes
| melting_point | melting_high
| melting_notes | boiling_point
| boiling_notes | solubility
| sol_units | specific_rotation
}}
<!-- Definition and uses -->
Ampicillin is an antibiotic belonging to the aminopenicillin class of the penicillin family. The drug is used to prevent and treat several bacterial infections, such as respiratory tract infections, urinary tract infections, meningitis, salmonellosis, and endocarditis.
<!-- Adverse effects -->
Common side effects include rash, nausea, and diarrhea.
<!-- Society and culture -->
Ampicillin was discovered in 1958 and came into commercial use in 1961. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. The World Health Organization classifies ampicillin as critically important for human medicine. It is available as a generic medication.
*Endocarditis by enterococcal strains (off-label use); often given with an aminoglycoside
*Gastrointestinal infections caused by contaminated water or food (for example, by Salmonella)
*Otitis media (middle ear infection)
*Prophylaxis (i.e. to prevent infection) in those who previously had rheumatic heart disease or are undergoing dental procedures, vaginal hysterectomies, or C-sections.
*Whooping cough, to prevent and treat secondary infections Activity against gram-negative bacteria includes Neisseria meningitidis, some Haemophilus influenzae, and some of the Enterobacteriaceae (though most Enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas are resistant). Its spectrum of activity is enhanced by co-administration of sulbactam, a drug that inhibits beta lactamase, an enzyme produced by bacteria to inactivate ampicillin and related antibiotics. It is sometimes used in combination with other antibiotics that have different mechanisms of action, like vancomycin, linezolid, daptomycin, and tigecycline.
Available forms
Ampicillin can be administered by mouth, an intramuscular injection (shot) or by intravenous infusion.
IV injections must be given slowly, as rapid IV injections can lead to convulsive seizures. Specific populationsAmpicillin is one of the most used drugs in pregnancy, and has been found to be generally harmless both by the Food and Drug Administration in the U.S. (which classified it as category B) and the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia (which classified it as category A). It is the drug of choice for treating Listeria monocytogenes in pregnant women, either alone or combined with an aminoglycoside.
Ampicillin crosses the placenta and remains in the amniotic fluid at 50–100% of the concentration in maternal plasma; this can lead to high concentrations of ampicillin in the newborn. The clearance by the kidneys is lower, as kidney function has not fully developed. Ampicillin has been said to make oral contraceptives less effective, It can be made less effective by other antibiotic, such as chloramphenicol, erythromycin, cephalosporins, and tetracyclines. If given at the same time as aminoglycosides, it can bind to it and inactivate it. When administered separately, aminoglycosides and ampicillin can potentiate each other instead.
Ampicillin causes skin rashes more often when given with allopurinol.PharmacologyMechanism of action
.]]
Ampicillin is in the penicillin group of beta-lactam antibiotics and is part of the aminopenicillin family. It is roughly equivalent to amoxicillin in terms of activity.
Ampicillin acts as an irreversible inhibitor of the enzyme transpeptidase, which is needed by bacteria to make the cell wall.PharmacokineticsAmpicillin is well-absorbed from the GI tract (though food reduces its absorption), and reaches peak concentrations in one to two hours. The bioavailability is around 62% for parenteral routes. Unlike other penicillins, which usually bind 60–90% to plasma proteins, ampicillin binds to only 15–20%.
History
Ampicillin has been used extensively to treat bacterial infections since 1961. Until the introduction of ampicillin by the British company Beecham, penicillin therapies had only been effective against gram-positive organisms such as staphylococci and streptococci. In the United States, it is available as a generic medication.
* Mixed aerobic–anaerobic infections, such as from cat bites<ref name="giguere" />
* Multidrug-resistant Enterococcus faecalis and E. faecium<ref name="magdesian" />
* Prophylactic use in poultry against Salmonella and sepsis from E. coli or Staphylococcus aureus<ref name="giguere" />
* Respiratory tract infections, including tonsilitis, bovine respiratory disease, shipping fever, bronchopneumonia, and calf and bovine pneumonia
* Urinary tract infections in dogs
Horses are generally not treated with oral ampicillin, as they have low bioavailability of beta-lactams.<ref name="magdesian" />
The half-life in animals is around that same of that in humans (just over an hour). Oral absorption is less than 50% in cats and dogs, and less than 4% in horses.<ref name"papich" /> References External links *
*
*
Category:Enantiopure drugs
Category:Penicillins
Category:Phenyl compounds
Category:World Health Organization essential medicines
Category:Wikipedia medicine articles ready to translate | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampicillin | 2025-04-05T18:25:49.748917 |
1913 | Annealing | Annealing may refer to:
Annealing (biology), in genetics
Annealing (glass), heating a piece of glass to remove stress
Annealing (materials science), a heat treatment that alters the microstructure of a material
Quantum annealing, a method for solving combinatorial optimisation problems and ground states of glassy systems
Simulated annealing, a numerical optimization technique | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annealing | 2025-04-05T18:25:49.750508 |
1914 | Antimicrobial resistance | : Bacteria are streaked on dishes with white disks, each impregnated with a different antibiotic. Clear rings, such as those on the left, show that bacteria have not grown—indicating that these bacteria are not resistant. The bacteria on the right are fully resistant to three of seven and partially resistant to two of seven antibiotics tested.|alt=Two petri dishes with antibiotic resistance tests]]
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR or AR) occurs when microbes evolve mechanisms that protect them from antimicrobials, which are drugs used to treat infections. This resistance affects all classes of microbes, including bacteria (antibiotic resistance), viruses (antiviral resistance), parasites (antiparasitic resistance), and fungi (antifungal resistance). Together, these adaptations fall under the AMR umbrella, posing significant challenges to healthcare worldwide. Misuse and improper management of antimicrobials are primary drivers of this resistance, though it can also occur naturally through genetic mutations and the spread of resistant genes.
Antibiotic resistance, a significant AMR subset, enables bacteria to survive antibiotic treatment, complicating infection management and treatment options.
The burden of AMR is immense, with nearly 5 million annual deaths associated with resistant infections. Infections from AMR microbes are more challenging to treat and often require costly alternative therapies that may have more severe side effects. Preventive measures, such as using narrow-spectrum antibiotics and improving hygiene practices, aim to reduce the spread of resistance. Microbes resistant to multiple drugs are termed multidrug-resistant (MDR) and are sometimes called superbugs.
The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that AMR is one of the top global public health and development threats, estimating that bacterial AMR was directly responsible for 1.27 million global deaths in 2019 and contributed to 4.95 million deaths. Moreover, the WHO and other international bodies warn that AMR could lead to up to 10 million deaths annually by 2050 unless actions are taken. Global initiatives, such as calls for international AMR treaties, emphasize coordinated efforts to limit misuse, fund research, and provide access to necessary antimicrobials in developing nations. However, the COVID-19 pandemic redirected resources and scientific attention away from AMR, intensifying the challenge.
Definition
Antimicrobial resistance means a microorganism's resistance to an antimicrobial drug that was once able to treat an infection by that microorganism. All types of microbes can develop drug resistance. Thus, there are antibiotic, antifungal, antiviral and antiparasitic resistance.
Overview
WHO report released April 2014 stated, "this serious threat is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country. Antibiotic resistance—when bacteria change so antibiotics no longer work in people who need them to treat infections—is now a major threat to public health."
Each year, nearly 5 million deaths are associated with AMR globally. Deaths attributable to AMR vary by area:
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Place
!Deaths per 100,000 attributable to AMR In 2019 there were 133,000 deaths caused by AMR. Causes AMR is driven largely by the misuse and overuse of antimicrobials. While antimicrobial resistance does occur naturally over time, the use of antimicrobial agents in a variety of settings both within the healthcare industry and outside of has led to antimicrobial resistance becoming increasingly more prevalent.
Although many microbes develop resistance to antibiotics over time though natural mutation, overprescribing and inappropriate prescription of antibiotics have accelerated the problem. It is possible that as many as 1 in 3 prescriptions written for antibiotics are unnecessary. Every year, approximately 154 million prescriptions for antibiotics are written. Of these, up to 46 million are unnecessary or inappropriate for the condition that the patient has. Many individuals stop taking antibiotics when they begin to feel better. When this occurs, it is possible that the microbes that are less susceptible to treatment still remain in the body. If these microbes are able to continue to reproduce, this can lead to an infection by bacteria that are less susceptible or even resistant to an antibiotic. As a result, the types of microorganisms that are able to survive over time with continued attack by certain antimicrobial agents will naturally become more prevalent in the environment, and those without this resistance will become obsolete. Also, many soil fungi and bacteria are natural competitors and the original antibiotic penicillin discovered by Alexander Fleming rapidly lost clinical effectiveness in treating humans and, furthermore, none of the other natural penicillins (F, K, N, X, O, U1 or U6) are currently in clinical use.
Antimicrobial resistance can be acquired from other microbes through swapping genes in a process termed horizontal gene transfer. This means that once a gene for resistance to an antibiotic appears in a microbial community, it can then spread to other microbes in the community, potentially moving from a non-disease causing microbe to a disease-causing microbe. This process is heavily driven by the natural selection processes that happen during antibiotic use or misuse.
Over time, most of the strains of bacteria and infections present will be the type resistant to the antimicrobial agent being used to treat them, making this agent now ineffective to defeat most microbes. With the increased use of antimicrobial agents, there is a speeding up of this natural process. Self-medication In the vast majority of countries, antibiotics can only be prescribed by a doctor and supplied by a pharmacy. Self-medication by consumers is defined as "the taking of medicines on one's own initiative or on another person's suggestion, who is not a certified medical professional", and it has been identified as one of the primary reasons for the evolution of antimicrobial resistance. Self-medication with antibiotics is an unsuitable way of using them but a common practice in resource-constrained countries. The practice exposes individuals to the risk of bacteria that have developed antimicrobial resistance. Many people resort to this out of necessity, when access to a physician is unavailable, or when patients have a limited amount of time or money to see a doctor. This increased access makes it extremely easy to obtain antimicrobials. An example is India, where in the state of Punjab 73% of the population resorted to treating their minor health issues and chronic illnesses through self-medication. and, secondly, broad microbial resistance and when to seek medical care if the infection is not clearing. In order to determine the public's knowledge and preconceived notions on antibiotic resistance, a screening of 3,537 articles published in Europe, Asia, and North America was done. Of the 55,225 total people surveyed in the articles, 70% had heard of antibiotic resistance previously, but 88% of those people thought it referred to some type of physical change in the human body. Another study in an intensive care unit in a major hospital in France has shown that 30% to 60% of prescribed antibiotics were unnecessary. These inappropriate uses of antimicrobial agents promote the evolution of antimicrobial resistance by supporting the bacteria in developing genetic alterations that lead to resistance.
According to research conducted in the US that aimed to evaluate physicians' attitudes and knowledge on antimicrobial resistance in ambulatory settings, only 63% of those surveyed reported antibiotic resistance as a problem in their local practices, while 23% reported the aggressive prescription of antibiotics as necessary to avoid failing to provide adequate care. This demonstrates how a majority of doctors underestimate the impact that their own prescribing habits have on antimicrobial resistance as a whole. It also confirms that some physicians may be overly cautious and prescribe antibiotics for both medical or legal reasons, even when clinical indications for use of these medications are not always confirmed. This can lead to unnecessary antimicrobial use, a pattern which may have worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Studies have shown that common misconceptions about the effectiveness and necessity of antibiotics to treat common mild illnesses contribute to their overuse.
Important to the conversation of antibiotic use is the veterinary medical system. Veterinary oversight is required by law for all medically important antibiotics. Veterinarians use the Pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic model (PK/PD) approach to ensuring that the correct dose of the drug is delivered to the correct place at the correct timing.
Pandemics, disinfectants and healthcare systems
Increased antibiotic use during the early waves of the COVID-19 pandemic may exacerbate this global health challenge<!--/threat/burden-->. Moreover, pandemic burdens on some healthcare systems may contribute to antibiotic-resistant infections. On the other hand, "increased hand hygiene, decreased international travel, and decreased elective hospital procedures may have reduced AMR pathogen selection and spread in the short term" during the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of disinfectants such as alcohol-based hand sanitizers, and antiseptic hand wash may also have the potential to increase antimicrobial resistance. Extensive use of disinfectants can lead to mutations that induce antimicrobial resistance.
A 2024 United Nations High-Level Meeting on AMR has pledged to reduce deaths associated with bacterial AMR by 10% over the next six years. In their first major declaration on the issue since 2016, global leaders also committed to raising $100 million to update and implement AMR action plans. However, the final draft of the declaration omitted an earlier target to reduce antibiotic use in animals by 30% by 2030, due to opposition from meat-producing countries and the farming industry. Critics argue this omission is a major weakness, as livestock accounts for around 73% of global sales of antimicrobial agents, including antibiotics, antivirals, and antiparasitics. Environmental pollution Considering the complex interactions between humans, animals and the environment, it is also important to consider the environmental aspects and contributors to antimicrobial resistance. Although there are still some knowledge gaps in understanding the mechanisms and transmission pathways, environmental pollution is considered a significant contributor to antimicrobial resistance. Important contributing factors are through "antibiotic residues", "industrial effluents", " agricultural runoffs", "heavy metals", "biocides and pesticides" and "sewage and wastewater" that create reservoirs for resistant genes and bacteria that facilitates the transfer of human pathogens. Antibiotics are fed to livestock to act as growth supplements, and a preventive measure to decrease the likelihood of infections.
Farmers typically use antibiotics in animal feed to improve growth rates and prevent infections. However, this is illogical as antibiotics are used to treat infections and not prevent infections. 80% of antibiotic use in the U.S. is for agricultural purposes and about 70% of these are medically important. Overusing antibiotics gives the bacteria time to adapt leaving higher doses or even stronger antibiotics needed to combat the infection. Though antibiotics for growth promotion were banned throughout the EU in 2006, 40 countries worldwide still use antibiotics to promote growth.
This can result in the transfer of resistant bacterial strains into the food that humans eat, causing potentially fatal transfer of disease. While the practice of using antibiotics as growth promoters does result in better yields and meat products, it is a major issue and needs to be decreased in order to prevent antimicrobial resistance. Though the evidence linking antimicrobial usage in livestock to antimicrobial resistance is limited, the World Health Organization Advisory Group on Integrated Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance strongly recommended the reduction of use of medically important antimicrobials in livestock. Additionally, the Advisory Group stated that such antimicrobials should be expressly prohibited for both growth promotion and disease prevention in food producing animals.
In the United States the Veterinary Feed Directive went into practice in 2017 dictating that All medically important antibiotics to be used in feed or water for food animal species require a veterinary feed directive (VFD) or a prescription. Pesticides
Most pesticides protect crops against insects and plants, but in some cases antimicrobial pesticides are used to protect against various microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, algae, and protozoa. The overuse of many pesticides in an effort to have a higher yield of crops has resulted in many of these microbes evolving a tolerance against these antimicrobial agents. Currently there are over 4000 antimicrobial pesticides registered with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and sold to market, showing the widespread use of these agents. It is estimated that for every single meal a person consumes, 0.3 g of pesticides is used, as 90% of all pesticide use is in agriculture. A majority of these products are used to help defend against the spread of infectious diseases, and hopefully protect public health. But out of the large amount of pesticides used, it is also estimated that less than 0.1% of those antimicrobial agents, actually reach their targets. That leaves over 99% of all pesticides used available to contaminate other resources. In soil, air, and water these antimicrobial agents are able to spread, coming in contact with more microorganisms and leading to these microbes evolving mechanisms to tolerate and further resist pesticides. The use of antifungal azole pesticides that drive environmental azole resistance have been linked to azole resistance cases in the clinical setting. The same issues confront the novel antifungal classes (e.g. orotomides) which are again being used in both the clinic and agriculture.
Wild birds
Wildlife, including wild and migratory birds, serve as a reservoir for zoonotic disease and antimicrobial-resistant organisms. Birds are a key link between the transmission of zoonotic diseases to human populations. By the same token, increased contact between wild birds and human populations (including domesticated animals), has increased the amount of anti-microbial resistance (AMR) to the bird population. In the recent decades, permafrost has been rapidly thawing due to climate change. The cold preserves any organic matter inside the permafrost, and it is possible for microorganisms to resume their life functions once it thaws. While some common pathogens such as influenza, smallpox or the bacteria associated with pneumonia have failed to survive intentional attempts to revive them, more cold-adapted microorganisms such as anthrax, or several ancient plant and amoeba viruses, have successfully survived prolonged thaw.
Some scientists have argued that the inability of known causative agents of contagious diseases to survive being frozen and thawed makes this threat unlikely. Instead, there have been suggestions that when modern pathogenic bacteria interact with the ancient ones, they may, through horizontal gene transfer, pick up genetic sequences which are associated with antimicrobial resistance, exacerbating an already difficult issue. Antibiotics to which permafrost bacteria have displayed at least some resistance include chloramphenicol, streptomycin, kanamycin, gentamicin, tetracycline, spectinomycin and neomycin. However, other studies show that resistance levels in ancient bacteria to modern antibiotics remain lower than in the contemporary bacteria from the active layer of thawed ground above them, which may mean that this risk is "no greater" than from any other soil.
Prevention
There have been increasing public calls for global collective action to address the threat, including a proposal for an international treaty on antimicrobial resistance. Further detail and attention is still needed in order to recognize and measure trends in resistance on the international level; the idea of a global tracking system has been suggested but implementation has yet to occur. A system of this nature would provide insight to areas of high resistance as well as information necessary for evaluating programs, introducing interventions and other changes made to fight or reverse antibiotic resistance.
Duration of antimicrobials
Delaying or minimizing the use of antibiotics for certain conditions may help safely reduce their use. Antimicrobial treatment duration should be based on the infection and other health problems a person may have.<!-- "When optimising therapy for an infection consider the person's immune status, the infecting agent and the focus of infection." --> For many infections once a person has improved there is little evidence that stopping treatment causes more resistance.Monitoring and mappingThere are multiple national and international monitoring programs for drug-resistant threats, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant S. aureus (VRSA), extended spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producing Enterobacterales, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), and multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (MRAB).
ResistanceOpen is an online global map of antimicrobial resistance developed by HealthMap which displays aggregated data on antimicrobial resistance from publicly available and user submitted data. The website can display data for a radius from a location. Users may submit data from antibiograms for individual hospitals or laboratories. European data is from the EARS-Net (European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network), part of the ECDC. ResistanceMap is a website by the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy and provides data on antimicrobial resistance on a global level.
The WHO's AMR global action plan also recommends antimicrobial resistance surveillance in animals. Initial steps in the EU for establishing the veterinary counterpart EARS-Vet (EARS-Net for veterinary medicine) have been made. AMR data from pets in particular is scarce, but needed to support antibiotic stewardship in veterinary medicine.
By comparison there is a lack of national and international monitoring programs for antifungal resistance. Limiting antimicrobial use in humans
Antimicrobial stewardship programmes appear useful in reducing rates of antimicrobial resistance. The antimicrobial stewardship program will also provide pharmacists with the knowledge to educate patients that antibiotics will not work for a virus for example.
Excessive antimicrobial use has become one of the top contributors to the evolution of antimicrobial resistance. Since the beginning of the antimicrobial era, antimicrobials have been used to treat a wide range of infectious diseases. Overuse of antimicrobials has become the primary cause of rising levels of antimicrobial resistance. The main problem is that doctors are willing to prescribe antimicrobials to ill-informed individuals who believe that antimicrobials can cure nearly all illnesses, including viral infections like the common cold. In an analysis of drug prescriptions, 36% of individuals with a cold or an upper respiratory infection (both usually viral in origin) were given prescriptions for antibiotics. These prescriptions accomplished nothing other than increasing the risk of further evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Using antimicrobials without prescription is another driving force leading to the overuse of antibiotics to self-treat diseases like the common cold, cough, fever, and dysentery resulting in an epidemic of antibiotic resistance in countries like Bangladesh, risking its spread around the globe. Introducing strict antibiotic stewardship in the outpatient setting to reduce inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics may reduce the emerging bacterial resistance.
The WHO AWaRe (Access, Watch, Reserve) guidance and antibiotic book has been introduced to guide antibiotic choice for the 30 most common infections in adults and children to reduce inappropriate prescribing in primary care and hospitals. Narrow-spectrum antibiotics are preferred due to their lower resistance potential, and broad-spectrum antibiotics are only recommended for people with more severe symptoms. Some antibiotics are more likely to confer resistance, so are kept as reserve antibiotics in the AWaRe book.
Various diagnostic strategies have been employed to prevent the overuse of antifungal therapy in the clinic, proving a safe alternative to empirical antifungal therapy, and thus underpinning antifungal stewardship schemes. At the hospital level Antimicrobial stewardship teams in hospitals are encouraging optimal use of antimicrobials. The goals of antimicrobial stewardship are to help practitioners pick the right drug at the right dose and duration of therapy while preventing misuse and minimizing the development of resistance. Stewardship interventions may reduce the length of stay by an average of slightly over 1 day while not increasing the risk of death. Dispensing, to discharged in-house patients, the exact number of antibiotic pharmaceutical units necessary to complete an ongoing treatment can reduce antibiotic leftovers within the community as community pharmacies can have antibiotic package inefficiencies. At the primary care level Given the volume of care provided in primary care (general practice), recent strategies have focused on reducing unnecessary antimicrobial prescribing in this setting. Simple interventions, such as written information explaining when taking antibiotics is not necessary, for example in common infections of the upper respiratory tract, have been shown to reduce antibiotic prescribing. Various tools are also available to help professionals decide if prescribing antimicrobials is necessary.
Parental expectations, driven by the worry for their children's health, can influence how often children are prescribed antibiotics. Parents often rely on their clinician for advice and reassurance. However a lack of plain language information and not having adequate time for consultation negatively impacts this relationship. In effect parents often rely on past experiences in their expectations rather than reassurance from the clinician. Adequate time for consultation and plain language information can help parents make informed decisions and avoid unnecessary antibiotic use.
Parents play a critical role in reducing unnecessary antibiotic use, particularly during cold and flu season when children frequently experience respiratory illnesses. Many of these illnesses are caused by viruses, such as colds or the flu, which antibiotics cannot treat. Misusing antibiotics in these situations not only fails to benefit the child but also contributes to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, posing a broader public health threat. To address parental concerns and reduce inappropriate prescribing, healthcare providers can offer plain-language explanations about the difference between bacterial and viral infections, alongside clear guidance on managing viral illnesses without antibiotics. Vaccinations also play a vital role in reducing the incidence of serious bacterial infections that may require antibiotic treatment, thereby helping to preserve the effectiveness of existing antibiotics. Schools further amplify the spread of infections due to close contact and shared surfaces, underscoring the importance of hygiene practices like regular handwashing, covering coughs, and staying home when unwell. These preventive measures not only reduce the need for antibiotics but also lower the overall risk of resistant bacteria spreading within communities.
The prescriber should closely adhere to the five rights of drug administration: the right patient, the right drug, the right dose, the right route, and the right time. Microbiological samples should be taken for culture and sensitivity testing before treatment when indicated and treatment potentially changed based on the susceptibility report.
Health workers and pharmacists can help tackle antibiotic resistance by: enhancing infection prevention and control; only prescribing and dispensing antibiotics when they are truly needed; prescribing and dispensing the right antibiotic(s) to treat the illness. The CDC recommends that you follow these behaviors so that you avoid these negative side effects and keep the community safe from spreading drug-resistant bacteria.
Country examples
* The Netherlands has the lowest rate of antibiotic prescribing in the OECD, at a rate of 11.4 defined daily doses (DDD) per 1,000 people per day in 2011. The defined daily dose (DDD) is a statistical measure of drug consumption, defined by the World Health Organization (WHO).
* Germany and Sweden also have lower prescribing rates, with Sweden's rate having been declining since 2007.
* Greece, France and Belgium have high prescribing rates for antibiotics of more than 28 DDD.
Water, sanitation, hygiene
Infectious disease control through improved water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure needs to be included in the antimicrobial resistance (AMR) agenda. The "Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance" stated in 2018 that "the spread of pathogens through unsafe water results in a high burden of gastrointestinal disease, increasing even further the need for antibiotic treatment." This is particularly a problem in developing countries where the spread of infectious diseases caused by inadequate WASH standards is a major driver of antibiotic demand. Growing usage of antibiotics together with persistent infectious disease levels have led to a dangerous cycle in which reliance on antimicrobials increases while the efficacy of drugs diminishes.
An increase in hand washing compliance by hospital staff results in decreased rates of resistant organisms.
Water supply and sanitation infrastructure in health facilities offer significant co-benefits for combatting AMR, and investment should be increased. Industrial wastewater treatment Manufacturers of antimicrobials need to improve the treatment of their wastewater (by using industrial wastewater treatment processes) to reduce the release of residues into the environment. For this reason only antimicrobials that are deemed "not-clinically relevant" are used in these practices.
Unlike resistance to antibacterials, antifungal resistance can be driven by arable farming, currently there is no regulation on the use of similar antifungal classes in agriculture and the clinic. The possibility for co-selection of AMR resistances in the food chain pipeline may have far-reaching implications for human health.
Country examples
Europe
In 1997, European Union health ministers voted to ban avoparcin and four additional antibiotics used to promote animal growth in 1999. In 2006 a ban on the use of antibiotics in European feed, with the exception of two antibiotics in poultry feeds, became effective. In Scandinavia, there is evidence that the ban has led to a lower prevalence of antibiotic resistance in (nonhazardous) animal bacterial populations. As of 2004, several European countries established a decline of antimicrobial resistance in humans through limiting the use of antimicrobials in agriculture and food industries without jeopardizing animal health or economic cost. United States The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) collect data on antibiotic use in humans and in a more limited fashion in animals. About 80% of antibiotic use in the U.S. is for agriculture purposes, and about 70% of these are medically important. Fluroquinolones have been banned from extra-label use in food animals in the USA since 2007. However, they remain widely used in companion and exotic animals.
Global action plans and awareness
At the 79th United Nations General Assembly High-Level Meeting on AMR on 26 September 2024, world leaders approved a political declaration committing to a clear set of targets and actions, including reducing the estimated 4.95 million human deaths associated with bacterial AMR annually by 10% by 2030. A global action plan to tackle the growing problem of resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines was endorsed at the Sixty-eighth World Health Assembly in May 2015.
* Videos are being produced for the general public to generate interest and awareness.
* The Irish Department of Health published a National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance in October 2017. The Strategy for the Control of Antimicrobial Resistance in Ireland (SARI), Iaunched in 2001 developed Guidelines for Antimicrobial Stewardship in Hospitals in Ireland in conjunction with the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, these were published in 2009. Following their publication a public information campaign 'Action on Antibiotics' was launched to highlight the need for a change in antibiotic prescribing. Despite this, antibiotic prescribing remains high with variance in adherence to guidelines.
* The United Kingdom published a 20-year vision for antimicrobial resistance that sets out the goal of containing and controlling AMR by 2040. The vision is supplemented by a 5-year action plan running from 2019 to 2024, building on the previous action plan (2013–2018).
* The World Health Organization has published the 2024 Bacterial Priority Pathogens List which covers 15 families of antibiotic-resistant bacterial pathogens. Notable among these are gram-negative bacteria resistant to last-resort antibiotics, drug-resistant mycobacterium tuberculosis, and other high-burden resistant pathogens such as Salmonella, Shigella, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus aureus. The inclusion of these pathogens in the list underscores their global impact in terms of burden, as well as issues related to transmissibility, treatability, and prevention options. It also reflects the R&D pipeline of new treatments and emerging resistance trends. Antibiotic Awareness Week The World Health Organization has promoted the first World Antibiotic Awareness Week running from 16 to 22 November 2015. The aim of the week is to increase global awareness of antibiotic resistance. It also wants to promote the correct usage of antibiotics across all fields in order to prevent further instances of antibiotic resistance.
World Antibiotic Awareness Week has been held every November since 2015. For 2017, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) are together calling for responsible use of antibiotics in humans and animals to reduce the emergence of antibiotic resistance.
United Nations
In 2016 the Secretary-General of the United Nations convened the Interagency Coordination Group (IACG) on Antimicrobial Resistance. The IACG worked with international organizations and experts in human, animal, and plant health to create a plan to fight antimicrobial resistance.
* Accelerate progress in countries
* Innovate to secure the future
* Collaborate for more effective action
* Invest for a sustainable response
* Strengthen accountability and global governance
One Health Approach
The One Health approach recognizes that human, animal, and environmental health are interconnected in the development and spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Key strategies include:
Integrated Surveillance
* Monitoring antibiotic use and resistance trends across human medicine, agriculture, and environmental sectors.
* For example, 73% of the world’s antibiotics are used in livestock, often for non-therapeutic purposes like growth promotion.
Policy Interventions
* Banning non-therapeutic antibiotics in agriculture (e.g., European Union’s 2006 growth promoter ban).
* Incentivizing development of new antibiotics and alternatives (e.g., vaccines, bacteriophages).
Environmental Mitigation
* Reducing pharmaceutical waste in water systems and soil through improved waste management.
* Addressing resistance genes in wastewater from hospitals, farms, and drug manufacturing sites.
Mechanisms and organisms
Bacteria
, which are essential for bacterial life, by permanently binding to their active sites. MRSA, however, expresses a PBP that does not allow the antibiotic into its active site.|alt=Diagram depicting antibiotic resistance through alteration of the antibiotic's target site]]
The five main mechanisms by which bacteria exhibit resistance to antibiotics are:
# Drug inactivation or modification: for example, enzymatic deactivation of penicillin G in some penicillin-resistant bacteria through the production of β-lactamases. Drugs may also be chemically modified through the addition of functional groups by transferase enzymes; for example, acetylation, phosphorylation, or adenylation are common resistance mechanisms to aminoglycosides. Acetylation is the most widely used mechanism and can affect a number of drug classes.
# Alteration of target- or binding site: for example, alteration of PBP—the binding target site of penicillins—in MRSA and other penicillin-resistant bacteria. Another protective mechanism found among bacterial species is ribosomal protection proteins. These proteins protect the bacterial cell from antibiotics that target the cell's ribosomes to inhibit protein synthesis. The mechanism involves the binding of the ribosomal protection proteins to the ribosomes of the bacterial cell, which in turn changes its conformational shape. This allows the ribosomes to continue synthesizing proteins essential to the cell while preventing antibiotics from binding to the ribosome to inhibit protein synthesis.
# Alteration of metabolic pathway: for example, some sulfonamide-resistant bacteria do not require para-aminobenzoic acid (PABA), an important precursor for the synthesis of folic acid and nucleic acids in bacteria inhibited by sulfonamides, instead, like mammalian cells, they turn to using preformed folic acid.
# Reduced drug accumulation: by decreasing drug permeability or increasing active efflux (pumping out) of the drugs across the cell surface. These multidrug efflux pumps within the cellular membrane of certain bacterial species are used to pump antibiotics out of the cell before they are able to do any damage. They are often activated by a specific substrate associated with an antibiotic, as in fluoroquinolone resistance.
# Ribosome splitting and recycling: for example, drug-mediated stalling of the ribosome by lincomycin and erythromycin unstalled by a heat shock protein found in Listeria monocytogenes, which is a homologue of HflX from other bacteria. Liberation of the ribosome from the drug allows further translation and consequent resistance to the drug.
There are several different types of germs that have developed a resistance over time.
The six pathogens causing most deaths associated with resistance are Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. They were responsible for 929,000 deaths attributable to resistance and 3.57 million deaths associated with resistance in 2019.
Penicillinase-producing Neisseria gonorrhoeae developed a resistance to penicillin in 1976. Another example is Azithromycin-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which developed a resistance to azithromycin in 2011.
In gram-negative bacteria, plasmid-mediated resistance genes produce proteins that can bind to DNA gyrase, protecting it from the action of quinolones. Finally, mutations at key sites in DNA gyrase or topoisomerase IV can decrease their binding affinity to quinolones, decreasing the drug's effectiveness.
Some bacteria are naturally resistant to certain antibiotics; for example, gram-negative bacteria are resistant to most β-lactam antibiotics due to the presence of β-lactamase. Antibiotic resistance can also be acquired as a result of either genetic mutation or horizontal gene transfer. Although mutations are rare, with spontaneous mutations in the pathogen genome occurring at a rate of about 1 in 10<sup>5</sup> to 1 in 10<sup>8</sup> per chromosomal replication, the fact that bacteria reproduce at a high rate allows for the effect to be significant. Given that lifespans and production of new generations can be on a timescale of mere hours, a new (de novo) mutation in a parent cell can quickly become an inherited mutation of widespread prevalence, resulting in the microevolution of a fully resistant colony. However, chromosomal mutations also confer a cost of fitness. For example, a ribosomal mutation may protect a bacterial cell by changing the binding site of an antibiotic but may result in slower growth rate. Moreover, some adaptive mutations can propagate not only through inheritance but also through horizontal gene transfer. The most common mechanism of horizontal gene transfer is the transferring of plasmids carrying antibiotic resistance genes between bacteria of the same or different species via conjugation. However, bacteria can also acquire resistance through transformation, as in Streptococcus pneumoniae uptaking of naked fragments of extracellular DNA that contain antibiotic resistance genes to streptomycin, through transduction, as in the bacteriophage-mediated transfer of tetracycline resistance genes between strains of S. pyogenes, or through gene transfer agents, which are particles produced by the host cell that resemble bacteriophage structures and are capable of transferring DNA.
Antibiotic resistance can be introduced artificially into a microorganism through laboratory protocols, sometimes used as a selectable marker to examine the mechanisms of gene transfer or to identify individuals that absorbed a piece of DNA that included the resistance gene and another gene of interest.
Recent findings show no necessity of large populations of bacteria for the appearance of antibiotic resistance. Small populations of Escherichia coli in an antibiotic gradient can become resistant. Any heterogeneous environment with respect to nutrient and antibiotic gradients may facilitate antibiotic resistance in small bacterial populations. Researchers hypothesize that the mechanism of resistance evolution is based on four SNP mutations in the genome of E. coli produced by the gradient of antibiotic.
In one study, which has implications for space microbiology, a non-pathogenic strain E. coli MG1655 was exposed to trace levels of the broad spectrum antibiotic chloramphenicol, under simulated microgravity (LSMMG, or Low Shear Modeled Microgravity) over 1000 generations. The adapted strain acquired resistance to not only chloramphenicol, but also cross-resistance to other antibiotics; this was in contrast to the observation on the same strain, which was adapted to over 1000 generations under LSMMG, but without any antibiotic exposure; the strain in this case did not acquire any such resistance. Thus, irrespective of where they are used, the use of an antibiotic would likely result in persistent resistance to that antibiotic, as well as cross-resistance to other antimicrobials.
In recent years, the emergence and spread of β-lactamases called carbapenemases has become a major health crisis. One such carbapenemase is New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM-1), an enzyme that makes bacteria resistant to a broad range of beta-lactam antibiotics. The most common bacteria that make this enzyme are gram-negative such as E. coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, but the gene for NDM-1 can spread from one strain of bacteria to another by horizontal gene transfer.
Viruses
Specific antiviral drugs are used to treat some viral infections. These drugs prevent viruses from reproducing by inhibiting essential stages of the virus's replication cycle in infected cells. Antivirals are used to treat HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, influenza, herpes viruses including varicella zoster virus, cytomegalovirus and Epstein–Barr virus. With each virus, some strains have become resistant to the administered drugs.
Antiviral drugs typically target key components of viral reproduction; for example, oseltamivir targets influenza neuraminidase, while guanosine analogs inhibit viral DNA polymerase. Resistance to antivirals is thus acquired through mutations in the genes that encode the protein targets of the drugs.
Resistance to HIV antivirals is problematic, and even multi-drug resistant strains have evolved. One source of resistance is that many current HIV drugs, including NRTIs and NNRTIs, target reverse transcriptase; however, HIV-1 reverse transcriptase is highly error prone and thus mutations conferring resistance arise rapidly. Resistant strains of the HIV virus emerge rapidly if only one antiviral drug is used. Using three or more drugs together, termed combination therapy, has helped to control this problem, but new drugs are needed because of the continuing emergence of drug-resistant HIV strains.FungiInfections by fungi are a cause of high morbidity and mortality in immunocompromised persons, such as those with HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis or receiving chemotherapy. The fungi Candida, Cryptococcus neoformans and Aspergillus fumigatus cause most of these infections and antifungal resistance occurs in all of them. Multidrug resistance in fungi is increasing because of the widespread use of antifungal drugs to treat infections in immunocompromised individuals and the use of some agricultural antifungals. Antifungal resistant disease is associated with increased mortality.
Some fungi (e.g. Candida krusei and fluconazole) exhibit intrinsic resistance to certain antifungal drugs or classes, whereas some species develop antifungal resistance to external pressures. Antifungal resistance is a One Health concern, driven by multiple extrinsic factors, including extensive fungicidal use, overuse of clinical antifungals, environmental change and host factors.
The identification of antifungal resistance is undermined by limited classical diagnosis of infection, where a culture is lacking, preventing susceptibility testing.
Malarial parasites that are resistant to the drugs that are currently available to infections are common and this has led to increased efforts to develop new drugs. Resistance to recently developed drugs such as artemisinin has also been reported. The problem of drug resistance in malaria has driven efforts to develop vaccines.
Trypanosomes are parasitic protozoa that cause African trypanosomiasis and Chagas disease (American trypanosomiasis). There are no vaccines to prevent these infections so drugs such as pentamidine and suramin, benznidazole and nifurtimox are used to treat infections. These drugs are effective but infections caused by resistant parasites have been reported.
Global and genomic data
In 2022, genomic epidemiologists reported results from a global survey of antimicrobial resistance via genomic wastewater-based epidemiology, finding large regional variations, providing maps, and suggesting resistance genes are also passed on between microbial species that are not closely related. The WHO provides the Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System (GLASS) reports which summarize annual (e.g. 2020's) data on international AMR, also including an interactive dashboard. Epidemiology United Kingdom Public Health England reported that the total number of antibiotic resistant infections in England rose by 9% from 55,812 in 2017 to 60,788 in 2018, but antibiotic consumption had fallen by 9% from 20.0 to 18.2 defined daily doses per 1,000 inhabitants per day between 2014 and 2018.United StatesThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than 2.8 million cases of antibiotic resistance have been reported. However, in 2019 overall deaths from antibiotic-resistant infections decreased by 18% and deaths in hospitals decreased by 30%.
The COVID pandemic caused a reversal of much of the progress made on attenuating the effects of antibiotic resistance, resulting in more antibiotic use, more resistant infections, and less data on preventive action. Hospital-onset infections and deaths both increased by 15% in 2020, and significantly higher rates of infections were reported for 4 out of 6 types of healthcare associated infections. History The 1950s to 1970s represented the golden age of antibiotic discovery, where countless new classes of antibiotics were discovered to treat previously incurable diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis. However, since that time the discovery of new classes of antibiotics has been almost nonexistent, and represents a situation that is especially problematic considering the resiliency of bacteria shown over time and the continued misuse and overuse of antibiotics in treatment.
Already in 1940, in their letter to the editor of Nature journal, Abraham and Chain identified the enzyme penicillinase as responsible for the deactivation of penicillin in penicillin-resistant bacteria. This discovery was the first step in understanding the mechanisms of microbial resistance to β-lactam antibiotics. The phenomenon of antimicrobial resistance caused by overuse of antibiotics was predicted as early as 1945 by Alexander Fleming who said "The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily under-dose himself and by exposing his microbes to nonlethal quantities of the drug make them resistant." Without the creation of new and stronger antibiotics an era where common infections and minor injuries can kill, and where complex procedures such as surgery and chemotherapy become too risky, is a very real possibility. Antimicrobial resistance can lead to epidemics of enormous proportions if preventive actions are not taken. In this day and age current antimicrobial resistance leads to longer hospital stays, higher medical costs, and increased mortality. A number of countries are considering or implementing delinked payment models for new antimicrobials whereby payment is based on value rather than volume of drug sales. This offers the opportunity to pay for valuable new drugs even if they are reserved for use in relatively rare drug resistant infections.Legal frameworksSome global health scholars have argued that a global, legal framework is needed to prevent and control antimicrobial resistance. For instance, binding global policies could be used to create antimicrobial use standards, regulate antibiotic marketing, and strengthen global surveillance systems.
United States
For the United States 2016 budget, U.S. president Barack Obama proposed to nearly double the amount of federal funding to "combat and prevent" antibiotic resistance to more than $1.2 billion. Many international funding agencies like USAID, DFID, SIDA and Gates Foundation have pledged money for developing strategies to counter antimicrobial resistance.
On 27 March 2015, the White House released a comprehensive plan to address the increasing need for agencies to combat the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The Task Force for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria developed The National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria with the intent of providing a roadmap to guide the US in the antibiotic resistance challenge and with hopes of saving many lives. This plan outlines steps taken by the Federal government over the next five years needed in order to prevent and contain outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant infections; maintain the efficacy of antibiotics already on the market; and to help to develop future diagnostics, antibiotics, and vaccines.
The Action Plan was developed around five goals with focuses on strengthening health care, public health veterinary medicine, agriculture, food safety and research, and manufacturing. These goals, as listed by the White House, are as follows:
* Slow the Emergence of Resistant Bacteria and Prevent the Spread of Resistant Infections
* Strengthen National One-Health Surveillance Efforts to Combat Resistance
* Advance Development and use of Rapid and Innovative Diagnostic Tests for Identification and Characterization of Resistant Bacteria
* Accelerate Basic and Applied Research and Development for New Antibiotics, Other Therapeutics, and Vaccines
* Improve International Collaboration and Capacities for Antibiotic Resistance Prevention, Surveillance, Control and Antibiotic Research and Development
The following are goals set to meet by 2020: Among the most concerning resistant pathogens are Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and Clostridioides difficile (C. diff), all of which continue to be responsible for severe healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a significant disruption in healthcare, with an increase in the use of antibiotics during the treatment of viral infections. This rise in antibiotic prescribing, coupled with overwhelmed healthcare systems, contributed to a resurgence in AMR during the pandemic years. A 2021 CDC report identified a sharp increase in HAIs caused by resistant pathogens in COVID-19 patients, a trend that has persisted into 2023. Recent data suggest that although antibiotic use has decreased since the pandemic, some resistant pathogens remain prevalent in healthcare settings. This initiative has reached millions through social media, healthcare facilities, and public health outreach, aiming to educate the public on the importance of preventing infections and reducing antibiotic misuse. Policies According to World Health Organization, policymakers can help tackle resistance by strengthening resistance-tracking and laboratory capacity and by regulating and promoting the appropriate use of medicines. The plan also emphasizes the importance of improving antibiotic stewardship across healthcare, agriculture, and veterinary settings.
Furthermore, the PASTEUR Act (Pioneering Antimicrobial Subscriptions to End Upsurging Resistance) has gained momentum in Congress. If passed, the bill would create a subscription-based payment model to incentivize the development of new antimicrobial drugs, while supporting antimicrobial stewardship programs to reduce the misuse of existing antibiotics. This legislation is considered a critical step toward addressing the economic barriers to developing new antimicrobials.
Policy evaluation
Measuring the costs and benefits of strategies to combat AMR is difficult and policies may only have effects in the distant future. In other infectious diseases this problem has been addressed by using mathematical models. More research is needed to understand how AMR develops and spreads so that mathematical modelling can be used to anticipate the likely effects of different policies. Further research Rapid testing and diagnostics
: Thin paper discs containing an antibiotic have been placed on an agar plate growing bacteria. Bacteria are not able to grow around antibiotics to which they are sensitive.]]
Distinguishing infections requiring antibiotics from self-limiting ones is clinically challenging. In order to guide appropriate use of antibiotics and prevent the evolution and spread of antimicrobial resistance, diagnostic tests that provide clinicians with timely, actionable results are needed.
Acute febrile illness is a common reason for seeking medical care worldwide and a major cause of morbidity and mortality. In areas with decreasing malaria incidence, many febrile patients are inappropriately treated for malaria, and in the absence of a simple diagnostic test to identify alternative causes of fever, clinicians presume that a non-malarial febrile illness is most likely a bacterial infection, leading to inappropriate use of antibiotics. Multiple studies have shown that the use of malaria rapid diagnostic tests without reliable tools to distinguish other fever causes has resulted in increased antibiotic use.
Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) can facilitate a precision medicine approach to treatment by helping clinicians to prescribe more effective and targeted antimicrobial therapy. At the same time with traditional phenotypic AST it can take 12 to 48 hours to obtain a result due to the time taken for organisms to grow on/in culture media. Rapid testing, possible from molecular diagnostics innovations, is defined as "being feasible within an 8-h working shift". Genotypic AMR characterisation methods are, however, being increasingly used in combination with machine learning algorithms in research to help better predict phenotypic AMR from organism genotype.
Optical techniques such as phase contrast microscopy in combination with single-cell analysis are another powerful method to monitor bacterial growth. In 2017, scientists from Uppsala University in Sweden published a method that applies principles of microfluidics and cell tracking, to monitor bacterial response to antibiotics in less than 30 minutes overall manipulation time. This invention was awarded the 8M£ Longitude Prize on AMR in 2024. Recently, this platform has been advanced by coupling microfluidic chip with optical tweezing in order to isolate bacteria with altered phenotype directly from the analytical matrix.
Rapid diagnostic methods have also been trialled as antimicrobial stewardship interventions to influence the healthcare drivers of AMR. Serum procalcitonin measurement has been shown to reduce mortality rate, antimicrobial consumption and antimicrobial-related side-effects in patients with respiratory infections, but impact on AMR has not yet been demonstrated. Similarly, point of care serum testing of the inflammatory biomarker C-reactive protein has been shown to influence antimicrobial prescribing rates in this patient cohort, but further research is required to demonstrate an effect on rates of AMR. Clinical investigation to rule out bacterial infections are often done for patients with pediatric acute respiratory infections. Currently it is unclear if rapid viral testing affects antibiotic use in children.
Vaccines
Vaccines are an essential part of the response to reduce AMR as they prevent infections, reduce the use and overuse of antimicrobials, and slow the emergence and spread of drug-resistant pathogens. A 2024 report by WHO finds that vaccines against 24 pathogens could reduce the number of antibiotics needed by 22% or 2.5 billion defined daily doses globally every year.
While theoretically promising, antistaphylococcal vaccines have shown limited efficacy, because of immunological variation between Staphylococcus species, and the limited duration of effectiveness of the antibodies produced. Development and testing of more effective vaccines is underway.
Two registrational trials have evaluated vaccine candidates in active immunization strategies against S. aureus infection. In a phase II trial, a bivalent vaccine of capsular proteins 5 & 8 was tested in 1804 hemodialysis patients with a primary fistula or synthetic graft vascular access. After 40 weeks following vaccination a protective effect was seen against S. aureus bacteremia, but not at 54 weeks following vaccination. Based on these results, a second trial was conducted which failed to show efficacy.
Merck tested V710, a vaccine targeting IsdB, in a blinded randomized trial in patients undergoing median sternotomy. The trial was terminated after a higher rate of multiorgan system failure–related deaths was found in the V710 recipients. Vaccine recipients who developed S. aureus infection were five times more likely to die than control recipients who developed S. aureus infection.
Numerous investigators have suggested that a multiple-antigen vaccine would be more effective, but a lack of biomarkers defining human protective immunity keep these proposals in the logical, but strictly hypothetical arena. Innovative strategies include DSTA4637S, an antibody-antibiotic conjugate, and MEDI13902, a bispecific antibody targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa components.
Studies have found that bacteria that evolve antibiotic resistance towards one group of antibiotic may become more sensitive to others. This phenomenon can be used to select against resistant bacteria using an approach termed collateral sensitivity cycling, which has recently been found to be relevant in developing treatment strategies for chronic infections caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Despite its promise, large-scale clinical and experimental studies revealed limited evidence of susceptibility to antibiotic cycling across various pathogens.
Development of new drugs
Since the discovery of antibiotics, research and development (R&D) efforts have provided new drugs in time to treat bacteria that became resistant to older antibiotics, but in the 2000s there has been concern that development has slowed enough that seriously ill people may run out of treatment options. Another concern is that practitioners may become reluctant to perform routine surgeries because of the increased risk of harmful infection. Backup treatments can have serious side-effects; for example, antibiotics like aminoglycosides (such as amikacin, gentamicin, kanamycin, streptomycin, etc.) used for the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis and cystic fibrosis can cause respiratory disorders, deafness and kidney failure.
The potential crisis at hand is the result of a marked decrease in industry research and development. Poor financial investment in antibiotic research has exacerbated the situation. In 2011, Pfizer, one of the last major pharmaceutical companies developing new antibiotics, shut down its primary research effort, citing poor shareholder returns relative to drugs for chronic illnesses. However, small and medium-sized pharmaceutical companies are still active in antibiotic drug research. In particular, apart from classical synthetic chemistry methodologies, researchers have developed a combinatorial synthetic biology platform on single cell level in a high-throughput screening manner to diversify novel lanthipeptides.
In the 5–10 years since 2010, there has been a significant change in the ways new antimicrobial agents are discovered and developed – principally via the formation of public-private funding initiatives. These include CARB-X, which focuses on nonclinical and early phase development of novel antibiotics, vaccines, rapid diagnostics; Novel Gram Negative Antibiotic (GNA-NOW), which is part of the EU's Innovative Medicines Initiative; and Replenishing and Enabling the Pipeline for Anti-infective Resistance Impact Fund (REPAIR). Later stage clinical development is supported by the AMR Action Fund, which in turn is supported by multiple investors with the aim of developing 2–4 new antimicrobial agents by 2030. The delivery of these trials is facilitated by national and international networks supported by the Clinical Research Network of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), European Clinical Research Alliance in Infectious Diseases (ECRAID) and the recently formed ADVANCE-ID, which is a clinical research network based in Asia. The Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP) is generating new evidence for global AMR threats such as neonatal sepsis, treatment of serious bacterial infections and sexually transmitted infections as well as addressing global access to new and strategically important antibacterial drugs.
The discovery and development of new antimicrobial agents has been facilitated by regulatory advances, which have been principally led by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These processes are increasingly aligned although important differences remain and drug developers must prepare separate documents. New development pathways have been developed to help with the approval of new antimicrobial agents that address unmet needs such as the Limited Population Pathway for Antibacterial and Antifungal Drugs (LPAD). These new pathways are required because of difficulties in conducting large definitive phase III clinical trials in a timely way.
Some of the economic impediments to the development of new antimicrobial agents have been addressed by innovative reimbursement schemes that delink payment of antimicrobials from volume-based sales. In the UK, a market entry reward scheme has been pioneered by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) whereby an annual subscription fee is paid for use of strategically valuable antimicrobial agents – cefiderocol and ceftazidime-aviabactam are the first agents to be used in this manner and the scheme is potential blueprint for comparable programs in other countries.
The available classes of antifungal drugs are still limited but as of 2021 novel classes of antifungals are being developed and are undergoing various stages of clinical trials to assess performance.
Scientists have started using advanced computational approaches with supercomputers for the development of new antibiotic derivatives to deal with antimicrobial resistance.
Biomaterials
Using antibiotic-free alternatives in bone infection treatment may help decrease the use of antibiotics and thus antimicrobial resistance.
Nanomaterials
During the last decades, copper and silver nanomaterials have demonstrated appealing features for the development of a new family of antimicrobial agents. Nanoparticles (1–100 nm) show unique properties and promise as antimicrobial agents against resistant bacteria. Silver (AgNPs) and gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are extensively studied, disrupting bacterial cell membranes and interfering with protein synthesis. Zinc oxide (ZnO NPs), copper (CuNPs), and silica (SiNPs) nanoparticles also exhibit antimicrobial properties. However, high synthesis costs, potential toxicity, and instability pose challenges. To overcome these, biological synthesis methods and combination therapies with other antimicrobials are explored. Enhanced biocompatibility and targeting are also under investigation to improve efficacy. there has already been some success in finding and testing ancient drugs and other treatments that are effective against AMR bacteria.
Computational community surveillance
One of the key tools identified by the WHO and others for the fight against rising antimicrobial resistance is improved surveillance of the spread and movement of AMR genes through different communities and regions. Recent advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing as a result of the Human Genome Project have resulted in the ability to determine the individual microbial genes in a sample. Along with the availability of databases of known antimicrobial resistance genes, such as the Comprehensive Antimicrobial Resistance Database (CARD) and ResFinder, this allows the identification of all the antimicrobial resistance genes within the sample – the so-called "resistome". In doing so, a profile of these genes within a community or environment can be determined, providing insights into how antimicrobial resistance is spreading through a population and allowing for the identification of resistance that is of concern. Phage therapy has many potential applications in human medicine as well as dentistry, veterinary science, and agriculture.
Phage therapy relies on the use of naturally occurring bacteriophages to infect and lyse bacteria at the site of infection in a host. Due to current advances in genetics and biotechnology these bacteriophages can possibly be manufactured to treat specific infections. Phages can be bioengineered to target multidrug-resistant bacterial infections, and their use involves the added benefit of preventing the elimination of beneficial bacteria in the human body. Bacteriophages can even possess the ability to digest the biofilm that many bacteria develop that protect them from antibiotics in order to effectively infect and kill bacteria. Bioengineering can play a role in creating successful bacteriophages.
Bacteriophagics are used against antibiotic resistant bacteria in Georgia (George Eliava Institute) and in one institute in Wrocław, Poland. Bacteriophage cocktails are common drugs sold over the counter in pharmacies in eastern countries. In Belgium, four patients with severe musculoskeletal infections received bacteriophage therapy with concomitant antibiotics. After a single course of phage therapy, no recurrence of infection occurred and no severe side-effects related to the therapy were detected.
See also
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References
Books
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* 16-minute film about a post-antibiotic world. Review:
Further reading
) on antibiotic resistance]]
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External links
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* [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antimicrobial-resistance WHO fact sheet on antimicrobial resistance]
* [https://pharmaxchange.info/2011/02/animation-of-antimicrobial-resistance/ Animation of Antibiotic Resistance]
* [https://www.unep.org/resources/superbugs/environmental-action Bracing for Superbugs: Strengthening environmental action in the One Health response to antimicrobial resistance] UNEP, 2023.
* [https://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dhqp/pdf/ar/mdroGuideline2006.pdf CDC Guideline "Management of Multidrug-Resistant Organisms in Healthcare Settings, 2006"]
Category:Evolutionary biology
Category:Health disasters
Category:Pharmaceuticals policy
Category:Veterinary medicine
Category:Global issues | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance | 2025-04-05T18:25:49.864399 |
1915 | Antigen | thumb|255px|An illustration that shows how antigens induce the immune system response by interacting with an antibody that matches the molecular structure of an antigen
In immunology, an antigen (Ag) is a molecule, moiety, foreign particulate matter, or an allergen, such as pollen, that can bind to a specific antibody or T-cell receptor. The presence of antigens in the body may trigger an immune response.
Antigens can be proteins, peptides (amino acid chains), polysaccharides (chains of simple sugars), lipids, or nucleic acids. Antigens exist on normal cells, cancer cells, parasites, viruses, fungi, and bacteria. The diseases in which antibodies react with self antigens and damage the body's own cells are called autoimmune diseases.
Vaccines are examples of antigens in an immunogenic form, which are intentionally administered to a recipient to induce the memory function of the adaptive immune system towards antigens of the pathogen invading that recipient. The vaccine for seasonal influenza is a common example.
Etymology
Paul Ehrlich coined the term antibody () in his side-chain theory at the end of the 19th century. In 1899, Ladislas Deutsch (László Detre) named the hypothetical substances halfway between bacterial constituents and antibodies "antigenic or immunogenic substances" (). He originally believed those substances to be precursors of antibodies, just as a zymogen is a precursor of an enzyme. But, by 1903, he understood that an antigen induces the production of immune bodies (antibodies) and wrote that the word antigen is a contraction of antisomatogen (). The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that the logical construction should be "anti(body)-gen".
The term originally referred to a substance that acts as an antibody generator.
Terminology
Epitope – the distinct surface features of an , its antigenic determinant.Antigenic molecules, normally "large" biological polymers, usually present surface features that can act as points of interaction for specific antibodies. Any such feature constitutes an epitope. Most antigens have the potential to be bound by multiple antibodies, each of which is specific to one of the antigen's epitopes. Using the "lock and key" metaphor, the antigen can be seen as a string of keys (epitopes) each of which matches a different lock (antibody). Different antibody idiotypes, each have distinctly formed complementarity-determining regions.
Allergen – A substance capable of causing an allergic reaction. The (detrimental) reaction may result after exposure via ingestion, inhalation, injection, or contact with skin.
Superantigen – A class of antigens that cause non-specific activation of T-cells, resulting in polyclonal T-cell activation and massive cytokine release.
Tolerogen – A substance that invokes a specific immune non-responsiveness due to its molecular form. If its molecular form is changed, a tolerogen can become an immunogen.
Immunoglobulin-binding protein – Proteins such as protein A, protein G, and protein L that are capable of binding to antibodies at positions outside of the antigen-binding site. While antigens are the "target" of antibodies, immunoglobulin-binding proteins "attack" antibodies.
T-dependent antigen – Antigens that require the assistance of T cells to induce the formation of specific antibodies.
T-independent antigen – Antigens that stimulate B cells directly.
Immunodominant antigens – Antigens that dominate (over all others from a pathogen) in their ability to produce an immune response. T cell responses typically are directed against a relatively few immunodominant epitopes, although in some cases (e.g., infection with the malaria pathogen Plasmodium spp.) it is dispersed over a relatively large number of parasite antigens.
Antigen-presenting cells present antigens in the form of peptides on histocompatibility molecules. The T cells selectively recognize the antigens; depending on the antigen and the type of the histocompatibility molecule, different types of T cells will be activated. For T-cell receptor (TCR) recognition, the peptide must be processed into small fragments inside the cell and presented by a major histocompatibility complex (MHC). The antigen cannot elicit the immune response without the help of an immunologic adjuvant. Similarly, the adjuvant component of vaccines plays an essential role in the activation of the innate immune system.
An immunogen is an antigen substance (or adduct) that is able to trigger a humoral (innate) or cell-mediated immune response. It first initiates an innate immune response, which then causes the activation of the adaptive immune response. An antigen binds the highly variable immunoreceptor products (B-cell receptor or T-cell receptor) once these have been generated. Immunogens are those antigens, termed immunogenic, capable of inducing an immune response.
At the molecular level, an antigen can be characterized by its ability to bind to an antibody's paratopes. Different antibodies have the potential to discriminate among specific epitopes present on the antigen surface. A hapten is a small molecule that can only induce an immune response when attached to a larger carrier molecule, such as a protein. Antigens can be proteins, polysaccharides, lipids, nucleic acids or other biomolecules. Neoantigens can be directly detected and quantified.
Viral antigens
For virus-associated tumors, such as cervical cancer and a subset of head and neck cancers, epitopes derived from viral open reading frames contribute to the pool of neoantigens.
Tumor antigens
Tumor antigens are those antigens that are presented by MHC class I or MHC class II molecules on the surface of tumor cells. Antigens found only on such cells are called tumor-specific antigens (TSAs) and generally result from a tumor-specific mutation. More common are antigens that are presented by tumor cells and normal cells, called tumor-associated antigens (TAAs). Cytotoxic T lymphocytes that recognize these antigens may be able to destroy tumor cells.
Tumor antigens can appear on the surface of the tumor in the form of, for example, a mutated receptor, in which case they are recognized by B cells.
For human tumors without a viral etiology, novel peptides (neo-epitopes) are created by tumor-specific DNA alterations.
Process
A large fraction of human tumor mutations are effectively patient-specific. Therefore, neoantigens may also be based on individual tumor genomes. Deep-sequencing technologies can identify mutations within the protein-coding part of the genome (the exome) and predict potential neoantigens. In mice models, for all novel protein sequences, potential MHC-binding peptides were predicted. The resulting set of potential neoantigens was used to assess T cell reactivity. Exome–based analyses were exploited in a clinical setting, to assess reactivity in patients treated by either tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) cell therapy or checkpoint blockade. Neoantigen identification was successful for multiple experimental model systems and human malignancies.
The false-negative rate of cancer exome sequencing is low—i.e.: the majority of neoantigens occur within exonic sequence with sufficient coverage. However, the vast majority of mutations within expressed genes do not produce neoantigens that are recognized by autologous T cells.
As of 2015 mass spectrometry resolution is insufficient to exclude many false positives from the pool of peptides that may be presented by MHC molecules. Instead, algorithms are used to identify the most likely candidates. These algorithms consider factors such as the likelihood of proteasomal processing, transport into the endoplasmic reticulum, affinity for the relevant MHC class I alleles and gene expression or protein translation levels.
The majority of human neoantigens identified in unbiased screens display a high predicted MHC binding affinity. Minor histocompatibility antigens, a conceptually similar antigen class are also correctly identified by MHC binding algorithms. Another potential filter examines whether the mutation is expected to improve MHC binding. The nature of the central TCR-exposed residues of MHC-bound peptides is associated with peptide immunogenicity.
Nativity
A native antigen is an antigen that is not yet processed by an APC to smaller parts. T cells cannot bind native antigens, but require that they be processed by APCs, whereas B cells can be activated by native ones.
Antigenic specificity
Antigenic specificity is the ability of the host cells to recognize an antigen specifically as a unique molecular entity and distinguish it from another with exquisite precision. Antigen specificity is due primarily to the side-chain conformations of the antigen. It is measurable and need not be linear or of a rate-limited step or equation. Both T cells and B cells are cellular components of adaptive immunity.
See also
References
Category:Immune system
Category:Biomolecules | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigen | 2025-04-05T18:25:49.879126 |
1916 | Autosome | An autosome is any chromosome that is not a sex chromosome. The members of an autosome pair in a diploid cell have the same morphology, unlike those in allosomal (sex chromosome) pairs, which may have different structures. The DNA in autosomes is collectively known as atDNA or auDNA.
For example, humans have a diploid genome that usually contains 22 pairs of autosomes and one allosome pair (46 chromosomes total). The autosome pairs are labeled with numbers (1–22 in humans) roughly in order of their sizes in base pairs, while allosomes are labelled with their letters. By contrast, the allosome pair consists of two X chromosomes in females or one X and one Y chromosome in males. Unusual combinations XYY, XXY, XXX, XXXX, XXXXX or XXYY, among other irregular combinations, are known to occur and usually cause developmental abnormalities.
Autosomes still contain sexual determination genes even though they are not sex chromosomes. For example, the SRY gene on the Y chromosome encodes the transcription factor TDF and is vital for male sex determination during development. TDF functions by activating the SOX9 gene on chromosome 17, so mutations of the SOX9 gene can cause humans with an ordinary Y chromosome to develop as females.
All human autosomes have been identified and mapped by extracting the chromosomes from a cell arrested in metaphase or prometaphase and then staining them with a type of dye (most commonly, Giemsa). These chromosomes are typically viewed as karyograms for easy comparison. Clinical geneticists can compare the karyogram of an individual to a reference karyogram to discover the cytogenetic basis of certain phenotypes. For example, the karyogram of someone with Patau Syndrome would show that they possess three copies of chromosome 13. Karyograms and staining techniques can only detect large-scale disruptions to chromosomes—chromosomal aberrations smaller than a few million base pairs generally cannot be seen on a karyogram.
Karyotype of human chromosomesFemale (XX)Male (XY)420px|center331px|centerThere are two copies of each autosome (chromosomes 1–22) in both females and males. The sex chromosomes are different: There are two copies of the X-chromosome in females, but males have a single X-chromosome and a Y-chromosome.
Autosomal genetic disorders
thumb|An illustration of the inheritance pattern and phenotypic effects of an autosomal recessive gene.
Autosomal genetic disorders can arise due to a number of causes, some of the most common being nondisjunction in parental germ cells or Mendelian inheritance of deleterious alleles from parents. Autosomal genetic disorders which exhibit Mendelian inheritance can be inherited either in an autosomal dominant or recessive fashion. Autosomal dominant disorders are often present in both parent and child, as the child needs to inherit only one copy of the deleterious allele to manifest the disease. Autosomal recessive diseases, however, require two copies of the deleterious allele for the disease to manifest. Because it is possible to possess one copy of a deleterious allele without presenting a disease phenotype, two phenotypically normal parents can have a child with the disease if both parents are carriers (also known as heterozygotes) for the condition.
Autosomal aneuploidy can also result in disease conditions. Aneuploidy of autosomes is not well tolerated and usually results in miscarriage of the developing fetus. Fetuses with aneuploidy of gene-rich chromosomes—such as chromosome 1—never survive to term, and fetuses with aneuploidy of gene-poor chromosomes—such as chromosome 21— are still miscarried over 23% of the time. Possessing a single copy of an autosome (known as a monosomy) is nearly always incompatible with life, though very rarely some monosomies can survive past birth. Having three copies of an autosome (known as a trisomy) is far more compatible with life, however. A common example is Down syndrome, which is caused by possessing three copies of chromosome 21 instead of the usual two. Deletions of part of a chromosome cause partial monosomies, while duplications can cause partial trisomies. If the duplication or deletion is large enough, it can be discovered by analyzing a karyogram of the individual. Autosomal translocations can be responsible for a number of diseases, ranging from cancer to schizophrenia. Unlike single gene disorders, diseases caused by aneuploidy are the result of improper gene dosage, not nonfunctional gene product.
See also
Aneuploidy (abnormal number of chromosomes)
Autosomal dominant
Autosomal recessive
Homologous chromosome
Pseudoautosomal region
XY sex-determination system
Genetic disorder
References
Category:Chromosomes
Category:Cytogenetics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autosome | 2025-04-05T18:25:49.887109 |
1919 | Antwerp (disambiguation) | Antwerp is the second largest city in Belgium and capital of the Antwerp province.
Antwerp may also refer to:
In Belgium
Antwerp (district)
Antwerp (province)
In the United States
Antwerp, Ohio
Antwerp Township, Michigan
Antwerp, New York
Antwerp (village), New York
In Australia
Antwerp, Victoria
Other
Port of Antwerp
Royal Antwerp FC, a football club
Antwerp (novel), by Roberto Bolaño
Antwerp, a poem by Ford Madox Ford
"Antwerp", a type of bizarre monster in the Quest For Glory computer-game series that resembles a bouncy, man-sized paramecium
See also | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antwerp_(disambiguation) | 2025-04-05T18:25:49.888920 |
1920 | Aquila | Aquila may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
Aquila, a series of books by S.P. Somtow
Aquila, a 1997 book by Andrew Norriss
Aquila (children's magazine), a UK-based children's magazine
Aquila (journal), an ornithological journal
Aquila (TV series), a BBC TV production for children based on the Norriss book
Aquila Theatre, a theatre company of New York
Fictional entities
Aquila, a ship in the video game Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Aquila, a ship in the video game Assassin's Creed III
Aquila Yuna, a character in the anime Saint Seiya Omega
Aquila, a medieval city in the fantasy film Ladyhawke (1985)
People
Aquila (name), a given name or surname
Places
Aquila, Michoacán, a town in Mexico
Aquila, Switzerland, a former municipality
Aquila, Veracruz, a municipality in Mexico
L'Aquila, sometimes Aquila, the regional capital of Abruzzo in Italy
Province of L'Aquila, Italy
Transportation
Automotive
Aquila Italiana, Italian car manufacturer or brand
Aquila racing cars, a Danish firm
Hyosung GV250, a cruiser motorcycle nicknamed the "Aquila"
Aviation
Angus Aquila, a British aircraft
Bristol Aquila, an aircraft engine
Aquila, an air traffic management services company owned by NATS Holdings
Aquila A 210, a German lightweight aircraft
Aquila Airways, a British flying boat operator (1948–1958)
Facebook Aquila, Facebook's design for an atmospheric satellite, a high-flying drone circling a particular location
Lockheed MQM-105 Aquila, the U.S. Army's first battlefield reconnaissance drone
Global 4L Aquila, a quadcopter drone; see List of UAVs
Boats
Aquila 27, a French sailboat design
Ships
Italian ship Aquila, various Italian naval ships
, more than one ship of the United States Navy
Other uses
Aquila (bird), a genus of birds including some eagles
Aquila (constellation), the astronomical constellation, the Eagle
Aquila (Roman), a Roman military standard
Aquila, Inc., a former electric and gas utility in Kansas City, Missouri, United States
Aquila Capital, an independent investment firm in Hamburg, Germany
See also
Aguila (disambiguation)
Aquila College of Ministries, former name of Hillsong College
Aquila Court Building of Omaha, Nebraska
Aquileia, an ancient Roman city in Italy
Aquilia (disambiguation)
Aquilinus (disambiguation)
Aquilla (disambiguation)
Balanus aquila, a species of barnacle
Dell'Aquila, a surname
Macroglossum aquila, a species of moth
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of L'Aquila, Italy | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquila | 2025-04-05T18:25:49.892749 |
1921 | Al-Qaeda | | native_name_lang = ar
| war |
}}
| image = Flag of Jihad.svg
| caption = Flag used by various Al-Qaeda factions
| founder = Osama bin Laden
| leaders = <br />(1988–2011)
* Ayman al-Zawahiri<br />(2011–2022)
* Saif al-Adel<br />(de facto; 2022–present)
}}
| active =
| allegiance (1995–present)
| ideology |
* Pan-Islamism}}
* Jihadism
* Muslim unity
* Sunni–Shia alliance
* Islamic fundamentalism
* Anti-Americanism
* Anti-communism
* Anti-imperialism
* Antisemitism
* Anti-Western imperialism
* Anti-Zionism
}}
Factions:|
* Deobandi jihadism
* Salafism
* Salafi jihadism
| size |
}}
| predecessor = Maktab al-Khidamat
| allies | State allies:
* (1996–2001, 2021–present)
* (alleged, but denied by Iran)
* (alleged by the US)
* (alleged, but denied by Pakistan)
* (alleged, but denied by Qatar)
* (alleged, but denied by Russia)
* (alleged, but denied by Saudi Arabia)
* (1989–1996)
* (alleged)
----
Non-state allies:
* (2001-2021)
* Hezbollah (sometimes)
* Ansar al-Islam
* Ansar Al-Furqan
* Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (1998–2015,–present)
* Pakistani Taliban
* Turkistan Islamic Party
** Turkistan Islamic Party in Syria
* Lashkar-e-Taiba
* Jaish-e-Mohammed
* Islamic Jihad Union
* Fatah al-Islam
* Harkat-ul-Mujahideen
* Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami
* Egyptian Islamic Jihad (until 2001)
* Jundallah (until 2011)
* Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (until 2010s)
* Uqba ibn Nafi Brigade (until 2014)
* Boko Haram (until 2015)
* Caucasus Emirate (until 2016)
* Jemaah Islamiyah (until 2024)
}}
| opponents | State opponents:
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* Syria
*
*
*
*
*
*
----
Formerly:
* Afghanistan (1988–1992; 1996–2001; 2002–2021)
* (1988–1989)
----
Non-state opponents:
*
* Houthis (until 2023)
}}
| status | designated_as_terror_group_by See below
}}
Al-Qaeda (; , ) is a pan-Islamist militant organization led by Sunni jihadists who self-identify as a vanguard spearheading a global Islamist revolution to unite the Muslim world under a supra-national Islamic caliphate. Its membership is mostly composed of Arabs but also includes people from other ethnic groups. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian, economic and military targets of the U.S. and its allies; such as the 1998 US embassy bombings, the USS Cole bombing, and the September 11 attacks.
The organization was founded in a series of meetings held in Peshawar during 1988, attended by Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, Muhammad Atef, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other veterans of the Soviet–Afghan War. Building upon the networks of Maktab al-Khidamat, the founding members decided to create an organization named "Al-Qaeda" to serve as a "vanguard" for jihad. When Saddam Hussein invaded and occupied Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden offered to support Saudi Arabia by sending his Mujahideen fighters. His offer was rebuffed by the Saudi government, which instead sought the aid of the United States. The stationing of U.S. troops in the Arabian Peninsula prompted bin Laden to declare a jihad against both the rulers of Saudi Arabia – whom he denounced as murtadd (apostates) – and against the US. From 1992, al-Qaeda established its headquarters in Sudan until it was expelled in 1996. It then shifted its base to the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and later expanded to other parts of the world, primarily in the Middle East and South Asia. In 1996 and 1998, bin Laden issued two fatāwā that demanded the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia.
In 1998, al-Qaeda conducted the US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people. The U.S. retaliated by launching Operation Infinite Reach, against al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. In 2001, al-Qaeda carried out the September 11 attacks, resulting in nearly 3,000 deaths, long-term health consequences of nearby residents, damage to global economic markets, the triggering of drastic geo-political changes as well as generating profound cultural influence across the world. The U.S. launched the war on Terror in response and invaded Afghanistan to depose the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda. In 2003, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, overthrowing the Ba'athist regime which they falsely accused of having ties with al-Qaeda. In 2004, al-Qaeda launched its Iraqi regional branch. After pursuing him for almost a decade, the U.S. military killed bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011.
Al-Qaeda members believe that a Judeo-Christian alliance (led by the United States) is waging a war against Islam and conspiring to destroy Islam. Al-Qaeda also opposes man-made laws, and seek to implement sharīʿah (Islamic law) in Muslim countries. Al-Qaeda fighters characteristically deploy tactics such as suicide attacks (Inghimasi and Istishhadi operations) involving simultaneous bombing of several targets in battle-zones. Al-Qaeda's Iraq branch, which later morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq after 2006, was responsible for numerous sectarian attacks against Shias during its Iraqi insurgency. Al-Qaeda ideologues envision the violent removal of all foreign and secularist influences in Muslim countries, which it denounces as corrupt deviations. Following the death of bin Laden in 2011, al-Qaeda vowed to avenge his killing. The group was then led by Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri until he too was killed by the United States in 2022. , they have reportedly suffered from a deterioration of central command over its regional operations. Organization Al-Qaeda only indirectly controls its day-to-day operations. Its philosophy calls for the centralization of decision making, while allowing for the decentralization of execution. The top leaders of al-Qaeda have defined the organization's ideology and guiding strategy, and they have also articulated simple and easy-to-receive messages. At the same time, mid-level organizations were given autonomy, but they had to consult with top management before large-scale attacks and assassinations. Top management included the shura council as well as committees on military operations, finance, and information sharing. Through the information committees of al-Qaeda, Zawahiri placed special emphasis on communicating with his groups. However, after the war on terror, al-Qaeda's leadership has become isolated. As a result, the leadership has become decentralized, and the organization has become regionalized into several al-Qaeda groups.
The group was initially dominated by Egyptians and Saudis, with some participation from Yemenis and Kuwaitis. Over time, it has evolved into a more international terrorist organization. While its core group originally shared a background in Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, it has since attracted fighters from other Arab groups, including North Africans, Jordanians, Palestinians, and Iraqis. In the decade following the 9/11 attacks, Muslims from non-Arab backgrounds, such as Pakistanis, Afghans, Turks, Kurds, and European converts to Islam, have also joined the organization.
Many Western analysts do not believe that the global jihadist movement is driven at every level by al-Qaeda's leadership. However, bin Laden held considerable ideological influence over revolutionary Islamist movements across the world. Experts argue that al-Qaeda has fragmented into a number of disparate regional movements, and that these groups bear little connection with one another.
This view mirrors the account given by Osama bin Laden in his October 2001 interview with Tayseer Allouni:
... is not about the al-Qa'idah Organization. We are the children of an Islamic Nation, with Prophet Muhammad as its leader, our Lord is one... and all the true believers [mu'mineen] are brothers. So the situation isn't like the West portrays it, that there is an 'organization' with a specific name (such as 'al-Qa'idah') and so on. That particular name is very old. It was born without any intention from us. Brother Abu Ubaida... created a military base to train the young men to fight against the vicious, arrogant, brutal, terrorizing Soviet empire... So this place was called 'The Base' ['Al-Qa'idah'], as in a training base, so this name grew and became. We aren't separated from this nation. We are the children of a nation, and we are an inseparable part of it, and from those public demonstrations which spread from the far east, from the Philippines to Indonesia, to Malaysia, to India, to Pakistan, reaching Mauritania... and so we discuss the conscience of this nation."}}
however, Bruce Hoffman saw al-Qaeda as a cohesive network that was strongly led from the Pakistani tribal areas.
*Islamic Jihad Union
*Jaish-e-Mohammed
*Lashkar-e-Taiba
Al-Qaeda's former affiliates include the following:
*Abu Sayyaf (pledged allegiance to ISIL in 2014)
*Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (dissolved)
*Caucasus Emirate (dissolved)
*Hurras al-Din (dissolved in 2025)
*Jemaah Islamiyah (dissolved in 2024)
*Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (dissolved)
*Al-Mourabitoun (joined JNIM in 2017)
*Al-Qaeda in Iraq (became the Islamic State of Iraq, which later seceded from al-Qaeda and became ISIL)
*Al-Qaeda in the Lands Beyond the Sahel (inactive since 2015)
*Ansar al-Islam (majority merged with ISIL in 2014)
*Ansar Dine (joined JNIM in 2017
*Al-Nusra Front (dissolved in 2017, merged with other Islamist organizations to form Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham and split ties)
Leadership
Osama bin Laden (1988 – May 2011)
Osama bin Laden served as the emir of al-Qaeda from the organization's founding in 1988 until his assassination by US forces on May 1, 2011. Atiyah Abd al-Rahman was alleged to be second in command prior to his death on August 22, 2011.
Bin Laden was advised by a Shura Council, which consists of senior al-Qaeda members.
On June 5, 2012, Pakistani intelligence officials announced that al-Rahman's alleged successor as second in command, Abu Yahya al-Libi, had been killed in Pakistan.
Nasir al-Wuhayshi was alleged to have become al-Qaeda's overall second in command and general manager in 2013. He was concurrently the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) until he was killed by a US airstrike in Yemen in June 2015. Abu Khayr al-Masri, Wuhayshi's alleged successor as the deputy to Ayman al-Zawahiri, was killed by a US airstrike in Syria in February 2017. Al-Qaeda's next alleged number two leader, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, was killed by Israeli agents. His pseudonym was Abu Muhammad al-Masri, who was killed in November 2020 in Iran. He was involved in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
<!--linked from Abu-Zaid al Kuwaiti-->Al-Qaeda's network was built from scratch as a conspiratorial network which drew upon the leadership of a number of regional nodes. The organization divided itself into several committees, which include:
* The Military Committee, which is responsible for training operatives, acquiring weapons, and planning attacks.
* The Money/Business Committee, which funds the recruitment and training of operatives through the hawala banking system. US-led efforts to eradicate the sources of "terrorist financing" were most successful in the year immediately following the September 11 attacks. Al-Qaeda continues to operate through unregulated banks, such as the 1,000 or so hawaladars in Pakistan, some of which can handle deals of up to million. The committee also procures false passports, pays al-Qaeda members, and oversees profit-driven businesses. In the 9/11 Commission Report, it was estimated that al-Qaeda required $30million per year to conduct its operations.
* The Law Committee reviews Sharia law, and decides upon courses of action conform to it.
* The Islamic Study/Fatwah Committee issues religious edicts, such as an edict in 1998 telling Muslims to kill Americans.
* The Media Committee ran the now-defunct newspaper Nashrat al Akhbar () and handled public relations.
* In 2005, al-Qaeda formed As-Sahab, a media production house, to supply its video and audio materials.
After Al-Zawahiri (2022 – present)
Al-Zawahiri was killed on July 31, 2022, in a drone strike in Afghanistan. In February 2023, a report from the United Nations, based on member state intelligence, concluded that de facto leadership of al-Qaeda had passed to Saif al-Adel, who was operating out of Iran. Adel, a former Egyptian army officer, became a military instructor in al-Qaeda camps in the 1990s and was known for his involvement in the Battle of Mogadishu. The report stated that al-Adel's leadership could not officially be declared by al-Qaeda because of "political sensitivities" of Afghan government in acknowledging the death of Al-Zawahiri as well as due to "theological and operational" challenges posed by the location of al-Adel in Iran.
Command structure
Most of al-Qaeda's top leaders and operational directors were veterans who fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were the leaders who were considered the operational commanders of the organization. Nevertheless, al-Qaeda was not operationally managed by Ayman al-Zawahiri. Several operational groups exist, which consult with the leadership in situations where attacks are in preparation.
When asked in 2005 about the possibility of al-Qaeda's connection to the July 7, 2005 London bombings, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair said: "Al-Qaeda is not an organization. Al-Qaeda is a way of working... but this has the hallmark of that approach... Al-Qaeda clearly has the ability to provide training... to provide expertise... and I think that is what has occurred here." On August 13, 2005, The Independent newspaper, reported that the July7 bombers had acted independently of an al-Qaeda mastermind.
Nasser al-Bahri, who was Osama bin Laden's bodyguard for four years in the run-up to 9/11 wrote in his memoir a highly detailed description of how the group functioned at that time. Al-Bahri described al-Qaeda's formal administrative structure and vast arsenal. However, the author Adam Curtis argued that the idea of al-Qaeda as a formal organization is primarily an American invention. Curtis contended the name "Al-Qaeda" was first brought to the attention of the public in the 2001 trial of bin Laden and the four men accused of the 1998 US embassy bombings in East Africa. Curtis wrote:
During the 2001 trial, the US Department of Justice needed to show that bin Laden was the leader of a criminal organization in order to charge him in absentia under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The name of the organization and details of its structure were provided in the testimony of Jamal al-Fadl, who said he was a founding member of the group and a former employee of bin Laden. Questions about the reliability of al-Fadl's testimony have been raised by a number of sources because of his history of dishonesty, and because he was delivering it as part of a plea bargain agreement after being convicted of conspiring to attack US military establishments. Sam Schmidt, a defense attorney who defended al-Fadl, said:
, it was believed that no more than 200–300 members were still active commanders.
According to the 2004 BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, al-Qaeda was so weakly linked together that it was hard to say it existed apart from bin Laden and a small clique of close associates. The lack of any significant numbers of convicted al-Qaeda members, despite a large number of arrests on terrorism charges, was cited by the documentary as a reason to doubt whether a widespread entity that met the description of al-Qaeda existed. al-Qaeda's commanders, as well as its sleeping agents, are hiding in different parts of the world to this day. They are mainly hunted by the American and Israeli secret services.
Insurgent forces
According to author Robert Cassidy, al-Qaeda maintains two separate forces which are deployed alongside insurgents in Iraq and Pakistan. The first, numbering in the tens of thousands, was "organized, trained, and equipped as insurgent combat forces" in the Soviet–Afghan war. It has been estimated that 62 percent of al-Qaeda members have a university education. In 2011 and the following year, the Americans successfully settled accounts with Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, the organization's chief propagandist, and Abu Yahya al-Libi's deputy commander. The optimistic voices were already saying it was over for al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, it was around this time that the Arab Spring greeted the region, the turmoil of which came great to al-Qaeda's regional forces. Seven years later, Ayman al-Zawahiri became arguably the number one leader in the organization, implementing his strategy with systematic consistency. Tens of thousands loyal to al-Qaeda and related organizations were able to challenge local and regional stability and ruthlessly attack their enemies in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and Russia alike. In fact, from Northwest Africa to South Asia, al-Qaeda had more than two dozen "franchise-based" allies. The number of al-Qaeda militants was set at 20,000 in Syria alone, and they had 4,000 members in Yemen and about 7,000 in Somalia. The war was not over.
In 2001, al-Qaeda had around 20 functioning cells and 70,000 insurgents spread over sixty nations. According to latest estimates, the number of active-duty soldiers under its command and allied militias have risen to approximately 250,000 by 2018. Financing Al-Qaeda usually does not disburse funds for attacks, and very rarely makes wire transfers. In the 1990s, financing came partly from the personal wealth of Osama bin Laden. Other sources of income included the heroin trade and donations from supporters in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic Gulf states.
Among the first pieces of evidence regarding Saudi Arabia's support for al-Qaeda was the so-called "Golden Chain", a list of early al-Qaeda funders seized during a 2002 raid in Sarajevo by Bosnian police. The hand-written list was validated by al-Qaeda defector Jamal al-Fadl, and included the names of both donors and beneficiaries. Osama bin-Laden's name appeared seven times among the beneficiaries, while 20 Saudi and Gulf-based businessmen and politicians were listed among the donors. Notably, this activity exploited the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and the Muslim World League (MWL). The IIRO had ties with al-Qaeda associates worldwide, including al-Qaeda's deputy Ayman al Zawahiri. Zawahiri's brother worked for the IIRO in Albania and had actively recruited on behalf of al-Qaeda. The MWL was openly identified by al-Qaeda's leader as one of the three charities al-Qaeda primarily relied upon for funding sources. The US Treasury has said Nuaimi "has facilitated significant financial support to al-Qaeda in Iraq, and served as an interlocutor between al-Qaeda in Iraq and Qatar-based donors". Nuaimi allegedly entertained relationships with Abu-Khalid al-Suri, al-Qaeda's top envoy in Syria, who processed a $600,000 transfer to al-Qaeda in 2013. The US authorities claimed that Humayqani exploited his role in Alkarama to fundraise on behalf of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Another Qatari citizen, Kalifa Mohammed Turki Subayi, was sanctioned by the US Treasury on June 5, 2008, for his activities as a "Gulf-based Al-Qaeda financier". Subayi's name was added to the UN Security Council's Sanctions List in 2008 on charges of providing financial and material support to al-Qaeda senior leadership. Subayi allegedly moved al-Qaeda recruits to South Asia-based training camps.
Qataris provided support to al-Qaeda through the country's largest NGO, the Qatar Charity. Al-Qaeda defector al-Fadl, who was a former member of Qatar Charity, testified in court that Abdullah Mohammed Yusef, who served as Qatar Charity's director, was affiliated to al-Qaeda and simultaneously to the National Islamic Front, a political group that gave al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden harbor in Sudan in the early 1990s.
Qatar financed al-Qaeda's enterprises through al-Qaeda's former affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. The funding was primarily channeled through kidnapping for ransom. The Consortium Against Terrorist Finance (CATF) reported that the Gulf country has funded al-Nusra since 2013. In addition, Qatar has launched fundraising campaigns on behalf of al-Nusra. Al-Nusra acknowledged a Qatar-sponsored campaign "as one of the preferred conduits for donations intended for the group".
Strategy
In the disagreement over whether al-Qaeda's objectives are religious or political, Mark Sedgwick describes al-Qaeda's strategy as political in the immediate term but with ultimate aims that are religious.
On March 11, 2005, Al-Quds Al-Arabi published extracts from Saif al-Adel's document "Al Qaeda's Strategy to the Year 2020". Abdel Bari Atwan summarizes this strategy as comprising five stages to rid the Ummah from all forms of oppression:
# Provoke the United States and the West into invading a Muslim country by staging a massive attack or string of attacks on US soil that results in massive civilian casualties.
# Incite local resistance to occupying forces.
# Expand the conflict to neighboring countries and engage the US and its allies in a long war of attrition.
# Convert al-Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against the US and countries allied with the US until they withdraw from the conflict, as happened with the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but which did not have the same effect with the July 7, 2005 London bombings.
# The US economy will finally collapse by 2020, under the strain of multiple engagements in numerous places. This will lead to a collapse in the worldwide economic system, and lead to global political instability. This will lead to a global jihad led by al-Qaeda, and a Wahhabi Caliphate will then be installed across the world.
Atwan noted that, while the plan is unrealistic, "it is sobering to consider that this virtually describes the downfall of the Soviet Union."
# "The Awakening." This phase was supposed to last from 2001 to 2003. The goal of the phase is to provoke the United States to attack a Muslim country by executing an attack that kills many civilians on US soil.
# "Opening Eyes." This phase was supposed to last from 2003 to 2006. The goal of this phase was to recruit young men to the cause and to transform the al-Qaeda group into a movement. Iraq was supposed to become the center of all operations with financial and military support for bases in other states.
# "Arising and Standing up", was supposed to last from 2007 to 2010. In this phase, al-Qaeda wanted to execute additional attacks and focus their attention on Syria. Hussein believed other countries in the Arabian Peninsula were also in danger.
# Al-Qaeda expected a steady growth among their ranks and territories due to the declining power of the regimes in the Arabian Peninsula. The main focus of attack in this phase was supposed to be on oil suppliers and cyberterrorism, targeting the US economy and military infrastructure.
# The declaration of an Islamic Caliphate, which was projected between 2013 and 2016. In this phase, al-Qaeda expected the resistance from Israel to be heavily reduced.
# The declaration of an "Islamic Army" and a "fight between believers and non-believers", also called "total confrontation".
# "Definitive Victory", projected to be completed by 2020.
According to the seven-phase strategy, the war is projected to last less than two years.
According to Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute and Katherine Zimmerman of the American Enterprise Institute, the new model of al-Qaeda is to "socialize communities" and build a broad territorial base of operations with the support of local communities, also gaining income independent of the funding of sheiks.
Name
The English name of the organization is a simplified transliteration of the Arabic noun (), which means "the foundation" or "the base". The initial al- is the Arabic definite article "the", hence "the base". In Arabic, al-Qaeda has four syllables ().<!--This is a phonemic transcription that differs somewhat from the transcription system described at Help:IPA for Arabic.--> However, since two of the Arabic consonants in the name are not phones found in the English language, the common naturalized English pronunciations include , and . Al-Qaeda's name can also be transliterated as al-Qaida, ''al-Qa'ida, or el-Qaida.
The doctrinal concept of "al-Qaeda" was first coined by the Palestinian Islamist scholar and Jihadist leader Abdullah Azzam in an April 1988 issue of Al-Jihad magazine to describe a religiously committed vanguard of Muslims who wage armed Jihad globally to liberate oppressed Muslims from foreign invaders, establish sharia'' (Islamic law) across the Islamic World by overthrowing the ruling secular governments; and thus restore the past Islamic prowess. This was to be implemented by establishing an Islamic state that would nurture generations of Muslim soldiers that would perpetually attack United States and its allied governments in the Muslim World. Numerous historical models were cited by Azzam as successful examples of his call; starting from the early Muslim conquests of the 7th century to the recent anti-Soviet Afghan Jihad of the 1980s. According to Azzam's world-view: <blockquote>It is about time to think about a state that would be a solid base for the distribution of the (Islamic) creed, and a fortress to host the preachers from the hell of the Jahiliyyah [the pre-Islamic period].}}
It has been argued that two documents seized from the Sarajevo office of the Benevolence International Foundation prove the name was not simply adopted by the mujahideen movement and that a group called al-Qaeda was established in August 1988. Both of these documents contain minutes of meetings held to establish a new military group, and contain the term "al-Qaeda".
Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote that the word al-Qaeda should be translated as "the database", because it originally referred to the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen militants who were recruited and trained with CIA help to defeat the Russians. In April 2002, the group assumed the name ''Qa'idat al-Jihad ( ''), which means "the base of Jihad". According to Diaa Rashwan, this was "apparently as a result of the merger of the overseas branch of Egypt's al-Jihad, which was led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the groups Bin Laden brought under his control after his return to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s." Ideology
, the Egyptian Islamic scholar and Jihadist theorist who inspired al-Qaeda]]
The pan-Islamist militant movement of al-Qaeda developed amid the rise of Islamic revivalist and Jihadist movements after the Iranian Revolution (1978–1979) and during the Afghan Jihad (1979–1989). The writings of Egyptian Islamist scholar and revolutionary ideologue Sayyid Qutb strongly inspired the founding leaders of al-Qaeda. In the 1950s and 1960s, Qutb preached that because of the lack of sharia law, the Muslim world was no longer Muslim, and had reverted to the pre-Islamic ignorance known as jahiliyyah. To restore Islam, Qutb argued that a vanguard of righteous Muslims was needed in order to establish "true Islamic states", implement sharia, and rid the Muslim world of any non-Muslim influences. In Qutb's view, the enemies of Islam included "world Jewry", which "plotted conspiracies" and opposed Islam. Qutb envisioned this vanguard to march forward to wage armed Jihad against tyrannical regimes after purifying from the wider Jahili societies and organising themselves under a righteous Islamic leadership; which he viewed as the model of early Muslims in the Islamic State of Medina under the leadership of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. This idea would directly influence many Islamist figures such as Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden; and became the core rationale for the formulation of "al-Qaeda" concept in the near future. Outlining his strategy to topple the existing secular orders, Qutb argued in Milestones: <blockquote>[It is necessary that] a Muslim community to come into existence which believes that ‘there is no deity except God,’ which commits itself to obey none but God, denying all other authority, and which challenges the legality of any law which is not based on this belief.. . It should come into the battlefield with the determination that its strategy, its social organization, and the relationship between its individuals should be firmer and more powerful than the existing jahili system.</blockquote>
In the words of Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a close college friend of bin Laden:
Qutb also influenced Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawahiri's uncle and maternal family patriarch, Mafouz Azzam, was Qutb's student, protégé, personal lawyer, and an executor of his estate. Azzam was one of the last people to see Qutb alive before his execution. Zawahiri paid homage to Qutb in his work ''Knights under the Prophet's Banner''.
Qutb argued that many Muslims were not true Muslims. Some Muslims, Qutb argued, were apostates. These alleged apostates included leaders of Muslim countries, since they failed to enforce sharia law. He also alleged that the West approaches the Muslim World with a "crusading spirit"; in spite of the decline of religious values in the 20th century Europe. According to Qutb; the hostile and imperialist attitudes exhibited by Europeans and Americans towards Muslim countries, their support for Zionism, etc. reflected hatred amplified over a millennia of wars such as the Crusades and was born out of Roman materialist and utilitarian outlooks that viewed the world in monetary terms.
Formation
The Afghan jihad against the pro-Soviet government further developed the Salafist Jihadist movement which inspired al-Qaeda. During this period, al-Qaeda embraced the ideals of the Indian Muslim militant revivalist Syed Ahmad Barelvi (d. 1831) who led a Jihad movement against British India from the frontiers of Afghanistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkwa in the early 19th century. Al-Qaeda readily adopted Sayyid Ahmad's doctrines such as returning to the purity of early generations (Salaf as-Salih), antipathy towards Western influences and restoration of Islamic political power. According to Pakistani journalist Hussain Haqqani, practices inimical to bin Laden's Wahhabi-Salafi school of thought. The only exception to this pan-Islamic policy is Shi'ism. Al-Qaeda seems implacably opposed to it, as it holds Shi'ism to be heresy. In Iraq it has openly declared war on the Badr Brigades, who have fully cooperated with the US, and now considers even Shi'i civilians to be legitimate targets for acts of violence.}}On the other hand, Professor Peter Mandaville states that Al-Qaeda follows a pragmatic policy in forming its local affiliates, with various cells being sub-contracted to Shia Muslim and non-Muslim members. The top-down chain of command means that each unit is answerable directly to central leadership, while they remain ignorant of their counterparts' presence or activities. These transnational networks of autonomous supply chains, financiers, underground militias and political supporters were set up during the 1990s, when Bin Laden's immediate aim was the expulsion of American troops from the Arabian Peninsula.
Attacks on civilians
Under the leadership of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda organization adopted the strategy of targeting non-combatant civilians of enemy states that indiscriminately attacked Muslims. Following the September 11 attacks, al-Qaeda provided a justification for the killing of non-combatants/civilians, entitled, "A Statement from Qaidat al-Jihad Regarding the Mandates of the Heroes and the Legality of the Operations in New York and Washington". According to a couple of critics, Quintan Wiktorowicz and John Kaltner, it provides "ample theological justification for killing civilians in almost any imaginable situation."
Among these justifications are that America is leading the west in waging a War on Islam so that attacks on America are a defense of Islam and any treaties and agreements between Muslim majority states and Western countries that would be violated by attacks are null and void. According to the tract, several conditions allow for the killing of civilians including:
* retaliation for the American war on Islam which al-Qaeda alleges has targeted "Muslim women, children and elderly";
* when it is too difficult to distinguish between non-combatants and combatants when attacking an enemy "stronghold" (hist) or non-combatants remain in enemy territory, killing them is allowed;
* those who assist the enemy "in deed, word, mind" are eligible for killing, and this includes the general population in democratic countries because civilians can vote in elections that bring enemies of Islam to power;
* the necessity of killing in the war to protect Islam and Muslims;
* Muhammad, when asked whether the Muslim fighters could use the catapult against the village of Taif, replied affirmatively, even though the enemy fighters were mixed with a civilian population;
* if the women, children and other protected groups serve as human shields for the enemy;
* if the enemy has broken a treaty, killing of civilians is permitted.
History
Attacks
thumb|upright=1.65|
1998 United States embassy bombings|Nairobi, Kenya: August 7, 1998<br />
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: August 7, 1998<br />
Aden, Yemen: October 12, 2000<br />
World Trade Center, US: September 11, 2001<br />
The Pentagon, US: September 11, 2001<br />
Istanbul, Turkey: November 15 and 20, 2003
Al-Qaeda has carried out a total of six major attacks, four of them in its jihad against America. In each case the leadership planned the attack years in advance, arranging for the shipment of weapons and explosives and using its businesses to provide operatives with safehouses and false identities.
1991
To prevent the former Afghan king Mohammed Zahir Shah from coming back from exile and possibly becoming head of a new government, bin Laden instructed a Portuguese convert to Islam, Paulo Jose de Almeida Santos, to assassinate Zahir Shah. On November 4, 1991, Santos entered the king's villa in Rome posing as a journalist and tried to stab him with a dagger. A tin of cigarillos in the king's breast pocket deflected the blade and saved Zahir Shah's life, although the king was also stabbed several times in the neck and was taken to hospital, later recovering from the attack. Santos was apprehended by General Abdul Wali, a former commander of the Royal Afghan Army, and jailed for 10 years in Italy. 1992 On December 29, 1992, al-Qaeda launched the 1992 Yemen hotel bombings. Two bombs were detonated in Aden, Yemen. The first target was the Movenpick Hotel and the second was the parking lot of the Goldmohur Hotel.
The bombings were an attempt to eliminate American soldiers on their way to Somalia to take part in the international famine relief effort, Operation Restore Hope. Internally, al-Qaeda considered the bombing a victory that frightened the Americans away, but in the US, the attack was barely noticed. No American soldiers were killed because no soldiers were staying in the hotel at the time it was bombed, however, an Australian tourist and a Yemeni hotel worker were killed in the bombing. Seven others, who were mostly Yemeni, were severely injured.
Late 1990s
]]
In 1996, bin Laden personally engineered a plot to assassinate United States President Bill Clinton while the president was in Manila for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. However, intelligence agents intercepted a message before the motorcade was to leave, and alerted the US Secret Service. Agents later discovered a bomb planted under a bridge.
On August 7, 1998, al-Qaeda bombed the US embassies in East Africa, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans. In retaliation, a barrage of cruise missiles launched by the US military devastated an al-Qaeda base in Khost, Afghanistan. The network's capacity was unharmed. In late 1999 and 2000, al-Qaeda planned attacks to coincide with the millennium, masterminded by Abu Zubaydah and involving Abu Qatada, which would include the bombing of Christian holy sites in Jordan, the bombing of Los Angeles International Airport by Ahmed Ressam, and the bombing of the .
On October 12, 2000, al-Qaeda militants in Yemen bombed the missile destroyer USS Cole in a suicide attack, killing 17 US servicemen and damaging the vessel while it lay offshore. Inspired by the success of such a brazen attack, al-Qaeda's command core began to prepare for an attack on the US itself.
September 11 attacks
The September 11 attacks on America by al-Qaeda killed 2,996 people2,507 civilians, 343 firefighters, 72 law enforcement officers, 55 military personnel as well as 19 hijackers who committed murder-suicide. Two commercial airliners were deliberately flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth, originally intended to target either the United States Capitol or the White House, crashed in a field in Stonycreek Township near Shanksville, Pennsylvania after passengers revolted. It was the deadliest foreign attack on American soil since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and to this day remains the deadliest terrorist attack in human history.
The attacks were conducted by al-Qaeda, acting in accord with the 1998 fatwa issued against the US and its allies by persons under the command of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and others. Bin Laden strongly supported the attacks by identifying numerous grievances of Muslims, such as the general perception that the US was actively oppressing Muslims. In his "Letter to the American people" published in 2002, Osama Bin Laden stated: <blockquote>Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us. ....
The American government and press still refuses to answer the question:
Why did they attack us in New York and Washington?
If Sharon is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush, then we are also men of peace!!! America does not understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing it using the language it understands.</blockquote>
Bin Laden asserted that America was massacring Muslims in "Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir and Iraq" and Muslims should retain the "right to attack in reprisal". He also claimed the 9/11 attacks were not targeted at people, but "America's icons of military and economic power", despite the fact he planned to attack in the morning when most of the people in the intended targets were present and thus generating the maximum number of human casualties.
Evidence later came to light that the original targets for the attack may have been nuclear power stations on the US East Coast. The targets were later altered by al-Qaeda, as it was feared that such an attack "might get out of hand". Designation as a terrorist group
Al-Qaeda is deemed a designated terrorist group by the following countries and international organizations:
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War on terror
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the US government responded, and began to prepare its armed forces to overthrow the Taliban, which it believed was harboring al-Qaeda. The US offered Taliban leader Mullah Omar a chance to surrender bin Laden and his top associates. The first forces to be inserted into Afghanistan were paramilitary officers from the CIA's elite Special Activities Division (SAD).
The Taliban offered to turn over bin Laden to a neutral country for trial if the US would provide evidence of bin Laden's complicity in the attacks. US President George W. Bush responded by saying: "We know he's guilty. Turn him over", and British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned the Taliban regime: "Surrender bin Laden, or surrender power."
Soon thereafter the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan, and together with the Afghan Northern Alliance removed the Taliban government as part of the war in Afghanistan. As a result of the US special forces and air support for the Northern Alliance ground forces, a number of Taliban and al-Qaeda training camps were destroyed, and much of the operating structure of al-Qaeda is believed to have been disrupted. After being driven from their key positions in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan, many al-Qaeda fighters tried to regroup in the rugged Gardez region of the nation.
after his arrest in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in March 2003]]
By early 2002, al-Qaeda had been dealt a serious blow to its operational capacity, and the Afghan invasion appeared to be a success. Nevertheless, a significant Taliban insurgency remained in Afghanistan.
Debate continued regarding the nature of al-Qaeda's role in the 9/11 attacks. The US State Department released a videotape showing bin Laden speaking with a small group of associates somewhere in Afghanistan shortly before the Taliban was removed from power. Although its authenticity has been questioned by a couple of people, the tape definitively implicates bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the September 11 attacks. The tape was aired on many television channels, with an accompanying English translation provided by the US Defense Department.
In September 2004, the 9/11 Commission officially concluded that the attacks were conceived and implemented by al-Qaeda operatives. In October 2004, bin Laden appeared to claim responsibility for the attacks in a videotape released through Al Jazeera, saying he was inspired by Israeli attacks on high-rises in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon: "As I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children."
By the end of 2004, the US government proclaimed that two-thirds of the most senior al-Qaeda figures from 2001 had been captured and interrogated by the CIA: Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2002; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003; and Saif al Islam el Masry in 2004. Mohammed Atef and several others were killed.<!--Despite this, the US government continues to warn that the organization is not yet defeated and battles between US forces and al-Qaeda-related groups continue.
By the end of 2008, the Taliban had severed any remaining ties with al-Qaeda. According to senior US military intelligence officials, there are fewer than 100 members of al-Qaeda remaining in Afghanistan.
WP article "FBI, CIA Debate Significance of Terror Suspect"--> The West was criticized for not being able to handle al-Qaeda despite a decade of the war.
Activities
Africa
(formerly GSPC) area of operations]]
Al-Qaeda involvement in Africa has included a number of bombing attacks in North Africa, while supporting parties in civil wars in Eritrea and Somalia. From 1991 to 1996, bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were based in Sudan.
Islamist rebels in the Sahara calling themselves al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb have stepped up their violence in recent years. French officials say the rebels have no real links to the al-Qaeda leadership, but this has been disputed. It seems likely that bin Laden approved the group's name in late 2006, and the rebels "took on the al Qaeda franchise label", almost a year before the violence began to escalate.
In Mali, the Ansar Dine faction was also reported as an ally of al-Qaeda in 2013. The Ansar al Dine faction aligned themselves with the AQIM.
In 2011, al-Qaeda's North African wing condemned Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and declared support for the Anti-Gaddafi rebels.
Following the Libyan Civil War, the removal of Gaddafi and the ensuing period of post-civil war violence in Libya, various Islamist militant groups affiliated with al-Qaeda were able to expand their operations in the region. The 2012 Benghazi attack, which resulted in the death of US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, is suspected of having been carried out by various Jihadist networks, such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Ansar al-Sharia and several other al-Qaeda affiliated groups. The capture of Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, a senior al-Qaeda operative wanted by the United States for his involvement in the 1998 United States embassy bombings, on October 5, 2013, by US Navy Seals, FBI and CIA agents illustrates the importance the US and other Western allies have placed on North Africa.
Europe
Before the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of Afghanistan, westerners who had been recruits at al-Qaeda training camps were sought after by al-Qaeda's military wing. Language skills and knowledge of Western culture were generally found among recruits from Europe, such was the case with Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian national studying in Germany at the time of his training, and other members of the Hamburg Cell. Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atef would later designate Atta as the ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers. Following the attacks, Western intelligence agencies determined that al-Qaeda cells operating in Europe had aided the hijackers with financing and communications with the central leadership based in Afghanistan.
In 2003, Islamists carried out a series of bombings in Istanbul killing fifty-seven people and injuring seven hundred. Seventy-four people were charged by the Turkish authorities. Some had previously met bin Laden, and though they specifically declined to pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda they asked for its blessing and help.
In 2009, three Londoners, Tanvir Hussain, Assad Sarwar and Ahmed Abdullah Ali, were convicted of conspiring to detonate bombs disguised as soft drinks on seven airplanes bound for Canada and the US. The MI5 investigation regarding the plot involved more than a year of surveillance work conducted by over two hundred officers. British and US officials said the plotunlike many similar homegrown European Islamic militant plotswas directly linked to al-Qaeda and guided by senior al-Qaeda members in Pakistan.
In 2012, Russian Intelligence indicated that al-Qaeda had given a call for "forest jihad" and has been starting massive forest fires as part of a strategy of "thousand cuts". Arab world
after the October 2000 attack]]
Following Yemeni unification in 1990, Wahhabi networks began moving missionaries into the country. Although it is unlikely bin Laden or Saudi al-Qaeda were directly involved, the personal connections they made would be established over the next decade and used in the USS Cole bombing. Concerns grew over al-Qaeda's group in Yemen.
In Iraq, al-Qaeda forces loosely associated with the leadership were embedded in the Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad group commanded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Specializing in suicide operations, they have been a "key driver" of the Sunni insurgency. Although they played a small part in the overall insurgency, between 30% and 42% of all suicide bombings which took place in the early years were claimed by Zarqawi's group. Reports have indicated that oversights such as the failure to control access to the Qa'qaa munitions factory in Yusufiyah have allowed large quantities of munitions to fall into the hands of al-Qaida. In November 2010, the militant group Islamic State of Iraq, which is linked to al-Qaeda in Iraq, threatened to "exterminate all Iraqi Christians".
Al-Qaeda did not begin training Palestinians until the late 1990s. Large groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have rejected an alliance with al-Qaeda, fearing that al-Qaeda will co-opt their cells. This may have changed recently. The Israeli security and intelligence services believe al-Qaeda has managed to infiltrate operatives from the Occupied Territories into Israel, and is waiting for an opportunity to attack. an umbrella rebel group fighting in the Syrian Civil War against the Syrian government that reportedly includes an al-Qaeda linked al-Nusra Front and another Salafi coalition known as Ahrar al-Sham.
Kashmir
Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri consider India to be a part of an alleged Crusader-Zionist-Hindu conspiracy against the Islamic world. According to a 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, bin Laden was involved in training militants for Jihad in Kashmir while living in Sudan in the early 1990s. By 2001, Kashmiri militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen had become a part of the al-Qaeda coalition. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), al-Qaeda was thought to have established bases in Pakistan administered Kashmir (in Azad Kashmir, and to some extent in Gilgit–Baltistan) during the 1999 Kargil War and continued to operate there with tacit approval of Pakistan's Intelligence services.
Many of the militants active in Kashmir were trained in the same madrasahs as Taliban and al-Qaeda. Fazlur Rehman Khalil of Kashmiri militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen was a signatory of al-Qaeda's 1998 declaration of Jihad against America and its allies. In a 'Letter to American People' (2002), bin Laden wrote that one of the reasons he was fighting America was because of its support to India on the Kashmir issue. In 2002, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, on a trip to Delhi, suggested that al-Qaeda was active in Kashmir though he did not have any evidence. Rumsfeld proposed hi-tech ground sensors along the Line of Control to prevent militants from infiltrating into Indian-administered Kashmir. In 2002, a special team of Special Air Service and Delta Force was sent into Indian-administered Kashmir to hunt for bin Laden after receiving reports that he was being sheltered by Kashmiri militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, which had been responsible for kidnapping western tourists in Kashmir in 1995. Britain's highest-ranking al-Qaeda operative Rangzieb Ahmed had previously fought in Kashmir with the group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and spent time in Indian prison after being captured in Kashmir.
US officials believe al-Qaeda was helping organize attacks in Kashmir in order to provoke conflict between India and Pakistan. Their strategy was to force Pakistan to move its troops to the border with India, thereby relieving pressure on al-Qaeda elements hiding in northwestern Pakistan. In 2006 al-Qaeda claimed they had established a wing in Kashmir. However Indian Army General H. S. Panag argued that the army had ruled out the presence of al-Qaeda in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. Panag also said al-Qaeda had strong ties with Kashmiri militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed based in Pakistan. It has been noted that Waziristan has become a battlefield for Kashmiri militants fighting NATO in support of al-Qaeda and Taliban. Dhiren Barot, who wrote the Army of Madinah in Kashmir and was an al-Qaeda operative convicted for involvement in the 2004 financial buildings plot, had received training in weapons and explosives at a militant training camp in Kashmir.
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Maulana Masood Azhar, the founder of Kashmiri group Jaish-e-Mohammed, is believed to have met bin Laden several times and received funding from him. According to American counter-terrorism expert Bruce Riedel, al-Qaeda and Taliban were closely involved in the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814 to Kandahar which led to the release of Maulana Masood Azhar and Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh from an Indian prison. This hijacking, Riedel said, was rightly described by then Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh as a 'dress rehearsal' for September 11 attacks. Bin Laden personally welcomed Azhar and threw a lavish party in his honor after his release. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, who had been in prison for his role in the 1994 kidnappings of Western tourists in India, went on to murder Daniel Pearl and was sentenced to death in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda operative Rashid Rauf, who was one of the accused in 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, was related to Maulana Masood Azhar by marriage.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri militant group which is thought to be behind 2008 Mumbai attacks, is also known to have strong ties to senior al-Qaeda leaders living in Pakistan. In late 2002, top al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was arrested while being sheltered by Lashkar-e-Taiba in a safe house in Faisalabad. The FBI believes al-Qaeda and Lashkar have been 'intertwined' for a long time while the CIA has said that al-Qaeda funds Lashkar-e-Taiba.
In a video released in 2008, American-born senior al-Qaeda operative Adam Yahiye Gadahn said that "victory in Kashmir has been delayed for years; it is the liberation of the jihad there from this interference which, Allah willing, will be the first step towards victory over the Hindu occupiers of that Islam land."
In September 2009, a US drone strike reportedly killed Ilyas Kashmiri who was the chief of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, a Kashmiri militant group associated with al-Qaeda. Kashmiri was described by Bruce Riedel as a 'prominent' al-Qaeda member while others have described him as head of military operations for al-Qaeda. Kashmiri was also charged by the US in a plot against Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper which was at the center of Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. US officials also believe that Kashmiri was involved in the Camp Chapman attack against the CIA. In January 2010, Indian authorities notified Britain of an al-Qaeda plot to hijack an Indian airlines or Air India plane and crash it into a British city. This information was uncovered from interrogation of Amjad Khwaja, an operative of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami, who had been arrested in India.
In January 2010, US Defense secretary Robert Gates, while on a visit to Pakistan, said that al-Qaeda was seeking to destabilize the region and planning to provoke a nuclear war between India and Pakistan.
Internet
Al-Qaeda and its successors have migrated online to escape detection in an atmosphere of increased international vigilance. The group's use of the Internet has grown more sophisticated, with online activities that include financing, recruitment, networking, mobilization, publicity, and information dissemination, gathering and sharing.
Abu Ayyub al-Masri's al-Qaeda movement in Iraq regularly releases short videos glorifying the activity of jihadist suicide bombers. In addition, both before and after the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the former leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq), the umbrella organization to which al-Qaeda in Iraq belongs, the Mujahideen Shura Council, has a regular presence on the Web.
The range of multimedia content includes guerrilla training clips, stills of victims about to be murdered, testimonials of suicide bombers, and videos that show participation in jihad through stylized portraits of mosques and musical scores. A website associated with al-Qaeda posted a video of captured American entrepreneur Nick Berg being decapitated in Iraq. Other decapitation videos and pictures, including those of Paul Johnson, Kim Sun-il (posted on websites), and Daniel Pearl obtained by investigators, have taken place.
In December 2004 an audio message claiming to be from bin Laden was posted directly to a website, rather than sending a copy to al Jazeera as he had done in the past. Al-Qaeda turned to the Internet for release of its videos in order to be certain they would be available unedited, rather than risk the possibility of al Jazeera editing out anything critical of the Saudi royal family.
The US government charged a British information technology specialist, Babar Ahmad, with terrorist offences related to his operating a network of English-language al-Qaeda websites, such as Azzam.com. He was convicted and sentenced to years in prison.
Online communications
In 2007, al-Qaeda released Mujahedeen Secrets, encryption software used for online and cellular communications. A later version, Mujahideen Secrets 2, was released in 2008.
Aviation network
Al-Qaeda is believed to be operating a clandestine aviation network including "several Boeing 727 aircraft", turboprops and executive jets, according to a 2010 Reuters story. Based on a US Department of Homeland Security report, the story said al-Qaeda is possibly using aircraft to transport drugs and weapons from South America to various unstable countries in West Africa. A Boeing 727 can carry up to ten tons of cargo. The drugs eventually are smuggled to Europe for distribution and sale, and the weapons are used in conflicts in Africa and possibly elsewhere. Gunmen with links to al-Qaeda have been increasingly kidnapping Europeans for ransom. The profits from the drug and weapon sales, and kidnappings can, in turn, fund more militant activities.
Involvement in military conflicts
}}
The following is a list of military conflicts in which al-Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken part militarily.
{|class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! scope="col" | Start of conflict
! scope="col" | End of conflict
! scope="col" | Conflict
! scope="col" | Continent
! scope="col" | Location
! scope="col" | Branches involved
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|1991
|align=center|ongoing
|Somali Civil War
|Africa
|Somalia
|Al-Shabaab
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|1992
|align=center|1996
|Civil war in Afghanistan (1992–1996)
|Asia
|Islamic State of Afghanistan
|Al-Qaeda Central
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|1992
|align=center|ongoing
|Al-Qaeda insurgency in Yemen
|Asia
|Yemen
|Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|1996
|align=center|2001
|Civil war in Afghanistan (1996–2001)
|Asia
|Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
|Al-Qaeda Central
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|2001
|align=center|2021
|War in Afghanistan (2001–2021)
|Asia
|Afghanistan
|Al-Qaeda Central
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|2002
|align=center|ongoing
|Insurgency in the Maghreb (2002–present)
|Africa
|Algeria<br />Chad<br />Mali<br />Mauritania<br />Morocco<br />Niger<br />Tunisia
|Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|2003
|align=center|2011
|Iraq War
|Asia
|Iraq
|Al-Qaeda in Iraq
Islamic State of Iraq
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|2004
|align=center|ongoing
|War in North-West Pakistan
|Asia
|Pakistan
|Al-Qaeda Central
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|2009
|align=center|2017
|Insurgency in the North Caucasus
|Asia
|Russia
|Caucasus Emirate
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|2011
|align=center|ongoing
|Syrian Civil War
|Asia
|Syria
|al-Nusra Front
|-
! scope"row" aligncenter|2015
|align=center|ongoing
|Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen
|Asia
|Yemen
|Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
|}
Broader influence
Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, was inspired by al-Qaeda, calling it "the most successful revolutionary movement in the world." While admitting different aims, he sought to "create a European version of Al-Qaida."
The appropriate response to offshoots is a subject of debate. A journalist reported in 2012 that a senior US military planner had asked: "Should we resort to drones and Special Operations raids every time some group raises the black banner of al Qaeda? How long can we continue to chase offshoots of offshoots around the world?" Criticism According to CNN journalists Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, a number of "religious scholars, former fighters and militants" who previously supported Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) had turned against the al-Qaeda-supported Iraqi insurgency in 2008; due to ISI's indiscriminate attacks against civilians while targeting US-led coalition forces. American military analyst Bruce Riedel wrote in 2008 that "a wave of revulsion" arose against ISI, which enabled US-allied Sons of Iraq faction to turn various tribal leaders in the Anbar region against the Iraqi insurgency. In response, Bin Laden and Zawahiri issued public statements urging Muslims to rally behind ISI leadership and support the armed struggle against American forces.
In November 2007, former Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) member Noman Benotman responded with a public, open letter of criticism to Ayman al-Zawahiri, after persuading the imprisoned senior leaders of his former group to enter into peace negotiations with the Libyan regime. While Ayman al-Zawahiri announced the affiliation of the group with al-Qaeda in November 2007, the Libyan government released 90 members of the group from prison several months after "they were said to have renounced violence."
In 2007, on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the Saudi sheikh Salman al-Ouda delivered a personal rebuke to bin Laden. Al-Ouda addressed al-Qaeda's leader on television asking him:
... in the name of al-Qaeda? Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions [of victims] on your back?}}
According to Pew polls, support for al-Qaeda had dropped in the Muslim world in the years before 2008. In Saudi Arabia, only ten percent had a favorable view of al-Qaeda, according to a December 2007 poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank.
In 2007, the imprisoned Dr. Fadl, who was an influential Afghan Arab and former associate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, withdrew his support from al-Qaeda and criticized the organization in his book ''Wathiqat Tarshid Al-'Aml Al-Jihadi fi Misr w'Al-'Alam (). In response, Al-Zawahiri accused Dr. Fadl of promoting "an Islam without jihad" that aligns with Western interests and wrote a nearly two hundred pages long treatise, titled "The Exoneration''" which appeared on the Internet in March 2008. In his treatise, Zawahiri justified military strikes against US targets as retaliatory attacks to defend Muslim community against American aggression.
In an online town hall forum conducted in December 2007, Zawahiri denied that al-Qaeda deliberately targeted innocents and accused the American coalition of killing innocent people. Although once associated with al-Qaeda, in September 2009 LIFG completed a new "code" for jihad, a 417-page religious document entitled "Corrective Studies". Given its credibility and the fact that several other prominent Jihadists in the Middle East have turned against al-Qaeda, the LIFG's reversal may be an important step toward staunching al-Qaeda's recruitment.
Other criticisms
Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American journalist based in Syria created a documentary about al-Shabab, al-Qaeda's affiliate in Somalia. The documentary included interviews with former members of the group who stated their reasons for leaving al-Shabab. The members made accusations of segregation, lack of religious awareness and internal corruption and favoritism. In response to Kareem, the Global Islamic Media Front condemned Kareem, called him a liar, and denied the accusations from the former fighters.
In mid-2014 after the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant declared that they had restored the Caliphate, an audio statement was released by the then-spokesman of the group Abu Muhammad al-Adnani claiming that "the legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organizations, becomes null by the expansion of the Caliphate's authority." The speech included a religious refutation of al-Qaeda for being too lenient regarding Shiites and their refusal to recognize the authority Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, al-Adnani specifically noting: "It is not suitable for a state to give allegiance to an organization." He also recalled a past instance in which Osama bin Laden called on al-Qaeda members and supporters to give allegiance to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi when the group was still solely operating in Iraq, as the Islamic State of Iraq, and condemned Ayman al-Zawahiri for not making this same claim for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Zawahiri was encouraging factionalism and division between former allies of ISIL such as the al-Nusra Front.
See also
* Al-Qaeda involvement in Asia
* Al Qaeda Network Exord
* Allegations of support system in Pakistan for Osama bin Laden
* Belligerents in the Syrian civil war
* Bin Laden Issue Station (former CIA unit for tracking bin Laden)
* Steven Emerson
* Fatawā of Osama bin Laden
* International propagation of Salafism and Wahhabism (by region)
* Iran – Alleged Al-Qaeda ties
* Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition
* Operation Cannonball
* Psychological warfare
* Religious terrorism
* Takfir wal-Hijra
* Videos and audio recordings of Osama bin Laden
* Violent extremism
Publications
* Al Qaeda Handbook
* Management of Savagery
References
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* [http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-113hhrg81977/pdf/CHRG-113hhrg81977.pdf Alt URL]
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External links
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* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110108062146/http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t125/e1909?_hi27&_pos4 Al-Qaeda in Oxford Islamic Studies Online]
* [http://www.counterextremism.com/threat/al-qaeda Al-Qaeda], Counter Extremism Project profile
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120505212905/http://www.ctc.usma.edu/posts/letters-from-abbottabad-bin-ladin-sidelined 17 de-classified documents captured during the Abbottabad raid and released to the Combating Terrorism Center]
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Media
* Peter Taylor. (2007). "[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/age_of_terror/7306413.stm War on the West]". Age of Terror, No. 4, series 1. BBC.
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/world/2001/war_on_terror/default.stm Investigating Al-Qaeda], BBC News
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* [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front "Al Qaeda's New Front"] from PBS Frontline, January 2005
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Category:Violence against Shia Muslims | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.036028 |
1923 | Alessandro Volta | <!--Galvani and "Early battery" sections need more citations-->
| image = Alessandro Volta.jpeg
| birth_name = Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta
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| birth_place = Como, Duchy of Milan
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| death_place = Como, Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, Austrian Empire
| known_for =
| spouse =
| children = 3
| awards =
| fields =
| work_institutions = University of Pavia (1779–1819)
}}
Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (, ; ; 18 February 1745 – 5 March 1827) was an Italian chemist and physicist who was a pioneer of electricity and power, With this invention, Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta's invention sparked a great amount of scientific excitement and led others to conduct similar experiments, which eventually led to the development of the field of electrochemistry. Furthermore, the emperor granted Volta substantial funding to equip the physics cabinet with instruments, purchased by Volta in England and France. At the University History Museum of the University of Pavia there are 150 of them, used by Alessandro Volta. Volta and Galvani
museum, Como]]
Luigi Galvani, an Italian physicist, discovered something he named "animal electricity" when two different metals were connected in series with a frog's leg and to one another. Volta realised that the frog's leg served as both a conductor of electricity (what we would now call an electrolyte) and as a detector of electricity. He also understood that the frog's legs were irrelevant to the electric current, which was caused by the two differing metals. He replaced the frog's leg with brine-soaked paper and detected the flow of electricity by other means familiar to him from his previous studies. In this way, he discovered the electrochemical series, and the law that the electromotive force (emf) of a galvanic cell, consisting of a pair of metal electrodes separated by electrolyte, is the difference between their two electrode potentials (thus, two identical electrodes and a common electrolyte give zero net emf). This may be called Volta's Law of the electrochemical series.
In 1800, as the result of a professional disagreement over the galvanic response advocated by Galvani, Volta invented the voltaic pile, an early electric battery, which produced a steady electric current.
His image was depicted on the Italian Lire 10,000 note (1990–1997) along with a sketch of his voltaic pile. Religious beliefs Volta was raised as a Catholic and for all of his life continued to maintain his belief.
}}
External links
*
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120716205546/http://electrochem.cwru.edu/encycl/art-v01-volta.htm Volta and the "Pile"]
* [http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/volta.htm Alessandro Volta]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20160304030624/http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/scientists/volta.html Count Alessandro Volta]
*
* [http://histoires-de-sciences.over-blog.fr/2013/11/electrical-units-history.html Electrical units history.]
* [https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/history/pioneers/alessandro-volta-biography.php Life of Alessandro Volta: Biography; Inventions; Facts]
* [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alessandro-Volta Alessandro Volta | Biography, Facts, Battery, & Invention | Britannica]
Category:1745 births
Category:1827 deaths
Category:People from Como
Category:19th-century Italian physicists
Category:Battery inventors
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Category:Independent scientists
Category:History of neuroscience
Category:18th-century Italian inventors
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Category:Academic staff of the University of Pavia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessandro_Volta | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.051743 |
1924 | Argo Navis | –
| dec = –
| areatotal = 1667
| arearank | numbermainstars 32
| numberbfstars = 178
| numberstarsplanets = 24
| numberbrightstars = 12
| numbernearbystars = 7
| brighteststarname = Canopus (α Arg)
| starmagnitude = −0.74
| neareststarname | stardistance
| numbermessierobjects = 3
| meteorshowers =
| bordering =
| latmax = 20
| latmin = 90
| month = February-March
| notes =
}}
]]
Argo Navis (the Ship Argo), or simply Argo, is one of Ptolemy's 48 constellations, now a grouping of three IAU constellations. It is formerly a single large constellation in the southern sky. The genitive is "Argus Navis", abbreviated "Arg". John Flamsteed and other early modern astronomers called it Navis (the Ship), genitive "Navis", abbreviated "Nav".
The constellation proved to be of unwieldy size, as it was 28% larger than the next largest constellation and had more than 160 easily visible stars. The 1755 catalogue of Nicolas Louis de Lacaille divided it into the three modern constellations that occupy much of the same area: Carina (the keel), Puppis (the poop deck or stern), and Vela (the sails).
Argo derived from the ship Argo in Greek mythology, sailed by Jason and the Argonauts to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece. The precession of the equinoxes has caused the position of the stars from Earth's viewpoint to shift southward. Though most of the constellation was visible in Classical times, the constellation is now not easily visible from most of the northern hemisphere. All the stars of Argo Navis are easily visible from the tropics southward and pass near zenith from southern temperate latitudes. The brightest of these is Canopus (α Carinae), the second-brightest night-time star, now assigned to Carina.
History
Development of the Greek constellation
Argo Navis is known from Greek texts, which derived it from Egypt around 1000 BC. Plutarch attributed it to the Egyptian "Boat of Osiris." which continued to be reflected in cartographic representations in celestial atlases into the nineteenth century (see below). The ship appeared to rotate about the pole sternwards, so nautically in reverse. Aratus, the Greek poet / historian living in the third century BCE, noted this backward progression writing, "Argo by the ''Great Dog's'' [Canis Major's] tail is drawn; for hers is not a usual course, but backward turned she comes ...".The constituent modern constellationsIn modern times, Argo Navis was considered unwieldy due to its enormous size (28% larger than Hydra, the largest modern constellation). Lacaille replaced Bayer's designations with new ones that followed stellar magnitudes more closely, but used only a single Greek-letter sequence and described the constellation for those stars as "Argûs". Similarly, faint unlettered stars were listed only as in "Argûs". Despite this, the constellation remained in use in parallel with its constituent parts into the 20th century. In 1922, along with the other constellations, it received a three-letter abbreviation: Arg. The breakup and relegation to a former constellation occurred in 1930 when the IAU defined the 88 modern constellations, formally instituting Carina, Puppis, and Vela, and declaring Argo obsolete. Lacaille's designations were kept in the offspring, so Carina has α, β, and ε; Vela has γ and δ; Puppis has ζ; and so on. As a result of this breakup, Argo Navis is the only one of Ptolemy's 48 constellations that is no longer officially recognized as a single constellation.
In addition, the constellation Pyxis (the mariner's compass) occupies an area near what in antiquity was considered part of Argo's mast. Some recent authors state that the compass was part of the ship, but magnetic compasses were unknown in ancient Greek times.}} Similarly, an effort by Edmond Halley to detach the "cloud of mist" at the prow of Argo Navis to form a new constellation named Robur Carolinum (Charles' Oak) in honor of King Charles II, his patron, was unsuccessful.
Representations in other cultures
In Vedic period astronomy, which drew its zodiac signs and many constellations from the period of the Indo-Greek Kingdom, Indian observers saw the asterism as a boat.
The Māori had several names for the constellation, including Te Waka-o-Tamarereti (the canoe of Tamarereti), Te Kohi-a-Autahi (an expression meaning "cold of autumn settling down on land and water"), and Te Kohi.
See also
*Asterism (astronomy)
*List of stars in Argo Navis
Footnotes
References
External links
*[http://www.starrynightphotos.com/constellations/argo_navis.htm Starry Night Photography : Argo Navis Image]
*[http://www.ianridpath.com/startales/argo.html Ian Ridpath's Star Tales – Argo Navis]
*[https://iconographic.warburg.sas.ac.uk/category/vpc-taxonomy-017083 Warburg Institute Iconographic Database – Argo (Navis)] (medieval and early modern images of Argo Navis) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_Navis | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.060918 |
1925 | Andromeda (mythology) | In Greek mythology, Andromeda (; or ) is the daughter of Cepheus, the king of Aethiopia, and his wife, Cassiopeia. When Cassiopeia boasts that she (or Andromeda) is more beautiful than the Nereids, Poseidon sends the sea monster Cetus to ravage the coast of Aethiopia as divine punishment. Queen Cassiopeia understands that chaining Andromeda to a rock as a human sacrifice is what will appease Poseidon. Perseus finds her as he is coming back from his quest to decapitate Medusa, and brings her back to Greece to marry her and let her reign as his queen. With the head of Medusa, Perseus petrifies Cetus to stop it from terrorizing the coast any longer.
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As a subject, Andromeda has been popular in art since classical antiquity; rescued by a Greek hero, Andromeda's narration is considered the forerunner to the "princess and dragon" motif. From the Renaissance, interest revived in the original story, typically as derived from Ovid's Metamorphoses. The story has appeared many times in such diverse media as plays, poetry, novels, operas, classical and popular music, film, and paintings. A significant part of the northern sky contains several constellations named after the story's figures; in particular, the constellation Andromeda is named after her.
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The Andromeda tradition, from classical antiquity onwards, has incorporated elements of other stories, including Saint George and the Dragon, introducing a horse for the hero, and the tale of Pegasus, Bellerophon's winged horse. Classical mythology Central story In Greek mythology, Andromeda is the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, king and queen of the kingdom of A<!--not a typo-->ethiopia. Her mother Cassiopeia foolishly boasts that she is more beautiful than the Nereids, a display of hubris by a human that is unacceptable to the gods. To punish the queen for her arrogance, Poseidon floods the kingdom's coast and sends a sea monster named Cetus to ravage its inhabitants. In desperation, King Cepheus consults the oracle of Ammon, who announces that no respite can be found until the king sacrifices his daughter, Andromeda, to the monster. She is thus stripped naked and chained to a rock in Jaffa by the sea to await her death. Perseus is just then flying near the coast of Aethiopia on his winged sandals or on Pegasus the winged horse, having slain the Gorgon Medusa and carrying her severed head, which instantly petrifies any who look at it. Upon seeing Andromeda bound to the rock, Perseus falls in love with her, and he secures Cepheus's promise of her hand in marriage if he can save her. Perseus kills the monster with the Medusa's head, saving Andromeda. Preparations are then made for their marriage, in spite of her having been previously promised to her uncle, Phineus. At the wedding, a quarrel between the rivals ends when Perseus shows Medusa's head to Phineus and his allies, turning them to stone.
Andromeda follows her husband to his native island of Seriphos, where he rescues his mother, Danaë from her unwanted wedding to the King of that island. They next go to Argos, where Perseus is the rightful heir to the throne. However, after accidentally killing his grandfather Acrisius, the king of Argos, Perseus chooses to become king of neighboring Tiryns instead. The mythographer Apollodorus states that Perseus and Andromeda have six sons: Perses, Alcaeus, Heleus, Mestor, Sthenelus, Electryon, and a daughter, Gorgophone. Their descendants rule Mycenae from Electryon down to Eurystheus, after whom Atreus attains the kingdom. The Greek hero Heracles is also a descendant, as his mother Alcmene is the daughter of Electryon.
According to the Catasterismi, Andromeda is placed in the sky by Athena as the constellation Andromeda, in a pose with her limbs outstretched, similar to when she was chained to the rock, in commemoration of Perseus' bravery in fighting the sea monster.
In classical art
The myth of Andromeda was represented in the art of ancient Greece and of Rome in media including red-figure pottery such as pelike jars, frescoes, Depictions range from straightforward representations of scenes from the myth, such as of Andromeda being tied up for sacrifice, to more ambiguous portrayals with different events depicted in the same painting, as at the Roman villa in Boscotrecase, where Perseus is shown twice, space standing in for time. Favoured scenes changed with time: until the 4th century BC, Perseus was shown decapitating Medusa, while after that, and in Roman portrayals, he was shown rescuing Andromeda.
<gallery class"center" mode"nolines" widths"180px" heights"180px">
File:Corinthian amphora, Andromeda, Perseus, Cetus, 575-550 BC, Berlin F 1652, 141650.jpg|Perseus defends Andromeda from the monster Cetus by pelting it with stones. Corinthian amphora, 575–550 BC
File:Cratere a volute con la liberazione di Andromeda, inv. 19.M325-1.6 - Marta -Mitomania (9).jpg|Andromeda being tied for sacrifice. Apulian red-figure vase,
File:Perseus and Andromeda MAN Napoli Inv8995.jpg|Perseus holds up Medusa's head so Andromeda may safely see its reflection in the pool below. Fresco, 1st century AD, Pompeii
File:Persée et Andromède, Boscotrecase, Italie.jpg|Roman wall painting of Perseus and Andromeda from Boscotrecase, late 1st century BC
File:Gaziantep Zeugma Museum Andromeda mosaic 4170.jpg|Detail of Andromeda mosaic from 'House of Poseidon' in Zeugma, Turkey, 2nd–3rd century AD
</gallery>
Variants
There are several variants of the legend. In Hyginus's account, Perseus does not ask for Andromeda's hand in marriage before saving her, and when he afterwards intends to keep her for his wife, both her father Cepheus and her uncle Phineas plot against him, and Perseus resorts to using Medusa's head to turn them to stone. In contrast, Ovid states that Perseus kills Cetus with his magical sword, even though he also carries Medusa's head, which could easily turn the monster to stone (and Perseus does use Medusa's head for this purpose in other situations). The earliest straightforward account of Perseus using Medusa's head against Cetus, however, is from the later 2nd-century AD satirist Lucian.
The 12th-century Byzantine writer John Tzetzes says that Cetus swallows Perseus, who kills the monster by hacking his way out with his sword. Conon places the story in Joppa (Iope or Jaffa, on the coast of modern Israel), and makes Andromeda's uncles Phineus and Phoinix rivals for her hand in marriage; her father Cepheus contrives to have Phoinix abduct her in a ship named Cetos from a small island she visits to make sacrifices to Aphrodite, and Perseus, sailing nearby, intercepts and destroys Cetos and its crew, who are "petrified by shock" at his bravery.<!-- Conon thus explains away all the exotic and magical elements of the story.--> Constellations
Andromeda as depicted in ''Urania's Mirror'' by Sidney Hall, ]]
Andromeda is represented in the Northern sky by the constellation Andromeda<!--NOT an overlink, tool gives false positive-->, mentioned by the astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century, which contains the Andromeda Galaxy. Several constellations are associated with the myth. Viewing the fainter stars visible to the naked eye, the constellations are rendered as a maiden (Andromeda) chained up, facing or turning away from the ecliptic; a warrior (Perseus), often depicted holding the head of Medusa, next to Andromeda; a huge man (Cepheus) wearing a crown, upside down with respect to the ecliptic; a smaller figure (Cassiopeia) next to the man, sitting on a chair; a whale or sea monster (Cetus) just beyond Pisces, to the south-east; the flying horse Pegasus, who was born from the stump of Medusa's neck after Perseus had decapitated her; the paired fish of the constellation Pisces, that in myth were caught by Dictys the fisherman who was brother of Polydectes, king of Seriphos, the place where Perseus and his mother Danaë were stranded. In literature In poetry George Chapman's poem in heroic couplets Andromeda liberata, Or the nuptials of Perseus and Andromeda, was written for the 1614 wedding of Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset and Frances Howard. The wedding, which led to a "train of intrigue and murder and executions, was the scandal of the age." Scholars have been surprised that Chapman should have celebrated such a marriage, and his choice of an allegory of the Perseus-Andromeda myth for the purpose. The poem infuriated both Carr and the Earl of Essex, causing Chapman to publish a "justification" of his approach. Chapman's poem sees human nature as chaotic and disorderly, like the sea monster, opposed by Andromeda's beauty and Perseus's balanced nature; their union brings about an astrological harmony of Venus and Mars which perfects the character of Perseus, since Venus was thought always to dominate Mars. Unfortunately for Chapman, Essex supposed that he was represented by the "barraine rocke" that Andromeda was chained up to: Howard had divorced Essex on the grounds that he could not consummate their marriage, and she had married Carr with her hair untied, indicating that she was a virgin. Further, the poem could be read as having dangerous political implications, involving King James.
John Keats's 1819 sonnet On the Sonnet compares the restricted sonnet form to the bound Andromeda as being "Fetter'd, in spite of pained loveliness". William Morris retells the story of Perseus and Andromeda in his epic 1868 poem The Earthly Paradise, in the section April: The Doom of King Acrisius. Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet Andromeda (1879) has invited many interpretations. Charles Kingsley's hexameter poem retelling the myth, Andromeda (1858), was set to music by Cyril Rootham in his Andromeda (1905)<!--; judging the poem's style to be "unfamiliar to most modern audiences", the cartoonist Matt Lawrence was commissioned in 2015 to create a set of cartoons to tell the poem's story-->.
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File:Chapman Andromeda Liberata 1614.jpg|Title page of George Chapman's Andromeda Liberata, 1614, allegorically celebrating the tumultuous marriage of Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset and Frances Howard<!-- Julia Constance Fletcher (who wrote under the pseudonym George Fleming), published Andromeda, a Novel in 1885. --> Jules Laforgue included what Knutson calls "a remarkable satirical adaptation", retelling of the Andromeda story in a modern setting. Robert Nichols's 1923 short story Perseus and Andromeda satirically retells the story in contrasting styles. In her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea, Iris Murdoch uses the Andromeda myth, as presented in a reproduction of Titian's painting Perseus and Andromeda in the Wallace Collection in London, to reflect the character and motives of her characters. Charles has an LSD-fuelled vision of a serpent; when he returns to London, he becomes ill on seeing Titian's painting, whereupon his cousin James comes to his rescue.
<gallery mode"packed" heights"180px">
File:Guido Reni - AndromedaFXD.jpg|Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick mentions Guido Reni's 17th century painting of Andromeda.
The legend of Perseus and Andromeda became popular among playwrights in the 17th century, including Lope de Vega's 1621 ,<!-- Another production of the period was John Weaver's 1716 Perseus and Andromeda, a pantomimic entertainment.-->
<gallery class"center" mode"nolines" widths"250px" heights"250px">
File:Set design Act2 of Andromède by P Corneille 1650 - Gallica 2010.jpg|Set design for Pierre Corneille's 1650 , noted for its stage effects: Act 2, where Aeolus and eight winds lift Andromeda into the clouds, with thunder and lightning<!-- and William Brough's Victorian burlesque Perseus and Andromeda, or, The Maid and the Monster: A Classical Extravaganza (1861).-->
In music and opera
The Andromeda theme has been popular in classical music since the 17th century. It became a theme for opera from the 16th century, with an Andromeda in Italy in 1587<!--must have been a private production-->. Benedetto Ferrari's Andromeda, with music by Francesco Manelli, was the first opera performed in a public theatre, Venice's Teatro San Cassiano, in 1637. This set the pattern for Italian opera for several centuries.
Jean-Baptiste Lully's (1682), a tragédie lyrique in 5 acts, was inspired by the popularity of Corneille's play. The libretto was by Philippe Quinault, and a real horse appeared on stage as Pegasus. Michael Haydn wrote the music for another in 1797. <!--'s (possibly 1762), a cantata for solo voice and orchestra,-->
</gallery>
In the 19th century, Augusta Holmès composed the symphonic poem (1883).<!-- In the 20th century, Jose Antonio Bottiroli composed Andrómeda, Micro-sorrow I in D minor B96 for piano (1984).--> In 2019, Caroline Mallonée wrote her Portraits of Andromeda for cello and string orchestra.
In popular music, the theme is employed in tracks on Weyes Blood's 2019 album Titanic Rising and on Ensiferum's 2020 album Thalassic.
In film
, showing the moment that Perseus and Pegasus free Andromeda
Alexander Liberman's 1962 Andromeda is a black circle on a white field, transected by purple and dark green crescent arcs.
<gallery class"center" mode"nolines" widths"180px" heights"180px">
File:Andromeda and the Sea Monster MET DP248138.jpg|Domenico Guidi, marble statue Andromeda and the Sea Monster, 1694
File:François Boucher - Andromeda (Andromède) - 2016.7 - Cleveland Museum of Art.tif|François Boucher, etching print Andromeda, 1732
File:Félix Vallotton Persée tuant le dragon 1910.JPG|Félix Vallotton, Perseus Killing the Dragon, 1910, in a deliberately harsh light. Oil on canvas]]
Andromeda was the daughter of the king and queen of Aethiopia, which ancient Greeks located at the edge of the world in Nubia, the lands south of Egypt. The term Aithiops was applied to peoples who dwelt above the equator, between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Homer says the Ethiopians live "at the world's end, and lie in two halves, the one looking West and the other East". The 5th-century BC historian Herodotus writes that "Where south inclines westwards, the part of the world stretching farthest towards the sunset is Ethiopia", and also included a plan by Cambyses II of Persia to invade Ethiopia (Kush).
By the 1st century BC a rival location for Andromeda's story had become established: an outcrop of rocks near the ancient port city of Joppa, as reported by Pomponius Mela, the traveller Pausanias, the geographer Strabo, and the historian Josephus. A case has been made that this new version of the myth was exploited to enhance the fame and serve the local tourist trade of Joppa, which also became connected with the biblical story of Jonah and yet another huge sea creature. This was at odds with Andromeda's African origins, adding to the confusion already surrounding her ethnicity, as reflected in 5th-century BC Greek vase images showing Andromeda attended by dark-skinned African servants and wearing clothing that would have looked foreign to Greeks, yet with light skin. At least one of the vases depicts Andromeda and her father as mixed race barbarians who possess some features similar to their dark-skinned African servants.
<!--
Pliny the Elder accepts both traditions: in his Natural History, Andromeda was an Ethiopian princess chained at the shores of Ioppe. Pliny comes to the conclusion that, in the time of Cepheus, the Ethiopian kingdom had to extend as far as Syria and the Mediterranean: well, Pliny accepts pretty much everything from fishermen's tales upwards, so this doesn't say a lot-->
The art historian Elizabeth McGrath discusses the tradition, as promoted by the influential Roman poet Ovid, that Andromeda was a dark-skinned woman of either Ethiopian or Indian origin. In the Greek Anthology, Philodemus (1st century BC) wrote about the "Indian Andromeda". In his Heroides, Ovid has Sappho explain to Phaon: "If I'm not pale, Andromeda pleased Perseus, dark with the colour of her father Cepheus's land. And often white pigeons mate with other hues, and the dark turtledove's loved by emerald birds"; the Latin word Ovid uses here for 'dark Andromeda' refers to the colour black or brown. Elsewhere he says that Perseus brought Andromeda from "darkest" India and declares "Nor was Andromeda's colour any problem to her wing-footed aerial lover" adding that "White suits dark girls; you looked so attractive in white, Andromeda". Ovid's account of Andromeda's story follows Euripides' play Andromeda in having Perseus initially mistake the chained Andromeda for a statue of marble, which has been taken to mean she was light-skinned; but since statues in Ovid's time were commonly painted to look like living people, her skin could have been of any colour. The ambiguity is reflected in a description by the 2nd-century AD sophist Philostratus of a painting depicting Perseus and Andromeda. He emphasizes the painting's Ethiopian setting, and notes that Andromeda "is charming in that she is fair of skin though in Ethiopia," in clear contrast to the other "charming Ethiopians with their strange coloring and their grim smiles" who have assembled to cheer Perseus in this picture. Heliodorus of Emesa follows Philostratus in describing Andromeda as light-skinned in contrast to the clearly dark-skinned Aethiopians; in his Aethiopica, Queen Persinna of Aethiopia gives birth to an inexplicably white girl, Chariclea. Heliodorus states that this happened because the queen had gazed at a picture of Andromeda in the palace. The scholar of literature John Michael Archer calls this an example of "how African space is defined by European reference points".
Artworks in the modern era continue to portray Andromeda as fair-skinned, regardless of her stated origins; only a small minority of artists, such as an engraving after Abraham van Diepenbeeck, have chosen to show her as dark. The journalist Patricia Yaker Ekall comments that even this work depicts Andromeda with "European features". She suggests that the "narrative" of white superiority took precedence, and that "the visual of a white man rescuing a chained up black woman would have been too much of a trigger".
<gallery class"center" mode"nolines" widths"180px" heights"180px">
File:Tableaux du temple des muses - tirez du cabinet de feu Mr. Fauereau, conseiller du roy en sa Cour des aydes, and grauez en tailles-douces par les meilleurs maistres de son temps, pour representer les (14586798939).jpg|Engraving after Abraham van Diepenbeeck, The Rescue of Andromeda (1632–1635), from M. de Marolles, (Paris, 1655), is exceptional in showing Andromeda as dark-skinned. and Frederic Leighton. In her view, this transitional moment just precedes "the hero's final test of manhood before entering adult sexuality".
The scholar of literature Harold Knutson describes the story as having a "disturbing sensuality", which together with the evident injustice of Andromeda's "undeserved sacrifice, create a curiously ambiguous effect". He suggests that in the earlier Palestinian version, the woman was the object of desire, Aphrodite/Ishtar/Astarte, and the hero was the sun god Marduk. The monster was woman in evil form, so chaining her human form would keep her from further evil. Knutson comments that the myth illustrates "the ambiguous male view of the eternal female principle."<ref name"Knutson 1992"/>
Knutson writes that a similar pattern is seen in several other myths, including Heracles' rescue of Hesione; Jason's rescue of Medea from the hundred-eyed dragon; Cadmus's rescue of Harmonia from a dragon; and in an early version of another tale, Theseus's rescue of Ariadne from the Minotaur. He comments that all of this points to "the richness of the [story's] archetypal model", citing Hudo Hetzner's analysis of the many stories that involve a hero rescuing a maiden from a monster. The beast may be a sea-monster, or it may be a dragon that lives in a cave and terrifies a whole country, or the monstrous Count Dracula who lives in a castle.<ref name"Knutson 1992"/> See also
* Hesione – saved by Heracles from a sea monster
* Cleostratus – saved by Menestratus from a dragon
* Alcyoneus – saved by Eurybarus from a cave-dwelling monster
* Iphigenia – sacrificed to the goddess Artemis (or rescued, depending on the version)
References
Sources
* Apollodorus, Apollodorus, The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, 1921. . [http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0548.tlg001.perseus-eng1 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Hard, Robin (2004), ''The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology: Based on H.J. Rose's "Handbook of Greek Mythology", Psychology Press, 2004. . [https://books.google.com/books?id=r1Y3xZWVlnIC Google Books].
* Hard, Robin (2015), Eratosthenes and Hyginus: Constellation Myths, With Aratus's Phaenomena, Oxford University Press, 2015. . [https://books.google.com/books?id=7IMSBwAAQBAJ Google Books].
* Herodotus, Histories, translated by A. D. Godley, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1920. . [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hdt.+1.1.0 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Hesiod, Catalogue of Women, in Hesiod: The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments, edited and translated by Glenn W. Most, Loeb Classical Library No. 503, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2007, 2018. . [https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL503/2018/volume.xml Online version].
* Hyginus, Gaius Julius, De astronomia, in The Myths of Hyginus, edited and translated by Mary A. Grant, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960. [https://topostext.org/work/207 Online version at ToposText].
* Hyginus, Gaius Julius, Fabulae, in The Myths of Hyginus, edited and translated by Mary A. Grant, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960. [https://topostext.org/work/206 Online version at ToposText].
* Lucian, Phalaris. Hippias or The Bath. Dionysus. Heracles. Amber or The Swans. The Fly. Nigrinus. Demonax. The Hall. My Native Land. Octogenarians. A True Story. Slander. The Consonants at Law. The Carousal (Symposium) or The Lapiths, translated by A. M. Harmon, Loeb Classical Library No. 14, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1913. . [https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL014/1913/volume.xml Online version at Harvard University Press].
* Manilius, Astronomica, edited and translated by G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library No. 469, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1977. . [https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL469/1977/volume.xml Online version at Harvard University Press].
* Ovid, Metamorphoses, edited and translated by Brookes More, Boston, Cornhill Publishing Co., 1922. [http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0959.phi006.perseus-eng1 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library]. [https://topostext.org/work/141 Online version at ToposText].
* Pausanias, Pausanias Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1918. [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Paus.+1.1.1 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.04.0104 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Strabo, Geography, edited and translated by H.C. Hamilton, Esq., W. Falconer, M.A., London, George Bell & Sons, 1903. [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0239%3Abook%3Dnotice Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Trzaskoma, Stephen M., R. Scott Smith, and Stephen Brunet, Anthology of Classical Myth: Primary Sources in Translation, Hackett Publishing Company, 2004. . [https://books.google.com/books?id=lWruCgAAQBAJ Google Books].
* Tzetzes, John, Scolia eis Lycophroon, edited by Christian Gottfried Müller, Sumtibus F.C.G. Vogelii, 1811. [https://archive.org/details/isaakioukaiiann00mlgoog/page/n5/mode/2up?viewtheater Internet Archive]. Further reading
* Edwin Hartland, The Legend of Perseus: A Study of Tradition in Story, Custom and Belief, 3 vols. (1894–1896) (available online at: https://archive.org/details/legendofperseuss01hart/page/n6/mode/2up)
* Daniel Ogden, Perseus'' (Routledge, 2008)
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Category:Princesses in Greek mythology
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Category:Deeds of Poseidon
Category:Love stories
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Category:Human sacrifice in folklore and mythology | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_(mythology) | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.143316 |
1926 | Antlia | , genitive
| symbolism the Air Pump
| RA –
| dec–
| stardistancely = 13.17
| stardistancepc = 4.04
| numbermessierobjects = 0
| meteorshowers = None
| bordering = Hydra<br />Pyxis<br />Vela<br />Centaurus
| latmax = 45
| latmin = 90
| month = April
| notes=}}
Antlia (; from Ancient Greek ἀντλία) is a constellation in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere. Its name means "pump" in Latin and Greek; it represents an air pump. Originally Antlia Pneumatica, the constellation was established by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in the 18th century. Its non-specific (single-word) name, already in limited use, was preferred by John Herschel then welcomed by the astronomic community which officially accepted this. North of stars forming some of the sails of the ship Argo Navis (the constellation Vela), Antlia is completely visible from latitudes south of 49 degrees north.
Antlia is a faint constellation; its brightest star is Alpha Antliae, an orange giant that is a suspected variable star, ranging between apparent magnitudes 4.22 and 4.29. S Antliae is an eclipsing binary star system, changing in brightness as one star passes in front of the other. Sharing a common envelope, the stars are so close they will one day merge to form a single star. Two star systems with known exoplanets, HD 93083 and WASP-66, lie within Antlia, as do NGC 2997, a spiral galaxy, and the Antlia Dwarf Galaxy.
History
The French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille first described the constellation in French as la Machine Pneumatique (the Pneumatic Machine) in 1751–52, commemorating the air pump invented by the French physicist Denis Papin. De Lacaille had observed and catalogued almost 10,000 southern stars during a two-year stay at the Cape of Good Hope, devising fourteen new constellations in uncharted regions of the Southern Celestial Hemisphere not visible from Europe. He named all but one in honour of instruments that symbolised the Age of Enlightenment. }} Lacaille depicted Antlia as a single-cylinder vacuum pump used in Papin's initial experiments, while German astronomer Johann Bode chose the more advanced double-cylinder version. This was universally adopted. The International Astronomical Union adopted it as one of the 88 modern constellations in 1922. Ridpath reports that due to their faintness, the stars of Antlia did not make up part of the classical depiction of Argo Navis.
In non-Western astronomy
Chinese astronomers were able to view what is modern Antlia from their latitudes, and incorporated its stars into two different constellations. Several stars in the southern part of Antlia were a portion of "''Dong'ou", which represented an area in southern China. Its position in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere means that the whole constellation is visible to observers south of 49°N. The official constellation boundaries, as set by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte in 1930, are defined by a polygon with an east side, south side and ten other sides (facing the two other cardinal compass points) (illustrated in infobox at top-right''). In the equatorial coordinate system, the right ascension coordinates of these borders lie between and , while the declination coordinates are between −24.54° and −40.42°.}} Alpha is an orange giant of spectral type K4III that is a suspected variable star, ranging between apparent magnitudes 4.22 and 4.29. It is located 320 ± 10 light-years away from Earth. Estimated to be shining with around 480 to 555 times the luminosity of the Sun, it is most likely an ageing star that is brightening and on its way to becoming a Mira variable star, having converted all its core fuel into carbon. Located 590 ± 30 light-years from Earth, Epsilon Antliae is an evolved orange giant star of spectral type K3 IIIa, that has swollen to have a diameter about 69 times that of the Sun, and a luminosity of around 1279 Suns. It is slightly variable. At the other end of Antlia, Iota Antliae is likewise an orange giant of spectral type K1 III. It is 202 ± 2 light-years distant.
<!-- bright double stars -->
Located near Alpha is Delta Antliae, a binary star, 450 ± 10 light-years distant from Earth. The primary is a blue-white main sequence star of spectral type B9.5V and magnitude 5.6, and the secondary is a yellow-white main sequence star of spectral type F9Ve and magnitude 9.6. Zeta Antliae is a wide optical double star. The brighter star—Zeta<sup>1</sup> Antliae—is 410 ± 40 light-years distant and has a magnitude of 5.74,<!-- can't find GAIA stats. add when available --> though it is a true binary star system composed of two white main sequence stars of magnitudes 6.20 and 7.01 that are separated by 8.042 arcseconds. The fainter star—Zeta<sup>2</sup> Antliae—is 386 ± 5 light-years distant and of magnitude 5.9. Eta Antliae is another double composed of a yellow white star of spectral type F1V and magnitude 5.31, with a companion of magnitude 11.3. S Antliae is an eclipsing binary star system that varies in apparent magnitude from 6.27 to 6.83 over a period of 15.6 hours. The system is classed as a W Ursae Majoris variable—the primary is hotter than the secondary and the drop in magnitude is caused by the latter passing in front of the former. Calculating the properties of the component stars from the orbital period indicates that the primary star has a mass 1.94 times and a diameter 2.026 times that of the Sun, and the secondary has a mass 0.76 times and a diameter 1.322 times that of the Sun. The two stars have similar luminosity and spectral type as they have a common envelope and share stellar material. The system is thought to be around 5–6 billion years old. The two stars will eventually merge to form a single fast-spinning star. U Antliae is a red C-type carbon star and is an irregular variable that ranges between magnitudes 5.27 and 6.04. At 910 ± 50 light-years distant, it is around 5819 times as luminous as the Sun. HR 4049, also known as AG Antliae, is an unusual hot variable ageing star of spectral type B9.5Ib-II. It is undergoing intense loss of mass and is a unique variable that does not belong to any class of known variable star, ranging between magnitudes 5.29 and 5.83 with a period of 429 days. It is around 6000 light-years away from Earth. UX Antliae is an R Coronae Borealis variable with a baseline apparent magnitude of around 11.85, with irregular dimmings down to below magnitude 18.0. A luminous and remote star, it is a supergiant with a spectrum resembling that of a yellow-white F-type star but it has almost no hydrogen.
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HD 93083 is an orange dwarf star of spectral type K3V that is smaller and cooler than the Sun. It has a planet that was discovered by the radial velocity method with the HARPS spectrograph in 2005. About as massive as Saturn, the planet orbits its star with a period of 143 days at a mean distance of 0.477 AU. WASP-66 is a sunlike star of spectral type F4V. A planet with 2.3 times the mass of Jupiter orbits it every 4 days, discovered by the transit method in 2012. DEN 1048-3956 is a brown dwarf of spectral type M8 located around 13 light-years distant from Earth. At magnitude 17 it is much too faint to be seen with the unaided eye. It has a surface temperature of about 2500 K. Two powerful flares lasting 4–5 minutes each were detected in 2002. 2MASS 0939-2448 is a system of two cool and faint brown dwarfs, probably with effective temperatures of about 500 and 700 K and masses of about 25 and 40 times that of Jupiter, though it is also possible that both objects have temperatures of 600 K and 30 Jupiter masses.Deep-sky objectsis located nearly 23 million light-years from Earth.]]
Antlia contains many faint galaxies, It is a loosely wound face-on spiral galaxy of type Sc. Though nondescript in most amateur telescopes, it presents bright clusters of young stars and many dark dust lanes in photographs. In 2018 the discovery was announced of a very low surface brightness galaxy near Epsilon Antliae, Antlia 2, which is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
The Antlia Cluster, also known as Abell S0636, is a cluster of galaxies located in the Hydra–Centaurus Supercluster. It is the third nearest to the Local Group after the Virgo Cluster and the Fornax Cluster. The cluster's distance from earth is Located in the southeastern corner of the constellation, it boasts the giant elliptical galaxies NGC 3268 and NGC 3258 as the main members of a southern and northern subgroup respectively, and contains around 234 galaxies in total.
Antlia is home to the huge Antlia Supernova Remnant, one of the largest supernova remnants in the sky.
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
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External links
* [http://www.allthesky.com/constellations/antlia/constell.html The Deep Photographic Guide to the Constellations: Antlia]
* [http://astrojan.nhely.hu/antlia.htm The clickable Antlia]
*
Category:Southern constellations
Category:Constellations listed by Lacaille | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antlia | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.164085 |
1927 | Ara (constellation) | | genitive Arae
| pronounce , genitive
| symbolism the Altar
| RA –
| dec– it had been recorded by Aratus in 270 BC as lying close to the horizon, and the Almagest portrays stars as far south as Gamma Arae. Professor Bradley Schaefer proposes such Ancients must have been able to see as far south as Zeta Arae, for a pattern that looked like an altar.
's illustration of Ara, from his Uranographia (1801)]]
In illustrations, Ara is usually depicted as compact classical altar with its smoke 'rising' southward. However, depictions often vary. In the early days of printing, a 1482 woodcut of Gaius Julius Hyginus's classic Poeticon Astronomicon depicts the altar as surrounded by demons. Johann Bayer in 1603 depicted Ara as an altar with burning incense. Indeed, frankincense burners were common throughout the Levant especially in the Yemen, where they are known as Mabkhara. This required live coals or burning embers called Jamra', in order to burn the incense. Willem Blaeu, a Dutch uranographer of the 16th and 17th centuries, drew Ara as an altar for sacrifices, with a burning animal offering unusually whose smoke rises northward, represented by Alpha Arae.
The Castle of Knowledge by Robert Record of 1556 lists the constellation stating that "Under the Scorpions tayle, standeth the Altar."; a decade later a translation of a fairly recent mainly astrological work by Marcellus Palingenius of 1565, by Barnabe Googe states "Here mayst thou both the Altar, and the myghty Cup beholde."
Equivalents
In Chinese astronomy, the stars of the constellation Ara lie within The Azure Dragon of the East (, ). Five stars of Ara formed (), a tortoise, while another three formed (), a pestle.
The Wardaman people of the Northern Territory in Australia saw the stars of Ara and the neighbouring constellation Pavo as flying foxes.
Characteristics
Covering 237.1 square degrees and hence 0.575% of the sky, Ara ranks 63rd of the 88 modern constellations by area. Its position in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere means that the whole constellation is visible to observers south of 22°N. The official constellation boundaries, as set by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte in 1930, are defined by a polygon of twelve segments. In the equatorial coordinate system, the right ascension coordinates of these borders lie between and , while the declination coordinates are between −45.49° and −67.69°.}} Beta is an orange-hued star of spectral type K3Ib-IIa that has been classified as a supergiant or bright giant, and lies around 650 light-years from Earth. Close to Beta Arae is Gamma Arae, a blue-hued supergiant of spectral type B1Ib. Of apparent magnitude 3.3, it is 1110 ± 60 light-years from Earth. and have around 120,000 times its luminosity. This star is around 9.6 times as massive as the Sun, It is 5,800 times as luminous as the Sun, its energy emitted from its outer envelope at an effective temperature of 18,044 K.
The third brightest star in Ara at magnitude 3.13 is Zeta Arae, an orange giant of spectral type K3III that is located 490 ± 10 light-years from Earth. Were it not dimmer by intervening interstellar dust, it would be significantly brighter at magnitude 2.11.
Epsilon<sup>1</sup> Arae is an orange giant of apparent magnitude 4.1, 360 ± 10 light-years distant from Earth.
Eta Arae is an orange giant of apparent magnitude 3.76, located 299 ± 5 light-years distant from Earth. The star is now spinning so slowly that it takes more than eleven years to complete a single rotation.
GX 339-4 (V821 Arae) is a moderately strong variable galactic low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) source and black-hole candidate that flares from time to time. From spectroscopic measurements, the mass of the black-hole was found to be at least of 5.8 solar masses.
Exoplanets have been discovered in seven star systems in the constellation. Mu Arae (Cervantes) is a sunlike star that hosts four planets. HD 152079 is a sunlike star with a jupiter-like planet with an orbital period of 2097 ± 930 days. HD 154672 is an ageing sunlike star with a Hot Jupiter. HD 154857 is a sunlike star with one confirmed and one suspected planet. HD 156411 is a star hotter and larger than the sun with a gas giant planet in orbit. Gliese 674 is a nearby red dwarf star with a planet. Gliese 676 is a binary star system composed of two red dwarves with four planets. Deep-sky objects galaxy taken by Hubble.]]
The northwest corner of Ara is crossed by the galactic plane of the Milky Way and contains several open clusters (notably NGC 6200) and diffuse nebulae (including the bright cluster/nebula pair NGC 6188 and NGC 6193). The brightest of the globular clusters, sixth magnitude NGC 6397, lies at a distance of just , making it one of the closest globular clusters to the Solar System.
Ara also contains Westerlund 1, a super star cluster containing itself the possible red supergiant Westerlund 1-237 and the red supergiant Westerlund 1-26. The latter is one of the largest stars known with an estimate varying between and .
Although Ara lies close to the heart of the Milky Way, two spiral galaxies (NGC 6215 and NGC 6221) are visible near star Eta Arae.
Open clusters
* NGC 6193 is an open cluster containing approximately 30 stars with an overall magnitude of 5.0 and a size of 0.25 square degrees, about half the size of the full Moon. It is approximately 4200 light-years from Earth. It has one bright member, a double star with a blue-white hued primary of magnitude 5.6 and a secondary of magnitude 6.9. NGC 6193 is surrounded by NGC 6188, a faint nebula only normally visible in long-exposure photographs.
* NGC 6200
* NGC 6204
* NGC 6208
* NGC 6250
* NGC 6253
* IC 4651
Globular clusters
* NGC 6352
* NGC 6362
* NGC 6397 is a globular cluster with an overall magnitude of 6.0; it is visible to the naked eye under exceptionally dark skies and is normally visible in binoculars. It is a fairly close globular cluster, at a distance of 10,500 light-years. Planetary Nebulae
* The Stingray Nebula (Hen 3–1357), the youngest known planetary nebula as of 2010, formed in Ara; the light from its formation was first observable around 1987.
* NGC 6326. A planetary nebula that might have a binary system at its center.
Notes
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References
Bibliography
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Online sources
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External links
* [http://www.allthesky.com/constellations/norma/ The Deep Photographic Guide to the Constellations: Ara]
* [https://iconographic.warburg.sas.ac.uk/category/vpc-taxonomy-017077 Warburg Institute Iconographic Database (medieval and early modern images of Ara)]
Category:Constellations
Category:Southern constellations
Category:Constellations listed by Ptolemy | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ara_(constellation) | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.183109 |
1928 | Auriga (disambiguation) | Auriga is a constellation.
Auriga or AURIGA may also refer to:
Auriga (slave), a Roman charioteer
HMS Auriga (P419), a British submarine launched in 1945
Auriga of Delphi, name of the statue Charioteer of Delphi
USM Auriga, a fictional spaceship in the film Alien Resurrection
Auriga, a fictional planet in the Endless franchise by Amplitude Studios
AURIGA, a gravitational wave detector in Italy
Auriga-1.2V (Аурига-1.2В), a Russian satellite communications system, and a component of the MK VTR-016 (МК ВТР-016) mobile video transmission system
, a number of steamships with this name; it is also the name of a diesel ship (MSC Orion-class container ship) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auriga_(disambiguation) | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.184692 |
1930 | Arkansas | Land of Opportunity (former)
| motto = Regnat populus (Latin: The People Rule)
| anthem = "Arkansas", "Arkansas (You Run Deep in Me)", "Oh, Arkansas", and "The Arkansas Traveler"
| Former = Arkansas Territory
| seat = Little Rock
| OfficialLang English
| population_demonym = ArkansanArkansawyerArkanite
| LargestCity = capital
| LargestCounty = Pulaski
| LargestMetro = Central Arkansas
Northwest Arkansas
| Governor =
| Lieutenant Governor =
| Legislature = Arkansas General Assembly
| Upperhouse = Senate
| Lowerhouse = House of Representatives
| Judiciary = Arkansas Supreme Court
| Senators =
| Representative = 4 Republicans
| postal_code = AR
| TradAbbreviation = Ark.
| area_rank = 29th
| area_total_km2 = 137,732
| area_total_sq_mi = 53,179
| area_land_km2 = 134,771
| area_land_sq_mi = 52,035
| area_water_km2 = 2,961
| area_water_sq_mi = 1,143
| area_water_percent = 2.15
| population_rank = 33rd
| population_as_of = 2024
| 2010Pop 3,088,354
| MedianHouseholdIncome $ (2<span>0</span>23)
| IncomeRank = 48th
| population_density_rank = 35th
| 2020Density = 22.4
| 2020DensityUS = 57.9
| AdmittanceOrder = 25th
| AdmittanceDate = June 15, 1836
| timezone1 = Central
| utc_offset1 = −06:00
| timezone1_DST = CDT
| utc_offset1_DST = −05:00
| Latitude = 33° 00′ N to 36° 30′ N
| Longitude = 89° 39′ W to 94° 37′ W
| width_km = 435
| width_mi = 270
| length_km = 386
| length_mi = 240
| elevation_max_point Mount Magazine
| elevation_max_m = 839
| elevation_max_ft = 2,753
| elevation_m = 200
| elevation_ft = 650
| elevation_min_point Ouachita River at It borders Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, Texas to the southwest, and Oklahoma to the west. Its name derives from the Osage language, and refers to their relatives, the Quapaw people. The state's diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the densely forested land in the south known as the Arkansas Timberlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta.
Previously part of French Louisiana and the Louisiana Purchase, the Territory of Arkansas was admitted to the Union as the 25th state on June 15, 1836. Much of the Delta had been developed for cotton plantations, and landowners there largely depended on enslaved African Americans' labor. In 1861, Arkansas seceded from the United States and joined the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. On returning to the Union in 1868, Arkansas continued to suffer economically, due to its overreliance on the large-scale plantation economy. Cotton remained the leading commodity crop, and the cotton market declined. Because farmers and businessmen did not diversify and there was little industrial investment, the state fell behind in economic opportunity. In the late 19th century, the state instituted various Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise and segregate the African-American population. White interests dominated Arkansas's politics, with disenfranchisement of African Americans and refusal to reapportion the legislature; only after the federal legislation passed were more African Americans able to vote. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Arkansas and particularly Little Rock were major battlegrounds for efforts to integrate schools. Following World War II in the 1940s, Arkansas began to diversify its economy and see prosperity. During the 1960s, the state became the base of the Walmart corporation, the world's largest company by revenue, headquartered in Bentonville.
Arkansas is the 29th largest by area and the 33rd most populous state, with a population of just over three million at the 2020 census. The capital and most populous city is Little Rock, in the central part of the state, a hub for transportation, business, culture, and government. The northwestern corner of the state, namely the Fayetteville–Springdale–Rogers Metropolitan Area, is a population, education, cultural, and economic center. The Fort Smith Metropolitan Area is also an economic center and is known for its historic sites related to western expansion and the persecution of Native Americans. The largest city in the state's eastern part is Jonesboro. The largest city in the state's southeastern part is Pine Bluff.
In the 21st century, Arkansas's economy is based on service industries, aircraft, poultry, steel, and tourism, along with important commodity crops of cotton, soybeans and rice. The state supports a network of public universities and colleges, including two major university systems: Arkansas State University System and University of Arkansas System. Arkansas's culture is observable in museums, theaters, novels, television shows, restaurants, and athletic venues across the state.
Etymology
The name Arkansas initially applied to the Arkansas River. It derives from a French term, Arcansas, their plural term for their transliteration of akansa, an Algonquian term for the Quapaw people, which is believed to translate to "south wind people." These were a Dhegiha Siouan-speaking people who settled in Arkansas around the 13th century. Kansa is likely also the root term for Kansas, which was named after the related Kaw people.
Despite this, the state's name is still frequently mispronounced, especially by non-Americans; in fact, it is spelled in Cyrillic with the pronunciation.
Citizens of the state of Kansas often pronounce the Arkansas River as , in a manner similar to the common pronunciation of the name of their state.}}
In 2007, the state legislature passed a non-binding resolution declaring that the possessive form of the state's name is ''Arkansas's'', which the state government has increasingly followed.History
Early history
s were constructed frequently during the Woodland and Mississippian periods.]]
Before European settlement of North America, Arkansas was inhabited by indigenous peoples for thousands of years. The Caddo, Osage, and Quapaw peoples encountered European explorers. The first of these Europeans was Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in 1541, who crossed the Mississippi and marched across central Arkansas and the Ozark Mountains. After finding nothing he considered of value and encountering native resistance the entire way, he and his men returned to the Mississippi River where de Soto fell ill. From his deathbed he ordered his men to massacre all the men of the nearby village of Anilco, who he feared had been plotting with a powerful polity down the Mississippi River, Quigualtam. His men obeyed and did not stop with the men, but were said to have massacred women and children as well. He died the following day in what is believed to be the vicinity of modern-day McArthur, Arkansas, in May 1542. His body was weighted down with sand and he was consigned to a watery grave in the Mississippi River under cover of darkness by his men. De Soto had attempted to deceive the native population into thinking he was an immortal deity, sun of the sun, in order to forestall attack by outraged Native Americans on his by then weakened and bedraggled army. In order to keep the ruse up, his men informed the locals that de Soto had ascended into the sky. His will at the time of his death listed "four Indian slaves, three horses and 700 hogs" which were auctioned off. The starving men, who had been living off maize stolen from natives, immediately started butchering the hogs and later, commanded by former aide-de-camp Moscoso, attempted an overland return to Mexico. They made it as far as Texas before running into territory too dry for maize farming and too thinly populated to sustain themselves by stealing food from the locals. The expedition promptly backtracked to Arkansas. After building a small fleet of boats they then headed down the Mississippi River and eventually on to Mexico by water.
Later explorers included the French Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet in 1673, and Frenchmen Robert La Salle and Henri de Tonti in 1681. Tonti established Arkansas Post at a Quapaw village in 1686, making it the first European settlement in the territory. The early Spanish or French explorers of the state gave it its name, which is probably a phonetic spelling of the Illinois tribe's name for the Quapaw people, who lived downriver from them. In April 1783, Arkansas saw its only battle of the American Revolutionary War, a brief siege of the post by British Captain James Colbert with the assistance of the Choctaw and Chickasaw.Purchase and statehood
]]
Napoleon Bonaparte sold French Louisiana to the United States in 1803, including all of Arkansas, in a transaction known today as the Louisiana Purchase. French soldiers remained as a garrison at Arkansas Post. Following the purchase, the balanced give-and-take relationship between settlers and Native Americans began to change all along the frontier, including in Arkansas. Following a controversy over allowing slavery in the territory, the Territory of Arkansas was organized on July 4, 1819.
Slavery became a wedge issue in Arkansas, forming a geographic divide that remained for decades. Owners and operators of the cotton plantation economy in southeast Arkansas firmly supported slavery, as they perceived slave labor as the best or "only" economically viable method of harvesting their commodity crops. The "hill country" of northwest Arkansas was unable to grow cotton and relied on a cash-scarce, subsistence farming economy.
at left with the present day state capitol building at right.]]
As European Americans settled throughout the East Coast and into the Midwest, in the 1830s the United States government forced the removal of many Native American tribes to Arkansas and Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.
Additional Native American removals began in earnest during the territorial period, with final Quapaw removal complete by 1833 as they were pushed into Indian Territory. The capital was relocated from Arkansas Post to Little Rock in 1821, during the territorial period.
When Arkansas applied for statehood, the slavery issue was again raised in Washington, D.C. Congress eventually approved the Arkansas Constitution after a 25-hour session, admitting Arkansas on June 15, 1836, as the 25th state and the 13th slave state, having a population of about 60,000. Arkansas struggled with taxation to support its new state government, a problem made worse by a state banking scandal and worse yet by the Panic of 1837.
Civil War and Reconstruction
, built ]]
In early antebellum Arkansas, the southeast Arkansas slave-based economy developed rapidly. On the eve of the American Civil War in 1860, enslaved African Americans numbered 111,115 people, just over 25% of the state's population. A plantation system based largely on cotton agriculture developed that, after the war, kept the state and region behind the nation for decades. The wealth developed among planters of southeast Arkansas caused a political rift between the northwest and southeast.
Many politicians were elected to office from the Family, the Southern rights political force in antebellum Arkansas. Residents generally wanted to avoid a civil war. When the Gulf states seceded in early 1861, delegates to a convention called to determine whether Arkansas should secede referred the question back to the voters for a referendum to be held in August. Passion for the Confederate cause waned after implementation of programs such as the draft, high taxes, and martial law.
Under the Military Reconstruction Act, Congress declared Arkansas restored to the Union in June 1868, after the Legislature accepted the 14th Amendment. The Republican-controlled reconstruction legislature established universal male suffrage (though temporarily disfranchising former Confederate Army officers, who were all Democrats), a public education system for blacks and whites, and passed general issues to improve the state and help more of the population. The State soon came under control of the Radical Republicans and Unionists, and led by Governor Powell Clayton, they presided over a time of great upheaval as Confederate sympathizers and the Ku Klux Klan fought the new developments, particularly voting rights for African Americans.
End of Reconstruction and late 19th century
In 1874, the Brooks-Baxter War, a political struggle between factions of the Republican Party shook Little Rock and the state governorship. It was settled only when President Ulysses S. Grant ordered Joseph Brooks to disperse his militant supporters.
Following the Brooks-Baxter War, a new state constitution was ratified, re-enfranchising former Confederates and effectively bringing an end to Reconstruction.
In 1881, the Arkansas state legislature enacted a bill that adopted an official pronunciation of the state's name, to combat a controversy then simmering. (See Law and Government below.)
After Reconstruction, the state began to receive more immigrants and migrants. Chinese, Italian, and Syrian men were recruited for farm labor in the developing Delta region. None of these nationalities stayed long at farm labor; the Chinese especially, as they quickly became small merchants in towns around the Delta. Many Chinese became such successful merchants in small towns that they were able to educate their children at college.
Construction of railroads enabled more farmers to get their products to market. It also brought new development into different parts of the state, including the Ozarks, where some areas were developed as resorts. In a few years at the end of the 19th century, for instance, Eureka Springs in Carroll County grew to 10,000 people, rapidly becoming a tourist destination and the fourth-largest city of the state. It featured newly constructed, elegant resort hotels and spas planned around its natural springs, considered to have healthful properties. The town's attractions included horse racing and other entertainment. It appealed to a wide variety of classes, becoming almost as popular as Hot Springs.
Rise of the Jim Crow laws and early 20th century
boys in Little Rock in 1938.]]
In the late 1880s, the worsening agricultural depression catalyzed Populist and third party movements, leading to interracial coalitions. Struggling to stay in power, in the 1890s the Democrats in Arkansas followed other Southern states in passing legislation and constitutional amendments that disfranchised blacks and poor whites. In 1891 state legislators passed a requirement for a literacy test, knowing it would exclude many blacks and whites. At the time, more than 25% of the population could neither read nor write. In 1892, they amended the state constitution to require a poll tax and more complex residency requirements, both of which adversely affected poor people and sharecroppers, forcing most blacks and many poor whites from voter rolls.
By 1900 the Democratic Party expanded use of the white primary in county and state elections, further denying blacks a part in the political process. Only in the primary was there any competition among candidates, as Democrats held all the power. The state was a Democratic one-party state for decades, until after passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 to enforce constitutional rights.
Between 1905 and 1911, Arkansas began to receive a small immigration of German, Slovak, and Scots-Irish from Europe. The German and Slovak peoples settled in the eastern part of the state known as the Prairie, and the Irish founded small communities in the southeast part of the state. The Germans were mostly Lutheran and the Slovaks were primarily Catholic. The Irish were mostly Protestant from Ulster, of Scots and Northern Borders descent. Some early 20th-century immigration included people from eastern Europe. Together, these immigrants made the Delta more diverse than the rest of the state. In the same years, some black migrants moved into the area because of opportunities to develop the bottomlands and own their own property.
Black sharecroppers began to try to organize a farmers' union after World WarI. They were seeking better conditions of payment and accounting from white landowners of the area cotton plantations. Whites resisted any change and often tried to break up their meetings. On September 30, 1919, two white men, including a local deputy, tried to break up a meeting of black sharecroppers who were trying to organize a farmers' union. After a white deputy was killed in a confrontation with guards at the meeting, word spread to town and around the area. Hundreds of whites from Phillips and neighboring areas rushed to suppress the blacks, and started attacking blacks at large. Governor Charles Hillman Brough requested federal troops to stop what was called the Elaine massacre. White mobs spread throughout the county, killing an estimated 237 blacks before most of the violence was suppressed after October 1. Five whites also died in the incident. The governor accompanied the troops to the scene; President Woodrow Wilson had approved their use.
The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 flooded the areas along the Ouachita Rivers along with many other rivers.
Based on the order of President Franklin D. Roosevelt given shortly after Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, nearly 16,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from the West Coast of the United States and incarcerated in two internment camps in the Arkansas Delta. The Rohwer Camp in Desha County operated from September 1942 to November 1945 and at its peak interned 8,475 prisoners.Geography
in Boxley Valley]]
Boundaries
Arkansas borders Louisiana to the south, Texas to the southwest, Oklahoma to the west, Missouri to the north, and Tennessee and Mississippi to the east. The United States Census Bureau classifies Arkansas as a southern state, sub-categorized among the West South Central States. The highlands are part of the Southern Interior Highlands, including The Ozarks and the Ouachita Mountains. The southern lowlands include the Gulf Coastal Plain and the Arkansas Delta. This split can yield to a regional division into northwest, southwest, northeast, southeast, and central Arkansas. These regions are broad and not defined along county lines. Arkansas has seven distinct natural regions: the Ozark Mountains, Ouachita Mountains, Arkansas River Valley, Gulf Coastal Plain, Crowley's Ridge, and the Arkansas Delta, with Central Arkansas sometimes included as a blend of multiple regions.
are in stark contrast to the northwestern part of the state.]]
The southeastern part of Arkansas along the Mississippi Alluvial Plain is sometimes called the Arkansas Delta. This region is a flat landscape of rich alluvial soils formed by repeated flooding of the adjacent Mississippi. Farther from the river, in the southeastern part of the state, the Grand Prairie has a more undulating landscape. Both are fertile agricultural areas. The Delta region is bisected by a geological formation known as Crowley's Ridge. A narrow band of rolling hills, Crowley's Ridge rises above the surrounding alluvial plain and underlies many of eastern Arkansas's major towns.
Northwest Arkansas is part of the Ozark Plateau including the Ozark Mountains, to the south are the Ouachita Mountains, and these regions are divided by the Arkansas River; the southern and eastern parts of Arkansas are called the Lowlands. These mountain ranges are part of the U.S. Interior Highlands region, the only major mountainous region between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian Mountains. The state's highest point is Mount Magazine in the Ouachita Mountains, which is above sea level. Arkansas is home to a dozen Wilderness Areas totaling . These areas are set aside for outdoor recreation and are open to hunting, fishing, hiking, and primitive camping. No mechanized vehicles nor developed campgrounds are allowed in these areas.
Hydrology
is one of many attractions that give the state its nickname, The Natural State]]
Arkansas has many rivers, lakes, and reservoirs within or along its borders. Major tributaries to the Mississippi River include the Arkansas River, the White River, and the St. Francis River. The Arkansas is fed by the Mulberry and Fourche LaFave Rivers in the Arkansas River Valley, which is also home to Lake Dardanelle. The Buffalo, Little Red, Black and Cache Rivers are all tributaries to the White River, which also empties into the Mississippi. Bayou Bartholomew and the Saline, Little Missouri, and Caddo Rivers are all tributaries to the Ouachita River in south Arkansas, which empties into the Mississippi in Louisiana. The Red River briefly forms the state's boundary with Texas. Arkansas has few natural lakes and many reservoirs, such as Bull Shoals Lake, Lake Ouachita, Greers Ferry Lake, Millwood Lake, Beaver Lake, Norfork Lake, DeGray Lake, and Lake Conway.
Flora and fauna
in eastern Arkansas]]
Arkansas's mix of warm temperate moist forest and subtropical bottomland is divided into three broad ecoregions: the Ozark, Ouachita-Appalachian Forests, the Mississippi Alluvial and Southeast USA Coastal Plains, and the Southeastern USA Plains. The state is further divided into seven subregions: the Arkansas Valley, Boston Mountains, Mississippi Alluvial Plain, Mississippi Valley Loess Plain, Ozark Highlands, Ouachita Mountains, and the South Central Plains. A 2010 United States Forest Service survey determined of Arkansas's land is forestland, or 56% of the state's total area. Dominant species in Arkansas's forests include Quercus (oak), Carya (hickory), Pinus echinata (shortleaf pine) and Pinus taeda (loblolly pine).
Arkansas's plant life varies with its climate and elevation. The pine belt stretching from the Arkansas delta to Texas consists of dense oak-hickory-pine growth. Lumbering and paper milling activity is active throughout the region. In eastern Arkansas, one can find Taxodium (cypress), Quercus nigra (water oaks), and hickories with their roots submerged in the Mississippi Valley bayous indicative of the Deep South. Saw palmetto and needle palm both range into Arkansas. Nearby Crowley's Ridge is the only home of the tulip tree in the state, and generally hosts more northeastern plant life such as the beech tree. The northwestern highlands are covered in an oak-hickory mixture, with Ozark white cedars, cornus (dogwoods), and Cercis canadensis (redbuds) also present. The higher peaks in the Arkansas River Valley play host to scores of ferns, including the Physematium scopulinum and Adiantum (maidenhair fern) on Mount Magazine. The white-tailed deer is the official state mammal.
Climate
in Hempstead County]]
Arkansas generally has a humid subtropical climate. While not bordering the Gulf of Mexico, Arkansas, is still close enough to the warm, large body of water for it to influence the weather in the state. Generally, Arkansas, has hot, humid summers and slightly drier, mild to cool winters. In Little Rock, the daily high temperatures average around with lows around in July. In January highs average around and lows around . In Siloam Springs in the northwest part of the state, the average high and low temperatures in July are and in January the average high and low are . Annual precipitation throughout the state averages between about ; it is somewhat wetter in the south and drier in the northern part of the state. Snowfall is infrequent but most common in the northern half of the state.
Arkansas is known for extreme weather and frequent storms. A typical year brings thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hail. Occasional cold snaps stand to bring varying amounts of snow, as well as ice storms. Between both the Great Plains and the Gulf States, Arkansas, receives around 60 days of thunderstorms. Arkansas is located in Dixie alley, and very near tornado alley. As a result, a few of the most destructive tornadoes in U.S. history have struck the state. While sufficiently far from the coast to avoid a direct hit from a hurricane, Arkansas can often get the remnants of a tropical system, which dumps tremendous amounts of rain in a short time and often spawns smaller tornadoes.
{| class="wikitable" "text-align:center;font-size:90%;"|
| colspan"14" style"text-align:center;font-size:120%;background:#E8EAFA;"|Monthly Normal High and Low Temperatures For Various Arkansas Cities
|-
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| City
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Jan
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Feb
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Mar
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Apr
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| May
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Jun
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Jul
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Aug
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Sep
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Oct
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Nov
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Dec
! style="background:#e5afaa; color:Black; height:17px;"| Avg
|-
! style"background:#f8f3ca; color:Black; height:16px;"| Fayetteville
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 44/24<br />(7/-4)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 51/29<br />(10/-2)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 59/38<br />(15/3)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 69/46<br />(20/8)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 76/55<br />(24/13)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 84/64<br />(29/18)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 89/69<br />(32/20)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 89/67<br />(32/19)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 81/59<br />(27/15)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 70/47<br />(21/9)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 57/37<br />(14/3)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 48/28<br />(9/-2)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 68/47<br />(20/8)
|-
! style"background:#c5dfe1; color:Black; height:16px;"| Jonesboro
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 45/26<br />(7/-3)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 51/30<br />(11/-1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 61/40<br />(16/4)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 71/49<br />(22/9)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 80/58<br />(26/15)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 88/67<br />(31/19)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 92/71<br />(34/22)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 91/69<br />(33/20)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 84/61<br />(29/16)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 74/49<br />(23/9)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 60/39<br />(15/4)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 49/30<br />(10/-1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 71/49<br />(21/9)
|-
! style"background:#f8f3ca; color:Black; height:16px;"| Little Rock
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 51/31<br />(11/-1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 55/35<br />(13/2)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 64/43<br />(18/6)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 73/51<br />(23/11)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 81/61<br />(27/16)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 89/69<br />(32/21)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 93/73<br />(34/23)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 93/72<br />(34/22)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 86/65<br />(30/18)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 75/53<br />(24/12)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 63/42<br />(17/6)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 52/34<br />(11/1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 73/51<br />(23/11)
|-
! style"background:#c5dfe1; color:Black; height:16px;"| Texarkana
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 53/31<br />(11/-1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 58/34<br />(15/1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 67/42<br />(19/5)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 75/50<br />(24/10)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 82/60<br />(28/16)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 89/68<br />(32/20)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 93/72<br />(34/22)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 93/71<br />(34/21)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 86/64<br />(30/18)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 76/52<br />(25/11)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 64/41<br />(18/5)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 55/33<br />(13/1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 74/52<br />(23/11)
|-
! style"background:#f8f3ca; color:Black; height:16px;"| Monticello
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 52/30<br />(11/-1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 58/34<br />(14/1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 66/43<br />(19/6)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 74/49<br />(23/10)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 82/59<br />(28/15)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 89/66<br />(32/19)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 92/70<br />(34/21)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 92/68<br />(33/20)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 86/62<br />(30/17)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 76/50<br />(25/10)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 64/41<br />(18/5)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 55/34<br />(13/1)
| style="text-align:center; background:#f8f3ca; color:Black;"| 74/51<br />(23/10)
|-
! style"background:#c5dfe1; color:Black; height:16px;"| Fort Smith
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 48/27<br />(8/-2)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 54/32<br />(12/0)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 64/40<br />(17/4)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 73/49<br />(22/9)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 80/58<br />(26/14)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 87/67<br />(30/19)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 92/71<br />(33/21)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 92/70<br />(33/21)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 84/62<br />(29/17)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 75/50<br />(23/10)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 61/39<br />(16/4)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 50/31<br />(10/0)
| style="text-align:center; background:#c5dfe1; color:Black;"| 72/50<br />(22/10)
|-
| style"text-align:center;" colspan"14"| Average high °F/average low °F (average high °C/average low°C)
|}
Cities and towns
in Rison]]
Little Rock has been Arkansas's capital city since 1821 when it replaced Arkansas Post as the capital of the Territory of Arkansas. The state capitol was moved to Hot Springs and later Washington during the American Civil War when the Union armies threatened the city in 1862, and state government did not return to Little Rock until after the war ended. Today, the Little Rock–North Little Rock–Conway metropolitan area is the largest in the state, with a population of 724,385 in 2013.
The Fayetteville–Springdale–Rogers Metropolitan Area is the second-largest metropolitan area in Arkansas, growing at the fastest rate due to the influx of businesses and the growth of the University of Arkansas and Walmart.
The state has eight cities with populations above 50,000 (based on 2010 census). In descending order of size, they are Little Rock, Fort Smith, Fayetteville, Springdale, Jonesboro, North Little Rock, Conway, and Rogers. Of these, only Fort Smith and Jonesboro are outside the two largest metropolitan areas. Other cities in Arkansas include Pine Bluff, Crossett, Bryant, Lake Village, Hot Springs, Bentonville, Texarkana, Sherwood, Jacksonville, Russellville, Bella Vista, West Memphis, Paragould, Cabot, Searcy, Van Buren, El Dorado, Blytheville, Harrison, Dumas, Rison, Warren, and Mountain Home.
County
| city_1 = Little Rock, ArkansasLittle Rock
| div_1 = Pulaski County, ArkansasPulaski
| pop_1 = 198,606
| img_1 = Little Rock.jpg
| city_2 = Fort Smith, ArkansasFort Smith
| div_2 = Sebastian County, ArkansasSebastian
| pop_2 = 88,037
| img_2 = Fort Smith, AR 002.jpg
| city_3 = Fayetteville, ArkansasFayetteville
| div_3 = Washington County, ArkansasWashington
| pop_3 = 85,257
| img_3 = Fayetteville, Arkansas skyline featuring University of Arkansas.jpg
| city_4 = Springdale, ArkansasSpringdale
| div_4 = Washington County, ArkansasWashington
| pop_4 = 79,599
| img_4 | city_5 Jonesboro, ArkansasJonesboro
| div_5 = Craighead County, ArkansasCraighead
| pop_5 = 75,866
| img_5 | city_6 Rogers, ArkansasRogers
| div_6 = Benton County, ArkansasBenton
| pop_6 = 66,430
| img_6 | city_7 North Little Rock, ArkansasNorth Little Rock
| div_7 = Pulaski County, ArkansasPulaski
| pop_7 = 65,911
| img_7 | city_8 Conway, ArkansasConway
| div_8 = Faulkner County, ArkansasFaulkner
| pop_8 = 65,782
| img_8 | city_9 Bentonville, ArkansasBentonville
| div_9 = Benton County, ArkansasBenton
| pop_9 = 49,298
| img_9 | city_10 Pine Bluff, ArkansasPine Bluff
| div_10 = Jefferson County, ArkansasJefferson
| pop_10 = 42,984
| img_10 | city_11 Hot Springs, ArkansasHot Springs
| div_11 = Garland County, ArkansasGarland
| pop_11 = 36,915
| img_11 | city_12 Benton, ArkansasBenton
| div_12 = Saline County, ArkansasSaline
| pop_12 = 35,789
| img_12 | city_13 Sherwood, ArkansasSherwood
| div_13 = Pulaski County, ArkansasPulaski
| pop_13 = 31,081
| img_13 | city_14 Texarkana, ArkansasTexarkana
| div_14 = Miller County, ArkansasMiller
| pop_14 = 30,259
| img_14 | city_15 Russellville, ArkansasRussellville
| div_15 = Pope County, ArkansasPope
| pop_15 = 29,318
| img_15 | city_16 Jacksonville, ArkansasJacksonville
| div_16 = Pulaski County, ArkansasPulaski
| pop_16 = 28,513
| img_16 | city_17 Bella Vista, ArkansasBella Vista
| div_17 = Benton County, ArkansasBenton
| pop_17 = 28,511
| img_17 | city_18 Paragould, ArkansasParagould
| div_18 = Greene County, ArkansasGreene
| pop_18 = 28,488
| img_18 | city_19 Cabot, ArkansasCabot
| div_19 = Lonoke County, ArkansasLonoke
| pop_19 = 26,141
| img_19 | city_20 West Memphis, ArkansasWest Memphis
| div_20 = Crittenden County, ArkansasCrittenden
| pop_20 = 24,860
| img_20 }}DemographicsPopulation
Right: Map showing population changes by county between 2000 and 2010. Blue indicates population gain, purple indicates population loss, and shade indicates magnitude.
}}
The United States Census Bureau estimated that the population of Arkansas was 3,017,804 on July 1, 2019, a 3.49% increase since the 2010 United States census. At the 2020 U.S. census, Arkansas had a resident population of 3,011,524.
From fewer than 15,000 in 1820, Arkansas's population grew to 52,240 during a special census in 1835, far exceeding the 40,000 required to apply for statehood. Following statehood in 1836, the population doubled each decade until the 1870 census conducted following the American Civil War. The state recorded growth in each successive decade, although it gradually slowed in the 20th century.
It recorded population losses in the 1950 and 1960 censuses. This outmigration was a result of multiple factors, including farm mechanization, decreasing labor demand, and young educated people leaving the state due to a lack of non-farming industry in the state. Arkansas again began to grow, recording positive growth rates ever since and exceeding two million by the 1980 census. Arkansas's rate of change, age distributions, and gender distributions mirror national averages. Minority group data also approximates national averages. There are fewer people in Arkansas of Hispanic or Latino origin than the national average. The center of population of Arkansas for 2000 was located in Perry County, near Nogal.
According to HUD's 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, there were an estimated 2,459 homeless people in Arkansas.
Race and ethnicity
Per the 2019 census estimates, Arkansas was 72.0% non-Hispanic white, 15.4% Black or African American, 0.5% American Indian and Alaska Native, 1.5% Asian, 0.4% Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, 0.1% some other race, 2.4% two or more races, and 7.7% Hispanic or Latin American of any race. In 2011, the state was 80.1% white (74.2% non-Hispanic white), 15.6% Black or African American, 0.9% American Indian and Alaska Native, 1.3% Asian, and 1.8% from two or more races. Hispanics or Latinos of any race made up 6.6% of the population. As of 2011, 39.0% of Arkansas's population younger than age1 were minorities.
{| class="wikitable sortable collapsible"; text-align:right; font-size:80%;"
|+ style="font-size:90%" |Ethnic composition as of the 2020 census
|-
! Race and ethnicity
! colspan"2" data-sort-typenumber |Alone
! colspan"2" data-sort-typenumber |Total
|-
| White (non-Hispanic)
|align=right|
|align=right|
|-
| African American (non-Hispanic)
|align=right|
|align=right|
|-
| Hispanic or Latino
|align=right|
|align=right|
|-
| Asian
|align=right|
|align=right|
|-
| Native American
|align=right|
|align=right|
|-
| Pacific Islander
|align=right|
|align=right|
|-
| Other
|align=right|
|align=right|
|}
thumb|187x187px|Map of counties in Arkansas by racial plurality, per the 2020 U.S. census
Non-Hispanic White
Black or African American
}}
{| class"wikitable sortable collapsible" style"font-size: 90%;"
|+ Arkansas Racial Breakdown of Population
|-
! Racial composition !! 1990 !! 2000!! 2010!! 2020
|-
| White || 82.7% || 80.0% || 77.0% || 70.2%
|-
| African American || 15.9% || 15.7% || 15.4% || 15.1%
|-
| Asian || 0.5% || 0.8% || 1.2% || 1.7%
|-
| Native || 0.5% || 0.7% || 0.8% || 0.9%
|-
| Native Hawaiian andother Pacific Islander || – || 0.1% || 0.2% || 0.5%
|-
| Other race || 0.3% || 1.5% || 3.4% || 4.5%
|-
| Two or more races || – || 1.3% || 2.0% || 7.1%
|}
European Americans have a strong presence in the northwestern Ozarks and the central part of the state. African Americans live mainly in the southern and eastern parts of the state. Arkansans of Irish, English and German ancestry are mostly found in the far northwestern Ozarks near the Missouri border. Ancestors of the Irish in the Ozarks were chiefly Scots-Irish, Protestants from Northern Ireland, the Scottish lowlands and northern England part of the largest group of immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland before the American Revolution. English and Scots-Irish immigrants settled throughout the back country of the South and in the more mountainous areas. Americans of English stock are found throughout the state.
A 2010 survey of the principal ancestries of Arkansas's residents revealed the following: 15.5% African American, 12.3% Irish, 11.5% German, 11.0% American, 10.1% English, 4.7% Mexican, 2.1% French, 1.7% Scottish, 1.7% Dutch, 1.6% Italian, and 1.4% Scots-Irish.
Most people identifying as "American" are of English descent or Scots-Irish descent. Their families have been in the state so long, in many cases since before statehood, that they choose to identify simply as having American ancestry or do not in fact know their ancestry. Their ancestry primarily goes back to the original 13 colonies and for this reason many of them today simply claim American ancestry. Many people who identify as of Irish descent are in fact of Scots-Irish descent.
According to the American Immigration Council, in 2015, the top countries of origin for Arkansas' immigrants were Mexico, El Salvador, India, Vietnam, and Guatemala.
According to the 2006–2008 American Community Survey, 93.8% of Arkansas's population (over the age of five) spoke only English at home. About 4.5% of the state's population spoke Spanish at home. About 0.7% of the state's population spoke another Indo-European language. About 0.8% of the state's population spoke an Asian language, and 0.2% spoke other languages.Religion
}}
Like most other Southern states, Arkansas is part of the Bible Belt and predominantly Protestant. The largest denominations by number of adherents in 2010 were the Southern Baptist Convention with 661,382; the United Methodist Church with 158,574; non-denominational Evangelical Protestants with 129,638; the Catholic Church with 122,662; and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with 31,254. Other religions include Islam, Judaism, Wicca/Paganism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and some residents have no religious affiliation.
In 2014, the Pew Research Center determined that 79% of the population was Christian, dominated by evangelicals in the Southern Baptist and independent Baptist churches. In contrast with many other states, the Catholic Church as of 2014 was not the largest Christian denomination in Arkansas. Of the unaffiliated population, 2% were atheist in 2014. By 2020, the Public Religion Research Institute determined 71% of the population was Christian. Arkansas continued to be dominated by evangelicals, followed by mainline Protestants and historically black or African American churches.
Economy
in Little Rock is the state's tallest building.]]
Once a state with a cashless society in the uplands and plantation agriculture in the lowlands, Arkansas's economy has evolved and diversified. The state's gross domestic product (GDP) was $176.24billion in 2023. Six Fortune 500 companies are based in Arkansas, including the world's #1 retailer, Walmart; Tyson Foods, J.B. Hunt, Dillard's, Murphy USA, and Windstream are also headquartered in the state. The per capita personal income in 2023 was $54,347, ranking 46th in the nation, and the median household income was $55,432, which ranked 47th. The state's agriculture outputs are poultry and eggs, soybeans, sorghum, cattle, cotton, rice, hogs, and milk. Its industrial outputs are food processing, electric equipment, fabricated metal products, machinery, and paper products. Arkansas's mines produce natural gas, oil, crushed stone, bromine, and vanadium. According to CNBC, Arkansas is the 20th-best state for business, with the 2nd-lowest cost of doing business, 5th-lowest cost of living, 11th-best workforce, 20th-best economic climate, 28th-best-educated workforce, 31st-best infrastructure and the 32nd-friendliest regulatory environment. Arkansas gained 12 spots in the best state for business rankings since 2011. As of 2014, it was the most affordable state to live in.
As of July 2023, the state's unemployment rate was 2.6%; the preliminary rate for December 2023 is 3.4%.
Industry and commerce
Arkansas's earliest industries were fur trading and agriculture, with development of cotton plantations in the areas near the Mississippi River. They were dependent on slave labor through the American Civil War.
Today only about three percent of the population are employed in the agricultural sector, it remains a major part of the state's economy, ranking 13th in the nation in the value of products sold. Arkansas is the nation's largest producer of rice, broilers, and turkeys, and ranks in the top three for cotton, pullets, and aquaculture (catfish). Automobile parts manufacturers have opened factories in eastern Arkansas to support auto plants in other states. Bauxite was formerly a large part of the state's economy, mined mostly around Saline County.
Tourism is also very important to the Arkansas economy; the official state nickname "The Natural State" was created for state tourism advertising in the 1970s, and is still used to this day. The state maintains 52 state parks and the National Park Service maintains seven properties in Arkansas. The completion of the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock has drawn many visitors to the city and revitalized the nearby River Market District. Many cities also hold festivals, which draw tourists to Arkansas culture, such as The Bradley County Pink Tomato Festival in Warren, King Biscuit Blues Festival, Ozark Folk Festival, Toad Suck Daze, and Tontitown Grape Festival.Transportation
crosses over the Mississippi River into Shives.]]
Transportation in Arkansas is overseen by the Arkansas Department of Transportation (ArDOT), headquartered in Little Rock. Several main corridors pass through Little Rock, including Interstate30 (I-30) and I-40 (the nation's 3rd-busiest trucking corridor). Arkansas first designated a state highway system in 1924, and first numbered its roads in 1926. Arkansas had one of the first paved roads, the Dollarway Road, and one of the first members of the Interstate Highway System. The state maintains a large system of state highways today, in addition to eight Interstates and 20 U.S. Routes.
In northeast Arkansas, I-55 travels north from Memphis to Missouri, with a new spur to Jonesboro (I-555). Northwest Arkansas is served by the segment of I-49 from Fort Smith to the beginning of the Bella Vista Bypass. This segment of I-49 currently follows mostly the same route as the former section of I-540 that extended north of I-40. The state also has the 13th largest state highway system in the nation.
]]
Arkansas is served by of railroad track divided among twenty-six railroad companies including three Class I railroads. Freight railroads are concentrated in southeast Arkansas to serve the industries in the region. The Texas Eagle, an Amtrak passenger train, serves five stations in the state Walnut Ridge, Little Rock, Malvern, Arkadelphia, and Texarkana.
Arkansas also benefits from the use of its rivers for commerce. The Mississippi River and Arkansas River are both major rivers. The United States Army Corps of Engineers maintains the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System, allowing barge traffic up the Arkansas River to the Port of Catoosa in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
There are four airports with commercial service: Clinton National Airport (formerly Little Rock National Airport or Adams Field), Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, Fort Smith Regional Airport, and Texarkana Regional Airport, with dozens of smaller airports in the state.
Intercity bus services across the state are provided by Flixbus, Greyhound Lines, and Jefferson Lines.
Public transit and community transport services for the elderly or those with developmental disabilities are provided by agencies such as the Central Arkansas Transit Authority and the Ozark Regional Transit, organizations that are part of the Arkansas Transit Association.
{| class"collapsible collapsed" style"border:1px #aaa solid; width:50em; margin:0.2em auto"
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! Local transit map
|-
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}}
|}
Government
As with the federal government of the United States, political power in Arkansas is divided into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. Each officer's term is four years long. Office holders are term-limited to two full terms plus any partial terms before the first full term.
Executive
The governor of Arkansas is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, who was inaugurated on January 10, 2023. The six other elected executive positions in Arkansas are lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, treasurer, auditor, and land commissioner. The governor also appoints the leaders of various state boards, committees, and departments. Arkansas governors served two-year terms until a referendum lengthened the term to four years, effective with the 1986 election. Individuals elected to these offices are limited to a lifetime total of two four-year terms per office.
In Arkansas, the lieutenant governor is elected separately from the governor and thus can be from a different political party.Legislative
The Arkansas General Assembly is the state's bicameral bodies of legislators, composed of the Senate and House of Representatives. The Senate contains 35 members from districts of approximately equal population. These districts are redrawn decennially with each US census, and in election years ending in "2", the entire body is put up for reelection. Following the election, half of the seats are designated as two-year seats and are up for reelection again in two years, these "half-terms" do not count against a legislator's term limits. The remaining half serve a full four-year term. This staggers elections such that half the body is up for reelection every two years and allows for complete body turnover following redistricting. Arkansas voters elected a 21–14 Republican majority in the Senate in 2012. Arkansas House members can serve a maximum of three two-year terms. House districts are redistricted by the Arkansas Board of Apportionment. In the 2012 elections, Republicans gained a 51–49 majority in the House of Representatives.
The Republican Party majority status in the Arkansas State House of Representatives after the 2012 elections, is the party's first since 1874. Arkansas was the last state of the old Confederacy to not have Republican control of either chamber of its house since the American Civil War.
Following the term limits changes, studies have shown that lobbyists have become less influential in state politics. Legislative staff, not subject to term limits, have acquired additional power and influence due to the high rate of elected official turnover.
Judicial
Arkansas's judicial branch has five court systems: Arkansas Supreme Court, Arkansas Court of Appeals, Circuit Courts, District Courts and City Courts.
Most cases begin in district court, which is subdivided into state district court and local district court. State district courts exercise district-wide jurisdiction over the districts created by the General Assembly, and local district courts are presided over by part-time judges who may privately practice law. 25 state district court judges preside over 15 districts, with more districts created in 2013 and 2017. There are 28 judicial circuits of Circuit Court, with each contains five subdivisions: criminal, civil, probate, domestic relations, and juvenile court. The jurisdiction of the Arkansas Court of Appeals is determined by the Arkansas Supreme Court, and there is no right of appeal from the Court of Appeals to the high court. The Arkansas Supreme Court can review Court of Appeals cases upon application by either a party to the litigation, upon request by the Court of Appeals, or if the Arkansas Supreme Court feels the case should have been initially assigned to it. The twelve judges of the Arkansas Court of Appeals are elected from judicial districts to renewable six-year terms.
The Arkansas Supreme Court is the court of last resort in the state, composed of seven justices elected to eight-year terms. Established by the Arkansas Constitution in 1836, the court's decisions can be appealed to only the Supreme Court of the United States.
Federal
Both Arkansas's U.S. senators, John Boozman and Tom Cotton, are Republicans. The state has four seats in U.S. House of Representatives. All four seats are held by Republicans: Rick Crawford (1st district), French Hill (2nd district), Steve Womack (3rd district), and Bruce Westerman (4th district).Politics
{| class=wikitable floatright"
! colspan 6 | Party registration as of October 3, 2024
|-
! colspan = 2 | Party
! Total voters
! Percentage
|-
|
| Nonpartisan
| align=center | 1,581,556
| align=center | 87.59%
|-
|
| Republican
| align=center | 140,291
| align=center | 7.47%
|-
|
| Democratic
| align=center | 88,969
| align=center | 4.89%
|-
|
|Other
| align=center | 851
| align=center | 0.05%
|-
! colspan = 2 | Total
! align=center | 1,811,667
! align=center | 100.00%
|}
in Little Rock]]
Arkansas governor Bill Clinton brought national attention to the state with a long speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention endorsing Michael Dukakis. Some journalists suggested the speech was a threat to his ambitions; Clinton defined it "a comedy of error, just one of those fluky things". He won the Democratic nomination for president in 1992. Presenting himself as a "New Democrat" and using incumbent George H. W. Bush's broken promise against him, Clinton won the 1992 presidential election with 43.0% of the vote to Bush's 37.5% and independent billionaire Ross Perot's 18.9%.
Most Republican strength traditionally lay mainly in the northwestern part of the state, particularly Fort Smith and Bentonville, as well as North Central Arkansas around the Mountain Home area. In the latter area, Republicans have been known to get 90% or more of the vote, while the rest of the state was more Democratic. After 2010, Republican strength expanded further to the Northeast and Southwest and into the Little Rock suburbs. The Democrats are mostly concentrated to central Little Rock, the Mississippi Delta, the Pine Bluff area, and the areas around the southern border with Louisiana.
Arkansas has elected only three Republicans to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction: Tim Hutchinson, who was defeated after one term by Mark Pryor; John Boozman, who defeated incumbent Blanche Lincoln; and Tom Cotton, who defeated Pryor in 2014. Before 2013, the General Assembly had not been controlled by the Republican Party since Reconstruction, with the GOP holding a 51-seat majority in the state House and a 21-seat (of 35) in the state Senate following victories in 2012. Arkansas was one of just three states among the states of the former Confederacy that sent two Democrats to the U.S. Senate (the others being Florida and Virginia) for any period during the first decade of the 21st century.
In 2010, Republicans captured three of the state's four seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 2012, they won election to all four House seats. Arkansas held the distinction of having a U.S. House delegation composed entirely of military veterans (Rick Crawford, Army; Tim Griffin, Army Reserve; Steve Womack, Army National Guard; Tom Cotton, Army). When Pryor was defeated in 2014, the entire congressional delegation was in GOP hands for the first time since Reconstruction.
Reflecting the state's large evangelical population, Arkansas has a strong social conservative bent. In the aftermath of the landmark Supreme Court decision ''Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Arkansas became one of nine states where abortion is banned. Under the Arkansas Constitution, Arkansas is a right to work state. Its voters passed a ban on same-sex marriage in 2004, with 75% voting yes, although that ban has been inactive since the Supreme Court protected same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges''.
Arkansas retains the death penalty. Authorized methods of execution include the electric chair.
Military
The Strategic Air Command facility of Little Rock Air Force Base was one of eighteen silos in the command of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing (308th SMW), specifically one of the nine silos within its 374th Strategic Missile Squadron (374th SMS). The squadron was responsible for Launch Complex 374–7, site of the 1980 explosion of a TitanII Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) in Damascus, Arkansas.TaxationTaxes are collected by the Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration.Health
, Little Rock]]
As of 2012, Arkansas, as with many Southern states, has a high incidence of premature death, infant mortality, cardiovascular deaths, and occupational fatalities compared to the rest of the United States. The state is tied for 43rd with New York in percentage of adults who regularly exercise. Arkansas is usually ranked as one of the least healthy states due to high obesity, smoking, and sedentary lifestyle rates,
The Arkansas Clean Indoor Air Act, a statewide smoking ban excluding bars and some restaurants, went into effect in 2006.
Healthcare in Arkansas is provided by a network of hospitals as members of the Arkansas Hospital Association. Major institutions with multiple branches include Baptist Health, Community Health Systems, and HealthSouth. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) in Little Rock operates the UAMS Medical Center, a teaching hospital ranked as high performing nationally in cancer and nephrology. The pediatric division of UAMS Medical Center is known as Arkansas Children's Hospital, nationally ranked in pediatric cardiology and heart surgery. Together, these two institutions are the state's only Level I trauma centers.Education
Arkansas has 1,064 state-funded kindergartens, elementary, junior and senior high schools.
The state supports a network of public universities and colleges, including two major university systems: Arkansas State University System and University of Arkansas System. The University of Arkansas, flagship campus of the University of Arkansas System in Fayetteville was ranked #63 among public schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Other public institutions include Arkansas State University, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Arkansas Tech University, Henderson State University, Southern Arkansas University, and University of Central Arkansas across the state. It is also home to 11 private colleges and universities including Hendrix College, one of the nation's top 100 liberal arts colleges, according to U.S. News & World Report.
In the 1920s the state required all children to attend public schools. The school year was set at 131 days, although some areas were unable to meet that requirement.
Generally prohibited in the West at large, school corporal punishment is not unusual in Arkansas, with 20,083 public school students paddled at least one time, according to government data for the 2011–12 school year.Media
<!-- see :Category:Mass media in Arkansas -->
As of 2010 many Arkansas local newspapers are owned by WEHCO Media, Alabama-based Lancaster Management, Kentucky-based Paxton Media Group, Missouri-based Rust Communications, Nevada-based Stephens Media, and New York-based GateHouse Media.Culture
at the Crawford County Courthouse in Van Buren, Arkansas]]
The culture of Arkansas includes distinct cuisine, dialect, and traditional festivals. Sports are also very important to the culture, including football, baseball, basketball, hunting, and fishing. Perhaps the best-known aspect of Arkansas's culture is the stereotype that its citizens are shiftless hillbillies. The reputation began when early explorers characterized the state as a savage wilderness full of outlaws and thieves. The most enduring icon of Arkansas's hillbilly reputation is The Arkansas Traveller, a painted depiction of a folk tale from the 1840s. Though intended to represent the divide between rich southeastern plantation Arkansas planters and the poor northwestern hill country, the meaning was twisted to represent a Northerner lost in the Ozarks on a white horse asking a backwoods Arkansan for directions. The state also suffers from the racial stigma common to former Confederate states, with historical events such as the Little Rock Nine adding to Arkansas's enduring image.
Art and history museums display pieces of cultural value for Arkansans and tourists to enjoy. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville was visited by 604,000 people in 2012, its first year. The museum includes walking trails and educational opportunities in addition to displaying over 450 works covering five centuries of American art. Several historic town sites have been restored as Arkansas state parks, including Historic Washington State Park, Powhatan Historic State Park, and Davidsonville Historic State Park.
Arkansas features a variety of native music across the state, ranging from the blues heritage of West Memphis, Pine Bluff, Helena–West Helena to rockabilly, bluegrass, and folk music from the Ozarks. Festivals such as the King Biscuit Blues Festival and Bikes, Blues, and BBQ pay homage to the history of blues in the state. The Ozark Folk Festival in Mountain View is a celebration of Ozark culture and often features folk and bluegrass musicians. Literature set in Arkansas such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and A Painted House by John Grisham describe the culture at various time periods.
Sports and recreation
of east Arkansas attract wintering waterfowl.]]
Sports have become an integral part of the culture of Arkansas, and her residents enjoy participating in, betting on, and spectating various events throughout the year.
Team sports and especially collegiate football are important to Arkansans. College football in Arkansas began from humble beginnings, when the University of Arkansas first fielded a team in 1894. Over the years, many Arkansans have looked to Arkansas Razorbacks football as the public image of the state. Although the University of Arkansas is based in Fayetteville, the Razorbacks have always played at least one game per season at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock in an effort to keep fan support in central and south Arkansas.
Arkansas State University became the second NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) (then known as Division I-A) team in the state in 1992 after playing in lower divisions for nearly two decades. The two schools have never played each other, due to the University of Arkansas's policy of not playing intrastate games. Two other campuses of the University of Arkansas System are Division I members. The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff is a member of the Southwestern Athletic Conference, a league whose members all play football in the second-level Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). The University of Arkansas at Little Rock, known for sports purposes as Little Rock, joined the Ohio Valley Conference in 2022 after playing in the Sun Belt Conference; unlike many other OVC members, it does not field a football program. The state's other DivisionI member is the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), which joined the ASUN Conference in 2021 after leaving the FCS Southland Conference. Because the ASUN does not plan to start FCS football competition until at least 2022, UCA football is competing in the Western Athletic Conference as part of a formal football partnership between the two leagues. Seven of Arkansas's smaller colleges play in NCAA Division II, with six in the Great American Conference and one in the Lone Star Conference. Two other small Arkansas colleges compete in NCAA Division III, in which athletic scholarships are prohibited. High school football also began to grow in Arkansas in the early 20th century.
Baseball runs deep in Arkansas and was popular before the state hosted Major League Baseball (MLB) spring training in Hot Springs from 1886 to the 1920s. Two minor league teams are based in the state. The Arkansas Travelers play at Dickey–Stephens Park in North Little Rock, and the Northwest Arkansas Naturals play in Arvest Ballpark in Springdale. Both teams compete in Double-A Central.
Hunting continues in the state. The state created the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission in 1915 to regulate hunting. Today a significant portion of Arkansas's population participates in hunting duck in the Mississippi flyway and deer across the state. Ducks Unlimited has called Stuttgart, Arkansas, "the epicenter of the duck universe". Millions of acres of public land are available for both bow and modern gun hunters. and the sport and the state have benefited from the creation of reservoirs across the state. Following the completion of Norfork Dam, the Norfork Tailwater and the White River have become a destination for trout fishers. Several smaller retirement communities such as Bull Shoals, Hot Springs Village, and Fairfield Bay have flourished due to their position on a fishing lake. The National Park Service has preserved the Buffalo National River in its natural state and fly fishers visit it annually.
Attractions
in Stone County]]
* Arkansas Post National Memorial at Gillett
* Blanchard Springs Caverns
* Buffalo National River
* Fort Smith National Historic Site
* Hot Springs National Park
* Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site
* Pea Ridge National Military Park
* President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home National Historic Site
* Arkansas State Capitol Building
* List of Arkansas state parks
See also
* Index of Arkansas-related articles
* Outline of Arkansas
* Spanish Empire
* History of Louisiana
* USS Arkansas, 5 ships
* <small></small>
* <small></small>
Notes
ReferencesBibliography*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* Further reading
* Blair, Diane D. & Jay Barth Arkansas Politics & Government: Do the People Rule? (2005)
* Deblack, Thomas A. With Fire and Sword: Arkansas, 1861–1874 (2003)
* Donovan, Timothy P. and Willard B. Gatewood Jr., eds. The Governors of Arkansas (1981)
* Dougan, Michael B. Confederate Arkansas (1982),
* Duvall, Leland. ed., Arkansas: Colony and State (1973)
* [https://books.google.com/books?iddvMZ_YNpYrYC&dqpeter+joseph+hamilton+reconstruction+period&pg=PP16 Hamilton, Peter Joseph. The Reconstruction Period] (1906), full length history of era; Dunning School approach; 570 pp; ch 13 on Arkansas
* Hanson, Gerald T. and Carl H. Moneyhon. Historical Atlas of Arkansas (1992)
* Key, V. O. Southern Politics (1949)
* Kirk, John A., Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940–1970 (2002).
* McMath, Sidney S. Promises Kept (2003)
* Moore, Waddy W. ed., Arkansas in the Gilded Age, 1874–1900 (1976).
* Peirce, Neal R. The Deep South States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Seven Deep South States (1974).
* Thompson, Brock. The Un-Natural State: Arkansas and the Queer South (2010)
* Thompson, George H. Arkansas and Reconstruction (1976)
* Whayne, Jeannie M. Arkansas Biography: A Collection of Notable Lives (2000)
* White, Lonnie J. Politics on the Southwestern Frontier: Arkansas Territory, 1819–1836 (1964)
* Williams, C. Fred. ed. A Documentary History Of Arkansas (2005)
External links
* [http://www.arkansas.gov/ Arkansas.gov]—Official State Website
* [http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/state-fact-sheets/state-data.aspx?StateFIPS05&StateNameArkansas#.U8FpBLH-ItU Arkansas State Facts from USDA]
* [http://www.arkansas.com Official State tourism website]
* [http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/ Encyclopedia of Arkansas]
* [http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/state/state_energy_profiles.cfm?sid=AR Energy & Environmental Data for Arkansas]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110104031416/http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/05000.html U.S. Census Bureau]
* [http://www2.census.gov/census_2000/datasets/demographic_profile/Arkansas/2kh05.pdf 2000 Census of Population and Housing for Arkansas], U.S. Census Bureau
* [http://www.usgs.gov/state/state.asp?State=AR USGS real-time, geographic, and other scientific resources of Arkansas]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120728123638/http://www.summercampsus.com/arkansas-summer-camps/ Arkansas Summer Camps]
* [http://www.arkshakes.com Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre]
*
*
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20081013051630/http://www.arkleg.state.ar.us/data/ar_code.asp Arkansas State Code (the state statutes of Arkansas)]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20150518075409/http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/Arkansas Arkansas State Databases]—Annotated list of searchable databases produced by Arkansas state agencies and compiled by the Government Documents Roundtable of the American Library Association.
The Natural State
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Category:1836 establishments in the United States
Category:Contiguous United States
Category:South Central United States
Category:Southern United States
Category:States and territories established in 1836
Category:States of the Confederate States of America
Category:States of the United States | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.290094 |
1931 | Atmosphere (disambiguation) | An atmosphere is a gas layer around a celestial body.
Atmosphere may also refer to:
Science
Atmosphere (unit), a unit of pressure
Atmosphere of Earth
Extraterrestrial atmospheres
Stellar atmosphere
Arts, entertainment, and media
Music
Groups
Atmosphere (music group), an American hip-hop duo from Minnesota
Atmosphere (Polish band)
Albums
Atmosphere (Atmosphere album) (1997)
Atmosphere (Eloy Fritsch album) (2003)
Atmosphere (Kaskade album) (2013), or the title song
Atmosphere (Sevenglory album) (2007)
Atmosphere, a 1969 album by Colours, produced by Dan Moore and Richard Delvy
Atmospheres (album) (2014)
Songs and orchestral pieces
"Atmosphere" (Drax Project song) (2023)
"Atmosphere" (Joy Division song) (1980)
"Atmosphere" (Kaskade song) (2013)
"Atmosphere" (Fisher and Kita Alexander song) (2023)
"Atmosphere" (1975), from Let's Take It to the Stage by Funkadelic
"Atmosphere" (2001), from Singularity by Joe Morris
"Atmosphere" (1984), by Russ Abbot
Atmosphères (1961), an orchestral piece by György Ligeti
Periodicals
Atmosphere (journal), an open access scientific journal
Atmosphere (magazine), the inflight magazine of Air Transat
Other uses in arts, entertainment, and media
Atmospheres (TV series)
Atmospheric theatre, a type of cinema architecture
Atmosphere, another term for a film extra
Atmosphere (literature), a literary term referring to the mood surrounding a story
Atmosphere (service), a video on-demand service that provides content in a business-to-business capacity
Other uses
Atmosphere (architecture and spatial design)
Atmosphere (Kolkata), a residential superstructure in India
Adobe Atmosphere, a computer graphics platform
Atmosphere Visual Effects, a Canadian company
See also
Atmosfear (disambiguation) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_(disambiguation) | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.294325 |
1933 | Apus | , genitive
| symbolism The Bird-of-Paradise
| dec to <!-- cites previous 2 sentences --> De Houtman included it in his southern star catalogue in 1603 under the Dutch name De Paradijs Voghel, "The Bird of Paradise", and Plancius called the constellation Paradysvogel Apis Indica; the first word is Dutch for "bird of paradise". Apis (Latin for "bee") is assumed to have been a typographical error for avis ("bird").
After its introduction on Plancius's globe, the constellation's first known appearance in a celestial atlas was in German cartographer Johann Bayer's Uranometria of 1603. The name Apus is derived from the Greek apous, meaning "without feet". This referred to the Western misconception that the bird-of-paradise had no feet, which arose because the only specimens available in the West had their feet and wings removed. Such specimens began to arrive in Europe in 1522, when the survivors of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition brought them home. Its position in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere means that the whole constellation is visible to observers south of 7°N. The official constellation boundaries, as set by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte in 1930, are defined by a polygon of six segments (illustrated in infobox). In the equatorial coordinate system, the right ascension coordinates of these borders lie between and , while the declination coordinates are between −67.48° and −83.12°.}} The five brightest stars are all red-tinged, which is unusual among constellations.
Alpha Apodis is an orange giant of spectral type K3III located 430 ± 20 light-years away from Earth, with an apparent magnitude of 3.8. It spent much of its life as a blue-white (B-type) main sequence star before expanding, cooling and brightening as it used up its core hydrogen. It has swollen to 48 times the Sun's diameter, and shines with a luminosity approximately 928 times that of the Sun, with a surface temperature of 4312 K. Beta Apodis is an orange giant 149 ± 2 light-years away, Gamma Apodis is a yellow giant of spectral type G8III located 150 ± 4 light-years away, Delta<sup>1</sup> is a red giant star of spectral type M4III located 630 ± 30 light-years away. with pulsations of multiple periods of 68.0, 94.9 and 101.7 days. Delta<sup>2</sup> is an orange giant star of spectral type K3III, located 550 ± 10 light-years away,
Eta Apodis is a white main sequence star located 140.8 ± 0.9 light-years distant.<!-- cites prev 2 sentences -->
Theta Apodis is a cool red giant of spectral type M7 III located 350 ± 30 light-years distant.—or approximately 4 months. NO Apodis is a red giant of spectral type M3III that varies between magnitudes 5.71 and 5.95. Located 780 ± 20 light-years distant, it shines with a luminosity estimated at 2059 times that of the Sun and has a surface temperature of 3568 K. R Apodis is a star that was given a variable star designation, yet has turned out not to be variable. Of magnitude 5.3, HD 134606 is a yellow sunlike star of spectral type G6IV that has begun expanding and cooling off the main sequence. Three planets orbit it with periods of 12, 59.5 and 459 days, successively larger as they are further away from the star. HD 137388 is another star—of spectral type K2IV—that is cooler than the Sun and has begun cooling off the main sequence. It has a planet that is 79 times as massive as the Earth and orbits its sun every 330 days at an average distance of 0.89 astronomical units (AU).Deep-sky objectsIC 4499 taken by Hubble Space Telescope.|altA spherical shaped group of a multitude of stars]]
The Milky Way covers much of the constellation's area. Of the deep-sky objects in Apus, there are two prominent globular clusters—NGC 6101 and IC 4499—and a large faint nebula that covers several degrees east of Beta and Gamma Apodis. NGC 6101 is a globular cluster of apparent magnitude 9.2 located around 50,000 light-years distant from Earth, which is around 160 light-years across. Around 13 billion years old, it contains a high concentration of massive bright stars known as blue stragglers, thought to be the result of two stars merging. IC 4499 is a loose globular cluster in the medium-far galactic halo; its apparent magnitude is 10.6.
The galaxies in the constellation are faint.<ref namehartungs/> IC 4633 is a very faint spiral galaxy surrounded by a vast amount of Milky Way line-of-sight integrated flux nebulae—large faint clouds thought to be lit by large numbers of stars.<ref nameimaging/>
See also
* IAU-recognized constellations
Notes
References
External links
* [http://www.allthesky.com/constellations/apus/constell.html The Deep Photographic Guide to the Constellations: Apus]
* [http://astrojan.nhely.hu/apus.htm The clickable Apus]
Category:Southern constellations
Category:Constellations listed by Petrus Plancius | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apus | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.310399 |
1934 | Abadan, Iran | Abadan|the administrative division of Khuzestan province|Abadan County}}
|settlement_type = City
|image_skyline =
| image_caption | image_seal
| seal_alt | image_shield
| shield_alt | nickname
| motto | image_map
| mapsize | map_caption
| mapsize1 | map_caption1
| pushpin_map = Iran#Persian Gulf
| pushpin_label_position = <!-- the position of the pushpin label: left, right, top, bottom, none -->
| pushpin_mapsize | pushpin_relief 1
| pushpin_map_caption = Location in Iran and Asia
| coordinates
| coordinates_footnotes
| subdivision_type = Country
| subdivision_name = Iran
| subdivision_type1 = Province
| subdivision_type2 = County
| subdivision_type3 = District
| subdivision_type4 | subdivision_name1 Khuzestan
| subdivision_name2 = Abadan
| subdivision_name3 = Central
| subdivision_name4 | established_title
| established_date | leader_title Mayor
| leader_name = Yasin Kavehpour
| leader_title2 = City Council chairman
| area_footnotes | area_magnitude
| area_land_km2 = 1275
| area_land_sq_mi | area_water_km2
| area_water_sq_mi | area_water_percent
| area_urban_km2 | area_metro_km2
| area_urban_sq_mi | elevation_footnotes
| elevation_m = 3
| elevation_ft | population_as_of 2016
| population_density_km2 = auto
| population_total = 231476
| population_footnotes The city is in the southwest of the county. It lies on Abadan Island ( long, 3–19 km or 2–12 miles wide). The island is bounded in the west by the Arvand waterway and to the east by the Bahmanshir outlet of the Karun River (the Arvand Rood), from the Persian Gulf, near the Iran–Iraq border. Abadan is 140 km from the provincial capital city of Ahvaz.EtymologyThe earliest mention of the island of Abadan, if not the port itself, is found in the works of the Greek geographer Marcian, who renders the name "Apphadana". Earlier, the classical geographer Ptolemy notes "Apphana" as an island off the mouth of the Tigris (which is where the modern Island of Abadan is located). An etymology for this name is presented by B. Farahvashi to be derived from the Persian word "ab" (water) and the root "pā" (guard, watch) thus "coastguard station").
History
Abadan is thought to have been further developed into a major port city under the Abbasids' rule. The city was then a commercial source of salt and woven mats. Politically, Abadan was often the subject of dispute between the nearby states. In 1847, Persia acquired it from the Ottoman Empire
It was not until the 20th century that rich oil fields were discovered in the area. On 16 July 1909, after secret negotiation with the British consul, Percy Cox, assisted by Arnold Wilson, and Sheik Khaz'al agreed to a rental agreement for the island, including Abadan. but more importantly, it was another event that kept the Islamic Revolution moving ahead. At the time, there was much confusion and misinformation about the perpetrators of the incident. The public largely put the blame on the local police chief and also the Shah and SAVAK. The reformist Sobh-e Emrooz newspaper in one of its editorials revealed that the Cinema Rex was burned down by radical Islamists. The newspaper was shut down immediately afterwards. Over time, the true culprits, radical Islamists, were apprehended, and the logic behind this act was revealed, as they were trying both to foment the general public to distrust the government even more, and perceived cinema as a link to the Americans. The fire was one of four during a short period in August, with other fires in Mashhad, Rizaiya, and Shiraz. Much of the city, including the oil refinery, which was the world's largest refinery with a capacity of 628,000 barrels per day, was badly damaged or destroyed by the siege and by bombing. Prior to the war, the city's civilian population was about 300,000, but at the war's end nearly the entire populace had sought refuge elsewhere in Iran.
After the war, the biggest concern was the rebuilding of Abadan's oil refinery, as it was operating at 10% of capacity due to damage. In 1993, the refinery began limited operation and the port reopened. By 1997, the refinery reached the same rate of production as before the war. Recently, Abadan has been the site of major labour activity as workers at the oil refineries in the city have staged walkouts and strikes to protest non-payment of wages and the political situation in the country.
<gallery widths"200px" heights"200px">
File:Exploded tank, remains in Abadan as symbol of Iran–Iraq War.jpg|The burnt-out shell of an Iraqi T-54/55 tank, now a monument to the Iran–Iraq War.|alt=
File:Abadan ruin.jpg|Ruins of a building in Abadan, which had suffered serious damages during the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88), including by Saddam's deadly chemical weapons.
File:Pictures From Iran E5329.jpg|Pictures From Iran E5329
File:Shah visits AbadanPetrochemical.jpg|Mohammad Reza Shah visits Abadan Petrochemical
File:Outdoor cinema in Abadan, Iran, 1960s.jpg|Outdoor cinema in Abadan, 1960s
</gallery>
Recent events
To honor the 100th anniversary of the refining of oil in Abadan, city officials are planning an oil museum. The Abadan oil refinery was featured on the reverse side of Iran's 100-rial banknotes printed in 1965 and from 1971 to 1973. Abadan today has been declared as a free zone city. The healthy relationship between Iran and Iraq has become one of the transit cities connecting both countries through a 40-minute drive.
Population
{| class="wikitable"
|+ Population
! Year!! People
|-
| 1910|| 400
|-
| 1949|| 173,000
|-
| 1956|| 220,000
|-
| 2001 || 206,073
|-
| 2006 || 217,988 The following census in 2011 counted 212,744 people in 55,318 households. The 2016 census measured the population of the city as 231,476 people in 66,470 households. Abadan Refinery is one of the largest in the world.
Only 9% of managers (of the oil company) were from Khuzestan. The proportion of natives of Tehran, the Caspian, Azerbaijan, and Kurdistan rose from 4% of blue collar workers to 22% of white collar workers from Esfhan and shiraz to 45% of managers, thus Arabic-speakers were concentrated on the lower rungs 4% of the work force. In general, Abadan is a city with a majority of the Persian population over 60% who have been influenced by Arabic culture, and the rest of the Azeri population is Kurds and... the native Arabic population is 4%-5% managers tended to be brought in from some distance. There is also a single Armenian church in the centre of the city, Saint Garapet church. Geography Climate The climate in Abadan is arid (Köppen climate classification BWh) and similar to Baghdad's, but slightly hotter due to Abadan's lower latitude. Summers are dry and extremely hot, with temperatures above almost daily and temperatures above can be almost common. Abadan is notably one of the few hottest populated places on earth and experiences a few sand and dust storms per year. Winters are mildly wet and spring-like, though subject to cold spells with night frost. However, winters in Abadan have no snow. Winter temperatures are around . The world's highest unconfirmed temperature was a temperature flare up during a heat burst in June 1967, with a temperature of . The lowest recorded temperature in the city range is . which was recorded on 20 January 1964 and 3 February 1967 while the highest is , recorded on 11 July 1951, 9 August 1981 and 5 August 2022.
* Abadan Oil Refining Co.
* Abadan Petrochemical Company
* Afra Arvand
* Homa Chemistry
* Iranol Oil Company
* KPC Karun
* Pars Opal Co.
* Pasargad Oil
* Shirin Diar Arvand Co.
* Tam Arvand Machine
* U-PVC Novin
* Vina Naghsh Industrial Group
* Yekta Tahviyeh Arvand Co.
Universities
* Abadan University of Medical Sciences
* Islamic Azad University of Abadan
* MehrArvand University
* Petroleum University of Technology
* PNU of Abadan
Main sights
Bridges
* Bahmanshir Bridge at Istgah-e Haft
* Imam Reza Cable Bridge
Mosques
* Rangooniha Mosque
Museums
* Abadan Museum
* Historical and Handwritten Documents Museum
* Abadan Gasoline House Museum
* Oil Museum of Abadan
Church
* St. Karapet Armenian Church
Cinema
* Cinema Naft
* Shirin Movie Theater
Notable people
<!-- Please respect alphabetical order. -->
* Ahmad Reza Abedzadeh – football player
* Sussan Babaie – art historian
* Patrik Baboumian – strongman
* Mohsen Bayatinia – football player
* Najaf Daryabandari – writer
* Parviz Dehdari – football coach
* Firoozeh Dumas – writer
* Bizhan Emkanian – actor
* Hamid Farrokhnezhad – actor
* Bahman Golbarnezhad – paralympic racing cyclist
* Farhad Hasanzadeh – poet
* Mehdi Hasheminasab – football player
* Hossein Kanaanizadegan – football player
* Abdolhassan Kazemi – retired football player
* Mojahed Khaziravi – football player
* Martik – singer
* Gholam Hossein Mazloumi – football coach
* Parviz Mazloumi – football coach
* Manouchehr Mohammadi – film producer
* Amir Naderi – director
* Hossein Nassim – water polo coach
* Abie Nathan – peace activist
* Zoya Pirzad – writer
* Hamid Rashidi – lawyer
* Nasser Taghvai – director
* Hossein Vafaei – snooker player
* Cyma Zarghami – TV producer
Transportation
By plane
The city is served by Abadan-Ayatollah Jami International Airport with flights on various commercial airlines.
By train
The nearest railway station is in Khorramshahr, about 10 km north of Abadan. Daytime trains from Ahvaz as well as overnight trains from Tehran and Mashhad are available.
Sport
Sanat Naft Abadan F.C., is a football club currently in the Iranian Football Premier League. Takhti Stadium, the main stadium is the city and the team.
Sister cities
* Karamay, China
* Borujerd, Iran
* Taormina, Sicily
See also
<!-- Please respect alphabetical order. -->
* Abadan Crisis
* Abadan crisis timeline
* Battle of Abadan
* Bechari House
* Bostan
* Iran–Iraq War
* Khorramshahr
* Shadegan
* Susangerd
* Tidal irrigation at Abadan island, Iran
Notes
Explanatory notes
Citations General and cited references *
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* Further reading*
External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20160305080725/http://www.abadanastro.ir/en.html Amateur Astronomers Association of Abadan]
* [http://www.abadan-ref.ir/ Abadan Oil Refinery] – Home page (Persian only)
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20050427111036/http://www.ostan-kz.ir/en/albumdetail_aen_i_1.html Abadan Photo Gallery from the Khuzestan Governorship]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110708033341/http://digitalspirit.blogspot.com/2007/10/in-south-east-of-iran-in-khuzistan.html Abadan's travel review]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20090701080543/http://www.put.ac.ir/WebUI/uniform/Default.aspx Petroleum University of Technology] (Abadan)
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20190703072510/http://abadan.ning.com/ Abadan Social Network]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20170710134034/http://www.arvanda.net/ Abadan Network]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20170928220109/http://vista-cafe.com/ VISTA Internet Cafe]
Category:Arab settlements in Khuzestan province
Category:Cities in Khuzestan province
Category:Populated places in Abadan County
Category:Shatt al-Arab basin | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abadan,_Iran | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.337808 |
1935 | Attorney | Attorney may refer to:
Lawyer
Attorney at law, in some jurisdictions
Attorney, one who has power of attorney
The Attorney, a 2013 South Korean film
See also
Attorney general, the principal legal officer of (or advisor to) a government
Attorney's fee, compensation for legal services
Attorney–client privilege
Clusia rosea, Scotch attorney, a tropical and sub-tropical flowering plant species | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.339480 |
1937 | Alexander Fleming | | image = Synthetic Production of Penicillin TR1468.jpg
| caption = Fleming in his laboratory,
| birth_date
| birth_place = Darvel, Ayrshire, Scotland
| death_date
| death_place = London, England
| resting_place = St Paul's Cathedral
| spouses =
*
}}
| field =
| alma_mater =
| work_institutions = St Mary's Hospital, London
| doctoral_advisor | doctoral_students
| known_for = Discovery of penicillin and lysozyme
| influences | influenced
| prizes =
Experiment By 1927, Fleming had been investigating the properties of staphylococci. He was already well known from his earlier work, and had developed a reputation as a brilliant researcher. In 1928, he studied the variation of Staphylococcus aureus grown under natural condition, after the work of Joseph Warwick Bigger, who discovered that the bacterium could grow into a variety of types (strains). On 3 September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory having spent a holiday with his family at Suffolk. Before leaving for his holiday, he inoculated staphylococci on culture plates and left them on a bench in a corner of his laboratory. On his return, Fleming noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus, and that the colonies of staphylococci immediately surrounding the fungus had been destroyed, whereas other staphylococci colonies farther away were normal, famously remarking "That's funny". Fleming showed the contaminated culture to his former assistant Merlin Pryce, who reminded him, "That's how you discovered lysozyme." He identified the mould as being from the genus Penicillium. He suspected it to be P. chrysogenum, but a colleague Charles J. La Touche identified it as P. rubrum. (It was later corrected as P. notatum and then officially accepted as P. chrysogenum; in 2011, it was resolved as P. rubens.)
]]
The laboratory in which Fleming discovered and tested penicillin is preserved as the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington. The source of the fungal contaminant was established in 1966 as coming from La Touche's room, which was directly below Fleming's.
Fleming grew the mould in a pure culture and found that the culture broth contained an antibacterial substance. He investigated its anti-bacterial effect on many organisms, and noticed that it affected bacteria such as staphylococci and many other Gram-positive pathogens that cause scarlet fever, pneumonia, meningitis and diphtheria, but not typhoid fever or paratyphoid fever, which are caused by Gram-negative bacteria, for which he was seeking a cure at the time. It also affected Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which causes gonorrhoea, although this bacterium is Gram-negative. After some months of calling it "mould juice" or "the inhibitor", he gave the name penicillin on 7 March 1929 for the antibacterial substance present in the mould. but little attention was paid to the article. His problem was the difficulty of producing penicillin in large amounts, and moreover, isolation of the main compound. Even with the help of Harold Raistrick and his team of biochemists at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, chemical purification was futile. "As a result, penicillin languished largely forgotten in the 1930s", as Milton Wainwright described. no one believed him. As Allison, his companion in both the Medical Research Club and international congress meeting, remarked the two occasions:<blockquote>[Fleming at the Medical Research Club meeting] suggested the possible value of penicillin for the treatment of infection in man. Again there was a total lack of interest and no discussion. Fleming was keenly disappointed, but worse was to follow. He read a paper on his work on penicillin at a meeting of the International Congress of Microbiology, attended by the foremost bacteriologists from all over the world. There was no support for his views on its possible future value for the prevention and treatment of human infections and discussion was minimal. Fleming bore these disappointments stoically, but they did not alter his views or deter him from continuing his investigation of penicillin. Shortly after the team published its first results in 1940, Fleming telephoned Howard Florey, Chain's head of department, to say that he would be visiting within the next few days. When Chain heard that Fleming was coming, he remarked "Good God! I thought he was dead."
Norman Heatley suggested transferring the active ingredient of penicillin back into water by changing its acidity. This produced enough of the drug to begin testing on animals. There were many more people involved in the Oxford team, and at one point the entire Sir William Dunn School of Pathology was involved in its production. After the team had developed a method of purifying penicillin to an effective first stable form in 1940, several clinical trials ensued, and their amazing success inspired the team to develop methods for mass production and mass distribution in 1945.
Fleming was modest about his part in the development of penicillin, describing his fame as the "Fleming Myth" and he praised Florey and Chain for transforming the laboratory curiosity into a practical drug. Fleming was the first to discover the properties of the active substance, giving him the privilege of naming it: penicillin. He also kept, grew, and distributed the original mould for twelve years, and continued until 1940 to try to get help from any chemist who had enough skill to make penicillin. Sir Henry Harris summed up the process in 1998 as: "Without Fleming, no Chain; without Chain, no Florey; without Florey, no Heatley; without Heatley, no penicillin." The discovery of penicillin and its subsequent development as a prescription drug mark the start of modern antibiotics.
Medical use and mass production
In his first clinical trial, Fleming treated his research scholar Stuart Craddock who had developed severe infection of the nasal antrum (sinusitis). The treatment started on 9 January 1929 but without any effect. It probably was due to the fact that the infection was with influenza bacillus (Haemophilus influenzae), the bacterium which he had found unsusceptible to penicillin. Although Wright reportedly said that it "seemed to work satisfactorily", there are no records of its specific use. Cecil George Paine, a pathologist at the Royal Infirmary in Sheffield and former student of Fleming, was the first to use penicillin successfully for medical treatment. He cured eye infections (conjunctivitis) of one adult and three infants (neonatal conjunctivitis) on 25 November 1930.
Fleming also successfully treated severe conjunctivitis in 1932. Keith Bernard Rogers, who had joined St Mary's as medical student in 1929, was captain of the London University rifle team and was about to participate in an inter-hospital rifle shooting competition when he developed conjunctivitis. Fleming applied his penicillin and cured Rogers before the competition. It is said that the "penicillin worked and the match was won." However, the report that "Keith was probably the first patient to be treated clinically with penicillin ointment" is no longer true as Paine's medical records showed up.
There is a popular assertion both in popular and scientific literature that Fleming largely abandoned penicillin work in the early 1930s. In his review of André Maurois's The Life of Sir Alexander Fleming, Discoverer of Penicillin, William L. Kissick went so far as to say that "Fleming had abandoned penicillin in 1932... Although the recipient of many honors and the author of much scientific work, Sir Alexander Fleming does not appear to be an ideal subject for a biography." This is false, as Fleming continued to pursue penicillin research. As late as in 1939, Fleming's notebook shows attempts to make better penicillin production using different media. As to the chemical isolation and purification, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford took up the research to mass-produce it, which they achieved with support from World War II military projects under the British and US governments.
By mid-1942, the Oxford team produced the pure penicillin compound as yellow powder. In August 1942, Harry Lambert (an associate of Fleming's brother Robert) was admitted to St Mary's Hospital due to a life-threatening infection of the nervous system (streptococcal meningitis). Fleming published the clinical case in The Lancet in 1943.
Upon this medical breakthrough, Allison informed the British Ministry of Health of the importance of penicillin and the need for mass production. The War Cabinet was convinced of the usefulness upon which Sir Cecil Weir, Director General of Equipment, called for a meeting on the mode of action on 28 September 1942. The Penicillin Committee was created on 5 April 1943. The committee consisted of Weir as chairman, Fleming, Florey, Sir Percival Hartley, Allison and representatives from pharmaceutical companies as members. The main goals were to produce penicillin rapidly in large quantities with collaboration of American companies, and to supply the drug exclusively for Allied armed forces.
Antibiotic resistance
Fleming also discovered very early that bacteria developed antibiotic resistance whenever too little penicillin was used or when it was used for too short a period. Almroth Wright had predicted antibiotic resistance even before it was noticed during experiments. Fleming cautioned about the use of penicillin in his many speeches around the world. On 26 June 1945, he made the following cautionary statements: "the microbes are educated to resist penicillin and a host of penicillin-fast organisms is bred out ... In such cases the thoughtless person playing with penicillin is morally responsible for the death of the man who finally succumbs to infection with the penicillin-resistant organism. I hope this evil can be averted." He cautioned not to use penicillin unless there was a properly diagnosed reason for it to be used, and that if it were used, never to use too little, or for too short a period, since these are the circumstances under which bacterial resistance to antibiotics develops.
It had been experimentally shown in 1942 that S. aureus could develop penicillin resistance under prolonged exposure. Elaborating the possibility of penicillin resistance in clinical conditions in his Nobel Lecture, Fleming said:<blockquote>The time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.Personal lifeOn 24 December 1915, Fleming married a trained nurse, Sarah Marion McElroy of Killala, County Mayo, Ireland. Their only child, Robert Fleming (1924–2015), became a general medical practitioner. After his first wife's death in 1949, Fleming married Amalia Koutsouri-Vourekas, a Greek colleague at St. Mary's, on 9 April 1953; she died in 1986.
Fleming came from a Presbyterian background, while his first wife Sarah was a (lapsed) Roman Catholic. It is said that he was not particularly religious, and their son Robert was later received into the Anglican church, while still reportedly inheriting his two parents' fairly irreligious disposition.
When Fleming learned of Robert D. Coghill and Andrew J. Moyer patenting the method of penicillin production in the United States in 1944, he was furious, and commented:<blockquote>I found penicillin and have given it free for the benefit of humanity. Why should it become a profit-making monopoly of manufacturers in another country? Death , London|alt]]
On 11 March 1955, Fleming died at his home in London of a heart attack. His ashes are buried in St Paul's Cathedral. Awards and legacy (right) in 1945|alt]]
postage stamp commemorating Fleming]]
sculptor Josep Manuel Benedicto. Barcelona: jardins del Doctor Fleming.]]
Fleming's discovery of penicillin changed the world of modern medicine by introducing the age of useful antibiotics; penicillin has saved, and is still saving, millions of people around the world.
The laboratory at St Mary's Hospital where Fleming discovered penicillin is home to the Fleming Museum, a popular London attraction. His alma mater, St Mary's Hospital Medical School, merged with Imperial College London in 1988. The Sir Alexander Fleming Building on the South Kensington campus was opened in 1998, where his son Robert and his great-granddaughter Claire were presented to the Queen; it is now one of the main preclinical teaching sites of the Imperial College School of Medicine.
His other alma mater, the Royal Polytechnic Institution (now the University of Westminster) has named one of its student halls of residence Alexander Fleming House, which is near to Old Street.
|12The importance of his work was recognized by the placement of an International Historic Chemical Landmark plaque at the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum in London on 19 November 1999.|13When 2000 was approaching, at least three large Swedish magazines ranked penicillin as the most important discovery of the millennium.|14In 2002, Fleming was named in the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons following a nationwide vote.|15A statue of him stands outside the main bullring in Madrid, Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas. It was erected by subscription from grateful matadors, as penicillin greatly reduced the number of deaths in the bullring.|20In 2009, Fleming was voted third greatest Scot in an opinion poll conducted by STV, behind only Scotland's national poet Robert Burns and national hero William Wallace.|2191006 Fleming, an asteroid in the Asteroid Belt, is named after him.|22Fleming metro station, on the Thessaloniki Metro system, takes its name from Fleming Street on which it is located.|23Sir Alexander Fleming College, a British school in Trujillo, northern Peru|24He and Howard Florey were jointly awarded the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of the University of Edinburgh in 1945.|25Rue Alexander Fleming in the borough of Saint-Laurent in Montreal is named in his honour.|26The Fleming crater on the moon is named after him and the Scottish astronomer Williamina Fleming. |27Mount Fleming in New Zealand's Paparoa Range was named after him in 1970 by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.|28Biomedical Sciences Research Center "Alexander Fleming", a research organization in Greece established in the vision of his wife Amalia Fleming.}}
Myths
The Fleming myth
By 1942, penicillin, produced as pure compound, was still in short supply and not available for clinical use. When Fleming used the first few samples prepared by the Oxford team to treat Harry Lambert who had streptococcal meningitis, the successful treatment was major news, particularly popularised in The Times. Wright was surprised to discover that Fleming and the Oxford team had not been mentioned, though Oxford was attributed as the source of the drug. Wright wrote to the editor of The Times, which eagerly interviewed Fleming, but Florey prohibited the Oxford team from seeking media coverage. As a consequence, only Fleming was widely publicised in the media, which led to the misconception that he was entirely responsible for the discovery and development of the drug. Fleming himself referred to this incident as "the Fleming myth."
The Churchills
The popular story of Winston Churchill's father paying for Fleming's education after Fleming's father saved young Winston from death is false. to his friend and colleague Andre Gratia, described this as "A wondrous fable." Nor did he save Winston Churchill himself during World War II. Churchill was saved by Lord Moran, using sulphonamides, since he had no experience with penicillin, when Churchill fell ill in Carthage in Tunisia in 1943. The Daily Telegraph and The Morning Post on 21 December 1943 wrote that he had been saved by penicillin. He was saved by the new sulphonamide drug sulphapyridine, known at the time under the research code M&B 693, discovered and produced by May & Baker Ltd, Dagenham, Essex – a subsidiary of the French group Rhône-Poulenc. In a subsequent radio broadcast, Churchill referred to the new drug as "This admirable M&B". See also
* Fleming Prize Lecture
* People on Scottish banknotes
References
Further reading
* [https://archive.org/stream/lifeofsiralexand000085mbp#page/n7/mode/2up The Life Of Sir Alexander Fleming, Jonathan Cape, 1959. Maurois, André.]
* Nobel Lectures, the Physiology or Medicine 1942–1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964
* An Outline History of Medicine. London: Butterworths, 1985. Rhodes, Philip.
* The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Porter, Roy, ed.
* Penicillin Man: Alexander Fleming and the Antibiotic Revolution, Stroud, Sutton, 2004. Brown, Kevin.
* Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984. Macfarlane, Gwyn
* Fleming, Discoverer of Penicillin, Ludovici, Laurence J., 1952
* The Penicillin Man: the Story of Sir Alexander Fleming, Lutterworth Press, 1957, Rowland, John.
External links
* [https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/mar/12/penicillin-fleming-alexander-bacteriology Alexander Fleming Obituary]
* including the Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1945 Penicillin
* [http://himetop.wikidot.com/alexander-fleming Some places and memories related to Alexander Fleming]
*
Category:1881 births
Category:1955 deaths
Category:Military personnel from East Ayrshire
Category:People from Darvel
Category:People educated at Kilmarnock Academy
Category:20th-century British biologists
Category:British Army personnel of World War I
Category:Alumni of Imperial College London
Category:Alumni of the University of Westminster
Category:Academics of Imperial College London
Category:Academics of the University of London
Category:Burials at St Paul's Cathedral
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1938 | Andrew Carnegie | | birth_date =
| birth_place = Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland
| death_date =
| death_place = Lenox, Massachusetts, U.S.
| resting_place = Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York, U.S.
| occupation = Industrialist, philanthropist
| known_for = Founding and leading the Carnegie Steel Company Founding the Carnegie Library, Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and the Carnegie Hero Fund
| party Republican
| spouse =
| children = Margaret Carnegie Miller
| parents = William Carnegie<br/>Margaret Morrison Carnegie
| relatives =
| signature = Andrew Carnegie signature.svg
}}
Andrew Carnegie ( , ; with the stress on the second syllable, but his name is now commonly pronounced with the stress on the first syllable. American English speakers who stress the second syllable generally do not produce the long in the Scots pronunciation but instead approximate it by producing its short equivalent as in the word "dress": ; if they try to lengthen this sound, they automatically produce the diphthong (as in "face"), which they normally do not notice: . This approximation with the diphthong is further from the Scots pronunciation and so rare that it is not mentioned even as a variant in the Columbia Encyclopedia or the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.}} November 25, 1835August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late-19th century and became one of the richest Americans in history.
He became a leading philanthropist in the United States, Great Britain, and the British Empire. During the last 18 years of his life, he gave away around $350 million (equivalent to $ billion in ), almost 90 percent of his fortune, to charities, foundations and universities. His 1889 article proclaiming "The Gospel of Wealth" called on the rich to use their wealth to improve society, expressed support for progressive taxation and an estate tax, and stimulated a wave of philanthropy.
Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. He immigrated to what is now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States with his parents in 1848 at the age of 12. Carnegie started work in a cotton mill and later as a telegrapher. By the 1860s he had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, bridges, and oil derricks. He accumulated further wealth as a bond salesman, raising money for American enterprise in Europe. He built Pittsburgh's Carnegie Steel Company, which he sold to J. P. Morgan in 1901 for $303,450,000 (equal to $ today); it formed the basis of the U.S. Steel Corporation. After selling Carnegie Steel, he surpassed John D. Rockefeller as the richest American of the time.
Carnegie devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on building local libraries, working for world peace, education, and scientific research. He funded Carnegie Hall in New York City, the Peace Palace in The Hague, founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie Hero Fund, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, among others.
Biography
Early life
, Scotland]]
Andrew Carnegie was born to Margaret (Morrison) Carnegie and William Carnegie in Dunfermline, Scotland, in a typical weaver's cottage with only one main room. It consisted of half the ground floor, which was shared with the neighboring weaver's family. The main room served as a living room, dining room and bedroom.
Carnegie's maternal uncle, Scottish political leader George Lauder Sr., deeply influenced him as a boy by introducing him to Robert Burns' writings and historical Scottish heroes such as Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. Lauder's son, also named George Lauder, grew up with Carnegie and later became his business partner in the United States.
When Carnegie was 12, his father had fallen on tough times as a handloom weaver. Making matters worse, the country was in starvation. His mother helped support the family by assisting her brother and by selling potted meats at her "sweetie shop", becoming the primary breadwinner. and move to the United States in 1848 for the prospect of a better life. They headed to Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where they heard there was a demand for workers. Carnegie's emigration to America was his second journey outside Dunfermline. The first was a family outing to Edinburgh to see Queen Victoria.
In September 1848, Carnegie and his family arrived in Allegheny. Carnegie's father struggled to sell his product on his own. Eventually, the father and son both received job offers at Anchor Cotton Mills, a Scottish-owned facility. Carnegie's first job in 1848 was as a bobbin boy, changing spools of thread in a cotton mill 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in a Pittsburgh cotton factory. His starting wage was $1.20 per week ().
His father soon quit his position at the cotton mill, returning to his loom, and was again removed as a substantial breadwinner. But Carnegie attracted the attention of John Hay, a Scottish manufacturer of bobbins, who offered him a job for $2.00 per week ().
In his autobiography, Carnegie writes about the hardships he had to endure with this new job:
Telegraph
In 1849, Carnegie became a telegraph messenger boy in the Pittsburgh Office of the Ohio Telegraph Company, at $2.50 per week ($ by -1}} inflation) following the recommendation of his uncle. He was a hard worker and would memorize all of the locations of Pittsburgh's businesses and the faces of important men. He made many connections this way. He also paid close attention to his work and quickly learned to distinguish the different sounds the incoming telegraph signals produced. He developed the ability to translate signals by ear, without using the paper slip.
Within a year he was promoted to an operator. Carnegie's education and passion for reading were given a boost by Colonel James Anderson, who opened his personal library of 400 volumes to working boys each Saturday night. Carnegie was a consistent borrower and a "self-made man" in both his economic development and his intellectual and cultural development. He was so grateful to Colonel Anderson for the use of his library that he "resolved, if ever wealth came to me, [to see to it] that other poor boys might receive opportunities similar to those for which we were indebted to the nobleman". His capacity, his willingness for hard work, his perseverance, and his alertness soon brought him opportunities.RailroadsStarting in 1853, when Carnegie was around 18 years old, Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad employed him as a secretary/telegraph operator at a salary of $4.00 per week ($ by -1}} inflation). Carnegie accepted the job with the railroad as he saw more prospects for career growth and experience there than with the telegraph company.
On December 1, 1859, Carnegie officially became superintendent of the Western Division. He hired his sixteen-year-old brother Tom to be his personal secretary and telegraph operator. Carnegie also hired his cousin, Maria Hogan, who became the first female telegraph operator in the country. As superintendent, Carnegie made a salary of $1500 a year ($ by -1}} inflation).
Scott also helped him with his first investments. Many of these were part of the corruption indulged in by Scott and the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, John Edgar Thomson, which consisted of inside trading in companies with which the railroad did business, or payoffs made by contracting parties "as part of a quid pro quo". In 1855, Scott made it possible for Carnegie to invest $500 in the Adams Express Company, which contracted with the Pennsylvania to carry its messengers. The money was secured by his mother's placing of a $600 mortgage on the family's $700 home, but the opportunity was available only because of Carnegie's close relationship with Scott. A few years later, he received a few shares in Theodore Tuttle Woodruff's sleeping car company as a reward for holding shares that Woodruff had given to Scott and Thomson, as a payoff. Reinvesting his returns in such inside investments in railroad-related industries (iron, bridges, and rails), Carnegie slowly accumulated capital, the basis for his later success. Throughout his later career, he made use of his close connections to Thomson and Scott, as he established businesses that supplied rails and bridges to the railroad, offering the two men stakes in his enterprises.
1860–1865: American Civil War
Before the American Civil War, Carnegie arranged a merger between Woodruff's company and that of George Pullman, the inventor of the sleeping car for first-class travel, which facilitated business travel at distances over . The investment proved a success and a source of profit for Woodruff and Carnegie. The young Carnegie continued to work for Pennsylvania's Tom Scott and introduced several improvements in the service.
In the spring of 1861, Carnegie was appointed by Scott, who was now Assistant Secretary of War in charge of military transportation, as Superintendent of the Military Railways and the Union Government's telegraph lines in the East. Carnegie helped open the rail lines into Washington D.C. that the rebels had cut; he rode the locomotive pulling the first brigade of Union troops to reach Washington D.C. Following the defeat of Union forces at Bull Run, he personally supervised the transportation of the defeated forces. Under his organization, the telegraph service rendered efficient service to the Union cause and significantly assisted in the eventual victory. Carnegie later joked that he was "the first casualty of the war" when he gained a scar on his cheek from freeing a trapped telegraph wire.
The defeat of the Confederacy required vast supplies of munitions, with railroads and telegraph lines being required to deliver them efficiently. The war demonstrated how integral the industries were to Union success.Keystone Bridge Company
, opened in 1874 using Carnegie steel ]]
In 1864, Carnegie was one of the early investors in the Columbia Oil Company in Venango County, Pennsylvania. In one year, the firm yielded over $1 million in cash dividends, and petroleum from oil wells on the property sold profitably. The demand for iron products, such as armor for gunboats, cannons, and shells, as well as a hundred other industrial products, made Pittsburgh a center of wartime production. Carnegie worked with others in establishing a steel rolling mill, and steel production and control of industry became the source of his fortune. Carnegie had some investments in the iron industry before the war.
After the war, Carnegie left the railroads to devote his energies to the ironworks trade. Carnegie worked to develop several ironworks, eventually forming the Keystone Bridge Works and the Union Ironworks, in Pittsburgh. Although he had left the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, he remained connected to its management, namely Thomas A. Scott and J. Edgar Thomson. He used his connection to the two men to acquire contracts for his Keystone Bridge Company and the rails produced by his ironworks. He also gave stock in his businesses to Scott and Thomson, and the Pennsylvania was his best customer. When he built his first steel plant, he made a point of naming it after Thomson. As well as having good business sense, Carnegie possessed charm and literary knowledge. He was invited to many important social functions, which Carnegie exploited to his advantage.
Carnegie, through Keystone, supplied the steel for and owned shares in the landmark Eads Bridge project across the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Missouri (completed 1874). This project was an important proof-of-concept for steel technology, which marked the opening of a new steel market.
Carnegie believed in using his fortune for others and doing more than making money. In 1868, at age 33, he wrote:
Industrialist
1875–1900: Steel empire
Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry, controlling the most extensive integrated iron and steel operations ever owned by an individual in the United States. One of his two great innovations was in the cheap and efficient mass production of steel by adopting and adapting the Bessemer process, which allowed the high carbon content of pig iron to be burnt away in a controlled and rapid way during steel production. Steel prices dropped as a result, and Bessemer steel was rapidly adopted for rails; however, it was not suitable for buildings and bridges.
The second was in his vertical integration of all suppliers of raw materials. In 1883, Carnegie bought the rival Homestead Steel Works, which included an extensive plant served by tributary coal and iron fields, a railway, and a line of lake steamships.
Carnegie's success was also due to his relationship with the railroad industries, which not only relied on steel for track, but were also making money from steel transport. The steel and railroad barons worked closely to negotiate prices instead of allowing free-market competition.
Besides Carnegie's market manipulation, United States trade tariffs were also working in favor of the steel industry. Carnegie spent energy and resources lobbying Congress for a continuation of favorable tariffs from which he earned millions of dollars a year. Carnegie tried to keep this information concealed, but legal documents released in 1900, during proceedings with the ex-chairman of Carnegie Steel, Henry Clay Frick, revealed how favorable the tariffs had been.
1901: U.S. Steel
In 1901, Carnegie was 65 years of age and considering retirement. He reformed his enterprises into conventional joint stock corporations as preparation for this. John Pierpont Morgan was a banker and America's most important financial deal maker. He had observed how efficiently Carnegie produced profits. He envisioned an integrated steel industry that would cut costs, lower prices to consumers, produce in greater quantities and raise wages to workers. To this end, he needed to buy out Carnegie and several other major producers and integrate them into one company, thereby eliminating duplication and waste. He concluded negotiations on March 2, 1901, and formed the United States Steel Corporation. It was the first corporation in the world with a market capitalization of over $1 billion.
The buyout, secretly negotiated by Charles M. Schwab (no relation to Charles R. Schwab), was the largest such industrial takeover in United States history to date. The holdings were incorporated in the United States Steel Corporation, a trust organized by Morgan, and Carnegie retired from business.
Scholar and activist
1880–1900
Carnegie continued his business career; some of his literary intentions were fulfilled. He befriended the English poet Matthew Arnold, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, and the American humorist Mark Twain, as well as being in correspondence and acquaintance with most of the U.S. Presidents, statesmen, and notable writers.
Carnegie constructed commodious swimming-baths for the people of his hometown in Dunfermline in 1879. In the following year, Carnegie gave £8,000 for the establishment of a Dunfermline Carnegie Library in Scotland. In 1884, he gave $50,000 to Bellevue Hospital Medical College (now part of New York University Medical Center) to create a histological laboratory, now called the Carnegie Laboratory.
In 1881, Carnegie took his family, including his 70-year-old mother, on a trip to the United Kingdom. They toured Scotland by coach and enjoyed several receptions en route. The highlight was a return to Dunfermline, where Carnegie's mother laid the foundation stone of a Carnegie Library which he funded. Carnegie's criticism of British society did not mean dislike; on the contrary, one of Carnegie's ambitions was to act as a catalyst for a close association between English-speaking peoples. To this end, in the early 1880s in partnership with Samuel Storey, he purchased numerous newspapers in Britain, all of which were to advocate the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of "the British Republic". Carnegie's charm, aided by his wealth, afforded him many British friends, including Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.
In 1886, Carnegie's younger brother Thomas died at age 43. While owning steel works, Carnegie had purchased at low cost the most valuable of the iron ore fields around Lake Superior.
Following his tour of the UK, he wrote about his experiences in a book entitled An American Four-in-hand in Britain. In 1886, Carnegie wrote his most radical work to date, entitled Triumphant Democracy. Liberal in its use of statistics to make its arguments, the book argued his view that the American republican system of government was superior to the British monarchical system. It gave a highly favorable and idealized view of American progress and criticized the British royal family. The cover depicted an upended royal crown and a broken scepter. The book created considerable controversy in the UK. The book made many Americans appreciate their country's economic progress and sold over 40,000 copies, mostly in the U.S.
]]
Although actively involved in running his many businesses, Carnegie had become a regular contributor to numerous magazines, most notably The Nineteenth Century, under the editorship of James Knowles, and the influential North American Review, led by the editor Lloyd Bryce. In 1889, Carnegie published "Wealth" in the June issue of the North American Review. After reading it, Gladstone requested its publication in Britain, where it appeared as "The Gospel of Wealth" in The Pall Mall Gazette. Carnegie argued that the life of a wealthy industrialist should comprise two parts. The first part was the gathering and the accumulation of wealth. The second part was for the subsequent distribution of this wealth to benevolent causes. Philanthropy was key to making life worthwhile.
Carnegie was a well-regarded writer. He published three books on travel.
Anti-imperialism
In the aftermath of the Spanish–American War, the United States seemed poised to annex Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Carnegie strongly opposed the idea of American colonies. He opposed the annexation of the Philippines almost to the point of supporting William Jennings Bryan against McKinley in 1900. In 1898, Carnegie tried to arrange independence for the Philippines. As the conclusion of the Spanish–American War neared, the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain for $20 million. To counter what he perceived as American imperialism, Carnegie personally offered $20 million to the Philippines so that the Filipino people could purchase their independence from the United States. However, nothing came of the offer. In 1898 Carnegie joined the American Anti-Imperialist League, in opposition to the U.S. annexation of the Philippines. Its membership included former presidents of the United States Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison and literary figures such as Mark Twain.
1901–1919: Philanthropist
Carnegie spent his last years as a philanthropist. From 1901 forward, public attention was turned from the shrewd business acumen which had enabled Carnegie to accumulate such a fortune, to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to using it on philanthropic projects. He had written about his views on social subjects and the responsibilities of great wealth in Triumphant Democracy (1886) and Gospel of Wealth (1889). Carnegie devoted the rest of his life to providing capital for purposes of public interest and social and educational advancement. He saved letters of appreciation from those he helped in a desk drawer labeled "Gratitude and Sweet Words."
He provided $25,000 a year to the movement for spelling reform. His organization, the Simplified Spelling Board, created the Handbook of Simplified Spelling, which was written wholly in reformed spelling.3,000 public libraries
" for the London magazine Vanity Fair, 1903]]
Among his many philanthropic efforts, the establishment of public libraries throughout the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and mostly other English-speaking countries was especially prominent. In this special driving interest of his, Carnegie was inspired by meetings with philanthropist Enoch Pratt (1808–1896). The Enoch Pratt Free Library (1886) of Baltimore, Maryland, impressed Carnegie deeply; he said, "Pratt was my guide and inspiration."
Carnegie turned over management of the library project by 1908 to his staff, led by James Bertram (1874–1934). The first Carnegie Library opened in 1883 in Dunfermline. His method was to provide funds to build and equip the library, but only on the condition that the local authority matched that by providing the land and a budget for operation and maintenance.
To secure local interest, in 1885, he gave $500,000 to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for a public library; in 1886, he gave $250,000 to Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, for a music hall and library; and he gave $250,000 to Edinburgh for a free library. In total, Carnegie funded some 3,000 libraries, located in 47 U.S. states, and also in Canada, Britain, Ireland, Belgium, Serbia, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies, and Fiji. He also donated £50,000 to help set up the University of Birmingham in 1899.
As Van Slyck (1991) showed, during the last years of the 19th century, there was the increasing adoption of the idea that free libraries should be available to the American public. But the design of such libraries was the subject of prolonged and heated debate. On one hand, the library profession called for designs that supported efficiency in administration and operation; on the other, wealthy philanthropists favored buildings that reinforced the paternalistic metaphor and enhanced civic pride. Between 1886 and 1917, Carnegie reformed both library philanthropy and library design, encouraging a closer correspondence between the two.
<gallery class="center">
File:CarnegieLibraryPittsburghFrontEntrance.jpg|Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
File:Macomb Public Library.JPG|Carnegie library, Macomb, Illinois
File:Edinburgh Central Library, George IV Bridge.JPG|Edinburgh Central Library
File:Yorkville Library.jpg|Yorkville Library, Ontario.
File:Syracuse Carnegie Library.jpg|Carnegie Library at Syracuse University, New York
File:Carnegie_library_002.jpg|Carnegie Library, Moorreesburg, South Africa
</gallery>
Investing in education, science, pensions, civil heroism, music, and world peace
]]
In 1900, Carnegie gave $2 million to start the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) at Pittsburgh and the same amount in 1902 to create the Carnegie Institution at Washington, D.C., to encourage research and discovery. He later contributed more to these and other schools. CIT is now known as Carnegie Mellon University after it merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research. Carnegie also served on the Boards of Cornell University and Stevens Institute of Technology.
In 1911, Carnegie became a sympathetic benefactor to George Ellery Hale, who was trying to build the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson, and donated an additional ten million dollars to the Carnegie Institution with the following suggestion to expedite the construction of the telescope: "I hope the work at Mount Wilson will be vigorously pushed, because I am so anxious to hear the expected results from it. I should like to be satisfied before I depart, that we are going to repay to the old land some part of the debt we owe them by revealing more clearly than ever to them the new heavens." The telescope saw first light on November 2, 1917, with Carnegie still alive.
, Scotland]]
In 1901, in Scotland, he gave $10 million to establish the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. It was created by a deed that he signed on June 7, 1901, and it was incorporated by royal charter on August 21, 1902. The establishing gift of $10 million was then an unprecedented sum: at the time, total government assistance to all four Scottish universities was about £50,000 a year. The aim of the Trust was to improve and extend the opportunities for scientific research in the Scottish universities and to enable the deserving and qualified youth of Scotland to attend a university. He was subsequently elected Lord Rector of University of St. Andrews in December 1901, and formally installed as such in October 1902, serving until 1907. He also donated large sums of money to Dunfermline, the place of his birth. In addition to a library, Carnegie also bought the private estate which became Pittencrieff Park and opened it to all members of the public, establishing the Carnegie Dunfermline Trust to benefit the people of Dunfermline. A statue of Carnegie was later built between 1913 and 1914 in the park as a commemoration for his creation of the park.
Carnegie was a major patron of music. He was a founding financial backer of Jeannette Thurber's National Conservatory of Music of America in 1885. He built the music performing venue Carnegie Hall in New York City; it opened in 1891 and remained in his family until 1925. His interest in music led him to fund the construction of 7,000 pipe organs in churches and temples, with no apparent preference for any religious denomination or sect.
He gave a further $10 million in 1913 to endow the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, a grant-making foundation. He transferred to the trust the charge of all his existing and future benefactions, other than university benefactions in the United Kingdom. He gave the trustees a wide discretion, and they inaugurated a policy of financing rural library schemes rather than erecting library buildings, and of assisting the musical education of the people rather than granting organs to churches.
(front row, center) in 1906 while visiting Tuskegee Institute]]
In 1901, Carnegie also established large pension funds for his former employees at Homestead and, in 1905, for American college professors. He had already given away $350,695,653 (approximately US$ in dollars) of his wealth. After his death, his last $30 million was given to foundations, charities, and to pensioners.
He was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York. The grave site is located on the Arcadia Hebron plot of land at the corner of Summit Avenue and Dingle Road. Carnegie is buried only a few yards away from union organizer Samuel Gompers, another important figure of industry in the Gilded Age.
Controversies
1889: Johnstown Flood
(1890)|left]]
Carnegie was one of more than 50 members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, which has been blamed for the Johnstown Flood that killed 2,209 people in 1889.
At the suggestion of his friend Benjamin Ruff, Carnegie's partner Henry Clay Frick had formed the exclusive South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club high above Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The sixty-odd club members were the leading business tycoons of Western Pennsylvania and included among their number Frick's best friend, Andrew Mellon, his attorneys Philander Knox and James Hay Reed, as well as Frick's business partner, Carnegie. High above the city, near the small town of South Fork, the South Fork Dam was originally built between 1838 and 1853 by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as part of a canal system to be used as a reservoir for a canal basin in Johnstown. With the coming-of-age of railroads superseding canal barge transport, the lake was abandoned by the Commonwealth, sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad, and sold again to private interests, and eventually came to be owned by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in 1881. Prior to the flood, speculators had purchased the abandoned reservoir, made less than well-engineered repairs to the old dam, raised the lake level, built cottages and a clubhouse, and created the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. Less than downstream from the dam sat the city of Johnstown.
The dam was high and long. Between 1881, when the club was opened, and 1889, the dam frequently sprang leaks and was patched, mostly with mud and straw. Additionally, a previous owner removed and sold for scrap the three cast iron discharge pipes that previously allowed a controlled release of water. There had been some speculation as to the dam's integrity, and concerns had been raised by the head of the Cambria Iron Works downstream in Johnstown. Such repair work, a reduction in height, and unusually high snowmelt and heavy spring rains combined to cause the dam to give way on May 31, 1889, resulting in twenty million tons of water sweeping down the valley as the Johnstown Flood. When word of the dam's failure was telegraphed to Pittsburgh, Frick and other members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club gathered to form the Pittsburgh Relief Committee for assistance to the flood victims as well as determining never to speak publicly about the club or the flood. This strategy was a success, and Knox and Reed were able to fend off all lawsuits that would have placed blame upon the club's members.
Although Cambria Iron and Steel's facilities were heavily damaged by the flood, they returned to full production within a year. After the flood, Carnegie built Johnstown a new library to replace the one built by Cambria's chief legal counsel Cyrus Elder, which was destroyed in the flood. The Carnegie-donated library is now owned by the Johnstown Area Heritage Association and houses the Flood Museum.
1892: Homestead Strike
The Homestead Strike was a bloody labor confrontation lasting 143 days in 1892, one of the most serious in U.S. history. The conflict was centered on Carnegie Steel's main plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and grew out of a labor dispute between the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) and the Carnegie Steel Company.
Carnegie left on a trip to Scotland before the unrest peaked. In doing so, Carnegie left mediation of the dispute in the hands of his associate and partner Henry Clay Frick. Frick was well known in industrial circles for maintaining staunch anti-union sentiment. With the collective bargaining agreement between the union and company expiring at the end of June, Frick and the leaders of the local AA union entered into negotiations in February. With the steel industry doing well and prices higher, the AA asked for a wage increase; the AA represented about 800 of the 3,800 workers at the plant. Frick immediately countered with an average 22% wage decrease that would affect nearly half the union's membership and remove a number of positions from the bargaining unit.
The union and company failed to come to an agreement, and management locked the union out. Workers considered the stoppage a "lockout" by management and not a "strike" by workers. As such, the workers would have been well within their rights to protest, and subsequent government action would have been a set of criminal procedures designed to crush what was seen as a pivotal demonstration of the growing labor rights movement, strongly opposed by management. Frick brought in thousands of strikebreakers to work the steel mills and Pinkerton agents to safeguard them.
On July 6, the arrival of a force of 300 Pinkerton agents from New York City and Chicago resulted in a fight in which 10 men — seven strikers and three Pinkertons — were killed and hundreds were injured. Pennsylvania Governor Robert Pattison ordered two brigades of the state militia to the strike site. Then allegedly in response to the fight between the striking workers and the Pinkertons, anarchist Alexander Berkman shot at Frick in an attempted assassination, wounding him. While not directly connected to the strike, Berkman was tied in for the assassination attempt. According to Berkman, "...with the elimination of Frick, responsibility for Homestead conditions would rest with Carnegie." Afterwards, the company successfully resumed operations with non-union immigrant employees in place of the Homestead plant workers, and Carnegie returned to the United States. Nasaw argues that Roosevelt systematically deceived and manipulated Carnegie and held the elderly man in contempt. Nasaw quotes a private letter Roosevelt wrote to Whitelaw Reid in 1905: <blockquote>[I have] tried hard to like Carnegie, but it is pretty difficult. There is no type of man for whom I feel a more contemptuous abhorrence than for the one who makes a God of mere money-making and at the same time is always yelling out that kind of utterly stupid condemnation of war which in almost every case springs from a combination of defective physical courage, of unmanly shrinking from pain and effort, and of hopelessly twisted ideals. All the suffering from Spanish war comes far short of the suffering, preventable and non-preventable, among the operators of the Carnegie steel works, and among the small investors, during the time that Carnegie was making his fortune…. It is as noxious folly to denounce war per se as it is to denounce business per se. Unrighteous war is a hideous evil; but I am not at all sure that it is worse evil than business unrighteousness.</blockquote>Personal lifeFamily
and their daughter Margaret Carnegie Miller in 1910]]
Carnegie did not want to marry during his mother's lifetime, instead choosing to take care of her in her illness towards the end of her life. After she died in 1886, the 51-year-old Carnegie married Louise Whitfield, who was 21 years his junior. In 1897, the couple had their only child, Margaret, whom they named after Carnegie's mother.Residences
, located on 5th Avenue in the Upper East Side, Manhattan, New York]]
Carnegie bought Skibo Castle in Scotland, and made his home partly there and partly in his New York mansion located at 2 East 91st Street at Fifth Avenue.PhilosophyPoliticsCarnegie gave "formal allegiance" to the Republican Party, though he was said to be "a violent opponent of some of the most sacred doctrines" of the party.
Andrew Carnegie Dictum
In his final days, Carnegie had pneumonia. Before his death on August 11, 1919, Carnegie had donated $350,695,654 for various causes. The "Andrew Carnegie Dictum" was:
*To spend the first third of one's life getting all the education one can.
*To spend the next third making all the money one can.
*To spend the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes.
Carnegie was involved in philanthropic causes, but he kept himself away from religious circles. He wanted to be identified by the world as a "positivist". He was highly influenced in public life by John Bright.
On wealth
, Edinburgh Central Library]]
As early as 1868, at age 33, he drafted a memo to himself. He wrote: "...The amassing of wealth is one of the worse species of idolatry. No idol more debasing than the worship of money." In order to avoid degrading himself, he wrote in the same memo he would retire at age 35 to pursue the practice of philanthropic giving, for "... the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." However, he did not begin his philanthropic work in all earnest until 1881, at age 46, with the gift of a library to his hometown of Dunfermline, Scotland.
Carnegie wrote "The Gospel of Wealth", an article in which he stated his belief that the rich should use their wealth to help enrich society. In that article, Carnegie also expressed sympathy for the ideas of progressive taxation and an estate tax:
The following is taken from one of Carnegie's memos to himself:
Intellectual influencesHerbert Spencer; evolutionary thought
Carnegie claimed to be a champion of evolutionary thought—particularly the work of Herbert Spencer, even declaring Spencer his teacher.
However although Carnegie claimed to be a disciple of Spencer, many of his actions went against the ideas he espoused.
Spencerian evolution was for individual rights and against government interference. Furthermore, Spencerian evolution held that those unfit to sustain themselves must be allowed to perish. Spencer believed that just as there were many varieties of beetles, respectively modified to existence in a particular place in nature, so too had human society "spontaneously fallen into division of labour". Individuals who survived to this, the latest and highest stage of evolutionary progress would be "those in whom the power of self-preservation is the greatest—are the select of their generation." Moreover, Spencer perceived governmental authority as borrowed from the people to perform the transitory aims of establishing social cohesion, insurance of rights, and security. Spencerian 'survival of the fittest' firmly credits any provisions made to assist the weak, unskilled, poor and distressed to be an imprudent disservice to evolution. Spencer insisted people should resist for the benefit of collective humanity, as severe fate singles out the weak, debauched, and disabled. Carnegie was an ardent supporter of commercial "survival of the fittest" and sought to attain immunity from business challenges by dominating all phases of the steel manufacturing procedure. Carnegie's determination to lower costs included cutting labor expenses as well. In a notably Spencerian manner, Carnegie argued that unions impeded the natural reduction of prices by pushing up costs, which blocked evolutionary progress. Carnegie felt that unions represented the narrow interest of the few while his actions benefited the entire community. Conversely, Carnegie, a titan of industry, seems to embody all of the qualities of Spencerian survival of the fittest. The two men enjoyed a mutual respect for one another and maintained a correspondence until Spencer's death in 1903. He did not think free-market competition necessitated competitive warfare. Furthermore, Spencer argued that individuals with superior resources who deliberately used investment schemes to put competitors out of business were committing acts of "commercial murder".
Herbert Spencer absolutely was against government interference in business in the form of regulatory limitations, taxes, and tariffs as well. Spencer saw tariffs as a form of taxation that levied against the majority in service to "the benefit of a small minority of manufacturers and artisans".
Despite Carnegie's personal dedication to Herbert Spencer as a friend, his adherence to Spencer's political and economic ideas is more contentious. In particular, it appears Carnegie either misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented some of Spencer's principal arguments. Spencer remarked upon his first visit to Carnegie's steel mills in Pittsburgh, which Carnegie saw as the manifestation of Spencer's philosophy, "Six months' residence here would justify suicide."
Carnegie believed that it is the effort and will of the people, that maintains the peace in international relations. Money is just a push for the act. If world peace depended solely on financial support, it would not seem a goal, but more like an act of pity.
Like Stead, he believed that the United States and the British Empire would merge into one nation, telling him "We are heading straight to the Re-United States". Carnegie believed that the combined country's power would maintain world peace and disarmament. The creation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1910 was regarded as a milestone on the road to the ultimate goal of abolition of war. Beyond a gift of $10 million for peace promotion, Carnegie also encouraged the "scientific" investigation of the various causes of war, and the adoption of judicial methods that should eventually eliminate them. He believed that the Endowment exists to promote information on the nations' rights and responsibilities under existing international law and to encourage other conferences to codify this law.Legacy and honors
]]
In 1899 Andrew Carnegie was awarded American Library Association Honorary Membership.
Carnegie received the honorary Doctor of Laws (DLL) from the University of Glasgow in June 1901, and received the Freedom of the City of Glasgow "in recognition of his munificence" later the same year.
in Washington, D.C.]]
In July 1902 he received the Freedom of the city of St Andrews, "in testimony of his great zeal for the welfare of his fellow-men on both sides of the Atlantic", and in October 1902 the Freedom of the City of Perth "in testimony of his high personal worth and beneficial influence, and in recognition of widespread benefactions bestowed on this and other lands, and especially in gratitude for the endowment granted by him for the promotion of University education in Scotland." and the Freedom of the City of Dundee. Also in 1902, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.
He received an honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) from the University of Aberdeen in 1906. In 1910, he received the Freedom of the City of Belfast and was made as well Commander of the National Order of the Legion of Honour by the French government. Carnegie was awarded as Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Orange-Nassau by Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands on August 25, 1913. Carnegie received July 1, 1914, an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen the Netherlands.
") skeleton at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History; considered the most famous single dinosaur skeleton in the world]]
*The dinosaur Diplodocus carnegiei (Hatcher) was named for Carnegie after he sponsored the expedition that discovered its remains in the Morrison Formation (Jurassic) of Utah. Carnegie was so proud of "Dippy" that he had casts made of the bones and plaster replicas of the whole skeleton donated to several museums in Europe and South America. The original fossil skeleton is assembled and stands in the Hall of Dinosaurs at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
*After the Spanish–American War, Carnegie offered to donate $20 million to the Philippines so they could buy their independence.
*Carnegie, Pennsylvania, and Carnegie, Oklahoma, were named in his honor.
*The Saguaro cactus's scientific name, Carnegiea gigantea, is named after him.
*The Carnegie Medal for the best children's literature published in the UK was established in his name.
*The Carnegie Faculty of Sport and Education, at Leeds Beckett University, UK, is named after him.
*The concert halls in Dunfermline and New York are named after him.
*At the height of his career, Carnegie was the second-richest person in the world, behind only John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil.
*Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh was named after Carnegie, who founded the institution as the Carnegie Technical Schools.]]
*Lauder College (named after his uncle George Lauder Sr.) in the Halbeath area of Dunfermline was renamed Carnegie College in 2007.
*A street in Belgrade (Serbia), next to the Belgrade University Library which is one of the Carnegie libraries, is named in his honor.
*An American high school, Carnegie Vanguard High School in Houston, Texas, is named after him
*Carnegie was awarded the Freedom of the Burgh of Kilmarnock in Scotland in 1903, prior to laying the foundation stone of Loanhead Public School.
Benefactions
According to biographer Burton J. Hendrick:
:His benefactions amounted to $350,000,000—for he gave away not only his annual income of something more than $12,500,000, but most of the principal as well. Of this sum, $62,000,000 was allotted to the British Empire and $288,000,000 to the United States, for Carnegie, in the main, confined his benefactions to the English-speaking nations. His largest gifts were $125,000,000 to the Carnegie Corporation of New York (this same body also became his residuary legatee), $60,000,000 to public library buildings, $20,000,000 to colleges (usually the smaller ones), $6,000,000 to church organs, $29,000,000 to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, $22,000,000 to the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh, $22,000,000 to the Carnegie Institution of Washington, $10,000,000 to Hero Funds, $10,000,000 to the Endowment for International Peace, $10,000,000 to the Scottish Universities Trust, $10,000,000 to the United Kingdom Trust, and $3,750,000 to the Dunfermline Trust.
Hendrick argues that:
:These gifts fairly picture Carnegie's conception of the best ways to improve the status of the common man. They represent all his personal tastes—his love of books, art, music, and nature—and the reforms which he regarded as most essential to human progress—scientific research, education both literary and technical, and, above all, the abolition of war. The expenditure the public most associates with Carnegie's name is that for public libraries. Carnegie himself frequently said that his favorite benefaction was the Hero Fund—among other reasons, because "it came up my ain back"; but probably deep in his own mind his library gifts took precedence over all others in importance. There was only one genuine remedy, he believed, for the ills that beset the human race, and that was enlightenment. "Let there be light" was the motto that, in the early days, he insisted on placing in all his library buildings. As to the greatest endowment of all, the Carnegie Corporation, that was merely Andrew Carnegie in permanently organized form; it was established to carry on, after Carnegie's death, the work to which he had given personal attention in his own lifetime.
Research sources
Carnegie's personal papers are at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.
The Carnegie Collections of the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library consist of the archives of the following organizations founded by Carnegie: The Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY); The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP); the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT);The Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs (CCEIA). These collections deal primarily with Carnegie philanthropy and have very little personal material related to Carnegie. Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh jointly administer the Andrew Carnegie Collection of digitized archives on Carnegie's life.
Moral appraisal
By the standards of 19th-century tycoons, Carnegie was not a particularly ruthless man but a humanitarian with enough acquisitiveness to go in the ruthless pursuit of money. "Maybe with the giving away of his money," commented biographer Joseph Wall, "he would justify what he had done to get that money."
To some, Carnegie represents the idea of the American dream. He was an immigrant from Scotland who came to America and became successful. He is not only known for his successes but his huge amounts of philanthropic works, not only for charities but also to promote democracy and independence to colonized countries.
Works
Carnegie was a frequent contributor to periodicals on labor issues.
<!--chronological list of works by Carnegie himself-->
Books
* Our Coaching Trip, Brighton to Inverness (1882).
* An American Four-in-hand in Britain (1883).
* Round the World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (1884).
* An American Four-in-Hand in Britain. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (1886).
* ''Triumphant Democracy, or, Fifty Years' March of the Republic''. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons (1886).
* The Gospel of Wealth (1889).
* [https://archive.org/download/gospelofwealthot00carnuoft/gospelofwealthot00carnuoft.pdf The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays.] New York: The Century Co. (1901).
* The Empire of Business (1902).
** [https://librivox.org/the-empire-of-business-by-andrew-carnegie/ Audiobook] via LibriVox.
* The Secret of Business is the Management of Men (1903).
* James Watt (Famous Scots Series). New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. (1905).
* [https://archive.org/download/problemsoftodayw00carnuoft/problemsoftodayw00carnuoft.pdf Problems of Today: Wealth–Labor–Socialism.] New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. (1907).
* Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (posthumous). Boston: Houghton Mifflin (1920).
** [https://librivox.org/autobiography-of-andrew-carnegie-by-andrew-carnegie/ Audiobook] via Librivox.
Articles
* "Wealth". North American Review, vol. 148, no. 381 (Jun. 1889), pp. 653–64. Original version of The Gospel of Wealth.
* "The Bugaboo of Trusts". North American Review, vol. 148, no. 377 (Feb. 1889).
Pamphlets
* The Bugaboo of Trusts. Reprinted from North American Review, vol. 148, no. 377 (Feb. 1889).
Public speaking
* Industrial Peace: Address at the Annual Dinner of the National Civic Federation, New York City, December 15, 1904. [n.c.]: National Civic Federation (1904).
* Edwin M. Stanton: An Address by Andrew Carnegie on Stanton Memorial Day at Kenyon College. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co. (1906).
* The Negro in America: An Address Delivered Before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburg, October 16, 1907. Inverness: R. Carruthers & Sons, Courier Office (1907).
* Speech at the Annual Meeting of the Peace Society, at the Guildhall, London, EC, May 24, 1910. London: The Peace Society (1910).
* A League of Peace: A Rectorial Address Delivered to the Students in the University of St. Andrews, October 17, 1905. New York: New York Peace Society (1911).
Collected works
* Wall, Joseph Frazier, ed. The Andrew Carnegie Reader (1992).
See also
* Carnegie (disambiguation)
* Commemoration of the American Civil War on postage stamps
* History of public library advocacy
* List of Carnegie libraries in the United States
* List of peace activists
* List of richest Americans in history
* List of colleges and universities named after people
Explanatory notes
ReferencesBibliography*
*
*
*
*
** Ernsberger, Richard Jr. (October 2018). "A Fool for Peace". American History, Vol. 53, Issue 4. Interview with Nasaw.
* Wall, Joseph Frazier (1989). Andrew Carnegie. . Along with Nasaw the most detailed scholarly biography.
*
Collections
*
*
* Further reading* Bostaph, Samuel (2015). Andrew Carnegie: An Economic Biography. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. . 125pp [http://eh.net/?sbostaph online review]
* Ernsberger, Richard Jr. (February 2015). "Robber Baron Turned Robin Hood". American History. 49#6 pp. 32–41, cover story.
* Farrah, Margaret Ann. Andrew Carnegie: A Psychohistorical Sketch (PhD dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University; ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1982. 8209384).
* Goldin, Milton (1997). "Andrew Carnegie and the Robber Baron Myth". In: Myth America: A Historical Anthology, Volume II. Gerster, Patrick, and Cords, Nicholas, eds. St. James, NY: Brandywine Press .
* Harvey, Charles, et al. Andrew Carnegie and the foundations of contemporary entrepreneurial philanthropy. Business History (2011) 53#3 pp. 425–450.
* Hendrick, Burton Jesse (1933). The Life of Andrew Carnegie (2 vol.). [https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.155770 Vol. 2 online].
* Josephson, Matthew (1938). The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901. .
* Krass, Peter (2002). Carnegie. Wiley. . Scholarly biography.
*
* Lester, Robert M. (1941). Forty Years of Carnegie Giving: A Summary of the Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie and of the Work of the Philanthropic Trusts Which He Created. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
* Livesay, Harold C. (1999). Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business, 2nd ed. . Short biography by a scholar.
*
* McGormick, Blaine, and Burton W. Folsom Jr. "Survey of Business Historians on America's Greatest Entrepreneurs." Business History Review (2003), 77#4, pp. 703–716. Carnegie ranks #3 behind Ford and Rockefeller.
* Patterson, David S. (1970). "Andrew Carnegie's Quest for World Peace." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 114#5 (1970): 371–383. .
* Rees, Jonathan. (1997). "Homestead in Context: Andrew Carnegie and the Decline of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers." Pennsylvania History 64(4): 509–533. .
* Skrabec, Quentin R. Jr. Henry Clay Frick: The life of the perfect capitalist (McFarland, 2010). [https://books.google.com/books?idICOfBQAAQBAJ&dqQuentin+R.+Skrabec+lauder++&pg=PP1 online]
* Skrabec, Quentin R. Jr. The Carnegie Boys: The Lieutenants of Andrew Carnegie that Changed America (McFarland, 2012) [https://books.google.com/books?idCkgc1qJfzCQC&dqQuentin+R.+Skrabec+lauder++&pg=PP1 online].
* VanSlyck, Abigail A. (1991). "'The Utmost Amount of Effective Accommodation': Andrew Carnegie and the Reform of the American Library." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. 50(4): 359–383. .
* Zimmerman, Jonathan. "Simplified Spelling and the Cult of Efficiency in the 'Progressiv' Era." Journal of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era (2010) 9#3 pp. 365–394.
External links
* [https://vimeo.com/ondemand/andrewcarnegie Documentary: "Andrew Carnegie: Rags to Riches, Power to Peace"]
* [http://www.carnegiebirthplace.com/ Carnegie Birthplace Museum website]
*
*
*
* [https://www.c-span.org/video/?173040-1/carnegie Booknotes interview with Peter Krass on Carnegie, November 24, 2002.]
*
* [https://www.citydeskpublishing.com/andrew-carnegie-on-prosperity-tax-and-poverty.html Marguerite Martyn, "Andrew Carnegie on Prosperity, Income Tax, and the Blessings of Poverty," May 1, 1914, City Desk Publishing]
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Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.442434 |
1939 | Approximant | Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence. This class is composed of sounds like (as in rest) and semivowels like and (as in yes and west, respectively), as well as lateral approximants like (as in less).
Terminology
Before Peter Ladefoged coined the term approximant in the 1960s, the terms frictionless continuant and semivowel were used to refer to non-lateral approximants.
In phonology, approximant is also a distinctive feature that encompasses all sonorants except nasals, including vowels, taps, and trills.
Semivowels
Some approximants resemble vowels in acoustic and articulatory properties and the terms semivowel and glide are often used for these non-syllabic vowel-like segments. The correlation between semivowels and vowels is strong enough that cross-language differences between semivowels correspond with the differences between their related vowels.
Vowels and their corresponding semivowels alternate in many languages depending on the phonological environment, or for grammatical reasons, as is the case with Indo-European ablaut. Similarly, languages often avoid configurations where a semivowel precedes its corresponding vowel. A number of phoneticians distinguish between semivowels and approximants by their location in a syllable. Although he uses the terms interchangeably, remarks that, for example, the final glides of English par and buy differ from French par ('through') and baille ('tub') in that, in the latter pair, the approximants appear in the syllable coda, whereas, in the former, they appear in the syllable nucleus. This means that opaque (if not minimal) contrasts can occur in languages like Italian (with the i-like sound of piede 'foot', appearing in the nucleus: , and that of piano 'plan', appearing in the syllable onset: ) and Spanish (with a near minimal pair being abyecto 'abject' and abierto 'opened').
{|class="wikitable"
|-
|+Approximant-vowel correspondences
! Vowel
! Correspondingapproximant
! Place of articulation
! Example
|-
| || ** || Palatal || Spanish amplío ('I extend') vs. amplió ('he extended')
|-
| || || Labialized palatal || French aigu ('sharp') vs. aiguille ('needle')
|-
| || ** || Velar || Korean 음식 ('food') vs. 의사 ('doctor')
|-
| || || Labialized velar || Spanish continúo ('I continue') vs. continuó ('he/she/it continued') and ('you continued') used only in the formal treatment of 'usted'.
|-
| || || Pharyngeal ||
|-
| || || Postalveolar, retroflex ||North American English waiter vs. waitress
|}
Because of the articulatory complexities of the American English rhotic, there is some variation in its phonetic description. A transcription with the IPA character for an alveolar approximant () is common, though the sound is more postalveolar. Actual retroflexion may occur as well and both occur as variations of the same sound. However, makes a distinction between the vowels of American English (which he calls "rhotacized") and vowels with "retroflexion" such as those that appear in Badaga; , on the other hand, labels both as r-colored and notes that both have a lowered third formant.
Because the vowels are articulated with spread lips, spreading is implied for their approximant analogues, . However, these sounds generally have little or no lip-spreading. The fricative letters with a lowering diacritic, , may therefore be justified for a neutral articulation between spread and rounded .
In articulation and often diachronically, palatal approximants correspond to front vowels, velar approximants to back vowels, and labialized approximants to rounded vowels. In American English, the rhotic approximant corresponds to the rhotic vowel. This can create alternations (as shown in the above table).
In addition to alternations, glides can be inserted to the left or the right of their corresponding vowels when they occur next to a hiatus. For example, in Ukrainian, medial triggers the formation of an inserted that acts as a syllable onset so that when the affix is added to футбол ('football') to make футболіст 'football player', it is pronounced , but маоїст ('Maoist'), with the same affix, is pronounced with a glide. Dutch for many speakers has a similar process that extends to mid vowels:
bioscoop → ('cinema')
zee + en → ('seas')
fluor → ('fluorine')
reu + en → ('male dogs')
Rwanda → ('Rwanda')
Boaz → ('Boaz') Spanish features a similar process and even nonsyllabic can occur so that ahorita ('right away') is pronounced . It is not often clear, however, whether such sequences involve a semivowel (a consonant) or a diphthong (a vowel), and in many cases, it may not be a meaningful distinction.
Although many languages have central vowels , which lie between back/velar and front/palatal , there are few cases of a corresponding approximant . One is in the Korean diphthong or though it is more frequently analyzed as velar (as in the table above), and Mapudungun may be another, with three high vowel sounds, , , and three corresponding consonants, , and , and a third one is often described as a non-labialized voiced velar fricative; some texts note a correspondence between this approximant and that is parallel to – and –. An example is liq (?) ('white').
It has been noted that the expected symbols for the approximant correlates of are or .
Approximants versus fricatives
In addition to less turbulence, approximants also differ from fricatives in the precision required to produce them. When emphasized, approximants may be slightly fricated (that is, the airstream may become slightly turbulent), which is reminiscent of fricatives. For example, the Spanish word ayuda ('help') features a palatal approximant that is pronounced as a fricative in emphatic speech. Spanish can be analyzed as having a meaningful distinction between fricative, approximant, and intermediate . However, such frication is generally slight and intermittent, unlike the strong turbulence of fricative consonants.
For places of articulation further back in the mouth, languages do not contrast voiced fricatives and approximants. Therefore, the IPA allows the symbols for the voiced fricatives to double for the approximants, with or without a lowering diacritic.
Occasionally, the glottal "fricatives" are called approximants, since typically has no more frication than voiceless approximants, but they are often phonations of the glottis without any accompanying manner or place of articulation.
Central approximants
Approximants with a dedicated IPA symbol are in bold.
bilabial approximant (usually transcribed )
labiodental approximant
linguolabial approximant (usually transcribed )
dental approximant (usually transcribed ) However, an audible voiceless sound may be made without this turbulent airflow: makes a distinction between "local friction" (as in or ) and "cavity friction" (as in voiceless vowels like and ). More recent research distinguishes between "turbulent" and "laminar" airflow in the vocal tract. It is not clear if it is possible to describe voiceless approximants categorically as having laminar airflow (or cavity friction in Pike's terms) as a way of distinguishing them from fricatives. write that "the airflow for voiced approximants remains laminar (smooth), and does not become turbulent. Voiceless approximants are rare in the languages of the world, but when they do occur the airflow is usually somewhat turbulent." Audible voiceless sounds may also be produced by means of turbulent airflow at the glottis, as in ; in such a case, it is possible to articulate an audible voiceless sound without the production of local friction at a supraglottal constriction. describes such sounds, but classes them as sonorants.
Distinctiveness
Voiceless approximants are rarely if ever distinguished phonemically from voiceless fricatives in the sound system of a language. discuss the issue and conclude "In practice, it is difficult to distinguish between a voiceless approximant and a voiceless fricative at the same place of articulation ... there is no evidence that any language in the world makes such a distinction crucial."
Disagreement over use of the term
Voiceless approximants are treated as a phonetic category by (among others) , , and . However, the term voiceless approximant is seen by some phoneticians as controversial. It has been pointed out that if approximant is defined as a speech sound that involves the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough to create turbulent airflow, then it is difficult to see how a voiceless approximant could be audible. As John C. Wells puts it in his blog, "voiceless approximants are by definition inaudible ... If there's no friction and no voicing, there's nothing to hear." A similar point is made in relation to frictionless continuants by : "There are no voiceless frictionless continuants because this would imply silence; the voiceless counterpart of the frictionless continuant is the voiceless fricative." argue that the increased airflow arising from voicelessness alone makes a voiceless continuant a fricative, even if lacking a greater constriction in the oral cavity than a voiced approximant.
argue that Burmese and Standard Tibetan have voiceless lateral approximants and Navajo and Zulu voiceless lateral fricatives , but also say that "in other cases it is difficult to decide whether a voiceless lateral should be described as an approximant or a fricative". compared voiceless laterals in Estonian Swedish, Icelandic, and Welsh and found that Welsh-speakers consistently used , that Icelandic-speakers consistently used , and that speakers of Estonian Swedish varied in their pronunciation. They conclude that there is "a range of variants within voiceless laterals, rather than a categorical split between lateral fricatives and voiceless approximant laterals".
Occurrence in Western American English
Voiceless lateral approximants can occur after voiceless stops as allophone of its voiced counterpart, especially after the voiceless velar plosive , in Western American English.
Nasalized approximants
Examples are:
nasal palatal approximant
nasal labialized velar approximant
voiceless nasal glottal approximant
In Portuguese, the nasal glides and historically became and in some words. In Edo, the nasalized allophones of the approximants and are nasal occlusives, and .
What are transcribed as nasal approximants may include non-syllabic elements of nasal vowels or diphthongs.
See also
Liquid consonant
List of phonetics topics
Semivowel
Notes
References
Category:Manner of articulation
* | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximant | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.540987 |
1940 | Astronomer Royal | thumb|220px|John Flamsteed, the first astronomer royal, by Thomas Gibson. Royal Society, London.
Astronomer Royal is a senior post in the Royal Households of the United Kingdom. There are two officers, the senior being the astronomer royal dating from 22 June 1675; the junior is the astronomer royal for Scotland dating from 1834. The Astronomer Royal works to make observations to improve navigation, cartography, instrument design, and applications of geomagnetism. The position was created with the overall goal of discovering a way to determine longitude at sea when out of sight of land.
History
The post was created by Charles II in 1675, at the same time as he founded the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. He appointed John Flamsteed, instructing him "." The first six Astronomer Royals dedicated themselves primarily to this task and focused on astronomical observations that would benefit navigation.
The origin of the title Astronomer Royal is unknown. Although Flamsteed is widely considered the first Astronomer Royal, he was never appointed with the title and only referred to in the Warrant to Ordinance as "Our Astronomical Observer". This eventually led to Queen Anne's Warrant of 1710 where members of the Royal Society were appointed as the Board of Visitors to the Royal Observatory to oversee Flamsteed. John Pond and subsequent Astronomers Royal elected to publish their findings quarterly instead.
Sir George Airy transformed the position from its original purpose of improving navigation to conducting more general astronomical and scientific research. With approval from the Board of Visitors in 1836, Airy created a Magnetic and Meteorological Department in the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Following this, in 1873 he created the Solar Photography Department.
Originally, the Astronomer Royal had one assistant but increased to six during John Pond's appointment as Astronomer Royal. and the office is of great prestige.
There was formerly a Royal Astronomer of Ireland who was also the Andrew's Professor of Astronomy at the University of Dublin. Both became vacant in 1921 with Irish Independence but a new Andrew's Professor of Astronomy was appointed in 1985. In 1694, he gathered evidence of the stellar parallax and became the first person to prove that the Earth revolves around the sun. It contains accurate tables of lunar motion, planetary motion, and detailed stellar catalog of 2935 stars. The catalog contained more stars recorded to a much higher degree of accuracy than any other publication at the time, and impressed many other astronomers across Europe.
Another notable Astronomer Royal was Sir George Biddell Airy. While still in college at Trinity College, Cambridge, he noticed he was having trouble reading with his left eye. Eventually, his condition would be classified as an astigmatism, but at the time, there was no cure that worked for everyone. After consulting with others who had the same condition, he specially crafted a lens to refract the light rays and correct the astigmatism. Using these improved instruments, he meticulously double-checked measurements and discoveries made by past astronomers. He used a telescope floating in mercury and was able to detect when the poles of the earth wobbled any distance greater than one foot. Starting months before the eclipse, stars were photographed and carefully charted, and during the total eclipse the same stars would be photographed and charted again. and in Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon. He also makes an appearance in the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan'''s The Pirates of Penzance and plays an important role in Fred Hoyle's novel The Black Cloud''.
References
External links
Official website
*
Category:Ceremonial officers in the United Kingdom
Category:Lists of British people
Category:Positions within the British Royal Household
Astronomer Royal
Category:Royal Observatory, Greenwich | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomer_Royal | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.558786 |
1941 | Aeon | The word aeon , also spelled eon (in American and Australian English), originally meant "life", "vital force" or "being", "generation" or "a period of time", though it tended to be translated as "age" in the sense of "ages", "forever", "timeless" or "for eternity". It is a Latin transliteration from the ancient Greek word (), from the archaic () meaning "century". In Greek, it literally refers to the timespan of one hundred years. A cognate Latin word (cf. ) for "age" is present in words such as eternal, longevity and mediaeval.
Although the term aeon may be used in reference to a period of a billion years (especially in geology, cosmology and astronomy), its more common usage is for any long, indefinite period. Aeon can also refer to the four aeons on the geologic time scale that make up the Earth's history, the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, and the current aeon, Phanerozoic.
Astronomy and cosmology
In astronomy, an aeon is defined as a billion years (109 years, abbreviated AE).
Roger Penrose uses the word aeon to describe the period between successive and cyclic Big Bangs within the context of conformal cyclic cosmology.
Philosophy and mysticism
In Buddhism, aeon may be used as a translation of the term kalpa or (Sanskrit: ). A mahakalpa is often said to be 1,334,240,000 years, the life cycle of the world. Yet, these numbers are symbolic, not literal.
Christianity's idea of "eternal life" comes from the word for life, (), and a form of (), which could mean life in the next aeon, the Kingdom of God, or Heaven, just as much as immortality, as in John 3:16.
According to Christian universalism, the Greek New Testament scriptures use the word () to mean a long period and the word () to mean "during a long period"; thus, there was a time before the aeons, and the aeonian period is finite. After each person's mortal life ends, they are judged worthy of aeonian life or aeonian punishment. That is, after the period of the aeons, all punishment will cease and death is overcome and then God becomes the all in each one (1Cor 15:28). This contrasts with the conventional Christian belief in eternal life and eternal punishment.
Occultists of the Thelema and Ordo Templi Orientis (English: "Order of the Temple of the East") traditions sometimes speak of a "magical Aeon" that may last for perhaps as little as 2,000 years.
Gnosticism
In many Gnostic systems, the various emanations of God, who is also known by such names as the One, the Monad, Aion teleos ("The Broadest Aeon", Greek: ), Bythos ("depth or profundity", Greek: ), Proarkhe ("before the beginning", Greek: ), ("the beginning", Greek: ), ("wisdom"), and ("the Anointed One"), are called Aeons. In the different systems these emanations are differently named, classified, and described, but the emanation theory itself is common to all forms of Gnosticism.
In the Basilidian Gnosis they are called sonships ( ; singular: ); according to Marcus, they are numbers and sounds; in Valentinianism they form male/female pairs called "" (Greek , from ).
See also
Aion (deity)
Kalpa (aeon)
Saeculum – comparable Latin concept
Aeon (company)
References
Category:New Testament Greek words and phrases
Category:Time
Category:Units of time | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeon | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.569325 |
1942 | Airline | An airline is a company that provides air transport services for traveling passengers or freight (cargo). Airlines use aircraft to supply these services and may form partnerships or alliances with other airlines for codeshare agreements, in which they both offer and operate the same flight. Generally, airline companies are recognized with an air operating certificate or license issued by a governmental aviation body. Airlines may be scheduled or charter operators.
The first airline was the German airship company DELAG, founded on November 16, 1909. Colombia's Avianca (1919), Australia's Qantas (1920) and the Russian Aeroflot (1923). Since the 1980s, there has been a trend of major airline mergers and the formation of airline alliances. The largest alliances are Star Alliance, SkyTeam and Oneworld. Airline alliances coordinate their passenger service programs (such as lounges and frequent-flyer programs), offer special interline tickets and often engage in extensive codesharing (sometimes systemwide).
History
The first airlines
DELAG, Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktiengesellschaft I was the world's first airline. It was founded on November 16, 1909, with government assistance, and operated airships manufactured by The Zeppelin Corporation. Its headquarters were in Frankfurt.
The first fixed-wing scheduled airline was started on January 1, 1914. The flight was piloted by Tony Jannus and flew from St. Petersburg, Florida, to Tampa, Florida, operated by the St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line.EuropeBeginnings
, founded on October 7, 1919, the oldest running airline still operating under its original name]]
was used by Handley Page Transport, an early British airline established in 1919.]]
The earliest fixed wing airline in Europe was Aircraft Transport and Travel, formed by George Holt Thomas in 1916; via a series of takeovers and mergers, this company is an ancestor of modern-day British Airways. Using a fleet of former military Airco DH.4A biplanes that had been modified to carry two passengers in the fuselage, it operated relief flights between Folkestone and Ghent, Belgium. On July 15, 1919, the company flew a proving flight across the English Channel, despite a lack of support from the British government. Flown by Lt. H Shaw in an Airco DH.9 between RAF Hendon and Paris – Le Bourget Airport, the flight took 2 hours and 30 minutes at £21 per passenger.
On August 25, 1919, the company used DH.16s to pioneer a regular service from Hounslow Heath Aerodrome to Paris's Le Bourget, the first regular international service in the world. The airline soon gained a reputation for reliability, despite problems with bad weather, and began to attract European competition. In November 1919, it won the first British civil airmail contract. Six Royal Air Force Airco DH.9A aircraft were lent to the company, to operate the airmail service between Hawkinge and Cologne. In 1920, they were returned to the Royal Air Force.
Other British competitors were quick to follow – Handley Page Transport was established in 1919 and used the company's converted wartime Type O/400 bombers with a capacity for 12 passengers, to run a London-Paris passenger service.
The first French airline was Société des lignes Latécoère, later known as Aéropostale, which started its first service in late 1918 to Spain. The Société Générale des Transports Aériens was created in late 1919, by the Farman brothers and the Farman F.60 Goliath plane flew scheduled services from Toussus-le-Noble to Kenley, near Croydon, England. Another early French airline was the Compagnie des Messageries Aériennes, established in 1919 by Louis-Charles Breguet, offering a mail and freight service between Le Bourget Airport, Paris and Lesquin Airport, Lille.
D-190 of Junkers Luftverkehr]]
The first German airline to use heavier than air aircraft was Deutsche Luft-Reederei established in 1917 which started operating in February 1919. In its first year, the D.L.R. operated regularly scheduled flights on routes with a combined length of nearly 1000 miles. By 1921 the D.L.R. network was more than 3000 km (1865 miles) long, and included destinations in the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the Baltic Republics. Another important German airline was Junkers Luftverkehr, which began operations in 1921. It was a division of the aircraft manufacturer Junkers, which became a separate company in 1924. It operated joint-venture airlines in Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Switzerland.
The Dutch airline KLM made its first flight in 1920, and is the oldest continuously operating airline in the world. Established by aviator Albert Plesman, it was immediately awarded a "Royal" predicate from Queen Wilhelmina. Its first flight was from Croydon Airport, London to Amsterdam, using a leased Aircraft Transport and Travel DH-16, and carrying two British journalists and a number of newspapers. In 1921, KLM started scheduled services.
In Finland, the charter establishing Aero O/Y (now Finnair) was signed in the city of Helsinki on 12 September 1923. Junkers F.13 D-335 became the first aircraft of the company, when Aero took delivery of it on 14 March 1924. The first flight was between Helsinki and Tallinn, capital of Estonia, and it took place on 20 March 1924, one week later.
In the Soviet Union, the Chief Administration of the Civil Air Fleet was established in 1921. One of its first acts was to help found Deutsch-Russische Luftverkehrs A.G. (Deruluft), a German-Russian joint venture to provide air transport from Russia to the West. Domestic air service began around the same time, when Dobrolyot started operations on 15 July 1923 between Moscow and Nizhni Novgorod. Since 1932 all operations had been carried under the name Aeroflot.
Early European airlines tended to favor comfort – the passenger cabins were often spacious with luxurious interiors – over speed and efficiency. The relatively basic navigational capabilities of pilots at the time also meant that delays due to the weather were commonplace.Rationalization
Empire Terminal, Victoria, London. Trains ran from here to flying boats in Southampton, and to Croydon Airport.]]
By the early 1920s, small airlines were struggling to compete, and there was a movement towards increased rationalization and consolidation. In 1924, Imperial Airways was formed from the merger of Instone Air Line Company, British Marine Air Navigation, Daimler Airway and Handley Page Transport, to allow British airlines to compete with stiff competition from French and German airlines that were enjoying heavy government subsidies. The airline was a pioneer in surveying and opening up air routes across the world to serve far-flung parts of the British Empire and to enhance trade and integration.
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.
Two French airlines also merged to form Air Union on 1 January 1923. This later merged with four other French airlines to become Air France, the country's flagship carrier to this day, on 17 May 1933.
Germany's Deutsche Lufthansa was created in 1926 by merger of two airlines, one of them Junkers Luftverkehr. Lufthansa, due to the Junkers heritage and unlike most other airlines at the time, became a major investor in airlines outside of Europe, providing capital to Varig and Avianca. German airliners built by Junkers, Dornier, and Fokker were among the most advanced in the world at the time.ExpansionIn 1926, Alan Cobham surveyed a flight route from the UK to Cape Town, South Africa, following this up with another proving flight to Melbourne, Australia. Other routes to British India and the Far East were also charted and demonstrated at this time. Regular services to Cairo and Basra began in 1927 and were extended to Karachi in 1929. The London-Australia service was inaugurated in 1932 with the Handley Page HP 42 airliners. Further services were opened up to Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Brisbane and Hong Kong passengers departed London on 14 March 1936 following the establishment of a branch from Penang to Hong Kong.
' routes from the UK to Australia and South Africa]]France began an air mail service to Morocco in 1919 that was bought out in 1927, renamed Aéropostale, and injected with capital to become a major international carrier. In 1933, Aéropostale went bankrupt, was nationalized and merged into Air France.
Although Germany lacked colonies, it also began expanding its services globally. In 1931, the airship Graf Zeppelin began offering regular scheduled passenger service between Germany and South America, usually every two weeks, which continued until 1937. In 1936, the airship Hindenburg entered passenger service and successfully crossed the Atlantic 36 times before crashing at Lakehurst, New Jersey, on 6 May 1937. In 1938, a weekly air service from Berlin to Kabul, Afghanistan, started operating.
From February 1934 until World War II began in 1939, Deutsche Lufthansa operated an airmail service from Stuttgart, Germany via Spain, the Canary Islands and West Africa to Natal in Brazil. This was the first time an airline flew across an ocean.
By the end of the 1930s Aeroflot had become the world's largest airline, employing more than 4,000 pilots and 60,000 other service personnel and operating around 3,000 aircraft (of which 75% were considered obsolete by its own standards). During the Soviet era Aeroflot was synonymous with Russian civil aviation, as it was the only air carrier. It became the first airline in the world to operate sustained regular jet services on 15 September 1956 with the Tupolev Tu-104.Deregulation
Deregulation of the European Union airspace in the early 1990s has had substantial effect on the structure of the industry there. The shift towards 'budget' airlines on shorter routes has been significant. Airlines such as EasyJet and Ryanair have often grown at the expense of the traditional national airlines.
There has also been a trend for these national airlines themselves to be privatized such as has occurred for Aer Lingus and British Airways. Other national airlines, including Italy's Alitalia, suffered – particularly with the rapid increase of oil prices in early 2008.
United States
Early development
Douglas DC-3 in 1940. The DC-3, often regarded as one of the most influential aircraft in the history of commercial aviation, revolutionized air travel.]]
Tony Jannus conducted the United States' first scheduled commercial airline flight on January 1, 1914, for the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line. The 23-minute flight traveled between St. Petersburg, Florida and Tampa, Florida, passing some above Tampa Bay in Jannus' Benoist XIV wood and muslin biplane flying boat. His passenger was a former mayor of St. Petersburg, who paid $400 for the privilege of sitting on a wooden bench in the open cockpit. The Airboat line operated for about four months, carrying more than 1,200 passengers who paid $5 each. Chalk's International Airlines began service between Miami and Bimini in the Bahamas in February 1919. Based in Ft. Lauderdale, Chalk's claimed to be the oldest continuously operating airline in the United States until its closure in 2008.
Following World War I, the United States found itself swamped with aviators. Many decided to take their war-surplus aircraft on barnstorming campaigns, performing aerobatic maneuvers to woo crowds. In 1918, the United States Post Office Department won the financial backing of Congress to begin experimenting with air mail service, initially using Curtiss Jenny aircraft that had been procured by the United States Army Air Service. Private operators were the first to fly the mail but due to numerous accidents the US Army was tasked with mail delivery. During the Army's involvement they proved to be too unreliable and lost their air mail duties. By the mid-1920s, the Post Office had developed its own air mail network, based on a transcontinental backbone between New York City and San Francisco. To supplement this service, they offered twelve contracts for spur routes to independent bidders. Some of the carriers that won these routes would, through time and mergers, evolve into Pan Am, Delta Air Lines, Braniff Airways, American Airlines, United Airlines (originally a division of Boeing), Trans World Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and Eastern Air Lines.
Service during the early 1920s was sporadic: most airlines at the time were focused on carrying bags of mail. In 1925, however, the Ford Motor Company bought out the Stout Aircraft Company and began construction of the all-metal Ford Trimotor, which became the first successful American airliner. With a 12-passenger capacity, the Trimotor made passenger service potentially profitable. Air service was seen as a supplement to rail service in the American transportation network.
At the same time, Juan Trippe began a crusade to create an air network that would link America to the world, and he achieved this goal through his airline, Pan Am, with a fleet of flying boats that linked Los Angeles to Shanghai and Boston to London. Pan Am and Northwest Airways (which began flights to Canada in the 1920s) were the only U.S. airlines to go international before the 1940s.
With the introduction of the Boeing 247 and Douglas DC-3 in the 1930s, the U.S. airline industry was generally profitable, even during the Great Depression. This trend continued until the beginning of World War II.Since 1945of American Export Airlines, the first airline to offer landplane flights across the North Atlantic in October 1945.]]
World War II, like World War I, brought new life to the airline industry. Many airlines in the Allied countries were flush from lease contracts to the military, and foresaw a future explosive demand for civil air transport, for both passengers and cargo. They were eager to invest in the newly emerging flagships of air travel such as the Boeing Stratocruiser, Lockheed Constellation, and Douglas DC-6. Most of these new aircraft were based on American bombers such as the B-29, which had spearheaded research into new technologies such as pressurization. Most offered increased efficiency from both added speed and greater payload.
In the 1950s, the De Havilland Comet, Boeing 707, Douglas DC-8, and Sud Aviation Caravelle became the first flagships of the Jet Age in the West, while the Eastern bloc had Tupolev Tu-104 and Tupolev Tu-124 in the fleets of state-owned carriers such as Czechoslovak ČSA, Soviet Aeroflot and East-German Interflug. The Vickers Viscount and Lockheed L-188 Electra inaugurated turboprop transport.
On 4 October 1958, British Overseas Airways Corporation started transatlantic flights between London Heathrow and New York Idlewild with a Comet 4, and Pan Am followed on 26 October with a Boeing 707 service between New York and Paris.
The next big boost for the airlines would come in the 1970s, when the Boeing 747, McDonnell Douglas DC-10, and Lockheed L-1011 inaugurated widebody ("jumbo jet") service, which is still the standard in international travel. The Tupolev Tu-144 and its Western counterpart, Concorde, made supersonic travel a reality. Concorde first flew in 1969 and operated through 2003. In 1972, Airbus began producing Europe's most commercially successful line of airliners to date. The added efficiencies for these aircraft were often not in speed, but in passenger capacity, payload, and range. Airbus also features modern electronic cockpits that were common across their aircraft to enable pilots to fly multiple models with minimal cross-training.DeregulationBoeing 747 ''Clipper Neptune's Car'' in 1985. The deregulation of the American airline industry increased the financial troubles of the airline which ultimately filed for bankruptcy in December 1991.]]
The 1978 U.S. airline industry deregulation lowered federally controlled barriers for new airlines just as a downturn in the nation's economy occurred. New start-ups entered during the downturn, during which time they found aircraft and funding, contracted hangar and maintenance services, trained new employees, and recruited laid-off staff from other airlines.
Major airlines dominated their routes through aggressive pricing and additional capacity offerings, often swamping new start-ups. In the place of high barriers to entry imposed by regulation, the major airlines implemented an equally high barrier called loss leader pricing. In this strategy an already established and dominant airline stomps out its competition by lowering airfares on specific routes, below the cost of operating on it, choking out any chance a start-up airline may have. The industry side effect is an overall drop in revenue and service quality. Since deregulation in 1978 the average domestic ticket price has dropped by 40%. So has airline employee pay. By incurring massive losses, the airlines of the USA now rely upon a scourge of cyclical Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings to continue doing business. America West Airlines (which has since merged with US Airways) remained a significant survivor from this new entrant era, as dozens, even hundreds, have gone under.
In many ways, the biggest winner in the deregulated environment was the air passenger. Although not exclusively attributable to deregulation, indeed the U.S. witnessed an explosive growth in demand for air travel. Many millions who had never or rarely flown before became regular fliers, even joining frequent flyer loyalty programs and receiving free flights and other benefits from their flying. New services and higher frequencies meant that business fliers could fly to another city, do business, and return the same day, from almost any point in the country. Air travel's advantages put long-distance intercity railroad travel and bus lines under pressure, with most of the latter having withered away, whilst the former is still protected under nationalization through the continuing existence of Amtrak.
By the 1980s, almost half of the total flying in the world took place in the U.S., and today the domestic industry operates over 10,000 daily departures nationwide.
Toward the end of the century, a new style of low cost airline emerged, offering a no-frills product at a lower price. Southwest Airlines, JetBlue, AirTran Airways, Skybus Airlines and other low-cost carriers began to represent a serious challenge to the so-called "legacy airlines", as did their low-cost counterparts in many other countries. Their commercial viability represented a serious competitive threat to the legacy carriers. However, of these, ATA and Skybus have since ceased operations.
Increasingly since 1978, US airlines have been reincorporated and spun off by newly created and internally led management companies, and thus becoming nothing more than operating units and subsidiaries with limited financially decisive control. Among some of these holding companies and parent companies which are relatively well known, are the UAL Corporation, along with the AMR Corporation, among a long list of airline holding companies sometime recognized worldwide. Less recognized are the private-equity firms which often seize managerial, financial, and board of directors control of distressed airline companies by temporarily investing large sums of capital in air carriers, to rescheme an airlines assets into a profitable organization or liquidating an air carrier of their profitable and worthwhile routes and business operations.
Thus the last 50 years of the airline industry have varied from reasonably profitable, to devastatingly depressed. As the first major market to deregulate the industry in 1978, U.S. airlines have experienced more turbulence than almost any other country or region. In fact, no U.S. legacy carrier survived bankruptcy-free. Among the outspoken critics of deregulation, former CEO of American Airlines, Robert Crandall has publicly stated: "Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing shows airline industry deregulation was a mistake."
Bailout
Congress passed the [https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/2926 Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act] (P.L. 107–42) in response to a severe liquidity crisis facing the already-troubled airline industry in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Through the ATSB Congress sought to provide cash infusions to carriers for both the cost of the four-day federal shutdown of the airlines and the incremental losses incurred through December 31, 2001, as a result of the terrorist attacks. This resulted in the first government bailout of the 21st century. Between 2000 and 2005 US airlines lost $30 billion with wage cuts of over $15 billion and 100,000 employees laid off.
In recognition of the essential national economic role of a healthy aviation system, Congress authorized partial compensation of up to $5 billion in cash subject to review by the U.S. Department of Transportation and up to $10 billion in loan guarantees subject to review by a newly created Air Transportation Stabilization Board (ATSB). The applications to DOT for reimbursements were subjected to rigorous multi-year reviews not only by DOT program personnel but also by the Government Accountability Office and the DOT Inspector General.
Ultimately, the federal government provided $4.6 billion in one-time, subject-to-income-tax cash payments to 427 U.S. air carriers, with no provision for repayment, essentially a gift from the taxpayers. (Passenger carriers operating scheduled service received approximately $4 billion, subject to tax.) In addition, the ATSB approved loan guarantees to six airlines totaling approximately $1.6 billion. Data from the U.S. Treasury Department show that the government recouped the $1.6 billion and a profit of $339 million from the fees, interest and purchase of discounted airline stock associated with loan guarantees.
The three largest major carriers and Southwest Airlines control 70% of the U.S. passenger market. Commercial air service commenced three weeks later from Manila to Baguio, making it Asia's first airline route. Bachrach's death in 1937 paved the way for its eventual merger with Philippine Airlines in March 1941 and made it Asia's oldest airline. It is also the oldest airline in Asia still operating under its current name. Bachrach's majority share in PATCO was bought by beer magnate Andres R. Soriano in 1939 upon the advice of General Douglas MacArthur and later merged with newly formed Philippine Airlines with PAL as the surviving entity. Soriano has controlling interest in both airlines before the merger. PAL restarted service on 15 March 1941, with a single Beech Model 18 NPC-54 aircraft, which started its daily services between Manila (from Nielson Field) and Baguio, later to expand with larger aircraft such as the DC-3 and Vickers Viscount.
of Japan Air Transport, 1937]]
In Japan, Japan Air Transport was established in 1928 as the national flag carrier. Upon the completion of Haneda Airport in 1931, it became the airline's hub. The airline initially operated domestic routes such as Tokyo–Osaka and Osaka–Fukuoka. In September 1929, it opened its first overseas route, which connected Fukuoka to Dalian in the Kwantung Leased Territory via Seoul and Pyongyang in Japanese Korea. After Japan established the puppet state of Manchukuo, the airline opened routes to major cities within this territory. The company was reorganised as Japan Airways in 1938. During the Second World War, it operated routes to various Japanese-occupied territories and Thailand. The company was dissolved immediately after the war, as civil aviation was prohibited by the Allied Occupation Forces. Civil aviation in Japan did not resume until the founding of Japan Airlines in 1951.
Cathay Pacific was one of the first airlines to be launched among the other Asian countries in 1946. The license to operate as an airliner was granted by the federal government body after reviewing the necessity at the national assembly. The Hanjin occupies the largest ownership of Korean Air as well as few low-budget airlines as of now. Korean Air is one of the four founders of SkyTeam, which was established in 2000. Asiana Airlines, launched in 1988, joined Star Alliance in 2003. Korean Air and Asiana Airlines comprise one of the largest combined airline miles and number of passenger served at the regional market of Asian airline industry
India was also one of the first countries to embrace civil aviation. One of the first Asian airline companies was Air India, which was founded as Tata Airlines in 1932, a division of Tata Sons Ltd. (now Tata Group). The airline was founded by India's leading industrialist, JRD Tata. On 15 October 1932, J. R. D. Tata himself flew a single engined De Havilland Puss Moth carrying air mail (postal mail of Imperial Airways) from Karachi to Bombay via Ahmedabad. The aircraft continued to Madras via Bellary piloted by Royal Air Force pilot Nevill Vintcent. Tata Airlines was also one of the world's first major airlines which began its operations without any support from the Government.
With the outbreak of World War II, the airline presence in Asia came to a relative halt, with many new flag carriers donating their aircraft for military aid and other uses. Following the end of the war in 1945, regular commercial service was restored in India and Tata Airlines became a public limited company on 29 July 1946, under the name Air India. After the independence of India, 49% of the airline was acquired by the Government of India. In return, the airline was granted status to operate international services from India as the designated flag carrier under the name Air India International.
On 31 July 1946, a chartered Philippine Airlines (PAL) DC-4 ferried 40 American servicemen to Oakland, California, from Nielson Airport in Makati with stops in Guam, Wake Island, Johnston Atoll and Honolulu, Hawaii, making PAL the first Asian airline to cross the Pacific Ocean. A regular service between Manila and San Francisco was started in December. It was during this year that the airline was designated as the flag carrier of Philippines.
During the era of decolonization, newly born Asian countries started to embrace air transport. Among the first Asian carriers during the era were Cathay Pacific of Hong Kong (founded in September 1946), Orient Airways (later Pakistan International Airlines; founded in October 1946), Air Ceylon (later SriLankan Airlines; founded in 1947), Malayan Airways Limited in 1947 (later Singapore and Malaysia Airlines), El Al in Israel in 1948, Garuda Indonesia in 1949, Thai Airways in 1960, and Korean National Airlines in 1947.Latin America and Caribbeanis the largest airline in Latin America in terms of number of annual passengers flown.]]
Among the first countries to have regular airlines in Latin America and the Caribbean were Bolivia with Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano, Cuba with Cubana de Aviación, Colombia with Avianca (the first airline established in the Americas), Argentina with Aerolíneas Argentinas, Chile with LAN Chile (today LATAM Airlines), Brazil with Varig, the Dominican Republic with Dominicana de Aviación, Mexico with Mexicana de Aviación, Trinidad and Tobago with BWIA West Indies Airways (today Caribbean Airlines), Venezuela with Aeropostal, Puerto Rico with Puertorriquena; and TACA based in El Salvador and representing several airlines of Central America (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua). All the previous airlines started regular operations well before World War II. Puerto Rican commercial airlines such as Prinair, Oceanair, Fina Air and Vieques Air Link came much after the second world war, as did several others from other countries like Mexico's Interjet and Volaris, Venezuela's Aserca Airlines and others.
The air travel market has evolved rapidly over recent years in Latin America. Some industry estimates indicated in 2011 that over 2,000 new aircraft will begin service over the next five years in this region.
These airlines serve domestic flights within their countries, as well as connections within Latin America and also overseas flights to North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.
Only five airline groups – Avianca, Panama's Copa, Mexico's Volaris, the Irelandia group and LATAM Airlines – have international subsidiaries and cover many destinations within the Americas as well as major hubs in other continents. LATAM with Chile as the central operation along with Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil and Argentina and formerly with some operations in the Dominican Republic. The Avianca group has its main operation in Colombia based around the hub in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as subsidiaries in various Latin American countries with hubs in San Salvador, El Salvador, as well as Lima, Peru, with a smaller operation in Ecuador. Copa has subsidiaries Copa Airlines Colombia and Wingo, both in Colombia, while Volaris of Mexico has Volaris Costa Rica and Volaris El Salvador, and the Irelandia group formerly included Viva Aerobus of Mexico; it formerly included Viva Colombia and Viva Air Peru.Regulation
National
tails of British Airways, UK's flag carrier]]
Many countries have national airlines that the government owns and operates. Fully private airlines are subject to much government regulation for economic, political, and safety concerns. For instance, governments often intervene to halt airline labor actions to protect the free flow of people, communications, and goods between different regions without compromising safety.
The United States, Australia, and to a lesser extent Brazil, Mexico, India, the United Kingdom, and Japan have "deregulated" their airlines. In the past, these governments dictated airfares, route networks, and other operational requirements for each airline. Since deregulation, airlines have been largely free to negotiate their own operating arrangements with different airports, enter and exit routes easily, and to levy airfares and supply flights according to market demand. The entry barriers for new airlines are lower in a deregulated market, and so the U.S. has seen hundreds of airlines start up (sometimes for only a brief operating period). This has produced far greater competition than before deregulation in most markets. The added competition, together with pricing freedom, means that new entrants often take market share with highly reduced rates that, to a limited degree, full service airlines must match. This is a major constraint on profitability for established carriers, which tend to have a higher cost base.
As a result, profitability in a deregulated market is uneven for most airlines. These forces have caused some major airlines to go out of business, in addition to most of the poorly established new entrants.
In the United States, the airline industry is dominated by four large firms. Because of industry consolidation, after fuel prices dropped considerably in 2015, very little of the savings were passed on to consumers.
International
headquarters in Montreal]]
Groups such as the International Civil Aviation Organization establish worldwide standards for safety and other vital concerns. Most international air traffic is regulated by bilateral agreements between countries, which designate specific carriers to operate on specific routes. The model of such an agreement was the Bermuda Agreement between the US and UK following World War II, which designated airports to be used for transatlantic flights and gave each government the authority to nominate carriers to operate routes.
Bilateral agreements are based on the "freedoms of the air", a group of generalized traffic rights ranging from the freedom to overfly a country to the freedom to provide domestic flights within a country (a very rarely granted right known as cabotage). Most agreements permit airlines to fly from their home country to designated airports in the other country: some also extend the freedom to provide continuing service to a third country, or to another destination in the other country while carrying passengers from overseas.
In the 1990s, "open skies" agreements became more common. These agreements take many of these regulatory powers from state governments and open up international routes to further competition. Open skies agreements have met some criticism, particularly within the European Union, whose airlines would be at a comparative disadvantage with the United States' because of cabotage restrictions.
Economy
In 2017, 4.1 billion passengers have been carried by airlines in 41.9 million commercial scheduled flights (an average payload of passengers), for 7.75 trillion passenger kilometres (an average trip of km) over 45,091 airline routes served globally.<!--
In July 2016, the total weekly airline capacity was 181.1 billion Available Seat Kilometers (+6.9% compared to July 2015): 57.6bn in Asia-Pacific, 47.7bn in Europe, 46.2bn in North America, 12.2bn in Middle East, 12.0bn in Latin America and 5.4bn in Africa.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Top 150 airline groups
! !! 2016 !! 2015 !! 2014 !! 2013 !! 2012 !! 2011 !! 2010 !! 2009 !! 2008
|-
! Revenue ($bn)
| 694 || 698 || 704 || 684 || 663 || 634 || 560 || 481 || 540
|-
! Operating result ($bn)
| 58.9 || 65.0 || 30.4 || 27.5 || 20.7 || 21.3 || 32.4 || 1.7 || −15.3
|-
! Operating margin (%)
| 8.5% || 9.3% || 4.3% || 4.0% || 3.1% || 3.4% || 5.8% || 0.4% || −2.8%
|-
! Net result ($bn)
| 34.2 || 42.4 || 11.7 || 15.3 || 4.6 || 0.3 || 19.0 || −5.7 || −32.5
|-
! Net margin (%)
| 4.9% || 6.1% || 1.7% || 2.2% || 0.7% || 0.0% || 3.4% || −1.2% || −6.0%
|}
Costs
-600 of Virgin Atlantic. In October 2008, Virgin Atlantic offered to combine its operations with BMI in an effort to reduce operating costs.]]
Airlines have substantial fixed and operating costs to establish and maintain air services: labor, fuel, airplanes, engines, spares and parts, IT services and networks, airport equipment, airport handling services, booking commissions, advertising, catering, training, aviation insurance and other costs. Thus all but a small percentage of the income from ticket sales is paid out to a wide variety of external providers or internal cost centers.
Moreover, the industry is structured so that airlines often act as tax collectors. Airline fuel is untaxed because of a series of treaties existing between countries. Ticket prices include a number of fees, taxes and surcharges beyond the control of airlines. Airlines are also responsible for enforcing government regulations. If airlines carry passengers without proper documentation on an international flight, they are responsible for returning them back to the original country.
Analysis of the 1992–1996 period shows that every player in the air transport chain is far more profitable than the airlines, who collect and pass through fees and revenues to them from ticket sales. While airlines as a whole earned 6% return on capital employed (2–3.5% less than the cost of capital), airports earned 10%, catering companies 10–13%, handling companies 11–14%, aircraft lessors 15%, aircraft manufacturers 16%, and global distribution companies more than 30%.
There has been continuing cost competition from low cost airlines. Many companies emulate Southwest Airlines in various respects. The lines between full-service and low-cost airlines have become blurred – e.g., with most "full service" airlines introducing baggage check fees despite Southwest not doing so.
Many airlines in the U.S. and elsewhere have experienced business difficulty. U.S. airlines that have declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy since 1990 have included American Airlines, Continental Airlines (twice), Delta Air Lines, Northwest Airlines, Pan Am, United Airlines and US Airways (twice).
Where an airline has established an engineering base at an airport, then there may be considerable economic advantages in using that same airport as a preferred focus (or "hub") for its scheduled flights.
Fuel hedging is a contractual tool used by transportation companies like airlines to reduce their exposure to volatile and potentially rising fuel costs. Several low-cost carriers such as Southwest Airlines adopt this practice.<!--ref name economist19jan2015/--> Southwest is credited with maintaining strong business profits between 1999 and the early 2000s due to its fuel hedging policy. Many other airlines are replicating Southwest's hedging policy to control their fuel costs.
Operating costs for US major airlines are primarily aircraft operating expense including jet fuel, aircraft maintenance, depreciation and aircrew for 44%, servicing expense for 29% (traffic 11%, passenger 11% and aircraft 7%), 14% for reservations and sales and 13% for overheads (administration 6% and advertising 2%).<!--
McKinsey observes that "newer technology, larger aircraft, and increasingly efficient operations continually drive down the cost of running an airline", from nearly 40 US cents per ASK at the beginning of the jet age, to just above 10 cents since 2000. Those improvements were passed onto the customer due to high competition: fares have been falling throughout the history of airlines.Revenue
]]
Airlines assign prices to their services in an attempt to maximize profitability. The pricing of airline tickets has become increasingly complicated over the years and is now largely determined by computerized yield management systems.
Because of the complications in scheduling flights and maintaining profitability, airlines have many loopholes that can be used by the knowledgeable traveler. Many of these airfare secrets are becoming more and more known to the general public, so airlines are forced to make constant adjustments.
Most airlines use differentiated pricing, a form of price discrimination, to sell air services at varying prices simultaneously to different segments. Factors influencing the price include the days remaining until departure, the booked load factor, the forecast of total demand by price point, competitive pricing in force, and variations by day of week of departure and by time of day. Carriers often accomplish this by dividing each cabin of the aircraft (first, business and economy) into a number of travel classes for pricing purposes.
A complicating factor is that of origin-destination control ("O&D control"). Someone purchasing a ticket from Melbourne to Sydney (as an example) for A$200 is competing with someone else who wants to fly Melbourne to Los Angeles through Sydney on the same flight, and who is willing to pay A$1400. Should the airline prefer the $1400 passenger, or the $200 passenger plus a possible Sydney-Los Angeles passenger willing to pay $1300? Airlines have to make hundreds of thousands of similar pricing decisions daily.
The advent of advanced computerized reservations systems in the late 1970s, most notably Sabre, allowed airlines to easily perform cost-benefit analyses on different pricing structures, leading to almost perfect price discrimination in some cases (that is, filling each seat on an aircraft at the highest price that can be charged without driving the consumer elsewhere).
The intense nature of airfare pricing has led to the term "fare war" to describe efforts by airlines to undercut other airlines on competitive routes. Through computers, new airfares can be published quickly and efficiently to the airlines' sales channels. For this purpose the airlines use the Airline Tariff Publishing Company (ATPCO), who distribute latest fares for more than 500 airlines to Computer Reservation Systems across the world.
The extent of these pricing phenomena is strongest in "legacy" carriers. In contrast, low fare carriers usually offer pre-announced and simplified price structure, and sometimes quote prices for each leg of a trip separately.
Computers also allow airlines to predict, with some accuracy, how many passengers will actually fly after making a reservation to fly. This allows airlines to overbook their flights enough to fill the aircraft while accounting for "no-shows", but not enough (in most cases) to force paying passengers off the aircraft for lack of seats, stimulative pricing for low demand flights coupled with overbooking on high demand flights can help reduce this figure. This is especially crucial during tough economic times as airlines undertake massive cuts to ticket prices to retain demand.
Over January/February 2018, the cheapest airline surveyed by price comparator rome2rio was now-defunct Tigerair Australia with $0.06/km followed by AirAsia X with $0.07/km, while the most expensive was Charterlines, Inc. with $1.26/km followed by Buddha Air with $1.18/km.
For the IATA, the global airline industry revenue was $754 billion in 2017 for a $38.4 billion collective profit, and should rise by 10.7% to $834 billion in 2018 for a $33.8 billion profit forecast, down by 12% due to rising jet fuel and labor costs.
<!--Elasticity-->
The demand for air transport will be less elastic for longer flights than for shorter flights, and more elastic for leisure travel than for business travel.
<!--Seasonality-->
Airlines often have a strong seasonality, with traffic low in winter and peaking in summer. In Europe the most extreme market are the Greek islands with July/August having more than ten times the winter traffic, as Jet2 is the most seasonal among low-cost carriers with July having seven times the January traffic, whereas legacy carriers are much less with only 85/115% variability.
Assets and financing
at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA).]]
Airline financing is quite complex, since airlines are highly leveraged operations. Not only must they purchase (or lease) new airliner bodies and engines regularly, they must make major long-term fleet decisions with the goal of meeting the demands of their markets while producing a fleet that is relatively economical to operate and maintain; comparably Southwest Airlines and their reliance on a single airplane type (the Boeing 737 and derivatives), with the now defunct Eastern Air Lines which operated 17 different aircraft types, each with varying pilot, engine, maintenance, and support needs.
A second financial issue is that of hedging oil and fuel purchases, which are usually second only to labor in its relative cost to the company. However, with the current high fuel prices it has become the largest cost to an airline. Legacy airlines, compared with new entrants, have been hit harder by rising fuel prices partly due to the running of older, less fuel efficient aircraft.
Other factors, such as surface transport facilities and onward connections, will also affect the relative appeal of different airports and some long-distance flights may need to operate from the one with the longest runway. For example, LaGuardia Airport is the preferred airport for most of Manhattan due to its proximity, while long-distance routes must use John F. Kennedy International Airport's longer runways.
Airline alliances
The first airline alliance was formed in the 1930s when Pan Am and its subsidiary, Panair do Brasil, agreed to codeshare routes in Latin America when they overlapped with each other.
Codesharing involves one airline selling tickets for another airline's flights under its own airline code. An early example of this was Japan Airlines' (JAL) codesharing partnership with Aeroflot in the 1960s on Tokyo–Moscow flights; Aeroflot operated the flights using Aeroflot aircraft, but JAL sold tickets for the flights as if they were JAL flights. Another example was the Austrian–Sabena partnership on the Vienna–Brussels–New York/JFK route during the late '60s, using a Sabena Boeing 707 with Austrian livery.
Since airline reservation requests are often made by city-pair (such as "show me flights from Chicago to Düsseldorf"), an airline that can codeshare with another airline for a variety of routes might be able to be listed as indeed offering a Chicago–Düsseldorf flight. The passenger is advised however, that airline no. 1 operates the flight from say Chicago to Amsterdam (for example), and airline no. 2 operates the continuing flight (on a different airplane, sometimes from another terminal) to Düsseldorf. Thus the primary rationale for code sharing is to expand one's service offerings in city-pair terms to increase sales.
A more recent development is the airline alliance, which became prevalent in the late 1990s. These alliances can act as virtual mergers to get around government restrictions. The largest are Star Alliance, SkyTeam and Oneworld, and these accounted for over 60% of global commercial air traffic . Alliances of airlines coordinate their passenger service programs (such as lounges and frequent-flyer programs), offer special interline tickets and often engage in extensive codesharing (sometimes systemwide). These are increasingly integrated business combinations—sometimes including cross-equity arrangements—in which products, service standards, schedules, and airport facilities are standardized and combined for higher efficiency. One of the first airlines to start an alliance with another airline was KLM, who partnered with Northwest Airlines. Both airlines later entered the SkyTeam alliance after the fusion of KLM and Air France in 2004.
Often the companies combine IT operations, or purchase fuel and aircraft as a bloc to achieve higher bargaining power. However, the alliances have been most successful at purchasing invisible supplies and services, such as fuel. Airlines usually prefer to purchase items visible to their passengers to differentiate themselves from local competitors. If an airline's main domestic competitor flies Boeing airliners, then the airline may prefer to use Airbus aircraft regardless of what the rest of the alliance chooses.
Largest airlines
The world's largest airlines can be defined in several ways. , American Airlines Group was the largest by fleet size, passengers carried and revenue passenger mile. Delta Air Lines was the largest by revenue, assets value and market capitalization. Lufthansa Group was the largest by number of employees, FedEx Express by freight tonne-kilometres, Turkish Airlines by number of countries served and UPS Airlines by number of destinations served (though United Airlines was the largest passenger airline by number of destinations served).State supportHistorically, air travel has survived largely through state support, whether in the form of equity or subsidies. The airline industry as a whole has made a cumulative loss during its 100-year history.
One argument is that positive externalities, such as higher growth due to global mobility, outweigh the microeconomic losses and justify continuing government intervention. A historically high level of government intervention in the airline industry can be seen as part of a wider political consensus on strategic forms of transport, such as highways and railways, both of which receive public funding in most parts of the world. Although many countries continue to operate state-owned or parastatal airlines, many large airlines today are privately owned and are therefore governed by microeconomic principles to maximize shareholder profit.
In December 1991, the collapse of Pan Am, an airline often credited for shaping the international airline industry, highlighted the financial complexities faced by major airline companies.
Following the 1978 deregulation, U.S. carriers did not manage to make an aggregate profit for 12 years in 31, including four years where combined losses amounted to $10 billion, but rebounded with eight consecutive years of profits since 2010, including its four with over $10 billion profits.<!--
Environment
tracking of contrails generated by air traffic over the southeastern United States on 29 January 2004.]]
Aircraft engines emit noise pollution, gases and particulate emissions, and contribute to global dimming.
Growth of the industry in recent years raised a number of ecological questions.
Domestic air transport grew in China at 15.5 percent annually from 2001 to 2006. The rate of air travel globally increased at 3.7 percent per year over the same time. In the EU greenhouse gas emissions from aviation increased by 87% between 1990 and 2006. However it must be compared with the flights increase, only in UK, between 1990 and 2006 terminal passengers increased from 100 000 thousands to 250 000 thousands., according to AEA reports every year, 750 million passengers travel by European airlines, which also share 40% of merchandise value in and out of Europe. Without even pressure from "green activists", targeting lower ticket prices, generally, airlines do what is possible to cut the fuel consumption (and gas emissions connected therewith). Further, according to some reports, it can be concluded that the last piston-powered aircraft were as fuel-efficient as the average jet in 2005.
Despite continuing efficiency improvements from the major aircraft manufacturers, the expanding demand for global air travel has resulted in growing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Currently, the aviation sector, including US domestic and global international travel, make approximately 1.6 percent of global anthropogenic GHG emissions per annum. North America accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world's GHG emissions from aviation fuel use.
emissions from the jet fuel burned per passenger on an average airline flight is about 353 kilograms (776 pounds). Loss of natural habitat potential associated with the jet fuel burned per passenger on a airline flight is estimated to be 250 square meters (2700 square feet).
In the context of climate change and peak oil, there is a debate about possible taxation of air travel and the inclusion of aviation in an emissions trading scheme, with a view to ensuring that the total external costs of aviation are taken into account.
The airline industry is responsible for about 11 percent of greenhouse gases emitted by the U.S. transportation sector. Boeing estimates that biofuels could reduce flight-related greenhouse-gas emissions by 60 to 80 percent. The solution would be blending algae fuels with existing jet fuel:
* Boeing and Air New Zealand are collaborating with leading Brazilian biofuel maker Tecbio, New Zealand's Aquaflow Bionomic and other jet biofuel developers around the world.
* Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Green Fund are looking into the technology as part of a biofuel initiative.
* KLM has made the first commercial flight with biofuel in 2009.
There are projects on electric aircraft, and some of which are fully operational as of 2013.
Call signs
Each operator of a scheduled or charter flight uses an airline call sign when communicating with airports or air traffic control. Most of these call-signs are derived from the airline's trade name, but for reasons of history, marketing, or the need to reduce ambiguity in spoken English (so that pilots do not mistakenly make navigational decisions based on instructions issued to a different aircraft), some airlines and air forces use call-signs less obviously connected with their trading name. For example, British Airways uses a Speedbird call-sign, named after the logo of one of its predecessors, BOAC, while SkyEurope used Relax.
Personnel
of a Jetstar Boeing 787]]
The various types of airline personnel include flight crew, responsible for the operation of the aircraft. Flight crew members include: pilots (captain and first officer: some older aircraft also required a flight engineer and/or a navigator); flight attendants (led by a purser on larger aircraft); In-flight security personnel on some airlines (most notably El Al)
Groundcrew, responsible for operations at airports, include Aerospace and avionics engineers responsible for certifying the aircraft for flight and management of aircraft maintenance; Aerospace engineers, responsible for airframe, powerplant and electrical systems maintenance; Avionics engineers responsible for avionics and instruments maintenance; Airframe and powerplant technicians; Electric System technicians, responsible for maintenance of electrical systems; Flight dispatchers; Baggage handlers; Ramp Agents; Remote centralized weight and balancing; Gate agents; Ticket agents; Passenger service agents (such as airline lounge employees); Reservation agents, usually (but not always) at facilities outside the airport; Crew schedulers.
Airlines follow a corporate structure where each broad area of operations (such as maintenance, flight operations (including flight safety), and passenger service) is supervised by a vice president. Larger airlines often appoint vice presidents to oversee each of the airline's hubs as well. Airlines employ lawyers to deal with regulatory procedures and other administrative tasks.Trends
, Japan]]
The pattern of ownership has been privatized since the mid-1980s, that is, the ownership has gradually changed from governments to private and individual sectors or organizations. This occurs as regulators permit greater freedom and non-government ownership, in steps that are usually decades apart. This pattern is not seen for all airlines in all regions. Many major airlines operating between the 1940s and 1980s were government-owned or government-established. However, most airlines from the earliest days of air travel in the 1920s and 1930s were personal businesses.
As in many mature industries, consolidation is a trend. Airline groupings may consist of limited bilateral partnerships, long-term, multi-faceted alliances between carriers, equity arrangements, mergers, or takeovers. Since governments often restrict ownership and merger between companies in different countries, most consolidation takes place within a country. In the U.S., over 200 airlines have merged, been taken over, or gone out of business since the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978. Many international airline managers are lobbying their governments to permit greater consolidation to achieve higher economy and efficiency.
Types
There are several types of passenger airlines, mainly:
* Mainline airlines operate flights by the airline's main operating unit, rather than by regional affiliates or subsidiaries.
* Regional airlines, non-"mainline" airlines that operate regional aircraft; regionals typically operate over shorter non-intercontinental distances, often as feeder services for legacy mainline networks.
* Low-cost carriers, giving a "basic", "no-frills" and perceived inexpensive service.
* Business class airline, an airline aimed at the business traveler, featuring all business class seating and amenities.
* Charter airlines, operating outside regular schedule intervals.
* Flag carriers, the historically nationally owned airlines that were considered representative of the country overseas.
* Legacy carriers, US carriers that predate the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978.
* Major airlines of the United States, airlines with at least $1 billion in revenues.
In addition, there are several cargo-only airlines.
See also
Related lists
References
Bibliography
# "A history of the world's airlines", R.E.G. Davies, Oxford U.P, 1964
# "The airline encyclopedia, 1909–2000.” Myron J. Smith, Scarecrow Press, 2002
# "Flying Off Course: The Economics of International Airlines," 3rd edition. Rigas Doganis, Routledge, New York, 2002.
# "The Airline Business in the 21st Century." Rigas Doganis, Routledge, New York, 2001.
External links
*
*
*
*
Category:Economics of transport and utility industries | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.606930 |
1943 | Australian Democrats | | abbreviation = AD
| leader1_title = President
| leader1_name = Lyn Allison
| leader2_title = Vice Presidents
| leader2_name =
| leader3_title | leader3_name
| leader4_title | leader4_name
| leader5_title | leader5_name
| founder Don Chipp
| founded 9 May 1977
| registered 7 April 2019
| seats1_title = House of Representatives
| seats1 }}
| seats2_title = Senate
| seats2 }}
| symbol | flag
| flag_title | flag_alt
| website =
| country = Australia
}}
The Australian Democrats is a centrist Founded in 1977 from a merger of the Australia Party and the New Liberal Movement, both of which were descended from Liberal Party splinter groups, it was Australia's largest minor party from its formation in 1977 through to 2004 and frequently held the balance of power in the Senate during that time. In 2018 the Democrats merged with CountryMinded, a small, also unregistered agrarian political party, and later that year the party's constitution was radically rewritten to establish "top-down" governance and de-emphasize the principle of participatory democracy. On 7 April 2019 the party regained registration with the Australian Electoral Commission. , the national president of the party is former senator and parliamentary leader Lyn Allison.History1977–1986: Foundation and Don Chipp's leadershipThe Australian Democrats were formed on 9 May 1977 from an amalgamation of the Australia Party and the New Liberal Movement. The two groups found a common basis for a new political movement in the widespread discontent with the two major parties. Former Liberal minister Don Chipp agreed to lead the new party.
At the 1977 election, the Australian Democrats secured two seats in the Senate with the election of Colin Mason (NSW) and Don Chipp (VIC), though Haines lost her seat in South Australia. At the 1980 election, this increased to five seats with the election of Michael Macklin (QLD) and John Siddons (VIC) and the return of Janine Haines (SA). Thereafter they frequently held enough seats to give them the balance of power in the upper chamber.
At a Melbourne media conference on 19 September 1980, in the midst of the 1980 election campaign, Chipp described his party's aim as to "keep the bastards honest"—the "bastards" being the major parties or politicians in general. This became a long-lived slogan for the Democrats. In the event, Victorian Janet Powell was elected as leader and John Coulter was chosen as deputy leader.
1990–1993: Janet Powell and John Coulter
Despite the loss of Haines and the WA Senate seat (through an inconsistent national preference agreement with the ALP), the 1990 federal election heralded something of a rebirth for the party, with a dramatic rise in primary vote. This was at the same time as an economic recession was building, and events such as the Gulf War in Kuwait were beginning to shepherd issues of globalisation and transnational trade on to national government agendas.
{| style="float:left;padding:1px 3px;margin:0 8px 5px 0;Background:#eee;Border:2px outset #AAA; border-radius:15px"
|-
||
Election Results<br />
Senate – National
9.3%
*1983: 9.6%
*1984: 7.6%
*1987: 8.5%
*1990: 12.6%
*1993: 5.3%
*1996: 10.8%
*1998: 8.4%
*2001: 7.3%
*2004: 2.1%
*2007: 1.3%
*2010: 0.6%
*2013: 0.3%
*2016: 0.0%*
*2019: 0.2%^
*2022: 0.4%^^}}*Did not contest
^NSW, SA, & VIC Only
^^NSW, VIC, QLD, WA,
<br />& SA Only
|}
The Australian Democrats had a long-standing policy to oppose war and so opposed Australia's support of, and participation in, the Gulf War. Whereas the House of Representatives was able to avoid any debate about the war and Australia's participation, the Democrats took full advantage of the opportunity to move for a debate in the Senate.
Because of the party's pacifist-based opposition to the Gulf War, there was mass-media antipathy and negative publicity which some construed as poor media performance by Janet Powell, the party's standing having stalled at about 10%. Before 12 months of her leadership had passed, the South Australian and Queensland divisions were circulating the party's first-ever petition to criticise and oust the parliamentary leader. The explicit grounds related to Powell's alleged responsibility for poor AD ratings in Gallup and other media surveys of potential voting support. When this charge was deemed insufficient, interested party officers and senators reinforced it with negative media 'leaks' concerning her openly established relationship with Sid Spindler and exposure of administrative failings resulting in excessive overtime to a staff member. With National Executive blessing, the party room pre-empted the ballot by replacing the leader with deputy John Coulter. In the process, severe internal divisions were generated. One major collateral casualty was the party whip Paul McLean who resigned and quit the Senate in disgust at what he perceived as in-fighting between close friends. The casual NSW vacancy created by his resignation was filled by Karin Sowada. Powell duly left the party, along with many leading figures of the Victorian branch of the party, and unsuccessfully stood as an Independent candidate when her term expired. In later years, she campaigned for the Australian Greens.
1993–1997: Cheryl Kernot
The party's parliamentary influence was weakened in 1996 after the Howard government was elected, and a Labor senator, Mal Colston, resigned from the Labor Party. Since the Democrats now shared the parliamentary balance of power with two Independent senators, the Coalition government was able on occasion to pass legislation by negotiating with Colston and Brian Harradine.
In October 1997, party leader Cheryl Kernot resigned, announcing that she would be joining the Australian Labor Party. (Five years later it was revealed that she had been in a sexual relationship with Labor deputy leader Gareth Evans). Kernot resigned from the Senate and was replaced by Andrew Bartlett, while deputy Meg Lees became the new party leader.1997–2004: Meg Lees, Natasha Stott Despoja and Andrew Bartlett
Under Lees' leadership, in the 1998 federal election, the Democrats' candidate John Schumann came within 2 per cent of taking Liberal Foreign Minister Alexander Downer's seat of Mayo in the Adelaide Hills under Australia's preferential voting system. The party's representation increased to nine senators, and they regained the balance of power, holding it until the Coalition gained a Senate majority at the 2004 election.
Internal conflict and leadership tensions from 2000 to 2002, blamed on the party's support for the Government's Goods and Services Tax, was damaging to the Democrats. Opposed by the Labor Party, the Australian Greens and independent Senator Harradine, the tax required Democrat support to pass. In an election fought on tax, the Democrats publicly stated that they liked neither the Liberal's nor the Labor's tax packages, but pledged to work with whichever party was elected to make theirs better. They campaigned with the slogan "No Goods and Services Tax on Food".
In 1999, after negotiations with Prime Minister Howard, Meg Lees, Andrew Murray and the party room senators agreed to support the A New Tax System legislation with exemptions from goods and services tax for most food and some medicines, as well as many environmental and social concessions. Five Australian Democrats senators voted in favour. However, two dissident senators on the party's left, Natasha Stott Despoja and Andrew Bartlett, voted against the GST.
The decision to pass the GST was opposed by the majority of the Democrats' members, and in 2001 a leadership spill saw Lees replaced as leader by Stott Despoja after a very public and bitter leadership battle. Despite criticism of Stott Despoja's youth and lack of experience, the 2001 election saw the Democrats receive similar media coverage to the previous election. Despite the internal divisions, the Australian Democrats' election result in 2001 was quite good. However, it was not enough to prevent the loss of Vicki Bourne's Senate seat in NSW.
The 2002 South Australian election was the last time an Australian Democrat would be elected to an Australian parliament. Sandra Kanck was re-elected to a second eight-year term from an upper house primary vote of 7.3 percent.
Resulting tensions between Stott Despoja and Lees led to Meg Lees leaving the party in 2002, becoming an independent and forming the Australian Progressive Alliance. Stott Despoja stood down from the leadership following a loss of confidence by her party room colleagues. It led to a protracted leadership battle in 2002, which eventually led to the election of Senator Andrew Bartlett as leader. While the public fighting stopped, the public support for the party remained at record lows.
On 6 December 2003, Bartlett stepped aside temporarily as leader of the party, after an incident in which he swore at Liberal Senator Jeannie Ferris on the floor of Parliament while intoxicated. The party issued a statement stating that deputy leader Lyn Allison would serve as the acting leader of the party. Bartlett apologised to the Democrats, Jeannie Ferris and the Australian public for his behaviour and assured all concerned that it would never happen again. On 29 January 2004, after seeking medical treatment, Bartlett returned to the Australian Democrats leadership, vowing to abstain from alcohol.
Decline
Following internal conflict over the goods and services tax and resultant leadership changes, a dramatic decline occurred in the Democrats' membership and voting support in all states. Simultaneously, an increase was recorded in support for the Australian Greens who, by 2004, were supplanting the Democrats as a substantial third party. The trend was noted that year by political scientists Dean Jaensch et al.
Support for the Australian Democrats fell significantly at the 2004 federal election in which they achieved only 2.4 per cent of the national vote. Nowhere was this more noticeable than in their key support base of suburban Adelaide in South Australia, where they received between 1 and 4 percent of the lower house vote; by comparison, they tallied between 7 and 31 per cent of the vote in 2001. No Democrat senators were elected, though four kept their seats due to being elected in 2001, thus their representation fell from eight senators to four. Three incumbent senators were defeated: Aden Ridgeway (NSW), Brian Greig (WA) and John Cherry (Qld). Following the loss, the customary post-election leadership ballot installed Allison as leader, with Bartlett as her deputy. From 1 July 2005 the Australian Democrats lost official parliamentary party status, being represented by only four senators while the governing Liberal-National Coalition gained a majority and potential control of the Senate—the first time this advantage had been enjoyed by any government since 1980.
On 28 August 2006, the founder of the Australian Democrats, Don Chipp, died. Former prime minister Bob Hawke said: "... there is a coincidental timing almost between the passing of Don Chipp and what I think is the death throes of the Democrats." In November 2006, the Australian Democrats fared very poorly in the Victorian state election, receiving a Legislative Council vote tally of only 0.83%, less than half of the party's result in 2002 (1.79 per cent).
The Democrats again had no success at the 2007 federal election, and lost all four of their remaining Senate seats. Two incumbent senators, Lyn Allison (Victoria) and Andrew Bartlett (Queensland), were defeated, their seats both reverting to major parties. Their two remaining colleagues, Andrew Murray (WA) and Natasha Stott Despoja (SA), retired. All four senators' terms expired on 30 June 2008—leaving the Australian Democrats with no federal representation for the first time since its founding in 1977. Later, in 2009, Jaensch suggested it was possible the Democrats could make a political comeback at the 2010 South Australian election, but this did not occur.State and territory lossesThe Tasmanian division of the party was deregistered for having insufficient members in January 2006.
At the 2006 South Australian election, the Australian Democrats were reduced to 1.7 per cent of the Legislative Council (upper house) vote. Their sole councillor up for re-election, Kate Reynolds, was defeated. In July 2006, Richard Pascoe, national and South Australian party president, resigned, citing slumping opinion polls and the poor result in the 2006 South Australian election as well as South Australian parliamentary leader Sandra Kanck's comments regarding the drug MDMA which he saw as damaging to the party.
In the New South Wales state election of March 2007, the Australian Democrats lost their last remaining NSW Upper House representative, Arthur Chesterfield-Evans. The party fared poorly, gaining only 1.8 per cent of the Legislative Council vote.
On 13 September 2007, the ACT Democrats (Australian Capital Territory Division of the party) was deregistered by the ACT Electoral Commissioner, being unable to demonstrate a minimum membership of 100 electors.
These losses left Sandra Kanck, in South Australia, as the party's only parliamentarian. She retired in 2009 and was replaced by David Winderlich, making him (as of 2020) the last Democrat to sit in any Australian parliament. The Democrats lost all representation when Winderlich resigned from the party in October 2009. He sat the remainder of his term as an independent, and lost his seat at the 2010 South Australian election.
Post-parliamentary decline
Following the loss of all Democrats MP's in both federal and state parliaments, the party continued to be riven by factionalism. In 2009 a dispute arose between two factions, the "Christian Centrists" loyal to former leader Meg Lees, and a faction comprising the party's more progressive members. The dispute arose when the Christian Centrist controlled national executive removed a website for party members from the internet, stating that its operation was a violation of the party constitution. In response, the progressive faction accused the national executive of being undemocratic and of acting contrary to the party constitution themselves. By 2012, this dispute had been superseded by another between members loyal to former Senator Brian Greig and members who were supporters of former South Australian MP Sandra Kanck. Brian Greig was elected the party's president, but resigned after less than a month due to frustration with the party's factionalism.DeregistrationOn 16 April 2015, the Australian Electoral Commission deregistered the Australian Democrats as a political party for failure to demonstrate the requisite 500 members to maintain registration. However, the party did run candidates and remain registered for a period of time thereafter in the New South Wales Democrats and Queensland Democrat divisions.
Renewed registration (since 2019)
In November 2018 there was a report that CountryMinded, a de-registered microparty, would merge with the Australian Democrats in a new bid to seek membership growth, electoral re-registration and financial support. In February 2019, application for registration was submitted to the AEC and was upheld on 7 April 2019, despite an objection from the Australian Democrats (Queensland Division).
The party unsuccessfully contested the lower-house seat of Adelaide and a total of six Senate seats (two in each state of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia) at the 2019 federal election. At the 2022 federal election one lower-house seat (Eden-Monaro) and three Senate seats were contested without success, polling fewer than 0.7% of first-preference votes.
The party polled fewer than 1.4% of first preference votes in the 2024 Dunkley by-election.
Overview
The party was founded on principles of honesty, tolerance, compassion and direct democracy through postal ballots of all members, so that "there should be no hierarchical structure ... by which a carefully engineered elite could make decisions for the members." From the outset, members' participation was fiercely protected in national and divisional constitutions prescribing internal elections, regular meeting protocols, annual conferences—and monthly journals for open discussion and balloting. Dispute resolution procedures were established, with final recourse to a party ombudsman and membership ballot.
Policies determined by the unique participatory method promoted environmental awareness and sustainability, opposition to the primacy of economic rationalism (Australian neoliberalism), preventative approaches to human health and welfare, animal rights, rejection of nuclear technology and weapons.
The Australian Democrats were the first representatives of green politics at the federal level in Australia. They "were in the vanguard of environmentalism in Australia. From the early 1980s they were unequivocally opposed to the building of the Franklin Dam in Tasmania and they opposed the mining and export of uranium and the development of nuclear power plants in Australia."
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Federal parliamentary leaders
{| class"wikitable sortable" width100%
|-
!#
!Leader
!State
!Start
!End
!Time in office
!Election(s)
|- align=center
|1
|Don Chipp
|VIC
|9 May 1977
|18 August 1986
|
|1977, 1980, 1983, 1984
|- align=center
|2
|Janine Haines
|SA
|18 August 1986
|24 March 1990
|
|1987, 1990
|- align=center
|–
|Michael Macklin
|VIC
|1 July 1990
|19 August 1991
|
|none
|- align=center
|4
|John Coulter
|SA
|19 August 1991
|29 April 1993
|
|1993
|- align=center
|5
|Cheryl Kernot
|QLD
|29 April 1993
|15 October 1997
|
|1996
|- align=center
|6
|Meg Lees
|SA
|6 April 2001
|21 August 2002
|
|2001
|- align=center
|–
|Brian Greig
|WA
|23 August 2002
|5 October 2002
|0 years,
|none
|- align=center
|8
|Andrew Bartlett
|QLD
|5 October 2002
|3 November 2004
|
|2004
|- align=center
|9
|Lyn Allison
|VIC
|3 November 2004
|30 June 2008
|
|2007
|}
;Notes
Elected representatives
See also
*Social liberalism
*Liberalism worldwide
*List of liberal parties
*Liberal democracy
*Timeline of (small-l) liberal parties in Australia
Notes
References
Further reading
*Bennett D, Discord in the Democrats PWHCE article, Melbourne 2002
*Beyond Our Expectations—Proceedings of the Australian Democrats First National Conference, Canberra, 16–17 February 1980. [Papers by: Don Chipp, Sir Mark Oliphant, Prof. Stephen Boyden, Bob Whan, Julian Cribb, Colin Mason, John Siddons, A. McDonald]
*Chipp D (ed. Larkin J) Chipp, Methuen Haynes, North Ryde NSW, 1987
*Gauja A Evaluating the Success and Contribution of a Minor Party: the Case of the Australian Democrats Parliamentary Affairs (2010) 63(3): 486–503, 21 January 2010, at Oxford Journals. (Paid subscription, Athens or participating library membership required)
*Paul A and Miller L The Third Team July 2007 A historical essay in 30 Years—Australian Democrats Melbourne 2007. (A 72-page anthology of historical and biographical monographs about the state and federal parliamentary experiences of the Democrats, for the party's 30th anniversary.)
*Sugita H ''Challenging 'twopartism'—the contribution of the Australian Democrats to the Australian party system, PhD thesis, Flinders University of South Australia, July 1995
*Warhurst J (ed.) Keeping the bastards honest Allen & Unwin Sydney 1997
*Warhurst J, Don Chipp Was The Right Man in the Right Place at the Right Time Canberra Times'' 7 September 2006
Category:1977 establishments in Australia
Category:Centrist parties in Australia
Category:Liberal parties in Australia
Category:Organisations based in Adelaide
Category:Political parties established in 1977
Category:Social liberal parties
Category:Republican parties in Australia | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Democrats | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.659533 |
1944 | Australian Capital Territory | }}
| image_map
| map_caption Location of ACT in Australia<br />
| subdivision_type = Country
| subdivision_name = Australia
| established_title = Transferred to Commonwealth
| established_date = 1 January 1911
| established_title2 = Responsible government
| established_date2 = 1988
| largest_city = Canberra
| leader_title1 = Monarch
| leader_name1 = Charles III
| legislature = Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly
| judiciary = Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory
| national_representation = Parliament of Australia
| national_representation_type1 = Senate
| national_representation1 = 2 senators (of 76)
| national_representation_type2 = House of Representatives
| national_representation2 = 3 seats (of 151)
| area_km2 = 2358
| area_land_km2 = 2358
| area_water_km2 = 0
| area_rank = 8th
| area_rank_link = States and territories of Australia#Statistics
| elevation_max_m = 1912
| elevation_max_point = Bimberi Peak
| elevation_min_m = 429
| elevation_min_point = Murrumbidgee River
| population_estimate 475,600
| population_estimate_rank = 7th
| population_rank_link = States and territories of Australia#Statistics
| population_estimate_year = September 2024
| population_density_km2 = 201.7
| population_density_sq_mi | population_density_rank 1st
| population_density_rank_link = States and territories of Australia#Statistics
| GDP_nominal AU$53,253 billion
| GDP_nominal_type = GSP
| GDP_nominal_year = 2024
| GDP_nominal_rank = 6th
| GDP_nominal_rank_link = List of Australian states and territories by gross state product
| GDP_nominal_per_capita = AU$112,324
| GDP_nominal_per_capita_rank = 3rd
| GDP_nominal_per_capita_rank_link = List of Australian states and territories by gross state product
| HDI = 0.976<!--number only-->
| HDI_year = 2022<!-- Please use the year to which the data refers, not the publication year-->
| HDI_change = increase
| HDI_ref
| HDI_rank = 1st
| HDI_rank_link = List of Australian states and territories by Human Development Index
| timezone = AEST
| utc_offset = +10:00
| timezone_DST = AEDT
| utc_offset_DST = +11:00
| calling_code | postal_code_type Postal abbreviation
| postal_code = ACT
| website =
| iso_code = AU–ACT
| demonym=Territorian
|capitalCanberra|leader_title2Governor-General|leader_name2Sam Mostyn|leader_title3Chief Minister|leader_name3=Andrew Barr (ALP)}}
The Australian Capital Territory (ACT), known as the Federal Capital Territory until 1938, is an internal territory of Australia. Canberra, the capital city of Australia, is situated within the territory, and is the territory's primate city. It is located in southeastern Australian mainland as an enclave surrounded by the state of New South Wales (NSW). Exclaved from NSW after federation as the seat of government for the new nation, the territory hosts parliament house, High Court of Australia and the head offices of many Australian Government agencies.
On 1 January 1901, federation of the colonies of Australia was achieved. Section 125 of the new Australian Constitution provided that land, situated in New South Wales and at least from Sydney, would be ceded to the new federal government. Following discussion and exploration of various areas within New South Wales, the Seat of Government Act 1908 was passed in 1908 which specified a capital in the Yass-Canberra region. The territory was transferred to the federal government by New South Wales in 1911, two years prior to the capital city being founded and formally named as Canberra in 1913.
While the overwhelming majority of the territory population resides in the city of Canberra in the territory 's north-east, the territory also includes some towns such as Williamsdale, Oaks Estate, Uriarra, Tharwa and Hall. The territory also includes the Namadgi National Park, which comprises the majority of land area of the territory. Despite a common misconception, the Jervis Bay Territory is not part of the ACT, although ACT laws apply in the Jervis Bay Territory. The territory has a relatively dry, continental climate, experiencing warm to hot summers and cool to cold winters.
The territory is home to many important institutions of the federal government, national monuments and museums. These include the Parliament of Australia, the High Court of Australia, the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Australian War Memorial. It also hosts the majority of foreign embassies in Australia, as well as regional headquarters of many international organisations, not-for-profit groups, lobbying groups and professional associations. Several major universities also have campuses in the territory, including the Australian National University, the University of Canberra, the University of New South Wales, Charles Sturt University and the Australian Catholic University.
A locally elected legislative assembly has governed the territory since 1988. However, the Commonwealth maintains authority over the territory and may disallow or overturn local laws. The Commonwealth maintains control over the area known as the Parliamentary Triangle through the National Capital Authority. Residents of the territory elect three members of the House of Representatives and, together with residents of the Jervis Bay Territory, elect two senators.
With 453,324 residents, the territory is the second smallest mainland state or territory by population. At the , the median weekly income for people in the territory aged over 15 was $998, significantly higher than the national median of $662. Evidence indicates habitation dating back at least 25,000 years, and it is possible that the area was inhabited for considerably longer. The principal group occupying the region were the Ngunnawal people, with the Ngarigo and Walgalu living immediately to the south, the Wandadian to the east, the Gandangara to the north and the Wiradjuri to the north-west.
European colonisation
Following European settlement, the growth of the new colony of New South Wales led to an increasing demand for arable land. The 1820s saw further exploration in the Canberra area associated with the construction of a road from Sydney to the Goulburn plains. While working on the project, Charles Throsby learned of a nearby lake and river from the local Indigenous peoples and he accordingly sent Wild to lead a small party to investigate the site. The search was unsuccessful, but they did discover the Yass River, and it is surmised that they would have set foot on part of the future territory.
A second expedition was mounted shortly thereafter, and they became the first Europeans to camp at the Molonglo (Ngambri) and Queanbeyan (Jullergung) Rivers. Early settlement The first land grant in the region was made to Joshua John Moore in 1823, and European settlement in the area began in 1824 with the construction of a homestead by his stockmen on what is now the Acton Peninsula. The gold rushes prompted the establishment of communication between Sydney and the region by way of the Cobb & Co coaches, which transported mail and passengers. The first post offices opened in Ginninderra in 1859 and at Lanyon in 1860. Section 125 of the Australian Constitution thus provided that, following Federation in 1901, land would be ceded freely to the new federal government.
| label2 = Yass-Canberra
| mark2size = 8
| label2_size = 70
| pos2 = top
| coordinates2 =
| label3 = Tooma
| mark3size = 8
| label3_size = 70
| pos3 = right
| coordinates3 =
| label4 = Lyndhurst
| mark4size = 8
| label4_size = 70
| pos4 = left
| coordinates4 =
| label5 = Armidale
| mark5size = 8
| label5_size = 70
| pos5 = top
| coordinates5 =
| label6 = Tumut
| mark6size = 8
| label6_size = 70
| pos6 = left
| coordinates6 =
| label7 = Bombala
| mark7size = 8
| label7_size = 70
| pos7 = bottom
| coordinates7 =
| label8 = Albury
| mark8size = 8
| label8_size = 70
| pos8 = top
| coordinates8 =
| label9 = Orange
| mark9size = 8
| label9_size = 70
| pos9 = top
| coordinates9 =
| label10 | mark10 Circle and its center.svg
| mark10size = 88
| coordinates10 =
}}
This, however, left open the question of where to locate the capital. In 1906 and after significant deliberations, New South Wales agreed to cede sufficient land on the condition that it was in the Yass-Canberra region, Initially, Dalgety, New South Wales remained at the forefront, but Yass-Canberra prevailed after voting by federal representatives. Government surveyor Charles Scrivener was deployed to the region in the same year to map out a specific site and, after an extensive search, settled upon the present location, basing the borders primarily on the need to secure a stable water supply for the planned capital.
{| class"wikitable" style"text-align:center; font-size:90%"
|+ Results of the 8 October 1908 House of Representatives ballot
! rowspan=2| Site
! rowspan=2|
! colspan=9| Ballot
|-
! width35px| 1st !! width35px| 2nd !! width35px| 3rd !! width35px| 4th !! width35px| 5th !! width35px| 6th !! width35px| 7th !! width35px| 8th !! width=35px| 9th
|-
| alignleft| Dalgety || 452 km || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 27 || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 26 || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 28 || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 28 || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 27 || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 27 || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 24 || 27 || 33
|-
| alignleft| Yass-Canberra || 248 km || 19 || 22 || 23 || 21 || 22 || 22 || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 24 || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 31 || bgcolor#D0F0D0| 39
|-
| align=left| Tooma || 514 km || 4 || 3 || 5 || 7 || 9 || 9 || 13 || 14
|-
| align=left| Lyndhurst || 269 km || 6 || 8 || 7 || 8 || 8 || 8 || 8
|-
| align=left| Armidale || 485 km || 7 || 5 || 5 || 5 || 5 || 5
|-
| align=left| Tumut || 411 km || 3 || 4 || 3 || 2 || 2
|-
| align=left| Canberra || 248 km || 1 || 1 || 1 || 1
|-
| align=left| Bombala || 485 km || 1 || 1
|-
| align=left| Albury || 554 km || 2
|-
| align=left| Orange || 254 km || 2
|-
! colspan=2| Total !! 72 || 70 || 72 || 72 || 73 || 71 || 69 || 72 || 72
|-
| colspan=2| Abstention || 2 || 4 || 2 || 2 || 1 || 3 || 4 || 2 || 2
|-
| colspan=2| Absent || 1 || 1 || 1 || 1 || 1 || 1 || 1 || 1 || 1
|}
The territory was transferred to the Commonwealth by New South Wales on 1 January 1911, two years before the naming of Canberra as the national capital on 20 March 1913.
The Commonwealth gained control of all land within the borders of the new territory but ownership only of NSW Crown land, with significant parcels of extant freehold remaining in the hands of their pre-existing owners. Much of this was acquired during World War One, though a few titles were not transferred until the late 20th Century.
Land within the territory is granted under a leasehold system, with 99-year residential leases sold to buyers as new suburbs are planned, surveyed, and developed. The current policy is for these leases to be extended for another 99-year period on expiry, subject to payment of an administrative fee. In an arrangement inspired by Georgism, the ideas of 19th-century American economist Henry George, leaseholders had to pay 5% of the unimproved value of the underlying land in rent until the Gorton government abolished it in 1970.
Development throughout 20th century
is standing, centre, in dark suit. To his right is the Governor-General, Lord Denman, and to his left, Lady Denman.]]
In 1911, an international competition to design the future capital was held; it was won by the Chicago architect Walter Burley Griffin in 1912. the Federal Capital Advisory Committee was established in 1920 to advise the government of the construction efforts.
From 1938 to 1957, the National Capital Planning and Development Committee continued to plan the further expansion of Canberra. However, it did not have executive power, and decisions were made on the development of Canberra without consulting the committee.
After World War II, there was a shortage of housing and office space in Canberra. A Senate Select Committee hearing was held in 1954 to address its development requirements. This Committee recommended the creation of a single planning body with executive power. Consequently, the National Capital Planning and Development Committee was replaced by the National Capital Development Commission in 1957. The National Capital Development Commission ended four decades of disputes over the shape and design of Lake Burley Griffin and construction was completed in 1964 after four years of work. The completion of the centrepiece of Griffin's design finally laid the platform for the development of Griffin's Parliamentary Triangle. Nevertheless, in 1988, the new federal minister for the territory Gary Punch received a report recommending the abolition of the National Capital Development Commission and the formation of a locally elected government. Punch recommended that the Hawke government accept the report's recommendations and subsequently Clyde Holding introduced legislation to grant self-government to the territory in October 1988.
The enactment on 6 December 1988 of the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988 established the framework for self-government. The first election for the 17-member Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly was held on 4 March 1989.
The initial years of self-government were difficult and unstable. A majority of territory residents had opposed self-government and had it imposed upon them by the federal parliament. At the first election, 4 of the 17 seats were won by anti-self-government single-issue parties due to a protest vote by disgruntled Canberrans and a total of 8 were won by minor parties and independents. The territory extends about north-south between 35.124°S and 35.921°S, and west-east between 148.763°E and 149.399°E. The city area of Canberra occupies the north-eastern corner of this area.
The territory includes the city of Canberra and some towns such as Williamsdale, Oaks Estate, Uriarra Village, Tharwa and Hall. The territory also contains agricultural land (sheep, dairy cattle, vineyards and small amounts of crops) and a large area of national park (Namadgi National Park), much of it mountainous and forested.
, located in the north-east of the region]]
Tidbinbilla is a locality to the south-west of Canberra that features the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, operated by the United States' NASA as part of its Deep Space Network. The Southern Tablelands Temperate Grassland straddles the state.
The territory includes a large range of mountains, rivers and creeks, largely contained within the Namadgi National Park. These include the Naas and Murrumbidgee Rivers.
In September 2022, a proposal was announced to change the border between NSW and the territory, the first change since the territory was created in 1911. ACT chief minister Andrew Barr said NSW premier Dominic Perrottet had agreed to a proposed border change of in the Ginninderra watershed.
Climate
in Canberra]]
The territory has a relatively dry, continental climate, experiencing warm to hot summers and cool to cold winters. Under the Köppen-Geiger classification, the territory has an oceanic climate (Cfb).
January is the hottest month with an average high of 27.7 °C.
Geology
Notable geological formations in the territory include the Canberra Formation, the Pittman Formation, Black Mountain Sandstone and State Circle Shale.
In the 1840s fossils of brachiopods and trilobites from the Silurian period were discovered at Woolshed Creek near Duntroon. At the time, these were the oldest fossils discovered in Australia, though this record has now been far surpassed. Other specific geological places of interest include the State Circle cutting and the Deakin anticline.
The oldest rocks in the territory date from the Ordovician around 480 million years ago. During this period the region along with most of Eastern Australia was part of the ocean floor; formations from this period include the Black Mountain Sandstone formation and the Pittman Formation consisting largely of quartz-rich sandstone, siltstone and shale. These formations became exposed when the ocean floor was raised by a major volcanic activity in the Devonian forming much of the east coast of Australia.
Flora and fauna
The environments range from alpine area on the higher mountains, to sclerophyll forest and to woodland. Much of the territory has been cleared for grazing and is also burnt off by bushfires several times per century. The kinds of plants can be grouped into vascular plants, that include gymnosperms, flowering plants, and ferns, as well as bryophytes, lichens, fungi and freshwater algae. Four flowering plants are endemic to the territory. Several lichens are unique to the territory. Most plants in the territory are characteristic of the Flora of Australia and include well known plants such as Grevillea, Eucalyptus trees and kangaroo grass.
The native forest in the territory was almost wholly eucalypt species and provided a resource for fuel and domestic purposes. By the early 1960s, logging had depleted the eucalypt, and concern about water quality led to the forests being closed. Interest in forestry began in 1915 with trials of a number of species including Pinus radiata on the slopes of Mount Stromlo. Since then, plantations have been expanded, with the benefit of reducing erosion in the Cotter catchment, and the forests are also popular recreation areas.
Fauna in the territory includes representatives from most major Australian animal groups. This includes kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, platypus, echidna, emu, kookaburras and dragon lizards.
Government and politics
, in the northeast of the ACT, is an entirely planned city.]]
Territory government
Unlike the states of Australia which have their own constitutions, territories are governed under a Commonwealth statutefor the ACT, the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988. The Self-Government Act constitutes a democratic government for the territory consisting of a popularly elected Legislative Assembly which elects a Chief Minister from among its membership who, in turn, appoints an Executive consisting of a number of Ministers.
The executive power of the territory rests with the ACT government, headed by the Chief Minister (currently the Labor Party's Andrew Barr) and consists of ministers appointed by them. The ministers are supported by the ACT Public Service, which is arranged into directorates, and a number of public authorities. The Chief Minister is the equivalent of a State Premier and sits on the National Cabinet. Unlike the states, there is no vice-regal representative who chairs the executive government council. The Chief Minister performs many of the roles that a state governor normally holds in the context of a state; however, the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly gazettes the laws and summons meetings of the Assembly.
The ACT Labor party has been in power since 2001.
The legislative power of the territory is vested in the unicameral Legislative Assembly. The assembly has 25 members, elected from five electorates using the Hare-Clark single transferable voting system. The assembly is presided over by the Speaker (currently the Labor Party's Joy Burch). The assembly has almost all of the same powers as the state parliaments, the power to "make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Territory", with limited exceptions relating to the territory's unique relationship with the commonwealth. The Hare-Clark voting system was adopted after a referendum in 1992 and was entrenched by another referendum in 1995. The electoral system cannot be changed except by a two-thirds majority in the Assembly or a majority vote of support at a public referendum.
There is no level of local government below the territory government as in the states and the functions associated with local government are carried out principally by the Transport Canberra and City Services Directorate. There is an indigenous voice to the ACT government, called the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body.
Despite the wide powers of the territory government, the federal government continues to have power over the territory. This includes an unused power to dissolve the assembly and appoint a caretaker government in extraordinary circumstances. The federal and territory governments share some officers, such as the Ombudsman. The federal parliament also retains the power to make any law for the territory under section 122 of the Constitution and an exclusive power to legislate for the "seat of government". Territory laws which conflict with federal law are inoperable to the extent of the inconsistency. Land in the territory that is designated to be "National Land" under federal law remains under the control of the federal government, usually represented by the National Capital Authority. The federal parliament can disallow laws enacted by the Assembly by a joint resolution of both houses of Parliament, a power which replaced a federal executive veto in 2011. Judiciary and policing
The judicial power of the territory is exercised by the territory courts. These are the Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory the Magistrates Court of the Australian Capital Territory (with summary jurisdiction) and the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal. From 2001, appeals from the Supreme Court are heard by a panel of Supreme Court judges sitting as the Court of Appeal. The current Chief Justice is Lucy McCallum and the current Chief Magistrate is Lorraine Walker.
The Federal Court has concurrent jurisdiction over civil matters arising under territory law, a fact which has become increasingly important to the practice of defamation law across Australia.
Policing services are provided by the ACT Policing unit of the Australian Federal Police under agreements between the territory government, the federal government, and the police force. Canberra had the lowest rate of crime of any capital city in Australia . Federal representation In the Australian federal parliament, the territory is represented by three members of the House of Representatives, for the Division of Bean, the Division of Canberra and the Division of Fenner and two Senators. The member for Bean also represents voters of Norfolk Island while the member for Fenner also represent voters of the Jervis Bay Territory. Senators representing the ACT also represent voters of Norfolk Island and the Jervis Bay Territory. Jervis Bay Territory
Jervis Bay Territory, created in 1915, is a separate territory but, by the Jervis Bay Territory Acceptance Act 1915 it is subject to ACT law.
Demographics
The Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that the population of the territory was 453,324 on 31 December 2021, with an annual growth in 2021 of 0.4%.
The overwhelming majority of the population reside in the city of Canberra.
The average level of degree qualification in the territory is higher than the national average. Within the territory, 37.1% of the population hold a bachelor's degree level or above education compared to the national figure of 20%.
! Birthplace !! Population
|-
| Australia ||269,682
|-
| England ||12,739 <!-- England and Scotland are listed separately as per the source. Do not combine -->
|-
| Mainland China ||11,334 <!-- Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau SARs are listed separately as per the source. Do not combine -->
|-
| India ||10,405
|-
| New Zealand ||4,722
|-
| Philippines ||3,789
|-
| Vietnam ||3,340
|-
| United States ||2,775
|-
| Sri Lanka ||2,774
|-
| Malaysia ||2,431
|-
| South Korea ||2,283
|}
At the , the most commonly nominated ancestries were:}}
*Irish (11.6%)
*Scottish (10.0%)
*Chinese (5.7%)
*Indian (4.5%)
*German (4.2%)
*Italian (3.3%)
*Indigenous (1.9%)
*Dutch (1.7%)
*Filipino (1.6%)
*Nepalese (1.3%)
*Vietnamese (1.3%)
*Croatian (1.2%)
*Greek (1.2%)
*Polish (1.1%)
}}
The showed that 32.5% of territory inhabitants were born overseas. Religion The most common responses in the for religion in the territory were No Religion (43.5%), Catholic (19.3%), Anglican (8.2%), Not stated (5.2%) and Hinduism (4.5%).
In February 2004 there were 140 public and non-governmental schools in the territory; 96 operated by the government and 44 independently. In 2005, there were 60,275 students in the territory school system. 59.3% of the students were enrolled in government schools with the remaining 40.7% in non-government schools. There were 30,995 students in primary school, 19,211 in high school, 9,429 in college and a further 340 in special schools.
As of May 2004, 30% of people in the territory aged 15–64 had a level of educational attainment equal to at least a bachelor's degree, significantly higher than the national average of 19%. The two main tertiary institutions are the Australian National University (ANU) in Acton and the University of Canberra (UC) in Bruce. There are also two religious university campuses in Canberra: Signadou is a campus of the Australian Catholic University and St Mark's Theological College is a campus of Charles Sturt University. Tertiary level vocational education is also available through the multi-campus Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT).
The Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) and the Royal Military College, Duntroon (RMC) are in the suburb of Campbell in Canberra's inner northeast. ADFA teaches military undergraduates and postgraduates and is officially a campus of the University of New South Wales while Duntroon provides Australian Army Officer training.
The Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE) offers courses in computer game development and 3D animation.
Sport
The territory is home to a number of major professional sports league franchise teams including the ACT Brumbies (Rugby Union), Canberra United (Soccer), Canberra Raiders (Rugby League), Canberra Capitals (Basketball) and the Canberra Chill (Field Hockey).
Big Bash League matches and other international cricket matches are held at the Manuka Oval. The ACT Comets (also known as the Canberra Comets) are a cricket team in the territory. The Comets are the premier team of Cricket ACT which is affiliated with Cricket Australia.
The Prime Minister's XI (Cricket), started by Robert Menzies in the 1950s and revived by Bob Hawke in 1984, has been played every year at Manuka Oval against an overseas touring team.
The Greater Western Sydney Giants (Football) play three regular season matches a year and one pre-season match in Canberra at Manuka Oval.
Arts and entertainment
established in 2001 records Australia's social history and is one of the territory's more architecturally daring buildings.]]
]]
The territory is home to many national monuments and institutions such as the Australian War Memorial, the National Gallery of Australia, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Library, the National Archives, the Australian Academy of Science, the National Film and Sound Archive and the National Museum.
Lake Burley Griffin is the site of the Captain James Cook Memorial and the National Carillon.
.]]
The Canberra Museum and Gallery in the city is a repository of local history and art, housing a permanent collection and visiting exhibitions. Several historic homes are open to the public: Lanyon and Tuggeranong Homesteads in the Tuggeranong Valley, Mugga-Mugga in Symonston, and Blundells' Cottage in Parkes all display the lifestyle of the early European settlers. Calthorpes' House in Red Hill is a well-preserved example of a 1920s house from Canberra's very early days.
The territory has many venues for live music and theatre: the Canberra Theatre and Playhouse which hosts many major concerts and productions; and Llewellyn Hall (within the ANU School of Music), a world-class concert hall are two of the most notable. The Albert Hall was Canberra's first performing arts venue, opened in 1928. It was the original performance venue for theatre groups such as the Canberra Repertory Society.
There are numerous bars and nightclubs which also offer live entertainment, particularly concentrated in the areas of Dickson, Kingston and the city. Most town centres have facilities for a community theatre and a cinema, and all have a library. Popular cultural events include the National Folk Festival, the Royal Canberra Show, the Summernats car festival, Enlighten festival and the National Multicultural Festival in February. Media The territory has a daily newspaper, The Canberra Times, which was established in 1926. There are also several free weekly publications, including news magazines City News and Canberra Weekly.
Major Australian metropolitan newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, The Age and Herald Sun from Melbourne as well as national publications The Australian and the Australian Financial Review are also available.
There are a number of AM and FM stations broadcasting throughout the territory (AM/FM Listing). The main commercial operators are the Capital Radio Network (2CA and 2CC), and Southern Cross Austereo/ARN Media (Hit 104.7 and Mix 106.3). There are also several community operated stations as well as the local and national stations of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
A DAB+ digital radio trial is also in operation, it simulcasts some of the AM/FM stations, and also provides several digital only stations (DAB+ Trial Listing).
Five free-to-air television stations service the territory:
*ABC Canberra (ABC)
*SBS New South Wales/Australian Capital Territory (SBS)
*WIN Television Southern NSW & ACT (WIN) – Nine Network affiliate
*Prime7 Southern NSW & ACT (CBN) – A Seven Network owned & operated station, Seven Network affiliate
*Southern Cross 10 Southern NSW & ACT (CTC) – Network 10 affiliate
Each station broadcasts a primary channel and several multichannels.
Pay television services are available from Foxtel (via satellite) and telecommunications company TransACT (via cable).
Infrastructure
Health
.]]
The territory has two large public hospitals both located in Canberra: the approximately 600-bed Canberra Hospital in Garran and the 174-bed Calvary Public Hospital in Bruce. Both are teaching institutions. The largest private hospital is the Calvary John James Hospital in Deakin. Calvary Private Hospital in Bruce and Healthscope's National Capital Private Hospital in Garran are also major healthcare providers. and ACT Ambulance Service is one of four operational agencies of the ACT Emergency Services Authority. NETS provides a dedicated ambulance service for inter-hospital transport of sick newborns within the ACT and into surrounding New South Wales.
Transport
.]]
terminal]]
]]
Ansair bodied Renault PR100.2]]
The automobile is by far the dominant form of transport in the territory. The city is laid out so that arterial roads connecting inhabited clusters run through undeveloped areas of open land or forest, which results in a low population density; this also means that idle land is available for the development of future transport corridors if necessary without the need to build tunnels or acquire developed residential land. In contrast, other capital cities in Australia have substantially less green space.
Suburbs of Canberra are generally connected by parkways—limited access dual carriageway roads with speed limits generally set at a maximum of . An example is the Tuggeranong Parkway which links Canberra's CBD and Tuggeranong, and bypasses Weston Creek. In most districts, discrete residential suburbs are bounded by main arterial roads with only a few residential linking in, to deter non-local traffic from cutting through areas of housing.
ACTION, the government-operated bus service, provides public transport route services in the territory. CDC Canberra provides bus services between the territory and nearby areas of New South Wales (Murrumbateman and Yass) and as Qcity Transit (Queanbeyan). A light rail line that opened in April 2019 links the CBD with the northern district of Gungahlin. At the 2016 census, 7.1% of the journeys to work involved public transport while 4.5% were on foot.
There are two local taxi companies. Aerial Capital Group enjoyed monopoly status until the arrival of Cabxpress in 2007. In October 2015, the territory government passed legislation to regulate ride sharing, allowing ride share services including Uber to operate legally in the territory. The territory government was the first jurisdiction in Australia to enact legislation to regulate the service.
An interstate NSW TrainLink railway service connects Canberra to Sydney. Canberra's railway station is in the inner south suburb of Kingston. Train services to Melbourne are provided by way of a NSW TrainLink bus service which connects with a rail service between Sydney and Melbourne in Yass, about a one-hour drive from Canberra. There are also direct flights to regional cities: Dubbo and Newcastle in New South Wales. Regular direct international flights operate to Singapore and Doha from the airport daily, but both with a stopover in Sydney before Canberra. Canberra Airport is, as of September 2013, designated by the Australian Government Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development as a restricted use designated international airport. Until 2003, the civilian airport shared runways with RAAF Base Fairbairn. In June of that year, the Air Force base was decommissioned and from that time the airport was fully under civilian control.
Utilities
has a rated output of 2.3 megawatts and was opened on 6 October 2016.]]
The government-owned Icon Water, formerly ACTEW, manages the territory's water and sewerage infrastructure. ActewAGL is a joint venture between Icon and AGL and is a retail provider of territory utility services including water, natural gas, electricity, and also some telecommunications services via a subsidiary TransACT.
The territory's water reservoirs are the Corin, Bendora and Cotter dams on the Cotter River and the Googong Dam on the Queanbeyan River. Although the Googong Dam is located in New South Wales, it is managed by the territory government. Icon Water owns the territory's two wastewater treatment plants, located at Fyshwick and on the lower reaches of the Molonglo River.
Electricity for the territory mainly comes from the national power grid through substations at Holt and Fyshwick (via Queanbeyan). Power was first supplied from a thermal plant built in 1913, near the Molonglo River, but this was finally closed in 1957. The ACT has four solar farms, which were opened between 2014 and 2017: Royalla (rated output of 20 megawatts, 2014), Mount Majura (2.3 MW, 2016), and Williamsdale (11 MW, 2017). In addition numerous houses in Canberra have photovoltaic panels or solar hot water systems. In 2015 and 2016, rooftop solar systems supported by the territory government's feed-in tariff had a capacity of 26.3 megawatts, producing 34,910 MWh. In the same year, retailer-supported schemes had a capacity of 25.2 megawatts and exported 28,815 MWh to the grid (power consumed locally was not recorded).
The territory has the highest rate with internet access at home (94 per cent of households in 2014–15). Economy
Economic activity in the territory is heavily concentrated around the city of Canberra.
A stable housing market, steady employment and rapid population growth in the 21st century have led to economic prosperity and, in 2011, Commsec ranked the territory as the second best performing state or territory in the country. This trend continued into 2016, when the territory was ranked the third best performing out of all of Australia's states and territories.
In 2017–18, the territory had the fastest rate of growth in the nation due to a rapid growth in population, a strongly performing higher education sector as well as a significant housing and infrastructure investment.
Higher education is the territory's largest export industry. The territory is home to a significant number of universities and higher education providers. The other major services exports of the territory in 2017–18 were government services and personal travel. Decisions by the federal government regarding the public service can have a significant impact on the territory's economy.
See also
*Community Based Corrections
*Human Rights Act 2004
*Index of Australia-related articles
*Jervis Bay Territory
*Revenue stamps of the Australian Capital Territory
Notes
References
Bibliography
*}}
*}}
*External links
*[http://www.act.gov.au/ Government of the Australian Capital Territory]
*[http://www.parliament.act.gov.au/ Legislative Assembly of the Australian Capital Territory]
*[http://www.courts.act.gov.au/ Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory]
*[http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/66f306f503e529a5ca25697e0017661f/F221BFA073B3ABC6CA256AD4007F6845?opendocument Statistical Subdivisions of the Australian Capital Territory]
*[https://www.arts.act.gov.au/public-art/list List of public art in Australian Capital Territory]
*
Category:1911 establishments in Australia
Category:Enclaves and exclaves
Category:Georgist communities
Category:States and territories established in 1911 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Capital_Territory | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.721815 |
1947 | Aotus | Aotus (the name is derived from the Ancient Greek words for "earless" in both cases: the monkey is missing external ears, and the pea is missing earlike bracteoles) may refer to:
Aotus (plant), one of the plant genera commonly known as golden peas in the family Fabaceae (bean family)
Aotus (monkey), the genus of night monkeys in the family Aotidae
AOTUS, the acronym for the Archivist of the United States | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aotus | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.724605 |
1948 | Ally McBeal | | creator = David E. Kelley
| starring =
| theme_music_composer = Vonda Shepard
| opentheme = "Searchin' My Soul"
| composer =
| country = United States
| language = English
| num_seasons = 5
| num_episodes = 112
| list_episodes = List of Ally McBeal episodes
| executive_producer =
| producer =
| cinematography =
| camera = Single-camera
| runtime = 45–48 minutes
| company =
| network = Fox
| first_aired =
| last_aired =
| related = The Practice
}}
Ally McBeal is<!-- DO NOT change the tense please! Read WP:MOSTV#Lead_paragraphs--> an American legal comedy drama television series created by David E. Kelley and produced by David E. Kelley Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. Kelley and Bill D'Elia were the series' executive producers.
The series revolves around Calista Flockhart in the title role as a lawyer working in the Boston law firm Cage and Fish. Although ostensibly a legal drama, the main focus of the series is the romantic and personal lives of the main characters. The show originally aired on Fox from September 8, 1997, to May 20, 2002.
The series received critical acclaim in its early seasons, winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy in 1998 and 1999, and also winning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1999. The series was canceled by Fox after five seasons.
Potential revivals of the show have been reported twice. In March 2021, it was reported that a revival as a limited series was in early development by 20th Television with Flockhart possibly returning.]]
{| class"wikitable plainrowheaders" style"text-align:center;"
|+List of main Ally McBeal characters, with actors, by season
!scope"col" rowspan"2" | Actor
!scope"col" rowspan"2" | Character
!scope"col" colspan"5" | Seasons
|-
!scope="col"|1
!scope"col" style"width:4em;"|2
!scope="col"|3
!scope="col"|4
!scope="col"|5
|-
!scope="row"| Calista Flockhart
| Ally McBeal
| colspan="5"
|-
!scope="row"| Greg Germann
| Richard Fish
| colspan="5"
|-
|-
!scope="row"| Lisa Nicole Carson
| Renée Raddick
| colspan="4"
|
|-
!scope="row"| Jane Krakowski
| Elaine Vassal
| colspan="5"
|-
!scope="row"| Peter MacNicol
| John Cage
| colspan="4"
|
|-
!scope="row"| Gil Bellows
| Billy Allen Thomas
| colspan="3"
| colspan="2"
|-
!scope="row"| Courtney Thorne-Smith
| Georgia Thomas
| colspan="3"
| colspan="2"
|-
!scope="row"| Portia de Rossi
| Nelle Porter
|
| colspan="4"
|-
!scope="row"| Lucy Liu
| Ling Woo
|
| colspan="3"
|
|-
!scope="row"| Vonda Shepard
| Herself
|
| colspan="4"
|-
!scope="row"| James LeGros
| Mark Albert
| colspan="2"
|
|
|
|-
!scope="row"| Robert Downey Jr.
| Larry Paul
| colspan="3"
|
|
|-
!scope="row"| Regina Hall
| Coretta Lipp
| colspan="3"
|
|
|-
!scope="row"| Julianne Nicholson
| Jenny Shaw
| colspan="4"
|
|-
!scope="row"| James Marsden
| Glenn Foy
| colspan="4"
|
|-
!scope="row"| Josh Hopkins
| Raymond Millbury
| colspan="4"
|
|-
!scope="row"| Hayden Panettiere
| Maddie Harrington
| colspan="4"
|
|-
|}
Recurring
* Dyan Cannon as Jennifer "Whipper" Cone (Seasons 1–3)
* Phil Leeds as Judge Dennis "Happy" Boyle (Seasons 1–2)
* Jennifer Holliday as Lisa Knowles (Seasons 1–4)
* Harrison Page as Reverend Mark Newman (Seasons 1–4)
* Lee Wilkof as District Attorney Nixon (Seasons 1–2, 5)
* Jesse L. Martin as Dr. Greg Butters (Seasons 1–2)
* Tracey Ullman as Dr. Tracey Clarke (Seasons 1–3)
* Albert Hall as Judge Seymore Walsh (Seasons 1–5)
* Gerry Becker as Attorney Myron Stone (Seasons 2–4)
* Amy Castle as Young Ally (Seasons 2–3)
* Gina Philips as Sandy Hingle (Season 3)
* Tim Dutton as Brian Selig (Seasons 3–4)
* Lisa Edelstein as Cindy McCauliff (Season 4)
* Christopher Neiman as Attorney Barry Mathers (Seasons 4–5)
* Jami Gertz as Kimmy Bishop (Seasons 4–5)
* John Michael Higgins as Steven Milter (Seasons 4–5)
* Anne Heche as Melanie West (Season 4)
* Taye Diggs as Jackson Duper (Season 4)
* Barry Humphries as Claire Otoms (Season 5)
* Jon Bon Jovi as Victor Morrison (Season 5)
* Christina Ricci as Liza Bump (Season 5)
* Bobby Cannavale as Wilson Jade (Season 5)
Episodes
In Australia, Ally McBeal was aired by the Seven Network from 1997 to 2002. In 2010, it was aired repeatedly by Network 10.
In the UK, Ally McBeal was aired by Channel 4, premiering on June 3, 1998 and concluding on October 30, 2002. It began airing for free on Channel 4's streaming service on August 30, 2024.Crossovers with The Practice
Seymore Walsh, a stern judge often exasperated by the eccentricities of the Cage & Fish lawyers and played by actor Albert Hall, was also a recurring character on The Practice. In addition, Judge Jennifer (Whipper) Cone appears on The Practice episode "Line of Duty" (S02 E15), while Judge Roberta Kittelson, a recurring character on The Practice, has a featured guest role in the Ally McBeal episode "Do you Wanna Dance?"
Most of the primary Practice cast members guest starred in the Ally McBeal episode "The Inmates" (S01 E20), in a storyline that concluded with the Practice episode "Axe Murderer" (S02 E26), featuring Calista Flockhart and Gil Bellows reprising their Ally characters. Unusually for a TV crossover, Ally McBeal and The Practice aired on different networks. Bobby Donnell, the main character of The Practice played by Dylan McDermott, was featured heavily in both this crossover and another Ally McBeal episode, "These are the Days".
Regular Practice cast members Lara Flynn Boyle and Michael Badalucco each had an uncredited cameo as their characters in Ally McBeal (Boyle as a woman who trades insults with Ally in the episode "Making Spirits Bright" and Badalucco as one of Ally's dates in the episode "I Know him by Heart").
In Season 5, Lara Flynn Boyle had an uncredited guest appearance as a rebuttal witness opposite guest star Heather Locklear's character in the episode, "Tom Dooley".
Filming location
14 Beacon Street in Boston was the exterior which was used as the location for the law firm "Cage & Fish" (later "Cage, Fish, & McBeal"), which was located on the 7th floor of this building.
The first two seasons, as well as the fourth, remain the most critically acclaimed and saw the most awards success at the Emmys, SAG Awards and the Golden Globes. In 2007, Ally McBeal placed #48 on Entertainment Weekly 2007 "New TV Classics" list.
Ratings
{|class="wikitable"
|+US viewer ratings for Ally McBeal, by season
|-
!scope"col" colspan"2"|Season
!scope="col"| Number of viewers
!scope="col"| Network
!scope="col"| Rank
|-
!scope="row"| 1 || 1997–98
| 11.4 million ||Fox ||#59
|-
!scope="row"| 2 || 1998–99
| 13.8 million ||Fox ||#20
|-
!scope="row"| 3 || 1999–2000
|12.4 million ||Fox ||#35
|-
!scope="row"| 4 || 2000–01
|12.0 million ||Fox ||#40
|-
!scope="row"| 5 || 2001–02
|9.4 million ||Fox ||#65
|}
Cancellation
Fox canceled Ally McBeal after five seasons. In addition to being the lowest-rated season of Ally McBeal and the grounds for the show's cancellation, the fifth season was also the only season of the show that failed to win any Emmy or Golden Globe awards.
Feminist criticism
Ally McBeal received some criticism from TV critics and feminists who found the title character annoying and demeaning to women (specifically regarding professional women) because of her perceived flightiness, lack of demonstrated legal knowledge, short skirts, and emotional instability. Perhaps the most notorious example of the debate sparked by the show was the June 29, 1998, cover story of Time magazine, which juxtaposed the character of Ally McBeal with three real-life pioneering feminists (Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem) and asked "Is Feminism Dead?" In the January 18, 1999 Ally McBeal episode, "Love Unlimited", Ally talks to her co-worker John Cage about a dream she had, saying "You know, I had a dream that they put my face on the cover of Time magazine as 'the face of feminism'."Music
Music was a prominent feature of Ally McBeal. Vonda Shepard, a relatively unknown musician at the time, performed regularly on the show and her song "Searchin' My Soul" was the show's theme song. Many of the songs Shepard performed were established hits with lyrics that paralleled the events of each episode, for example, "Both Sides Now", "Hooked on a Feeling" and "Tell Him". Besides recording background music for the show, Shepard frequently appeared at the ends of episodes as a musician performing at a local piano bar frequented by the main characters. On rare occasions, her character would have conventional dialogue. A portion of "Searchin' My Soul" was played at the beginning of each episode, but the song was never played in its entirety.
Several of the characters had a musical leitmotif that played when they appeared. John Cage's was "You're the First, the Last, My Everything", Ling Woo's was the Wicked Witch of the West theme from The Wizard of Oz, and Ally McBeal herself picked "Tell Him", when told by a psychiatrist that she needed a theme song in a Season 1 episode.
Due to the popularity of the show and Shepard's music, a soundtrack titled Songs from Ally McBeal was released in 1998, as well as a successor soundtrack titled Heart and Soul: New Songs from Ally McBeal in 1999. Two compilation albums from the show featuring Shepard were also released in 2000 and 2001. A Christmas album was also released under the title Ally McBeal: A Very Ally Christmas. The album received positive reviews, and Shephard's version of Kay Starr's Christmas song "(Everybody's Waitin' for) The Man with the Bag", received considerable airplay during the holiday season.
Other artists featured on the show include Barry White, Al Green, Gladys Knight, Tina Turner, Macy Gray, Gloria Gaynor, Chayanne, Barry Manilow, Anastacia, Elton John, Sting and Mariah Carey. Josh Groban played the role of Malcolm Wyatt in the May 2001 season finale, performing "You're Still You". The series creator, David E. Kelley, was impressed with Groban's performance at The Family Celebration event and based on the audience reaction to Groban's singing, Kelley created a character for him in that finale. The background score for the show was composed by Danny Lux.
{| class"wikitable plainrowheaders" style"text-align:center;"
|+ Musical releases from Ally McBeal
|-
!scope="col"| Soundtrack name
!scope="col"| Number of tracks
!scope="col"| Release date
|-
!scope="row"| Songs from Ally McBeal
| 14
| May 5, 1998
|-
!scope="row"| Heart and Soul: New Songs from Ally McBeal
| 14
| November 9, 1999
|-
!scope="row"| Ally McBeal: A Very Ally Christmas
| 14
| November 7, 2000
|-
!scope="row"| Ally McBeal: For Once in My Life
| 14
| April 24, 2001
|-
!scope="row"| The Best of Ally McBeal
| 12
| October 6, 2009
|}
Home media
Due to music licensing issues, none of the seasons of Ally McBeal were available on DVD in the United States until 2009, though the show had been available in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan, Hong Kong, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, and the Czech Republic with all the show's music intact since 2005. In the UK, Ireland, and Spain all seasons are available in a complete box set.
20th Century Fox released the complete first season on DVD in Region 1 on October 6, 2009. They also released a special complete series edition on the same day. Season 1 does not contain any special features, but the complete series set contains several bonus features, including featurettes, an all-new retrospective, the episode of The Practice in which Calista Flockhart guest-starred, and a bonus disc entitled "The Best of Ally McBeal Soundtrack." In addition, both releases contain all of the original music. Season 2 was released on April 6, 2010. Seasons 3, 4, and 5 were all released on October 5, 2010.
{| class"wikitable" style"text-align:center;"
|+ Home media releases of Ally McBeal, showing season numbers, with release dates
|-
!scope="col"| DVD name
!scope="col"| No. episodes
!scope="col"| Region 1
!scope="col"| Region 2
!scope="col"| Region 4
|-
!scope="row"| The Complete First Season
| 23
| October 6, 2009
| February 21, 2005
| April 26, 2006
|-
!scope="row"| The Complete Second Season
| 23
| April 6, 2010
| February 21, 2005
| April 26, 2006
|-
!scope="row"| The Complete Third Season
| 21
| October 5, 2010
| February 21, 2005
| April 26, 2006
|-
!scope="row"| The Complete Fourth Season
| 23
| October 5, 2010
| May 9, 2005
| April 26, 2006
|-
!scope="row"| The Complete Fifth and Final Season
| 22
| October 5, 2010
| May 9, 2005
| April 26, 2006
|-
!scope="row"| The Complete Series
| 112
| October 6, 2009
| October 30, 2006
| April 18, 2012
|}
Ally (1999)
In 1999, at the height of the show's popularity, a half-hour version titled Ally began airing in parallel with the main program. This version, designed in a sitcom format, used re-edited scenes from the main program, along with previously unseen footage. The intention was to further develop the plots in the comedy drama in a sitcom style. It also focused only on Ally's personal life, cutting all the courtroom plots. The repackaged show was canceled partway through its initial run. While 13 episodes of Ally were produced, only ten aired.Possible revivalIn March 2021, it was reported that a revival as a limited series was in early development by 20th Television with Flockhart possibly returning.
In August 2022, it was reported that ABC was in early development of a sequel series with Karin Gist writing and executive producing. The series would follow a young Black woman out of law school who joins the law firm. Flockhart has been approached to both reprise her role and executive-produce.
Flockhart, Germann, MacNicol and Bellows reunited at the 2024 75th Primetime Emmy Awards in a choreographed dance to Barry White's "You're the First, the Last, My Everything" recreating the unisex bathroom from the series.
In popular culture
In a third-season episode of the British comedy The Adam and Joe Show, the show was parodied as "Ally McSqueal" using soft toys.
A first season episode of the animated sitcom Futurama, "When Aliens Attack", centers on an invasion of Earth by the Omicronians precipitated by a signal loss during the climax of an episode of Single Female Lawyer, whose main character is Jenny McNeal.
In a fourth season episode of the show The Good Place, the Judge, played by Maya Rudolph, hands Ted Danson's character (Michael) a petition to reboot Ally McBeal, stating "everything else is getting rebooted."
In the 2021 film The Mauritanian, Guantanamo Bay detention camp detainee Mohamedou Ould Salahi says to an American judge "Even in Mauritania, we have watched Law & Order and Ally McBeal."
In a fourth season episode of the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a lyric in the song "Don't Be a Lawyer", mentions the show "No one you work with looks like Ally McBeal".
Awards and nominations
References
External links
*
*
*
*
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20051220134133/http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/1997/10/20ally.html Ally McBeal: Woman of the '90s or Retro Airhead]
}}
Category:1997 American television series debuts
Category:2002 American television series endings
Category:1990s American comedy-drama television series
Category:1990s American legal drama television series
Category:1990s American romantic comedy television series
Category:1990s American workplace comedy television series
Category:1990s romantic drama television series
Category:2000s American comedy-drama television series
Category:2000s American legal drama television series
Category:2000s American romantic comedy television series
Category:2000s American workplace comedy television series
Category:2000s romantic drama television series
Category:American English-language television shows
Category:American romantic drama television series
Category:Best Musical or Comedy Series Golden Globe winners
Category:Fox Broadcasting Company comedy-dramas
Category:Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series Screen Actors Guild Award winners
Category:Peabody Award–winning television programs
Category:Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series winners
Category:Primetime Emmy Award–winning television series
Category:Television series by 20th Century Fox Television
Category:Television series created by David E. Kelley
Category:Television shows set in Boston
Category:The Practice
Category:Television series about lawyers
Category:Legal comedies | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ally_McBeal | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.748378 |
1949 | Andreas Capellanus | Andreas Capellanus (Capellanus meaning "chaplain"), also known as Andrew the Chaplain ( 1185}}), and occasionally by a French translation of his name, André le Chapelain, was the 12th-century author of a treatise commonly known as De amore ("About Love"), and often known in English, somewhat misleadingly, as The Art of Courtly Love, though its realistic, somewhat cynical tone suggests that it is in some measure an antidote to courtly love. Little is known of Andreas Capellanus's life, but he is presumed to have been a courtier of Marie de Champagne, and probably of French origin.
His work
De Amore was written at the request of Marie de Champagne, daughter of King Louis VII of France and of Eleanor of Aquitaine. In it, the author informs a young pupil, Walter, of the pitfalls of love. A dismissive allusion in the text to the "wealth of Hungary" has suggested the hypothesis that it was written after 1184, at the time when Bela III of Hungary had sent to the French court a statement of his income and had proposed marriage to Marie's half-sister Marguerite of France, but before 1186, when his proposal was accepted.
De Amore is made up of three books. The first book covers the etymology and definition of love and is written in the manner of an academic lecture. The second book consists of sample dialogues between members of different social classes; it outlines how the romantic process between the classes should work. This second work is largely considered to be an inferior to the first. Book three is made of stories from actual courts of love presided over by noble women.
John Jay Parry, the editor of one modern edition of De Amore, quotes critic Robert Bossuat as describing De Amore as "one of those capital works which reflect the thought of a great epoch, which explains the secret of a civilization". It may be viewed as didactic, mocking, or merely descriptive; in any event it preserves the attitudes and practices that were the foundation of a long and significant tradition in Western literature.
The social system of "courtly love", as gradually elaborated by the Provençal troubadours from the mid twelfth century, soon spread. One of the circles in which this poetry and its ethic were cultivated was the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine (herself the granddaughter of an early troubadour poet, William IX of Aquitaine). De Amore codifies the social and love life of Eleanor's court at Poitiers between 1170 and 1174, though it was evidently written at least ten years later and, apparently, at Troyes. It deals with several specific themes that were the subject of poetical debate among late twelfth century troubadours and trobairitz.
The meaning of De Amore has been debated over the centuries. In the years immediately following its release many people took Andreas' opinions concerning Courtly Love seriously. In more recent times, however, scholars have come to view the priest's work as satirical. Many scholars now agree that Andreas was commenting on the materialistic, superficial nature of medieval nobles. Andreas seems to have been warning young Walter, his protégé, about love in the Middle Ages.
See also
* Martianus Capella
* Quadrivium
Bibliography
* Andreas Capellanus: The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Parry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1941. (Reprinted: New York: Norton, 1969.)
* Andreas Capellanus: On Love, ed. and trans. P. G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982.
References
Citations
General references
*
*
*
External links
* [https://archive.today/20121212050414/http://www.courses.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/andreas/de_amore.html Excerpts of De Amore in English]
Category:12th-century writers in Latin
Category:French essayists
Category:12th-century births
Category:Date of death unknown
Category:12th-century deaths
Category:French male essayists
Category:12th-century French writers | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Capellanus | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.751075 |
1950 | American Civil Liberties Union | | name = American Civil Liberties Union
| membership 1.7million (2024)
| region_served = United States
| num_staff = 500 staff attorneys
| num_volunteers = Several thousand attorneys
| website =
}}
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit civil rights organization founded in 1920. ACLU affiliates are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The budget of the ACLU in 2024 was $383 million.
The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation. In addition to representing persons and organizations in lawsuits, the ACLU lobbies for policy positions established by its board of directors.
The ACLU's current positions include opposing the death penalty; supporting same-sex marriage and the right of LGBTQ+ people to adopt; supporting reproductive rights such as birth control and abortion rights; eliminating discrimination against women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people; decarceration in the United States; protecting housing and employment rights of veterans; reforming sex offender registries and protecting housing and employment rights of convicted first-time offenders; supporting the rights of prisoners and opposing torture; upholding the separation of church and state by opposing government preference for religion over non-religion or for particular faiths over others; and supporting the legality of gender-affirming treatments, including those that are government funded, for trans youth.
Leadership
The ACLU is led by a president and an executive director, Deborah Archer and Anthony D. Romero, respectively, as of March 2024. The president acts as chair of the ACLU's board of directors, leads fundraising, and facilitates policy-setting. The executive director manages the day-to-day operations of the organization. The board of directors consists of 80 persons, including representatives from each state affiliate and at-large delegates. The organization has its headquarters in 125 Broad Street, a 40-story skyscraper located in Lower Manhattan, New York City.
The leadership of the ACLU does not always agree on policy decisions; differences of opinion within the ACLU leadership have sometimes grown into major debates. In 1937, an internal debate erupted over whether to defend Henry Ford's right to distribute anti-union literature. In 2005, there was internal conflict about whether or not a gag rule should be imposed on ACLU employees to prevent the publication of internal disputes.
Funding
The ACLU solicits donations to its charitable foundation. The local affiliates solicit their own funding; however, some also receive funds from the national ACLU, with the distribution and amount of such assistance varying from state to state. At its discretion, the national organization provides subsidies to smaller affiliates that lack sufficient resources to be self-sustaining; for example, the Wyoming ACLU chapter received such subsidies until April 2015, when, as part of a round of layoffs at the national ACLU, the Wyoming office was closed.
In October 2004, the ACLU rejected $1.5 million from both the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation because the foundations had adopted language from the USA PATRIOT Act in their donation agreements, including a clause stipulating that none of the money would go to "underwriting terrorism or other unacceptable activities". The ACLU views this clause, both in federal law and in the donors' agreements, as a threat to civil liberties, saying it is overly broad and ambiguous.
Due to the nature of its legal work, the ACLU is often involved in litigation against governmental bodies, which are generally protected from adverse monetary judgments; a town, state, or federal agency may be required to change its laws or behave differently, but not to pay monetary damages except by an explicit statutory waiver. In some cases, the law permits plaintiffs who successfully sue government agencies to collect money damages or other monetary relief. In particular, the Civil Rights Attorney's Fees Award Act of 1976 leaves the government liable in some civil rights cases. Fee awards under this civil rights statute are considered "equitable relief" rather than damages, and government entities are not immune from equitable relief. Under laws such as this, the ACLU and its state affiliates sometimes share in monetary judgments against government agencies. In 2006, the Public Expressions of Religion Protection Act sought to prevent monetary judgments in the particular case of violations of church-state separation.
The ACLU has received court-awarded fees from opponents; for example, the Georgia affiliate was awarded $150,000 in fees after suing a county demanding the removal of a Ten Commandments display from its courthouse; a second Ten Commandments case in the state, in a different county, led to a $74,462 judgment. The State of Tennessee was required to pay $50,000, the State of Alabama $175,000, and the State of Kentucky $121,500, in similar Ten Commandments cases.
In 2024, the ACLU received $268M in grants and donations from supporters. The ACLU also opposes state censorship of the Confederate flag. Free speech on college campuses has been the subject of several lawsuits the ACLU has supported. In the employment realm, the ACLU has supported the rights of employees to engage in free speech. Protests outside religious buildings are supported by the ACLU, even when perceived as offensive.
Combating discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, or gender has been a focus of the ACLU since the civil rights era in the 1960s. The ACLU frequently participates in legal actions in support of the LGBTQ community.
Criminal justice has been long-standing goal of the ACLU, focusing on constitutional issues such as excessive punishment and the right to an attorney. Immigrant rights, for undocumented immigrants in particular, is an area of the law that the ACLU frequently acts as an advocate.
Many of the ACLU positions are rooted in the U.S. Constitution, such as the Second Amendment: the ACLU opposes any effort to create a national registry of gun owners and has worked with the National Rifle Association of America to prevent a registry from being created, and it has favored protecting the right to carry guns under the Second Amendment. The ACLU works to support the right to vote.
Support and opposition
A variety of persons and organizations support the ACLU. Allies of the ACLU in legal actions have included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Jewish Congress, the National Rifle Association of America, Planned Parenthood, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
The ACLU has been criticized by liberals, such as when it excluded communists from its leadership ranks, when it defended Neo-Nazis, when it declined to defend Paul Robeson, or when it opposed the passage of the National Labor Relations Act. In 2014, an ACLU affiliate supported anti-Islam protesters, and in 2018 the ACLU was criticized when it supported the NRA.
Conversely, it has been criticized by conservatives such as when it argued against official prayer in public schools or when it opposed the Patriot Act.
The ACLU has supported conservative figures such as Rush Limbaugh, George Wallace, Henry Ford and Oliver North; as well as liberal figures such as Dick Gregory, Rockwell Kent and Benjamin Spock. The ACLU's official policy is "... [we have] represented or defended individuals engaged in some truly offensive speech. We have defended the speech rights of communists, Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, accused terrorists, pornographers, anti-LGBTQ activists, and flag burners. That's because the defense of freedom of speech is most necessary when the message is one most people find repulsive. Constitutional rights must apply to even the most unpopular groups if they're going to be preserved for everyone."
Organization and state affiliants
At the national level, the ACLU consists of two legal entities: the American Civil Liberties Union, a 501(c)(4) social welfare group; and the ACLU Foundation, a 501(c)(3) public charity. Both are non-profit organizations that engage in civil rights litigation, advocacy, and education. The two organizations are closely related, and share common goals and some common leadership. Donations to the 501(c)(3) foundation are tax-deductible, but donations to the 501(c)(4) are not. The 501(c)(4) group can engage in unlimited political advocacy (including lobbying), but the 501(c)(3) foundation cannot.
with Amnesty International.]]
Most of the organization's workload is performed by its local affiliates. There is at least one affiliate organization in each state, as well as one in Washington, D.C., and in Puerto Rico. California has three affiliates. The affiliates operate autonomously from the national organization; each affiliate has its own staff, executive director, board of directors, and budget. Each affiliate consists of two non-profit corporations: a 501(c)(3) corporation–called the ACLU Foundation–that does not perform lobbying, and a 501(c)(4) corporation–called ACLU–which is entitled to lobby. Both organizations share staff and offices.
ACLU affiliates are the basic unit of the ACLU's organization and engage in litigation, lobbying, and public education. For example, in 2020, the ACLU's New Jersey chapter argued 26 cases before the New Jersey Supreme Court, about one-third of the total cases heard in that court. They sent over 50,000 emails to officials or agencies and had 28 full-time staff.
List of ACLU state affiliates
{| class=wikitable
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! colspan"2" style"text-align:center;" |
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!State
!ACLU state affiliate
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|Alabama
|ACLU of Alabama
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|Alaska
|ACLU of Alaska
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|Arizona
|ACLU Arizona|ACLU of Arizona
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|Arkansas
|ACLU of Arkansas
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|California
|<br /><br />ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties
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|Colorado
|ACLU of Colorado
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|Connecticut
|ACLU of Connecticut
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|Delaware
|ACLU of Delaware
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|District of Columbia
|ACLU of the District of Columbia
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|Florida
|
|-
|Georgia
|
|-
|Hawaii
|ACLU of Hawai'i
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|Idaho
|
|-
|Illinois
|
|-
|Indiana
|ACLU of Indiana
|-
|Iowa
|ACLU of Iowa
|-
|Kansas
|
|-
|Kentucky
|ACLU of Kentucky
|-
|Louisiana
|ACLU of Louisiana
|-
|Maine
|ACLU of Maine
|-
|Maryland
|
|-
|Massachusetts
|ACLU of Massachusetts
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|Michigan
|
|-
|Minnesota
|
|-
|Mississippi
|ACLU of Mississippi
|-
|Missouri
|ACLU of Missouri
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|Montana
|ACLU of Montana
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|Nebraska
|ACLU of Nebraska
|-
|Nevada
|
|-
|New Hampshire
|ACLU of New Hampshire
|-
|New Jersey
|American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey
|-
|New Mexico
|ACLU of New Mexico
|-
|New York
|New York Civil Liberties Union
|-
|North Carolina
|
|-
|North Dakota
|ACLU of North Dakota
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|Ohio
|
|-
|Oklahoma
|ACLU of Oklahoma
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|Oregon
|
|-
|Pennsylvania
|
|-
|Puerto Rico
|ACLU of Puerto Rico National Chapter
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|Rhode Island
|ACLU of Rhode Island
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|South Carolina
|ACLU of South Carolina
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|South Dakota
|ACLU of South Dakota
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|Tennessee
|ACLU of Tennessee
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|Texas
|ACLU of Texas
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|Utah
|
|-
|Vermont
|ACLU of Vermont
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|Virginia
|
|-
|Washington
|
|-
|West Virginia
|ACLU of West Virginia
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|Wisconsin
|ACLU of Wisconsin
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|Wyoming
|ACLU of Wyoming
|}
History
1910s and '20s
Origins
was one of the co-founders of the CLB, the predecessor to the ACLU.]]
The ACLU developed from the National Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), co-founded in 1917 during World War I by Crystal Eastman, an attorney activist, and Roger Nash Baldwin. The focus of the CLB was on freedom of speech, primarily anti-war speech, and on supporting conscientious objectors who did not want to serve in World War I. In 1918, Crystal Eastman resigned from the organization due to health issues. After assuming sole leadership of the CLB, Baldwin insisted that the organization be reorganized. He wanted to change its focus from litigation to direct action and public education.
The CLB directors concurred, and on January 19, 1920, they formed an organization under a new name, the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU was directed by an executive committee and was not particularly democratic or egalitarian. New Yorkers dominated the ACLU's headquarters. Most ACLU funding came from philanthropies, such as the Garland Fund.
Lucille Bernheimer Milner was cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union. She also served for a time as Executive Secretary.
Free speech era
was one of the early leaders of the ACLU.]]
During the 1920s, the ACLU's primary focus was on freedom of speech in general and speech within the labor movement particularly. Because most of the ACLU's efforts were associated with the labor movement, the ACLU itself came under heavy attack from conservative groups, such as the American Legion, the National Civic Federation, and Industrial Defense Association and the Allied Patriotic Societies. ACLU leadership was divided on how to challenge civil rights violations. One faction, including Baldwin, Arthur Garfield Hays, and Norman Thomas, believed that direct, militant action was the best path. Another group, including Walter Nelles and Walter Pollak, felt that lawsuits taken to the Supreme Court were the best way to achieve change.
In addition to labor, the ACLU also led efforts in non-labor arenas, for example, promoting free speech in public schools. The ACLU was banned from speaking in New York public schools in 1921. The ACLU, working with the NAACP, also supported racial discrimination cases. The ACLU defended free speech regardless of espoused opinions. For example, the reactionary, anti-Catholic, anti-black Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was a frequent target of ACLU efforts, but the ACLU defended the KKK's right to hold meetings in 1923. There were some civil rights that the ACLU did not make an effort to defend in the 1920s, including censorship of the arts, government search and seizure issues, right to privacy, or wiretapping.
Government officials routinely hounded the Communist Party USA, leading it to be the primary client of the ACLU. At the same time, the Communists were very aggressive in their tactics, often engaging in illegal conduct such as denying their party membership under oath. This led to frequent conflicts between the Communists and ACLU. That changed in 1925, when the ACLU persuaded John T. Scopes to defy Tennessee's anti-evolution law in The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. Clarence Darrow, a member of the ACLU National Committee, headed Scopes' legal team. The prosecution, led by William Jennings Bryan, contended that the Bible should be interpreted literally in teaching creationism in school. The ACLU lost the case, and Scopes was fined $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court later upheld the law. Still, it overturned the conviction on a technicality.
The Scopes trial was a phenomenal public relations success for the ACLU. The ACLU became well known across America, and the case led to the first endorsement of the ACLU by a major US newspaper. The ACLU continued to fight for the separation of church and state in schoolrooms, decade after decade, including the 1982 case McLean v. Arkansas and the 2005 case Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District.
Baldwin was involved in a significant free speech victory of the 1920s after he was arrested for attempting to speak at a rally of striking mill workers in New Jersey. Although the decision was limited to the state of New Jersey, the appeals court's judgment in 1928 declared that constitutional guarantees of free speech must be given "liberal and comprehensive construction", and it marked a major turning point in the civil rights movement, signaling the shift of judicial opinion in favor of civil rights.
The most important ACLU case of the 1920s was Gitlow v. New York, in which Benjamin Gitlow was arrested for violating a state law against inciting anarchy and violence when he distributed literature promoting communism. Although the Supreme Court did not overturn Gitlow's conviction, it adopted the ACLU's stance (later termed the incorporation doctrine) that the First Amendment freedom of speech applied to state laws, as well as federal laws.
The Oregon Compulsory Education Act required almost all children in Oregon between eight and sixteen years of age to attend public school by 1926. Associate Director Roger Nash Baldwin, a personal friend of Luke E. Hart, the then–Supreme Advocate and future Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, offered to join forces with the Knights to challenge the law. The Knights of Columbus pledged an immediate $10,000 to fight the law and any additional funds necessary to defeat it. The case became known as Pierce v. Society of Sisters, a United States Supreme Court decision that significantly expanded coverage of the Due Process Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. In a unanimous decision, the court held that the act was unconstitutional and that parents, not the state, had the authority to educate children as they thought best. It upheld the religious freedom of parents to educate their children in religious schools.Free speech expansion
Leaders of the ACLU were divided on the best tactics to use to promote civil liberties. Felix Frankfurter felt that legislation was the best long-term solution because the Supreme Court could not mandate liberal interpretations of the Bill of Rights. But Walter Pollak, Morris Ernst, and other leaders felt that Supreme Court decisions were the best path to guarantee civil liberties. A series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1920s foretold a changing national atmosphere; anti-radical emotions were diminishing, and there was a growing willingness to protect freedom of speech and assembly via court decisions.
when he was arrested for distributing banned literature.]]
Starting in 1926, the ACLU expanded its free speech activities to encompass censorship of art and literature. In that year, H. L. Mencken deliberately broke Boston law by distributing copies of his banned American Mercury magazine; the ACLU defended him and won an acquittal. The ACLU only achieved mixed results in the early years, and it was not until 1966 that the Supreme Court finally clarified the obscenity laws in the Roth v. United States and Memoirs v. Massachusetts cases.
The Comstock laws banned the distribution of sex education information based on the premise that it was obscene and led to promiscuous behavior. Mary Ware Dennett was fined $300 in 1928 for distributing a pamphlet containing sex education material. The ACLU, led by Morris Ernst, appealed her conviction and won a reversal, in which judge Learned Hand ruled that the pamphlet's primary purpose was to "promote understanding". In Near v. Minnesota, also decided in 1931, the Supreme Court ruled that states may not exercise prior restraint and prevent a newspaper from publishing, simply because the newspaper had a reputation for being scandalous.
1930s
The late 1930s saw the emergence of a new era of tolerance in the United States. National leaders hailed the Bill of Rights, particularly as it protected minorities, as the essence of democracy.
The ACLU played a significant role in passing the 1932 Norris–La Guardia Act, a federal law that prohibited employers from preventing employees from joining unions and stopped the practice of outlawing strikes, marriages, and labor organizing activities with the use of injunctions. Funded by the Garland Fund, the ACLU also participated in producing the influential Margold Report, which outlined a strategy to fight for civil rights for blacks. The ACLU planned to demonstrate that the "separate but equal" policies governing the Southern discrimination were illegal because blacks were never, in fact, treated equally. But the Great Depression brought new assaults on civil liberties; the year 1930 saw a large increase in the number of free speech prosecutions, a doubling of the number of lynchings, and all meetings of unemployed persons were banned in Philadelphia. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration proposed the New Deal to combat the depression. ACLU leaders were of mixed opinions about the New Deal since many felt that it represented an increase in government intervention into personal affairs and because the National Recovery Administration suspended antitrust legislation.
The economic policies of the New Deal leaders were often aligned with ACLU goals, but social goals were not. In particular, movies were subject to a barrage of local ordinances that banned screenings deemed immoral or obscene. Even public health films portraying pregnancy and birth were banned, as was Life magazine's April 11, 1938, issue, which included photos of the birth process. The ACLU fought these bans but did not prevail. The Catholic Church attained increasing political influence in the 1930s; it used its influence to promote the censorship of movies and to discourage the publication of birth control information. This conflict between the ACLU and the Catholic Church led to the resignation of the last Catholic priest from ACLU leadership in 1934; a Catholic priest would not be represented again until the 1970s.
The first decision that marked the Supreme Court's major shift in policy—no longer applying strict constitutional limits to government programs, and taking a more active role in protecting civil liberties—was De Jonge v. Oregon, in which a communist labor organizer was arrested for calling a meeting to discuss unionization. The ACLU attorney Osmond Fraenkel, working with International Labor Defense, defended De Jonge in 1937 and won a major victory when the Supreme Court ruled that "peaceable assembly for lawful discussion cannot be made a crime." The De Jonge case marked the start of an era lasting for a dozen years, during which Roosevelt appointees (led by Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Frank Murphy) established a body of civil liberties law.
Senator Robert F. Wagner proposed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, which empowered workers to unionize. Ironically, after 15 years of fighting for workers' rights, the ACLU initially opposed the act (it later took no stand on the legislation) because some ACLU leaders feared the increased power the bill gave to the government. The newly formed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) posed a dilemma for the ACLU because, in 1937, it issued an order to Henry Ford, prohibiting Ford from disseminating anti-union literature. Part of the ACLU leadership habitually took the side of labor, and that faction supported the NLRB's action. Until 1937, the ACLU felt that citizens and private organizations best upheld civil rights. Other ACLU members wanted the ACLU to shift focus into the political arena and be more willing to compromise their ideals to strike deals with politicians. The ACLU leadership also rejected this initiative. The most important cases involved statutes requiring flag salutes. The Jehovah's Witnesses felt that saluting a flag was contrary to their religious beliefs. Two children were convicted in 1938 of not saluting the flag. But three years later, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme court reversed itself.
Communism and totalitarianism
was voted off the ACLU board in 1940 because of her Communist Party membership but reinstated posthumously in 1970.]]
The rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Russia, and other countries that rejected freedom of speech and association greatly impacted the civil liberties movement in the US; anti-Communist sentiment rose, and civil liberties were curtailed.
The ACLU leadership was divided over whether or not to defend pro-Nazi speech in the United States; pro-labor elements within the ACLU were hostile towards Nazism and fascism and objected when the ACLU defended Nazis. The ACLU defended numerous pro-Nazi groups, defending their rights to free speech and free association. In the late 1930s, the ACLU allied itself with the Popular Front, a coalition of liberal organizations coordinated by the United States Communist Party. The ACLU benefited because affiliates from the Popular Front could often fight local civil rights battles much more effectively than the New York-based ACLU.
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938 to uncover sedition and treason within the United States. When witnesses testified at its hearings, the ACLU was mentioned several times, leading the HUAC to mention the ACLU prominently in its 1939 report. This damaged the ACLU's reputation severely, even though the report said that it could not "definitely state whether or not" the ACLU was a Communist organization. The ACLU was one of the few organizations to protest (unsuccessfully) against the passage of the Smith Act in 1940, which would later be used to imprison many persons who supported Communism. The ACLU defended many persons who were prosecuted under the Smith Act, including labor leader Harry Bridges.
ACLU leadership was split on whether to purge its leadership of Communists. Norman Thomas, John Haynes Holmes, and Morris Ernst were anti-Communists who wanted to distance the ACLU from Communism; opposing them were Harry F. Ward, Corliss Lamont, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who rejected any political test for ACLU leadership. A bitter struggle ensued throughout 1939, and the anti-Communists prevailed in February 1940 when the board voted to prohibit anyone who supported totalitarianism from ACLU leadership roles. Ward immediately resigned, andfollowing a contentious six-hour debateFlynn was voted off the ACLU's board. The 1940 resolution was considered by many to be a betrayal of its fundamental principles. The resolution was rescinded in 1968, and Flynn was posthumously reinstated to the ACLU in 1970.
Roosevelt put constant pressure on Attorney General Francis Biddle to take legal action against his prominent pre-war critics. Partly to appease the president, Biddle finally charged thirty lesser-known individuals for violating the Smith Act. Although many of the defendants did not know each other, and most lived in scattered locations in the U.S., they were all tried at once in Washington, D.C., in the Sedition Trial of 1944 Despite efforts by Roger N. Baldwin, Norman Thomas, Thurgood Marshall, and others in the leadership to get the ACLU to go on record condemning the trial (Baldwin called it "monstrous,") the board of directors overruled them.
The ACLU also had a mixed record on fighting wartime restrictions on the press. It was silent when the U.S. Post Office revoked the second class mailing privileges of Social Justice, the magazine of Father Charles E. Coughlin. On the other hand, it extended legal aid to the publishers of the Militant of the Socialist Workers Party and the Boise Valley Herald when their mailing rights were revoked. The ACLU was unable to prevent extensive extralegal harassment of the black press by the FBI and other agencies. The ACLU's shortcomings in defending civil liberties inspired the contemporary saying "born in World War I and died in World War II."
.]]
Two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt authorized the creation of military "exclusion zones" with Executive Order 9066, paving the way for the detention of all West Coast Japanese Americans in inland camps. In addition to the non-citizen Issei (prohibited from naturalization as members of an "unassimilable" race), over two-thirds of those swept up were American-born citizens. Opinions within the organization became increasingly divided as the Army began the "evacuation" of the West Coast. The board decided not to challenge the eviction of Japanese American citizens; on June 22, instructions were sent to West Coast branches not to support cases that argued the government had no constitutional right to do so. The ACLU offices on the West Coast had been more directly involved in addressing the tide of anti-Japanese prejudice from the start, as they were geographically closer to the issue and were already working on cases challenging the exclusion by this time. The Seattle office, assisting in Gordon Hirabayashi's lawsuit, created an unaffiliated committee to continue the work the ACLU had started, while in Los Angeles, attorney A.L. Wirin continued to represent Ernest Kinzo Wakayama but without addressing the case's constitutional questions. however, the San Francisco branch, led by Ernest Besig, refused to discontinue its support for Fred Korematsu, whose case had been taken on before the June 22 directive, and attorney Wayne Collins, with Besig's full support, centered his defense on the illegality of Korematsu's exclusion. Hirabayashi v. United States came before the Court in May 1943, and the justices upheld the government's right to exclude Japanese Americans from the West Coast; although it had earlier forced its local office in L.A. to stop aiding Hirabayashi, the ACLU donated $1,000 to the case (over a third of the legal team's total budget) and submitted an amicus brief. Besig, dissatisfied with Osmond Fraenkel's tamer defense, filed an additional amicus brief that directly addressed Hirabayashi's constitutional rights. In the meantime, A.L. Wirin served as one of the attorneys in Yasui v. United States (decided the same day as the Hirabayashi case and with the same results). Still, he kept his arguments within the national office's parameters. The only case to receive a favorable ruling, ex parte Endo, was also aided by two amicus briefs from the ACLU, one from the more conservative Fraenkel and another from the more putative Wayne Collins. although Korematsu's, Hirabayashi's and Yasui's convictions were later overturned in coram nobis proceedings in the 1980s. Legal scholar Peter Irons later asserted that the national office of the ACLU's decision not to challenge the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066 directly had "crippled the effective presentation of these appeals to the Supreme Court". Included in this group were the thousands of Nisei who renounced their US citizenship during the war but later regretted the decision and tried to revoke their applications for "repatriation". (A significant number of those slated to "go back" to Japan had never actually been to the country and were being deported rather than repatriated.) Ernest Besig had in 1944 visited the Tule Lake Segregation Center, where the majority of these "renunciants" were concentrated, and subsequently enlisted Wayne Collins' help to file a lawsuit on their behalf, arguing the renunciations had been given under duress. The national organization prohibited local branches from representing the renunciants, forcing Collins to pursue the case independently, although Besig and the Northern California office provided some support.
Cold War era
Anti-Communist sentiment gripped the United States during the Cold War beginning in 1946. Federal investigations caused many persons with Communist or left-leaning affiliations to lose jobs, become blocklisted, or be jailed. The ACLU was internally divided when it purged Communists from its leadership in 1940, and that ambivalence continued as it decided whether to defend alleged Communists during the late 1940s. Some ACLU leaders were anti-Communist and felt that the ACLU should not defend any victims. Some ACLU leaders felt that Communists were entitled to free speech protections and that the ACLU should defend them. Other ACLU leaders were uncertain about the threat posed by Communists and tried to establish a compromise between the two extremes. This ambivalent state of affairs would last until 1954, when the civil liberties faction prevailed, leading to most anti-Communist leaders' resignations.
In 1947, President Truman issued Executive Order 9835, which created the Federal Loyalty Program. This program authorized the Attorney General to create a list of organizations that were deemed to be subversive. Listed organizations were not notified that they were being considered for the list, nor did they have an opportunity to present counterarguments; nor did the government divulge any factual basis for inclusion in the list. Although ACLU leadership was divided on whether to challenge the Federal Loyalty Program, some challenges were successfully made. The Hollywood establishment panicked after the HUAC hearings and created a blacklist that prohibited anyone with leftist associations from working. The ACLU supported legal challenges to the blocklist, but those challenges failed.
or other leaders of the US Communist Party, and they were all imprisoned, along with their attorneys.]]
The federal government took direct aim at the US Communist Party in 1948 when it indicted its top twelve leaders in the Foley Square trial. The case hinged on whether or not mere membership in a totalitarian political party was sufficient to conclude that members advocated the overthrow of the United States government. The ACLU issued a public condemnation of the Dennis decision, and resolved to fight it.
The Dennis decision paved the way for the prosecution of hundreds of other Communist party members. The ACLU supported many Communists during their appeals (although most of the initiative originated with local ACLU affiliates, not the national headquarters), but most convictions were upheld. The Supreme Court, until 1957, upheld nearly every law which restricted the liberties of Communists. The ACLU, even though it scaled back its defense of Communists during the Cold War, still came under heavy criticism as a "front" for Communism. Critics included the American Legion, Senator Joseph McCarthy, the HUAC, and the FBI. Several ACLU leaders were sympathetic to the FBI, and as a consequence, the ACLU rarely investigated any of the many complaints alleging abuse of power by the FBI during the Cold War.
1950s
In 1950, the ACLU board of directors asked executive director Baldwin to resign, feeling he lacked the organizational skills to lead the 9,000 (and growing) member organization. Baldwin objected, but a majority of the board elected to remove him from the position, and he was replaced by Patrick Murphy Malin. Under Malin's guidance, membership tripled to 30,000 by 1955the start of 24 years of continual growth leading to 275,000 members in 1974. Malin also presided over an expansion of local ACLU affiliates. A bi-annual conference, open to the entire membership, was instituted in the same year; in later decades, it became a pulpit for activist members, who suggested new directions for the ACLU, including abortion rights, death penalty, and rights of the poor. The ACLU later reversed their stance and supported William Worthy and Rockwell Kent in their passport confiscation cases, which resulted in legal victories in the late 1950s.
In response to communist witch-hunts, many witnesses and employees chose to use the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination to avoid divulging information about their political beliefs. Government agencies and private organizations, in response, established policies which inferred communist party membership for anyone who invoked the fifth amendment. The national ACLU was divided on whether to defend employees who had been fired merely for pleading the fifth amendment, but the New York affiliate successfully assisted teacher Harry Slochower in his Supreme Court case, which reversed his termination.
The fifth amendment issue became the catalyst for a watershed event in 1954, which finally resolved the ACLU's ambivalence by ousting the anti-communists from ACLU leadership. In 1953, the anti-communists, led by Norman Thomas and James Fly, proposed a set of resolutions that inferred guilt of persons that invoked the fifth amendment. Anti-communist leaders refused to accept the results of the vote and brought the issue up for discussion again at the 1954 bi-annual convention. ACLU member Frank Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, attacked the anti-communists with a counter-proposal, which stated that the ACLU "stand[s] against guilt by association, judgment by accusation, the invasion of privacy of personal opinions and beliefs, and the confusion of dissent with disloyalty". The anti-communists continued to battle Graham's proposal but were outnumbered by the affiliates. The anti-communists finally gave up and departed the board of directors in late 1954 and 1955, ending an eight-year ambivalence within the ACLU leadership ranks. After that, the ACLU proceeded with firmer resolve against Cold War anti-communist legislation. The period from the 1940 resolution (and the purge of Elizabeth Flynn) to the 1954 resignation of the anti-communist leaders is considered by many to be an era in which the ACLU abandoned its core principles.
McCarthyism declined in late 1954 after television journalist Edward R. Murrow and others publicly chastised McCarthy. The controversies over the Bill of Rights that the Cold War generated ushered in a new era in American Civil liberties. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned state-sanctioned school segregation, and after that, a flood of civil rights victories dominated the legal landscape.
The Supreme Court handed the ACLU two key victories in 1957, in Watkins v. United States and Yates v. United States, both of which undermined the Smith Act and marked the beginning of the end of communist party membership inquiries. In 1965, the Supreme Court produced some decisions, including Lamont v. Postmaster General (in which the plaintiff was Corliss Lamont, a former ACLU board member), which upheld fifth amendment protections and brought an end to restrictions on political activity.1960sThe decade from 1954 to 1964 was the most successful period in the ACLU's history. Membership rose from 30,000 to 80,000, and by 1965 it had affiliates in seventeen states. During the ACLU's bi-annual conference in Colorado in 1964, the Supreme Court issued rulings on eight cases involving the ACLU; the ACLU prevailed on seven of the eight. The ACLU played a role in Supreme Court decisions reducing censorship of literature and arts, protecting freedom of association, prohibiting racial segregation, excluding religion from public schools, and providing due process protection to criminal suspects. The Catholic church was a leading proponent of such laws, and the primary opponents (the "separationists") were the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the American Jewish Congress. It was not clear that the Bill of Rights forbid state governments from supporting religious education, and strong legal arguments were made by religious proponents, arguing that the Supreme Court should not act as a "national school board", and that the Constitution did not govern social issues. However, the ACLU and other advocates of church/state separation persuaded the Court to declare such activities unconstitutional. In the 1960s, the ACLU, in response to member insistence, turned its attention to the in-class promotion of religion. In 1960, 42 percent of American schools included Bible reading. Religious factions across the country rebelled against the anti-prayer decisions, leading them to propose the School Prayer Constitutional Amendment, which declared in-school prayer legal. The ACLU participated in a lobbying effort against the amendment, and the 1966 congressional vote failed to obtain the required two-thirds majority. The film The Miracle was banned in New York in 1951 at the behest of the Catholic Church, but the ACLU supported the film's distributor in an appeal of the ban, and won a major victory in the 1952 decision Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson. Hollywood continued employing self-censorship with its own Production Code, but in 1956 the ACLU called on Hollywood to abolish the Code.
The ACLU lost an important press censorship case when, in 1957, the Supreme Court upheld the obscenity conviction of publisher Samuel Roth for distributing adult magazines. As late as 1953, books such as Tropic of Cancer and From Here to Eternity were still banned. But public standards rapidly became more liberal through the 1960s, and obscenity was notoriously difficult to define, so by 1971, obscenity prosecutions had halted. The NAACP took primary responsibility for Supreme Court cases (often led by lead NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall), with the ACLU focusing on police misconduct, and supporting the NAACP with amicus briefs. Southern states instituted a McCarthyism-style witch-hunt against the NAACP, attempting to force it to disclose membership lists. The ACLU's fight against racism was not limited to segregation; in 1964, the ACLU provided key support to plaintiffs, primarily lower-income urban residents, in Reynolds v. Sims, which required states to establish the voting districts following the "one person, one vote" principle.Police misconductThe ACLU regularly tackled police misconduct issues, starting with the 1932 case Powell v. Alabama (right to an attorney), and including 1942's Betts v. Brady (right to an attorney), and 1951's Rochin v. California (involuntary stomach pumping). During the 1950s and 1960s, the ACLU was responsible for substantially advancing the legal protections against police misconduct. In 1958, the Philadelphia affiliate was responsible for causing the City of Philadelphia to create the nation's first civilian police review board. In 1959, the Illinois affiliate published the first report in the nation, Secret Detention by the Chicago Police which documented unlawful detention by police.
Some of the most notable ACLU successes came in the 1960s when the ACLU prevailed in a string of cases limiting the power of police to gather evidence; in 1961's Mapp v. Ohio, the Supreme court required states to obtain a warrant before searching a person's home. The Gideon v. Wainwright decision in 1963 provided legal representation to indigents. In 1964, the ACLU persuaded the Court, in Escobedo v. Illinois, to permit suspects to have an attorney present during questioning. And, in 1966, Miranda v. Arizona federal decision required police to notify suspects of their constitutional rights, which was later extended to juveniles in the following year's in re Gault (1967) federal ruling. Although many law enforcement officials criticized the ACLU for expanding the rights of suspects, police officers also used the services of the ACLU. For example, when the ACLU represented New York City policemen in their lawsuit, which objected to searches of their workplace lockers. In the late 1960s, civilian review boards in New York City and Philadelphia were abolished, over the ACLU's objection.
Civil liberties revolution
The 1960s was a tumultuous era in the United States, and public interest in civil liberties underwent explosive growth. Civil liberties actions in the 1960s were often led by young people and often employed tactics such as sit ins and marches. Protests were often peaceful but sometimes employed militant tactics. The ACLU played a central role in all major civil liberties debates of the 1960s, including new fields such as gay rights, prisoner's rights, abortion, rights of the poor, and the death penalty. In 1960, there were affiliates in seven states, and by 1974 there were affiliates in 46 states. During the 1960s, the ACLU underwent a major transformation in tactics; it shifted emphasis from legal appeals (generally involving amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court) to direct representation of defendants when they were initially arrested. The ACLU published a breakthrough document in 1963, titled How Americans Protest, which was borne of frustration with the slow progress in battling racism, and which endorsed aggressive, even militant protest techniques.
After four African-American college students staged a sit-in in a segregated North Carolina department store, the sit-in movement gained momentum across the United States. During 1960–61, the ACLU defended black students arrested for demonstrating in North Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. The NAACP was responsible for managing most sit-in related cases that made it to the Supreme Court, winning nearly every decision. But it fell to the ACLU and other legal volunteer efforts to provide legal representation to hundreds of protestorswhite and blackwho were arrested while protesting in the South. The ACLU provided the majority of the funding for the LCDC.
In 1964, the ACLU opened up a major office in Atlanta, Georgia, dedicated to serving Southern issues. Much of the ACLU's progress in the South was due to Charles Morgan Jr., the charismatic leader of the Atlanta office. Morgan was responsible for desegregating juries (Whitus v. Georgia), desegregating prisons (Lee v. Washington), and reforming election laws. In 1966, the southern office successfully represented African-American congressman Julian Bond in Bond v. Floyd, after the Georgia House of Representatives refused to admit Bond into the legislature on the basis that he was an admitted pacifist opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War. Another widely publicized case defended by Morgan was that of Army doctor Howard Levy, who was convicted of refusing to train Green Berets. Despite raising the defense that the Green Berets were committing war crimes in Vietnam, Levy lost on appeal in Parker v. Levy, 417 US 733 (1974).
In 1969, the ACLU won a significant victory for free speech when it defended Dick Gregory after he was arrested for peacefully protesting against the mayor of Chicago. The court ruled in Gregory v. Chicago that a speaker cannot be arrested for disturbing the peace when hostility is initiated by someone in the audience, as that would amount to a "heckler's veto".
Vietnam War
The ACLU was at the center of several legal aspects of the Vietnam war: defending draft resisters, challenging the constitutionality of the war, the potential impeachment of Richard Nixon, and the use of national security concerns to preemptively censor newspapers.
David J. Miller was the first person prosecuted for burning his draft card. The New York affiliate of the ACLU appealed his 1965 conviction (367 F.2d 72: United States of America v. David J. Miller, 1966), but the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal. Two years later, the Massachusetts affiliate took the card-burning case of David O'Brien to the Supreme Court, arguing that the act of burning was a form of symbolic speech, but the Supreme Court upheld the conviction in ''United States v. O'Brien, 391 US 367 (1968). Thirteen-year-old Junior High student Mary Tinker wore a black armband to school in 1965 to object to the war and was suspended from school. The ACLU appealed her case to the Supreme Court and won a victory in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. This critical case established that the government may not establish "enclaves" such as schools or prisons where all rights are forfeited. The ACLU successfully defended Paul Cohen, who was arrested for wearing a jacket with the words "fuck the draft" on its back while he walked through the Los Angeles courthouse. The Supreme Court, in Cohen v. California'', held that the vulgarity of the wording was essential to convey the intensity of the message.
Non-war-related free speech rights were also advanced during the Vietnam war era; in 1969, the ACLU defended a Ku Klux Klan member who advocated long-term violence against the government, and the Supreme Court concurred with the ACLU's argument in the landmark decision Brandenburg v. Ohio, which held that only speech which advocated imminent violence could be outlawed. After the Kent State shootings in 1970, ACLU leaders took another step toward politics by passing a resolution condemning the Vietnam War. The resolution was based on various legal arguments, including civil liberties violations and claiming that the war was illegal.
Also in 1968, the ACLU held an internal symposium to discuss its dual roles: providing "direct" legal support (defense for accused in their initial trial, benefiting only the individual defendant) and appellate support (providing amicus briefs during the appeal process, to establish widespread legal precedent). Historically, the ACLU was known for its appellate work, which led to landmark Supreme Court decisions, but by 1968, 90% of the ACLU's legal activities involved direct representation. The symposium concluded that both roles were valid for the ACLU.
On September 30, 1973, the ACLU became first national organization to publicly call for the impeachment and removal from office of President Richard Nixon. Six civil liberties violations were cited as grounds: "specific proved violations of the rights of political dissent; usurpation of Congressional war-making powers; establishment of a personal secret police which committed crimes; attempted interference in the trial of Daniel Ellsberg; distortion of the system of justice and perversion of other Federal agencies". One month later, after the House of Representatives began an impeachment inquiry against him, the organization released a 56-page handbook detailing "17 things citizens could do to bring about the impeachment of President Nixon". This resolution, when placed beside the earlier resolution opposing the Vietnam war, convinced many ACLU critics, particularly conservatives, that the organization had transformed into a liberal political organization.
Enclaves and new civil liberties
The decade from 1965 to 1975 saw an expansion of civil liberties. Administratively, the ACLU responded by appointing Aryeh Neier to take over from Pemberton as executive director in 1970. Neier embarked on an ambitious program to expand the ACLU; he created the ACLU Foundation to raise funds and created several new programs to focus the ACLU's legal efforts. By 1974, ACLU membership had reached 275,000.
During those years, the ACLU worked to expand legal rights in three directions: new rights for persons within government-run "enclaves", new rights for members of what it called "victim groups", and privacy rights for citizens in general. At the same time, the organization grew substantially. The ACLU helped develop the field of constitutional law that governs "enclaves", which are groups of persons that live in conditions under government control. Enclaves include mental hospital patients, military members, prisoners, and students (while at school). The term enclave originated with Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas's use of the phrase "schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism" in the Tinker v. Des Moines decision.
The ACLU initiated the legal field of student's rights with the Tinker v. Des Moines case and expanded it with cases such as Goss v. Lopez, which required schools to provide students an opportunity to appeal suspensions.
As early as 1945, the ACLU had taken a stand to protect the rights of the mentally ill when it drafted a model statute governing mental commitments. In the 1960s, the ACLU opposed involuntary commitments unless it could be demonstrated that the person was a danger to himself or the community.
Before 1960, prisoners had virtually no recourse to the court system because courts considered prisoners to have no civil rights. That changed in the late 1950s, when the ACLU began representing prisoners subject to police brutality or deprived of religious reading material. In 1968, the ACLU successfully sued to desegregate the Alabama prison system; in 1969, the New York affiliate adopted a project to represent prisoners in New York prisons. Private attorney Phil Hirschkop discovered degrading conditions in Virginia prisons following the Virginia State Penitentiary strike and won an important victory in 1971's Landman v. Royster which prohibited Virginia from treating prisoners in inhumane ways. In 1972, the ACLU consolidated several prison rights efforts across the nation and created the National Prison Project. The ACLU's efforts led to landmark cases such as Ruiz v. Estelle (requiring reform of the Texas prison system), and in 1996 US Congress enacted the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) which codified prisoners' rights.Victim groups
co-founded the ACLU's Women's Rights Project in 1971. She was later appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Bill Clinton.]]
During the 1960s and 1970s, the ACLU expanded its scope to include what it referred to as "victim groups", namely women, the poor, and homosexuals. Heeding the call of female members, the ACLU endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1970 and created the Women's Rights Project in 1971. The Women's Rights Project dominated the legal field, handling more than twice as many cases as the National Organization for Women, including breakthrough cases such as Reed v. Reed, Frontiero v. Richardson, and Taylor v. Louisiana.
ACLU leader Harriet Pilpel raised the issue of the rights of homosexuals in 1964, and two years later, the ACLU formally endorsed gay rights. In 1972, ACLU cooperating attorneys in Oregon filed the first federal civil rights case involving a claim of unconstitutional discrimination against a gay or lesbian public school teacher. The US District Court held that a state statute that authorized school districts to fire teachers for "immorality" was unconstitutionally vague, and awarded monetary damages to the teacher. The court refused to reinstate the teacher, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that refusal by a 2-to-1 vote. In 1973, the ACLU created the Sexual Privacy Project (later the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project), which combated discrimination against homosexuals. This support continued into the 2000s. For example, after then-Senator Larry Craig was arrested for soliciting sex in a public restroom in 2007, the ACLU wrote an amicus brief for Craig, saying that sex between consenting adults in public places was protected under privacy rights.
The rights of the poor were another area that the ACLU expanded. In 1966 and again in 1968, activists within the ACLU encouraged the organization to adopt a policy overhauling the welfare system and guaranteeing low-income families a baseline income; but the ACLU board did not approve the proposals. However, the ACLU played a key role in the 1968 King v. Smith decision, where the Supreme Court ruled that welfare benefits for children could not be denied by a state simply because the mother cohabited with a boyfriend. The project also opposes abstinence-only sex education, arguing that it promotes an unwillingness to use contraceptives.
In 1980, the Project filed Poe v. Lynchburg Training School & Hospital which attempted to overturn Buck v. Bell, the 1927 US Supreme Court decision which had allowed the Commonwealth of Virginia to legally sterilize persons it deemed to be mentally defective without their permission. Though the Court did not overturn Buck v.Bell, in 1985, the state agreed to provide counseling and medical treatment to the survivors among the 7,200 to 8,300 people sterilized between 1927 and 1979. In 1977, the ACLU took part in and litigated Walker v. Pierce, the federal circuit court case that led to federal regulations to prevent Medicaid patients from being sterilized without their knowledge or consent. In 1981–1990, the Project litigated Hodgson v. Minnesota, which resulted in the Supreme Court overturning a state law requiring both parents to be notified before a minor could legally have an abortion. In the 1990s, the Project provided legal assistance and resource kits to those who were being challenged for educating about sexuality and AIDS. In 1995, the Project filed an amicus brief in Curtis v. School Committee of Falmouth, which allowed for the distribution of condoms in a public school.
The Reproductive Freedom Project focuses on three ideas: (1) to "reverse the shortage of trained abortion providers throughout the country" (2) to "block state and federal welfare "reform" proposals that cut off benefits for children who are born to women already receiving welfare, unmarried women, or teenagers" and (3) to "stop the elimination of vital reproductive health services as a result of hospital mergers and health care networks". The Project proposes to achieve these goals through legal action and litigation.
Privacy
The right to privacy is not explicitly identified in the US Constitution, but the ACLU led the charge to establish such rights in the indecisive Poe v. Ullman (1961) case, which addressed a state statute outlawing contraception. The issue arose again in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), and this time the Supreme Court adopted the ACLU's position and formally declared a right to privacy. The New York affiliate of the ACLU pushed to eliminate anti-abortion laws starting in 1964, a year before Griswold was decided; in 1967 the ACLU itself formally adopted the right to abortion as a policy. The ACLU led the defense in United States v. Vuitch (1971), which expanded the right of physicians to determine when abortions were necessary. These efforts culminated in one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions, Roe v. Wade (1973), which legalized abortion throughout the United States. The ACLU successfully argued against state bans on interracial marriage, in the case of Loving v. Virginia (1967).
Related to privacy, the ACLU engaged in several battles to ensure that government records about individuals were kept private and to give individuals the right to review their records. The ACLU supported several measures, including the 1970 Fair Credit Reporting Act, which required credit agencies to divulge credit information to individuals; the 1973 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which provided students the right to access their records; and the 1974 Privacy Act, which prevented the federal government from disclosing personal information without good cause.
Allegations of bias
In the early 1970s, conservatives and libertarians began to criticize the ACLU for being too political and too liberal. Legal scholar Joseph W. Bishop wrote that the ACLU's trend to partisanship started with its defense of Spock's anti-war protests. Critics also blamed the ACLU for encouraging the Supreme Court to embrace judicial activism. Critics claimed that the ACLU's support of controversial decisions like Roe v. Wade and Griswold v. Connecticut violated the intention of the authors of the Bill of Rights.
Skokie case
In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America, led by Frank Collin, applied to the town of Skokie, Illinois, for a permit to hold a demonstration in the town park. Skokie at the time had a majority population of Jews, totaling 40,000 of 70,000 citizens, some of whom were survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Skokie refused to grant the NSPA a permit and passed ordinances against hate speech and military wear, in addition to requiring an insurance bond. Skokie's Village Council ordered village attorney, Harvey Schwartz, to seek an injunction to stop the demonstration. The ACLU assisted Collin and appealed to federal court, eventually prevailing in NSPA v. Village of Skokie.
The Skokie case was heavily publicized across America, partially because Jewish groups such as the Jewish Defense League and Anti Defamation League strenuously objected to the demonstration, leading many members of the ACLU to cancel their memberships. The financial strain from the controversy led to layoffs at local chapters. After the membership crisis died down, the ACLU sent out a fund-raising appeal which explained their rationale for the Skokie case and raised over $500,000 ($}} in dollars).1980sReagan era
in 1990, arguing that his conviction was tainted by coerced testimony.]]
The inauguration of Ronald Reagan as president in 1981 ushered in an eight-year period of conservative leadership in the US government. Under Reagan's leadership, the government pushed a conservative social agenda.
The Arkansas 1981 creationism statute, which required schools to teach the biblical account of creation as a scientific alternative to evolution. The ACLU won the case in the McLean v. Arkansas decision.
In 1982, the ACLU became involved in a case involving the distribution of child pornography (New York v. Ferber). In an amicus brief, the ACLU argued that child pornography that violates the three prong obscenity test should be outlawed. However, the law was overly restrictive because it banned artistic displays and non-obscene material. The court did not adopt the ACLU's position.
During the 1988 presidential election, Vice President George H. W. Bush noted that his opponent Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis had described himself as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU" and used that as evidence that Dukakis was "a strong, passionate liberal" and "out of the mainstream". The phrase subsequently was used by the organization in an advertising campaign.1990s Free speech In 1997, ruling unanimously in the case of Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, the Supreme Court voided the anti-indecency provisions of the Communications Decency Act (the CDA), finding they violated the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment. In their decision, the Supreme Court held that the CDA's "use of the undefined terms 'indecent' and 'patently offensive' will provoke uncertainty among speakers about how the two standards relate to each other and just what they mean."
In 2000, Marvin Johnson, a legislative counsel for the ACLU, stated that proposed anti-spam legislation infringed on free speech by denying anonymity and by forcing spam to be labeled as such, "Standardized labeling is compelled speech." He also stated, "It's relatively simple to click and delete." The debate found the ACLU joining with the Direct Marketing Association and the Center for Democracy and Technology in 2000 in criticizing a bipartisan bill in the House of Representatives. As early as 1997, the ACLU had taken a strong position that nearly all spam legislation was improper, although it has supported "opt-out" requirements in some cases. The ACLU opposed the 2003 CAN-SPAM act suggesting that it could have a chilling effect on speech in cyberspace. It has been criticized for this position.
2000s
In 2006, the ACLU of Washington State joined with a pro-gun rights organization, the Second Amendment Foundation, and prevailed in a lawsuit against the North Central Regional Library District (NCRL) in Washington for its policy of refusing to disable restrictions upon an adult patron's request. Library patrons attempting to access pro-gun web sites were blocked, and the library refused to remove the blocks. In 2012, the ACLU sued the same library system for refusing to disable temporarily, at the request of an adult patron, Internet filters which blocked access to Google Images.
In 2006, the ACLU challenged a Missouri law prohibiting picketing outside veterans' funerals. The ACLU filed the suit in support of the Westboro Baptist Church and Shirley Phelps-Roper, who were threatened with arrest. The Westboro Baptist Church is well known for its picket signs that contain messages such as "God Hates Fags", "Thank God for Dead Soldiers", and "Thank God for 9/11". The ACLU issued a statement calling the legislation a "law that infringes on Shirley Phelps-Roper's rights to religious liberty and free speech." The ACLU prevailed in the lawsuit.
The ACLU argued in an amicus brief to the Supreme Court that a decision on the constitutionality of a Massachusetts law required the consideration of additional evidence because lower courts have undervalued the right to engage in sidewalk counseling. The law prohibited sidewalk counselors from approaching women outside abortion facilities and offering them alternatives to abortion but allowed escorts to speak with them and accompany them into the building. In overturning the law in McCullen v. Coakley, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that it violated the counselors' freedom of speech and constituted viewpoint discrimination.
In 2009, the ACLU filed an amicus brief in Citizens United v. FEC, arguing that the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 violated the First Amendment right to free speech by curtailing political speech. This stance on the landmark Citizens United case caused considerable disagreement within the organization, resulting in a discussion about its future stance during a quarterly board meeting in 2010. On March 27, 2012, the ACLU reaffirmed its stance in support of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, at the same time voicing support for expanded public financing of election campaigns and stating the organization would firmly oppose any future constitutional amendment limiting free speech.2010sIn 2012, the ACLU filed suit on behalf of the Ku Klux Klan of Georgia, claiming that the KKK was unfairly rejected from the state's "Adopt-a-Highway" program. The ACLU prevailed in the lawsuit.
Allegations of prioritizing civil rights over civil liberties
Some have claimed the ACLU is reducing its support of unpopular free speech (specifically, by declining to defend speech made by conservatives) in favor of identity politics, political correctness, and progressivism. Instead, critics contend that the organization has become a progressive advocacy organization intensely focused on identity politics.
One basis of these allegations was a 2017 statement the ACLU president made to a reporter after the death of a counter-protester during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Virginia, where Romero told a reporter that the ACLU would no longer support legal cases of activists that wish to carry guns at their protests. Another basis for these claims was an internal ACLU memo dated June 2018, discussing factors to evaluate when deciding whether to take a case. The memo listed several factors to consider, including "the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values."
Some analysts viewed this as a retreat from the ACLU's historically strong support of First Amendment rights, regardless of whether minorities were negatively impacted by the speech, citing the ACLU's past support for certain KKK and Nazi legal cases. The memo's authors stated that the memo did not define a change in official ACLU policy, but was intended as a guideline to assist ACLU affiliates in deciding which cases to take.2020sIn 2021, the ACLU responded to the criticisms by denying that they are reducing their support for unpopular First Amendment causes and listing 27 cases from 2017 to 2021 where the ACLU supported a party holding an unpopular or repugnant viewpoint. The cases included one which challenged college restrictions on hate speech; a case defending a Catholic school's right to discriminate in hiring; and a case that defended antisemitic protesters who marched outside a synagogue.
In 2024, the National Labor Relations Board sued the ACLU in an unfair labor practice case after the ACLU fired an Asian attorney for criticizing her Black bosses. The ACLU contended that the employee's use of phrases like "the beatings will continue until morale improves" was racially coded and that it "caused serious harm to Black members of the ACLU community." According to Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times, critics of the ACLU saw the firing as "a sign of how far the group has strayed from its core mission — defending free speech — and has instead aligned itself with a progressive politics that is intensely focused on identity."
LGBTQ issues
In 2000, the ACLU lost the Boy Scouts of America v. Dale case, which had asked the Supreme Court to require the Boy Scouts of America to drop their policy of prohibiting homosexuals from becoming Boy Scout leaders.
In March 2004, the ACLU, along with Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, sued the state of California on behalf of six same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses. That case, Woo v. Lockyer, was eventually consolidated into In re Marriage Cases, the California Supreme Court case which led to same-sex marriage being available in that state from June 16, 2008, until Proposition 8 was passed on November 4, 2008. The ACLU, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights then challenged Proposition 8 and won.
In 2011, the ACLU started its Don't Filter Me project, countering LGBT-related Internet censorship in public schools in the United States.
On January 7, 2013, the ACLU settled with the federal government in Collins v. United States that provided for the payment of full separation pay to servicemembers discharged under "don't ask, don't tell" since November 10, 2004, who had previously been granted only half that.
In 2021, the ACLU filed a brief siding with a school district that had a policy of using preferred pronouns for transgender students. Some analysts felt this was a retreat from the ACLU's historical defense of the First Amendment because the ACLU was opposing the teachers who were disciplined for refusing to use the preferred pronouns.
Anti-terrorism issues
Nicholas Merrill in a 2004 lawsuit which challenged the government's right to gather information about Internet access secretly.]]
After the September 11 attacks, the federal government instituted a broad range of new measures to combat terrorism, including the passage of the Patriot Act. The ACLU challenged many of the measures, claiming that they violated rights regarding due process, privacy, illegal searches, and cruel and unusual punishment. An ACLU policy statement states:
During the ensuing debate regarding the proper balance of civil liberties and security, the membership of the ACLU increased by 20%, bringing the group's total enrollment to 330,000. The growth continued, and by August 2008 ACLU membership was greater than 500,000. It remained at that level through 2011.
The ACLU has been a vocal opponent of the Patriot Act of 2001, the PATRIOT 2 Act of 2003, and associated legislation made in response to the threat of domestic terrorism. In response to a requirement of the USA PATRIOT Act, the ACLU withdrew from the Combined Federal Campaign charity drive. The campaign required ACLU employees to be checked against a federal anti-terrorism watch list. The ACLU has stated that it would "reject $500,000 in contributions from private individuals rather than submit to a government 'blacklist' policy".
In January 2006, the ACLU filed a lawsuit, ACLU v. NSA, in a federal district court in Michigan, challenging government spying in the NSA warrantless surveillance (2001–2007) controversy. On August 17, 2006, that court ruled that the warrantless wiretapping program was unconstitutional and ordered it ended immediately. However, the order was stayed pending an appeal. The Bush administration did suspend the program while the appeal was being heard. In February 2008, the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal from the ACLU to let it pursue a lawsuit against the program that began shortly after the September 11 terror attacks.
The ACLU and other organizations also filed separate lawsuits against telecommunications companies. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in Illinois (Terkel v. AT&T), which was dismissed because of the state secrets privilege and two others in California requesting injunctions against AT&T and Verizon. On August 10, 2006, the lawsuits against the telecommunications companies were transferred to a federal judge in San Francisco.
The ACLU represents a Muslim-American who was detained but never accused of a crime in Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, a civil suit against former Attorney General John Ashcroft. In January 2010, the American military released the names of 645 detainees held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility in Afghanistan, modifying its long-held position against publicizing such information. This list was prompted by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in September 2009 by the ACLU, whose lawyers had also requested detailed information about conditions, rules, and regulations.
On August 10, 2020, in an opinion article for USA Today by Anthony D. Romero, the ACLU called for the dismantling of the United States Department of Homeland Security over the deployment of federal forces in July 2020 during the George Floyd protests. On August 26, 2020, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of seven protesters and three veterans following the protests in Portland, Oregon, which accused the Trump Administration of using excessive force and unlawful arrests with federal officers.
Trump administration
Following Donald Trump's election as president on November 8, 2016, the ACLU responded on Twitter by saying: "Should President-elect Donald Trump attempt to implement his unconstitutional campaign promises, we'll see him in court." On January 27, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order indefinitely barring "Syrian refugees from entering the United States, suspended all refugee admissions for 120 days and blocked citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, refugees or otherwise, from entering the United States for 90 days: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen". The ACLU responded by filing a lawsuit against the ban on behalf of Hameed Khalid Darweesh and Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi, who had been detained at JFK International Airport. On January 28, 2017, District Court Judge Ann Donnelly granted a temporary injunction against the immigration order, saying it was difficult to see any harm from allowing the newly arrived immigrants to remain in the country. In response to Trump's order, the ACLU raised more than $24 million from more than 350,000 individual online donations in two days. This amounted to six times what the ACLU normally receives in online donations in a year. Celebrities donating included Chris Sacca (who offered to match other people's donations and ultimately gave $150,000), Rosie O'Donnell, Judd Apatow, Sia, John Legend, and Adele. The number of members of the ACLU doubled in the time from the election to end of January to 1 million. Besides filing more lawsuits than during previous presidential administrations, the ACLU has spent more money on advertisements and messaging as well, weighing in on elections and pressing political concerns. This increased public profile has drawn some accusations that the organization has become more politically partisan than in previous decades. Israel–Palestine In 2022, the ACLU petitioned the US Supreme Court to overturn an Arkansas anti-BDS law mandating that companies pledge not to boycott Israel in order to do business with the state.
During the Gaza war, the New York chapter of the ACLU sued Columbia University for banning its campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine on the grounds of First Amendment violations. In February 2024, the ACLU signed a letter to US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona calling on him to reject redefining antisemitism to include political criticism of the government of the state of Israel, saying it would lead to First Amendment violations. The ACLU also rejected a staff petition urging the organization to oppose U.S. military aid to Israel and divest from potential financial ties to the country. In a 50-4 vote, with one abstention, the board stated that their mission focuses on U.S. civil rights, as an ACLU spokesperson stated "it is not the ACLU's practice to take positions on overseas conflicts." Nearly 700 staff members stated that the ACLU had previously taken stances on global issues like the Vietnam War and South African apartheid. The organization specifically condemned a U.S. House bill banning the platform in March 2024, calling the legislation "unconstitutional." In December 2024, the ACLU criticized a federal appeals court ruling that upheld the law, claiming it "sets a flawed and dangerous precedent, one that gives the government far too much power to silence Americans' speech online."
The ACLU has also lobbied against the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill meant to protect children online. The organization claims it would censor important conversations online, particularly among marginalized groups.
See also
* American Civil Rights Union
* British Columbia Civil Liberties Association
* Canadian Civil Liberties Association
* Common Cause
* Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)
* Institute for Justice
* Liberty, a British equivalent
* List of court cases involving the American Civil Liberties Union
* National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee
* Political freedom
* Southern Poverty Law Center
Citations
General and cited references
*
*
* Bodenhamer, David, and Ely, James, Editors (2008). The Bill of Rights in Modern America, second edition. Indiana University Press. .
* Donohue, William (1985). The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union. Transaction Books. .
* Kaminer, Wendy (2009). Worst Instincts: Cowardice, Conformity, and the ACLU. Beacon Press. . A dissident member of the ACLU criticizes its post-9/11 actions as betraying the core principles of its founders.
*
* Lamson, Peggy (1976). Roger Baldwin: Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Houghton Mifflin Company. .
* Walker, Samuel (1990). In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU. Oxford University Press. .
Further reading
* Klein Woody, and Baldwin, Roger Nash (2006). Liberties lost: the endangered legacy of the ACLU. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006. A collection of essays by Baldwin, each accompanied by commentary from a modern analyst.
* Krannawitter, Thomas L. and Palm, Daniel C. (2005). A Nation Under God?: The ACLU and religion in American politics. Rowman & Littlefield.
* Sears, Alan, and Osten, Craig (2005). The ACLU vs America: Exposing the Agenda to Redefine Moral Values. B&H Publishing Group.
* Smith, Frank LaGard (1996). ''ACLU: The Devil's Advocate: The Seduction of Civil Liberties in America. Marcon Publishers.
Archives
* [https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9c60151m/ American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California records]. 754 boxes. UCLA Library Special Collections.
* [https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:80444/xv75164 American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.] 1917–2019. 188.31 cubic feet (including 13 microfilm reels and 1 videocassette) plus 62 cartons and 2 rolled posters. [http://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/laws/ Labor Archives of Washington. University of Washington Special Collections.]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20151117022142/http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/2181 American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan: Detroit Branch Records] 1952–1966. This collection documents the early years of the Detroit ACLU branch. The collection contains documents related to academic freedom; censorship; church and state; civil liberties; police brutality; HUAC; and legal assistance to prisoners. Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit, Michigan.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20151117014756/http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/2180 American Civil Liberties Union of Oakland County, Michigan] 1970–1984. This collection illustrates that the branch was formed to address Oakland County jail conditions, lie detector use, senior housing rights, and attempts to reinstate the death penalty. Walter P. Reuther Library, Detroit, Michigan.
* [https://archive.today/20121215000319/http://findingaids.princeton.edu/getEad?eadid=MC001.01&kw American Civil Liberties Union Records], Princeton University. Document archive 1917–1950, including the history of the ACLU.
* [http://library.indstate.edu/about/units/rbsc/debs/pamphlet.html Debs Pamphlet Collection] , Indiana State University Library. An array of annual ACLU reports in PDF.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120701045320/http://www.nhclu.org/ACLU-greatest-hits.php List of 100 most important ACLU victories (through 2002)] by New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union
* [http://vault.fbi.gov/ACLU De-classified records on the ACLU], FBI
Selected works sponsored or published by the ACLU
* Annual Report – American Civil Liberties Union, American Civil Liberties Union, 1921.
* Black Justice, ACLU, 1931.
* How Americans Protest, American Civil Liberties Union, 1963.
* Secret detention by the Chicago police: a report, American Civil Liberties Union, 1959.
* Report on lawlessness in law enforcement, Wickersham Commission, Patterson Smith, 1931. This report was written by the ACLU but published under the auspices of the Wickersham Commission.
* Miller, Merle, (1952), The Judges and the Judged, Doubleday.
* ACLU organization records, 1947–1995. Princeton University Library, Mudd Manuscript Library.
* The Dangers of Domestic Spying by Federal Law Enforcement, American Civil Liberties Union, 2002.
* Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law'', David D. Cole, 2016
External links
* <!-- Per WP:ELMINOFFICIAL, choose one official website only -->
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Category:Civil rights organizations in the United States
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Category:Privacy organizations
Category:Transgender organizations in the United States | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.840380 |
1955 | Adobe Inc. | |Nasdaq-100 component|S&P 100 component|S&P 500 component}}
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Adobe Inc. ( ), formerly Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American computer software company based in San Jose, California. It offers a wide range of programs from web design tools, photo manipulation and vector creation, through to video/audio editing, mobile app development, print layout and animation software.
It has historically specialized in software for the creation and publication of a wide range of content, including graphics, photography, illustration, animation, multimedia/video, motion pictures, and print. Its flagship products include Adobe Photoshop image editing software; Adobe Illustrator vector-based illustration software; Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Portable Document Format (PDF); and a host of tools primarily for audio-visual content creation, editing and publishing. Adobe offered a bundled solution of its products named Adobe Creative Suite, which evolved into a subscription-based offering named Adobe Creative Cloud. The company also expanded into digital marketing software and in 2021 was considered one of the top global leaders in Customer Experience Management (CXM).
Adobe was founded in December 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, who established the company after leaving Xerox PARC to develop and sell the PostScript page description language. In 1985, Apple Computer licensed PostScript for use in its LaserWriter printers, which helped spark the desktop publishing revolution. Adobe later developed animation and multimedia through its acquisition of Macromedia, from which it acquired Macromedia Flash; video editing and compositing software with Adobe Premiere, later known as Adobe Premiere Pro; low-code web development with Adobe Muse; and a suite of software for digital marketing management.
Adobe has more than 26,000 employees worldwide. New York City, Arden Hills, Lehi, Seattle, Austin and San Francisco. It also has major development operations in Noida and Bangalore in India. The company has long been the dominant tech firm in design and creative software, despite attracting criticism for its policies and practices particularly around Adobe Creative Cloud's switch to subscription only pricing and its early termination fees for its most promoted Creative Cloud plan, the latter of which attracted a joint civil lawsuit from the US Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice in 2024.
History
PostScript (1982–1986)
The company was started in John Warnock's garage. The name of the company, Adobe, comes from Adobe Creek in Los Altos, California, a stream which ran behind Warnock's house. Steve Jobs attempted to buy the company for $5 million in 1982, but Warnock and Geschke refused. Their investors urged them to work something out with Jobs, so they agreed to sell him shares worth 19 percent of the company. Jobs paid a five-times multiple of their company's valuation at the time, plus a five-year license fee for PostScript, in advance. The purchase and advance made Adobe the first company in the history of Silicon Valley to become profitable in its first year.
Warnock and Geschke considered various business options including a copy-service business and a turnkey system for office printing. Then they chose to focus on developing specialized printing software and created the Adobe PostScript page description language.
PostScript was the first international standard for computer printing as it included algorithms describing the letter-forms of many languages. Adobe added kanji printer products in 1988. Warnock and Geschke were also able to bolster the credibility of PostScript by connecting with a typesetting manufacturer. They weren't able to work with Compugraphic, but then worked with Linotype to license the Helvetica and Times Roman fonts (through the Linotron 100). By 1987, PostScript had become the industry-standard printer language with more than 400 third-party software programs and licensing agreements with 19 printer companies. Around the same time as the development of Illustrator, Adobe entered the NASDAQ Composite index in August 1986. PDFs and file formats (1993–1999) In 1993, Adobe introduced the Portable Document Format, commonly shortened to the initialism PDF, and its Adobe Acrobat and Reader software. Warnock originally developed the PDF under a code name, "The Camelot Project", using PostScript technology to create a widely available digital document format, able to display text, raster graphics, vector graphics, and fonts. Adobe kept the PDF as a proprietary file format from its introduction until 2008, when the PDF became an ISO international standard under ISO number ISO 32000-1:2008, though the PDF file format was free for viewers since its introduction.
With its acquisition of Aldus, in addition to gaining PageMaker and After Effects, Adobe gained control over the TIFF file format for images.Creative Suite and the Macromedia acquisition (2000–2009)The 2000s saw various developments for the company. Its first notable acquisition in the decade was in 2002, when Adobe acquired Canadian company Accelio, also known as JetForm. In May 2003, Adobe purchased audio editing and multitrack recording software Cool Edit Pro from Syntrillium Software for $16.5 million, as well as a large loop library called "Loopology". Adobe then renamed Cool Edit Pro to Adobe Audition. It was in 2003 that the company introduced the first version of Adobe Creative Suite, bundling its creative software into a single package. The first version of Creative Suite introduced InDesign (the successor to PageMaker), Illustrator, Photoshop, ImageReady and InCopy, with the 2005 second edition of Creative Suite including an updated version of Adobe Acrobat, Premiere Pro, GoLive, the file manager Adobe Bridge, and Adobe Dreamweaver, the latter of which was acquired from a $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia, most notably.
In addition to bringing in Dreamweaver, the $3.4 billion Macromedia acquisition, completed as a stock swap, added ColdFusion, Contribute, Captivate, Breeze (rebranded as Adobe Connect), Director, Fireworks, Flash, FlashPaper, Flex, FreeHand, HomeSite, JRun, Presenter, and Authorware to Adobe's product line.
By April 2008, Adobe released Adobe Media Player. On April 27, Adobe discontinued the development and sales of its older HTML/web development software, GoLive, in favor of Dreamweaver. Adobe offered a discount on Dreamweaver for GoLive users and supports those who still use GoLive with online tutorials and migration assistance. On June 1, Adobe launched Acrobat.com, a series of web applications geared for collaborative work. Creative Suite 4, which includes Design, Web, Production Premium, and Master Collection came out in October 2008 in six configurations at prices from about US$1,700 to $2,500 or by individual application.
On December 3, 2008, Adobe laid off 600 of its employees (8% of the worldwide staff) citing the weak economic environment. On September 15, 2009, Adobe Systems announced that it would acquire online marketing and web analytics company Omniture for $1.8 billion. The deal was completed on October 23, 2009. Former Omniture products were integrated into the Adobe Marketing Cloud. On November 10, 2009, the company laid off a further 680 employees.End of Flash, security breach, and employee compensation class action (2010–2014)Adobe's 2010 was marked by continuing arguments with Apple over the latter's non-support for Adobe Flash on its iPhone, iPad and other products. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs claimed that Flash was not reliable or secure enough, while Adobe executives have argued that Apple wishes to maintain control over the iOS platform. In April 2010, Steve Jobs published a post titled Thoughts on Flash where he outlined his thoughts on Flash and the rise of HTML5.
In July 2010, Adobe bought Day Software integrating their line of CQ Products: WCM, DAM, SOCO, and Mobile
In January 2011, Adobe acquired DemDex, Inc. with the intent of adding DemDex's audience-optimization software to its online marketing suite. At Photoshop World 2011, Adobe unveiled a new mobile photo service. Carousel was a new application for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that used Photoshop Lightroom technology to allow users to adjust and fine-tune images on all platforms. Carousel also allowed users to automatically sync, share and browse photos. Later that same year in October, Adobe acquired Nitobi Software, the maker of the mobile application development framework PhoneGap. As part of the acquisition, the source code of PhoneGap was submitted to the Apache Foundation, where it became Apache Cordova.
In November 2011, Adobe announced that they would cease development of Flash for mobile devices following version 11.1. Instead, it would focus on HTML5 for mobile devices. In December 2011, Adobe announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Efficient Frontier. In December 2012, Adobe opened a new corporate campus in Lehi, Utah.
In 2013, Adobe endured a major security breach. Vast portions of the source code for the company's software were stolen and posted online and over 150 million records of Adobe's customers were made readily available for download. In 2012, about 40 million sets of payment card information were compromised by a hack at Adobe.
A class-action lawsuit alleging that the company suppressed employee compensation was filed against Adobe, and three other Silicon Valley–based companies in a California federal district court in 2013. In May 2014, it was revealed the four companies, Adobe, Apple, Google, and Intel had reached an agreement with the plaintiffs, 64,000 employees of the four companies, to pay a sum of $324.5 million to settle the suit. Adobe Creative Cloud (Since 2011) 2011 saw the company first introduce Adobe Creative Cloud, a $600/year subscription plan to its creative software as opposed to a one-time perpetual license payment which could often top $2000 for creative professionals. The initial launch of Creative Cloud alongside Creative Suite 5 users came at the same time that Adobe ran into controversy from users of Adobe's creative software, with users of Adobe software stating that the original perpetual and subscription pricing plans for CS5 would be unaffordable for not only individuals but also businesses, as well as refusing to extend a Creative Suite 6 discount to non-CS5 users. The original announcement of Adobe Creative Cloud was met with a positive reception from CNET journalists as a much more enticing plan, and Creative Cloud was first released in 2012, though a later CNET survey evidenced that more users had a negative perception about subscription creative software than a positive view. The original pricing plan for Creative Cloud was $75 per month for the entire suite of software, though Adobe discounted the monthly cost to $50 for users willing to commit to at least one year of continuous subscription for Creative Cloud, and down to $30 per month for former CS users with the one year commitment.
By 2013, Adobe decided that CS6 would be the last version of Creative Suite software that would be sold through perpetual licensing option, and in May announced that a Creative Cloud subscription would be the only way to get the newest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and other Adobe creative software. Reception to the mandatory subscriptions for future Adobe software was mostly negative, despite some positive testimonies on the move from customers and Adobe's attraction of 500,000 Creative Cloud subscribers by the service's first year. The switch to subscription only also did not deter software piracy of Creative Cloud services; within the first day of the first version of Photoshop exclusively made for Creative Cloud being released, cracked versions of Adobe Photoshop CC 2013 were found on The Pirate Bay, an online website used for distributing pirated software. Further acquisitions and failed buyout of Figma (2018–2023) In March 2018, at Adobe Summit, the company and Nvidia announced their association to upgrade their AI and profound learning innovations. They planned to streamline Adobe Sensei AI and machine learning structure for Nvidia GPUs. Adobe and Nvidia had cooperated for 10 years on GPU quickening. This incorporates Sensei-powered features, e.g. auto lip-sync in Adobe Character Animator CC and face-aware editing in Photoshop CC, and also cloud-based AI/ML items and features, for example, picture investigation for Adobe Stock and Lightroom CC and auto-labeling in Adobe Experience Supervisor.
Adobe further spent its time from 2018 to 2023 acquiring more companies to boost both Creative Cloud and the Adobe Experience Cloud, a software suite which increased business. These included e-commerce services provider Magento Commerce from private equity firm Permira for $1.68 billion in June 2018, Marketo for $4.75 billion in 2018, Allegorithmic in 2019 for just under $160 million, and Workfront in December 2020 for $1.5 billion. 2021 additionally saw Adobe add payment services to its e-commerce platforms in an attempt to compete with Shopify, accepting both credit cards and PayPal.
In July 2020, as the United States presidential elections approached, the software giant imposed a ban on the political ads features on its digital advertising sales platform.
On November 9, 2020, Adobe announced it would spend US$1.5 billion to acquire Workfront, a provider of marketing collaboration software. The acquisition was completed in early December 2020.
On August 19, 2021, Adobe announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Frame.io, a leading cloud-based video collaboration platform. The transaction is valued at $1.275 billion and closed during the fourth quarter of Adobe's 2021 fiscal year.
Adobe announced a $20 billion acquisition of Figma, an Adobe XD competitor, in September 2022, its largest to date. Regulatory scrutiny from the US and European Union began shortly after due to concerns that Adobe, already a major player in the design software market with XD, would have too much control if it also owned Figma. At the time of the announcement to acquire Figma, Adobe's share over the creative software market and design-software market was almost a monopoly. In December 2023, the two companies called off their merger, citing the regulatory challenges as a sign to both that the deal was not likely to be approved. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee per their merger agreement.FTC lawsuit and terms of service update (2024–present)On June 17, 2024, the US Federal Trade Commission together with the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Adobe for its subscription business model practice, citing hidden termination fees and the company pushing customers towards more expensive plans.
In June 2024, after facing backlash for its changes to the terms of service, Adobe updated them to explicitly pledge it will not use customer data to train its AI models.Products
Adobe's currently supported roster of software, online services and file formats comprises the following ():
{| class="wikitable noresize"
|+ Graphic design software
! Name
! Icon
! Type
|-
| Photoshop || || Raster graphics editor
|-
| Photoshop Elements || || Raster graphics editor, hobbyist
|-
| Illustrator || || Vector graphics editor
|-
| Acrobat DC || || Portable Document Format viewer, creator, and editor
|-
| FrameMaker || || Complex document processor
|-
| XD || || Vector design tool for web and mobile applications
|-
| InDesign || || Desktop publishing design and typesetting tool
|-
| Lightroom || || Raw image processor
|-
|Express
|
|Vector design tool for web and mobile applications
|-
| InCopy || || Simple word processor
|}
{| class="wikitable noresize"
|+ Web design software
! Name
! Icon
! Type
|-
| Dreamweaver || || Web development tool
|-
| Flash || || Multimedia software platform
|}
{| class="wikitable noresize"
|+ Video editing, audio editing, animation, and visual effects software
! Name
! Icon
! Type
|-
| Premiere Pro || || Non-linear video editor
|-
| Premiere Elements || || Non-linear video editor, hobbyist
|-
| Audition || || Audio editor
|-
| After Effects || || Digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application
|-
| Character Animator || || Motion capture tool
|-
| Prelude || || Broadcast ingest and logging application
|-
| Animate || || Computer animation application
|}
{| class="wikitable noresize"
|+ E-learning software
! Name
! Icon
! Type
|-
| Captivate || || E-learning course authoring tool
|-
| Presenter Video Express || || Screencasting recorder and editor
|-
| Connect || || Teleconferencing and videotelephony tool
|}
{| class="wikitable noresize"
|+ Web design software
! Name
! Icon
! Type
|-
| ColdFusion || || Rapid web-application development platform
|-
| Content Server || || E-book digital rights management system
|-
| LiveCycle || || Java EE Service-oriented architecture software
|}
{| class="wikitable noresize"
|+ 3D and AR software by Mixamo
! Name
! Icon
! Type
|-
| Aero || || Augmented reality authoring and publishing tool
|-
| Dimension || || 3D rendering and rudimentary design tool
|-
| Substance 3D|| || Suite of 3D model and texture authoring tools.
|}
Formats
Portable Document Format (PDF), PDF's predecessor PostScript, ActionScript, Shockwave Flash (SWF), Flash Video (FLV), and Filmstrip (.flm)
Web-hosted services
Adobe Color, Photoshop Express, Acrobat.com, Behance and Adobe Express.
Adobe Renderer
Adobe Media Encoder
Adobe Stock
A microstock agency that presently provides over 57 million high-resolution, royalty-free images and videos available to license (via subscription or credit purchase methods). In 2015, Adobe acquired Fotolia, a stock content marketplace founded in 2005 by Thibaud Elziere, Oleg Tscheltzoff, and Patrick Chassany which operated in 23 countries. It was run as a stand-alone website until 2019, but has since been integrated into Adobe Stock. Criticisms PricingAdobe has been criticized for its pricing practices, with retail prices being up to twice as much in non-US countries.
After Adobe revealed the pricing for the Creative Suite 3 Master Collection, which was £1,000 higher for European customers, a petition to protest over "unfair pricing" was published and signed by 10,000 users. In June 2009, Adobe further increased its prices in the UK by 10% in spite of weakening of the pound against the dollar, and UK users were not allowed to buy from the US store.
Adobe's Reader and Flash programs were listed on "The 10 most hated programs of all time" article by TechRadar.
Security
Hackers have exploited vulnerabilities in Adobe programs, such as Adobe Reader, to gain unauthorized access to computers. Adobe's Flash Player has also been criticized for, among other things, suffering from performance, memory usage and security problems. A report by security researchers from Kaspersky Lab criticized Adobe for producing the products having top 10 security vulnerabilities.
Observers noted that Adobe was spying on its customers by including spyware in the Creative Suite 3 software and quietly sending user data to a firm named Omniture. When users became aware, Adobe explained what the suspicious software did and admitted that they: "could and should do a better job taking security concerns into account". When a security flaw was later discovered in Photoshop CS5, Adobe sparked outrage by saying it would leave the flaw unpatched, so anyone who wanted to use the software securely would have to pay for an upgrade. Following a fierce backlash Adobe decided to provide the software patch.
Adobe has been criticized for pushing unwanted software including third-party browser toolbars and free virus scanners, usually as part of the Flash update process, and for pushing a third-party scareware program designed to scare users into paying for unneeded system repairs.
Customer data breach
On October 3, 2013, the company initially revealed that 2.9 million customers' sensitive and personal data was stolen in a security breach which included encrypted credit card information. Adobe later admitted that 38 million active users have been affected and the attackers obtained access to their IDs and encrypted passwords, as well as to many inactive Adobe accounts. The company did not make it clear if all the personal information was encrypted, such as email addresses and physical addresses, though data privacy laws in 44 states require this information to be encrypted.
In late 2013 a 3.8 GB file stolen from Adobe and containing 152 million usernames, reversibly encrypted passwords and unencrypted password hints was posted on AnonNews.org. LastPass, a password security firm, said that Adobe failed to use best practices for securing the passwords and has not salted them. Another security firm, Sophos, showed that Adobe used a weak encryption method permitting the recovery of a lot of information with very little effort. According to IT expert Simon Bain, Adobe has failed its customers and 'should hang their heads in shame'.
Many of the credit cards were tied to the Creative Cloud software-by-subscription service. Adobe offered its affected US customers a free membership in a credit monitoring service, but no similar arrangements have been made for non-US customers. When a data breach occurs in the US, penalties depend on the state where the victim resides, not where the company is based.
After stealing the customers' data, cyber-thieves also accessed Adobe's source code repository, likely in mid-August 2013. Because hackers acquired copies of the source code of Adobe proprietary products, they could find and exploit any potential weaknesses in its security, computer experts warned. Security researcher Alex Holden, chief information security officer of Hold Security, characterized this Adobe breach, which affected Acrobat, ColdFusion and numerous other applications, as "one of the worst in US history". Adobe also announced that hackers stole parts of the source code of Photoshop, which according to commentators could allow programmers to copy its engineering techniques and would make it easier to pirate Adobe's expensive products.
Published on a server of a Russian-speaking hacker group, the "disclosure of encryption algorithms, other security schemes, and software vulnerabilities can be used to bypass protections for individual and corporate data" and may have opened the gateway to new generation zero-day attacks. Hackers already used ColdFusion exploits to make off with usernames and encrypted passwords of PR Newswire's customers, which has been tied to the Adobe security breach. They also used a ColdFusion exploit to breach Washington state court and expose up to 200,000 Social Security numbers.
Anti-competitive practices
In 1994, Adobe acquired Aldus Corp., a software vendor that sold FreeHand, a competing product. With FreeHand and Illustrator, Adobe controlled the only two products that compete in the professional illustration program market for Macintosh operating systems. The suit alleged that:
<blockquote>''Adobe has violated federal and state antitrust laws by abusing its dominant position in the professional vector graphic illustration software market [...] Adobe has engaged in a series of exclusionary and anti-competitive acts and strategies designed to kill FreeHand, the dominant competitor to Adobe's Illustrator software product, instead of competing on the basis of product merit according to the principals of free market capitalism.''
Cancellation fees
In April 2021, Adobe received criticism from Twitter users for the company's cancellation fees after a customer shared a tweet showing they had been charged a $291.45 cancellation fee for their Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Many also showed their cancellation fees for Adobe Creative Cloud, with this leading to many encouraging piracy of Adobe products and/or purchase of alternatives with lower prices or using free and open-source software instead. Furthermore, there have been reports that with changing subscriptions it is possible to avoid paying this fee.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the FTC filed a lawsuit against Adobe and two of its executives in June 2024, alleging that the company's deceptive subscription practices and cancellation policies violated the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act. According to the lawsuit, the company purportedly used small text disclosures, optional input fields, and complex web of links to obscure a concealed early termination fee. This fee reportedly amounted to fifty percent of the remaining value of annual contracts for users who chose to cancel early in the first year, resulting in significant penalties. Customers who tried to cancel services by contacting customer service faced obstacles, including dropped calls and multiple transfers between representatives; others continued to be billed by Adobe, under the mistaken belief that they had successfully ended their subscriptions. 2024 terms of service update On June 5, 2024, Adobe updated their terms of service (TOS) for Photoshop stating "we may access your content through both manual and automated methods, such as for content review." This sparked outrage with Adobe users, as the new terms implied that the users' work would be used to train Adobe's generative AI, even if the work was under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
Adobe responded the following day clarifying that they will not use user data to train generative AI or take users work as their own; however, they neglected to respond to the part in the TOS that gives Adobe the ability to view or use work that is contracted under an NDA.
See also
* Adobe MAX
* Digital rights management (DRM)
* List of acquisitions by Adobe
* United States v. Elcom Ltd.
References
External links
*
*
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Category:Companies based in San Jose, California
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Category:Software companies established in 1982
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Category:Software companies of the United States | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc. | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.883683 |
1957 | Alexander Technique | The Alexander Technique, named after its developer Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869–1955), is an alternative therapy based on the idea that poor posture causes a range of health problems. to address his own voice loss during public speaking.
Proponents and teachers of the Alexander Technique believe the technique can address a variety of health conditions, but there is a lack of research to support the claims. Both the American health-insurance company Aetna and the Australian Department of Health have conducted reviews and concluded that there is insufficient evidence for the technique's health claims to warrant insurance coverage. Sessions include chair work – often in front of a mirror – during which the instructor will guide the student while the student stands, sits and walks, learning to move efficiently while maintaining a comfortable relationship between the head, neck, and spine, and table work or physical manipulation.
In the United Kingdom, there is no regulation for who can offer Alexander Technique services. Professional organisations do exist, however, typically offering three-year courses to people becoming instructors.
Alexander did not originally conceive of his technique as therapy, but it has become a form of alternative medicine.
When considering how to classify the Alexander Technique in relation to mainstream medicine, some sources describe it as alternative and/or complementary, depending on whether it is used alone or with mainstream methods. The American National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health classifies it as a "psychological and physical" complementary approach to health when used with mainstream methods. When used "in place of" conventional medicine, it is considered "alternative".
Influence
The American philosopher and educator John Dewey became impressed with the Alexander Technique after his headaches, neck pains, blurred vision, and stress symptoms largely improved during the time he used Alexander's advice to change his posture. In 1923, Dewey wrote the introduction to Alexander's Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual.
Fritz Perls, who originated Gestalt therapy, credited Alexander as an inspiration for his psychological work.
Uses
The Alexander Technique is used as a therapy for stress-related chronic conditions. It does not attempt to cure the underlying cause, but to teach people how to avoid bad habits which might exacerbate their condition.
The Technique is used as an alternative treatment to improve both voice and posture for people in the performing arts. it was on the curriculum of prominent Western performing arts institutions.
According to Alexander Technique instructor Michael J. Gelb, people tend to study the Alexander Technique for reasons of personal development.
Health effects
The UK National Health Service says that advocates of the Alexander Technique made claims for it that were not supported by evidence, but that there was evidence suggesting that it might help with chronic back or neck pain. According to the NHS, Alexander technique may be of benefit for people with Parkinson disease.
A review published in BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine in 2014 focused on "the evidence for the effectiveness of AT sessions on musicians' performance, anxiety, respiratory function and posture" concluded that "evidence from RCTs and CTs suggests that AT sessions may improve performance anxiety in musicians. Effects on music performance, respiratory function and posture yet remain inconclusive."
A 2015 review, conducted for the Australian Department of Health in order to determine what services the Australian government should pay for, examined clinical trials published to date and found that "overall, the evidence was limited by the small number of participants in the intervention arms, wide confidence intervals or a lack of replication of results." It concluded that "the Alexander Technique may improve short-term pain and disability in people with low back pain, but the longer-term effects remain uncertain. For all other clinical conditions, the effectiveness of the Alexander Technique was deemed to be uncertain, due to insufficient evidence." It also noted that "evidence for the safety of Alexander Technique was lacking, with most trials not reporting on this outcome." Subsequently, in 2017, the Australian government named the Alexander Technique as a practice that would not qualify for insurance subsidy, saying this step would "ensure taxpayer funds are expended appropriately and not directed to therapies lacking evidence".
A review by Aetna last updated in 2021 stated: "Aetna considers the following alternative medicine interventions experimental and investigational because there is inadequate evidence in the peer-reviewed published medical literature of their effectiveness." The Alexander Technique is included in that list.
See also
Nikolai Bernstein
George E. Coghill
Motor skill consolidation
Neutral spine
Psychomotor learning
References
External links
Category:Mind–body interventions
Category:Postural awareness techniques
Category:Somatics
Category:Alternative medicine | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Technique | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.893935 |
1960 | Andrea Alciato | | birth_place = Alzate Brianza, Duchy of Milan
| death_date
| death_place = Pavia, Duchy of Milan
| death_cause | nationality Italian
| citizenship = <!-- use only when necessary per WP:INFONAT -->
| other_names | occupation Jurist, university teacher, lawyer, writer
| period | known_for
| title | boards
| spouse | partner
| children | parents Ambrogio Alciati and Margherita Alciati (née Landriani)
| relatives = Francesco Alciati
| awards = <!--notable national-level awards only-->
| website | education
| alma_mater =
| thesis_title | thesis_url
| thesis_year | school_tradition Mos gallicus iura docendi
| doctoral_advisor | academic_advisors
| influences = Seneca, Tacitus, Tribonian, Bartolus de Saxoferrato, Erasmus
| era | discipline Civilist, legal theorist, philosopher of law
| sub_discipline | workplaces
| doctoral_students | notable_students Bonifacius Amerbach, Viglius, François Connan, Johannes Secundus, Antonio Agustín y Albanell, Giulio Claro
| main_interests | notable_works Emblemata (1531)
| notable_ideas | influenced French school of legal humanism
| signature | signature_alt
| signature_size | footnotes
| resting_place = Chiesa di Sant'Epifanio
}}
Andrea Alciato (8 May 149212 January 1550), commonly known as Alciati (Andreas Alciatus), was an Italian jurist and writer. He is regarded as the founder of the French school of legal humanists.
Biography
Alciati was born in Alzate Brianza, near Milan, and settled in France in the early 16th century. He displayed great literary skill in his exposition of the laws, and was one of the first to interpret the civil law by the history, languages and literature of antiquity, and to substitute original research for the servile interpretations of the glossators. He published many legal works, and some annotations on Tacitus and accumulated a sylloge of Roman inscriptions from Milan and its territories, as part of his preparation for his history of Milan, written in 1504–05.
Among his several appointments, Alciati taught law at the University of Bourges between 1529 and 1535. It was Guillaume Budé who encouraged the call to Bourges at the time. Pierre Bayle, in his General Dictionary (article "Alciat"), relates that he greatly increased his salary there, by the "stratagem" of arranging to get a job offer from the University of Bologna and using it as a negotiation point [https://books.google.com/books?idPmZZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA444].
Alciati is most famous for his Emblemata, published in dozens of editions from 1531 onward. This collection of short Latin verse texts and accompanying woodcuts created an entire European genre, the emblem book, which attained enormous popularity in continental Europe and Great Britain.
Alciati died at Pavia in 1550.
*
<gallery>
File:Alciati, Andrea – De ponderibus et mensuris, 1532 – BEIC 13750776.jpg|De ponderibus et mensuris, 1532
File:Alciati, Andrea – In Digestorum titulos aliquot commentaria, 1560 – BEIC 11135576.tif|In Digestorum titulos aliquot commentaria, 1560
</gallery>
Bibliography
*
* Andrea Alciato, Il libro degli emblemi secondo le edizioni del 1531 e del 1534, with Introduction, Italian translation and commentary by Mino Gabriele (Milan: Adelphi, 2009; second revised edition 2015) ISBN 978-88-459-2967-0
* William S. Heckscher, ''The Princeton Alciati Companion. A Glossary of Neo-Latin words and phrases used by Andrea Alciati and the emblem book writers of his time, including a bibliography of secondary sources relevant to the study of Alciati's emblems'' (New York: Garland, 1989) ISBN 0-8240-3715-4
Quotation
References
External links
*
*[http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/ Alciato at Glasgow] – Reproductions of 22 editions of Alciato's emblems from 1531 to 1621
*[https://www.mun.ca/alciato/index.html Description, Reproduction and translation] Memorial University of Newfoundland
*[http://www.uni-mannheim.de/mateo/itali/autoren/alciati_itali.html Emblemata] Latin text, Antwerp 1577, full digital facsimile, CAMENA Project
Category:1492 births
Category:1550 deaths
Category:16th-century Italian jurists
Category:16th-century writers in Latin
Category:16th-century Italian historians
Category:16th-century Italian male writers
Category:Italian male non-fiction writers
Category:Italian Renaissance humanists
Category:People from the Province of Como | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Alciato | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.899275 |
1962 | Apparent magnitude | and two stars in the constellation Aquarius, with their magnitudes labeled]]
Apparent magnitude () is a measure of the brightness of a star, astronomical object or other celestial objects like artificial satellites. Its value depends on its intrinsic luminosity, its distance, and any extinction of the object's light caused by interstellar dust along the line of sight to the observer.
Unless stated otherwise, the word magnitude in astronomy usually refers to a celestial object's apparent magnitude. The magnitude scale likely dates to before the ancient Roman astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, whose star catalog popularized the system by listing stars from 1st magnitude (brightest) to 6th magnitude (dimmest). The modern scale was mathematically defined to closely match this historical system by Norman Pogson in 1856.
The scale is reverse logarithmic: the brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude number. A difference of 1.0 in magnitude corresponds to the brightness ratio of <math>\sqrt[5]{100}</math>, or about 2.512. For example, a magnitude 2.0 star is 2.512 times as bright as a magnitude 3.0 star, 6.31 times as magnitude 4.0, and 100 times magnitude 7.0.
The brightest astronomical objects have negative apparent magnitudes: for example, Venus at −4.2 or Sirius at −1.46. The faintest stars visible with the naked eye on the darkest night have apparent magnitudes of about +6.5, though this varies depending on a person's eyesight and with altitude and atmospheric conditions. The apparent magnitudes of known objects range from the Sun at −26.832 to objects in deep Hubble Space Telescope images of magnitude +31.5.
The measurement of apparent magnitude is called photometry. Photometric measurements are made in the ultraviolet, visible, or infrared wavelength bands using standard passband filters belonging to photometric systems such as the UBV system or the Strömgren uvbyβ system. Measurement in the V-band may be referred to as the apparent visual magnitude.
Absolute magnitude is a related quantity which measures the luminosity that a celestial object emits, rather than its apparent brightness when observed, and is expressed on the same reverse logarithmic scale. Absolute magnitude is defined as the apparent magnitude that a star or object would have if it were observed from a distance of . Therefore, it is of greater use in stellar astrophysics since it refers to a property of a star regardless of how close it is to Earth. But in observational astronomy and popular stargazing, references to "magnitude" are understood to mean apparent magnitude.
Amateur astronomers commonly express the darkness of the sky in terms of limiting magnitude, i.e. the apparent magnitude of the faintest star they can see with the naked eye. This can be useful as a way of monitoring the spread of light pollution.
Apparent magnitude is technically a measure of illuminance, which can also be measured in photometric units such as lux.
History
{|class"wikitable" style"float: center; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"
! Visible to<br />typical<br />human<br />eye<br />in the night sky
|-
| rowspan="9" | Yes
|−1.0 || 251% ||1 (Sirius)
|-
|0.0 || 100% ||5
<small>(Vega, Canopus, Alpha Centauri,</small>
<small>Arcturus)</small>
|-
|1.0 || 40% ||15
|-
|2.0 || 16% ||48
|-
|3.0 || 6.3% ||171
|-
|4.0 || 2.5% ||513
|-
|5.0 || 1.0% ||
|-
|6.0 || 0.4% ||
|-
|6.5 || 0.25% ||
|-
| rowspan="4" | No
|7.0 || 0.16% ||
|-
|8.0 || 0.063% ||
|-
|9.0 || 0.025% ||
|-
|10.0 || 0.010% ||
|}
The scale used to indicate magnitude originates in the Hellenistic practice of dividing stars visible to the naked eye into six magnitudes. The brightest stars in the night sky were said to be of first magnitude ( 1), whereas the faintest were of sixth magnitude ( 6), which is the limit of human visual perception (without the aid of a telescope). Each grade of magnitude was considered twice the brightness of the following grade (a logarithmic scale), although that ratio was subjective as no photodetectors existed. This rather crude scale for the brightness of stars was popularized by Ptolemy in his Almagest and is generally believed to have originated with Hipparchus. This cannot be proved or disproved because Hipparchus's original star catalogue is lost. The only preserved text by Hipparchus himself (a commentary to Aratus) clearly documents that he did not have a system to describe brightness with numbers: He always uses terms like "big" or "small", "bright" or "faint" or even descriptions such as "visible at full moon".
In 1856, Norman Robert Pogson formalized the system by defining a first magnitude star as a star that is 100 times as bright as a sixth-magnitude star, thereby establishing the logarithmic scale still in use today. This implies that a star of magnitude is about 2.512 times as bright as a star of magnitude . This figure, the fifth root of 100, became known as . The 1884 Harvard Photometry and 1886 Potsdamer Duchmusterung star catalogs popularized Pogson's ratio, and eventually it became a de facto standard in modern astronomy to describe differences in brightness.
Defining and calibrating what magnitude 0.0 means is difficult, and different types of measurements which detect different kinds of light (possibly by using filters) have different zero points. Pogson's original 1856 paper defined magnitude 6.0 to be the faintest star the unaided eye can see, but the true limit for faintest possible visible star varies depending on the atmosphere and how high a star is in the sky. The Harvard Photometry used an average of 100 stars close to Polaris to define magnitude 5.0. Later, the Johnson UVB photometric system defined multiple types of photometric measurements with different filters, where magnitude 0.0 for each filter is defined to be the average of six stars with the same spectral type as Vega. This was done so the color index of these stars would be 0. Although this system is often called "Vega normalized", Vega is slightly dimmer than the six-star average used to define magnitude 0.0, meaning Vega's magnitude is normalized to 0.03 by definition.
{|class"wikitable" style"float: right; margin-left: 0.5em; text-align: center;"
|+ Limiting Magnitudes for Visual Observation at High Magnification
|-
!Telescope<br />aperture<br />(mm)
!Limiting<br />Magnitude
|-
| 35
| 11.3
|-
| 60
| 12.3
|-
| 102
| 13.3
|-
| 152
| 14.1
|-
| 203
| 14.7
|-
| 305
| 15.4
|-
| 406
| 15.7
|-
| 508
| 16.4
|}
With the modern magnitude systems, brightness is described using Pogson's ratio. In practice, magnitude numbers rarely go above 30 before stars become too faint to detect. While Vega is close to magnitude 0, there are four brighter stars in the night sky at visible wavelengths (and more at infrared wavelengths) as well as the bright planets Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, and since brighter means smaller magnitude, these must be described by negative magnitudes. For example, Sirius, the brightest star of the celestial sphere, has a magnitude of −1.4 in the visible. Negative magnitudes for other very bright astronomical objects can be found in the table below.
Astronomers have developed other photometric zero point systems as alternatives to Vega normalized systems. The most widely used is the AB magnitude system, in which photometric zero points are based on a hypothetical reference spectrum having constant flux per unit frequency interval, rather than using a stellar spectrum or blackbody curve as the reference. The AB magnitude zero point is defined such that an object's AB and Vega-based magnitudes will be approximately equal in the V filter band. However, the AB magnitude system is defined assuming an idealized detector measuring only one wavelength of light, while real detectors accept energy from a range of wavelengths. Measurement
Precision measurement of magnitude (photometry) requires calibration of the photographic or (usually) electronic detection apparatus. This generally involves contemporaneous observation, under identical conditions, of standard stars whose magnitude using that spectral filter is accurately known. Moreover, as the amount of light actually received by a telescope is reduced due to transmission through the Earth's atmosphere, the airmasses of the target and calibration stars must be taken into account. Typically one would observe a few different stars of known magnitude which are sufficiently similar. Calibrator stars close in the sky to the target are favoured (to avoid large differences in the atmospheric paths). If those stars have somewhat different zenith angles (altitudes) then a correction factor as a function of airmass can be derived and applied to the airmass at the target's position. Such calibration obtains the brightness as would be observed from above the atmosphere, where apparent magnitude is defined.
The apparent magnitude scale in astronomy reflects the received power of stars and not their amplitude. Newcomers should consider using the relative brightness measure in astrophotography to adjust exposure times between stars. Apparent magnitude also integrates over the entire object, regardless of its focus, and this needs to be taken into account when scaling exposure times for objects with significant apparent size, like the Sun, Moon and planets. For example, directly scaling the exposure time from the Moon to the Sun works because they are approximately the same size in the sky. However, scaling the exposure from the Moon to Saturn would result in an overexposure if the image of Saturn takes up a smaller area on your sensor than the Moon did (at the same magnification, or more generally, f/#).
Calculations
taken by ESO's VISTA. This nebula has a visual magnitude of 8.]]
The dimmer an object appears, the higher the numerical value given to its magnitude, with a difference of 5 magnitudes corresponding to a brightness factor of exactly 100. Therefore, the magnitude , in the spectral band , would be given by
<math display"block">m_{x} -5 \log_{100} \left(\frac {F_x}{F_{x,0}}\right),</math>
which is more commonly expressed in terms of common (base-10) logarithms as
<math display"block">m_{x} -2.5 \log_{10} \left(\frac {F_x}{F_{x,0}}\right),</math>
where is the observed irradiance using spectral filter , and is the reference flux (zero-point) for that photometric filter. Since an increase of 5 magnitudes corresponds to a decrease in brightness by a factor of exactly 100, each magnitude increase implies a decrease in brightness by the factor <math>\sqrt[5]{100} \approx 2.512</math> (Pogson's ratio). Inverting the above formula, a magnitude difference Δm}} implies a brightness factor of
<math display"block"> \frac{F_2}{F_1} 100^\frac{\Delta m}{5} 10^{0.4 \Delta m} \approx 2.512^{\Delta m}.</math> Example: Sun and Moon
What is the ratio in brightness between the Sun and the full Moon?
The apparent magnitude of the Sun is −26.832
<math display"block"> 10^{-m_f \times 0.4} 10^{-m_1 \times 0.4} + 10^{-m_2 \times 0.4}. </math>
Solving for <math>m_f</math> yields
<math display"block"> m_f -2.5\log_{10} \left(10^{-m_1 \times 0.4} + 10^{-m_2 \times 0.4} \right), </math>
where is the resulting magnitude after adding the brightnesses referred to by and .
Apparent bolometric magnitude
While magnitude generally refers to a measurement in a particular filter band corresponding to some range of wavelengths, the apparent or absolute bolometric magnitude (m<sub>bol</sub>) is a measure of an object's apparent or absolute brightness integrated over all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum (also known as the object's irradiance or power, respectively). The zero point of the apparent bolometric magnitude scale is based on the definition that an apparent bolometric magnitude of 0 mag is equivalent to a received irradiance of 2.518×10<sup>−8</sup> watts per square metre (W·m<sup>−2</sup>).
Absolute magnitude
While apparent magnitude is a measure of the brightness of an object as seen by a particular observer, absolute magnitude is a measure of the intrinsic brightness of an object. Flux decreases with distance according to an inverse-square law, so the apparent magnitude of a star depends on both its absolute brightness and its distance (and any extinction). For example, a star at one distance will have the same apparent magnitude as a star four times as bright at twice that distance. In contrast, the intrinsic brightness of an astronomical object, does not depend on the distance of the observer or any extinction.
The absolute magnitude , of a star or astronomical object is defined as the apparent magnitude it would have as seen from a distance of . The absolute magnitude of the Sun is 4.83 in the V band (visual), 4.68 in the Gaia satellite's G band (green) and 5.48 in the B band (blue).
In the case of a planet or asteroid, the absolute magnitude rather means the apparent magnitude it would have if it were from both the observer and the Sun, and fully illuminated at maximum opposition (a configuration that is only theoretically achievable, with the observer situated on the surface of the Sun). Standard reference values {| class"wikitable floatright" style="text-align:center;"
|+ Standard apparent magnitudes and fluxes for typical bands
|-
! rowspan="2" | Band
! rowspan="2" | <br />(μm)
! rowspan="2" | }}<br />(FWHM)
! colspan"2" | Flux at 0}},
|-
! Jy
! 10<sup>−20</sup> erg/(s·cm<sup>2</sup>·Hz)
|-
| U || 0.36 || 0.15 || 1810 || 1.81
|-
| B || 0.44 || 0.22 || 4260 || 4.26
|-
| V || 0.55 || 0.16 || 3640 || 3.64
|-
| R || 0.64 || 0.23 || 3080 || 3.08
|-
| I || 0.79 || 0.19 || 2550 || 2.55
|-
| J || 1.26 || 0.16 || 1600 || 1.60
|-
| H || 1.60 || 0.23 || 1080 || 1.08
|-
| K || 2.22 || 0.23 || 670 || 0.67
|-
| L || 3.50 || || ||
|-
| g || 0.52 || 0.14 || 3730 || 3.73
|-
| r || 0.67 || 0.14 || 4490 || 4.49
|-
| i || 0.79 || 0.16 || 4760 || 4.76
|-
| z || 0.91 || 0.13 || 4810 || 4.81
|-
|}
The magnitude scale is a reverse logarithmic scale. A common misconception is that the logarithmic nature of the scale is because the human eye itself has a logarithmic response. In Pogson's time this was thought to be true (see Weber–Fechner law), but it is now believed that the response is a power law .
Magnitude is complicated by the fact that light is not monochromatic. The sensitivity of a light detector varies according to the wavelength of the light, and the way it varies depends on the type of light detector. For this reason, it is necessary to specify how the magnitude is measured for the value to be meaningful. For this purpose the UBV system is widely used, in which the magnitude is measured in three different wavelength bands: U (centred at about 350 nm, in the near ultraviolet), B (about 435 nm, in the blue region) and V (about 555 nm, in the middle of the human visual range in daylight). The V band was chosen for spectral purposes and gives magnitudes closely corresponding to those seen by the human eye. When an apparent magnitude is discussed without further qualification, the V magnitude is generally understood.
Because cooler stars, such as red giants and red dwarfs, emit little energy in the blue and UV regions of the spectrum, their power is often under-represented by the UBV scale. Indeed, some L and T class stars have an estimated magnitude of well over 100, because they emit extremely little visible light, but are strongest in infrared.
Measures of magnitude need cautious treatment and it is extremely important to measure like with like. On early 20th century and older orthochromatic (blue-sensitive) photographic film, the relative brightnesses of the blue supergiant Rigel and the red supergiant Betelgeuse irregular variable star (at maximum) are reversed compared to what human eyes perceive, because this archaic film is more sensitive to blue light than it is to red light. Magnitudes obtained from this method are known as photographic magnitudes, and are now considered obsolete.
For objects within the Milky Way with a given absolute magnitude, 5 is added to the apparent magnitude for every tenfold increase in the distance to the object. For objects at very great distances (far beyond the Milky Way), this relationship must be adjusted for redshifts and for non-Euclidean distance measures due to general relativity.
For planets and other Solar System bodies, the apparent magnitude is derived from its phase curve and the distances to the Sun and observer.
List of apparent magnitudes
Some of the listed magnitudes are approximate. Telescope sensitivity depends on observing time, optical bandpass, and interfering light from scattering and airglow.
{| class="wikitable"
|+Apparent visual magnitudes of celestial objects
! Apparent<br />magnitude<br />(V)
! width="215px" | Object
! Seen from...
!Notes
|-
|−67.57
|gamma-ray burst GRB 080319B
|seen from 1 AU away
|would be over (20 quadrillion) times as bright as the Sun when seen from the Earth
|-
|−43.27
|star NGC 2403 V14
|seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
|−41.82
|star NGC 2363-V1
|seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
|−41.39
|star Cygnus OB2-12
|seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
|−40.67
|star M33-013406.63
|seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
|−40.17
|star η Carinae A
|seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
| −40.07 || star Zeta<sup>1</sup> Scorpii || seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
| −39.66 || star R136a1 || seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
|−39.47
|star P Cygni
|seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
| −38.00 || star Rigel || seen from 1 AU away
|would be seen as a large, very bright bluish disk of 35° apparent diameter
|-
|−37.42
|star Betelgeuse
|seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
| −30.30 || star Sirius A || seen from 1 AU away
|
|-
| −29.30 || star Sun || seen from Mercury at perihelion
|
|-
| −27.40 || star Sun || seen from Venus at perihelion
|
|-
| −26.83|| star Sun || seen from Earth
|
|-
| −16.70 || star Sun || seen from Eris at aphelion
|
|-
| −16.00 || star Sun || as twilight on Earth
|measuring about 10 lux
|-
| −14.2 || colspan"3" style"background-color:#EEE;" | An illumination level of 1 lux
|-
| −12.60 || full moon || seen from Earth at perihelion
|maximum brightness of perigee + perihelion + full Moon (~0.267 lux; mean distance value is −12.74,
|
|-
| −11.20 || star Sun || seen from Sedna at aphelion
|
|-
| −10.00 || Comet Ikeya–Seki (1965) || seen from Earth
|which was the brightest Kreutz Sungrazer of modern times
|-
| −9.50||Iridium (satellite) flare || seen from Earth
|maximum brightness
|-
| −9 to −10 || Phobos (moon)
| seen from Mars
|maximum brightness
|-
| −7.50||supernova of 1006 || seen from Earth
|the brightest stellar event in recorded history (7200 light-years away)
|-
| −6.00||The total integrated magnitude of the night sky (incl. airglow) || seen from Earth
|measuring about 0.002 lux
|-
| −6.00||Crab Supernova of 1054 || seen from Earth
|(6500 light-years away)
|-
| −4.92|| planet Venus || seen from Earth
|maximum brightness
|-
| −3.99|| star Epsilon Canis Majoris || seen from Earth
|maximum brightness of 4.7 million years ago, the historical brightest star of the last and next five million years.
|-
| −3.69 || Moon || lit by earthlight, reflecting earthshine seen from Earth (maximum)
|-
| +2.00
|star system T CrB (when nova)
|seen from Earth
|Star system that goes nova every 80 years
|-
| +2.40
|Halley's Comet
|seen from Earth
|About Magnitude during 1986 perihelion
|-
| +3 || colspan"3" style"background-color:#EEE;" |Faintest objects visible in an urban neighborhood with naked eye
|-
| +3.03|| supernova SN 1987A || seen from Earth
|in the Large Magellanic Cloud (160,000 light-years away)
|-id=3
| +3.44||Andromeda Galaxy || seen from Earth
|M31
|-
| +4.50
|Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy
|seen from Earth
|-
| +5.20|| asteroid Vesta || seen from Earth
|maximum brightness
|-id=Uranus
| +5.38
| planet Uranus || seen from Earth
|maximum brightness
|-
| +5.80 ||gamma-ray burst GRB 080319B || seen from Earth
|Peak visual magnitude (the "Clarke Event") seen on Earth on 19 March 2008 from a distance of 7.5 billion light-years.
|-
| +6.03|| planet Uranus || seen from Earth
|minimum brightness
|-
| +7.25|| planet Mercury || seen from Earth
|minimum brightness|| planet Neptune || seen from Earth
|maximum brightness
|-
| +8.00|| planet Neptune || seen from Earth
|minimum brightness
|-
| +10
|star system T CrB(average)
|seen from Earth
|Star system that goes nova every 80 years
|-
| +10.20|| moon Iapetus || seen from Earth
|maximum brightness,
|-
| +12.89
|moon Deimos
|seen from Earth
|Maximum brightness
|-
| +12.91||quasar 3C 273 || seen from Earth
|brightest (luminosity distance of 2.4 billion light-years)
|-
| +13.42|| moon Triton || seen from Earth
|Maximum brightness and also the approximate limiting magnitude of Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS)
|-
| +20.7 || moon Callirrhoe || seen from Earth
|(small ≈8 km satellite of Jupiter)
|-
| +22.8
|Luhman 16
|seen from Earth
|Closest brown dwarfs (Luhman 16A23.25, Luhman 16B24.07) This is currently the limiting magnitude of automated allsky astronomical surveys.
|-id=25
| +25.0 || moon Fenrir || seen from Earth
|(small ≈4 km satellite of Saturn)
|-id=28
| +28.2 ||Halley's Comet || seen from Earth (2003)
|in 2003 when it was from the Sun, imaged using 3 of 4 synchronised individual scopes in the ESO's Very Large Telescope array using a total exposure time of about 9 hours
|-
| +28.4 || asteroid || seen from Earth orbit
|observed magnitude of ≈15-kilometer Kuiper belt object seen by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in 2003, dimmest known directly observed asteroid.
|-id=29
| +29.4 || JADES-GS-z13-0 || seen from Earth || Discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope. One of the furthest objects discovered. Approximately a billion times fainter than can be observed with the naked eye.
|-
|-id=31
| +31.5 || colspan"3" style"background-color:#EEE;" |Faintest objects observable in visible light with Hubble Space Telescope via the EXtreme Deep Field with ≈23 days of exposure time collected over 10 years
|-
| +35 || unnamed asteroid || seen from Earth orbit
|expected magnitude of dimmest known asteroid, a 950-meter Kuiper belt object discovered (by the HST) passing in front of a star in 2009.
|-
| +35 || star LBV 1806−20 || seen from Earth
|a luminous blue variable star, expected magnitude at visible wavelengths due to interstellar extinction
|}
See also
* Angular diameter
* Distance modulus
* List of nearest bright stars
* List of nearest stars
* Luminosity
* Surface brightness
References
<!-- END: refs--> External links *
Category:Observational astronomy
Category:Logarithmic scales of measurement | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude | 2025-04-05T18:25:50.982237 |
1963 | Absolute magnitude | In astronomy, absolute magnitude () is a measure of the luminosity of a celestial object on an inverse logarithmic astronomical magnitude scale; the more luminous (intrinsically bright) an object, the lower its magnitude number. An object's absolute magnitude is defined to be equal to the apparent magnitude that the object would have if it were viewed from a distance of exactly , without extinction (or dimming) of its light due to absorption by interstellar matter and cosmic dust. By hypothetically placing all objects at a standard reference distance from the observer, their luminosities can be directly compared among each other on a magnitude scale. For Solar System bodies that shine in reflected light, a different definition of absolute magnitude (H) is used, based on a standard reference distance of one astronomical unit.
Absolute magnitudes of stars generally range from approximately −10 to +20. The absolute magnitudes of galaxies can be much lower (brighter).
The more luminous an object, the smaller the numerical value of its absolute magnitude. A difference of 5 magnitudes between the absolute magnitudes of two objects corresponds to a ratio of 100 in their luminosities, and a difference of n magnitudes in absolute magnitude corresponds to a luminosity ratio of 100<sup>n/5</sup>. For example, a star of absolute magnitude M<sub>V</sub> 3.0 would be 100 times as luminous as a star of absolute magnitude M<sub>V</sub> 8.0 as measured in the V filter band. The Sun has absolute magnitude M<sub>V</sub> +4.83.
Apparent magnitude
The Greek astronomer Hipparchus established a numerical scale to describe the brightness of each star appearing in the sky. The brightest stars in the sky were assigned an apparent magnitude , and the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye are assigned .
! H !! Diameter
|-
| 10 || 36 km
|-
| 12.7 || 10 km
|-
| 15 || 3.6 km
|-id=1km
| 17.7 || 1 km
|-
| 19.2 || 510 m
|-
| 20 || 360 m
|-id=PHA
| 22 || 140 m
|-
| 22.7 || 100 m
|-
| 24.2 || 51 m
|-
| 25 || 36 m
|-id=Chelyabinsk
| 26.6 || 17 m
|-
| 27.7 || 10 m
|-
| 30 || 3.6 m
|-id=1m
| 32.7 || 1 m
|}
For planets and asteroids, a definition of absolute magnitude that is more meaningful for non-stellar objects is used. The absolute magnitude, commonly called <math>H</math>, is defined as the apparent magnitude that the object would have if it were one astronomical unit (AU) from both the Sun and the observer, and in conditions of ideal solar opposition (an arrangement that is impossible in practice).
! <math>H</math>
! Approximation for <math>-2.5\log_{10}{q(\alpha)}</math>
|-
| Mercury
| −0.4
| −0.613
| <math>+6.328\times10^{-2}\alpha - 1.6336\times10^{-3}\alpha^{2}+3.3644\times10^{-5}\alpha^{3}-3.4265\times10^{-7}\alpha^{4}+1.6893\times10^{-9}\alpha^{5}-3.0334\times10^{-12}\alpha^{6}</math>
|-
| Venus
| −4.4
| −4.384
|
* <math>-1.044\times10^{-3}\alpha+3.687\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}-2.814\times10^{-6}\alpha^{3}+8.938\times10^{-9}\alpha^{4}</math> (for <math>0^{\circ}<\alpha \le 163.7^{\circ}</math>)
* <math>+240.44228-2.81914\alpha+8.39034\times10^{-3}\alpha^{2}</math> (for <math>163.7^{\circ}<\alpha<179^{\circ}</math>)
|-
| Earth
| −
| −3.99
|<math>-1.060\times10^{-3}\alpha+2.054\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}</math>
|-
| Moon
| 0.2
| +0.28
|
* <math>+2.9994\times10^{-2}\alpha-1.6057\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}+3.1543\times10^{-6}\alpha^{3}-2.0667\times10^{-8}\alpha^{4}+6.2553\times10^{-11}\alpha^{5}</math> (for <math>\alpha\le150^{\circ}</math>, before full Moon)
* <math>+3.3234\times10^{-2}\alpha-3.0725\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}+6.1575\times10^{-6}\alpha^{3}-4.7723\times10^{-8}\alpha^{4}+1.4681\times10^{-10}\alpha^{5}</math> (for <math>\alpha\le150^{\circ}</math>, after full Moon)
|-
| Mars
| −1.5
| −1.601
|
* <math>+2.267\times10^{-2}\alpha-1.302\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}</math> (for <math>0^{\circ}<\alpha\le50^{\circ}</math>)
* <math>+1.234-2.573\times10^{-2}\alpha+3.445\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}</math> (for <math>50^{\circ}<\alpha\le120^{\circ}</math>)
|-
| Jupiter
| −9.4
| −9.395
|
* <math>-3.7\times10^{-4}\alpha+6.16\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}</math> (for <math>\alpha\le12^{\circ}</math>)
* <math>-0.033-2.5\log_{10}{\left(1-1.507\left(\frac{\alpha}{180^{\circ}}\right)-0.363\left(\frac{\alpha}{180^{\circ}}\right)^{2}-0.062\left(\frac{\alpha}{180^{\circ}}\right)^{3}+2.809\left(\frac{\alpha}{180^{\circ}}\right)^{4}-1.876\left(\frac{\alpha}{180^{\circ}}\right)^{5}\right)}</math> (for <math>\alpha>12^{\circ}</math>)
|-
| Saturn
| −9.7
| −8.914
|
* <math>-1.825\sin{\left(\beta\right)}+2.6\times10^{-2}\alpha-0.378\sin{\left(\beta\right)}e^{-2.25\alpha}</math> (for planet and rings, <math>\alpha<6.5^{\circ}</math> and <math>\beta<27^{\circ}</math>)
* <math>-0.036-3.7\times10^{-4}\alpha+6.16\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}</math> (for the globe alone, <math>\alpha\le6^{\circ}</math>)
* <math>+0.026+2.446\times10^{-4}\alpha+2.672\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}-1.505\times10^{-6}\alpha^{3}+4.767\times10^{-9}\alpha^{4}</math> (for the globe alone, <math>6^{\circ}<\alpha<150^{\circ}</math>)
|-
| Uranus
| −7.2
| −7.110
|<math>-8.4\times10^{-4}\phi'+6.587\times10^{-3}\alpha+1.045\times10^{-4}\alpha^{2}</math> (for <math>\alpha < 3.1^{\circ}</math>)
|-
| Neptune
| −6.9
| −7.00
|<math>+7.944\times10^{-3}\alpha+9.617\times10^{-5}\alpha^{2}</math> (for <math>\alpha < 133^{\circ}</math> and <math>t > 2000.0</math>)
|}
Here <math>\beta</math> is the effective inclination of Saturn's rings (their tilt relative to the observer), which as seen from Earth varies between 0° and 27° over the course of one Saturn orbit, and <math>\phi'</math> is a small correction term depending on Uranus' sub-Earth and sub-solar latitudes. <math>t</math> is the Common Era year. Neptune's absolute magnitude is changing slowly due to seasonal effects as the planet moves along its 165-year orbit around the Sun, and the approximation above is only valid after the year 2000. For some circumstances, like <math>\alpha \ge 179^{\circ}</math> for Venus, no observations are available, and the phase curve is unknown in those cases. The formula for the Moon is only applicable to the near side of the Moon, the portion that is visible from the Earth.
Example 1: On 1 January 2019, Venus was <math>d_{BS}0.719\text{ AU}</math> from the Sun, and <math>d_{BO} 0.645\text{ AU}</math> from Earth, at a phase angle of <math>\alpha93.0^{\circ}</math> (near quarter phase). Under full-phase conditions, Venus would have been visible at <math>m-4.384+5\log_{10}{\left(0.719 \cdot 0.645\right)}-6.09.</math> Accounting for the high phase angle, the correction term above yields an actual apparent magnitude of <math display"block">m -6.09 + \left(-1.044 \times 10^{-3} \cdot 93.0 + 3.687\times10^{-4} \cdot 93.0^{2} - 2.814 \times 10^{-6} \cdot 93.0^{3} + 8.938 \times 10^{-9} \cdot 93.0^{4}\right) -4.59.</math> This is close to the value of <math>m-4.62</math> predicted by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. || 60–200 km?
|-
|289P/Blanpain (during 1819 outburst) || 8.5
}}
External links
* [http://astro.pas.rochester.edu/~aquillen/ast142/costanti.html Reference zero-magnitude fluxes]
* [http://www.iau.org/ International Astronomical Union]
* [http://www.fxsolver.com/solve/share/knc8CRLY7WMX324G2I7GXg/ Absolute Magnitude of a Star calculator]
* [http://www.astronomynotes.com/starprop/s4.htm The Magnitude system]
* [http://webcitation.org/query.php About stellar magnitudes]
* [http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/sim-fid.pl Obtain the magnitude of any star] – SIMBAD
* [http://www.minorplanetcenter.org/iau/lists/Sizes.html Converting magnitude of minor planets to diameter]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20010302182040/http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/glossary/h.html Another table for converting asteroid magnitude to estimated diameter]
Category:Observational astronomy | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_magnitude | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.017090 |
1965 | Apollo 1 | | landing_mass = <!--Mass after landing (recovered spacecraft only)-->
| dimensions = <!--body dimensions and solar array span-->
<!--Launch details-->
| launch_date = February 21, 1967 (planned)
| launch_rocket = Saturn IB AS-204
| launch_site = Cape Kennedy LC-34
| launch_contractor = <!--organisation(s) that conducted the launch (e.g. United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, etc)-->
<!--Crew details-->
| crew_size = 3
| crew_members =
| crew_photo = Apollo 1 Prime Crew - GPN-2000-001159.jpg
| crew_photo_alt = Apollo 1 Prime Crew
| crew_photo_caption = From left: White, Grissom, Chaffee
| crew_photo_size = <!--defaults to 220px-->
<!--end of mission-->
| destroyed =
<!--orbit parameters-->
| orbit_reference = Geocentric
| orbit_regime = Low Earth orbit
| orbit_periapsis (planned)
| orbit_apoapsis (planned)
| orbit_inclination = 31 degrees (planned)
| orbit_period = 89.7 minutes (planned)
| apsis = gee
<!--Only use where a spacecraft/mission is part of a clear programme of sequential missions-->
| previous_mission = AS-202
| next_mission = Apollo 4
| programme = Apollo program
}}
Apollo 1, initially designated AS-204, was planned to be the first crewed mission of the Apollo program,
}}
First backup crew (April–December 1966)
1 (though the approval was subsequently withdrawn pending a final decision on the mission designation, which was not resolved until after the fire). The design's center depicts a command and service module flying over the southeastern United States with Florida (the launch point) prominent. The Moon is seen in the distance, symbolic of the eventual program goal. A yellow border carries the mission and astronaut names with another border set with stars and stripes, trimmed in gold. The insignia was designed by the crew, with the artwork done by North American Aviation employee Allen Stevens.<!-- Note: the genedorr.com site quotes Deke Slayton's book "Deke!: U.S. Manned Space : from Mercury to the Shuttle", ISBN 978-0-312-85503-1, for the premise that the crew designed the patch. I don't have the book to confirm and provide a cite. Someone who does may wish to add this as a reference. -->
<!-- collectspace says Stevens worked for "Rockwell" but that company wasn't acquired by North American until after the fire. -->
Spacecraft and crew preparation
The Apollo command and service module was much bigger and far more complex than any previous crewed spacecraft. In October 1963, Joseph F. Shea was named Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO) manager, responsible for managing the design and construction of both the CSM and the LM.
In a spacecraft review meeting held with Shea on August 19, 1966 (a week before delivery), the crew expressed concern about the amount of flammable material (mainly nylon netting and Velcro) in the cabin, which both astronauts and technicians found convenient for holding tools and equipment in place. Although Shea gave the spacecraft a passing grade, after the meeting they gave him a crew portrait they had posed with heads bowed and hands clasped in prayer, with the inscription:
}}
Shea gave his staff orders to tell North American to remove the flammables from the cabin, but did not supervise the issue personally. and hung it on the simulator.
Once all outstanding CSM-012 hardware problems had been fixed, the reassembled spacecraft completed a successful altitude chamber test with Schirra's backup crew on December 30. According to the final report of the accident investigation board, "At the post-test debriefing the backup flight crew expressed their satisfaction with the condition and performance of the spacecraft."
After the successful altitude tests, the spacecraft was removed from the altitude chamber on January 3, 1967, and mated to its Saturn IB launch vehicle on pad 34 on January 6.
Grissom said in a February 1963 interview that NASA could not eliminate risk despite precautions:
"I suppose that someday we are going to have a failure. In every other business there are failures, and they are bound to happen sooner or later", he added. Grissom was asked about the fear of potential catastrophe in a December 1966 interview:
Accident
Plugs-out test
The launch simulation on January 27, 1967, on pad 34, was a "plugs-out" test to determine whether the spacecraft would operate nominally on (simulated) internal power while detached from all cables and umbilicals. Passing this test was essential to making the February 21 launch date. The test was considered non-hazardous because neither the launch vehicle nor the spacecraft was loaded with fuel or cryogenics and all pyrotechnic systems (explosive bolts) were disabled. this was followed by two seconds of scuffling sounds through Grissom's open microphone. This was immediately followed at 6:31:06.2 (23:31:06.2 GMT) by someone (believed by most listeners, and supported by laboratory analysis, to be Chaffee) saying, "[I've, or We've] got a fire in the cockpit." After 6.8 seconds of silence, a second, badly garbled transmission was heard by various listeners (who believed this transmission was made by Chaffee His testimony contradicted the official report concerning the position of Grissom's body. Slayton said of Grissom and White's bodies, "it is very difficult for me to determine the exact relationships of these two bodies. They were sort of jumbled together, and I couldn't really tell which head even belonged to which body at that point. I guess the only thing that was real obvious is that both bodies were at the lower edge of the hatch. They were not in the seats. They were almost completely clear of the seat areas." Investigation As a result of the in-flight failure of the Gemini 8 mission on March 17, 1966, NASA Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans wrote and implemented Management Instruction 8621.1 on April 14, 1966, defining Mission Failure Investigation Policy And Procedures. This modified NASA's existing accident procedures, based on military aircraft accident investigation, by giving the Deputy Administrator the option of performing independent investigations of major failures, beyond those for which the various Program Office officials were normally responsible. It declared, "It is NASA policy to investigate and document the causes of all major mission failures which occur in the conduct of its space and aeronautical activities and to take appropriate corrective actions as a result of the findings and recommendations."
Immediately after thefire NASA Administrator James E. Webb asked President Lyndon B. Johnson to allow NASA to handle the investigation according to its established procedure, promising to be truthful in assessing blame, and to keep the appropriate leaders of Congress informed. Deputy Director Seamans then ordered the establishment of the Apollo 204 Review Board chaired by Langley Research Center director Floyd L. Thompson, which included astronaut Frank Borman, spacecraft designer Maxime Faget, and six others. On February 1, Cornell University professor Frank A. Long left the board, and was replaced by Robert W. Van Dolah of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. The next day North American's chief engineer for Apollo, George Jeffs, resigned as well.
Seamans ordered all Apollo1 hardware and software impounded, to be released only under control of the board. After thorough stereo photographic documentation of the CM-012 interior, the board ordered its disassembly using procedures tested by disassembling the identical CM-014 and conducted a thorough investigation of every part. The board also reviewed the astronauts' autopsy results and interviewed witnesses. Seamans sent Webb weekly status reports of the investigation's progress, and the board issued its final report on April 5, 1967. Soon after making his comment McCarthy had said, "I only brought it up as a hypothesis."}}
This weak point in the wiring also ran near a junction in an ethylene glycol/water cooling line that had been prone to leaks. Electrolysis of ethylene glycol solution with the silver anode of the wire was discovered at the Manned Spacecraft Center on May 29, 1967, to be a hazard capable of causing a violent exothermic reaction, igniting the ethylene glycol mixture in the Command Module's pure oxygen atmosphere. Experiments at the Illinois Institute of Technology confirmed the hazard existed for silver-plated wires, but not for copper-only or nickel-plated copper. In July, ASPO directed both North American and Grumman to ensure no silver or silver-coated electrical contacts existed in the vicinity of possible glycol spills in the Apollo spacecraft.
Pure oxygen atmosphere
The plugs-out test had been run to simulate the launch procedure, with the cabin pressurized with pure oxygen at the nominal launch level of , above standard sea level atmospheric pressure. This is more than five times the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere, and provides an environment in which materials not normally considered flammable will be highly flammable and burst into flame.
The high-pressure oxygen atmosphere was similar to that which had been used successfully in the Mercury and Gemini programs. The pressure before launch was deliberately greater than ambient in order to drive out the nitrogen-containing air and replace it with pure oxygen, and also to seal the plug door hatch cover. During the launch, the pressure would have been gradually reduced to the in-flight level of , providing sufficient oxygen for the astronauts to breathe while reducing the fire risk. The Apollo1 crew had successfully tested this procedure with their spacecraft in the Operations and Checkout Building altitude (vacuum) chamber on October 18 and 19, 1966, and the backup crew of Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham had repeated it on December 30. The investigation board noted that, during these tests, the command module had been fully pressurized with pure oxygen four times, for a total of six hours and fifteen minutes, two and a half hours longer than it had been during the plugs-out test. Hatch design The inner hatch cover used a plug door design, sealed by higher pressure inside the cabin than outside. The normal pressure level used for launch ( above ambient) created sufficient force to prevent removing the cover until the excess pressure was vented. Emergency procedure called for Grissom to open the cabin vent valve first, allowing White to remove the cover, Before the fire, the Apollo astronauts had recommended changing the design to an outward-opening hatch, and this was already slated for inclusion in the Block II command module design. According to Donald K. Slayton's testimony before the House investigation of the accident, this was based on ease of exit for spacewalks and at the end of flight, rather than for emergency exit. North American Aviation had suggested using an oxygen/nitrogen mixture for Apollo, but NASA overruled this. The pure oxygen design was judged to be safer, less complicated, and lighter in weight. In his monograph Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions, Deputy Administrator Seamans wrote that NASA's worst mistake in engineering judgment was not running a fire test on the command module before the plugs-out test. In the first episode of the 2009 BBC documentary series NASA: Triumph and Tragedy, Jim McDivitt said that NASA had no idea how a 100% oxygen atmosphere would influence burning. Similar remarks by other astronauts were expressed in the 2007 documentary film In the Shadow of the Moon. Other oxygen incidents Several fires in high-oxygen test environments had occurred before the Apollo fire. In 1962, USAF Colonel B. Dean Smith was conducting a test of the Gemini space suit with a colleague in a pure oxygen chamber at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, when a fire broke out, destroying the chamber. Smith and his partner narrowly escaped. On November 17, 1962, a fire broke out in a chamber at the Navy's Air Crew Equipment Laboratory during a pure oxygen test. The fire was started because a faulty ground wire arced onto nearby insulation. After attempts to extinguish the fire by smothering it, the crew escaped the chamber with minor burns across large parts of their bodies. On February 16, 1965, United States Navy Divers Fred Jackson and John Youmans were killed in a decompression chamber fire at the Experimental Diving Unit in Washington, D.C., shortly after additional oxygen was added to the chamber's atmospheric mix.
In addition to fires with personnel present, the Apollo Environmental Control System experienced several accidents from 1964 to 1966 due to various hardware malfunctions. Notable is the April 28, 1966, fire, as the subsequent investigation found that several new measures should be taken to avoid fires, including improved selection of materials and that ESC and Command Module circuits have a potential for arcing or short circuits.
Other oxygen fire occurrences are documented in reports archived in the National Air and Space Museum, such as:
* Selection of Space Cabin Atmospheres. Part II: Fire and Blast Hazards in Space Cabins. (Emanuel M. Roth; Dept of Aeronautics Medicine and Bioastronautics, Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research. c. 1964–1966)
* "Fire Prevention in Manned Spacecraft and Test Chamber Oxygen Atmospheres". (Manned Spacecraft Center. NASA General Working Paper 10 063. October 10, 1966)
Incidents had also occurred in the Soviet space program, but due to the Soviet government's policy of secrecy, these were not disclosed until well after the Apollo1 fire. Cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko died on March 23, 1961, from burns sustained in a fire while participating in a 15-day endurance experiment in a high-oxygen isolation chamber, less than three weeks before the first Vostok crewed space flight; this was disclosed on January 28, 1986.
During the Voskhod 2 mission in March 1965, cosmonauts Pavel Belyayev and Alexei Leonov could not completely seal the spacecraft hatch after Leonov's historic first walk in space. The spacecraft's environmental control system responded to the leaking air by adding more oxygen to the cabin, causing the concentration level to rise as high as 45%. The crew and ground controllers worried about the possibility of fire, remembering Bondarenko's death four years earlier. Like the Apollo1 fire, the School fire was caused by an electrical spark in a pure oxygen environment. The widows of the Apollo1 crew sent condolence letters to Bartley and Harmon's families.
During Mondale's 1967 questioning about what was to become known as the "Phillips Report", Seamans was afraid Mondale might actually have seen a hard copy of Phillips' presentation, and responded that contractors have occasionally been subjected to on-site progress reviews; perhaps this was what Mondale's information referred to. but stated in its recommendations:
... Competent means we will never take anything for granted... Mission Control will be perfect. When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is to write Tough and Competent on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room, these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.|sourceGene Kranz, speech given to Mission Control after the accident. Speaking of the errors and overall attitude surrounding the Apollo program before the accident, he said: "We were too 'gung-ho' about the schedule and we blocked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we." He reminded the team of the perils and mercilessness of their endeavor, and stated the new requirement that every member of every team in mission control be "tough and competent", requiring nothing less than perfection throughout NASA's programs.
* Block II had already been planned to use a completely redesigned hatch which opened outward, and could be opened in less than five seconds. Even though three uncrewed Apollo missions (AS-201, AS-202, and AS-203) had previously occurred, only AS-201 and AS-202 carried spacecraft. Therefore, the next mission, the first uncrewed Saturn V test flight (AS-501) would be designated Apollo4, with all subsequent flights numbered sequentially in the order flown. The first three flights would not be renumbered, and the names Apollo2 and Apollo3 would officially go unused. Mueller considered AS-201 and AS-202, the first and second flights of the Apollo Block I CSM, as Apollo2 and3 respectively.
The crewed flight hiatus allowed work to catch up on the Saturn V and lunar module, which were encountering their own delays. Apollo4 flew in November 1967. Apollo1's (AS-204) Saturn IB rocket was taken down from Launch Complex 34, later reassembled at Launch complex 37B and used to launch Apollo5, an uncrewed Earth orbital test flight of the first lunar module, LM-1, in January 1968. A second uncrewed Saturn V AS-502 flew as Apollo6 in April 1968, and Grissom's backup crew of Wally Schirra, Don Eisele, and Walter Cunningham, finally flew the orbital test mission as Apollo7 (AS-205), in a Block II CSM in October 1968. Memorials
at the Kennedy Space Center bears the names of Grissom, White, and Chaffee at the bottom middle.]]
Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee were buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Ed White was buried at West Point Cemetery on the grounds of the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. NASA officials attempted to pressure Pat White, Ed White's widow, into allowing her husband also to be buried at Arlington, against what she knew to be his wishes; their efforts were foiled by astronaut Frank Borman. The names of the Apollo 1 crew are among those of multiple astronauts who have died in the line of duty, listed on the Space Mirror Memorial at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Merritt Island, Florida. President Jimmy Carter awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor posthumously to Grissom on October 1, 1978. President Bill Clinton awarded it to White and Chaffee on December 17, 1997.
flown on Apollo9 by Jim McDivitt]]
An Apollo 1 mission patch was left on the Moon's surface after the first crewed lunar landing by Apollo11 crew members Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. The Apollo15 mission left on the surface of the Moon a tiny memorial statue, Fallen Astronaut, along with a plaque containing the names of the Apollo1 astronauts, among others including Soviet cosmonauts, who perished in the pursuit of human space flight. Launch Complex 34
After the Apollo 1 fire, Launch Complex 34 was subsequently used only for the launch of Apollo7 and later dismantled down to the concrete launch pedestal, which remains at the site () along with a few other concrete and steel-reinforced structures. The pedestal bears two plaques commemorating the crew.
The "Ad Astra per aspera" plaque for "the crew of Apollo 1" is seen in the 1998 film Armageddon.
The "Dedicated to the living memory of the crew of the Apollo 1" plaque is quoted at the end of Wayne Hale's Requiem for the NASA Space Shuttle program. Each year the families of the Apollo1 crew are invited to the site for a memorial, and the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex includes the site during the tour of the historic Cape Canaveral launch sites.
In January 2005, three granite benches, built by a college classmate of one of the astronauts, were installed at the site on the southern edge of the launch pad. Each bears the name of one of the astronauts and his military service insignia.
<gallery>
KSC Launch Complex 34.jpg|Launch pedestal, with dedication plaque on the rear of right post
Pad 34 astronaut memorial.jpg|Memorial kiosk
Apollo1plaque.JPG|Dedication plaque attached to launch platform
LC34plaque2.jpg|Memorial plaque attached to launch platform
LC34 memorial benches.jpg|Granite memorial benches on the edge of the launch pad
</gallery>
Stars, landmarks on the Moon and Mars
* Apollo astronauts frequently aligned their spacecraft inertial navigation platforms and determined their positions relative to the Earth and Moon by sighting sets of stars with optical instruments. As a practical joke, the Apollo1 crew named three of the stars in the Apollo catalog after themselves and introduced them into NASA documentation. Gamma Cassiopeiae became Navi – Ivan (Gus Grissom's middle name) spelled backwards. Iota Ursae Majoris became Dnoces – "Second" spelled backwards, for Edward H. White II. And Gamma Velorum became Regor – Roger (Chaffee) spelled backwards. These names quickly stuck after the Apollo1 accident and were regularly used by later Apollo crews.
* Craters on the Moon and hills on Mars are named after the three Apollo1 astronauts.
Civic and other memorials
* Three public schools in Huntsville, Alabama (home of George C. Marshall Space Flight Center and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center): Virgil I. Grissom High School, Ed White Middle School, and the Chaffee Elementary School.
* Ed White II Elementary e-STEM (Elementary-Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Magnet school in El Lago, Texas, near the Johnson Space Center. White lived in El Lago (next door to Neil Armstrong).
* There are Grissom or Virgil I. Grissom middle schools in Mishawaka, Indiana, Sterling Heights, Michigan, and Tinley Park, Illinois.
Virgil Grissom Elementary School in Houston, Texas.
* Virgil Grissom Elementary School in Princeton, Iowa, and the Edward White Elementary School in Eldridge, Iowa, are both part of the North Scott Community School District also naming the other three elementary schools after astronauts Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, and Alan Shepard.
* School #7 in Rochester, New York, is also known as the Virgil I. Grissom School.
* In the early 1970s, three streets in Amherst, New York, were named for Chaffee, White and Grissom. By 1991, when no homes had been built on Grissom Drive, the area was repurposed as commercial property; the Grissom street sign was removed and the street renamed Classics V Drive for the banquet hall that occupied the land.
* The THUMS Islands, four man-made oil drilling islands in the harbor off Long Beach, California, are named Grissom, White, Chaffee and Theodore Freeman.
* The Roger B. Chaffee Planetarium is located at the Grand Rapids Public Museum.
* Roger B. Chaffee Memorial Boulevard in Wyoming, Michigan, the largest suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is today an industrial park, but exists on the site of the former Grand Rapids Airport. A large portion of the north-south runway is used today as the roadway of the Roger B. Chaffee Memorial Boulevard.
* Roger B. Chaffee Scholarship Fund in Grand Rapids, Michigan, each year in memory of Chaffee honors one student who intends to pursue a career in engineering or the sciences
* Three adjacent parks in Fullerton, California, are each named for Grissom, Chaffee and White. The parks are located near a former Hughes Aircraft research and development facility. A Hughes subsidiary, Hughes Space and Communications Company, built components for the Apollo program.
* Two buildings on the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, are named for Grissom and Chaffee (both Purdue alumni). Grissom Hall houses the School of Industrial Engineering (and was home to the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics before it moved into the new Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering). Chaffee Hall, constructed in 1965, is the administration complex of Maurice J. Zucrow Laboratories where combustion, propulsion, gas dynamics, and related fields are studied. The Chaffee Hall contains a 72-seat auditorium, offices, and administrative staff.
* A tree for each astronaut was planted in NASA's Astronaut Memorial Grove at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, not far from the Saturn V building, along with trees for each astronaut from the Challenger and Columbia disasters. Tours of the space center pause briefly near the grove for a moment of silence, and the trees can be seen from nearby NASA Road 1.
* In 1968, Bunker Hill Air Force Base near Peru, Indiana was renamed Grissom Air Force Base. The three-letter code for the VOR air navigation beacon at the base is GUS.
* All three Apollo 1 astronauts are memorialized in Jacksonville, Florida: Edward H. White High School, Chaffee Road, and Grissom Drive. Remains of CM-012 The Apollo 1 command module has never been on public display. After the accident, the spacecraft was removed and taken to Kennedy Space Center to facilitate the review board's disassembly in order to investigate the cause of the fire. When the investigation was complete, it was moved to the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and placed in a secured storage warehouse.
On February 17, 2007, the parts of CM-012 were moved approximately to a newer, environmentally controlled warehouse. Only a few weeks earlier, Gus Grissom's brother Lowell publicly suggested CM-012 be permanently entombed in the concrete remains of Launch Complex 34.
On January 27, 2017, the 50th anniversary of the fire, NASA put the hatch from Apollo1 on display at the Saturn V Rocket Center at Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex. KSC's Visitor Complex also houses memorials that include parts of Challenger and Columbia, located in the Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit. "This is way, way, way long overdue. But we're excited about it," said Scott Grissom, Gus Grissom's older son. In popular culture * The accident and its aftermath are the subject of episode2, "Apollo One", of the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.
* The mission and accident are covered in the 2015 ABC television series The Astronaut Wives Club, episodes8 "Rendezvous" and9 "Abort" from the point of view of Grissom's widow Betty.
* The incident is the subject of the Public Service Broadcasting track "Fire in the Cockpit" from their 2015 album The Race for Space.
* The incident is featured in the 2018 movie First Man.
* A short dramatization of the accident is featured at the beginning of the 1995 film Apollo 13.
* The accident and a subsequent emphasis on safety within NASA are the subject of investigation in the first two episodes of the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind.
* The accident is covered in the 2024 movie Fly Me to the Moon.
See also
* List of spaceflight-related accidents and incidents
* STS-1 – First Space Shuttle flight, three technicians asphyxiated on the launch pad after a countdown test
* STS-51-L – Space Shuttle Challenger, America's first in-flight fatality
* STS-107 – Space Shuttle Columbia, America's first return-flight fatality
* Valentin Bondarenko – a Soviet cosmonaut-in-training, died in a high-oxygen fire in an experimental chamber
* Soyuz 1 – First Soviet spaceflight death
* Soyuz 11 – Loss of an entire Soviet spacecraft crew
References
Notes
Citations
Further reading
*
*
*
*
* External links
*
* [http://www.clavius.org/baron-test.html Baron testimony at investigation before Olin Teague, 21. April 1967]
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/Apollo204/content.html Apollo 204 Review Board Final Report] , NASA's final report on its investigation, April 5, 1967
* Final report of the U.S. Senate investigation, January 30, 1968
*
* [https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19820066925.pdf Apollo Operations Handbook, Command and Service Module, Spacecraft 012] (The flight manual for CSM 012)
*[https://www.c-span.org/video/?422730-1/cbs-news-special-report-apollo-1-disaster CBS News Special Report on Apollo 1 Disaster, January 27, 1967], C-SPAN
Category:Apollo program missions
Category:Fires in Florida
Category:1967 fires in the United States
Category:1967 in Florida
Category:Spacecraft launched by Saturn rockets
Category:Gus Grissom
Category:Ed White (astronaut)
Category:Saturn IB | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1 | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.081194 |
1966 | Apollo 10 | | SATCAT =
| mission_duration = 8 days, 3 minutes, 23 seconds
| spacecraft =
| manufacturer =
| launch_mass 42,775 kg
| landing_mass
| launch_date UTC
| launch_rocket = Saturn V SA-505
| launch_site = Kennedy LC-39B
| landing_date UTC
| landing_site
| recovery_by =
| orbit_epoch | orbit_reference Selenocentric
| orbit_periapsis
| orbit_apoapsis
| orbit_inclination = 1.2 degrees
| orbit_period = 2 hours
| apsis = selene
|interplanetary =
|apsis = selene
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| docking =
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| crew_members =
| crew_callsign =
| crew_photo = The Apollo 10 Prime Crew - GPN-2000-001163.jpg
| crew_photo_caption = Left to right: Cernan, Stafford, Young
| previous_mission = Apollo 9
| next_mission = Apollo 11
| programme = Apollo program
}}
Apollo 10 (May 18–26, 1969) was the fourth human spaceflight in the United States' Apollo program and the second to orbit the Moon. NASA, the mission's operator, described it as a "dress rehearsal" for the first Moon landing (Apollo 11, two months later).<!-- The source is only for NASA's description of Apollo 10 as a dress rehearsal --> It was designated an "F"mission, intended to test all spacecraft components and procedures short of actual descent and landing.
After the spacecraft reached lunar orbit, astronaut John Young remained in the Command and Service Module (CSM) while astronauts Thomas Stafford and Gene Cernan flew the Apollo Lunar Module (LM) to within of the lunar surface, the point at which powered descent for landing would begin on a landing mission. After four orbits they rejoined Young in the CSM and, after the CSM completed its 31st orbit of the Moon, they returned safely to Earth.
While NASA had considered attempting the first crewed lunar landing on Apollo 10, mission planners ultimately decided that it would be prudent to have a practice flight to hone the procedures and techniques. The crew encountered some problems during the flight: pogo oscillations during the launch phase and a brief, uncontrolled tumble of the LM ascent stage in lunar orbit during its solo flight. However, the mission accomplished its major objectives. Stafford and Cernan observed and photographed Apollo 11's planned landing site in the Sea of Tranquility. Apollo 10 spent 61 hours and 37 minutes orbiting the Moon, for about eight hours of which Stafford and Cernan flew the LM apart from Young in the CSM, and about eight days total in space. Additionally, Apollo 10 set the record for the highest speed attained by a crewed vehicle: 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph) on May 26, 1969, during the return from the Moon.
The mission's call signs were the names of the Peanuts characters Charlie Brown for the CSM and Snoopy for the LM, who became Apollo 10's semi-official mascots. Peanuts creator Charles Schulz also drew mission-related artwork for NASA.
Framework
Background
By 1967, NASA had devised a list of mission types, designated by letters, that needed to be flown before a landing attempt, which would be the "G" mission. The early uncrewed flights were considered "A" or "B" missions, while Apollo 7, the crewed-flight test of the Command and Service Module (CSM), was the "C" mission. The first crewed orbital test of the Lunar Module (LM) was accomplished on Apollo 9, the "D" mission. Apollo 8, flown to the Moon's orbit without an LM, was considered a "C-prime" mission, but its success gave NASA the confidence to skip the "E" mission, which would have tested the full Apollo spacecraft in medium or high Earth orbit. Apollo 10, the dress rehearsal for the lunar landing, was to be the "F" mission. However, Director of Flight Operations Christopher C. Kraft and others opposed this, feeling that new procedures would have to be developed for a rendezvous in lunar orbit and that NASA had incomplete information regarding the Moon's mass concentrations, which might throw off the spacecraft's trajectory. Lieutenant General Sam Phillips, the Apollo Program Manager, listened to the arguments on both sides and decided that having a dress rehearsal was crucial. Crew and key Mission Control personnel
On November 13, 1968, NASA announced the crew members of Apollo 10. John Young, the command module pilot, was 38 years old and a commander in the Navy at the time of Apollo 10. A 1952 graduate of Georgia Tech who entered the Navy after graduation and became a test pilot in 1959, he was selected as a Group 2 astronaut alongside Stafford. He flew in Gemini 3 with Gus Grissom in 1965, becoming the first American not of the Mercury Seven to fly in space. Young thereafter commanded Gemini 10 (1966), flying with Michael Collins. Eugene Cernan, the lunar module pilot, was a commander in the Navy at the time of Apollo 10. A 1952 graduate of Purdue University, he entered the Navy after graduation. Selected for the third group of astronauts in 1963, Cernan flew with Stafford on Gemini 9A before his assignment to Apollo 10. With five prior flights among them, the Apollo 10 crew was the most experienced to reach space until the Space Shuttle era, and the first American space mission whose crew were all spaceflight veterans.
The backup crew for Apollo 10 was L. Gordon Cooper Jr as commander, Donn F. Eisele as command module pilot, and Edgar D. Mitchell as lunar module pilot. By the normal crew rotation in place during Apollo, Cooper, Eisele, and Mitchell would have flown on Apollo 13, but Cooper and Eisele never flew again. Deke Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations, felt that Cooper did not train as hard as he could have. Eisele was blackballed because of incidents during Apollo 7, which he had flown as CMP and which had seen conflict between the crew and ground controllers; he had also been involved in a messy divorce. Slayton only assigned the two as backups because he had few veteran astronauts available. Cooper and Eisele were replaced by Alan Shepard and Stuart Roosa respectively. Feeling they needed additional training time, George Mueller rejected the Apollo 13 crew. The crew was switched to Apollo 14, which saw Shepard and Mitchell walk on the Moon.
For projects Mercury and Gemini, a prime and a backup crew had been designated, but for Apollo, a third group of astronauts, known as the support crew, was also designated. Slayton created the support crews early in the Apollo program on the advice of McDivitt, who would lead Apollo 9. McDivitt believed that, with preparation going on in facilities across the U.S., meetings that needed a member of the flight crew would be missed. Support crew members were to assist as directed by the mission commander. Usually low in seniority, they assembled the mission's rules, flight plan, and checklists, and kept them updated. For Apollo 10, they were Joe Engle, James Irwin, and Charles Duke.
Flight directors were Gerry Griffin, Glynn Lunney, Milt Windler, and Pete Frank. Flight directors during Apollo had a one-sentence job description: "The flight director may take any actions necessary for crew safety and mission success." CAPCOMs were Duke, Engle, Jack Lousma, and Bruce McCandless II.
Call signs and mission insignia
The command module was given the call sign "Charlie Brown" and the lunar module the call sign "Snoopy". These were taken from the characters in the comic strip, Peanuts, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. These names were chosen by the astronauts with the approval of Charles Schulz, the strip's creator, Snoopy had been associated for some time with the space program, with workers who performed in an outstanding manner awarded silver "Snoopy pins", and Snoopy posters were seen at NASA facilities, with the cartoon dog having traded in his World War I aviator's headgear for a space helmet.
]]
The shield-shaped mission insignia shows a large, three-dimensional Roman numeral X sitting on the Moon's surface, in Stafford's words, "to show that we had left our mark". Although it did not land on the Moon, the prominence of the number represents the contributions the mission made to the Apollo program. A CSM circles the Moon as an LM ascent stage flies up from its low pass over the lunar surface with its engine firing. The Earth is visible in the background. On the mission patch, a wide, light blue border carries the word APOLLO at the top and the crew names around the bottom. The patch is trimmed in gold. The insignia was designed by Allen Stevens of Rockwell International.Training and preparationApollo 10, the "F" mission or dress rehearsal for the lunar landing, had as its primary objectives to demonstrate crew, space vehicle and mission support facilities performance during a crewed mission to lunar orbit, and to evaluate the performance of the lunar module there. In addition, it was to attempt photography of Apollo Landing Site 2 (ALS-2) in the Sea of Tranquillity, the contemplated landing site for Apollo 11. According to Stafford, <blockquote>Our flight was to take the first lunar module to the moon. We would take the lunar module, go down to within about ten miles above the moon, nine miles above the mountains, radar map, photo map, pick out the first landing site, do the first rendezvous around the moon, pick out some future landing sites, and come home.</blockquote>
Apollo 10 was to adhere as closely as possible to the plans for Apollo 11, including its trajectory to and from lunar orbit, the timeline of mission events, and even the angle of the Sun at ALS-2. However, no landing was to be attempted. ALS-1, given that number because it was the furthest to the east of the candidate sites,}} and also located in the Sea of Tranquility, had been extensively photographed by Apollo 8 astronauts; at the suggestion of scientist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt, the launch of Apollo 10 had been postponed a day so ALS-2 could be photographed under proper conditions. ALS-2 was chosen as the lunar landing site since it was relatively smooth, of scientific interest, and ALS-1 was deemed too far to the east. Thus, when Apollo 10's launch date was announced on January 10, 1969, it was shifted from its placeholder date of May 1 to May 17, rather than to May 16. On March 17, 1969, the launch was slipped one day to May 18, to allow for a better view of ALS-3, to the west of ALS-2. Mueller, NASA's Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight, stated, <blockquote>There had been some speculation about whether or not the crew might have landed, having gotten so close. They might have wanted to, but it was impossible for that lunar module to land. It was an early design that was too heavy for a lunar landing, or, to be more precise, too heavy to be able to complete the ascent back to the command module. It was a test module, for the dress rehearsal only, and that was the way it was used.</blockquote>
Equipment
The descent stage of the LM was delivered to KSC on October 11, 1968, and the ascent stage arrived five days later. They were mated on November 2. The Service Module (SM) and Command Module (CM) arrived on November 24 and were mated two days later. Portions of the Saturn V launch vehicle arrived during November and December 1968, and the complete launch vehicle was erected in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on December 30. After being tested in an altitude chamber, the CSM was placed atop the launch vehicle on February 6, 1969. The completed space vehicle was rolled out to Launch Complex 39B on March 11, 1969—the fact that it had been assembled in the VAB's High Bay 2 (the first time it had been used) required the crawler to exit the rear of the VAB before looping around the building and joining the main crawlerway, proceeding to the launch pad.
The launch vehicle for Apollo 10 was a Saturn V, designated AS-505, the fifth flight-ready Saturn V to be launched and the third to take astronauts to orbit. The Saturn V differed from that used on Apollo 9 in having a lower dry weight (without propellant) in its first two stages, with a significant reduction to the interstage joining them. Although the S-IVB third stage was slightly heavier, all three stages could carry a greater weight of propellant, and the S-II second stage generated more thrust than that of Apollo 9.
The Apollo spacecraft for the Apollo 10 mission was composed of Command Module 106 (CM-106), Service Module 106 (SM-106, together with the CM known as CSM-106), Lunar Module 4 (LM-4), a spacecraft-lunar module adapter (SLA), numbered as SLA-13A, and a launch escape system. The SLA was a mating structure joining the Instrument Unit on the S-IVB stage of the Saturn V launch vehicle and the CSM, and acted as a housing for the LM, while the Launch Escape System (LES) contained rockets to propel the CM to safety if there was an aborted launch. At about 76.99 metric tons, Apollo 10 would be the heaviest spacecraft to reach orbit to that point. and the only one to be controlled from its Firing Room 3.
Problems that arose during the countdown were dealt with during the built-in holds, and did not delay the mission. On the day before launch, Cernan had been stopped for speeding while returning from a final visit with his wife and child. Lacking identification and under orders to tell no one who he was, Cernan later attested in his autobiography that he had feared being arrested. Launch pad leader Gunther Wendt, who had pulled over nearby after recognizing Cernan, explained the situation to the police officer, who then released Cernan despite the officer's skepticism that Cernan was an astronaut.
The crew experienced a somewhat rough ride on the way to orbit due to pogo oscillations. About 12 minutes after liftoff, the spacecraft entered a low Earth orbit with a high point of and a low point of . All appeared to be normal during the systems review period in Earth orbit, and the crew restarted the S-IVB third stage to achieve trans-lunar injection (TLI) and send them towards the Moon. The vehicle shook again while executing the TLI burn, causing Cernan to be concerned that they might have to abort. However, the TLI burn was completed without incident. Young then performed the transposition, docking, and extraction maneuver, separating the CSM from the S-IVB stage, turning around, and docking its nose to the top of the lunar module (LM), before separating from the S-IVB. Apollo 10 was the first mission to carry a color television camera inside the spacecraft, and mission controllers in Houston watched as Young performed the maneuver. Soon thereafter, the large television audience was treated to color views of the Earth. One problem that was encountered was that the mylar cover of the CM's hatch had pulled loose, spilling quantities of fiberglass insulation into the tunnel, and then into both the CM and LM. The S-IVB was fired by ground command and sent into solar orbit with a period of 344.88 days.
The crew settled in for the voyage to the Moon. They had a light workload, and spent much of their time studying the flight plan or sleeping. They made five more television broadcasts back to Earth, and were informed that more than a billion people had watched some part of their activities. In June 1969, the crew would accept a special Emmy Award on behalf of the first four Apollo crews for their television broadcasts from space. One slight course correction was necessary; this occurred at 26:32:56.8 into the mission and lasted 7.1 seconds. This aligned Apollo 10 with the trajectory Apollo 11 was expected to take. One issue the crew encountered was bad-tasting food, as Stafford apparently used a double dose of chlorine in their drinking water, which had to be placed in their dehydrated food to reconstitute it. Shortly after the circularization burn, the crew partook in a scheduled half-hour color-television broadcast with descriptions and video transmissions of views of the lunar surface below.
About an hour after the second burn, the LM crew of Stafford and Cernan entered the LM to check out its systems. They were met with a blizzard of fiberglass particles from the earlier problem, which they cleaned up with a vacuum cleaner as best they could. Stafford had to help Cernan remove smaller bits from his hair and eyebrows. Stafford later commented that Cernan looked like he just came out of a chicken coop, and that the particles made them itch and got into the air conditioning system, and they were scraping it off the filter screens for the rest of the mission. After undocking, Stafford and Cernan deployed the LM's landing gear and inspected the LM's systems. The CSM performed an 8.3-second burn with its RCS thrusters to separate itself from the LM by about 30 feet, after which Young visually inspected the LM from the CSM. The CSM performed another separation burn, this time separating the two spacecraft by about . The LM crew then performed the descent orbit insertion maneuver by firing their descent engine for 27.4 seconds at 99:46:01.6, and tested their craft's landing radar as they approached the altitude where the subsequent Apollo 11 mission would begin powered descent to land on the Moon. Previously, the LM's landing radar had only been tested under terrestrial conditions. While the LM executed these maneuvers, Young monitored the location and status of the LM from the CSM, standing by to rescue the LM crew if necessary. Cernan and Stafford surveyed ALS-2, coming within of the surface at a point 15 degrees to its east, then performed a phasing burn at 100:58:25.93, thrusting for just under 40 seconds to allow a second pass at ALS-2, when the craft came within of the Moon, its closest approach. Reporting on his observations of the site from the LM's low passes, Stafford indicated that ALS-2 seemed smoother than he had expected and described its appearance as similar to the desert surrounding Blythe, California; but he observed that Apollo 11 could face rougher terrain downrange if it approached off-target. Based upon Apollo 10's observations from relatively low altitude, NASA mission planners became comfortable enough with ALS-2 to confirm it as the target site for Apollo 11.
The next action was to prepare to separate the LM ascent stage from the descent stage, to jettison the descent stage, and fire the Ascent Propulsion System to return the ascent stage towards the CSM. As Stafford and Cernan prepared to do so, the LM began to gyrate out of control. Alarmed, Cernan exclaimed, "Son of a bitch!" into a hot mic being broadcast live, which, combined with other language used by the crew during the mission, generated some complaints back on Earth. Stafford discarded the descent stage about five seconds after the tumbling began and fought to regain control manually, suspecting that there might have been an "open thruster", or a thruster stuck firing. He did so in time to orient the spacecraft to rejoin Charlie Brown. The problem was traced to a switch controlling the mode of the abort guidance system; it was to be moved as part of the procedure, but both of the crew members switched it, thus returning it to the original position. Had they fired Snoopy in the wrong direction, they might have missed the rendezvous with Charlie Brown or crashed into the Moon. Once Stafford had regained control of the LM ascent stage, which took about eight seconds, the pair fired the ascent engine at the lowest point of the LM's orbit, mimicking the orbital insertion maneuver after launch from the lunar surface in a later landing mission. Snoopy coasted on that trajectory for about an hour before firing the engine once more to further fine-tune its approach to Charlie Brown.
Snoopy rendezvoused with and re-docked with Charlie Brown at 106:22:02, just under eight hours after undocking. The docking was telecast live in color from the CSM. Once Cernan and Stafford had re-entered Charlie Brown, Snoopy was sealed off and separated from Charlie Brown. The rest of the LM's ascent-stage engine fuel was burned to send it on a trajectory past the Moon and into a heliocentric orbit.
It was the only Apollo LM to meet this fate. The Apollo 11 ascent stage would be left in lunar orbit to crash randomly, while ascent stages of later Apollo mission (12, 14, 15 and 17) were steered into the Moon to obtain readings from seismometers placed nearby on the surface, with two exceptions: Apollo 13's ascent stage, which the crew used as a "life boat" to get safely back to Earth before releasing it to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, and Apollo 16's, which NASA lost control of after jettison. This is because the return trajectory was designed to take only 42 hours rather than the normal 56. The Apollo 10 crew also traveled farther than any humans before or since from their (Houston) homes: (though the Apollo 13 crew was 200 km farther away from Earth as a whole).
At 191:33:26, the CM (which contained the crew) separated from the SM in preparation for reentry, which occurred about 15 minutes later at 191:48:54.5. Splashdown of the CM occurred about 15 minutes after reentry in the Pacific Ocean about east of American Samoa on May 26, 1969, at 16:52:23 UTC and mission elapsed time 192:03:23. The astronauts were recovered by . They spent about four hours aboard, during which they took a congratulatory phone call from President Richard Nixon. Aftermath Orbital operations and the solo maneuvering of the LM in partial descent to the lunar surface paved the way for the successful Apollo 11 lunar landing by demonstrating the capabilities of the mission hardware and systems. The crew demonstrated that the checkout procedures of the LM and initial descent and rendezvous could be accomplished within the allotted time, that the communication systems of the LM were sufficient, that the rendezvous and landing radars of the LM were operational in lunar orbit, and that the two spacecraft could be adequately monitored by personnel on Earth. Additionally, the precision of lunar orbital navigation improved with Apollo 10 and, combined with data from Apollo 8, NASA expected that it had achieved a level of precision sufficient to execute the first crewed lunar landing. After about two weeks of Apollo 10 data analysis, a NASA flight readiness team cleared Apollo 11 to proceed with its scheduled July 1969 flight. On July 16, 1969, the next Saturn V to launch carried the astronauts of Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins. On July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon, and four days later the three astronauts returned to Earth, fulfilling John F. Kennedy's challenge to Americans to land astronauts on the Moon and return them safely to Earth by the end of the 1960s.
In July 1969, Stafford replaced Alan Shepard as Chief Astronaut, and then became deputy director of Flight Crew Operations under Deke Slayton. Charlie Brown's SM was jettisoned just before re-entry and burned up in the Earth's atmosphere, its remnants scattering in the Pacific Ocean.
After translunar injection, the Saturn V's S-IVB third stage was accelerated past Earth escape velocity to become space debris; , it remains in a heliocentric orbit.
The ascent stage of the Lunar Module Snoopy was jettisoned into a heliocentric orbit. Snoopy's ascent stage orbit was not tracked after 1969, and its whereabouts were unknown. In 2011, a group of amateur astronomers in the UK started a project to search for it. In June 2019, the Royal Astronomical Society announced a possible rediscovery of Snoopy, determining that small Earth-crossing asteroid 2018 AV<sub>2</sub> is likely to be the spacecraft with "98%" certainty. It is the only once-crewed spacecraft known to still be in outer space without a crew.
''Snoopy's'' descent stage was jettisoned in lunar orbit; its current location is unknown, though it may have eventually crashed into the Moon as a result of orbital decay. Phil Stooke, a planetary scientist who studied the lunar crash sites of the LM's ascent stages, wrote that the descent stage "crashed at an unknown location", and another source stated that the descent stage "eventually impact(ed) within a few degrees of the equator on the near side". Richard Orloff and David M. Harland, in their sourcebook on Apollo, stated that "the descent stage was left in the low orbit, but perturbations by 'mascons' would have caused this to decay, sending the stage to crash onto the lunar surface".
Images
<gallery style"text-align:left" mode"packed" heights="220px">
Image:Ap10-KSC-68C-7912.jpg|The S-IC first stage in the VAB
Image:Ap10-KSC-69PC-110.jpg|Apollo 10 during rollout
Image:Apollo 10 Prime Crew - GPN-2000-001501.jpg|The crew poses with their launch vehicle; left to right, Cernan, Young, Stafford.
Image:Apollo 10 Stafford and Cernan in White Room.jpg|Crew boarding the command module before launch
Image:Apollo 10 earthrise.jpg|Apollo 10 view of Earthrise
File:Apollo 10 command module.jpg|CSM Charlie Brown
Image:Apollo 10 Lunar Module Rendezvous.jpg|Apollo Lunar Module Snoopy about to dock with the command module
File:Necho crater as10-33-4989.jpg|Necho crater on the far side of the Moon
File:Swirls_near_Firsov_crater_AS10-30-4365HR.jpg|High-albedo swirls within unnamed crater east of Firsov
</gallery>
See also
* List of artificial objects on the Moon
* List of missions to the Moon
* List of vehicle speed records
Notes
References
Bibliography
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External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20020415044235/http://www.astronautix.com/flights/apollo10.htm "Apollo 10"] at Encyclopedia Astronautica
* [http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/ NSSDC Master Catalog] at NASA
* [https://history.nasa.gov/afj/ap10fj/index.html Apollo 10 Flight Journal]
NASA reports
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4009/cover.htm The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology] NASA, NASA SP-4009
* [https://history.nasa.gov/apsr/apsr.htm "Apollo Program Summary Report"] (PDF), NASA, JSC-09423, April 1975
* [https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4012/vol3/table2.38.htm "Table 2-38. Apollo 10 Characteristics"] from NASA Historical Data Book: Volume III: Programs and Projects 1969–1978 by Linda Neuman Ezell, NASA History Series (1988)
Multimedia
* [https://archive.org/details/Jsc-519Apollo10-toSortOutTheUnknowns.wmv Apollo 10: "To Sort Out the Unknowns"] Official NASA/JSC documentary film, JSC-519 (1969)
* [https://archive.org/details/Apollo1016mmOnboardFilm1 Apollo 10 16mm onboard film part 1], [https://archive.org/details/Apollo1016mmOnboardFilm2 part 2] raw footage taken from Apollo 10 at the Internet Archive
* [http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/apollo10.htm Mission Transcripts: Apollo 10] at NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center
* [http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/mirrors/images/html/as10.htm Images from Apollo 10] at NASA's Kennedy Space Center
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20190830171304/http://www.apollotv.net/ Apollo launch and mission videos] at ApolloTV.net
Category:Spacecraft launched in 1969
Category:1969 in the United States
Apollo 10
Category:Crewed missions to the Moon
Category:Peanuts (comic strip)
Category:Spacecraft which reentered in 1969
Category:Articles containing video clips
Category:May 1969
Category:Spacecraft launched by Saturn rockets
Category:John Young (astronaut)
Category:Gene Cernan
Category:Thomas P. Stafford
Category:Successful space missions | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10 | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.116991 |
1967 | Apollo 12 | | LM: 1969-099C
}}
| SATCAT =
| LM: 4226
}}
| mission_duration 10 days, 4 hours, 36 minutes, 24 seconds
| spacecraft =
| manufacturer =
| launch_mass
| landing_mass
| launch_date UTC (11:22 am EST)
| launch_rocket = Saturn V SA-507
| launch_site = Kennedy, LC-39A
| landing_date UTC (10:58:24 am HST)
| landing_site South Pacific Ocean ()
| recovery_by =
| orbit_epoch | orbit_reference Selenocentric
| orbit_periapsis (54.59 nmi; )
| orbit_apoapsis (66.1 nmi; )
| orbit_inclination | orbit_period
| apsis = selene
| insignia = Apollo 12 insignia.png
| insignia_alt | crew_photo Apollo 12 crew.jpg
| crew_photo_caption = Left to right: Conrad, Gordon, Bean
| crew_photo_alt = Apollo 12 crew
|interplanetary =
| sample_mass
| surface_EVAs = 2
| surface_EVA_time =
}}
| docking =
| undocking_date November 19, 1969, 04:16:02 UTC
| time_docked =
}}
| undocking_date November 20, 1969, 20:21:31 UTC
| time_docked =
}}
| crew_size = 3
| crew_members =
| crew_callsign =
| previous_mission = Apollo 11
| next_mission = Apollo 13
| programme = Apollo program
}}
Apollo 12 (November 14–24, 1969) was the sixth crewed flight in the United States Apollo program and the second to land on the Moon. It was launched on November 14, 1969, by NASA from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Commander Charles "Pete" Conrad and Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean completed just over one day and seven hours of lunar surface activity while Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon remained in lunar orbit.
Apollo 12 would have attempted the first lunar landing had Apollo 11 failed, but after the success of the earlier mission, Apollo 12 was postponed by two months, and other Apollo missions also put on a more relaxed schedule. More time was allotted for geologic training in preparation for Apollo 12 than for Apollo 11, Conrad and Bean making several geology field trips in preparation for their mission. Apollo 12's spacecraft and launch vehicle were almost identical to Apollo 11's. One addition was a set of hammocks, designed to provide Conrad and Bean with a more comfortable resting arrangement inside the Lunar Module during their stay on the Moon.
Shortly after being launched on a rainy day at Kennedy Space Center, Apollo 12 was twice struck by lightning, causing instrumentation problems but little damage. The crew found that switching to the auxiliary power supply resolved the data relay problem, which helped save the mission. The outward journey to the Moon otherwise saw few problems. On November 19, Conrad and Bean achieved a precise landing at their expected location within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 robotic probe, which had landed on April 20, 1967. In making a pinpoint landing, they showed that NASA could plan future missions in the expectation that astronauts could land close to sites of scientific interest. Conrad and Bean carried the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package, a group of nuclear-powered scientific instruments, as well as the first color television camera taken by an Apollo mission to the lunar surface, but transmission was lost after Bean accidentally pointed the camera at the Sun and its sensor was burned out. On the second of two moonwalks, they visited Surveyor 3 and removed parts for return to Earth.
Lunar Module Intrepid lifted off from the Moon on November 20 and docked with the command module, which subsequently traveled back to Earth. The Apollo 12 mission ended on November 24 with a splashdown.
Crew and key Mission Control personnel
The commander of the all-Navy Apollo 12 crew was Charles "Pete" Conrad, who was 39 years old at the time of the mission. After receiving a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from Princeton University in 1953, he became a naval aviator, and completed United States Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River Naval Air Station. He was selected in the second group of astronauts in 1962, and flew on Gemini 5 in 1965, and as command pilot of Gemini 11 in 1966. Command Module Pilot Richard "Dick" Gordon, 40 years old at the time of Apollo 12, also became a naval aviator in 1953, following graduation from the University of Washington with a degree in chemistry, and completed test pilot school at Patuxent River. Selected as a Group 3 astronaut in 1963, he flew with Conrad on Gemini 11.
The original Lunar Module pilot assigned to work with Conrad was Clifton C. Williams Jr., who was killed in October 1967 when the T-38 he was flying crashed near Tallahassee. When forming his crew, Conrad had wanted Alan L. Bean, a former student of his at the test pilot school, but had been told by Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton that Bean was unavailable due to an assignment to the Apollo Applications Program. After Williams's death, Conrad asked for Bean again, and this time Slayton yielded. Bean, 37 years old when the mission flew, had graduated from the University of Texas in 1955 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. Also a naval aviator, he was selected alongside Gordon in 1963, and first flew in space on Apollo 12. The three Apollo 12 crew members had backed up Apollo 9 earlier in 1969.
The Apollo 12 backup crew was David R. Scott as commander, Alfred M. Worden as Command Module pilot, and James B. Irwin as Lunar Module pilot. They became the crew of Apollo 15. For Apollo, a third crew of astronauts, known as the support crew, was designated in addition to the prime and backup crews used on projects Mercury and Gemini. Slayton created the support crews because James McDivitt, who would command Apollo 9, believed that, with preparation going on in facilities across the US, meetings that needed a member of the flight crew would be missed. Support crew members were to assist as directed by the mission commander. Usually low in seniority, they assembled the mission's rules, flight plan, and checklists, and kept them updated; For Apollo 12, they were Gerald P. Carr, Edward G. Gibson and Paul J. Weitz. Flight directors were Gerry Griffin, first shift, Pete Frank, second shift, Clifford E. Charlesworth, third shift, and Milton Windler, fourth shift. Flight directors during Apollo had a one-sentence job description, "The flight director may take any actions necessary for crew safety and mission success." Capsule communicators (CAPCOMs) were Scott, Worden, Irwin, Carr, Gibson, Weitz and Don Lind. Preparation Site selection The landing site selection process for Apollo 12 was greatly informed by the site selection for Apollo 11. There were rigid standards for the possible Apollo 11 landing sites, in which scientific interest was not a major factor: they had to be close to the lunar equator and not on the periphery of the portion of the lunar surface visible from Earth; they had to be relatively flat and without major obstructions along the path the Lunar Module (LM) would fly to reach them, their suitability confirmed by photographs from Lunar Orbiter probes. Also desirable was the presence of another suitable site further west in case the mission was delayed, and the Sun would have risen too high in the sky at the original site for desired lighting conditions. The need for three days to recycle if a launch had to be scrubbed meant that only three of the five suitable sites found were designated as potential landing sites for Apollo 11, of which the Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility was the easternmost. Since Apollo 12 was to attempt the first lunar landing if Apollo 11 failed, both sets of astronauts trained for the same sites.
With the success of Apollo 11, it was initially contemplated that Apollo 12 would land at the site next further west from the Sea of Tranquility, in Sinus Medii. However, NASA planning coordinator Jack Sevier and engineers at the Manned Spaceflight Center at Houston argued for a landing close enough to the crater in which the Surveyor 3 probe had landed in 1967 to allow the astronauts to cut parts from it for return to Earth. The site was otherwise suitable and had scientific interest. Given that Apollo 11 had landed several miles off-target, though, some NASA administrators feared Apollo 12 would land far enough away that the astronauts could not reach the probe, and the agency would be embarrassed. Nevertheless, the ability to perform pinpoint landings was essential if Apollo's exploration program was to be carried out, and on July 25, 1969, Apollo Program Manager Samuel Phillips designated what became known as Surveyor crater as the landing site, despite the unanimous opposition of members of two site selection boards.
To locate Surveyor 3, NASA invited Ewen Whitaker, who together with Gerard Kuiper worked on multiple Moon atlases. Whitaker had found the Surveyor 1 landing site with better precision than NASA. By studying images from Surveyor 3 and comparing them with photographs of thousands of similar craters under the microscope, he identified two rocks near Surveyor 3, that led to the identification of the probe's location.
Training and preparation
The Apollo 12 astronauts spent five hours in mission-specific training for every hour they expected to spend in flight on the mission, a total exceeding 1,000 hours per crew member. Conrad and Bean received more mission-specific training than Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had. This was in addition to the 1,500 hours of training they received as backup crew members for Apollo 9. The Apollo 12 training included over 400 hours per crew member in simulators of the Command Module (CM) and of the LM. Some of the simulations were linked in real time to flight controllers in Mission Control. To practice landing on the Moon, Conrad flew the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV), training in which continued to be authorized even though Armstrong had been forced to bail out of a similar vehicle in 1968, just before it crashed.
Soon after being assigned as Apollo 12 crew commander, Conrad met with NASA geologists and told them that the training for lunar surface activities would be conducted much as Apollo 11's, but there was to be no publicity or involvement by the media. Conrad felt he had been abused by the press during Gemini, and the sole Apollo 11 geology field trip had turned into a near-fiasco, with a large media contingent present, some getting in the way—the astronauts had trouble hearing each other due to a hovering press helicopter. After the return of Apollo 11 in July 1969, more time was allotted for geology, but the astronauts' focus was on getting time in the simulators without being preempted by the Apollo 11 crew. On the six Apollo 12 geology field trips, the astronauts would practice as if on the Moon, collecting samples and documenting them with photographs, while communicating with a CAPCOM and geologists who were out of sight in a nearby tent. Afterwards, the astronauts' performance in choosing samples and taking photographs would be critiqued. To the frustration of the astronauts, the scientists kept changing the photo documentation procedures; after the fourth or fifth such change, Conrad required that there be no more. After the return of Apollo 11, the Apollo 12 crew was able to view the lunar samples, and be briefed on them by scientists.
As Apollo 11 was targeted for an ellipse-shaped landing zone, rather than at a specific point, there was no planning for geology traverses, the designated tasks to be done at sites of the crew's choosing. For Apollo 12, before the mission, some of NASA's geology team met with the crew and Conrad suggested they lay out possible routes for him and Bean. The result was four traverses, based on four potential landing points for the LM. This was the start of geology traverse planning that on later missions became a considerable effort involving several organizations.
The stages of the lunar module, LM–6, were delivered to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on March 24, 1969, and were mated to each other on April 28. Command module CM–108 and service module SM–108 were delivered to KSC on March 28, and were mated to each other on April 21. Following installation of gear and testing, the launch vehicle, with the spacecraft atop it, was rolled out to Launch Complex 39A on September 8, 1969. The training schedule was complete, as planned, by November 1, 1969; activities after that date were intended as refreshers. The crew members felt that the training, for the most part, was adequate preparation for the Moon mission.
Hardware
Launch vehicle
There were no significant changes to the Saturn V launch vehicle used on Apollo 12, SA–507, from that used on Apollo 11. There were another 17 instrumentation measurements in the Apollo 12 launch vehicle, bringing the number to 1,365. The entire vehicle, including the spacecraft, weighed at launch, an increase from Apollo 11's . Of this figure, the spacecraft weighed , up from on Apollo 11. Third stage trajectory After LM separation, the third stage of the Saturn V, the S-IVB, was intended to fly into solar orbit. The S-IVB auxiliary propulsion system was fired, with the intent that the Moon's gravity would slingshot the stage into solar orbit. Due to an error, the S-IVB flew past the Moon at too high an altitude to achieve Earth escape velocity. It remained in a semi-stable Earth orbit until it finally escaped Earth orbit in 1971, but briefly returned to Earth orbit 31 years later. It was discovered by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung who gave it the temporary designation J002E3 before it was determined to be an artificial object. Again in solar orbit as of 2021, it may again be captured by Earth's gravity, but not at least until the 2040s. The S-IVBs used on later lunar missions were deliberately crashed into the Moon to create seismic events that would register on the seismometers left on the Moon and provide data about the Moon's structure.
Spacecraft
The Apollo 12 spacecraft consisted of Command Module 108 and Service Module 108 (together Command and Service Modules 108, or CSM–108), Lunar Module 6 (LM–6), a Launch Escape System (LES), and Spacecraft-Lunar Module Adapter 15 (SLA–15). The LES contained three rocket motors to propel the CM to safety in the event of an abort shortly after launch, while the SLA housed the LM and provided a structural connection between the Saturn V and the LM. The SLA was identical to Apollo 11's, while the LES differed only in the installation of a more reliable motor igniter.
The CSM was given the call sign Yankee Clipper, while the LM had the call sign Intrepid. These sea-related names were selected by the all-Navy crew from several thousand proposed names submitted by employees of the prime contractors of the respective modules. George Glacken, a flight test engineer at North American Aviation, builder of the CSM, proposed Yankee Clipper as such ships had "majestically sailed the high seas with pride and prestige for a new America". Intrepid was from a suggestion by Robert Lambert, a planner at Grumman, builder of the LM, as evocative of "this nation's resolute determination for continued exploration of space, stressing our astronauts' fortitude and endurance of hardship".
The differences between the CSM and LM of Apollo 11, and those of Apollo 12, were few and minor. A hydrogen separator was added to the CSM to stop the gas from entering the potable water tank—Apollo 11 had had one, though mounted on the water dispenser in the CM's cabin. Gaseous hydrogen in the water had given the Apollo 11 crew severe flatulence. Other changes included the strengthening of the recovery loop attached following splashdown, meaning that the swimmers recovering the CM would not have to attach an auxiliary loop. LM changes included a structural modification so that scientific experiment packages could be carried for deployment on the lunar surface. Two hammocks were added for greater comfort of the astronauts while resting on the Moon, and a color television camera substituted for the black and white one used on the lunar surface during Apollo 11.
ALSEP
The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) was a suite of scientific instruments designed to be emplaced on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts, and thereafter operate autonomously, sending data to Earth. Due to the limited time the Apollo 11 crew would have on the lunar surface, a smaller suite of experiments was flown, known as the Early Apollo Surface Experiment Package (EASEP). Apollo 12 was the first mission to carry an ALSEP; one would be flown on each of the subsequent lunar landing missions, though the components that were included would vary.
The Apollo 12 ALSEP experiments were activated from Earth on November 19, 1969. The LAD returned only a small amount of useful data due to the failure of its power supply soon after activation. The LSM was deactivated on June 14, 1974, as was the other LSM deployed on the Moon, from Apollo 15. All powered ALSEP experiments that remained active were deactivated on September 30, 1977, principally because of budgetary constraints.Mission highlights, November 14, 1969]]LaunchWith President Richard Nixon in attendance, the first time a current U.S. president had witnessed a crewed space launch, as well as Vice President Spiro Agnew, Apollo 12 launched as planned on November 14, 1969 from the Kennedy Space Center at 16:22:00 UTC (11:22 am EST, local time at the launch site). This was at the start of a launch window of three hours and four minutes to reach the Moon with optimal lighting conditions at the planned landing point. There were completely overcast rainy skies, and the vehicle encountered winds of during ascent, the strongest of any Apollo mission. There was a NASA rule against launching into a cumulonimbus cloud; this had been waived and it was later determined that the launch vehicle never entered such a cloud. Had the mission been postponed, it could have been launched on November 16 with landing at a backup site where there would be no Surveyor, but since time pressure to achieve a lunar landing had been removed by Apollo 11's success, NASA might have waited until December for the next opportunity to go to the Surveyor crater.
Lightning struck the Saturn V 36.5 seconds after lift-off, triggered by the vehicle itself. The static discharge caused a voltage transient that knocked all three fuel cells offline, meaning the spacecraft was being powered entirely from its batteries, which could not supply enough current to meet demand. A second strike at 52 seconds knocked out the "8-ball" attitude indicator. The telemetry stream at Mission Control was garbled, but the Saturn V continued to fly normally; the strikes had not affected the Saturn V instrument unit guidance system, which functioned independently from the CSM. The astronauts unexpectedly had a board red with caution and warning lights, but could not tell exactly what was wrong.
The Electrical, Environmental and Consumables Manager (EECOM) in Mission Control, John Aaron, remembered the telemetry failure pattern from an earlier test when a power loss caused a malfunction in the CSM signal conditioning electronics (SCE), which converted raw signals from instrumentation to data that could be displayed on Mission Control's consoles, and knew how to fix it. Aaron made a call, "Flight, EECOM. Try SCE to Aux", to switch the SCE to a backup power supply. The switch was fairly obscure, and neither Flight Director Gerald Griffin, CAPCOM Gerald P. Carr, nor Conrad knew what it was; Bean, who as LMP was the spacecraft's engineer, knew where to find it and threw the switch, after which the telemetry came back online, revealing no significant malfunctions. Bean put the fuel cells back online, and the mission continued. The stage fired its engines to leave the vicinity of the spacecraft, a change from Apollo 11, where the SM's Service Propulsion System (SPS) engine was used to distance it from the S-IVB.
As there were concerns the LM might have been damaged by the lightning strikes, Conrad and Bean entered it on the first day of flight to check its status, earlier than planned. They found no issues. At 30:52.44.36, the only necessary midcourse correction during the translunar coast was made, placing the craft on a hybrid, non-free-return trajectory. Previous crewed missions to lunar orbit had taken a free-return trajectory, allowing an easy return to Earth if the craft's engines did not fire to enter lunar orbit. Apollo 12 was the first crewed spacecraft to take a hybrid free-return trajectory, that would require another burn to return to Earth, but one that could be executed by the LM's Descent Propulsion System (DPS) if the SPS failed. The use of a hybrid trajectory allowed more flexibility in mission planning. It for example allowed Apollo 12 to launch in daylight and reach the planned landing spot on schedule. Use of a hybrid trajectory meant that Apollo 12 took 8 hours longer to go from trans-lunar injection to lunar orbit.
Lunar orbit and Moon landing
Intrepid above the Moon. The small crater in the foreground is Ammonius; the large crater at right is Herschel. Photograph by Richard F. Gordon Jr. on board the Command Module Yankee Clipper.]]
Apollo 12 entered a lunar orbit of with an SPS burn of 352.25 seconds at mission time 83:25:26.36. On the first lunar orbit, there was a television transmission that resulted in good-quality video of the lunar surface. On the third lunar orbit, there was another burn to circularize the craft's orbit to , and on the next revolution, preparations began for the lunar landing. The CSM and LM undocked at 107:54:02.3; a half hour later there was a burn by the CSM to separate them. The 14.4 second burn by some of the CSM's thrusters meant that the two craft would be apart when the LM began the burn to move to a lower orbit in preparation for landing on the Moon.
The LM's Descent Propulsion System began a 29-second burn at 109:23:39.9 to move the craft to the lower orbit, from which the 717-second powered descent to the lunar surface began at 110:20:38.1. Conrad had trained to expect a pattern of craters known as "the Snowman" to be visible when the craft underwent "pitchover", with the Surveyor crater in its center, but had feared he would see nothing recognizable. He was astonished to see the Snowman right where it should be, meaning they were directly on course. He took over manual control, planning to land the LM, as he had in simulations, in an area near the Surveyor crater that had been dubbed "Pete's Parking Lot", but found it rougher than expected. He had to maneuver, and landed the LM
at 110:32:36.2 (06:54:36 UTC on November 19, 1969), just from the Surveyor probe. This achieved one objective of the mission, to perform a precision landing near the Surveyor craft.
The lunar coordinates of the landing site were 3.01239° S latitude, 23.42157° W longitude. The landing caused high velocity sandblasting of the Surveyor probe. It was later determined that the sandblasting removed more dust than it delivered onto the Surveyor, because the probe was covered by a thin layer that gave it a tan hue as observed by the astronauts, and every portion of the surface exposed to the direct sandblasting was lightened back toward the original white color through the removal of lunar dust.
Lunar surface activities
When Conrad, the shortest man of the initial groups of astronauts, stepped onto the lunar surface his first words were "Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me." This was not an off-the-cuff remark: Conrad had made a bet with reporter Oriana Fallaci he would say these words, after she had queried whether NASA had instructed Neil Armstrong what to say as he stepped onto the Moon. Conrad later said he was never able to collect the money.
To improve the quality of television pictures from the Moon, a color camera was carried on Apollo 12 (unlike the monochrome camera on Apollo 11). When Bean carried the camera to the place near the LM where it was to be set up, he inadvertently pointed it directly into the Sun, destroying the Secondary Electron Conduction (SEC) tube. Television coverage of this mission was thus terminated almost immediately.
After raising a U.S. flag on the Moon, Conrad and Bean devoted much of the remainder of the first EVA to deploying the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). There were minor difficulties with the deployment. Bean had trouble extracting the RTG's plutonium fuel element from its protective cask, and the astronauts had to resort to the use of a hammer to hit the cask and dislodge the fuel element. Some of the ALSEP packages proved hard to deploy, though the astronauts were successful in all cases. With the PSE able to detect their footprints as they headed back to the LM, the astronauts secured a core tube full of lunar material, and collected other samples. The first EVA lasted 3 hours, 56 minutes and 3 seconds.
Four possible geologic traverses had been planned, the variable being where the LM might set down. Conrad had landed it between two of these potential landing points, and during the first EVA and the rest break that followed, scientists in Houston combined two of the traverses into one that Conrad and Bean could follow from their landing point. The resultant traverse resembled a rough circle, and when the astronauts emerged from the LM some 13 hours after ending the first EVA, the first stop was Head crater, some from the LM. There, Bean noticed that Conrad's footprints showed lighter material underneath, indicating the presence of ejecta from Copernicus crater, to the north, something that scientists examining overhead photographs of the site had hoped to find. After the mission, samples from Head allowed geologists to date the impact that formed Copernicus—according to initial dating, some 810,000,000 years ago.
The astronauts proceeded to Bench crater and Sharp crater and past Halo crater before arriving at Surveyor crater, where the Surveyor 3 probe had landed. Fearing treacherous footing or that the probe might topple on them, they approached Surveyor cautiously, descending into the shallow crater some distance away and then following a contour to reach the craft, but found the footing solid and the probe stable. They collected several pieces of Surveyor, including the television camera, as well as taking rocks that had been studied by television. Conrad and Bean had procured an automatic timer for their Hasselblad cameras, and had brought it with them without telling Mission Control, hoping to take a selfie of the two of them with the probe, but when the time came to use it, could not locate it among the lunar samples they had already placed in their Hand Tool Carrier. Before returning to the LM's vicinity, Conrad and Bean went to Block crater, within Surveyor crater. The second EVA lasted 3 hours, 49 minutes, 15 seconds, during which they traveled . During the EVAs, Conrad and Bean went as far as from the LM, and collected of samples.
Lunar orbit solo activities
After the LM's departure, Gordon had little to say as Mission Control focused on the lunar landing. Once that was accomplished, Gordon sent his congratulations and, on the next orbit, was able to spot both the LM and the Surveyor on the ground and convey their locations to Houston. During the first EVA, Gordon prepared for a plane change maneuver, a burn to alter the CSM's orbit to compensate for the rotation of the Moon, though at times he had difficulty communicating with Houston since Conrad and Bean were using the same communications circuit. Once the two moonwalkers had returned to the LM, Gordon executed the burn, which ensured he would be in the proper position to rendezvous with the LM when it launched from the Moon.
While alone in orbit, Gordon performed the Lunar Multispectral Photography Experiment, using four Hasselblad cameras arranged in a ring and aimed through one of the CM's windows. With each camera having a different color filter, simultaneous photos would be taken by each, showing the appearance of lunar features at different points on the spectrum. Analysis of the images might reveal colors not visible to the naked eye or detectable with ordinary color film, and information could be obtained about the composition of sites that would not soon be visited by humans. Among the sites studied were contemplated landing points for future Apollo missions.
Return
LM Intrepid lifted off from the Moon at mission time 143:03:47.78, or 14:25:47 UTC on November 20, 1969; after several maneuvers, CSM and LM docked three and a half hours later. At 147:59:31.6, the LM ascent stage was jettisoned, and shortly thereafter the CSM maneuvered away. Under control from Earth, the LM's remaining propellant was depleted in a burn that caused it to impact the Moon from the Apollo 12 landing point. The seismometer the astronauts had left on the lunar surface registered the resulting vibrations for more than an hour.
The crew stayed another day in lunar orbit taking photographs of the surface, including of candidate sites for future Apollo landings. A second plane change maneuver was made at 159:04:45.47, lasting 19.25 seconds.
The trans-Earth injection burn, to send the CSM Yankee Clipper towards home, was conducted at 172:27:16.81 and lasted 130.32 seconds. Two short midcourse correction burns were made en route. A final television broadcast was made, the astronauts answering questions submitted by the media. There was ample time for rest on the way back to Earth. One event was the photography of a solar eclipse that occurred when the Earth came between the spacecraft and the Sun; Bean described it as the most spectacular sight of the mission.SplashdownYankee Clipper returned to Earth on November 24, 1969 splashing down in the South Pacific Ocean southeast of Samoa at 244:36:25 (20:58:24 UTC, 10:58:24amHST, local time at the landing site). The landing was hard, resulting in a camera becoming dislodged and striking Bean in the forehead. After recovery by , they entered the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF), while lunar samples and Surveyor parts were sent ahead by air to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory (LRL) in Houston. Once the Hornet docked in Hawaii, the MQF was offloaded and flown to Ellington Air Force Base near Houston on November 29, from where it was taken to the LRL, where the astronauts remained until released from quarantine on December 10.Mission insigniaThe Apollo 12 mission patch shows the crew's naval background; all three astronauts at the time of the mission were U.S. Navy commanders. It features a clipper ship arriving at the Moon, representing the CM Yankee Clipper. The ship trails fire, and flies the flag of the United States. The mission name APOLLO XII and the crew names are on a wide gold border, with a small blue trim. Blue and gold are traditional U.S. Navy colors. The patch has four stars on it – one each for the three astronauts who flew the mission and one for Clifton Williams, the original LMP on Conrad's crew who was killed in 1967 and would have flown the mission. The star was placed there at the suggestion of his replacement, Bean.
The insignia was designed by the crew with the aid of several employees of NASA contractors. The Apollo 12 landing area on the Moon is within the portion of the lunar surface shown on the insignia, based on a photograph of a globe of the Moon, taken by engineers. The clipper ship was based on photographs of such a ship obtained by Bean.Aftermath and spacecraft location
in Hampton, Virginia]]
After the mission, Conrad urged his crewmates to join him in the Skylab program, seeing in it the best chance of flying in space again. Bean did so—Conrad commanded Skylab 2, the first crewed mission to the space station, while Bean commanded Skylab 3. Gordon, though, still hoped to walk on the Moon and remained with the Apollo program, serving as backup commander of Apollo 15. He was the likely commander of Apollo 18, but that mission was canceled and he did not fly in space again.
The Apollo 12 command module Yankee Clipper, was displayed at the Paris Air Show and was then placed at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia; ownership was transferred to the Smithsonian in July 1971. It is on display at the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton.
Mission Control had remotely fired the service module's thrusters after jettison, hoping to have it skip off the atmosphere and enter a high-apogee orbit, but the lack of tracking data confirming this caused it to conclude it most likely burned up in the atmosphere at the time of CM re-entry. The S-IVB is in a solar orbit that is sometimes affected by the Earth.
The ascent stage of LM Intrepid impacted the Moon November 20, 1969, at 22:17:17.7 UT (5:17pm EST). In 2009, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) photographed the Apollo 12 landing site, where the descent stage, ALSEP, Surveyor3 spacecraft, and astronaut footpaths remain. In 2011, the LRO returned to the landing site at a lower altitude to take higher resolution photographs.
See also
* List of artificial objects on the Moon
* List of missions to the Moon
* List of spacewalks and moonwalks 1965–1999
References
Bibliography
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External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20040104202456/http://www.astronautix.com/flights/apollo12.htm "Apollo 12"] at Encyclopedia Astronautica
* [http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo12info.html "Apollo 12"] at NASA's National Space Science Data Center
* [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LPST/ap_11_12_14/ Apollo 11, 12, and 14 Traverses], at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
* [https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/search/details?id=/Moon/Apollo/Traverse/AP12Trav.jpg "Apollo 12 Traverse Map"] at the USGS Astrogeology Science Center
* Lunar Orbiter 3 image [http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/images/print/3154_h2.jpg 154 H2], used for planning the mission (landing site is left of center).
* Lunar Orbiter 1 sequence of images [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/frame/?1157 157], [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/frame/?1158 158], and [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/lunarorbiter/frame/?1159 159], showing the Apollo 12 landing site and vicinity
NASA reports
* [http://www.history.nasa.gov/alsj/a12/as12psr.pdf "Apollo 12 Preliminary Science Report"] (PDF), NASA, NASA SP-235, 1970
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20190530150031/https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/outreach/SignificantIncidents/assets/analysis-of-apollo-12-lightning-incident.pdf "Analysis of Apollo 12 Lightning Incident"], (PDF) February 1970
* [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/documents/NTRS/collection2/NASA_SP_284.pdf "Analysis of Surveyor 3 material and photographs returned by Apollo 12"] (PDF) 1972
* [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1971LPSC....2.2743S "Examination of Surveyor 3 surface sampler scoop"](PDF) 1971
* [https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4012/vol3/table2.40.htm "Table 2-40. Apollo 12 Characteristics"] from NASA Historical Data Book: Volume III: Programs and Projects 1969–1978 by Linda Neuman Ezell, NASA History Series (1988)
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4009/cover.htm The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology] NASA, NASA SP-4009
* [https://history.nasa.gov/apsr/apsr.htm "Apollo Program Summary Report"] (PDF), NASA, JSC-09423, April 1975
Multimedia
*
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8K41rbTmUcU "Apollo 12: Pinpoint For Science"] on YouTube
* [https://history.nasa.gov/afj/ap12fj/audio/audioindex.html "Apollo 12: The Bernie Scrivener Audio Tapes"] – Apollo 12 audio recordings at the Apollo 12 Flight Journal
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20091222095116/http://www.life.com/image/first/in-gallery/37132/apollo-12-there-and-back-again "Apollo 12: There and Back Again"] – Image slideshow by Life magazine
*
* [http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo-12/apollo-12-patch.jpg "Apollo 12: Patch"] – Image of Apollo 12 mission patch
Archival documents
* [https://catalog.archives.gov/search?availableOnlinetrue&contributionApollo%2012&contributionTypetag&page1 Records tagged "apollo 12"] in National Archives Catalog
Category:Alan Bean
Category:Pete Conrad
Category:Richard F. Gordon Jr.
Apollo 12
Category:Extravehicular activity
Category:Crewed missions to the Moon
Category:Sample return missions
Category:Soft landings on the Moon
Category:Spacecraft launched in 1969
Category:Spacecraft which reentered in 1969
Category:Spacecraft launched by Saturn rockets
Category:Articles containing video clips
Category:1969 on the Moon
Category:1969 in the United States
Category:November 1969
Category:Successful space missions | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_12 | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.144885 |
1968 | Apollo 14 | |LM: 1971-008C
}}
| SATCAT =
| mission_duration = 9 days, 1 minute, 58 seconds
| spacecraft =
| manufacturer = CSM: North American Rockwell<br />LM: Grumman
| launch_mass =
| landing_mass =
| launch_date UTC
| launch_rocket = Saturn V SA-509
| launch_site = Kennedy LC-39A
| landing_date UTC
| landing_site South Pacific Ocean<br />
| recovery_by =
| orbit_epoch | orbit_reference Selenocentric
| orbit_periapsis
| orbit_apoapsis
| orbit_inclination | orbit_period 120 minutes
| apsis = selene
|interplanetary =
|sample_mass
|surface_EVAs = 2
|surface_EVA_time =
}}
| docking =
| crew_size = 3
| crew_members =
| crew_callsign =
| crew_photo = Apollo 14 crew.jpg
| crew_photo_caption = <!--Left to right:-->Stuart Roosa, Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell
| crew_photo_size = 275px
| previous_mission = Apollo 13
| next_mission = Apollo 15
| programme = Apollo program
}}
Apollo 14 (January 31February 9, 1971) was the eighth crewed mission in the United States Apollo program, the third to land on the Moon, and the first to land in the lunar highlands. It was the last of the "H missions", landings at specific sites of scientific interest on the Moon for two-day stays with two lunar extravehicular activities (EVAs or moonwalks).
The mission was originally scheduled for 1970, but was postponed because of the investigation following the failure of Apollo 13 to reach the Moon's surface, and the need for modifications to the spacecraft as a result. Commander Alan Shepard, Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa, and Lunar Module Pilot Edgar Mitchell launched on their nine-day mission on Sunday, January 31, 1971, at 4:03:02 p.m. EST. En route to the lunar landing, the crew overcame malfunctions that might have resulted in a second consecutive aborted mission, and possibly, the premature end of the Apollo program.
Shepard and Mitchell made their lunar landing on February 5 in the Fra Mauro formation – originally the target of Apollo 13. During the two walks on the surface, they collected of Moon rocks and deployed several scientific experiments. To the dismay of some geologists, Shepard and Mitchell did not reach the rim of Cone crater as had been planned, though they came close. In Apollo 14's most famous event, Shepard hit two golf balls he had brought with him with a makeshift club.
While Shepard and Mitchell were on the surface, Roosa remained in lunar orbit aboard the Command and Service Module, performing scientific experiments and photographing the Moon, including the landing site of the future Apollo 16 mission. He took several hundred seeds on the mission, many of which were germinated on return, resulting in the so-called Moon trees, that were widely distributed in the following years. After liftoff from the lunar surface and a successful docking, the spacecraft was flown back to Earth where the three astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean on February 9.
Astronauts and key Mission Control personnel
The mission commander of Apollo 14, Alan Shepard, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, became the first American to enter space with a suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. Thereafter, he was grounded by Ménière's disease, a disorder of the ear, and served as Chief Astronaut, the administrative head of the Astronaut Office. He had experimental surgery in 1968 which was successful and allowed his return to flight status. Shepard, at age 47, was the oldest U.S. astronaut to fly when he made his trip aboard Apollo 14, and he is the oldest person to walk on the Moon.
Apollo 14's Command Module Pilot (CMP), Stuart Roosa, aged 37 when the mission flew, had been a smoke jumper before joining the Air Force in 1953. He became a fighter pilot and then in 1965 successfully completed Aerospace Research Pilot School (ARPS) at Edwards Air Force Base in California prior to his selection as a Group 5 astronaut the following year. He served as a capsule communicator (CAPCOM) for Apollo 9. The Lunar Module Pilot (LMP), Edgar Mitchell, aged 40 at the time of Apollo 14, joined the Navy in 1952 and served as a fighter pilot, beginning in 1954. He was assigned to squadrons aboard aircraft carriers before returning to the United States to further his education while in the Navy, also completing the ARPS prior to his selection as a Group 5 astronaut. He served on the support crew for Apollo 9 and was the LMP of the backup crew for Apollo 10.
Shepard and his crew had originally been designated by Deke Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations and one of the Mercury Seven, as the crew for Apollo 13. NASA's management felt that Shepard needed more time for training given he had not flown in space since 1961, and chose him and his crew for Apollo 14 instead. The crew originally designated for Apollo 14, Jim Lovell as the commander, Ken Mattingly as CMP and Fred Haise as LMP, all of whom had backed up Apollo 11, was made the prime crew for Apollo 13 instead.
Mitchell's commander on the Apollo 10 backup crew had been another of the original seven, Gordon Cooper, who had tentatively been scheduled to command Apollo 13, but according to author Andrew Chaikin, his casual attitude toward training resulted in him being not selected. Also on that crew, but excluded from further flights, was Donn Eisele, likely because of problems aboard Apollo 7, which he had flown, and because he had been involved in a messy divorce.
Apollo 14's backup crew was Eugene A. Cernan as commander, Ronald E. Evans Jr. as CMP and Joe H. Engle as LMP. The backup crew, with Harrison Schmitt replacing Engle, would become the prime crew of Apollo 17. Schmitt flew instead of Engle because there was intense pressure on NASA to fly a scientist to the Moon (Schmitt was a geologist) and Apollo 17 was the last lunar flight. Engle, who had flown the X-15 to the edge of outer space, flew into space for NASA in 1981 on STS-2, the second Space Shuttle flight.
During projects Mercury and Gemini, each mission had a prime and a backup crew. Apollo 9 commander James McDivitt believed meetings that required a member of the flight crew were being missed, so for Apollo a third crew of astronauts was added, known as the support crew. Usually low in seniority, support crew members assembled the mission's rules, flight plan, and checklists, and kept them updated; for Apollo 14, they were Philip K. Chapman, Bruce McCandless II, William R. Pogue and C. Gordon Fullerton. CAPCOMs, the individuals in Mission Control responsible for communications with the astronauts were Evans, McCandless, Fullerton and Haise. A veteran of Apollo 13, which had aborted before reaching the Moon, Haise put his training for that mission to use, especially during the EVAs, since both missions were targeted at the same place on the Moon. Had Haise walked on the Moon, he would have been the first Group 5 astronaut to do so, an honor that went to Mitchell.
The flight directors during Apollo had a one-sentence job description, "The flight director may take any actions necessary for crew safety and mission success." For Apollo 14, they were: Pete Frank, Orange team; Glynn Lunney, Black team; Milt Windler, Maroon team and Gerry Griffin, Gold team. Preparation and training
, flown to simulate the landing]]
Prime and backup crews for both Apollo 13 and 14 were announced on August 6, 1969. Apollo 14 was scheduled for July 1970, but in January of that year, due to budget cuts that saw the cancellation of Apollo 20, NASA decided there would be two Apollo missions per year with 1970 to see Apollo 13 in April and Apollo 14 likely in October or November.
The investigation into the accident which caused an abort of Apollo 13 delayed Apollo 14. On May 7, 1970, NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine announced that Apollo 14 would launch no earlier than December 3, and the landing would be close to the site targeted by Apollo 13. The Apollo 14 astronauts continued their training. On June 30, 1970, following the release of the accident report and a NASA review of what changes to the spacecraft would be necessary, NASA announced that the launch would slip to no earlier than January 31, 1971.
The crew of Apollo 14 trained together for 19 months after assignment to the mission, longer than any other Apollo crew to that point. In addition to the normal training workload, they had to supervise the changes to the command and service module (CSM) made as a result of the Apollo 13 investigation, much of which was delegated by Shepard to Roosa. Mitchell later stated, "We realized that if our mission failed—if we had to turn back—that was probably the end of the Apollo program. There was no way NASA could stand two failures in a row. We figured there was a heavy mantle on our shoulders to make sure we got it right."
Before the abort of the Apollo 13 mission, the plan was to have Apollo 14 land near Littrow crater, in Mare Serenitatis, where there are features that were thought to be volcanic. After Apollo 13 returned, it was decided that its landing site, near Cone crater in the Fra Mauro formation, was scientifically more important than Littrow. The Fra Mauro formation is composed of ejecta from the impact event that formed Mare Imbrium, and scientists hoped for samples that originated deep under the Moon's surface. Cone crater was the result of a young, deep impact, and large enough to have torn through whatever debris was deposited since the Imbrium Event, which geologists hoped to be able to date. Landing at Fra Mauro would also allow orbital photography of another candidate landing site, the Descartes Highlands, which became the landing site for Apollo 16. Although Littrow went unvisited, a nearby area, Taurus-Littrow, was the landing site for Apollo 17. Apollo 14's landing site was located slightly closer to Cone crater than the point designated for Apollo 13.
The change in landing site from Littrow to Fra Mauro affected the geological training for Apollo 14. Before the switch, the astronauts had been taken to volcanic sites on Earth; afterwards, they visited crater sites, such as the Ries Crater in West Germany and an artificial crater field created for astronaut training in Arizona's Verde Valley. The effectiveness of the training was limited by a lack of enthusiasm shown by Shepard, which set the tone for Mitchell. Harrison Schmitt suggested that the commander had other things on his mind, such as overcoming a ten-year absence from spaceflight and ensuring a successful mission after the near-disaster of Apollo 13.
Roosa undertook training for his period alone in lunar orbit, when he would make observations of the Moon and take photographs. He had been impressed by the training given to Apollo 13 prime crew CMP Mattingly by geologist Farouk El-Baz and got El-Baz to agree to undertake his training. The two men pored over lunar maps depicting the areas the CSM would pass over. When Shepard and Mitchell were on their geology field trips, Roosa would be overhead in an airplane taking photographs of the site and making observations. El-Baz had Roosa make observations while flying his T-38 jet at a speed and altitude simulating the speed at which the lunar surface would pass below the CSM.
Another issue that had marked Apollo 13 was the last-minute change of crew due to exposure to communicable disease. To prevent another such occurrence, for Apollo 14 NASA instituted what was called the Flight Crew Health Stabilization Program. Beginning 21 days before launch, the crew lived in quarters at the launch site, Florida's Kennedy Space Center (KSC), with their contacts limited to their spouses, the backup crew, mission technicians, and others directly involved in training. Those individuals were given physical examinations and immunizations, and crew movements were limited as much as possible at KSC and nearby areas.
The Command and Service Modules were delivered to KSC on November 19, 1969; the ascent stage of the LM arrived on November 21 with the descent stage three days later. Thereafter, checkout, testing and equipment installation proceeded. The launch vehicle stack, with the spacecraft on top, was rolled out from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Pad 39A on November 9, 1970.
Hardware
Spacecraft
, November 9, 1970.]]
The Apollo 14 spacecraft consisted of Command Module (CM) 110 and Service Module (SM) 110 (together CSM-110), called Kitty Hawk, and Lunar Module 8 (LM-8), called Antares. Also considered part of the spacecraft were a Launch Escape System and a Spacecraft/Launch Vehicle Adapter, numbered SLA-17.
The changes to the Apollo spacecraft between Apollo 13 and 14 were more numerous than with earlier missions, not only because of the problems with Apollo 13, but because of the more extensive lunar activities planned for Apollo 14. The Apollo 13 accident had been caused by the explosive failure of an oxygen tank, after the insulation of the internal wiring had been damaged by heating of the tank contents pre-launch—that the oxygen had gotten hot enough to damage the insulation had not been realized, since the protective thermostatic switches had failed because they were, through an error, not designed to handle the voltage applied during ground testing. The explosion damaged the other tank or its tubing, causing its contents to leak away.
The changes in response included a redesign of the oxygen tanks, with the thermostats being upgraded to handle the proper voltage. A third tank was also added, placed in Bay1 of the SM, on the side opposite the other two, and was given a valve that could isolate it in an emergency, and allow it to feed the CM's environmental system only. The quantity probe in each tank was upgraded from aluminum to stainless steel.
Also in response to the Apollo 13 accident, the electrical wiring in Bay4 (where the explosion had happened) was sheathed in stainless steel. The fuel cell oxygen supply valves were redesigned to isolate the Teflon-coated wiring from the oxygen. The spacecraft and Mission Control monitoring systems were modified to give more immediate and visible warnings of anomalies. The Apollo 13 astronauts had suffered shortages of water and of power after the accident. Accordingly, an emergency supply of of water was stored in Apollo 14's CM, and an emergency battery, identical to those that powered the LM's descent stage, was placed in the SM. The LM was modified to make the transfer of power from LM to CM easier.
Other changes included the installation of anti-slosh baffles in the LM descent stage's propellant tanks. This would prevent the low fuel light from coming on prematurely, as had happened on Apollo 11 and 12. Structural changes were made to accommodate the equipment to be used on the lunar surface, including the Modular Equipment Transporter. Launch vehicle The Saturn V used for Apollo 14 was designated SA-509, and was similar to those used on Apollo 8 through 13. At , it was the heaviest vehicle yet flown by NASA, heavier than the launch vehicle for Apollo 13.
A number of changes were made to avoid pogo oscillations, that had caused an early shutdown of the center J-2 engine on Apollo 13's S-II second stage. These included a helium gas accumulator installed in the liquid oxygen (LOX) line of the center engine, a backup cutoff device for that engine, and a simplified 2-position propellant utilization valve on each of the five J-2 engines. ALSEP and other lunar surface equipment The Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) array of scientific instruments carried by Apollo 14 consisted of the Passive Seismic Experiment (PSE), Active Seismic Experiment (ASE), Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment (SIDE), Cold Cathode Ion Gauge Experiment (CCIG), and Charged Particle Lunar Environment Experiment (CPLEE). Two additional lunar surface experiments not part of the ALSEP were also flown, the Laser Ranging Retroreflector (LRRR or LR3), to be deployed in the ALSEP's vicinity, and the Lunar Portable Magnetometer (LPM), to be used by the astronauts during their second EVA. The PSE had been flown on Apollo 12 and 13, the ASE on Apollo 13, the SIDE on Apollo 12, the CCIG on Apollo 12 and 13, and the LRRR on Apollo 11. The LPM was new, but resembled equipment flown on Apollo 12. The ALSEP components flown on Apollo 13 were destroyed when its LM burned up in Earth's atmosphere.
Deployment of the ALSEP, and of the other instruments, each formed one of Apollo 14's mission objectives.
Central Station deployed on the Moon]]
The PSE was a seismometer, similar to one left on the Moon by Apollo 12, and was to measure seismic activity in the Moon. The Apollo 14 instrument would be calibrated by the impact, after being jettisoned, of the LM's ascent stage, since an object of known mass and velocity would be impacting at a known location on the Moon. The Apollo 12 instrument would also be activated by the spent Apollo 14 S-IVB booster, which would impact the Moon after the mission entered lunar orbit. The two seismometers would, in combination with those left by later Apollo missions, constitute a network of such instruments at different locations on the Moon.
The ASE would also measure seismic waves. It consisted of two parts. In the first, one of the crew members would deploy three geophones at distances up to from the ALSEP's Central Station, and on his way back from the furthest, fire thumpers every . The second consisted of four mortars (with their launch tubes), of different properties and set to impact at different distances from the experiment. It was hoped that the waves generated from the impacts would provide data about seismic wave transmission in the Moon's regolith. The mortar shells were not to be fired until the astronauts had returned to Earth, and in the event were never fired for fear they would damage other experiments. A similar experiment was successfully deployed, and the mortars launched, on Apollo 16.
The LPM was to be carried during the second EVA and used to measure the Moon's magnetic field at various points.
The SIDE measured ions on the lunar surface, including from the solar wind. It was combined with the CCIG, which was to measure the lunar atmosphere and detect if it varied over time. The CPLEE measured the particle energies of protons and electrons generated by the Sun that reached the lunar surface. The LRRR acts as a passive target for laser beams, allowing the measurement of the Earth/Moon distance and how it changes over time. The LRRRs from Apollo 11, 14 and 15 are the only experiments left on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts that are still returning data.
Flown for the first time on Apollo 14 was the Buddy Secondary Life Support System (BSLSS), a set of flexible hoses that would enable Shepard and Mitchell to share cooling water should one of their Primary Life Support System (PLSS) backpacks fail. In such an emergency, the astronaut with the failed equipment would get oxygen from his Oxygen Purge System (OPS) backup cylinder, but the BSLSS would ensure he did not have to use oxygen for cooling, extending the life of the OPS. The OPSs used on Apollo 14 were modified from those used on previous missions in that the internal heaters were removed as unnecessary.
Water bags were also taken to the lunar surface, dubbed "Gunga Dins", for insertion in the astronauts' helmets, allowing them sips of water during the EVAs. These had been flown on Apollo 13, but Shepard and Mitchell were the first to use them on the Moon. Similarly, Shepard was the first on the lunar surface to wear a spacesuit with commander's stripes: red stripes on arms, legs, and on the helmet, though one had been worn by Lovell on Apollo 13. These were instituted because of the difficulty in telling one spacesuited astronaut from the other in photographs.
Modular Equipment Transporter
]]
The Modular Equipment Transporter (MET) was a two-wheeled handcart, used only on Apollo 14, intended to allow the astronauts to take tools and equipment with them, and store lunar samples, without needing to carry them. On later Apollo program missions, the self-propelled Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) was flown instead.
The MET, when deployed for use on the lunar surface, was about long, wide and high. It had pressurized rubber tires wide and in diameter, containing nitrogen and inflated to about . The first use of tires on the Moon, these were developed by Goodyear and were dubbed their XLT (Experimental Lunar Tire) model. Fully loaded, the MET weighed about . Two legs combined with the wheels to provide four-point stability when at rest.
Mission highlights
Launch and flight to lunar orbit
Apollo 14 launched from Launch Complex 39-A at KSC at 4:03:02 pm (21:03:02 UTC), January 31, 1971.
After the vehicle reached orbit, the S-IVB third stage shut down, and the astronauts performed checks of the spacecraft before restarting the stage for translunar injection (TLI), the burn that placed the vehicle on course for the Moon. After TLI, the CSM separated from the S-IVB, and Roosa performed the transposition maneuver, turning it around in order to dock with the LM before the entire spacecraft separated from the stage. Roosa, who had practiced the maneuver many times, hoped to break the record for the least amount of propellant used in docking. But when he gently brought the modules together, the docking mechanism would not activate. He made several attempts over the next two hours, as mission controllers huddled and sent advice. If the LM could not be extracted from its place on the S-IVB, no lunar landing could take place, and with consecutive failures, the Apollo program might end. Mission Control proposed that they try it again with the docking probe retracted, hoping the contact would trigger the latches. This worked, and within an hour the joined spacecraft had separated from the S-IVB. The stage was set on a course to impact the Moon, which it did just over three days later, causing the Apollo 12 seismometer to register vibrations for over three hours.
The crew settled in for its voyage to Fra Mauro. At 60:30 Ground Elapsed Time, Shepard and Mitchell entered the LM to check its systems; while there they photographed a wastewater dump from the CSM, part of a particle contamination study in preparation for Skylab. Two midcourse corrections were performed on the translunar coast, with one burn lasting 10.19 seconds and one lasting 0.65 seconds.
Lunar orbit and descent
At 81:56:40.70 into the mission (February 4 at 1:59:43 am EST; 06:59:43 UTC), the Service Propulsion System engine in the SM was fired for 370.84 seconds to send the craft into a lunar orbit with apocynthion of and pericynthion of . A second burn, at 86:10:52 mission time, sent the spacecraft into an orbit of by . This was done in preparation for the release of the LM Antares. Apollo 14 was the first mission on which the CSM propelled the LM to the lower orbit—though Apollo 13 would have done so had the abort not already occurred. This was done to increase the amount of hover time available to the astronauts, a safety factor since Apollo 14 was to land in rough terrain.
After separating from the command module in lunar orbit, the LM Antares had two serious problems. First, the LM computer began getting an ABORT signal from a faulty switch. NASA believed the computer might be getting erroneous readings like this if a tiny ball of solder had shaken loose and was floating between the switch and the contact, closing the circuit. The immediate solution – tapping on the panel next to the switch – did work briefly, but the circuit soon closed again. If the problem recurred after the descent engine fired, the computer would think the signal was real and would initiate an auto-abort, causing the ascent stage to separate from the descent stage and climb back into orbit. NASA and the software teams at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scrambled to find a solution. The software was hard-wired, preventing it from being updated from the ground. The fix made it appear to the system that an abort had already happened, and it would ignore incoming automated signals to abort. This would not prevent the astronauts from piloting the ship, though if an abort became necessary, they might have to initiate it manually. Mitchell entered the changes with minutes to go until planned ignition.
A second problem occurred during the powered descent, when the LM landing radar failed to lock automatically onto the Moon's surface, depriving the navigation computer of vital information on the vehicle's altitude and vertical descent speed. After the astronauts cycled the landing radar breaker, the unit successfully acquired a signal near . Mission rules required an abort if the landing radar was out at , though Shepard might have tried to land without it. With the landing radar, Shepard steered the LM to a landing which was the closest to the intended target of the six missions that landed on the Moon. Lunar surface operations
}}
Shepard stated, after stepping onto the lunar surface, "And it's been a long way, but we're here." as well as setting up and loading the MET. These activities were televised back to Earth, though the picture tended to degenerate during the latter portion of the EVA. Mitchell deployed the ASE's geophone lines, unreeling and emplacing the two lines leading out from the ALSEP's Central Station. He then fired the thumper explosives, vibrations from which would give scientists back on Earth information about the depth and composition of the lunar regolith. Of the 21 thumpers, five failed to fire. On the way back to the LM, the astronauts collected and documented lunar samples, and took photographs of the area. Images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) show the tracks of the astronauts and the MET come to within 30 m of the rim. The difficulties faced by Shepard and Mitchell would emphasize the need for a means of transportation on the lunar surface with a navigation system, which was met by the Lunar Roving Vehicle, already planned to fly on Apollo 15.
Once the astronauts returned to the vicinity of the LM and were again within view of the television camera, Shepard performed a stunt he had been planning for years in the event he reached the Moon, and which is probably what Apollo 14 is best remembered for. Shepard brought along a Wilson six iron golf club head, which he had modified to attach to the handle of the contingency sample tool, and two golf balls. Shepard took several one-handed swings (due to the limited flexibility of the EVA suit) and exuberantly exclaimed that the second ball went "miles and miles and miles" in the low lunar gravity. Mitchell then threw a lunar scoop handle as if it were a javelin. The "javelin" and one of the golf balls wound up in a crater together, with Mitchell's projectile a bit further. In an interview with Ottawa Golf, Shepard stated the other landed near the ALSEP. The second EVA lasted 4 hours, 34 minutes, 41 seconds. Shepard brought back the club, gave it to the USGA Museum in New Jersey, and had a replica made which he gave to the National Air and Space Museum. In February 2021, to commemorate Apollo 14's 50th anniversary, imaging specialist Andy Saunders, who had previously worked to produce the clearest image of Neil Armstrong on the Moon, produced new, digitally enhanced images that were used to estimate the final resting places of the two balls that Shepard hit - the first landed approximately 24 yards from the "tee", while the second managed 40 yards.
showing Shepard taking a couple of golf swings]]
Lunar samples
" rock (Lunar Sample 14321) was the third largest rock collected during the Apollo program.]]
A total of of Moon rocks, or lunar samples, were brought back from Apollo 14. Most are breccias, which are rocks composed of fragments of other, older rocks. Breccias form when the heat and pressure of meteorite impacts fuse small rock fragments together. There were a few basalts that were collected in this mission in the form of clasts (fragments) in breccia. The Apollo 14 basalts are generally richer in aluminum and sometimes richer in potassium than other lunar basalts. Most lunar mare basalts collected during the Apollo program were formed from 3.0 to 3.8 billion years ago. The Apollo 14 basalts were formed 4.0 to 4.3 billion years ago, older than the volcanism known to have occurred at any of the mare locations reached during the Apollo program.
Some geologists were pleased enough with the close approach to Cone crater to send a case of scotch to the astronauts while they were in post-mission quarantine, though their enthusiasm was tempered by the fact that Shepard and Mitchell had documented few of the samples they brought back, making it hard and sometimes impossible to discern where they came from. Others were less happy; Don Wilhelms wrote in his book on the geological aspects of Apollo, "the golf game did not set well with most geologists in light of the results at Cone crater. The total haul from the rim-flank of Cone ... was 16 Hasselblad photographs (out of a mission total of 417), six rock-size samples heavier than 50 g, and a grand total of 10 kg of samples, 9 kg of which are in one rock (sample 14321 [i.e., Big Bertha]). That is to say, apart from 14321 we have less than 1 kg of rock—962 g to be exact—from what in my opinion is the most important single point reached by astronauts on the Moon." Geologist Lee Silver stated, "The Apollo 14 crews did not have the right attitude, did not learn enough about their mission, had the burden of not having the best possible preflight photography, and they weren't ready." In their sourcebook on Apollo, Richard W. Orloff and David M. Harland doubted that if Apollo 13 had reached the Moon, Lovell, and Haise, given a more distant landing point, could have got as close to Cone crater as Shepard and Mitchell did.
In January 2019 research showed that Big Bertha, which weighs , has characteristics that make it likely to be a terrestrial (Earth) meteorite. Granite and quartz, which are commonly found on Earth but very rarely found on the Moon, were confirmed to exist on Big Bertha. To find the sample's age, the research team from Curtin University looked at bits of the mineral zircon embedded in its structure. "By determining the age of zircon found in the sample, we were able to pinpoint the age of the host rock at about four billion years old, making it similar to the oldest rocks on Earth," researcher Alexander Nemchin said, adding that "the chemistry of the zircon in this sample is very different from that of every other zircon grain ever analyzed in lunar samples, and remarkably similar to that of zircons found on Earth." This would mean Big Bertha is both the first discovered terrestrial meteorite and the oldest known Earth rock.
Lunar orbit operations
Roosa spent almost two days alone aboard Kitty Hawk, performing the first intensive program of scientific observation from lunar orbit, much of which was intended to have been done by Apollo 13. After Antares separated and its crew began preparations to land, Roosa in Kitty Hawk performed an SPS burn to send the CSM to an orbit of approximately , and later a plane change maneuver to compensate for the rotation of the Moon.
Roosa took pictures from lunar orbit. The Lunar Topographic Camera, also known as the Hycon camera, was supposed to be used to image the surface, including the Descartes Highlands site being considered for Apollo 16, but it quickly developed a fault with the shutter that Roosa could not fix despite considerable help from Houston. Although about half of the photographic targets had to be scrubbed, Roosa was able to obtain photographs of Descartes with a Hasselblad camera and confirm that it was a suitable landing point. Roosa also used the Hasselblad to take photographs of the impact point of Apollo 13's S-IVB near Lansburg B crater. After the mission, troubleshooting found a tiny piece of aluminum contaminating the shutter control circuit, which caused the shutter to operate continuously.
Roosa was able to see sunlight glinting off Antares and view its lengthy shadow on the lunar surface on Orbit 17; on Orbit 29 he could see the sun reflecting off the ALSEP. He also took astronomical photographs, of the Gegenschein, and of the Lagrangian point of the Sun-Earth system that lies beyond the Earth (L), testing the theory that the Gegenschein is generated by reflections off particles at L. Performing the bistatic radar experiment, he also focused Kitty Hawk VHF and S-band transmitters at the Moon so that they would bounce off and be detected on Earth in an effort to learn more about the depth of the lunar regolith. Return, splashdown and quarantine Antares lifted off from the Moon at 1:48:42 pm EST
On the final evening in space, the crew conducted a press conference, with the questions submitted to NASA in advance and read to the astronauts by the CAPCOM.
The command module Kitty Hawk splashed down in the South Pacific Ocean on February 9, 1971, at 21:05 [UTC], approximately south of American Samoa. After recovery by the ship USS New Orleans, the crew was flown to Pago Pago International Airport in Tafuna, then to Honolulu, then to Ellington Air Force Base near Houston in a plane containing a Mobile Quarantine Facility trailer before they continued their quarantine in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. They remained there until their release from quarantine on February 27, 1971. The Apollo 14 astronauts were the last lunar explorers to be quarantined on their return from the Moon. They were the only Apollo crew to be quarantined both before and after the flight.
Roosa, who worked in forestry in his youth, took several hundred tree seeds on the flight. These were germinated after the return to Earth, and were widely distributed around the world as commemorative Moon trees. Some seedlings were given to state forestry associations in 1975 and 1976 to mark the United States Bicentennial.
Mission insignia
]]
The mission insignia is an oval depicting the Earth and the Moon, and an astronaut pin drawn with a comet trail. The pin is leaving Earth and is approaching the Moon. A gold band around the edge includes the mission and astronaut names. The designer was Jean Beaulieu, who based it on a sketch by Shepard, who had been head of the Astronaut Office and meant the pin to symbolize that through him, the entire corps was in spirit flying to the Moon.
The backup crew spoofed the patch with its own version, with revised artwork showing a Wile E. Coyote cartoon character depicted as gray-bearded (for Shepard, who was 47 at the time of the mission and the oldest man on the Moon), pot-bellied (for Mitchell, who had a pudgy appearance) and red-furred (for Roosa's red hair), still on the way to the Moon, while Road Runner (for the backup crew) is already on the Moon, holding a U.S. flag and a flag labelled "1st Team". The flight name is replaced by "BEEP BEEP" and the backup crew's names are given. Several of these patches were hidden by the backup crew and found during the flight by the crew in notebooks and storage lockers in both the CSM Kitty Hawk and the LM Antares, and one patch was stored in the MET lunar handcart. One patch, attached to Shepard's PLSS, was worn on the lunar surface, and, mounted on a plaque, was presented by him to Cernan after the mission. At the time of its transfer of ownership from NASA to the Smithsonian in July 1977, it was on display at the facilities of North American Rockwell (the company that had constructed it) in Downey, California. Antares' descent stage and the mission's other equipment remain at Fra Mauro at .
Gallery
<gallery>
File:Apollo 14 footage of the astronauts climbing down from the lunar lander and planting an American flag.ogv|Apollo 14 astronaut Ed Mitchell sets foot on the Moon.
File:Ap14 flag.ogv|Shepard and Mitchell erect a U.S. flag on the lunar surface.
File:Apollo14LRO2.png|Apollo 14 landing site, 2009 photograph by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter
</gallery>
See also
* Google Moon
* List of artificial objects on the Moon
* List of missions to the Moon
* List of spacewalks and moonwalks 1965–1999
References
Bibliography
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External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060919032908/http://astrogeology.usgs.gov/Projects/LunarAtlas/maps/images/AP14_traverseL.jpg "Apollo 14"] at Encyclopedia Astronautica
* [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LPST/ap_11_12_14/ Apollo 11, 12, and 14 Traverses], at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
* [https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/search/map/Moon/Apollo/Traverse/AP14_traverseL Apollo 14 Traverse Map] – United States Geological Survey (USGS)
* [https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/maps/moon-apollo-traverse-maps Apollo Mission Traverse Maps] – Several maps showing routes of moonwalks
* [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_14/experiments/ Apollo 14 Science Experiments] at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
NASA reports
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4009/cover.htm The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology] NASA, NASA SP-4009
* [https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4012/vol3/table2.42.htm "Table 2-42. Apollo 14 Characteristics"] from NASA Historical Data Book: Volume III: Programs and Projects 1969–1978 by Linda Neuman Ezell, NASA History Series (1988)
* [https://www.nasa.gov/history/alsj/a14/a14AbortDiscrete.html "Masking the Abort Discrete"] – by Paul Fjeld at the [https://web.archive.org/web/20110504171049/http://www.life.com/gallery/25452/apollo-14-shepard-roosa-mitchell#index/0 Apollo 14 Lunar Surface Journal]. NASA. Detailed technical article describing the ABORT signal problem and its solution
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20170315151944/http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS14_TEC.PDF "Apollo 14 Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription"] (PDF) Manned Spacecraft Center, NASA, February 1971
Multimedia
*
* – slideshow by Life magazine
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110613184854/http://hoohila.stanford.edu/commonwealth/programView.php?programID1260 "The Apollo Astronauts"] – Interview with the Apollo 14 astronauts, March 31, 1971, from the [http://content.cdlib.org/view?docIdkt3g5032c1&brand=oac Commonwealth Club of California Records] at the [http://www.hoover.org/hila/ Hoover Institution Archives]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20070510211611/http://www.maniacworld.com/Apollo-14-Lunar-Liftoff.htm "Apollo 14 Lunar Liftoff – Video"] at [https://web.archive.org/web/20061114015028/http://www.maniacworld.com/ Maniac World]
* , with Cone crater
Category:1971 in spaceflight
Category:1971 in the United States
Category:Edgar Mitchell
Category:Stuart Roosa
Category:Alan Shepard
Category:Apollo program missions
Category:Articles containing video clips
Category:Extravehicular activity
Category:Crewed missions to the Moon
Category:Sample return missions
Category:Soft landings on the Moon
Category:Spacecraft which reentered in 1971
Category:Spacecraft launched in 1971
Category:January 1971
Category:February 1971
Category:Spacecraft launched by Saturn rockets
Category:1971 on the Moon
Category:Successful space missions | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_14 | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.178495 |
1969 | Apollo 15 | }}
| SATCAT =
| launch_mass
|departure_date August 2, 1971, 17:11:23 UTC
|sample_mass
|surface_EVAs = 4 (including standup)
|surface_EVA_time =
| instruments = <!-- a list of instruments on the satellite -->
| docking = 7 despite the partial opening of one of its three parachutes.
The mission accomplished its goals and also saw the collection of the Genesis Rock, thought to be part of the Moon's early crust, and Scott's use of a hammer and a feather to validate Galileo's theory that when there is no air resistance, objects fall at the same rate due to gravity regardless of their mass. The mission received negative publicity the following year when it emerged that the crew had carried unauthorized postal covers to the lunar surface, some of which were sold by a West German stamp dealer. The members of the crew were reprimanded for poor judgment, and did not fly in space again.
Background
In 1962, NASA contracted for the construction of fifteen Saturn V rockets to achieve the Apollo program's goal of a crewed landing on the Moon by 1970; at the time no one knew how many missions this would require. In 1969 Apollo 11 succeeded in landing on the Moon with the sixth SaturnV, so nine rockets remained available for a hoped-for total of ten landings. These plans included a heavier, extended version of the Apollo spacecraft to be used in the last five missions (Apollo 16 through 20). The revamped Lunar Module would be capable of up to a 75-hour stay, and would carry a Lunar Roving Vehicle to the Moon's surface. The service module would house a package of orbital experiments to gather data on the Moon. In the original plan Apollo 15 was to be the last of the non-extended missions to land in Censorinus crater. But in anticipation of budget cuts, NASA cancelled three landing missions by September 1970. Apollo 15 became the first of three extended missions, known as J missions, and the landing site was moved to Hadley Rille, originally planned for Apollo 19.
Crew and key Mission Control personnel
Crew
Scott was born in 1932 in San Antonio, Texas, and, after spending his freshman year at the University of Michigan on a swimming scholarship, transferred to the United States Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1954. Serving in the Air Force, Scott had received two advanced degrees from MIT in 1962 before being selected as one of the third group of astronauts the following year. He flew in Gemini 8 in 1966 alongside Neil Armstrong and as command module pilot of Apollo 9 in 1969. Worden was born in 1932 in Jackson, Michigan, and like his commander, had attended West Point (class of 1955) and served in the Air Force. Worden earned two master's degrees in engineering from Michigan in 1963. Irwin had been born in 1930 in Pittsburgh, and had attended the United States Naval Academy, graduating in 1951 and serving in the Air Force, receiving a master's degree from Michigan in 1957. Both Worden and Irwin were selected in the fifth group of astronauts (1966), and Apollo 15 would be their only spaceflight. All three future astronauts had attended Michigan, and two had taken degrees from there; it had been the first university to offer an aeronautical engineering program.
(right) and Schmitt during geology training]]
The backup crew was Richard F. Gordon Jr. as commander, Vance D. Brand as command module pilot and Harrison H. Schmitt as Lunar Module pilot. Gold team For Apollo 15, the CAPCOMs were Allen, Brand, C. Gordon Fullerton, Gordon, Henize, Edgar D. Mitchell, Parker, Schmitt and Alan B. Shepard. Planning and training Schmitt and other scientist-astronauts advocated for a greater place for science on the early Apollo missions. They were often met with disinterest from other astronauts, or found science displaced by higher priorities. Schmitt realized that what was needed was an expert teacher who could fire the astronauts' enthusiasm, and contacted Caltech geologist Lee Silver, whom Schmitt introduced to Apollo 13's commander, Jim Lovell, and to its Lunar Module pilot, Fred Haise, then in training for their mission. Lovell and Haise were willing to go on a field expedition with Silver, and geology became a significant part of their training. Geologist Farouk El-Baz trained the prime crew's command module pilot, Ken Mattingly to inform his planned observations from lunar orbit. The crew's newly acquired skills mostly went unused, due to the explosion that damaged the Apollo 13 spacecraft, and caused an abort of the mission. Apollo 14's CMP, Stuart Roosa, was enthusiastic about geology, but the mission commander, Shepard, less so.
Already familiar with the spacecraft as the backup crew for Apollo 12, Scott, Worden and Irwin could devote more of their training time as prime crew for Apollo 15 to geology and sampling techniques. Scott was determined that his crew bring back the maximum amount of scientific data possible, and met with Silver in April 1970 to begin planning the geological training. Schmitt's assignment as Apollo 15's backup LMP made him an insider, and allowed him to spark competition between the prime and backup crews. The cancellation of two Apollo missions in September 1970 transformed Apollo 15 into a J mission, with a longer stay on the lunar surface, and the first Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). This change was welcomed by Scott, who according to David West Reynolds in his account of the Apollo program, was "something more than a hotshot pilot. Scott had the spirit of a true explorer", one determined to get the most from the J mission. The additional need for communications, including from planned experiments and the rover, required the near-rebuilding of the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station in Australia.
takes a photograph during geology training in Hawaii, December 1970]]
Geology field trips took place about once a month throughout the crew's 20 months of training. At first, Silver would take the commanders and LMPs from the prime and backup crews to geological sites in Arizona and New Mexico as if for a normal field geology lesson, but closer to launch, these trips became more realistic. Crews began to wear mock-ups of the backpacks they would carry while hiking near the Rio Grande Gorge, and communicate using walkie-talkies to a CAPCOM in a tent. The CAPCOM was accompanied by a geologist unfamiliar with the area who would rely on the astronauts' descriptions to interpret the findings, and familiarized the crew members with describing landscapes to people who could not see them. Considering himself a serious amateur, Scott came to enjoy field geology.
The decision to land at Hadley came in September 1970. The Site Selection Committee had narrowed the field down to two sites—Hadley Rille, a deep channel on the edge of Mare Imbrium close to the Apennine mountains or the crater Marius, near which were a group of low, possibly volcanic, domes. Although not ultimately his decision, the commander of a mission always held great sway. To David Scott the choice was clear, as Hadley "had more variety. There is a certain intangible quality which drives the spirit of exploration and I felt that Hadley had it. Besides it looked beautiful and usually when things look good they are good." The selection of Hadley was made although NASA lacked high resolution images of the landing site; none had been made as the site was considered too rough to risk one of the earlier Apollo missions. The proximity of the Apennine mountains to the Hadley site required a landing approach trajectory of 26 degrees, far steeper than the 15 degrees in earlier Apollo landings.
The expanded mission meant that Worden spent much of his time at North American Rockwell's facilities at Downey, California, where the command and service module (CSM) was being built. He undertook a different kind of geology training. Working with El-Baz, he studied maps and photographs of the craters he would pass over while orbiting alone in the CSM. As El-Baz listened and gave feedback, Worden learned how to describe lunar features in a way that would be useful to the scientists who would listen to his transmissions back on Earth. Worden found El-Baz to be an enjoyable and inspiring teacher. Worden usually accompanied his crewmates on their geology field trips, though he was often in an airplane overhead, describing features of the landscape as the plane simulated the speed at which the lunar landscape would pass below the CSM.<!-- Chapter 7, "while Dave and Jim" to "I went on almost all" -->
The demands of the training strained both Worden's and Irwin's marriages; each sought Scott's advice, fearing a divorce might endanger their places on the mission as not projecting the image NASA wanted for the astronauts. Scott consulted Director of Flight Crew Operations Deke Slayton, their boss, who stated what was important was that the astronauts do their jobs. Although the Irwins overcame their marital difficulties, the Wordens divorced before the mission. Hardware Spacecraft Apollo 15 used command and service module CSM-112, which was given the call sign Endeavour, named after HMS Endeavour, and Lunar Module LM-10, call sign Falcon, named after the United States Air Force Academy mascot. Scott explained the choice of the name Endeavour on the grounds that its captain, James Cook, had commanded the first purely scientific sea voyage, and Apollo 15 was the first lunar landing mission on which there was a heavy emphasis on science. Apollo 15 took with it a small piece of wood from Cook's ship, while Falcon carried two falcon feathers to the Moon in recognition of the crew's service in the Air Force.
Technicians at the Kennedy Space Center had some problems with the instruments in the service module's scientific instrument module (SIM) bay. Some instruments were late in arriving, and principal investigators or representatives of NASA contractors sought further testing or to make small changes. Mechanical problems came from the fact the instruments were designed to operate in space, but had to be tested on the surface of the Earth. As such, things like the 7.5 m (24 ft) booms for the mass and gamma ray spectrometers could be tested only using equipment that tried to mimic the space environment, and, in space, the mass spectrometer boom several times did not fully retract.
On the Lunar Module, the fuel and oxidizer tanks were enlarged on both the descent and ascent stages, and the engine bell on the descent stage was extended. Batteries and solar cells were added for increased electrical power. In all this increased the weight of the Lunar Module to , heavier than previous models. but the lunar module went unused and is now at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Endeavour is on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, following its transfer of ownership from NASA to the Smithsonian in December 1974.
Worden wore a suit similar to those worn by the Apollo 14 astronauts, but modified to interface with Apollo 15's equipment. Gear needed only for lunar surface EVAs, such as the liquid cooling garment, was not included with Worden's suit, as the only EVA he was expected to do was one to retrieve film cartridges from the SIM bay on the flight home. The Apollo 15 rover bore a plaque, reading: "Man's First Wheels on the Moon, Delivered by Falcon, July 30, 1971". During pre-launch testing, the LRV was given additional bracing, lest it collapse if someone sat on it under Earth conditions.
Particles and Fields Subsatellite
The Apollo 15 Particles and Fields Subsatellite (PFS-1) was a small satellite released into lunar orbit from the SIM bay just before the mission left orbit to return to Earth. Its main objectives were to study the plasma, particle, and magnetic field environment of the Moon and map the lunar gravity field. Specifically, it measured plasma and energetic particle intensities and vector magnetic fields, and facilitated tracking of the satellite velocity to high precision. A basic requirement was that the satellite acquire fields and particle data everywhere on the orbit around the Moon. Mission highlights Launch and outbound trip
Apollo 15 was launched on July 26, 1971, at 9:34am EDT from the Kennedy Space Center at Merritt Island, Florida. The time of launch was at the very start of the two-hour, 37-minute launch window, which would allow Apollo 15 to arrive at the Moon with the proper lighting conditions at Hadley Rille; had the mission been postponed beyond another window on July 27, it could not have been rescheduled until late August. The astronauts had been awakened five and a quarter hours before launch by Slayton, and after breakfast and suiting up, had been taken to Pad 39A, launch site of all seven attempts at crewed lunar landing, and entered the spacecraft about three hours before launch. There were no unplanned delays in the countdown.
At 000:11:36 into the mission, the S-IVB engine shut down, leaving Apollo 15 in its planned parking orbit in low Earth orbit. The mission remained there for 2hours and 40 minutes, allowing the crew (and Houston, via telemetry) to check the spacecraft's systems. At 002:50.02.6 into the mission, the S-IVB was restarted for trans-lunar injection (TLI), placing the craft on a path to the Moon. Before TLI, the craft had completed 1.5 orbits around the Earth.
The command and service module (CSM) and the Lunar Module remained attached to the nearly-exhausted S-IVB booster. Once trans-lunar injection had been achieved, placing the spacecraft on a trajectory towards the Moon, explosive cords separated the CSM from the booster as Worden operated the CSM's thrusters to push it away. Worden then maneuvered the CSM to dock with the LM (mounted on the end of the S-IVB), and the combined craft was then separated from the S-IVB by explosives. After Apollo 15 separated from the booster, the S-IVB maneuvered away, and, as planned, impacted the Moon about an hour after the crewed spacecraft entered lunar orbit, though due to an error the impact was away from the intended target. The booster's impact was detected by the seismometers left on the Moon by Apollo 12 and Apollo 14, providing useful scientific data.
There was a malfunctioning light on the craft's service propulsion system (SPS); after considerable troubleshooting, the astronauts did a test burn of the system that also served as a midcourse correction. This occurred about 028:40:00 into the mission. Fearing that the light meant the SPS might unexpectedly fire, the astronauts avoided using the control bank with the faulty light, bringing it online only for major burns, and controlling it manually. After the mission returned, the malfunction proved to be caused by a tiny bit of wire trapped within the switch. but due to the breakage, it was in the LM's oxygen atmosphere. Testing on the ground verified the tapemeter would still work properly, and the crew removed most of the glass using a vacuum cleaner and adhesive tape.
At 073:31:14 into the mission, a second midcourse correction, with less than a second of burn, was made. Although there were four opportunities to make midcourse corrections following TLI, only two were needed. Apollo 15 approached the Moon on July 29, and the lunar orbit insertion (LOI) burn had to be made using the SPS, on the far side of the Moon, out of radio contact with Earth. If no burn occurred, Apollo 15 would emerge from the lunar shadow and come back in radio contact faster than expected; the continued lack of communication allowed Mission Control to conclude that the burn had taken place. When contact resumed, Scott did not immediately give the particulars of the burn, but spoke admiringly of the beauty of the Moon, causing Alan Shepard, the Apollo 14 commander, who was awaiting a television interview, to grumble, "To hell with that shit, give us details of the burn." The 398.36-second burn took place at 078:31:46.7 into the mission at an altitude of above the Moon, and placed Apollo 15 in an elliptical lunar orbit of .
Lunar orbit and landing
On Apollo 11 and 12, the Lunar Module decoupled from the CSM and was piloted to a much lower orbit from which the lunar landing attempt commenced; to save fuel in an increasingly heavy lander, beginning with Apollo 14, the SPS in the service module made that burn, known as descent orbit insertion (DOI), with the lunar module still attached to the CSM. The initial orbit Apollo 15 was in had its apocynthion, or high point, over the landing site at Hadley; a burn at the opposite point in the orbit was performed, with the result that Hadley would now be under the craft's pericynthion, or low point. The DOI burn was performed at 082:39:49.09 and took 24.53 seconds; the result was an orbit with apocynthion of and pericynthion of . Overnight between July 29 and 30, as the crew rested, it became apparent to Mission Control that mass concentrations in the Moon were making Apollo 15's orbit increasingly elliptical—pericynthion was by the time the crew was awakened on July 30. This, and uncertainty as to the exact altitude of the landing site, made it desirable that the orbit be modified, or trimmed. Using the craft's RCS thrusters, this took place at 095:56:44.70, lasting 30.40 seconds, and raised the pericynthion to and the apocynthion to .
As well as preparing the Lunar Module for its descent, the crew continued observations of the Moon (including of the landing site at Hadley) and provided television footage of the surface. Then, Scott and Irwin entered the Lunar Module in preparation for the landing attempt. Undocking was planned for 100:13:56, over the far side of the Moon, but nothing happened when separation was attempted. After analyzing the problem, the crew and Houston decided the probe instrumentation umbilical was likely loose or disconnected; Worden went into the tunnel connecting the command and lunar modules and determined this was so, seating it more firmly. With the problem resolved, Falcon separated from Endeavour at 100:39:16.2, about 25 minutes late, at an altitude of . Worden in Endeavour executed a SPS burn at 101:38:58.98 to send Endeavour to an orbit of by in preparation for his scientific work.
Aboard Falcon, Scott and Irwin prepared for powered descent initiation (PDI), the burn that was to place them on the lunar surface, and, after Mission Control gave them permission,}}
With Falcon due to remain on the lunar surface for almost three days, Scott deemed it important to maintain the circadian rhythm they were used to, and as they had landed in the late afternoon, Houston time, the two astronauts were to sleep before going onto the surface. But the time schedule allowed Scott to open the lander's top hatch (usually used for docking) and spend a half hour looking at their surroundings, describing them, and taking photographs. Lee Silver had taught him the importance of going to a high place to survey a new field site, and the top hatch served that purpose. Deke Slayton and other managers were initially opposed due to the oxygen that would be lost, but Scott got his way. During the only stand-up extravehicular activity (EVA) ever performed through the LM's top hatch on the lunar surface, Scott was able to make plans for the following day's EVA. He offered Irwin a chance to look out as well, but this would have required rearranging the umbilicals connecting Irwin to Falcon life support system, and he declined. After repressurizing the spacecraft, Scott and Irwin removed their space suits for sleep, becoming the first astronauts to doff their suits while on the Moon.
]]
Throughout the sleep period Mission Control in Houston monitored a slow but steady oxygen loss. Scott and Irwin eventually were awakened an hour early, and the source of the problem was found to be an open valve on the urine transfer device. In post-mission debriefing, Scott recommended that future crews be woken at once under similar circumstances. After the problem was solved, the crew began preparation for the first Moon walk.
After donning their suits and depressurizing the cabin, Scott and Irwin began their first full EVA, becoming the seventh and eighth humans, respectively, to walk on the Moon. They began deploying the lunar rover, stored folded up in a compartment of Falcon descent stage, but this proved troublesome due to the slant of the lander. The experts in Houston suggested lifting the front end of the rover as the astronauts pulled it out, and this worked. Scott began a system checkout. One of the batteries gave a zero voltage reading, but this was only an instrumentation problem. A greater concern was that the front wheel steering would not work. However, the rear wheel steering was sufficient to maneuver the vehicle. Completing his checkout, Scott said "Okay. Out of detent; we're moving", maneuvering the rover away from Falcon in mid-sentence. These were the first words uttered by a human while driving a vehicle on the Moon. Reaching Elbow, a known location, allowed Mission Control to backtrack and get closer to pinpointing the location of the lander. The astronauts took samples there, and then drove to another crater on the flank of Mons Hadley Delta, where they took more. After concluding this stop, they returned to the lander to drop off their samples and prepare to set up the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP), the scientific instruments that would remain when they left. Scott had difficulty drilling the holes required for the heat flow experiment, and the work was not completed when they had to return to the lander. The first EVA lasted 6hours and 32 minutes. Second and third EVAs
]]
The rover's front steering, inoperative during the first EVA, worked during the second and third ones. The target of the second EVA, on August 1, was the slope of Mons Hadley Delta, where the pair sampled boulders and craters along the Apennine Front. They spent an hour at Spur crater, during which the astronauts collected a sample dubbed the Genesis Rock. This rock, an anorthosite, is believed to be part of the early lunar crust—the hope of finding such a specimen had been one reason the Hadley area had been chosen. Once back at the landing site, Scott continued to try to drill holes for experiments at the ALSEP site, with which he had struggled the day before. After conducting soil-mechanics experiments and raising the U.S. flag, Scott and Irwin returned to the LM. EVA2 lasted 7hours and 12 minutes. Scott then performed an experiment in view of the television camera, using a falcon feather and hammer to demonstrate Galileo's theory that all objects in a given gravity field fall at the same rate, regardless of mass, in the absence of aerodynamic drag. He dropped the hammer and feather at the same time; because of the negligible lunar atmosphere, there was no drag on the feather, which hit the ground at the same time as the hammer. This was Joe Allen's idea (he also served as CAPCOM during it) and was part of an effort to find a memorable popular science experiment to do on the Moon along the lines of Shepard's hitting of golf balls. The feather was most likely from a female gyrfalcon (a type of falcon), a mascot at the United States Air Force Academy.
Worden got busy with the tasks that were to occupy him for much of the time he spent in space alone: photography and operating the instruments in the SIM bay.
Endeavour was slated to pass over the landing site at the moment of planned landing,
Results from the SIM bay experiments would include the conclusion, from data gathered by the X-ray spectrometer, that there was greater fluorescent X-ray flux than anticipated, and that the lunar highlands were richer in aluminum than were the mares. Endeavour was in a more inclined orbit than previous crewed missions, and Worden saw features that were not known previously, supplementing photographs with thorough descriptions.
Return to Earth
on the lunar rover]]
Falcon lifted off the Moon at 17:11:22 GMT on August2 after 66 hours and 55 minutes on the lunar surface. Docking with the CSM took place just under two hours later. After the astronauts transferred samples and other items from the LM to the CSM, the LM was sealed off, jettisoned, and intentionally crashed into the lunar surface, an impact registered by the seismometers left by Apollo 12, 14 and 15. At approximately 171,000 nautical miles (197,000 mi; 317,000 km) from Earth, it was the first "deep space" EVA in history, performed at great distance from any planetary body. As of , it remains one of only three such EVAs, all performed during Apollo's J missions under similar circumstances. Later that day, the crew set a record for the longest Apollo flight to that point.
According to David Woods in the Apollo Lunar Flight Journal,
No permission had been received from Slayton to carry the covers, as required.
The 100 covers were put on sale to Sieger's customers in late 1971 at a price of about $1,500 each. After receiving the agreed payments, the astronauts returned them, and accepted no compensation. In April 1972, Slayton learned that unauthorized covers had been carried, and removed the three as the backup crew for Apollo 17. The matter became public in June 1972 and the three astronauts were reprimanded for poor judgment; none ever flew in space again. During the investigation, the astronauts had surrendered those covers still in their possession; after Worden filed suit, they were returned in 1983, something Slate magazine deemed an exoneration. Under pressure from NASA, Van Hoeydonck canceled a plan to publicly sell 950 signed copies.
In 2021, Scott published a document entitled "Memorandum for the Record", in which he stated that the figurine left on the Moon was designed and fabricated by NASA personnel. While testifying before a Senate committee in 1972, he had stated that the figurine had been made and provided by Van Hoeydonck at Scott's request.
During those congressional hearings into the postal covers and Fallen Astronaut matters, two Bulova timepieces taken on the mission by Scott were also matters of controversy. Before the mission, Scott had been introduced to Bulova's representative, General James McCormack by Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman. Bulova had been seeking to have its timepieces taken on Apollo missions, but after evaluation, NASA had selected Omega watches instead. Scott brought the Bulova timepieces on the mission, without disclosing them to Slayton. During Scott's second EVA, the crystal on his NASA standard issue Omega Speedmaster watch popped off, and, during the third EVA, he used a Bulova watch. The Bulova Chronograph Model #88510/01 that Scott wore on the lunar surface was a prototype, given to him by the Bulova Company, and it is the only privately owned watch to have been worn while walking on the lunar surface. There are images of him wearing this watch, when he saluted the American flag on the Moon, with the Hadley Delta expanse in the background. In 2015, the watch sold for $1.625 million, which makes it one of the most expensive astronaut-owned artifact ever sold at auction and one of the most expensive watches sold at auction.
Mission insignia
s driven by Scott (right) and Worden during the training for Apollo 15, photographed in 2019]]
The Apollo 15 mission patch carries Air Force motifs, a nod to the crew's service there, just as the Apollo 12 all-Navy crew's patch had featured a sailing ship. The circular patch features stylized red, white and blue birds flying over Hadley Rille. Immediately behind the birds, a line of craters forms the Roman numeral XV. The Roman numerals were hidden in emphasized outlines of some craters after NASA insisted that the mission number be displayed in Arabic numerals. The artwork is circled in red, with a white band giving the mission and crew names and a blue border. Scott contacted fashion designer Emilio Pucci to design the patch, who came up with the basic idea of the three-bird motif on a square patch. a Florida car dealer had, since the time of Project Mercury, been leasing Chevrolets to astronauts for $1 and later selling them to the public. The astronauts were photographed with the cars and the training LRV for the June 11, 1971, edition of Life magazine.
Visibility from space
The halo area of the Apollo 15 landing site, created by the LM's exhaust plume, was observed by a camera aboard the Japanese lunar orbiter SELENE and confirmed by comparative analysis of photographs in May 2008. This corresponds well to photographs taken from the Apollo 15 command module showing a change in surface reflectivity due to the plume, and was the first visible trace of crewed landings on the Moon seen from space since the close of the Apollo program.
Gallery
Still images
<gallery widths"200px" heights"200px" perrow="4">
File:Apollo 15 rollout from VAB.jpg|alt=A rocket on a launchpad|The Apollo 15 launch vehicle during rollout
File:Jim Irwin (left) Al Worden, and Dave Scott pose in front of the VAB during the Saturn V roll-out.jpg|alt=Three men stand in front of a rocket|The astronauts pose before the VAB as the Saturn V is rolled out
File:Al Worden, Dave Scott, Deke Slayton, and Jack Schmitt dig into the pre-launch breakfast.jpg|alt=Several men at a sit-down breakfast|Worden, Scott, Slayton and Schmitt eat the pre-launch breakfast
File:Falcon lunar module on the Moon.jpg|alt=A lunar landscape with a lander in the background|Falcon on the Moon. Note the slant of the vehicle
File:Apollo 15 Station 2 Rille, Lunar Rover, Scott.jpg|alt=Lunar landscape with man leaning over rover|Scott does geology work near Hadley Rille
File:Apollo 15 Dave Scott at St. 9a.jpg|alt=A man in a spacesuit leans over a large rock|Scott examines a boulder during the third EVA
File:A15.s74 41836.jpg|alt=A control room; visible on a large screen are two astronauts walking on the Moon|Mission Control in Houston during the third Apollo 15 EVA, August 2, 1971. CAPCOM Joe Allen is to left (pointing) with Dick Gordon next to him.
File:S71-41759.jpg|alt=Several rows of consoles. A large screen showed a lunar lander|Mission Control in Houston as Falcon takes off from the Moon
File:Worden podczas EVA S71-43202.jpg|alt=A man in a spacesuit floating beside a spacecraft|Alfred Worden in space suit retrieving film cartridges during the transearth coast
File:S71-42825.jpg|alt=Three men in flight suits disembark a helicopter|The astronauts disembark their helicopter aboard the Okinawa
File:Moon AS15-M-2778.jpg|alt=The Moon|The Moon as seen from the departing Apollo 15 spacecraft
File:Stafford Air & Space Museum, Weatherford, OK, US (60).jpg|alt=A plaque to be left on the lander|Backup of the plaque left on Falcon descent stage
File:Apollo 15 Command Module at the National Museum of the United States Air Force.jpg|alt=A spaceship on display|Command Module Endeavour on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio
File:Apollo 15 Space Suit David Scott.jpg|The spacesuit David Scott wore during the Apollo 15 mission is on display at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
</gallery>
Multimedia
<gallery widths"200px" heights"200px" perrow="4">
File:Apollo 15 CSM moving away from LM.ogv |alt=Film of a spacecraft in space|Endeavour filmed from Falcon after undocking
File:Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle deployment.webm|alt=The lunar rover is set up|Deployment of the lunar rover on the Moon
File:Apollo 15 liftoff from inside LM.ogv|alt=A spacecraft takes off from the Moon|Liftoff from the Moon, seen through the LMP's window as Scott and Irwin play a prerecorded instrumental version of the song "The U.S. Air Force", commonly known as "Wild Blue Yonder".
File:Apollo 15 splashdown.ogv|alt=A spacecraft descends to the ocean|Apollo 15 splashdown
</gallery>
See also
* List of artificial objects on the Moon
* List of missions to the Moon
* List of spacewalks and moonwalks 1965–1999
Notes
References
Apollo Lunar Flight Journal
Apollo Lunar Surface Journal
Bibliography
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* |title-link=A Man on the Moon }}
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External links
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a15/as15psr.pdf Apollo 15 Preliminary Science Report] (1972) by the Manned Spacecraft Center
* [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LPST/41b4s4/ Apollo 15 Traverses], 41B4S4(25), Lunar Photomap at Lunar and Planetary Institute
* [https://history.nasa.gov/apsr/apsr.htm 1975 summary report] by NASA
* [http://www.collectspace.com/resources/flown_a15_articlescarried.html 1972 NASA press releases] at collectSPACE
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4204/contents.html Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations], a 1978 book published by NASA
* [https://archive.org/details/IntheMountainsOfTheMoonApollo15 Part 1] and [https://archive.org/details/InTheMountainsOfTheMoon part 2] of Apollo 15: In the Mountains of the Moon, a NASA documentary film on the Apollo 15 mission, at the Internet Archive
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110706030936/http://astrotalkuk.org/2011/07/04/episode-45-4th-july-2011-apollo-15-command-module-pilot-al-worden/ 2011 podcast interview] with AstrotalkUK
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20160805175025/https://medium.com/learning-for-life/to-see-earth-and-moon-in-a-single-glance-89d094f6d40f 2016 interview with Worden] at Medium
Category:James Irwin
Category:David Scott
Category:Alfred Worden
Category:Articles containing video clips
Category:Apollo program missions
Category:Extravehicular activity
Category:LQ12 quadrangle
Category:Lunar rovers
Category:Crewed missions to the Moon
Category:Sample return missions
Category:Soft landings on the Moon
Category:Spacecraft which reentered in 1971
Category:Spacecraft launched in 1971
Category:July 1971
Category:August 1971
Category:Spacecraft launched by Saturn rockets
Category:1971 on the Moon
Category:Successful space missions | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_15 | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.242959 |
1970 | Apollo 16 | | operator = NASA
| COSPAR_ID =
|LM: 1972-031C
}}
| SATCAT =
|LM: 6005
}}
| mission_duration 11 days, 1 hour, 51 minutes, 5 seconds
| spacecraft =
|Apollo LM-11
}}
| manufacturer =
|LM: Grumman
}}
| launch_mass
| landing_mass
| launch_date UTC
| launch_rocket = Saturn V SA-511
| launch_site = Kennedy LC-39A
| landing_date UTC
| landing_site South Pacific Ocean<br />
| recovery_by =
|interplanetary =
|arrival_date April 19, 1972, 20:22:27 UTC
|departure_date April 25, 1972, 02:15:33 UTC
}}
|departure_date April 24, 1972, 01:25:47 UTC
|location Descartes Highlands<br />}}
|sample_mass
|surface_EVAs = 3
|surface_EVA_time =
|Second: 7 h 23 min 09 s
|Third: 5 h 40 min 3 s
}}
}}
|component = <!--Cargo, not a spacecraft component-->
}}
<!--Cargo parameters-->
| payload_items =
| cargo_mass =
}}
| instruments = <!--a list of instruments on the satellite-->
| docking =
| undocking_date April 20, 1972, 18:07:31 UTC
| time_docked =
}}
| undocking_date April 24, 1972, 20:54:12 UTC
| time_docked =
}}
| crew_size = 3
| crew_members =
| crew_EVAs = 1 in cislunar space to retrieve film cassettes
| crew_EVA_duration = 1 h 23 min 42 s
| crew_callsign =
| crew_photo = Apollo 16 crew.jpg
| crew_photo_caption = Left to right: Mattingly, Young, Duke
| previous_mission = Apollo 15
| next_mission = Apollo 17
| programme = Apollo program
}}
Apollo 16 (April 1627, 1972) was the tenth crewed mission in the United States Apollo space program, administered by NASA, and the fifth and penultimate to land on the Moon. It was the second of Apollo's "J missions", with an extended stay on the lunar surface, a focus on science, and the use of the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). The landing and exploration were in the Descartes Highlands, a site chosen because some scientists expected it to be an area formed by volcanic action, though this proved not to be the case.
The mission was crewed by Commander John Young, Lunar Module Pilot Charles Duke and Command Module Pilot Ken Mattingly. Launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 16, 1972, Apollo 16 experienced a number of minor glitches en route to the Moon. These culminated with a problem with the spacecraft's main engine that resulted in a six-hour delay in the Moon landing as NASA managers contemplated having the astronauts abort the mission and return to Earth, before deciding the problem could be overcome. Although they permitted the lunar landing, NASA had the astronauts return from the mission one day earlier than planned.
After flying the Lunar Module to the Moon's surface on April 21, Young and Duke spent 71 hours—just under three days—on the lunar surface, during which they conducted three extravehicular activities or moonwalks, totaling 20 hours and 14 minutes. The pair drove the lunar rover, the second used on the Moon, for . On the surface, Young and Duke collected of lunar samples for return to Earth, including Big Muley, the largest Moon rock collected during the Apollo missions. During this time Mattingly orbited the Moon in the command and service module (CSM), taking photos and operating scientific instruments. Mattingly, in the command module, spent 126 hours and 64 revolutions in lunar orbit. After Young and Duke rejoined Mattingly in lunar orbit, the crew released a subsatellite from the service module (SM). During the return trip to Earth, Mattingly performed a one-hour spacewalk to retrieve several film cassettes from the exterior of the service module. Apollo 16 returned safely to Earth on April 27, 1972.
Crew and key Mission Control personnel
John Young, the mission commander, was 41 years old and a captain in the Navy at the time of Apollo 16. Becoming an astronaut in 1962 as part of the second group to be selected by NASA, he flew in Gemini 3 with Gus Grissom in 1965, becoming the first American not of the Mercury Seven to fly in space. He thereafter flew in Gemini 10 (1966) with Michael Collins and as command module pilot of Apollo 10 (1969). With Apollo 16, he became the second American, after Jim Lovell, to fly in space four times.
Thomas Kenneth "Ken" Mattingly, the command module pilot, was 36 years old and a lieutenant commander in the Navy at the time of Apollo 16. Mattingly had been selected in NASA's fifth group of astronauts in 1966. He was a member of the support crew for Apollo 8 and Apollo 9. Mattingly then undertook parallel training with Apollo 11's backup CMP, William Anders, who had announced his resignation from NASA effective at the end of July 1969 and would thus be unavailable if the first lunar landing mission was postponed. Had Anders left NASA before Apollo 11 flew, Mattingly would have taken his place on the backup crew.
Mattingly had originally been assigned to the prime crew of Apollo 13, but was exposed to rubella through Charles Duke, at that time with Young on Apollo 13's backup crew; Duke had caught it from one of his children. Mattingly never contracted the illness, but three days before launch was removed from the crew and replaced by his backup, Jack Swigert. Duke, also a Group 5 astronaut and a space rookie, had served on the support crew of Apollo 10 and was a capsule communicator (CAPCOM) for Apollo 11. However, after the cancellations of Apollos 18 and 19 were announced in September 1970, it made more sense to use astronauts who had already flown lunar missions as backups, rather than training others on what would likely be a dead-end assignment. Subsequently, Roosa and Mitchell were assigned to the backup crew, while Pogue and Carr were reassigned to the Skylab program where they flew on Skylab 4.
For projects Mercury and Gemini, a prime and a backup crew had been designated, but for Apollo, a third group of astronauts, known as the support crew, was also designated. Slayton created the support crews early in the Apollo Program on the advice of Apollo crew commander James McDivitt, who would lead Apollo 9. McDivitt believed that, with preparation going on in facilities across the U.S., meetings that needed a member of the flight crew would be missed. Support crew members were to assist as directed by the mission commander. Usually low in seniority, they assembled the mission's rules, flight plan, and checklists, and kept them updated. For Apollo 16, they were: Anthony W. England, Karl G. Henize, Henry W. Hartsfield Jr., Robert F. Overmyer and Donald H. Peterson.
Flight directors were Pete Frank and Philip Shaffer, first shift, Gene Kranz and Donald R. Puddy, second shift, and Gerry Griffin, Neil B. Hutchinson and Charles R. Lewis, third shift. Flight directors during Apollo had a one-sentence job description: "The flight director may take any actions necessary for crew safety and mission success." CAPCOMs were Haise, Roosa, Mitchell, James B. Irwin, England, Peterson, Hartsfield, and C. Gordon Fullerton.
Mission insignia and call signs
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The insignia of Apollo 16 is dominated by a rendering of an American eagle and a red, white and blue shield, representing the people of the United States, over a gray background representing the lunar surface. Overlaying the shield is a gold NASA vector, orbiting the Moon. On its gold-outlined blue border, there are 16 stars, representing the mission number, and the names of the crew members: Young, Mattingly, Duke. The insignia was designed from ideas originally submitted by the crew of the mission, by Barbara Matelski of the graphics shop at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston.
Young and Duke chose "Orion" for the Lunar Module's call sign, while Mattingly chose "Casper" for the command and service module. According to Duke, he and Young chose "Orion" for the LM because they wanted something connected with the stars. Orion is one of the brightest constellations as seen from Earth, and one visible to the astronauts throughout their journey. Duke also stated, "it is a prominent constellation and easy to pronounce and transmit to Mission Control". As Apollo 16 was the penultimate mission in the Apollo program and there was no major new hardware or procedures to test on the lunar surface, the last two missions (the other being Apollo 17) presented opportunities for astronauts to clear up some of the uncertainties in understanding the Moon's characteristics. Scientists sought information on the Moon's early history, which might be obtained from its ancient surface features, the lunar highlands. Previous Apollo expeditions, including Apollo 14 and Apollo 15, had obtained samples of pre-mare lunar material, likely thrown from the highlands by meteorite impacts. These were dated from before lava began to upwell from the Moon's interior and flood the low areas and basins. Nevertheless, no Apollo mission had actually visited the lunar highlands.
Apollo 14 had visited and sampled a ridge of material ejected by the impact that created the Mare Imbrium impact basin. Likewise, Apollo 15 had also sampled material in the region of Imbrium, visiting the basin's edge. Because the Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 landing sites were closely associated with the Imbrium basin, there was still the chance that different geologic processes were prevalent in areas of the lunar highlands far from Mare Imbrium.
At Alphonsus, three scientific objectives were determined to be of primary interest and paramount importance: the possibility of old, pre-Imbrium impact material from within the crater's wall, the composition of the crater's interior and the possibility of past volcanic activity on the floor of the crater at several smaller "dark halo" craters. Geologists feared, however, that samples obtained from the crater might have been contaminated by the Imbrium impact, thus preventing Apollo 16 from obtaining samples of pre-Imbrium material. There also remained the distinct possibility that this objective would have already been satisfied by the Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 missions, as the Apollo 14 samples had not yet been completely analyzed and samples from Apollo 15 had not yet been obtained. The backup LMP, Mitchell, was unavailable during the early part of the training, occupied with tasks relating to Apollo 14, but by September 1971 had joined the geology field trips. Before that, Tony England (a member of the support crew and the lunar EVA CAPCOM) or one of the geologist trainers would train alongside Haise on geology field trips.
Since Descartes was believed to be volcanic, a good deal of this training was geared towards volcanic rocks and features, but field trips were made to sites featuring other sorts of rock. As Young later commented, the non-volcanic training proved more useful, given that Descartes did not prove to be volcanic. In July 1971, they visited Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, for geology training exercises, the first time U.S. astronauts trained in Canada. By the end of the training, the field trips had become major exercises, involving up to eight astronauts and dozens of support personnel, attracting coverage from the media. For the exercise at the Nevada Test Site, where the massive craters left by nuclear explosions simulated the large craters to be found on the Moon, all participants had to have security clearance and a listed next-of-kin, and an overflight by CMP Mattingly required special permission.
]]
In addition to the field geology training, Young and Duke also trained to use their EVA space suits, adapt to the reduced lunar gravity, collect samples, and drive the Lunar Roving Vehicle. The astronauts spent much time studying the lunar samples brought back by earlier missions, learning about the instruments to be carried on the mission, and hearing what the principal investigators in charge of those instruments expected to learn from Apollo 16. This training helped Young and Duke, while on the Moon, quickly realize that the expected volcanic rocks were not there, even though the geologists in Mission Control initially did not believe them. Much of the training—according to Young, 350 hours—was conducted with the crew wearing space suits, something that Young deemed vital, allowing the astronauts to know the limitations of the equipment in doing their assigned tasks. Mattingly also received training in recognizing geological features from orbit by flying over the field areas in an airplane, and trained to operate the Scientific Instrument Module from lunar orbit.
Equipment
, January 27, 1972]]
Launch vehicle
The launch vehicle which took Apollo 16 to the Moon was a Saturn V, designated as AS-511. This was the eleventh Saturn V to be flown and the ninth used on crewed missions. Apollo 16's Saturn V was almost identical to Apollo 15's. One change that was made was the restoration of four retrorockets to the S-IC first stage, meaning there would be a total of eight, as on Apollo 14 and earlier. The retrorockets were used to minimize the risk of collision between the jettisoned first stage and the Saturn V. These four retrorockets had been omitted from Apollo 15's Saturn V to save weight, but analysis of Apollo 15's flight showed that the S-IC came closer than expected after jettison, and it was feared that if there were only four rockets and one failed, there might be a collision. Apollo 16's ALSEP consisted of a Passive Seismic Experiment (PSE, a seismometer), an Active Seismic Experiment (ASE), a Lunar Heat Flow Experiment (HFE), and a Lunar Surface Magnetometer (LSM). The ALSEP was powered by a SNAP-27 radioisotope thermoelectric generator, developed by the Atomic Energy Commission.
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The PSE added to the network of seismometers left by Apollo 12, 14 and 15. NASA intended to calibrate the Apollo 16 PSE by crashing the LM's ascent stage near it after the astronauts were done with it, an object of known mass and velocity impacting at a known location. However, NASA lost control of the ascent stage after jettison, and this did not occur. The ASE, designed to return data about the Moon's geologic structure, consisted of two groups of explosives: one, a line of "thumpers" were to be deployed attached to three geophones. The thumpers would be exploded during the ALSEP deployment. A second group was four mortars of different sizes, to be set off remotely once the astronauts had returned to Earth. Apollo 14 had also carried an ASE, though its mortars were never set off for fear of affecting other experiments.
The HFE involved the drilling of two holes into the lunar surface and emplacement of thermometers which would measure how much heat was flowing from the lunar interior. This was the third attempt to emplace a HFE: the first flew on Apollo 13 and never reached the lunar surface, while on Apollo 15, problems with the drill meant the probes did not go as deep as planned. The Apollo 16 attempt would fail after Duke had successfully emplaced the first probe; Young, unable to see his feet in the bulky spacesuit, pulled out and severed the cable after it wrapped around his leg. NASA managers vetoed a repair attempt due to the amount of time it would take. A HFE flew, and was deployed, on Apollo 17.
The LSM was designed to measure the strength of the Moon's magnetic field, which is only a small fraction of Earth's. Additional data would be returned by the use of the Lunar Portable Magnetometer (LPM), to be carried on the lunar rover and activated at several geology stops. Scientists also hoped to learn from an Apollo 12 sample, to be briefly returned to the Moon on Apollo 16, from which "soft" magnetism had been removed, to see if it had been restored on its journey. Measurements after the mission found that "soft" magnetism had returned to the sample, although at a lower intensity than before.
A Far Ultraviolet Camera/Spectrograph (UVC) was flown, the first astronomical observations taken from the Moon, seeking data on hydrogen sources in space without the masking effect of the Earth's corona. The instrument was placed in the LM's shadow and pointed at nebulae, other astronomical objects, the Earth itself, and any suspected volcanic vents seen on the lunar surface. The film was returned to Earth. When asked to summarize the results for a general audience, Dr. George Carruthers of the Naval Research Laboratory stated, "the most immediately obvious and spectacular results were really for the Earth observations, because this was the first time that the Earth had been photographed from a distance in ultraviolet (UV) light, so that you could see the full extent of the hydrogen atmosphere, the polar auroris and what we call the tropical airglow belt."
Four panels mounted on the LM's descent stage comprised the Cosmic Ray Detector, designed to record cosmic ray and solar wind particles. Three of the panels were left uncovered during the voyage to the Moon, with the fourth uncovered by the crew early in the EVA. The panels would be bagged for return to Earth. The free-standing Solar Wind Composition Experiment flew on Apollo 16, as it had on each of the lunar landings, for deployment on the lunar surface and return to Earth. Platinum foil was added to the aluminum of the previous experiments, to minimize contamination.Particles and Fields Subsatellite PFS-2The Apollo 16 Particles and Fields Subsatellite (PFS-2) was a small satellite released into lunar orbit from the service module. Its principal objective was to measure charged particles and magnetic fields all around the Moon as the Moon orbited Earth, similar to its sister spacecraft, PFS-1, released eight months earlier by Apollo 15. The two probes were intended to have similar orbits, ranging from above the lunar surface.
Like the Apollo 15 subsatellite, PFS-2 was expected to have a lifetime of at least a year before its orbit decayed and it crashed onto the lunar surface. The decision to bring Apollo 16 home early after there were difficulties with the main engine meant that the spacecraft did not go to the orbit which had been planned for PFS-2. Instead, it was ejected into a lower-than-planned orbit and crashed into the Moon a month later on May 29, 1972, after circling the Moon 424 times. This brief lifetime was because lunar mascons were near to its orbital ground track and helped pull PFS-2 into the Moon.
Mission events
Elements of the spacecraft and launch vehicle began arriving at Kennedy Space Center in July 1970, and all had arrived by September 1971. Apollo 16 was originally scheduled to launch on March 17, 1972. One of the bladders for the CM's reaction control system burst during testing. This issue, in combination with concerns that one of the explosive cords that would jettison the LM from the CSM after the astronauts returned from the lunar surface would not work properly, and a problem with Duke's spacesuit, made it desirable to slip the launch to the next launch window. Thus, Apollo 16 was postponed to April 16. The launch vehicle stack, which had been rolled out from the Vehicle Assembly Building on December 13, 1971, was returned thereto on January 27, 1972. It was rolled out again to Launch Complex 39A on February 9.
The official mission countdown began on Monday, April 10, 1972, at 8:30 am, six days before the launch. At this point the SaturnV rocket's three stages were powered up, and drinking water was pumped into the spacecraft. As the countdown began, the crew of Apollo 16 was participating in final training exercises in anticipation of a launch on April 16. The astronauts underwent their final preflight physical examination on April 11. The only holds in the countdown were the ones pre-planned in the schedule, and the weather was fair as the time for launch approached.Launch and outward journeyThe Apollo 16 mission launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 12:54 pm EST on April 16, 1972. Six minutes after the burn of the S-IVB, the command and service modules (CSM), containing the crew, separated from the rocket and traveled away from it before turning around and retrieving the lunar module from inside the expended rocket stage. The maneuver, performed by Mattingly and known as transposition, docking, and extraction, went smoothly.
Following transposition and docking, the crew noticed the exterior surface of the Lunar Module was giving off particles from a spot where the LM's skin appeared torn or shredded; at one point, Duke estimated they were seeing about five to ten particles per second. Young and Duke entered the Lunar Module through the docking tunnel connecting it with the command module to inspect its systems, at which time they did not spot any major issues.
Once on course towards the Moon, the crew put the spacecraft into a rotisserie "barbecue" mode in which the craft rotated along its long axis three times per hour to ensure even heat distribution about the spacecraft from the Sun. After further preparing the craft for the voyage, the crew began the first sleep period of the mission just under 15 hours after launch.
By the time Mission Control issued the wake-up call to the crew for flight day two, the spacecraft was about away from the Earth, traveling at about . As it was not due to arrive in lunar orbit until flight day four, flight days two and three were largely preparatory, consisting of spacecraft maintenance and scientific research. On day two, the crew performed an electrophoresis experiment, also performed on Apollo 14,
The remainder of day two included a two-second mid-course correction burn performed by the CSM's service propulsion system (SPS) engine to tweak the spacecraft's trajectory. Later in the day, the astronauts entered the Lunar Module for the second time to further inspect the landing craft's systems. The crew reported they had observed additional paint peeling from a portion of the LM's outer aluminum skin. Despite this, the crew discovered that the spacecraft's systems were performing nominally. Following the LM inspection, the crew reviewed checklists and procedures for the following days in anticipation of their arrival and the Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) burn. Command Module Pilot Mattingly reported "gimbal lock", meaning that the system to keep track of the craft's attitude was no longer accurate. Mattingly had to realign the guidance system using the Sun and Moon. At the end of day two, Apollo 16 was about away from Earth.
When the astronauts were awakened for flight day three, the spacecraft was about away from the Earth. The velocity of the craft steadily decreased, as it had not yet reached the lunar sphere of gravitational influence. The early part of day three was largely housekeeping, spacecraft maintenance and exchanging status reports with Mission Control in Houston. The crew performed the Apollo light flash experiment, or ALFMED, to investigate "light flashes" that were seen by Apollo lunar astronauts when the spacecraft was dark, regardless of whether their eyes were open. This was thought to be caused by the penetration of the eye by cosmic ray particles. During the second half of the day, Young and Duke again entered the Lunar Module to power it up and check its systems, and perform housekeeping tasks in preparation for the lunar landing. The systems were found to be functioning as expected. Following this, the crew donned their space suits and rehearsed procedures that would be used on landing day. Just before the end of flight day three at 59 hours, 19 minutes, 45 seconds after liftoff, while from the Earth and from the Moon, the spacecraft's velocity began increasing as it accelerated towards the Moon after entering the lunar sphere of influence.
After waking up on flight day four, the crew began preparations for the LOI maneuver that would brake them into orbit. After entering lunar orbit, the crew began preparations for the Descent Orbit Insertion (DOI) maneuver to further modify the spacecraft's orbital trajectory. The maneuver decreased the craft's pericynthion to . The remainder of flight day four was spent making observations and preparing for activation of the Lunar Module, undocking, and landing the following day.Lunar surfaceThe crew continued preparing for Lunar Module activation and undocking shortly after waking up to begin flight day five. The boom that extended the mass spectrometer in the SIM bay was stuck, semi-deployed. It was decided that Young and Duke would visually inspect the boom after undocking the LM from the CSM. They entered the LM for activation and checkout of the spacecraft's systems. Despite entering the LM 40 minutes ahead of schedule, they completed preparations only 10 minutes early due to numerous delays in the process.
For the rest of the two crafts' passes over the near side of the Moon, Mattingly prepared to shift Casper to a higher, near-circular orbit, while Young and Duke prepared Orion for the descent to the lunar surface. At this point, during tests of the CSM's steerable rocket engine in preparation for the burn to modify the craft's orbit, Mattingly detected oscillations in the SPS engine's backup gimbal system. According to mission rules, under such circumstances, Orion was to re-dock with Casper, in case Mission Control decided to abort the landing and use the Lunar Module's engines for the return trip to Earth. Instead, the two craft kept station, maintaining positions close to each other. After several hours of analysis, mission controllers determined that the malfunction could be worked around, and Young and Duke could proceed with the landing. The availability of the Lunar Roving Vehicle rendered their distance from the targeted point trivial. The landing delay caused by the malfunction in the CSM's main engine necessitated significant modifications to the mission schedule. Apollo 16 would spend one less day in lunar orbit after surface exploration had been completed to afford the crew ample margins in the event of further problems. In order to improve Young's and Duke's sleep schedule, the third and final moonwalk of the mission was trimmed from seven hours to five. After the pair donned and pressurized their space suits and depressurized the Lunar Module cabin, Young climbed out onto the "porch" of the LM, a small platform above the ladder. Duke handed Young a jettison bag full of trash to dispose of on the surface. Young then lowered the equipment transfer bag (ETB), containing equipment for use during the EVA, to the surface. Young descended the ladder and, upon setting foot on the lunar surface, became the ninth human to walk on the Moon. and other equipment. This was done without problems. On first driving the lunar rover, Young discovered that the rear steering was not working. He alerted Mission Control to the problem before setting up the television camera, after which Duke erected the United States flag. During lunar surface operations, Commander Young always drove the rover, while Lunar Module Pilot Duke assisted with navigation; this was a division of responsibilities used consistently throughout Apollo's J missions.
The day's next task was to deploy the ALSEP; while they were parking the lunar rover, on which the TV camera was mounted, to observe the deployment, the rear steering began functioning. After ALSEP deployment, they collected samples in the vicinity. About four hours after the beginning of EVA-1, they mounted the lunar rover and drove to the first geologic stop, Plum Crater, a crater on the rim of Flag Crater, about across. There, at a distance of from the LM, they sampled material in the vicinity, which scientists believed had penetrated through the upper regolith layer to the underlying Cayley Formation. It was there that Duke retrieved, at the request of Mission Control, the largest rock returned by an Apollo mission, a breccia nicknamed Big Muley after mission geology principal investigator William R. Muehlberger. The next stop of the day was Buster Crater, a small crater located north of the larger Spook Crater, about from the LM. There, Duke took pictures of Stone Mountain and South Ray Crater, while Young deployed the LPM. By this point, scientists were beginning to reconsider their pre-mission hypothesis that Descartes had been the setting of ancient volcanic activity, as the two astronauts had yet to find any volcanic material. Following their stop at Buster, Young did a "Grand Prix" demonstration drive of the lunar rover, which Duke filmed with a 16 mm movie camera. This had been attempted on Apollo 15, but the camera had malfunctioned. After completing more tasks at the ALSEP, they returned to the LM to close out the moonwalk. They reentered the LM 7hours, 6minutes, and 56 seconds after the start of the EVA. Once inside, they pressurized the LM cabin, went through a half-hour debriefing with scientists in Mission Control, and configured the cabin for the sleep period.
Second moonwalk
Waking up three and a half minutes earlier than planned, they discussed the day's timeline of events with Houston. The second lunar excursion's primary objective was to visit Stone Mountain to climb up the slope of about 20 degrees to reach a cluster of five craters known as "Cinco craters". They drove there in the LRV, traveling from the LM. At above the valley floor, the pair were at the highest elevation above the LM of any Apollo mission. They marveled at the view (including South Ray) from the side of Stone Mountain, which Duke described as "spectacular", then gathered samples in the vicinity. which was believed to be free of ejecta from South Ray, they spent about 40 minutes gathering samples. Twenty-five minutes after departing the Vacant Lot, they arrived at the final stop of the day, halfway between the ALSEP site and the LM. There, they dug a double core and conducted several penetrometer tests along a line stretching east of the ALSEP. At the request of Young and Duke, the moonwalk was extended by ten minutes. After returning to the LM to wrap up the second lunar excursion, they climbed back inside the landing craft's cabin, sealing and pressurizing the interior after 7hours, 23 minutes, and 26 seconds of EVA time, breaking a record that had been set on Apollo 15. After eating a meal and proceeding with a debriefing on the day's activities with Mission Control, they reconfigured the LM cabin and prepared for the sleep period. Third moonwalk Flight day seven was their third and final day on the lunar surface, returning to orbit to rejoin Mattingly in the CSM following the day's moonwalk. During the third and final lunar excursion, they were to explore North Ray crater, the largest of any of the craters any Apollo expedition had visited. After exiting Orion, the pair drove to North Ray crater. The drive was smoother than that of the previous day, as the craters were shallower and boulders were less abundant north of the immediate landing site. After passing Palmetto crater, boulders gradually became larger and more abundant as they approached North Ray in the lunar rover. Upon arriving at the rim of North Ray crater, they were away from the LM. After their arrival, the duo took photographs of the wide and deep crater. They visited a large boulder, taller than a four-story building, which became known as 'House Rock'. Samples obtained from this boulder delivered the final blow to the pre-mission volcanic hypothesis, proving it incorrect. House Rock had numerous bullet hole-like marks where micrometeoroids from space had impacted the rock. After pressurizing the LM cabin, the crew began preparing to return to lunar orbit.
Solo activities
After Orion was cleared for the landing attempt, Casper maneuvered away, and Mattingly performed a burn that took his spacecraft to an orbit of in preparation for his scientific work. Its work was also hampered by the delay in the beginning of Caspers orbital scientific work and the early return to Earth, and by a malfunction resulting in the overexposure of many of the photographs. Nevertheless, it was able to take a photograph of the Descartes area in which Orion is visible. The Mass Spectrometer boom did not fully retract following its initial extension, as had happened on Apollo 15, though it retracted far enough to allow the SPS engine to be fired safely when Casper maneuvered away from Orion before the LM began its Moon landing attempt. Although the Mass Spectrometer was able to operate effectively, it stuck near its fully deployed position prior to the burn that preceded rendezvous, and had to be jettisoned. Scientists had hoped to supplement the lunar data gained with more on the trans-Earth coast, but Apollo 15 data could be used instead. Young and Duke rendezvoused and re-docked with Mattingly in the CSM. To minimize the transfer of lunar dust from the LM cabin into the CSM, Young and Duke cleaned the cabin before opening the hatch separating the two spacecraft. After opening the hatch and reuniting with Mattingly, the crew transferred the samples Young and Duke had collected on the surface into the CSM for transfer to Earth. After transfers were completed, the crew would sleep before jettisoning the empty Lunar Module ascent stage the next day, when it was to be crashed intentionally into the lunar surface in order to calibrate the seismometer Young and Duke had left on the surface. Likely because of a failure by the crew to activate a certain switch in the LM before sealing it off, it tumbled after separation. NASA could not control it, and it did not execute the rocket burn necessary for the craft's intentional de-orbit. The ascent stage eventually crashed into the lunar surface nearly a year after the mission. The crew's next task, after jettisoning the Lunar Module ascent stage, was to release a subsatellite into lunar orbit from the CSM's scientific instrument bay. The burn to alter the CSM's orbit to that desired for the subsatellite had been cancelled; as a result, the subsatellite lasted just over a month in orbit, far less than its anticipated one year. Just under five hours after the subsatellite release, on the CSM's 65th orbit around the Moon, its service propulsion system main engine was reignited to propel the craft on a trajectory that would return it to Earth. The SPS engine performed the burn flawlessly despite the malfunction that had delayed their landing several days previously. At approximately from Earth, it was the second "deep space" EVA in history, performed at great distance from any planetary body. }}, it remains one of only three such EVAs, all performed during Apollo's J-missions under similar circumstances. During the EVA, Mattingly set up a biological experiment, the Microbial Ecology Evaluation Device (MEED), an experiment unique to Apollo 16, to evaluate the response of microbes to the space environment. The crew carried out various housekeeping and maintenance tasks aboard the spacecraft and ate a meal before concluding the day.
When the wake-up call was issued to the crew for their final day in space by CAPCOM England, the CSM was about from Earth, traveling just over . Just over three hours before splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, the crew performed a final course correction burn, using the spacecraft's thrusters to change their velocity by . Approximately ten minutes before reentry into Earth's atmosphere, the cone-shaped command module containing the three crewmembers separated from the service module, which would burn up during reentry. At 265 hours and 37 minutes into the mission, at a velocity of about , Apollo 16 began atmospheric reentry. At its maximum, the temperature of the heat shield was between . After parachute deployment and less than 14 minutes after reentry began, the command module splashed down in the Pacific Ocean southeast of the island of Kiritimati 265 hours, 51 minutes, 5seconds after liftoff. Scientific results and aftermath Scientific analysis of the rocks brought back to Earth confirmed that the Cayley Formation was not volcanic in nature. There was less certainty regarding the Descartes Formation, as it was not clear which if any of the rocks came from there. There was no evidence that showed that Stone Mountain was volcanic. One reason why Descartes had been selected was that it was visually different from previous Apollo landing sites, but rocks from there proved to be closely related to those from the Fra Mauro Formation, Apollo 14's landing site. Geologists realized that they had been so certain that Cayley was volcanic, they had not been open to dissenting views, and that they had been over-reliant on analogues from Earth, a flawed model because the Moon does not share much of the Earth's geologic history. They concluded that there are few if any volcanic mountains on the Moon. These conclusions were informed by observations from Mattingly, the first CMP to use binoculars in his observations, who had seen that from the perspective of lunar orbit, there was nothing distinctive about the Descartes Formation—it fit right in with the Mare Imbrium structure. Other results gained from Apollo 16 included the discovery of two new auroral belts around Earth.
After the mission, Young and Duke served as backups for Apollo 17, and Duke retired from NASA in December 1975. Young and Mattingly both flew the Space Shuttle: Young, who served as Chief Astronaut from 1974 to 1987, commanded the first Space Shuttle mission, STS-1 in 1981, as well as STS-9 in 1983, on the latter mission becoming the first person to journey into space six times. He retired from NASA in 2004. Mattingly also twice commanded Shuttle missions, STS-4 (1982) and STS-51-C (1985), before retiring from NASA in 1985.
Locations of spacecraft and other equipment
in Huntsville, Alabama]]
The Ticonderoga delivered the Apollo 16 command module to the North Island Naval Air Station, near San Diego, California, on Friday, May 5, 1972. On Monday, May 8, ground service equipment being used to empty the residual toxic reaction control system fuel in the command module tanks exploded in a Naval Air Station hangar. Forty-six people were sent to the hospital for 24 to 48 hours' observation, most suffering from inhalation of toxic fumes. Most seriously injured was a technician who suffered a fractured kneecap when a cart overturned on him. A hole was blown in the hangar roof 250 feet above; about 40 windows in the hangar were shattered. The command module suffered a three-inch gash in one panel.
The Apollo 16 command module Casper is on display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, following a transfer of ownership from NASA to the Smithsonian in November 1973. The Lunar Module ascent stage separated from the CSM on April 24, 1972, but NASA lost control of it. It orbited the Moon for about a year. Its impact site remains unknown,
The S-IVB was deliberately crashed into the Moon. However, due to a communication failure before impact the exact location was unknown until January 2016, when it was discovered within Mare Insularum by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, approximately southwest of Copernicus Crater.
Duke left two items on the Moon, both of which he photographed while there. One is a plastic-encased photo portrait of his family. The reverse of the photo is signed by Duke's family and bears this message: "This is the family of Astronaut Duke from Planet Earth. Landed on the Moon, April 1972." The other item was a commemorative medal issued by the United States Air Force, which was celebrating its 25th anniversary in 1972. He took two medals, leaving one on the Moon and donating the other to the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
In 2006, shortly after Hurricane Ernesto affected Bath, North Carolina, eleven-year-old Kevin Schanze discovered a piece of metal debris on the ground near his beach home. Schanze and a friend discovered a "stamp" on the flat metal sheet, which upon further inspection turned out to be a faded copy of the Apollo 16 mission insignia. NASA later confirmed the object to be a piece of the first stage of the SaturnV that had launched Apollo 16 into space. In July 2011, after returning the piece of debris at NASA's request, 16-year-old Schanze was given an all-access tour of the Kennedy Space Center and VIP seating for the launch of STS-135, the final mission of the Space Shuttle program.See also
* List of artificial objects on the Moon
* List of missions to the Moon
* List of spacewalks and moonwalks 1965–1999
References
Bibliography
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* ...": Personal Reflections on the Apollo Program |seriesThe NASA History Series |year1999 |publisherNASA |locationWashington, D.C. |isbn978-0-16-050139-5 |idNASA SP-4223 |chapterCharles M. Duke Jr. |chapter-urlhttps://history.nasa.gov/SP-4223/ch11.htm|ref=}}
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External links
* [http://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LPST/78d2s2/ Apollo 16 Traverses], Lunar Photomap 78D2S2(25)
* [https://history.nasa.gov/EP-95/ep95.htm On the Moon with Apollo 16: A guidebook to the Descartes Region] by Gene Simmons, NASA, EP-95, 1972
* [https://archive.org/details/NothingSoHiddenApollo16 Apollo 16: "Nothing so hidden..." (Part 1)] – NASA film on the Apollo 16 mission at the Internet Archive
* [https://archive.org/details/NothingSoHidden Apollo 16: "Nothing so hidden..." (Part 2)] – NASA film on the Apollo 16 mission at the Internet Archive
* [http://moonpans.com/vr Apollo Lunar Surface VR Panoramas] – QTVR panoramas at moonpans.com
* [http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_16/experiments/ Apollo 16 Science Experiments] at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
* [http://www.honeysucklecreek.net/msfn_missions/Apollo_16_mission/index.html Audio recording of Apollo 16 landing] as recorded at the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110613184415/http://hoohila.stanford.edu/commonwealth/programView.php?programID1269 Interview with the Apollo 16 Astronauts (28 June 1972)] from the [http://content.cdlib.org/view?docIdkt3g5032c1&brand=oac Commonwealth Club of California Records] at the [http://www.hoover.org/hila/ Hoover Institution Archives]
* [http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130129.html "Apollo 16: Driving on the Moon"] – Apollo 16 film footage of lunar rover at the Astronomy Picture of the Day, 29 January 2013
* [http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/529 Astronaut's Eye View of Apollo 16 Site], from LROC
Category:Apollo program missions
Category:Crewed missions to the Moon
Category:Charles Duke
Category:Ken Mattingly
Category:John Young (astronaut)
Category:1972 on the Moon
Category:1972 in the United States
Category:April 1972
Category:Extravehicular activity
Category:LQ20 quadrangle
Category:Lunar rovers
Category:Sample return missions
Category:Soft landings on the Moon
Category:Spacecraft launched in 1972
Category:Spacecraft which reentered in 1972
Category:Spacecraft launched by Saturn rockets
Category:Successful space missions | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_16 | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.289236 |
1971 | Apollo 17 | |LM:
}}
| SATCAT =
| mission_duration = 12 days, 13 hours, 51 minutes, 59 seconds
| spacecraft =
| manufacturer =
|LM: Grumman
}}
| launch_mass
| landing_mass
| launch_date UTC (12:33amEST)
| landing_site South Pacific Ocean (}})
| recovery_by =
| interplanetary =
|surface_EVAs = 3
|surface_EVA_time = 1st: 7 hours, 11 minutes, 53 seconds
|2nd: 7 hours, 36 minutes, 56 seconds
|3rd: 7 hours, 15 minutes, 8 seconds
}}
}}
}}
| crew_size = 3
| crew_members =
| crew_EVAs = 1 in cislunar space
| crew_EVA_duration = 1 hour, 5 minutes, 44 seconds (spacewalk to retrieve film cassettes)
| crew_callsign =
| crew_photo = Apollo 17 crew.jpg
| crew_photo_caption = Left to right: Schmitt, Cernan (seated), Evans
| previous_mission = Apollo 16
| programme = Apollo program
| next_mission = Apollo 18 (canceled)
}}
Apollo 17 (December 7–19, 1972) was the eleventh and final mission of NASA's Apollo program, the sixth and most recent time humans have set foot on the Moon. Commander Gene Cernan and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon, while Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans orbited above. Schmitt was the only professional geologist to land on the Moon; he was selected in place of Joe Engle, as NASA had been under pressure to send a scientist to the Moon. The mission's heavy emphasis on science meant the inclusion of a number of new experiments, including a biological experiment containing five mice that was carried in the command module.
Mission planners had two primary goals in deciding on the landing site: to sample lunar highland material older than that at Mare Imbrium and to investigate the possibility of relatively recent volcanic activity. They therefore selected Taurus–Littrow, where formations that had been viewed and pictured from orbit were thought to be volcanic in nature. Since all three crew members had backed up previous Apollo lunar missions, they were familiar with the Apollo spacecraft and had more time for geology training.
Launched at 12:33 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) on December 7, 1972, following the only launch-pad delay in the Apollo program, which was caused by a hardware problem, Apollo 17 was a "J-type" mission that included three days on the lunar surface, expanded scientific capability, and the use of the third Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV). Cernan and Schmitt landed in the Taurus–Littrow valley, completed three moonwalks, took lunar samples and deployed scientific instruments. Orange soil was discovered at Shorty crater; it proved to be volcanic in origin, although from early in the Moon's history. Evans remained in lunar orbit in the command and service module (CSM), taking scientific measurements and photographs. The spacecraft returned to Earth on December 19.
The mission broke several records for crewed spaceflight, including the longest crewed lunar landing mission (12 days, 14 hours), greatest distance from a spacecraft during an extravehicular activity of any type (7.6 kilometers or 4.7 miles), longest time on the lunar surface (75 hours), longest total duration of lunar-surface extravehicular activities (22 hours, 4 minutes),
|position1 = Commander
|crew1_up = Eugene A. Cernan
|flights1_up = Third and last
|position2 = Command Module Pilot (CMP)
|crew2_up = Ronald E. Evans
|flights2_up = Only
|position3 = Lunar Module Pilot (LMP)
|crew3_up = Harrison H. Schmitt
|flights3_up = Only
}}
In 1969, NASA announced that the backup crew of Apollo 14 would be Gene Cernan, Ronald Evans, and former X-15 pilot Joe Engle. This put them in line to be the prime crew of Apollo 17, because the Apollo program's crew rotation generally meant that a backup crew would fly as prime crew three missions later. Harrison Schmitt, who was a professional geologist as well as an astronaut, had served on the backup crew of Apollo 15, and thus, because of the rotation, would have been due to fly as lunar module pilot on Apollo 18.
In September 1970, the plan to launch Apollo 18 was cancelled. The scientific community pressed NASA to assign a geologist, rather than a pilot with non-professional geological training, to an Apollo landing. NASA subsequently assigned Schmitt to Apollo 17 as the lunar module pilot. After that, NASA's director of flight crew operations, Deke Slayton, was left with the question of who would fill the two other Apollo 17 slots: the rest of the Apollo 15 backup crew (Dick Gordon and Vance Brand), or Cernan and Evans from the Apollo 14 backup crew. Slayton ultimately chose Cernan and Evans. The prime crew of Apollo 17 was publicly announced on August 13, 1971.
When assigned to Apollo 17, Cernan was a 38-year-old captain in the United States Navy; he had been selected in the third group of astronauts in 1963, and flown as pilot of Gemini 9A in 1966 and as lunar module pilot of Apollo 10 in 1969 before he served on Apollo 14's backup crew. Evans, 39 years old when assigned to Apollo 17, had been selected as part of the fifth group of astronauts in 1966, and had been a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy. Schmitt, a civilian, was 37 years old when assigned Apollo 17, had a doctorate in geology from Harvard University, and had been selected in the fourth group of astronauts in 1965. Both Evans and Schmitt were making their first spaceflights.
For the backup crews of Apollo 16 and 17, the final Apollo lunar missions, NASA selected astronauts who had already flown Apollo lunar missions, to take advantage of their experience, and avoid investing time and money in training rookies who would be unlikely to ever fly an Apollo mission. The original backup crew for Apollo 17, announced at the same time as the prime crew, Originally, Apollo 16's CMP, Ken Mattingly, was to be assigned along with his crewmates, but he declined so he could spend more time with his family, his son having just been born, and instead took an assignment to the Space Shuttle program. Roosa had also served as backup CMP for Apollo 16.
For the Apollo program, in addition to the prime and backup crews that had been used in the Mercury and Gemini programs, NASA assigned a third crew of astronauts, known as the support crew. Their role was to provide any assistance in preparing for the missions that the missions director assigned then. Preparations took place in meetings at facilities across the US and sometimes needed a member of the flight crew to attend them. Because McDivitt was concerned that problems could be created if a prime or backup crew member was unable to attend a meeting, Slayton created the support crews to ensure that someone would be able to attend in their stead. Usually low in seniority, they also assembled the mission's rules, flight plan and checklists, and kept them updated; for Apollo 17, they were Robert F. Overmyer, Robert A. Parker and C. Gordon Fullerton.
Flight directors were Gerry Griffin, first shift, Gene Kranz and Neil B. Hutchinson, second shift, and Pete Frank and Charles R. Lewis, third shift. According to Kranz, flight directors during the program Apollo had a one-sentence job description, "The flight director may take any actions necessary for crew safety and mission success." Capsule communicators (CAPCOMs) were Fullerton, Parker, Young, Duke, Mattingly, Roosa, Alan Shepard and Joseph P. Allen.
Mission insignia and call signs
The insignia's most prominent feature is an image of the Greek sun god Apollo backdropped by a rendering of an American eagle, the red bars on the eagle mirroring those on the U.S. flag. Three white stars above the red bars represent the three crewmembers of the mission. The background includes the Moon, the planet Saturn, and a galaxy or nebula. The wing of the eagle partially overlays the Moon, suggesting humanity's established presence there.
|alt=The Apollo seventeen emblem containing Apollo, an eagle made of lines, the Moon, and Saturn; around the outside of the emblem the text Apollo XVII, and then the names Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt.]]
The insignia includes, along with the colors of the U.S. flag (red, white, and blue), the color gold, representative of a "golden age" of spaceflight that was to begin with Apollo 17. Following the cancellation of Apollo 20 in early 1970, NASA decided there would be no more than two Apollo missions per year. Part of the reason Apollo 17 was scheduled for December 1972 was to make it fall after the presidential election in November, ensuring that if there was a disaster, it would have no effect on President Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. Nixon had been deeply concerned about the Apollo 13 astronauts, and, fearing another mission in crisis as he ran for re-election, initially decided to omit the funds for Apollo 17 from the budget; he was persuaded to accept a December 1972 date for the mission.
Like Apollo 15 and 16, Apollo 17 was slated to be a "J-mission", an Apollo mission type that featured lunar surface stays of three days, higher scientific capability, and the usage of the Lunar Roving Vehicle. Since Apollo 17 was to be the final lunar landing of the Apollo program, high-priority landing sites that had not been visited previously were given consideration for potential exploration. Some sites were rejected at earlier stages. For instance, a landing in the crater Copernicus was rejected because Apollo 12 had already obtained samples from that impact, and three other Apollo expeditions had already visited the vicinity of Mare Imbrium, near the rim of which Copernicus is located. The lunar highlands near the crater Tycho were rejected because of the rough terrain that the astronauts would encounter there. A site on the lunar far side in the crater Tsiolkovskiy was rejected due to technical considerations and the operational costs of maintaining communication with Earth during surface operations. Lastly, a landing in a region southwest of Mare Crisium was rejected on the grounds that a Soviet spacecraft could easily access the site and retrieve samples; Luna 20 ultimately did so shortly after the Apollo 17 site selection was made. Schmitt advocated for a landing on the far side of the Moon until told by Director of Flight Operations Christopher C. Kraft that it would not happen as NASA lacked the funds for the necessary communications satellites.
The three sites that made the final consideration for Apollo 17 were Alphonsus crater, Gassendi crater, and the Taurus–Littrow valley. In making the final landing site decision, mission planners considered the primary objectives for Apollo 17: obtaining old highlands material a substantial distance from Mare Imbrium, sampling material from young volcanic activity (i.e., less than three billion years), and having minimal ground overlap with the orbital ground tracks of Apollo 15 and Apollo 16 to maximize the amount of new data obtained. unanimously recommended Taurus–Littrow at its final meeting in February 1972. Upon that recommendation, NASA selected Taurus–Littrow as the landing site for Apollo 17.
Training
, in May 1972|alt=A photo of Gene Cernan standing on a rock with holding a stick while participating in geology training.]]
As with previous lunar landings, the Apollo 17 astronauts undertook an extensive training program that included learning to collect samples on the surface, usage of the spacesuits, navigation in the Lunar Roving Vehicle, field geology training, survival training, splashdown and recovery training, and equipment training. The geology field trips were conducted as much as possible as if the astronauts were on the Moon: they would be provided with aerial images and maps, and briefed on features of the site and a suggested routing. The following day, they would follow the route, and have tasks and observations to be done at each of the stops.
The geology field trips began with one to Big Bend National Park in Texas in October 1971. The early ones were not specifically tailored to prepare the astronauts for Taurus–Littrow, which was not selected until February 1972, but by June, the astronauts were going on field trips to sites specifically selected to prepare for Apollo 17's landing site. Both Cernan and Schmitt had served on backup crews for Apollo landing missions, and were familiar with many of the procedures. Their trainers, such as Gordon Swann, feared that Cernan would defer to Schmitt as a professional geologist on matters within his field. Cernan also had to adjust for the loss of Engle, with whom he had trained for Apollo 14. In spite of these issues, Cernan and Schmitt worked well together as a team, and Cernan became adept at describing what he was seeing on geology field trips, and working independently of Schmitt when necessary.
The landing crew aimed for a division of labor so that, when they arrived in a new area, Cernan would perform tasks such as adjusting the antenna on the Lunar Roving Vehicle so as to transmit to Earth while Schmitt gave a report on the geological aspects of the site. The scientists in the geology "backroom" relied on Schmitt's reports to adjust the tasks planned for that site, which would be transmitted to the CapCom and then to Cernan and Schmitt. According to William R. Muehlberger, one of the scientists who trained the astronauts, "In effect [Schmitt] was running the mission from the Moon. But we set it up this way. All of those within the geological world certainly knew it, and I had a sneaking hunch that the top brass knew it too, but this is a practical way out, and they didn't object."
Also participating in some of the geology field trips were the commander and lunar module pilot of the backup crew. The initial field trips took place before the Apollo 15 astronauts were assigned as the backup crew for Apollo 17 in February 1972. Either one or both of Scott and Irwin of Apollo 15 took part in four field trips, though both were present together for only two of them. After they were removed from the backup crew, the new backup commander and LMP, Young and Duke, took part in the final four field trips. On field trips, the backup crew would follow half an hour after the prime crew, performing identical tasks, and have their own simulated CapCom and Mission Control guiding them. The Apollo 17 astronauts had fourteen field trips—the Apollo 11 crew had only one.
Evans did not go on the geology field trips, having his own set of trainers—by this time, geology training for the CMP was well-established. He would fly with a NASA geologist/pilot, Dick Laidley, over geologic features, with part of the exercise conducted at , and part at to . The higher altitude was equivalent to what could be seen from the planned lunar orbit of about 60 nmi with binoculars. Evans would be briefed for several hours before each exercise, and given study guides; afterwards, there would be debriefing and evaluation. Evans was trained in lunar geology by Farouk El-Baz late in the training cycle; this continued until close to launch. The CMP was given information regarding the lunar features he would overfly in the CSM and which he was expected to photograph. Mission hardware and experiments Spacecraft and launch vehicle The Apollo 17 spacecraft comprised CSM-114 (consisting of Command Module 114 (CM-114) and Service Module 114 (SM-114)); Lunar Module 12 (LM-12); a Spacecraft-Lunar Module Adapter (SLA) numbered SLA-21; and a Launch Escape System (LES). The LES contained a rocket motor that would propel the CM to safety in the event of an aborted mission in the moments after launch, while the SLA housed the LM during the launch and early part of the flight. The LES was jettisoned after the launch vehicle ascended to the point that it was not needed, while the SLA was left atop the S-IVB third stage of the rocket after the CSM and LM separated from it.
The launch vehicle, SA-512, was one of fifteen Saturn V rockets built, and was the twelfth to fly. With a weight at launch of ( of which was attributable to the spacecraft), Apollo 17's vehicle was slightly lighter than Apollo 16, but heavier than every other crewed Apollo mission.
Preparation and assembly
The first piece of the launch vehicle to arrive at Kennedy Space Center was the S-II second stage, on October 27, 1970; it was followed by the S-IVB on December 21; the S-IC first stage did not arrive until May 11, 1972, followed by the Instrument Unit on June 7. By then, LM-12 had arrived, the ascent stage on June 16, 1971, and the descent stage the following day; they were not mated until May 18, 1972. CM-114, SM-114 and SLA-21 all arrived on March 24, 1972. The rover reached Kennedy Space Center on June 2, 1972.
, with the mockup Lunar Module in the background, August 1972|alt=Schmitt, (left), Cernan, (right) in a training LRV, with the Lunar Landing Module in the background.]]
The CM and the service module (SM) were mated on March 28, 1972, and the testing of the spacecraft began that month. Following the July 1972 removal from the vacuum chamber, the LM's landing gear was installed, and it, the CSM and the SLA were mated to each other. The combined craft was moved into the Vehicle Assembly Building in August for further testing, after which it was mounted on the launch vehicle. After completing testing, including a simulated mission, the LRV was placed in the LM on August 13.
Erection of the stages of the launch vehicle began on May 15, 1972, in High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building, and was completed on June 27. Since the launch vehicles for Skylab 1 and Skylab 2 were being processed in that building at the same time, this marked the first time NASA had three launch vehicles there since the height of the Apollo program in 1969. After the spacecraft was mounted on the launch vehicle on August 24, it was rolled out to Pad 39-A on August 28. Although this was not the final time a Saturn V would fly (another would lift Skylab to orbit), area residents reacted as though it was, and 5,000 of them watched the rollout, during which the prime crew joined the operating crew from Bendix atop the crawler. a Lunar Seismic Profiling Experiment (LSPE), to detect nearby seismic activity, and a Lunar Ejecta and Meteorites Experiment (LEME), to measure the velocity and energy of dust particles. Of these, only the HFE had been flown before; the others were new.
The HFE had been flown on the aborted Apollo 13 mission, as well as on Apollo 15 and 16, but placed successfully only on Apollo 15, and unexpected results from that device made scientists anxious for a second successful emplacement. It was successfully deployed on Apollo 17. The lunar gravimeter was intended to detect wavers in gravity, which would provide support for Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity; it ultimately failed to function as intended. On previous missions, the Code Cathode Gauge experiment had measured the quantity of atmospheric particles, but the LACE determined which gases were present: principally neon, helium and hydrogen. The LEME had a set of detectors to measure the characteristics of the dust particles it sought. It was hoped that the LEME would detect dust impacting the Moon from elsewhere, such as from comets or interstellar space, but analysis showed that it primarily detected dust moving at slow speeds across the lunar surface.
All powered ALSEP experiments that remained active were deactivated on September 30, 1977, principally because of budgetary constraints.
Other lunar-surface science
. The Surface Electrical Properties (SEP) experiment receiver is the antenna on the right-rear of the vehicle|altBlack and white photo of a lunar rover with a lunar landing module in the background.]]Like Apollo 15 and 16, Apollo 17 carried a Lunar Roving Vehicle. In addition to being used by the astronauts for transport from station to station on the mission's three moonwalks, the LRV was used to transport the astronauts' tools, communications equipment, and the lunar samples they gathered. The Apollo 17 LRV was also used to carry some of the scientific instruments, such as the Traverse Gravimeter Experiment (TGE) and Surface Electrical Properties (SEP) experiment. The Apollo 17 LRV traveled a cumulative distance of approximately in a total drive time of about four hours and twenty-six minutes; the greatest distance Cernan and Schmitt traveled from the lunar module was about .
This was the only mission to carry the TGE, which was built by Draper Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As gravimeters had been useful in studying the Earth's internal structure, the objective of this experiment was to do the same on the Moon. The gravimeter was used to obtain relative gravity measurements at the landing site in the immediate vicinity of the lunar module, as well as various locations on the mission's traverse routes. Scientists would then use this data to help determine the geological substructure of the landing site and the surrounding vicinity. Measurements were taken while the TGE was mounted on the LRV, and also while the device was placed on the lunar surface. A total of 26 measurements were taken with the TGE during the mission's three moonwalks, with productive results.
The SEP was also unique to Apollo 17, and included two major components: a transmitting antenna deployed near the lunar module and a receiver mounted on the LRV. At different stops during the mission's traverses, electrical signals traveled from the transmitting device, through the ground, and were received at the LRV. The electrical properties of the lunar regolith could be determined by comparison of the transmitted and received electrical signals. The results of this experiment, which are consistent with lunar rock composition, show that there is almost no water in the area of the Moon in which Apollo 17 landed, to a depth of .Orbital science Biological experiments
Apollo 17's CM carried a biological cosmic ray experiment (BIOCORE), containing five mice that had been implanted with radiation monitors under their scalps to see whether they suffered damage from cosmic rays. These animals were placed in individual metal tubes inside a sealed container that had its own oxygen supply, and flown on the mission. All five were pocket mice (Perognathus longimembris); this species was chosen because it was well-documented, small, easy to maintain in an isolated state (not requiring drinking water during the mission and with highly concentrated waste), and for its ability to withstand environmental stress. Officially, the mice—four male and one female—were assigned the identification numbers A3326, A3400, A3305, A3356 and A3352. Unofficially, according to Cernan, the Apollo 17 crew dubbed them Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey.
Four of the five mice survived the flight, though only two of them appeared healthy and active; the cause of death of the fifth mouse was not determined. Of those that survived, the study found lesions in the scalp itself and, in one case, the liver. The scalp lesions and liver lesions appeared to be unrelated to one another; nothing was found that could be attributed to cosmic rays.
The Biostack experiment was similar to one carried on Apollo 16, and was designed to test the effects of the cosmic rays encountered in space travel on microorganisms that were included, on seeds, and on the eggs of simple animals (brine shrimp and beetles), which were carried in a sealed container. After the mission, the microorganisms and seeds showed little effect, but many of the eggs of all species failed to hatch, or to mature normally; many died or displayed abnormalities. Scientific Instrument Module The Apollo 17 SM contained the scientific instrument module (SIM) bay. The SIM bay housed three new experiments for use in lunar orbit: a lunar sounder, an infrared scanning radiometer, and a far-ultraviolet spectrometer. A mapping camera, panoramic camera, and a laser altimeter, which had been carried previously, were also included in the SIM bay.
The lunar sounder was to beam electromagnetic impulses toward the lunar surface, which were designed with the objective of obtaining data to assist in developing a geological model of the interior of the Moon to an approximate depth of .
Apollo 17 carried a sodium-iodide crystal identical to the ones in the gamma-ray spectrometer flown on Apollo 15 and 16. Data from this, once it was examined on Earth, was to be used to help form a baseline, allowing for subtraction of rays from the CM or from cosmic radiation to gain better data from the earlier results. In addition, the S-band transponders in the CSM and LM were pointed at the Moon to gain data on its gravitational field. Results from the Lunar Orbiter probes had revealed that lunar gravity varies slightly due to the presence of mass concentrations, or "mascons". Data from the missions, and from the lunar subsatellites left by Apollo 15 and 16, were used to map such variations in lunar gravity.
Mission events
Launch and outbound trip
Originally planned to launch on December 6, 1972, at 9:53 p.m. EST (2:53 a.m. on December 7 UTC), Apollo 17 was the final crewed SaturnV launch, and the only one to occur at night. The launch was delayed by two hours and forty minutes due to an automatic cutoff in the launch sequencer at the T−30 second mark in the countdown. The cause of the problem was quickly determined to be the launch sequencer's failure to automatically pressurize the liquid oxygen tank in the third stage of the rocket; although launch control noticed this and manually caused the tank to pressurize, the sequencer did not recognize the fix and therefore paused the countdown. The clock was reset and held at the T−22 minute mark while technicians worked around the malfunction in order to continue with the launch. This pause was the only launch delay in the Apollo program caused by a hardware problem. The countdown then resumed, and the liftoff occurred at 12:33 a.m. EST on December 7, 1972. The launch window, which had begun at the originally planned launch time of 9:53 p.m. on December 6, remained open until 1:31 a.m., the latest time at which a launch could have occurred during the December 6–7 window.
Approximately 500,000 people observed the launch in the immediate vicinity of Kennedy Space Center, despite the early-morning hour. The launch was visible as far away as , and observers in Miami, Florida, reported a "red streak" crossing the northern sky. Ground controllers chose a faster trajectory for Apollo 17 than originally planned to allow the vehicle to reach lunar orbit at the planned time, despite the launch delay. The Command and Service Module separated from the S-IVB approximately half an hour following the S-IVB trans-lunar injection burn, after which Evans turned the spacecraft to face the LM, still attached to the S-IVB. The CSM then docked with the LM and extracted it from the S-IVB. Following the LM extraction, Mission Control programmed the S-IVB, no longer needed to propel the spacecraft, to impact the Moon and trip the seismometers left by prior Apollo crews.
Among their other activities during the outbound trip, the crew photographed the Earth from the spacecraft as it travelled towards the Moon. One of these photographs is now known as The Blue Marble. The crew found that one of the latches holding the CSM and LM together was unlatched. While Schmitt and Cernan were engaged in a second period of LM housekeeping beginning just before sixty hours into the Mission, Evans worked on the balky latch. He was successful, and left it in the position it would need to be in for the CSM-LM docking that would occur upon return from the lunar surface.
Also during the outward journey, the crew performed a heat flow and convection demonstration, as well as the Apollo light-flash experiment. A few hours before entry into lunar orbit, the SIM door on the SM was jettisoned. At approximately 2:47 p.m. EST on December 10, the service propulsion system engine on the CSM ignited to slow down the CSM/LM stack into lunar orbit. Following orbit insertion and orbital stabilization, the crew began preparations for the landing at Taurus–Littrow.
Soon after completing their preparations for landing and just over two hours following the LM's undocking from the CSM, Cernan and Schmitt began their descent to the Taurus–Littrow valley on the lunar surface with the ignition of the Lunar Module's descent propulsion system (DPS) engine. During lunar-surface operations, Commander Cernan always drove the rover, while Lunar Module Pilot Schmitt was a passenger who assisted with navigation. This division of responsibilities between the two crew positions was used consistently throughout Apollo's J-missions.
The first lunar excursion began four hours after landing, at 6:54 p.m. EST on December 11. After exiting through the hatch of the LM and descending the ladder to the footpad, Cernan took the first step on the lunar surface of the mission. Just before doing so, Cernan remarked, "I'm on the footpad. And, Houston, as I step off at the surface at Taurus–Littrow, we'd like to dedicate the first step of Apollo 17 to all those who made it possible." After Cernan surveyed the exterior of the LM and commented on the immediate landing site, Schmitt joined Cernan on the surface. The crew made a short-lived fix using duct tape at the beginning of the second EVA, attaching a paper map to the damaged fender. Lunar dust stuck to the tape's surface, however, preventing it from adhering properly. Following deployment and testing the maneuverability of the rover, the crew deployed the ALSEP just west of the landing site. The ALSEP deployment took longer than had been planned, with the drilling of core holes presenting some difficulty, meaning the geological portion of the first EVA would need to be shortened, cancelling a planned visit to Emory crater. Instead, following the deployment of the ALSEP, Cernan and Schmitt drove to Steno crater, to the south of the landing site. The objective at Steno was to sample the subsurface material excavated by the impact that formed the crater. The astronauts gathered of samples, took seven gravimeter measurements, and deployed two explosive packages. The explosive packages were later detonated remotely; the resulting explosions detected by geophones placed by the astronauts and also by seismometers left during previous missions. The first EVA ended after seven hours and twelve minutes. Cernan and Schmitt began their second lunar excursion. The first order of business was to provide the rover's fender a better fix. Overnight, the flight controllers devised a procedure communicated by John Young: taping together four stiff paper maps The astronauts carried out the new fix which did its job without failing until near the end of the third excursion. Cernan and Schmitt then departed for station 2—Nansen Crater, at the foot of the South Massif. When they arrived, their range from the Challenger was 7.6 kilometers (4.7 miles, 25,029 feet). This remains the furthest distance any spacefarers have ever traveled away from the safety of a pressurizable spacecraft while on a planetary body, and also during an EVA of any type. The astronauts were at the extremity of their "walkback limit", a safety constraint meant to ensure that they could walk back to the LM if the rover failed. They began a return trip, traveling northeast in the rover.
At station 3, Schmitt fell to the ground while working, looking so awkward that Parker jokingly told him that NASA's switchboard had lit up seeking Schmitt's services for Houston's ballet group, and the site of station 3 was in 2019 renamed Ballet Crater. Cernan took a sample at Station 3 that was to be maintained in vacuum until better analytical techniques became available, joking with the CAPCOM, Parker, about placing a note inside. The container remained unopened until 2022.
Stopping at station 4—Shorty crater—the astronauts discovered orange soil, which proved to be very small beads of volcanic glass formed over 3.5 billion years ago. This discovery caused great excitement among the scientists at Mission Control, who felt that the astronauts may have discovered a volcanic vent. However, post-mission sample analysis revealed that Shorty is not a volcanic vent, but rather an impact crater. Analysis also found the orange soil to be a remnant of a lava fountain. This lava fountain sprayed molten lava high into the lunar sky in the Moon's early days, some 3.5 billion years ago and long before Shorty's creation. The orange volcanic beads were droplets of molten lava from the fountain that solidified and were buried by lava deposits until exposed by the impact that formed Shorty, less than 20 million years ago.
The final stop before returning to the LM was Camelot crater; throughout the sojourn, the astronauts collected of samples, took another seven gravimeter measurements, and deployed three more explosive packages. Schmitt also collected a sample, designated as Sample 76535, at geology station 6 near the base of the North Massif; the sample, a troctolite, was later identified as the oldest known "unshocked" lunar rock, meaning it has not been damaged by high-impact geological events. Scientists have therefore used Sample 76535 in thermochronological studies to determine if the Moon formed a metallic core or, as study results suggest, a core dynamo.
Before concluding the moonwalk, the crew collected a breccia rock, dedicating it to the nations of Earth, 70 of which were represented by students touring the U.S. and present in Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, at the time. Portions of this sample, known as the Friendship Rock, were subsequently distributed to the nations represented by the students. A plaque located on the LM, commemorating the achievements made during the Apollo program, was then unveiled. Before reentering the LM for the final time, Cernan remarked,}}
Cernan then followed Schmitt into the LM; the final lunar excursion had a duration of seven hours and fifteen minutes. Solo activities While Cernan and Schmitt were on the lunar surface, Evans remained alone in the CSM in lunar orbit and was assigned a number of observational and scientific tasks to perform while awaiting the return of his crewmates. In addition to the operation of the various orbital science equipment contained in the CSM's SIM bay, Evans conducted both visual and photographic observation of surface features from his aerial vantage point. The orbit of the CSM having been modified to an elliptical orbit in preparation for the LM's departure and eventual descent, one of Evans' solo tasks in the CSM was to circularize its orbit such that the CSM would remain at approximately the same distance above the surface throughout its orbit. Evans observed geological features visible to him and used handheld cameras to record certain visual targets. To photograph portions of the surface that were not illuminated by the sun while Evans passed over them, Evans relied in conjunction on exposure and Earthlight. Evans photographed such features as the craters Eratosthenes and Copernicus, as well as the vicinity of Mare Orientale, using this technique. According to the Apollo 17 Mission Report, Evans was able to capture all scientific photographic targets, as well as some other targets of interest.
Similarly to the crew of Apollo 16, Evans (as well as Schmitt, while in lunar orbit) reported seeing light "flashes" apparently originating from the lunar surface, known as transient lunar phenomena (TLP); Evans reported seeing these "flashes" in the vicinity of Grimaldi crater and Mare Orientale. The causes of TLP are not well-understood and, though inconclusive as an explanation, both of the sites in which Evans reported seeing TLP are the general locations of outgassing from the Moon's interior. Meteorite impacts are another possible explanation.
The flight plan kept Evans busy, making him so tired he overslept one morning by an hour, despite the efforts of Mission Control to awaken him. Before the LM departed for the lunar surface, Evans had discovered that he had misplaced his pair of scissors, necessary to open food packets. Cernan and Schmitt lent him one of theirs. The instruments in the SIM bay functioned without significant hindrance during the orbital portion of the mission, though the lunar sounder and the mapping camera encountered minor problems. Evans spent approximately 148 total hours in lunar orbit, including solo time and time spent together with Cernan and Schmitt, which is more time than any other individual has spent orbiting the Moon.
Evans was also responsible for piloting the CSM during the orbital phase of the mission, maneuvering the spacecraft to alter and maintain its orbital trajectory. In addition to the initial orbital recircularization maneuver shortly after the LM's departure, one of the solo activities Evans performed in the CSM in preparation for the return of his crewmates from the lunar surface was the plane change maneuver. This maneuver was meant to align the CSM's trajectory to the eventual trajectory of the LM to facilitate rendezvous in orbit. Evans fired the SPS engine of the CSM for about 20 seconds in successfully adjusting the CSM's orbital plane.
Return to Earth
Cernan and Schmitt lifted off from the lunar surface in the ascent stage of the LM on December14, at 5:54 p.m. EST. The return to lunar orbit took just over seven minutes. The LM, piloted by Cernan, and the CSM, piloted by Evans, maneuvered, and redocked about two hours after liftoff from the surface. After docking, the crew transferred equipment and lunar samples from the LM to the CSM for return to Earth. At 6:35 p.m. EST on December16, the CSM's SPS engine was ignited once more to propel the spacecraft away from the Moon on a trajectory back towards Earth. The trans-Earth injection SPS burn lasted just over two minutes.
During the return to Earth, Evans performed a 65-minute EVA to retrieve film cassettes from the service module's SIM bay, with assistance from Schmitt who remained at the command module's hatch. At approximately 160,000 nautical miles (184,000 mi; 296,000 km) from Earth, it was the third "deep space" EVA in history, performed at great distance from any planetary body. As of , it remains one of only three such EVAs, all performed during Apollo's J-missions under similar circumstances. It was the last EVA of the Apollo program.
During the trip back to Earth, the crew operated the infrared radiometer in the SM, as well as the ultraviolet spectrometer. One midcourse correction was performed, lasting 9 seconds. On December 19, the crew jettisoned the no-longer-needed SM, leaving only the CM for return to Earth. The Apollo 17 spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere and splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean at 2:25 p.m. EST, from the recovery ship, . Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt were then retrieved by a recovery helicopter piloted by Commander Edward E. Dahill, III and were safe aboard the recovery ship 52 minutes after splashdown. As the final Apollo mission concluded successfully, Mission Control in Houston was filled with many former flight controllers and astronauts, who applauded as America returned to Earth. Aftermath and spacecraft locations
]]
image of the Apollo 17 mission site taken in 2011, the Challenger descent stage is in the center, the Lunar Roving Vehicle appears in the lower right.]]
Following their mission, the crew undertook both domestic and international tours, visiting 29 states and 11 countries. The tour kicked off at Super Bowl VII, with the crew leading the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance; the CM America was also displayed during the pregame activities.
None of the Apollo 17 astronauts flew in space again. Cernan retired from NASA and the Navy in 1976. He died in 2017. Evans retired from the Navy in 1976 and from NASA in 1977, entering the private sector. He died in 1990. Schmitt resigned from NASA in 1975 prior to his successful run for a United States Senate seat from New Mexico in 1976. There, he served one six-year term.
The Command Module America is currently on display at Space Center Houston at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The ascent stage of Lunar Module Challenger impacted the Moon on December 15, 1972, at 06:50:20.8 UTC (1:50 a.m. EST), at .
Eugene Cernan's flown Apollo 17 spacesuit is in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (NASM), where it was transferred in 1974, and Harrison Schmitt's is in storage at NASM's Paul E. Garber Facility. Amanda Young of NASM indicated in 2004 that Schmitt's suit is in the best condition of the flown Apollo lunar spacesuits, and therefore is not on public display. Ron Evans' spacesuit was also transferred from NASA in 1974 to the collection of the NASM; it remains in storage.
Since Apollo 17's return, there have been attempts to photograph the landing site, where the LM's descent stage, LRV and some other mission hardware, remain. In 2009 and again in 2011, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed the landing site from increasingly low orbits. At least one group has indicated an intention to visit the site as well; in 2018, the German space company PTScientists said that it planned to land two lunar rovers nearby.
Gallery
<gallery mode="packed">
File:Apollo17-03412-cp.jpg|Case for transporting Moon rocks, Apollo 17 mission, on display at the Florida Historic Capitol Museum, Tallahassee, Florida, 2019
</gallery>
See also
* List of Apollo missions
* List of missions to the Moon
* List of astronauts by year of selection
* List of human spaceflights
* List of human spaceflight programs
* List of landings on extraterrestrial bodies
* List of crewed spacecraft
* List of NASA missions
* List of spacewalks and moonwalks 1965–1999
* Moon landing
* The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks
* Apollo in Real Time
Notes
References
Bibliography
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External links
* [https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LPST/43d1s2/ Apollo 17 Traverses], 43D1S2(25), Lunar Photomap at Lunar and Planetary Institute
* [http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo17info.html "Apollo 17"] – Detailed mission information by David R. Williams, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
* [https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4012/vol3/table2.45.htm "Table 2-45. Apollo 17 Characteristics"] from NASA Historical Data Book: Volume III: Programs and Projects 1969–1978 by Linda Neuman Ezell, NASA SP-4012, NASA History Series (1988)
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/a17/a17.html Apollo 17 Lunar Surface Journal]
* [http://apollo17.org/ "Apollo 17 Real-Time Mission Experience"] – All mission audio, film, video, and photography presented in real-time.
* [http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_17/experiments/ Apollo 17 Mission Experiments Overview] at the Lunar and Planetary Institute
* [http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/documents/NASA%20CR-146107.pdf Apollo 17 Voice Transcript Pertaining to the Geology of the Landing Site] (PDF) by N. G. Bailey and G. E. Ulrich, United States Geological Survey, 1975
* [https://history.nasa.gov/apsr/apsr.htm "Apollo Program Summary Report"] (PDF), NASA, JSC-09423, April 1975
* [http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4009/cover.htm The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology] NASA, NASA SP-4009
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* [https://web.archive.org/web/20071022054959/http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0407/online_extra.html?cNewsletters&n2Q04_Insider2&t=internal "The Final Flight"] – Excerpt from the September 1973 issue of National Geographic magazine
Category:Gene Cernan
Category:Ronald Evans (astronaut)
Category:Harrison Schmitt
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Category:Crewed missions to the Moon
Category:Sample return missions
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Category:Successful space missions | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17 | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.357903 |
1973 | American Revolution | The American Revolution (1765–1783) was an ideological and political movement in the Thirteen Colonies in what was then British America. The revolution culminated in the American Revolutionary War, which was launched on April 19, 1775, in the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Leaders of the American Revolution were colonial separatist leaders who, as British subjects, initially sought incremental levels of autonomy but came to embrace the cause of full independence and the necessity of prevailing in the Revolutionary War to obtain it. The Second Continental Congress, which represented the colonies and convened in present-day Independence Hall in Philadelphia, formed the Continental Army and appointed George Washington as its commander-in-chief in June 1775, and unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence the following year, which inspired, formalized, and escalated the war. For most of the eight-year war, its outcome appeared uncertain. But in 1781, a decisive victory by Washington and the Continental Army in the Siege of Yorktown inspired King George III and the British to negotiate an end to colonial rule in the colonies and acknowledge their independence, which was codified in the Treaty of Paris in 1783, leading to the establishment of the sovereign United States of America.
Discontent with colonial rule began shortly after the defeat of France in the French and Indian War in 1763. Even though the colonies had fought in and supported the war, British Parliament imposed new taxes to compensate for wartime costs and turned control of the colonies' western lands over to the British officials in Montreal. Representatives from several colonies convened the Stamp Act Congress in 1765; its "Declaration of Rights and Grievances" argued that taxation without representation violated their rights as Englishmen. In 1767, tensions flared again following British Parliament's passage of the Townshend Acts. In an effort to quell the mounting rebellion, King George III deployed British troops to Boston, where British troops killed protesters in the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. In 1772, anti-tax demonstrators destroyed the Royal Navy customs schooner Gaspee off present-day Warwick, Rhode Island. On December 16, 1773, in a seminal event in the American Revolution's escalation, Sons of Liberty activists disguised as Indians instigated the Boston Tea Party, during which they boarded and dumped chests of tea owned by the British East India Company into Boston Harbor. London responded by closing Boston Harbor and enacting a series of punitive laws, which effectively ended self-government in Massachusetts but also served to expand and intensify the revolutionary cause.
In late 1774, 12 of the Thirteen Colonies sent delegates to the First Continental Congress, which met inside Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia; the Province of Georgia joined in 1775. The First Continental Congress began coordinating Patriot resistance through underground networks of committees. Following the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Washington and the Continental Army responded by surrounding Boston, forcing the British to withdraw by sea in March 1776, and leaving Patriots in control in every colony. In August 1775, King George III proclaimed Massachusetts to be in a state of open defiance and rebellion.
In 1776, the Second Continental Congress began debating and deliberating on the Articles of Confederation, an effort to establish a self-governing rule of law in the Thirteen Colonies. On July 2, they passed the Lee Resolution, affirming their support for national independence, and on July 4, 1776, they unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, authored primarily by Thomas Jefferson, which embodied the political philosophies of liberalism and republicanism, rejected monarchy and aristocracy, and famously proclaimed that "all men are created equal".
The Revolutionary War continued for another five years during which France ultimately entered the war, supporting the colonial cause of independence. On September 28, 1781, Washington, with support from Marquis de Lafayette, the French Army, and French Navy, led the Continental Army's most decisive victory, capturting roughly 7,500 British troops led by British general Charles Cornwallis during the Siege of Yorktown, leading to the collapse of King George's control of Parliament and consensus in Parliament that the war should be ended on American terms. On September 3, 1783, the British signed the Treaty of Paris, granting their former colonies nearly all the territory east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes. About 60,000 Loyalists migrated to other British territories in Canada and elsewhere, but the great majority remained in the United States. With its victory in the American Revolution, the United States became the first constitutional republic in world history founded on the consent of the governed and the rule of law.
Origins
, the Thirteen Colonies on the Atlantic Coast, and the Indian Reserve as defined by the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The border between the red and pink areas represents the 1763 Proclamation line, and the orange area represents Spanish colonial claims.]]
Under the British policy of salutary neglect, Britain traded with the colonies but otherwise mostly left them alone over the first 150 years of the colonies’ existence. The colonists became accustomed to running their own affairs, and they liked it. This British policy changed significantly after the French and Indian War, prompting the Thirteen Colonies to seek greater autonomy from Britain. After the Revolution, one colonist, Capt. Levi Preston, of Danvers, Massachusetts, was asked why the Americans rebelled against England, responded, "…we always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn’t mean we should."
1651–1763: Early seeds
The Thirteen Colonies were established in the 17th century as part of the English Empire, and they formed part of the British Empire after the union of England and Scotland in 1707. The development of a unique American identity can be traced to the English Civil War (1642–1651) and its aftermath. The Puritan colonies of New England supported the Commonwealth government responsible for the execution of King Charles I. After the Stuart Restoration of 1660, Massachusetts did not recognize Charles II as the legitimate king for more than a year after his coronation. In King Philip's War (1675–1678), the New England colonies fought a handful of Native American tribes without military assistance from England, thereby contributing to the development of a uniquely American identity separate from that of the British people.
In the 1680s, Charles and his brother, James II, attempted to bring New England under direct English control. The colonists fiercely opposed this, and the Crown nullified their colonial charters in response. In 1686, James finalized these efforts by consolidating the separate New England colonies along with New York and New Jersey into the Dominion of New England. Edmund Andros was appointed royal governor and tasked with governing the new Dominion under his direct rule. Colonial assemblies and town meetings were restricted, new taxes were levied, and rights were abridged. Dominion rule triggered bitter resentment throughout New England. When James tried to rule without Parliament, the English aristocracy removed him from power in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This was followed by the 1689 Boston revolt, which overthrew Dominion rule. Colonial governments reasserted their control after the revolt. The new monarchs, William and Mary, granted new charters to the individual New England colonies, and local democratic self-government was restored.
After the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the British Empire was a constitutional monarchy with sovereignty in the King-in-Parliament. Aristocrats inherited seats in the House of Lords, while the gentry and merchants controlled the elected House of Commons. The king ruled through cabinet ministers who depended on majority support in the Commons to govern effectively. British subjects on both sides of the Atlantic proudly claimed the unwritten British constitution, with its guarantees of the rights of Englishmen, protected personal liberty better than any other government. It served as the model for colonial governments. The Crown appointed a royal governor to exercise executive power. Property owners elected a colonial assembly with powers to legislate and levy taxes, but the British government reserved the right to veto colonial legislation. Radical Whig ideology profoundly influenced American political philosophy with its love of liberty and opposition to tyrannical government.
With little industry except shipbuilding, the colonies exported agricultural products to Britain in return for manufactured goods. They also imported molasses, rum, and sugar from the British West Indies. The British government pursued a policy of mercantilism in order to grow its economic and political power. According to mercantilism, the colonies existed for the mother country's economic benefit, and the colonists' economic needs took second place. In 1651, Parliament passed the first in a series of Navigation Acts, which restricted colonial trade with foreign countries. The Thirteen Colonies could trade with the rest of the empire but only ship certain commodities like tobacco to Britain. Any European imports bound for British America had to first pass through an English port and pay customs duties. Other laws regulated colonial industries, such as the Wool Act 1698, the Hat Act 1731, and the Iron Act 1750.
Colonial reactions to these policies were mixed. The Molasses Act 1733 placed a duty of six pence per gallon upon foreign molasses imported into the colonies. This act was particularly egregious to the New England colonists, who protested it as taxation without representation. The act increased the smuggling of foreign molasses, and the British government ceased enforcement efforts after the 1740s. On the other hand, certain merchants and local industries benefitted from the restrictions on foreign competition. The limits on foreign-built ships greatly benefitted the colonial shipbuilding industry, particularly in New England. Some argue that the economic impact was minimal on the colonists, but the political friction that the acts triggered was more serious, as the merchants most directly affected were also the most politically active.
The British government lacked the resources and information needed to control the colonies. Instead, British officials negotiated and compromised with colonial leaders to gain compliance with imperial policies. The colonies defended themselves with colonial militias, and the British government rarely sent military forces to America before 1755. According to historian Robert Middlekauff, "Americans had become almost completely self-governing" before the American Revolution .
During the French and Indian War (1754–1763), the British government fielded 45,000 soldiers, half British Regulars and half colonial volunteers. The colonies also contributed money to the war effort; however, two-fifths of this spending was reimbursed by the British government. Great Britain defeated France and acquired that nation's territory east of the Mississippi River.
In early 1763, the Bute ministry decided to permanently garrison 10,000 soldiers in North America. This would allow approximately 1,500 politically well-connected British Army officers to remain on active duty with full pay (stationing a standing army in Great Britain during peacetime was politically unacceptable). A standing army would provide defense against Native Americans in the west and foreign populations in newly acquired territories (the French in Canada and the Spanish in Florida). In addition, British soldiers could prevent white colonists from instigating conflict with Native Americans and help collect customs duties.
Migration beyond the Appalachian Mountains increased after the French threat was removed, and Native Americans launched Pontiac's War (1763–1766) in response. The Grenville ministry issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, designating the territory between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River as an Indian Reserve closed to white settlement. The Proclamation failed to stop westward migration while angering settlers, fur traders, and land speculators in the Thirteen Colonies.1764–1766: Taxes imposed and withdrawn
in a colonial newspaper]]
George Grenville became prime minister in 1763, and "the need for money played a part in every important decision made by Grenville regarding the colonies—and for that matter by the ministries that followed up to 1776." The national debt had grown to £133 million with annual debt payments of £5 million (out of an £8 million annual budget). Stationing troops in North America on a permanent basis would cost another £360,000 a year. On a per capita basis, Americans only paid 1 shilling in taxes to the empire compared to 26 shillings paid by the English. Grenville believed that the colonies should help pay the troop costs.
In 1764 Parliament passed the Sugar Act, decreasing the existing customs duties on sugar and molasses but providing stricter measures of enforcement and collection. That same year, Grenville proposed direct taxes on the colonies to raise revenue, but he delayed action to see whether the colonies would propose some way to raise the revenue themselves.
Parliament passed the Stamp Act in March 1765, which imposed direct taxes on the colonies for the first time. All official documents, newspapers, almanacs, and pamphlets were required to have the stamps—even decks of playing cards. The colonists did not object that the taxes were high; they were actually low. American spokesmen such as Samuel Adams, James Otis, John Hancock, John Dickinson, Thomas Paine, and many others, rejected aristocracy and propounded "republicanism" as the political philosophy that was best suited to American conditions.
The Parliament at Westminster saw itself as the supreme lawmaking authority throughout the Empire and thus entitled to levy any tax without colonial approval or even consultation. They argued that the colonies were legally British corporations subordinate to the British Parliament. Parliament insisted that the colonists effectively enjoyed a "virtual representation", as most British people did, since only a small minority of the British population were eligible to elect representatives to Parliament. However, Americans such as James Otis maintained that there was no one in Parliament responsible specifically to any colonial constituency, so they were not "virtually represented" by anyone in Parliament.
The Rockingham government came to power in July 1765, and Parliament debated whether to repeal the stamp tax or to send an army to enforce it. Benjamin Franklin appeared before them to make the case for repeal, explaining that the colonies had spent heavily in manpower, money, and blood defending the empire, and that further taxes to pay for those wars were unjust and might bring about a rebellion. Parliament agreed and repealed the tax on February 21, 1766, but they insisted in the Declaratory Act of March 1766 that they retained full power to make laws for the colonies "in all cases whatsoever". The repeal nonetheless caused widespread celebrations in the colonies.1767–1773: Townshend Acts and the Tea Act
's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, published in the Pennsylvania Chronicle, December 1767]]
burned HMS Gaspee, a British customs schooner in Narragansett Bay.]]
, led by Samuel Adams and Sons of Liberty, has become a mainstay of American patriotic lore.]]
In 1767, the British Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which placed duties on several staple goods, including paper, glass, and tea, and established a Board of Customs in Boston to more rigorously execute trade regulations. Parliament's goal was not so much to collect revenue but to assert its authority over the colonies. The new taxes were enacted on the belief that Americans only objected to internal taxes and not to external taxes such as custom duties. However, in his widely read pamphlet, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson argued against the constitutionality of the acts because their purpose was to raise revenue and not to regulate trade. Colonists responded to the taxes by organizing new boycotts of British goods. These boycotts were less effective, however, as the goods taxed by the Townshend Acts were widely used.
In February 1768, the Assembly of Massachusetts Bay Colony issued a circular letter to the other colonies urging them to coordinate resistance. The governor dissolved the assembly when it refused to rescind the letter. Meanwhile, a riot broke out in Boston in June 1768 over the seizure of the sloop Liberty, owned by John Hancock, for alleged smuggling. Customs officials were forced to flee, prompting the British to deploy troops to Boston. A Boston town meeting declared that no obedience was due to parliamentary laws and called for the convening of a convention. A convention assembled but only issued a mild protest before dissolving itself. In January 1769, Parliament responded to the unrest by reactivating the Treason Act 1543 which called for subjects outside the realm to face trials for treason in England. The governor of Massachusetts was instructed to collect evidence of said treason, and the threat caused widespread outrage, though it was not carried out.
On March 5, 1770, a large crowd gathered around a group of British soldiers on a Boston street. The crowd grew threatening, throwing snowballs, rocks, and debris at them. One soldier was clubbed and fell. There was no order to fire, but the soldiers panicked and fired into the crowd. They hit 11 people; three civilians died of wounds at the scene of the shooting, and two died shortly after. The event quickly came to be called the Boston Massacre. The soldiers were tried and acquitted (defended by John Adams), but the widespread descriptions soon began to turn colonial sentiment against the British. This accelerated the downward spiral in the relationship between Britain and the province of Massachusetts. A total of about 7,000 to 8,000 Patriots served on these Committees; Loyalists were excluded. The committees became the leaders of the American resistance to British actions, and later largely determined the war effort at the state and local level. When the First Continental Congress decided to boycott British products, the colonial and local Committees took charge, examining merchant records and publishing the names of merchants who attempted to defy the boycott by importing British goods.
Meanwhile, Parliament passed the Tea Act lowering the price of taxed tea exported to the colonies, to help the British East India Company undersell smuggled untaxed Dutch tea. Special consignees were appointed to sell the tea to bypass colonial merchants. The act was opposed by those who resisted the taxes and also by smugglers who stood to lose business. In every colony demonstrators warned merchants not to bring in tea that included the hated new tax. In most instances, the consignees were forced by the Americans to resign and the tea was turned back, but Massachusetts governor Hutchinson refused to allow Boston merchants to give in to pressure.
A town meeting in Boston determined that the tea would not be landed, and ignored a demand from the governor to disperse. On December 16, 1773, a group of men, led by Samuel Adams and dressed to evoke the appearance of Indigenous people, boarded the ships of the East India Company and dumped £10,000 worth of tea from their holds (approximately £636,000 in 2008) into Boston Harbor. Decades later, this event became known as the Boston Tea Party and remains a significant part of American patriotic lore.1774–1775: Intolerable Acts
depicts Prime Minister Lord North, author of the Boston Port Act, forcing the Intolerable Acts down the throat of America, whose arms are restrained by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield with a tattered "Boston Petition" trampled on the ground beside her. Lord Sandwich pins down her feet and peers up her robes; behind them, Mother Britannia weeps while France and Spain look on.]]
The British government responded by passing four laws that came to be known as the Intolerable Acts, further darkening colonial opinion towards England. The first was the Massachusetts Government Act which altered the Massachusetts charter and restricted town meetings. The second was the Administration of Justice Act which ordered that all British soldiers to be tried were to be arraigned in Britain, not in the colonies. The third was the Boston Port Act, which closed the port of Boston until the British had been compensated for the tea lost in the Boston Tea Party. The fourth was the Quartering Act of 1774, which allowed royal governors to house British troops in the homes of citizens without permission of the owner.
In response, Massachusetts patriots issued the Suffolk Resolves and formed an alternative shadow government known as the Provincial Congress, which began training militia outside British-occupied Boston. In September 1774, the First Continental Congress convened, consisting of representatives from each colony, to serve as a vehicle for deliberation and collective action. During secret debates, conservative Joseph Galloway proposed the creation of a colonial Parliament that would be able to approve or disapprove acts of the British Parliament, but his idea was tabled in a vote of 6 to 5 and was subsequently removed from the record. Congress called for a boycott beginning on December 1, 1774, of all British goods; it was enforced by new local committees authorized by the Congress.
It also began coordinating Patriot resistance by militias which existed in every colony and which had gained military experience in the French and Indian War. For the first time, the Patriots were armed and unified against Parliament.
Military hostilities begin
, a political cartoon created in 1754 attributed to Benjamin Franklin, urged the Thirteen Colonies to unite.]]
King George declared Massachusetts to be in a state of rebellion in February 1775 and the British garrison received orders to seize the rebels' weapons and arrest their leaders, leading to the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. The Patriots assembled a militia 15,000 strong and laid siege to Boston, occupied by 6500 British soldiers. The Second Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia on June 14, 1775. The congress was divided on the best course of action. They authorized formation of the Continental Army and appointed George Washington as its commander-in-chief, and produced the Olive Branch Petition in which they attempted to come to an accord with King George. The king, however, issued a Proclamation of Rebellion which declared that the states were "in rebellion" and the members of Congress were traitors. The Battle of Bunker Hill followed on June 17, 1775. It was a British victory—but at a great cost: about 1,000 British casualties from a garrison of about 6,000, as compared to 500 American casualties from a much larger force.
As Benjamin Franklin wrote to Joseph Priestley in October 1775:
In the winter of 1775, the Americans invaded northeastern Quebec under generals Benedict Arnold and Richard Montgomery, expecting to rally sympathetic colonists there. The attack was a failure; many Americans were killed, captured, or died of smallpox.
In March 1776, aided by the fortification of Dorchester Heights with cannons recently captured at Fort Ticonderoga, the Continental Army led by George Washington forced the British to evacuate Boston. The revolutionaries now fully controlled all thirteen colonies and were ready to declare independence. There still were many Loyalists, but they were no longer in control anywhere by July 1776, and all of the Royal officials had fled.
Creating new state constitutions
Following the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, the Patriots had control of Massachusetts outside Boston's city limits, and the Loyalists suddenly found themselves on the defensive with no protection from the British army. In each of the Thirteen Colonies, American patriots overthrew their existing governments, closed courts, and drove out British colonial officials. They held elected conventions and established their own legislatures, which existed outside any legal parameters established by the British. New constitutions were drawn up in each state to supersede royal charters. They proclaimed that they were now states, no longer colonies.
On January 5, 1776, New Hampshire ratified the first state constitution. In May 1776, Congress voted to suppress all forms of crown authority, to be replaced by locally created authority. New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia created their constitutions before July 4. Rhode Island and Connecticut simply took their existing royal charters and deleted all references to the crown. The new states were all committed to republicanism, with no inherited offices. On May 26, 1776, John Adams wrote James Sullivan from Philadelphia warning against extending the franchise too far:
The resulting constitutions in states, including those of Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia featured:
* Property qualifications for voting and even more substantial requirements for elected positions (though New York and Maryland lowered property qualifications)Second Continental Congress
in New York City on July 9, 1776, five days after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.]]
In April 1776, the North Carolina Provincial Congress issued the Halifax Resolves explicitly authorizing its delegates to vote for independence. By June, nine Provincial Congresses supported independence from Britain, and Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and New York followed. Richard Henry Lee was instructed by the Virginia legislature to propose independence, and he did so on June 7, 1776.
Declaration of Independence
Gathered at Pennsylvania State House, later renamed Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, 56 of the nation's Founding Fathers, representing America's Thirteen Colonies, unanimously adopted and issued to King George III the Declaration of Independence, which was drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson and presented by the Committee of Five, which was charged with authoring it. The Congress struck several provisions of Jefferson's draft, and then adopted it unanimously on July 4. The Declaration embodied the political philosophies of liberalism and republicanism, rejected monarchy and aristocracy, and famously proclaimed that "all men are created equal". With the issuance of the Declaration of Independence, each colony began operating as independent and sovereign states. The next step was to form a union to facilitate international relations and alliances.
On November 5, 1777, the Congress approved the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union and sent it to each state for ratification. The Congress immediately began operating under the Articles' terms, providing a structure of shared sovereignty during prosecution of the Revolutionary War and facilitating international relations and alliances. The Articles were fully ratified on March 1, 1781. At that point, the Continental Congress was dissolved and a new government of the United States in Congress Assembled took its place the following day, on March 2, 1782, with Samuel Huntington leading the Congress as presiding officer.
Defending the revolution
British return: 1776–1777
in New York Harbor in the summer of 1776, as depicted in ''Harper's Magazine'' in 1876]]
According to British historian Jeremy Black, the British had significant advantages, including a highly trained army, the world's largest navy, and an efficient system of public finance that could easily fund the war. However, they seriously misunderstood the depth of support for the American Patriot position, misinterpreting the situation as merely a large-scale riot. The British government believed that they could overawe the Americans by sending a large military and naval force:
In the Siege of Boston, Washington forced the British out of the city in the spring of 1776, and neither the British nor the Loyalists controlled any significant areas. The British, however, were amassing forces at their naval base at Halifax, Nova Scotia. They returned in force in July 1776, landing in New York and defeating Washington's Continental Army in August at the Battle of Brooklyn. This gave the British control of New York City and its strategic harbor. Following that victory, they requested a meeting with representatives from Congress to negotiate an end to hostilities.
A delegation including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin met British admiral Richard Howe on Staten Island in New York Harbor on September 11 in what became known as the Staten Island Peace Conference. Howe demanded that the Americans retract the Declaration of Independence, which they refused to do, and negotiations ended. The British then seized New York City and nearly captured Washington's army. They made the city their main political and military base of operations, holding it until November 1783. The city became the destination for Loyalist refugees and a focal point of Washington's intelligence network. The dilemma was that tens of thousands of Loyalists were under American control and American retaliation would have been easy. The British built much of their strategy around using these Loyalists. The British maltreated the prisoners whom they held, resulting in more deaths to American prisoners of war than from combat operations.
American alliances after 1778
troops hired out to the British by their German sovereigns]]
The capture of a British army at Saratoga encouraged the French to formally enter the war in support of Congress, and Benjamin Franklin negotiated a permanent military alliance in early 1778; France thus became the first foreign nation to officially recognize the Declaration of Independence. On February 6, 1778, the United States and France signed the Treaty of Amity and Commerce and the Treaty of Alliance. William Pitt spoke out in Parliament urging Britain to make peace in America and to unite with America against France, while British politicians who had sympathized with colonial grievances now turned against the Americans for allying with Britain's rival and enemy.
The Spanish and the Dutch became allies of the French in 1779 and 1780 respectively, forcing the British to fight a global war without major allies, and requiring it to slip through a combined blockade of the Atlantic. Britain began to view the American war for independence as merely one front in a wider war, and the British chose to withdraw troops from America to reinforce the British colonies in the Caribbean, which were under threat of Spanish or French invasion. British commander Sir Henry Clinton evacuated Philadelphia and returned to New York City. Washington intercepted him in the Battle of Monmouth Court House, the last major battle fought in the north. After an inconclusive engagement, the British retreated to New York City. The northern war subsequently became a stalemate, as the focus of attention shifted to the smaller southern theater.1778–1783: the British move south
The British Royal Navy blockaded ports and held New York City for the duration of the war, and other cities for brief periods, but failed in their effort to destroy Washington's forces. The British strategy now concentrated on a campaign in the southern states. With fewer regular troops at their disposal, the British commanders saw the "southern strategy" as a more viable plan, as they perceived the south as strongly Loyalist with a large population of recent immigrants and large numbers of slaves who might be tempted to run away from their masters to join the British and gain their freedom.
Beginning in late December 1778, the British captured Savannah and controlled the Georgia coastline. In 1780, they launched a fresh invasion and took Charleston. A significant victory at the Battle of Camden meant that royal forces soon controlled most of Georgia and South Carolina. The British set up a network of forts inland, hoping that the Loyalists would rally to the flag. Not enough Loyalists turned out, however, and the British had to fight their way north into North Carolina and Virginia with a severely weakened army. Behind them, much of the territory that they had already captured dissolved into a chaotic guerrilla war, fought predominantly between bands of Loyalists and American militia, which negated many of the gains that the British had previously made. The fleet did arrive, but so did a larger French fleet. The French were victorious in the Battle of the Chesapeake, and the British fleet returned to New York for reinforcements, leaving Cornwallis trapped. In October 1781, the British surrendered their second invading army of the war under a siege by the combined French and Continental armies commanded by Washington.
End of the war
Washington did not know if or when the British might reopen hostilities after Yorktown. They still had 26,000 troops occupying New York City, Charleston, and Savannah, together with a powerful fleet. The French army and navy departed, so the Americans were on their own in 1782–83. The American treasury was empty, and the unpaid soldiers were growing restive, almost to the point of mutiny or possible coup d'etat. Washington dispelled the unrest among officers of the Newburgh Conspiracy in 1783, and Congress subsequently created the promise of a five years bonus for all officers.
Historians continue to debate whether the odds were long or short for American victory. John E. Ferling says that the odds were so long that the American victory was "almost a miracle". On the other hand, Joseph Ellis says that the odds favored the Americans, and asks whether there ever was any realistic chance for the British to win. He argues that this opportunity came only once, in the summer of 1776, and Admiral Howe and his brother General Howe "missed several opportunities to destroy the Continental Army .... Chance, luck, and even the vagaries of the weather played crucial roles." Ellis's point is that the strategic and tactical decisions of the Howes were fatally flawed because they underestimated the challenges posed by the Patriots. Ellis concludes that, once the Howe brothers failed, the opportunity "would never come again" for a British victory.
Support for the conflict had never been strong in Britain, where many sympathized with the Americans, but now it reached a new low. King George wanted to fight on, but his supporters lost control of Parliament and they launched no further offensives in America on the eastern seaboard.}}Paris peace treaty
by Benjamin West portrays the American delegation about to sign the 1783 Treaty of Paris (John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Laurens, W.T. Franklin). The British delegation refused to pose and the painting was never completed.]]
During negotiations in Paris, the American delegation discovered that France supported American independence but no territorial gains, hoping to confine the new nation to the area east of the Appalachian Mountains. The Americans opened direct secret negotiations with London, cutting out the French. British Prime Minister Lord Shelburne was in charge of the British negotiations, and he saw a chance to make the United States a valuable economic partner, facilitating trade and investment opportunities. The US obtained all the land east of the Mississippi River, including southern Canada, but Spain took control of Florida from the British. It gained fishing rights off Canadian coasts, and agreed to allow British merchants and Loyalists to recover their property. Prime Minister Shelburne foresaw highly profitable two-way trade between Britain and the rapidly growing United States, which did come to pass. The blockade was lifted and American merchants were free to trade with any nation anywhere in the world.
The British largely abandoned their Indigenous allies, who were not a party to this treaty and did not recognize it until they were defeated militarily by the United States. However, the British did sell them munitions and maintain forts in American territory until the Jay Treaty of 1795.
Losing the war and the Thirteen Colonies was a shock to Britain. The war revealed the limitations of Britain's fiscal-military state when they discovered that they suddenly faced powerful enemies with no allies, and they were dependent on extended and vulnerable transatlantic lines of communication. The defeat heightened dissension and escalated political antagonism to the King's ministers. The King went so far as to draft letters of abdication, although they were never delivered. Inside Parliament, the primary concern changed from fears of an over-mighty monarch to the issues of representation, parliamentary reform, and government retrenchment. Reformers sought to destroy what they saw as widespread institutional corruption, and the result was a crisis from 1776 to 1783. The crisis ended after 1784 confidence in the British constitution was restored during the administration of Prime Minister William Pitt.
Finance
honoring Founding Father and financier Robert Morris at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia]]
in 1775]]
Britain's war against the Americans, the French, and the Spanish cost about £100 million. The Treasury borrowed 40 percent of the money that it needed. Britain had a sophisticated financial system based on the wealth of thousands of landowners who supported the government, together with banks and financiers in London. In London the British had relatively little difficulty financing their war, keeping their suppliers and soldiers paid, and hiring tens of thousands of German soldiers.
In sharp contrast, Congress and the American states had no end of difficulty financing the war. In 1775, there was at most 12 million dollars in gold in the colonies, not nearly enough to cover current transactions, let alone finance a major war. The British made the situation much worse by imposing a tight blockade on every American port, which cut off almost all trade. One partial solution was to rely on volunteer support from militiamen and donations from patriotic citizens. Another was to delay actual payments, pay soldiers and suppliers in depreciated currency, and promise that it would be made good after the war. Indeed, the soldiers and officers were given land grants in 1783 to cover the wages that they had earned but had not been paid during the war. The national government did not have a strong leader in financial matters until 1781, when Robert Morris was named Superintendent of Finance of the United States. Congress made issues of paper money, known colloquially as "Continental Dollars", in 1775–1780 and in 1780–1781. The first issue amounted to 242 million dollars. This paper money would supposedly be redeemed for state taxes, but the holders were eventually paid off in 1791 at the rate of one cent on the dollar. By 1780, the paper money was so devalued that the phrase "not worth a Continental" became synonymous with worthlessness. The skyrocketing inflation was a hardship on the few people who had fixed incomes, but 90 percent of the people were farmers and were not directly affected by it. Debtors benefited by paying off their debts with depreciated paper. The greatest burden was borne by the soldiers of the Continental Army whose wages were usually paid late and declined in value every month, weakening their morale and adding to the hardships of their families.
Beginning in 1777, Congress repeatedly asked the states to provide money, but the states had no system of taxation and were of little help. By 1780, Congress was making requisitions for specific supplies of corn, beef, pork, and other necessities, an inefficient system which barely kept the army alive. Starting in 1776, the Congress sought to raise money by loans from wealthy individuals, promising to redeem the bonds after the war. The bonds were redeemed in 1791 at face value, but the scheme raised little money because Americans had little specie, and many of the rich merchants were supporters of the Crown. The French secretly supplied the Americans with money, gunpowder, and munitions to weaken Great Britain; the subsidies continued when France entered the war in 1778, and the French government and Paris bankers lent large sums<!-- see Talk:American Revolution/Archive 5#Funding from France for source idea --> to the American war effort. The Americans struggled to pay off the loans; they ceased making interest payments to France in 1785 and defaulted on installments due in 1787. In 1790, however, they resumed regular payments on their debts to the French, and settled their accounts with the French government in 1795 when James Swan, an American banker, assumed responsibility for the balance of the debt in exchange for the right to refinance it at a profit.
Concluding the revolution
at Independence Hall in Philadelphia depicted in Howard Chandler Christy's 1940 painting, Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States]]
The war ended in 1783 and was followed by a period of prosperity. The national government was still operating under the Articles of Confederation and settled the issue of the western territories, which the states ceded to Congress. American settlers moved rapidly into those areas, with Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee becoming states in the 1790s.
However, the national government had no money either to pay the war debts owed to European nations and the private banks, or to pay Americans who had been given millions of dollars of promissory notes for supplies during the war. Nationalists led by Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and other veterans feared that the new nation was too fragile to withstand an international war, or even the repetition of internal revolts such as the Shays' Rebellion of 1786 in Massachusetts. They convinced Congress to call the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. The Convention adopted a new Constitution which provided for a republic with a much stronger national government in a federal framework, including an effective executive in a check-and-balance system with the judiciary and legislature. The Constitution was ratified in 1788, after a fierce debate in the states over the proposed new government. The new administration under President George Washington took office in New York in March 1789. James Madison spearheaded Congressional legislation proposing amendments to the Constitution as assurances to those cautious about federal power, guaranteeing many of the inalienable rights that formed a foundation for the revolution. Rhode Island was the final state to ratify the Constitution in 1790, the first ten amendments were ratified in 1791 and became known as the United States Bill of Rights.
National debt
, the first Secretary of the Treasury during the Presidency of George Washington]]
The national debt fell into three categories after the American Revolution. The first was the $12 million owed to foreigners, mostly money borrowed from France. There was general agreement to pay the foreign debts at full value. The national government owed $40 million and state governments owed $25 million to Americans who had sold food, horses, and supplies to the Patriot forces. There were also other debts which consisted of promissory notes issued during the war to soldiers, merchants, and farmers who accepted these payments on the premise that the new Constitution would create a government that would pay these debts eventually.
The war expenses of the individual states added up to $114 million, compared to $37 million by the central government. In 1790, Congress combined the remaining state debts with the foreign and domestic debts into one national debt totaling $80 million at the recommendation of first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. Everyone received face value for wartime certificates, so that the national honor would be sustained and the national credit established.
Ideology and factions
The population of the Thirteen States was not homogeneous in political views and attitudes. Loyalties and allegiances varied widely within regions and communities and even within families, and sometimes shifted during the Revolution.
Ideology behind the revolution
The American Enlightenment was a critical precursor of the American Revolution. Chief among the ideas of the American Enlightenment were the concepts of natural law, natural rights, consent of the governed, individualism, property rights, self-ownership, self-determination, liberalism, republicanism, and defense against corruption. A growing number of American colonists embraced these views and fostered an intellectual environment which led to a new sense of political and social identity.
Liberalism
points at the Massachusetts Charter, which he viewed as a constitution that protected the people's rights, in this portrait by John Singleton Copley.]]
John Locke is often referred to as "the philosopher of the American Revolution" due to his work in the Social Contract and Natural Rights theories that underpinned the Revolution's political ideology. Locke's Two Treatises of Government published in 1689 was especially influential. He argued that all humans were created equally free, and governments therefore needed the "consent of the governed". In late eighteenth-century America, belief was still widespread in "equality by creation" and "rights by creation". Locke's ideas on liberty influenced the political thinking of English writers such as John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Benjamin Hoadly, whose political ideas in turn also had a strong influence on the American Patriots. His work also inspired symbols used in the American Revolution such as the "Appeal to Heaven" found on the Pine Tree Flag, which alludes to Locke's concept of the right of revolution.
The theory of the social contract influenced the belief among many of the Founders that the right of the people to overthrow their leaders, should those leaders betray the historic rights of Englishmen, was one of the "natural rights" of man. The Americans heavily relied on Montesquieu's analysis of the wisdom of the "balanced" British Constitution (mixed government) in writing the state and national constitutions.
Republicanism
The American interpretation of republicanism was inspired by the Whig party in Great Britain which openly criticized the corruption within the British government. Americans were increasingly embracing republican values, seeing Britain as corrupt and hostile to American interests. The colonists associated political corruption with ostentatious luxury and inherited aristocracy.
The Founding Fathers were strong advocates of republican values, particularly Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, George Washington, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, which required men to put civic duty ahead of their personal desires. Men were honor bound by civic obligation to be prepared and willing to fight for the rights and liberties of their countrymen. John Adams wrote to Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, agreeing with some classical Greek and Roman thinkers: "Public Virtue cannot exist without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics." He continued:
Protestant dissenters and the Great Awakening
Protestant churches that had separated from the Church of England, called "dissenters", were the "school of democracy", in the words of historian Patricia Bonomi. Before the Revolution, the Southern Colonies and three of the New England Colonies had official established churches: Congregational in Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, and the Church of England in Maryland, Virginia, North-Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations had no officially established churches. Church membership statistics from the period are unreliable and scarce, but what little data exists indicates that the Church of England was not in the majority, not even in the colonies where it was the established church, and they probably did not comprise even 30 percent of the population in most localities (with the possible exception of Virginia). --->
John Witherspoon, who was considered a "new light" Presbyterian, wrote widely circulated sermons linking the American Revolution to the teachings of the Bible. Throughout the colonies, dissenting Protestant ministers from the Congregational, Baptist, and Presbyterian churches preached Revolutionary themes in their sermons while most Church of England clergymen preached loyalty to the king, the titular head of the English state church. Religious motivation for fighting tyranny transcended socioeconomic lines.
Historian Bernard Bailyn argues that the evangelicalism of the era challenged traditional notions of natural hierarchy by preaching that the Bible teaches that all men are equal, so that the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior, not in his class. Kidd argues that religious disestablishment, belief in God as the source of human rights, and shared convictions about sin, virtue, and divine providence worked together to unite rationalists and evangelicals and thus encouraged a large proportion of Americans to fight for independence from the Empire. Bailyn, on the other hand, denies that religion played such a critical role. Alan Heimert argues that New Light anti-authoritarianism was essential to furthering democracy in colonial American society, and set the stage for a confrontation with British monarchical and aristocratic rule.Class and psychology of the factions
tarring and feathering Loyalist John Malcolm depicted in a 1774 painting]]
John Adams concluded in 1818:
In the mid-20th century, historian Leonard Woods Labaree identified eight characteristics of the Loyalists that made them essentially conservative, opposite to the characteristics of the Patriots. Loyalists tended to feel that resistance to the Crown was morally wrong, while the Patriots thought that morality was on their side. Loyalists were alienated when the Patriots resorted to violence, such as burning houses and tarring and feathering. Loyalists wanted to take a centrist position and resisted the Patriots' demand to declare their opposition to the Crown. Many Loyalists had maintained strong and long-standing relations with Britain, especially merchants in port cities such as New York and Boston. More recent historians have largely abandoned that interpretation, emphasizing instead the high level of ideological unity. Both Loyalists and Patriots were a "mixed lot", but ideological demands always came first. The Patriots viewed independence as a means to gain freedom from British oppression and to reassert their basic rights. Most yeomen farmers, craftsmen, and small merchants joined the Patriot cause to demand more political equality. They were especially successful in Pennsylvania but less so in New England, where John Adams attacked Thomas Paine's Common Sense for the "absurd democratical notions" that it proposed.
King George III is often accused of obstinately trying to keep Great Britain at war with the revolutionaries in America, despite the opinions of his own ministers. In the words of the British historian George Otto Trevelyan, the King was determined "never to acknowledge the independence of the Americans, and to punish their contumacy by the indefinite prolongation of a war which promised to be eternal." The king wanted to "keep the rebels harassed, anxious, and poor, until the day when, by a natural and inevitable process, discontent and disappointment were converted into penitence and remorse". Later historians defend George by saying in the context of the times no king would willingly surrender such a large territory, and his conduct was far less ruthless than contemporary monarchs in Europe. After the surrender of a British army at Saratoga, both Parliament and the British people were largely in favor of the war; recruitment ran at high levels and although political opponents were vocal, they remained a small minority.
With the setbacks in America, Lord North asked to transfer power to Lord Chatham, whom he thought more capable, but George refused to do so; he suggested instead that Chatham serve as a subordinate minister in North's administration, but Chatham refused. He died later in the same year. Lord North was allied to the "King's Friends" in Parliament and believed George III had the right to exercise powers. In early 1778, Britain's chief rival France signed a treaty of alliance with the United States, and the confrontation soon escalated from a "rebellion" to something that has been characterized as "world war". The French fleet was able to outrun the British naval blockade of the Mediterranean and sailed to North America. Opposition to the costly war was increasing, and in June 1780 contributed to disturbances in London known as the Gordon riots. In late 1781, the news of Cornwallis's surrender at the siege of Yorktown reached London; Lord North's parliamentary support ebbed away and he resigned the following year. The king drafted an abdication notice, which was never delivered, finally accepted the defeat in North America, and authorized peace negotiations. The Treaties of Paris, by which Britain recognized the independence of the United States and returned Florida to Spain, were signed in 1782 and 1783 respectively. In early 1783, George III privately conceded "America is lost!" He reflected that the Northern colonies had developed into Britain's "successful rivals" in commercial trade and fishing.
When John Adams was appointed American Minister to London in 1785, George had become resigned to the new relationship between his country and the former colonies. He told Adams, "I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power."
Patriots
Those who fought for independence were called "Revolutionaries", "Continentals", "Rebels", "Patriots", "Whigs", "Congress-men", or "Americans" during and after the war. They included a full range of social and economic classes but were unanimous regarding the need to defend the rights of Americans and uphold the principles of republicanism in rejecting monarchy and aristocracy, while emphasizing civic virtue by citizens. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were mostly—with definite exceptions—well-educated, of British stock, and of the Protestant faith. Newspapers were strongholds of patriotism (although there were a few Loyalist papers) and printed many pamphlets, announcements, patriotic letters, and pronouncements.
According to historian Robert Calhoon, 40 to 45 percent of the white population in the Thirteen Colonies supported the Patriots' cause, 15 to 20 percent supported the Loyalists, and the remainder were neutral or kept a low profile. Mark Lender concludes that ordinary people became insurgents against the British because they held a sense of rights which the British were violating, rights that stressed local autonomy, fair dealing, and government by consent. They were highly sensitive to the issue of tyranny, which they saw manifested in the British response to the Boston Tea Party. The arrival in Boston of the British Army heightened their sense of violated rights, leading to rage and demands for revenge. They had faith that God was on their side.
Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense in January 1776, after the Revolution had started. It was widely distributed and often read aloud in taverns, contributing significantly to concurrently spreading the ideas of republicanism and liberalism, bolstering enthusiasm for separation from Great Britain and encouraging recruitment for the Continental Army. Paine presented the Revolution as the solution for Americans alarmed by the threat of tyranny. Those who actively supported the king were known at the time as "Loyalists", "Tories", or "King's men". The Loyalists never controlled territory unless the British Army occupied it. They were typically older, less willing to break with old loyalties, and often connected to the Church of England; they included many established merchants with strong business connections throughout the Empire, as well as royal officials such as Thomas Hutchinson of Boston.
There were 500 to 1,000 Black Loyalists, enslaved African Americans who escaped to British lines and supported Britain's cause via several means. Many of them died from disease, but the survivors were evacuated by the British to their remaining colonies in North America.
The revolution could divide families, such as William Franklin, son of Benjamin Franklin and royal governor of the Province of New Jersey who remained loyal to the Crown throughout the war. He and his father never spoke again. Recent immigrants who had not been fully Americanized were also inclined to support the King.
After the war, the great majority of the half-million Loyalists remained in America and resumed normal lives. Some became prominent American leaders, such as Samuel Seabury. Approximately 46,000 Loyalists relocated to Canada; others moved to Britain (7,000), Florida, or the West Indies (9,000). The exiles represented approximately two percent of the total population of the colonies. Nearly all Black Loyalists left for Nova Scotia, Florida, or England, where they could remain free. Loyalists who left the South in 1783 took thousands of their slaves with them as they fled to the British West Indies. Most Quakers remained neutral, although a sizeable number participated to some degree.Role of women
published poems and plays that attacked royal authority and urged colonists to resist British rule.]]
Women contributed to the American Revolution in many ways and were involved on both sides. Formal politics did not include women, but ordinary domestic behaviors became charged with political significance as Patriot women confronted a war which permeated all aspects of political, civil, and domestic life. They participated by boycotting British goods, spying on the British, following armies as they marched, washing, cooking, and mending for soldiers, delivering secret messages, and even fighting disguised as men in a few cases, such as Deborah Samson. Mercy Otis Warren held meetings in her house and cleverly attacked Loyalists with her creative plays and histories. Many women also acted as nurses and helpers, tending to the soldiers' wounds and buying and selling goods for them. Some of these camp followers even participated in combat, such as Madam John Turchin who led her husband's regiment into battle. Above all, women continued the agricultural work at home to feed their families and the armies. They maintained their families during their husbands' absences and sometimes after their deaths.
American women were integral to the success of the boycott of British goods, as the boycotted items were largely household articles such as tea and cloth. Women had to return to knitting goods and to spinning and weaving their own cloth—skills that had fallen into disuse. In 1769, the women of Boston produced 40,000 skeins of yarn, and 180 women in Middletown, Massachusetts wove of cloth. A woman's loyalty to her husband could become an open political act, especially for women in America committed to men who remained loyal to the King. Legal divorce, usually rare, was granted to Patriot women whose husbands supported the King.Other participantsFrance and Spain
, King of France and Navarre]]
In early 1776, France set up a major program of aid to the Americans, and the Spanish secretly added funds. Each country spent one million "livres tournaises" to buy munitions. A dummy corporation run by Pierre Beaumarchais concealed their activities. American Patriots obtained some munitions from the Dutch Republic as well, through the French and Spanish ports in the West Indies. Heavy expenditures and a weak taxation system pushed France toward bankruptcy.
In 1777, Charles François Adrien le Paulmier, Chevalier d'Annemours, acting as a secret agent for France, made sure General George Washington was privy to his mission. He followed Congress around for the next two years, reporting what he observed back to France. The Treaty of Alliance between the French and the Americans followed in 1778, which led to more French money, matériel and troops being sent to the United States.
Spain did not officially recognize the United States, but it was a French ally and it separately declared war on Britain on June 21, 1779. Bernardo de Gálvez, general of the Spanish forces in New Spain, also served as governor of Louisiana. He led an expedition of colonial troops to capture Florida from the British and to keep open a vital conduit for supplies going to the Americans.
Germans
was a former Prussian Army officer who served as inspector general of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. He is credited with teaching the Continental Army the essentials of military drill and discipline beginning at Valley Forge in 1778, considered a turning point for the Americans.]]
Ethnic Germans served on both sides of the American Revolutionary War. As George III was also the Elector of Hanover, many supported the Loyalist cause and served as allies of the Kingdom of Great Britain; most notably rented auxiliary troops from German states such as the Landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel.
American Patriots tended to represent such troops as mercenaries in propaganda against the British Crown. Even American historians followed suit, in spite of Colonial-era jurists drawing a distinction between auxiliaries and mercenaries, with auxiliaries serving their prince when sent to the aid of another prince, and mercenaries serving a foreign prince as individuals. Those tribes closely involved in trade tended to side with the Patriots, although political factors were important as well. Some tried to remain neutral, seeing little value in joining what they perceived to be a "white man's war", and fearing reprisals from whichever side they opposed.
The great majority of Indigenous people did not participate directly in the war, with the notable exceptions of warriors and bands associated with four of the Iroquois tribes in New York and Pennsylvania which allied with the British, and the Oneida and Tuscarora tribes among the Iroquois of central and western New York who supported the American cause. The British did have other allies, particularly in the regions of southwest Quebec on the Patriot's frontier. The British provided arms to Indigenous people who were led by Loyalists in war parties to raid frontier settlements from the Carolinas to New York. These war parties managed to kill many settlers on the frontier, especially in Pennsylvania and New York's Mohawk Valley.
In 1776, Cherokee war parties attacked American Colonists all along the southern Quebec frontier of the uplands throughout the Washington District, North Carolina (now Tennessee) and the Kentucky wilderness area. The Chickamauga Cherokee under Dragging Canoe allied themselves closely with the British, and fought on for an additional decade after the Treaty of Paris was signed. They launched raids with roughly 200 warriors, as seen in the Cherokee–American wars; they could not mobilize enough forces to invade settler areas without the help of allies, most often the Creek.
Joseph Brant (also Thayendanegea) of the powerful Mohawk tribe in New York was the most prominent Indigenous leader against the Patriot forces. In 1778 and 1780, he led 300 Iroquois warriors and 100 white Loyalists in multiple attacks on small frontier settlements in New York and Pennsylvania, killing many settlers and destroying villages, crops, and stores.
In 1779, the Continental Army forced the hostile Indigenous people out of upstate New York when Washington sent an army under John Sullivan which destroyed 40 evacuated Iroquois villages in central and western New York. The Battle of Newtown proved decisive, as the Patriots had an advantage of three-to-one, and it ended significant resistance; there was little combat otherwise. Facing starvation and homeless for the winter, the Iroquois fled to Canada.
At the peace conference following the war, the British ceded lands which they did not really control, without consultation with their Indigenous allies. They transferred control to the United States of all the land south of the Great Lakes east of the Mississippi and north of Florida. Calloway concludes:
}}Black Americans
depicts Attucks, who is considered to be the first American to die for the cause of independence in the Revolution.]]
, widely regarded as the first Black battalion in U.S. military history]]
Free Blacks in the New England Colonies and Middle Colonies in the North as well as Southern Colonies fought on both sides of the War, but the majority fought for the Patriots. Gary Nash reports that there were about 9,000 Black veteran Patriots, counting the Continental Army and Navy, state militia units, privateers, wagoneers in the Army, servants to officers, and spies. Ray Raphael notes that thousands did join the Loyalist cause, but "a far larger number, free as well as slave, tried to further their interests by siding with the patriots." Crispus Attucks was one of the five people killed in the Boston Massacre in 1770 and is considered the first American casualty for the cause of independence.
The effects of the war were more dramatic in the South. Tens of thousands of slaves escaped to British lines throughout the South, causing dramatic losses to slaveholders and disrupting cultivation and harvesting of crops. For instance, South Carolina was estimated to have lost about 25,000 slaves to flight, migration, or death which amounted to a third of its slave population.
During the war, the British commanders attempted to weaken the Patriots by issuing proclamations of freedom to their slaves. In the November 1775 document known as Dunmore's Proclamation Virginia royal governor, Lord Dunmore recruited Black men into the British forces with the promise of freedom, protection for their families, and land grants. Some men responded and briefly formed the British Ethiopian Regiment. Historian David Brion Davis explains the difficulties with a policy of wholesale arming of the slaves:
Davis underscores the British dilemma: "Britain, when confronted by the rebellious American colonists, hoped to exploit their fear of slave revolts while also reassuring the large number of slave-holding Loyalists and wealthy Caribbean planters and merchants that their slave property would be secure". The Americans, however, accused the British of encouraging slave revolts, with the issue becoming one of the 27 colonial grievances.
The existence of slavery in the American colonies had attracted criticism from both sides of the Atlantic as many could not reconcile the existence of the institution with the egalitarian ideals espoused by leaders of the Revolution. British writer Samuel Johnson wrote "how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of the Negroes?" in a text opposing the grievances of the colonists. Referring to this contradiction, English abolitionist Thomas Day wrote in a 1776 letter that Thomas Jefferson unsuccessfully attempted to include a section in the Declaration of Independence which asserted that King George III had "forced" the slave trade onto the colonies. Despite the turmoil of the period, African-Americans contributed to the foundation of an American national identity during the Revolution. Phyllis Wheatley, an African-American poet, popularized the image of Columbia to represent America.
The 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation expanded the promise of freedom for Black men who enlisted in the British military to all the colonies in rebellion. British forces gave transportation to 10,000 slaves when they evacuated Savannah and Charleston, carrying through on their promise. They evacuated and resettled more than 3,000 Black Loyalists from New York to Nova Scotia, Upper Canada, and Lower Canada. Others sailed with the British to England or were resettled as freedmen in the West Indies of the Caribbean. But slaves carried to the Caribbean under control of Loyalist masters generally remained slaves until British abolition of slavery in its colonies in 1833–1838. More than 1,200 of the Black Loyalists of Nova Scotia later resettled in the British colony of Sierra Leone, where they became leaders of the Krio ethnic group of Freetown and the later national government. Many of their descendants still live in Sierra Leone, as well as other African countries.Effects of the revolution
After the Revolution, genuinely democratic politics became possible in the former American colonies. The rights of the people were incorporated into state constitutions. Concepts of liberty, individual rights, equality among men and hostility toward corruption became incorporated as core values of liberal republicanism. The greatest challenge to the old order in Europe was the challenge to inherited political power and the democratic idea that government rests on the consent of the governed. The example of the first successful revolution against a European empire, and the first successful establishment of a republican form of democratically elected government, provided a model for many other colonial peoples who realized that they too could break away and become self-governing nations with directly elected representative government.
, meaning "A New Age Now Begins", is paraphrased from Thomas Paine's Common Sense, published January 10, 1776. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," Paine wrote. The American Revolution ended an age—an age of monarchy. And, it began a new age—an age of freedom. As a result of the growing wave started by the Revolution, there are now more people around the world living in freedom than ever before, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the world's population. John Murrin, by contrast, argues that the definition of "the people" at that time was mostly restricted to free men who passed a property qualification.
Gordon Wood states:
:The American Revolution was integral to the changes occurring in American society, politics and culture .... These changes were radical, and they were extensive .... The Revolution not only radically changed the personal and social relationships of people, including the position of women, but also destroyed aristocracy as it'd been understood in the Western world for at least two millennia.
Edmund Morgan has argued that, in terms of long-term impact on American society and values:
:The Revolution did revolutionize social relations. It did displace the deference, the patronage, the social divisions that had determined the way people viewed one another for centuries and still view one another in much of the world. It did give to ordinary people a pride and power, not to say an arrogance, that have continued to shock visitors from less favored lands. It may have left standing a host of inequalities that have troubled us ever since. But it generated the egalitarian view of human society that makes them troubling and makes our world so different from the one in which the revolutionists had grown up.Inspiring other independence movements and revolutions
, an 18th and 19th century revolutionary wave in the Atlantic World.]]
The first shot of the American Revolution at the Battle of Lexington and Concord is referred to as the "shot heard 'round the world". The Revolutionary War victory not only established the United States as the first modern constitutional republic, but marked the transition from an age of monarchy to a new age of freedom by inspiring similar movements worldwide. The American Revolution was the first of the "Atlantic Revolutions": followed most notably by the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and the Latin American wars of independence. Aftershocks contributed to rebellions in Ireland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Netherlands. Some historians and scholars argue that the subsequent wave of independence and revolutionary movements has contributed to the continued expansion of democratic government; 144 countries, representing two-third of the world's population, are full or partially democracies of same form.
For many Europeans, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, who later were active during the era of the French Revolution, the American case along with the Dutch Revolt (end of the 16th century) and the 17th century English Civil War, was among the examples of overthrowing an old regime. The American Declaration of Independence influenced the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. The spirit of the Declaration of Independence led to laws ending slavery in all the Northern states and the Northwest Territory, with New Jersey the last in 1804. States such as New Jersey and New York adopted gradual emancipation, which kept some people as slaves for more than two decades longer.Status of African Americans
memorial to Prince Estabrook, who was wounded in the Battle of Lexington and Concord and was the first Black casualty of the Revolutionary War]]
, who was an enslaved African American man who purchased his freedom, became a soldier, and rose to fame as a war hero during the Battle of Bunker Hill.]]
During the revolution, the contradiction between the Patriots' professed ideals of liberty and the institution of slavery generated increased scrutiny of the latter. As early as 1764, the Boston Patriot leader James Otis, Jr. declared that all men, "white or black", were "by the law of nature" born free.
In the late 1760s and early 1770s, several colonies, including Massachusetts and Virginia, attempted to restrict the slave trade, but were prevented from doing so by royally appointed governors. Nevertheless, slavery continued in the South, where it became a "peculiar institution", setting the stage for future sectional conflict between North and South over the issue.Status of American women
The status of women during the Revolutionary War can be illustrated by the interchange of gender, sexuality, citizenship, and class. While women were entering a period in which they found themselves gaining more identity within society, it was clear that they were still very much considered under men as their role in society remained being a good wife and mother. Their clothes, the way they responded to their husband, and listened to their husband, was incredibly important in the social sphere. Having a woman who was dressed well for her role as a good wife and mother as well as fitting the social role, was a symbol of not only status, but a family devoted to the republic. As they continued to nurture social and political partnerships, their role in enabling the success of the revolution emphasized their changing role in society – leading to the post-revolutionary reconstruction of gender ideology.
The democratic ideals of the Revolution inspired changes in the roles of women. Patriot women married to Loyalists who left the state could get a divorce and obtain control of the ex-husband's property. Abigail Adams expressed to her husband, the president, the desire of women to have a place in the new republic:
The Revolution sparked a discussion on the rights of woman and an environment favorable to women's participation in politics. Briefly the possibilities for women's rights were highly favorable, but a backlash led to a greater rigidity that excluded women from politics.
Soon after the Revolutionary War, Mary Wallostonecraft would publish: Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) – challenging the idea that rights should only be granted to men. Her radical ideas would give ground to the conversation in allowing women to be bearers of rights alongside men – that while the rights of man were taking on a new meaning post-revolutionary America, it was time for the rights of women too.
However, this new sense of independence and dignity did not come with ease, as a gender hierarchy would continue to bound what it meant for women to have rights during the Post-Revolutionary era.
Women’s rights were founded on the Scottish theory that treated rights simply as benefits . The emphasis was on duty and obligation, instead of liberty and choice – confining women to the traditional role of wife and mother. On the other hand, men’s rights were heavily inspired by Locke, as it emphasized equality, individual autonomy, and the expansion of personal freedoms. So while women were becoming bearers of rights, the foundation and philosophy of those given rights differed vastly.
The early national period of America would continue to struggle with the concept of rights and equality, as women faced the notion that women should be under the dominance of men – carried by Christian beliefs. Women were blamed for the “Fall of Man”, in reference to Eve and Adam in the Bible. So while women were beginning to bear rights, the type of language that was being used when talking about the rights of women was done with care and hesitance.
For more than thirty years, however, the 1776 New Jersey State Constitution gave the vote to "all inhabitants" who had a certain level of wealth, including unmarried women and blacks (not married women because they could not own property separately from their husbands), until in 1807, when that state legislature passed a bill interpreting the constitution to mean universal white male suffrage, excluding paupers.
Loyalist expatriation
as depicted in this early 20th century drawing]]
Tens of thousands of Loyalists left the United States following the war; Philip Ranlet estimates 20,000, while Maya Jasanoff estimates as many as 70,000. Some migrated to Britain, but the great majority received land and subsidies for resettlement in British colonies in North America, especially Quebec (concentrating in the Eastern Townships), Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia. Britain created the colonies of Upper Canada (Ontario) and New Brunswick expressly for their benefit, and the Crown awarded land to Loyalists as compensation for losses in the United States. Nevertheless, approximately eighty-five percent of the Loyalists stayed in the United States as American citizens, and some of the exiles later returned to the U.S. Patrick Henry spoke of the issue of allowing Loyalists to return as such: "Shall we, who have laid the proud British lion at our feet, be frightened of its whelps?" His actions helped secure return of the Loyalists to American soil.Commemorations
The American Revolution has a central place in the American memory as the story of the nation's founding. It is covered in the schools, memorialized by two national holidays, Washington's Birthday in February and Independence Day in July, and commemorated in innumerable monuments. George Washington's estate at Mount Vernon was one of the first national pilgrimages for tourists and attracted 10,000 visitors a year by the 1850s.
The Revolution became a matter of contention in the 1850s in the debates leading to the American Civil War (1861–1865), as spokesmen of both the Northern United States and the Southern United States claimed that their region was the true custodian of the legacy of 1776. The United States Bicentennial in 1976 came a year after the American withdrawal from the Vietnam War, and speakers stressed the themes of renewal and rebirth based on a restoration of traditional values.
Today, more than 100 battlefields and historic sites of the American Revolution are protected and maintained by the government. The National Park Service alone manages and maintains more than 50 battlefield parks and many other sites such as Independence Hall that are related to the Revolution. The private American Battlefield Trust uses government grants and other funds to preserve almost 700 acres of battlefield land in six states, and the ambitious private recreation/restoration/preservation/interpretation of over 300 acres of pre-1790 Colonial Williamsburg was created in the first half of the 20th century for public visitation.
See also
* International relations (1648–1814)
* List of films about the American Revolution
* List of George Washington articles
* List of television series and miniseries about the American Revolution
* Museum of the American Revolution
Notes
References
Sources
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Further reading
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Reference works
* Barnes, Ian, and Charles Royster. The Historical Atlas of the American Revolution (2000), maps and commentary [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0415922437/ excerpt and text search]
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* Herrera, Ricardo A. "American War of Independence" Oxford Bibliographies (2017) annotated guide to major scholarly books and articles [https://web.archive.org/web/20180612142036/http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791279/obo-9780199791279-0011.xml?rskeyiDQdfx&result15&q=Hanoverian+Britain#firstMatch online]
* Kennedy, Frances H. The American Revolution: A Historical Guidebook (2014) A guide to 150 famous historical sites.
* Purcell, L. Edward. Who Was Who in the American Revolution (1993); 1500 short biographies
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Surveys of the era
* Alden, John R. A history of the American Revolution (1966) 644 pp [https://archive.org/details/historyofamerica00alde online], A scholarly general survey
* Allison, Robert. The American Revolution: A Concise History (2011) 128 pp [https://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195312953/ excerpt and text search]
* Atkinson, Rick. The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777 (2019) (vol 1 of his 'The Revolution Trilogy'); called, "one of the best books written on the American War for Independence," [Journal of Military History Jan 2020 p. 268]; the maps are [https://web.archive.org/web/20200725045812/https://revolutiontrilogy.com/books/the-british-are-coming/the-british-are-coming-maps/ online here]
* , British perspective
* Brown, Richard D., and Thomas Paterson, eds. Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760–1791: Documents and Essays (2nd ed. 1999)
*Bunker, Nick. An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America. New York 2014.
* , British perspective'
* Cogliano, Francis D. Revolutionary America, 1763–1815; A Political History (2nd ed. 2008), British textbook
* Ellis, Joseph J. American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic (2008) [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307276457/ excerpt and text search]
* Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789 (1983) [http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cacls;ccacls;q1don;q2ACLS%20Humanities%20E-Book;op2and;rgnworks;rgn1author;rgn2series;viewtoc;idnoheb01365.0001.001 Online in ACLS Humanities E-book Project]; comprehensive coverage of military and domestic aspects of the war.
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* Mackesy, Piers. The War for America: 1775–1783 (1992), British military study
* Rakove, Jack N. Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (2010) interpretation by leading scholar [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0618267468/ excerpt and text search]
* Taylor, Alan. American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (2016) 704 pp; recent survey by leading scholar
* Weintraub, Stanley. Iron Tears: Rebellion in America 1775–83 (2005) [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0743226879/ excerpt and text search], popular
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Specialized studies
* Baer, Friederike. Hessians: German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War (Oxford University Press, 2022). [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/hessians-9780190249632?ccus&langen& Publisher's website].
* Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. (Harvard University Press, 1967).
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* Becker, Frank: [https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20171019144355/http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/european-media/european-media-events/american-revolution/frank-becker-the-american-revolution-as-a-european-media-event The American Revolution as a European Media Event], European History Online, Mainz: Institute of European History, 2011, retrieved: October 25, 2011.
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* Carté, Katerine. Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History. Chapel Hill: Omohondro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press 2021.
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* Fischer, David Hackett. ''Washington's Crossing (2004). 1776 campaigns; Pulitzer prize.
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* Gilbert, Alan. Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipstuob in the War for Independence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2012.
* Horne, Gerald. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. (New York University Press, 2014).
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*
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* Langley, Lester D. The Long American Revolution and Its Legacy(U of Georgia Press, 2019) [https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55104 online review] emphasis on long-term global impact.
*
* McCullough, David. 1776 (2005). ; popular narrative of the year 1776
* Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1998) [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679779086/ excerpt and text search]
* Nash, Gary B. The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. (2005).
* Nevins, Allan; The American States during and after the Revolution, 1775–1789'' 1927. [https://archive.org/details/americanstatesdu00nevi online edition]
*
* Norton, Mary Beth. 1774: The Long Year of Revolution (2020) [https://www.wsj.com/articles/1774-review-the-year-that-changed-the-world-11582303285?modsearchresults&page1&pos=1 online review] by Gordon S. Wood
*
* Palmer, Robert R. The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800. vol 1 (1959)
*
* Rothbard, Murray, Conceived in Liberty (2011), Volume III: Advance to Revolution, 1760–1775 and Volume IV: The Revolutionary War, 1775–1784. , libertarian perspective
*
* Van Tyne, Claude Halstead. American Loyalists: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (1902) [https://books.google.com/books?id=mNtEAAAAIAAJ online edition]
* Volo, James M. and Dorothy Denneen Volo. Daily Life during the American Revolution (2003)
* Wahlke, John C. ed. The Causes of the American Revolution (1967) primary and secondary readings [https://archive.org/details/TheCausesOfTheAmericanRevolution online]
*
* Wood, Gordon S. American Revolution (2005) [excerpt and text search] 208 pp [https://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0753818078/ excerpt and text search]
*
Historiography
* Allison, David, and Larrie D. Ferreiro, eds. The American Revolution: A World War (Smithsonian, 2018) [https://www.amazon.com/American-Revolution-World-War/dp/1588346331/ excerpt]
* Breen, Timothy H. "Ideology and nationalism on the eve of the American Revolution: Revisions once more in need of revising." Journal of American History (1997): 13–39. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2952733 in JSTOR]
* Burnard, Trevor. Writing Early America: From Empire to Revolution. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2023. Analysis of 400 scholarly journal articles.
* Countrymen, Edward. "Historiography" in Harold E. Selesky, ed., Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (Gale, 2006) pp. 501–508.
* Gibson, Alan. [https://archive.org/details/interpretingfoun0000gibs/page/n3/mode/2up Interpreting the Founding: Guide to the Enduring Debates over the Origins and Foundations of the American Republic] (2006).
* Hattem, Michael D. "The Historiography of the American Revolution" Journal of the American Revolution (2013) [https://web.archive.org/web/20180826063433/https://allthingsliberty.com/2013/08/historiography-of-american-revolution/ online] outlines ten different scholarly approaches
* Morgan, Gwenda. The Debate on the American Revolution (2007). Manchester University Press.
* Schocket, Andrew M. Fighting over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution (2014). . How politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, museum professionals, and re-enactors portray the American Revolution. [https://www.amazon.com/Fighting-over-Founders-Remember-Revolution/dp/0814708161/ excerpt]
* Shalhope, Robert E. "Toward a republican synthesis: the emergence of an understanding of republicanism in American historiography." William and Mary Quarterly (1972): 49–80. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1921327 in JSTOR]
* Waldstreicher, David. "The Revolutions of Revolution Historiography: Cold War Contradance, Neo-Imperial Waltz, or Jazz Standard?" Reviews in American History 42.1 (2014): 23–35. [http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/reviews_in_american_history/v042/42.1.waldstreicher.html online]
* Wood, Gordon S. "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution." William and Mary Quarterly (1966): 4–32. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2936154 in JSTOR]
* Young, Alfred F. and Gregory H. Nobles. Whose American Revolution Was It? Historians Interpret the Founding (2011). NYU Press.
Primary sources
* The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (2001), Library of America
* Dann, John C., ed. The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (1999). . [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226136248/ excerpt and text search], recollections by ordinary soldiers
* Humphrey, Carol Sue, ed. The Revolutionary Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1776 to 1800 (2003), Greenwood Press. , Newspaper accounts [https://www.amazon.com/dp/0313320837/ excerpt and text search]
* Jensen, Merill, ed. Tracts of the American Revolution, 1763–1776 (1967). American pamphlets
* Jensen, Merill, ed. English Historical Documents: American Colonial Documents to 1776: Volume 9 (1955), 890 pp; major collection of important documents
* Morison, Samuel E. ed. Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, 1764–1788, and the Formation of the Federal Constitution (1923). .
* Murdoch, David H. ed. Rebellion in America: A Contemporary British Viewpoint, 1769–1783 (1979), 900+ pp of annotated excerpts from Annual Register[https://archive.org/details/rebellioninameri0000unse online]
* [https://archive.org/details/TheAmericanRevolutionThroughBritishEyes Martin Kallich and Andrew MacLeish, eds. The American Revolution through British eyes (1962)] primary documents
*
External links
* [https://www.nps.gov/subjects/americanrevolution/index.htm American Revolution], US National Park Service website portal
* [https://www.nps.gov/articles/american-independence-teaching-with-historic-places.htm American Independence] Teaching with Historic Places uses historic places in National Parks and the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places to enliven history, social studies, geography, civics, and other subjects
*''Ben Franklin's World'', podcast on early America, sponsored by the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. <www.benfranklinsworld.com>
* [https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/revolution/home.html Library of Congress Guide to the American Revolution]
* [https://friederikebaer.com/ "Hessians:" German Soldiers in the American Revolutionary War]. Academic blog with original German sources, English translations, and commentary.
* [https://www.amrevmuseum.org/ Museum of the American Revolution]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20150211220154/http://sandbox.nyhsdev.org/sites/default/files/curriculum_materials/revolution/Revolution-Teachers-Guide.zip Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn], explores the transformations in the world's politics from 1763 to 1815, with particular attention to three revolutions in America, France, and Haiti. Linking the attack on monarchism and aristocracy to the struggle against slavery, it at how freedom, equality, and sovereignty of the people became universal goals. New-York Historical Society
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20170925043204/https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-pageant-of-america-collection#/?tabnavigation&roots5:ea3df220-c613-012f-a026-58d385a7bc34 132 historic photographs dealing with the personalities, monuments, weapons and locations of the American Revolution; these are pre-1923 and out of copyright.]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20170826032429/https://www.archives.gov/research/military/american-revolution/pictures Pictures of the Revolutionary War: Select Audiovisual Records], National Archives and Records Administration images, including non-military events and portraits
* [https://www.academia.edu/38673024/The_Democratic_Revolution_of_the_Enlightenment The Democratic Revolution of the Enlightenment]. Legacy of the struggle for independence and democracy.
* [https://www.pbs.org/ktca/liberty/ PBS Television Series Liberty]
* [http://www.chickasaw.tv/history-timeline/document/american-revolution Chickasaws Conflicted by the American Revolution] – Chickasaw.TV
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060711130731/http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/educators/lesson_plans/revolutionary_money/ Smithsonian study unit on Revolutionary Money]
* [http://www.blackloyalist.com/ Black Loyalist Heritage Society]
* [http://www.ouramericanhistory.com/ Spanish and Latin American contribution to the American Revolution]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20080512003745/http://dig.lib.niu.edu/amarch/index.html American Archives: Documents of the American Revolution] at Northern Illinois University Libraries
* [http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/27/counter_revolution_of_1776_was_us "Counter-Revolution of 1776": Was U.S. Independence War a Conservative Revolt in Favor of Slavery?] Democracy Now! June 27, 2014.
* Wikiversity:The Great American Paradox
Category:1760s conflicts
Category:1770s conflicts
Category:1780s conflicts
Category:1770s in the United States
Category:1780s in the United States
Category:18th-century rebellions
Category:18th-century revolutions
Category:Age of Enlightenment
Category:Legal history of the United States
Category:Coups d'état and coup attempts in the United States
Category:Democratization | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.445690 |
1974 | April 17 | Events
Pre-1600
*1080 – Harald III of Denmark dies and is succeeded by Canute IV, who would later be the first Dane to be canonized.
*1349 – The rule of the Bavand dynasty in Mazandaran is brought to an end by the murder of Hasan II.
*1362 – Kaunas Castle falls to the Teutonic Order after a month-long siege.
*1492 – Spain and Christopher Columbus sign the Capitulations of Santa Fe for his voyage to Asia to acquire spices.
*1521 – Trial of Martin Luther over his teachings begins during the assembly of the Diet of Worms. Initially intimidated, he asks for time to reflect before answering and is given a stay of one day.
*1524 – Giovanni da Verrazzano reaches New York harbor.
1601–1900
*1797 – Sir Ralph Abercromby attacks San Juan, Puerto Rico, in what would be one of the largest invasions of the Spanish territories in the Americas.
* 1797 – Citizens of Verona begin an unsuccessful eight-day rebellion against the French occupying forces.
*1861 – The state of Virginia's secession convention votes to secede from the United States; Virginia later becomes the eighth state to join the Confederate States of America.
*1863 – American Civil War: Grierson's Raid begins: Troops under Union Army Colonel Benjamin Grierson attack central Mississippi.
*1864 – American Civil War: The Battle of Plymouth begins: Confederate forces attack Plymouth, North Carolina.
*1869 – Morelos is admitted as the 27th state of Mexico.
*1876 – Catalpa rescue: The rescue of six Fenian prisoners from Fremantle Prison in Western Australia.
*1895 – The Treaty of Shimonoseki between China and Japan is signed. This marks the end of the First Sino-Japanese War, and the defeated Qing Empire is forced to renounce its claims on Korea and to concede the southern portion of the Fengtian province, Taiwan and the Penghu to Japan.
1901–present
*1905 – The Supreme Court of the United States decides Lochner v. New York, which holds that the "right to free contract" is implicit in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
*1907 – The Ellis Island immigration center processes 11,747 people, more than on any other day.
*1912 – Russian troops open fire on striking goldfield workers in northeast Siberia, killing at least 150.
*1931 – After negotiations between Catalan and Spanish provisional governments, the Catalan Republic proclaimed in April 14 becomes the Generalitat de Catalunya, the autonomous government of Catalonia within the Spanish Republic.
*1941 – World War II: The Axis powers invasion of Yugoslavia is completed when it signs an armistice with Germany and Italy.
*1942 – French prisoner of war General Henri Giraud escapes from his castle prison in Königstein Fortress.
*1944 – Forces of the Communist-controlled Greek People's Liberation Army attack the smaller National and Social Liberation resistance group, which surrenders. Its leader Dimitrios Psarros is murdered.
*1945 – World War II: Montese, Italy, is liberated from Nazi forces.
* 1945 – Historian Tran Trong Kim is appointed the Prime Minister of the Empire of Vietnam.
*1946 – The last French troops are withdrawn from Syria.
*1951 – The Peak District becomes the United Kingdom's first National Park.
*1961 – Bay of Pigs Invasion: A group of Cuban exiles financed and trained by the CIA lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.
*1964 – Jerrie Mock completes the first around-the-world airplane flight by a woman. Her solo flight in the Spirit of Columbus, which took 29 1/2 days, took off and landed at the Port Columbus International Airport in Ohio.
*1969 – Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy.
* 1969 – Communist Party of Czechoslovakia chairman Alexander Dubček is deposed.
*1970 – Apollo program: The damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft returns to Earth safely.
*1971 – The Provisional Government of Bangladesh is formed.
*1975 – The Cambodian Civil War ends. The Khmer Rouge captures the capital Phnom Penh and Cambodian government forces surrender.
*1978 – Mir Akbar Khyber is assassinated, provoking the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan.
*1982 – Constitution Act, 1982 Patriation of the Canadian constitution in Ottawa by Proclamation of Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada.
*1986 – An alleged state of war lasting 335 years between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly declared peace bringing an end to any hypothetical war that may have been legally considered to exist.
*1992 – The Katina P is deliberately run aground off Maputo, Mozambique, and 60,000 tons of crude oil spill into the ocean.
*1998 – Space Shuttle Columbia is launched on STS-90, the final Spacelab mission.
*2003 – Anneli Jäätteenmäki takes office as the first female prime minister of Finland.
*2006 – A Palestinian suicide bomber detonates an explosive device in a Tel Aviv restaurant, killing 11 people and injuring 70.
*2013 – An explosion at a fertilizer plant in the city of West, Texas, kills 15 people and injures 160 others.
*2014 – NASA's Kepler space telescope confirms the discovery of the first Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of another star.
*2021 – The funeral of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, takes place at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.
Births
Pre-1600
*1277 – Michael IX Palaiologos, Byzantine emperor (d. 1320)
*1455 – Andrea Gritti, Doge of Venice (d. 1538)
*1497 – Pedro de Valdivia, Spanish conquistador, conquered northern Chile (d. 1553)
*1573 – Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria (d. 1651)
*1586 – John Ford, English poet and playwright (d. 1639)
*1598 – Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Italian priest and astronomer (d. 1671)
1601–1900
*1620 – Marguerite Bourgeoys, French-Canadian nun and saint, founded the Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal (d. 1700)
*1635 – Edward Stillingfleet, British theologian and scholar (d. 1699)
*1683 – Johann David Heinichen, German composer and theorist (d. 1729)
*1710 – Henry Erskine, 10th Earl of Buchan, Scottish politician (d. 1767)
*1734 – Taksin, King of Thailand (d. 1782)
*1741 – Samuel Chase, American lawyer and jurist (d. 1811)
*1750 – François de Neufchâteau, French academic and politician, French Minister of the Interior (d. 1828)
*1756 – Dheeran Chinnamalai, Indian commander (d. 1805)
*1766 – Collin McKinney, American surveyor, merchant, and politician (d. 1861)
*1794 – Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, German botanist and explorer (d. 1868)
*1798 – Étienne Bobillier, French mathematician and academic (d. 1840)
*1799 – Eliza Acton, English food writer and poet (d. 1859)
*1814 – Josif Pančić, Serbian botanist and academic (d. 1888)
*1816 – Thomas Hazlehurst, English architect and philanthropist (d. 1876)
*1820 – Alexander Cartwright, American firefighter and (disputed) inventor of baseball (d. 1892)
*1833 – Jean-Baptiste Accolay, Belgian violinist, composer, and conductor (d. 1900)
*1837 – J. P. Morgan, American banker and financier, founded J.P. Morgan & Co. (d. 1913)
*1842 – Maurice Rouvier, French businessman and politician, 53rd Prime Minister of France (d. 1911)
*1849 – William R. Day, American jurist and politician, 36th United States Secretary of State (d. 1923)
*1852 – Cap Anson, American baseball player and manager (d. 1922)
*1863 – Augustus Edward Hough Love, English mathematician and theorist (d. 1940)
*1865 – Ursula Ledóchowska, Polish-Austrian nun and saint, founded the Congregation of the Ursulines of the Agonizing Heart of Jesus (d. 1939)
*1866 – Ernest Starling, English physiologist and academic (d. 1927)
*1875 – Aleksander Tõnisson, Estonian general and politician, 5th Estonian Minister of War (d. 1941)
*1877 – Matsudaira Tsuneo, Japanese diplomat (d. 1949)
*1878 – Emil Fuchs, German-American lawyer and businessman (d. 1961)
* 1878 – Demetrios Petrokokkinos, Greek tennis player (d. 1942)
*1879 – Henri Tauzin, French hurdler (d. 1918)
*1882 – Artur Schnabel, Polish pianist and composer (d. 1951)
*1888 – Herms Niel, German soldier, trombonist, and composer (d. 1954)
*1891 – George Adamski, Polish-American ufologist and author (d. 1965)
*1895 – Robert Dean Frisbie, American soldier and author (d. 1948)
*1896 – Señor Wences, Spanish-American ventriloquist (d. 1999)
*1897 – Nisargadatta Maharaj, Indian philosopher and educator (d. 1981)
* 1897 – Thornton Wilder, American novelist and playwright (d. 1975)
* 1897 – Edouard Wyss-Dunant, Swiss physician and mountaineer (d. 1983)
*1899 – Aleksander Klumberg, Estonian decathlete and coach (d. 1958)
1901–present
*1903 – Nicolas Nabokov, Russian-American composer and educator (d. 1978)
* 1903 – Gregor Piatigorsky, Ukrainian-American cellist and educator (d. 1976)
* 1903 – Morgan Taylor, American hurdler and coach (d. 1975)
*1905 – Louis Jean Heydt, American journalist and actor (d. 1960)
* 1905 – Arthur Lake, American actor (d. 1987)
*1906 – Sidney Garfield, American physician, co-founded Kaiser Permanente (d. 1984)
*1909 – Alain Poher, French politician, President of France (d. 1996)
*1910 – Evangelos Averoff, Greek historian and politician, Greek Minister of Defence (d. 1990)
* 1910 – Ivan Goff, Australian screenwriter and producer (d. 1999)
* 1910 – Helenio Herrera, French footballer and manager (d. 1997)
*1911 – Hervé Bazin, French author and poet (d. 1996)
* 1911 – Lester Rodney, American soldier and journalist (d. 2009)
*1912 – Marta Eggerth, Hungarian-American actress and singer (d. 2013)
*1914 – George Davis, American art director (d. 1984)
* 1914 – Mac Raboy, American illustrator (d. 1967)
*1915 – Martin Clemens, Scottish soldier (d. 2009)
* 1915 – Joe Foss, American general and politician, 20th Governor of South Dakota (d. 2003)
* 1915 – Regina Ghazaryan, Armenian painter (d. 1999)
*1916 – Win Maung, 3rd President of Union of Myanmar (d. 1989)
* 1916 – A. Thiagarajah, Sri Lankan educator and politician (d. 1981)
* 1916 – Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, world's first female prime minister (d. 2000)
*1918 – William Holden, American actor (d. 1981)
*1919 – Gilles Lamontagne, Canadian lieutenant and politician, 24th Lieutenant Governor of Quebec (d. 2016)
* 1919 – Chavela Vargas, Costa Rican-Mexican singer-songwriter and actress (d. 2012)
*1920 – Edmonde Charles-Roux, French journalist and author (d. 2016)
*1923 – Lindsay Anderson, English actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1994)
* 1923 – Solly Hemus, American baseball player, coach, and manager (d. 2017)
* 1923 – Neville McNamara, Australian air marshal (d. 2014)
* 1923 – Gianni Raimondi, Italian lyric tenor (d. 2008)
* 1923 – Harry Reasoner, American soldier and journalist (d. 1991)
*1924 – Kenneth Norman Jones, Australian public servant (d. 2022)
* 1924 – Donald Richie, American-Japanese author and critic (d. 2013)
*1925 – René Moawad, Lebanese lawyer and politician, 13th President of Lebanon (d. 1989)
*1926 – Joan Lorring, British actress (d. 2014)
* 1926 – Gerry McNeil, Canadian ice hockey player and manager (d. 2004)
*1927 – Margot Honecker, East German politician and First Lady (d. 2016)
*1928 – Victor Lownes, American businessman (d. 2017)
* 1928 – Cynthia Ozick, American short story writer, novelist, and essayist
* 1928 – Heinz Putzl, Austrian fencer
* 1928 – Fabien Roy, Canadian accountant and politician (d. 2023)
*1929 – James Last, German-American bassist, composer, and bandleader (d. 2015)
*1930 – Chris Barber, English trombonist and bandleader (d. 2021)
*1931 – John Barrett, English tennis player and sportscaster
* 1931 – Malcolm Browne, American journalist and photographer (d. 2012)
*1934 – Don Kirshner, American songwriter and producer (d. 2011)
* 1934 – Peter Morris, Australian-English surgeon and academic (d. 2022)
*1935 – Bud Paxson, American broadcaster, founded Home Shopping Network and Pax TV (d. 2015)
*1936 – Urs Wild, Swiss chemist (d. 2022)
*1937 – Ronald Hamowy, Canadian historian and academic (d. 2012)
* 1937 – Ferdinand Piëch, Austrian-German engineer and businessman (d. 2019)
*1938 – Ben Barnes, American businessman and politician, 36th Lieutenant Governor of Texas
* 1938 – Doug Lewis, Canadian lawyer and politician, 41st Canadian Minister of Justice
* 1938 – Ronald H. Miller, American theologian, author, and academic (d. 2011)
* 1938 – Kerry Wendell Thornley, American theorist and author (d. 1988)
*1939 – Robert Miller, American art dealer (d. 2011)
*1940 – Eric Dancer, English businessman and politician, Lord Lieutenant of Devon
* 1940 – Billy Fury, English singer-songwriter (d. 1983)
* 1940 – John McCririck, English journalist (d. 2019)
* 1940 – Chuck Menville, American animator and screenwriter (d. 1992)
* 1940 – Anja Silja, German soprano and actress
* 1940 – Agostino Vallini, Italian cardinal and vicar general of Rome
*1941 – Lagle Parek, Estonian architect and politician, Estonian Minister of the Interior
*1942 – Buster Williams, American jazz bassist
* 1942 – Dnyaneshwar Agashe, Indian businessman and cricketer (d. 2009)
*1943 – Richard Allen Epstein, American lawyer, author, and academic
*1946 – Clare Francis, English sailor and author
*1947 – Nigel Emslie, Lord Emslie, Scottish lawyer and judge
* 1947 – Richard Field, English lawyer and judge
* 1947 – Sherrie Levine, American photographer
* 1947 – Tsutomu Wakamatsu, Japanese baseball player, coach, and manager
*1948 – Jan Hammer, Czech pianist, composer, and producer
* 1948 – Alice Harden, American educator and politician (d. 2012)
* 1948 – Pekka Vasala, Finnish runner
*1951 – Olivia Hussey, Argentinian-English actress (d. 2024)
* 1951 – Börje Salming, Swedish ice hockey player and businessman (d. 2022)
*1952 – Joe Alaskey, American voice actor (d. 2016)
* 1952 – Pierre Guité, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1952 – John McColl, English general and politician, Lieutenant Governor of Jersey
* 1952 – Željko Ražnatović, Serbian commander "Arkan" (d. 2000)
* 1952 – John Robertson, Scottish businessman and politician
*1954 – Riccardo Patrese, Italian race car driver
* 1954 – Roddy Piper, Canadian professional wrestler and actor (d. 2015)
* 1954 – Michael Sembello, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
*1955 – Todd Lickliter, American basketball player and coach
* 1955 – Pete Shelley, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2018)
* 1955 – Mike Stroud, English physician and explorer
*1956 – Colin Tyre, Lord Tyre, Scottish lawyer and judge
*1957 – Teri Austin, Canadian actress
* 1957 – Afrika Bambaataa, American disc jockey
* 1957 – Dwane Casey, American basketball coach
* 1957 – Nick Hornby, English novelist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter
* 1957 – Julia Macur, English lawyer and judge
* 1957 – Frank McDonough, British historian
*1958 – Laslo Babits, Canadian javelin thrower (d. 2013)
*1959 – Sean Bean, English actor
* 1959 – Jimmy Mann, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1959 – Li Meisu, Chinese shot putter
*1960 – Vladimir Polyakov, Russian pole vaulter
* 1961 – Norman Cowans, Jamaican-English cricketer
* 1961 – Boomer Esiason, American football player and sportscaster
* 1961 – Bella Freud, English fashion designer
*1962 – Paul Nicholls, English jockey and trainer
*1964 – Ken Daneyko, Canadian ice hockey player and sportscaster
* 1964 – Maynard James Keenan, American singer-songwriter and producer
* 1964 – Rachel Notley, Canadian politician
* 1964 – Lela Rochon, American actress
*1966 – Vikram, Indian actor and singer
*1967 – Henry Ian Cusick, Peruvian-Scottish actor
* 1967 – Kimberly Elise, American actress
* 1967 – Marquis Grissom, American baseball player and coach
* 1967 – Ian Jones, New Zealand rugby player
* 1967 – Barnaby Joyce, Australian politician, 17th Deputy Prime Minister of Australia
* 1967 – Liz Phair, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
*1968 – Julie Fagerholt, Danish fashion designer
* 1968 – Phil Henderson, American basketball player and coach (d. 2013)
* 1968 – Eric Lamaze, Canadian jockey
* 1968 – Roger Twose, New Zealand cricketer
* 1968 – Richie Woodhall, English boxer and trainer
*1970 – Redman, American rapper, producer, and actor
*1971 – Claire Sweeney, English actress
*1972 – Gary Bennett, American baseball player
* 1972 – Tony Boselli, American football player and sportscaster
* 1972 – Jennifer Garner, American actress
* 1972 – Muttiah Muralitharan, Sri Lankan cricketer
* 1972 – Yuichi Nishimura, Japanese footballer and referee
* 1972 – Terran Sandwith, Canadian ice hockey player
*1973 – Katrin Koov, Estonian architect
* 1973 – Brett Maher, Australian basketball player and sportscaster
* 1973 – Theo Ratliff, American basketball player
*1974 – Mikael Åkerfeldt, Swedish singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
* 1974 – Victoria Beckham, English singer and fashion designer
*1975 – Heidi Alexander, English politician
* 1975 – Travis Roy, American ice hockey player (d. 2020)
*1976 – Maurice Wignall, Jamaican hurdler and long jumper
*1977 – Chad Hedrick, American speed skater
* 1977 – Frederik Magle, Danish composer, organist, and pianist
*1978 – Monika Bergmann-Schmuderer, German skier
* 1978 – Lindsay Hartley, American actress
* 1978 – Jason White, Scottish rugby player
*1979 – Eric Brewer, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1979 – Marija Šestak, Serbian-Slovenian triple jumper
*1980 – Fabián Vargas, Colombian footballer
* 1980 – Curtis Woodhouse, English footballer, boxer, and manager
*1981 – Jenny Meadows, English runner
* 1981 – Hanna Pakarinen, Finnish singer-songwriter
* 1981 – Ryan Raburn, American baseball player
* 1981 – Chris Thompson, English runner
* 1981 – Zhang Yaokun, Chinese footballer
*1982 – Brad Boyes, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1982 – Chuck Kobasew, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1982 – Tyron Woodley, American mixed martial artist
*1983 – Stanislav Chistov, Russian ice hockey player
* 1983 – Roberto Jiménez, Peruvian footballer
* 1983 – Andrea Marcato, Italian rugby player
*1984 – Pablo Sebastián Álvarez, Argentinian footballer
* 1984 – Jed Lowrie, American baseball player
* 1984 – Raffaele Palladino, Italian footballer
*1985 – Rooney Mara, American actress
* 1985 – Luke Mitchell, Australian actor and model
* 1985 – Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, French tennis player
*1986 – Romain Grosjean, French race car driver
*1988 – Takahiro Moriuchi, Japanese singer-songwriter
*1989 – Paraskevi Papachristou, Greek triple jumper
* 1989 – Avi Kaplan, singer and songwriter
*1990 – Jonathan Brown, Welsh footballer
*1992 – Lachlan Maranta, Australian rugby league footballer
*1992 – Jo Jinho, South Korean singer
*1994 – Alanna Goldie, Canadian fencer
*1994 – Yang Hongseok, South Korean singer and actor
*1995 – Jung Wheein, South Korean singer
*1996 – Lorna Fitzgerald, British actress
* 1996 – Caitlin Parker, Australian boxer
* 1996 – Helene Spilling, Norwegian dancer
*1998 – Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana (Saint), Thai actor and singer
*2001 – Shin Ryujin, South Korean rapper, singer and dancer
<!-- Do NOT add yourself or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Deaths
Pre-1600
* 485 – Proclus, Greek mathematician and philosopher (b. 412)
* 617 – Donnán of Eigg, Irish priest and saint
* 648 – Xiao, empress of the Sui dynasty
* 744 – Al-Walid II, Umayyad caliph (b. 706)
* 818 – Bernard of Italy, Frankish king (b. 797)
* 858 – Benedict III, pope of the Catholic Church
*1071 – Manuel Komnenos, Byzantine military commander (b. c. 1045)
*1080 – Harald III of Denmark (b. 1041)
*1111 – Robert of Molesme, Christian saint and abbot (b. 1027)
*1298 – Árni Þorláksson, Icelandic bishop (b. 1237)
*1321 – Infanta Branca of Portugal, daughter of King Afonso III of Portugal (b. 1259)
*1331 – Robert de Vere, 6th Earl of Oxford, English nobleman (b. 1257)
*1344 – Constantine II, King of Armenia
*1355 – Marin Falier, Doge of Venice (b. 1285)
*1427 – John IV, Duke of Brabant (b. 1403)
*1539 – George, Duke of Saxony (b. 1471)
*1574 – Joachim Camerarius, German scholar and translator (b. 1500)
1601–1900
*1669 – Antonio Bertali, Italian violinist and composer (b. 1605)
*1680 – Kateri Tekakwitha, Mohawk-born Native American saint (b. 1656)
*1695 – Juana Inés de la Cruz, Mexican poet and scholar (b. 1651)
*1696 – Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, French author (b. 1626)
*1711 – Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor (b. 1678)
*1713 – David Hollatz, Polish pastor and theologian (b. 1648)
*1764 – Johann Mattheson, German lexicographer and composer (b. 1681)
*1790 – Benjamin Franklin, American inventor, publisher, and politician, 6th President of Pennsylvania (b. 1706)
*1799 – Richard Jupp, English surveyor and architect (b. 1728)
*1840 – Hannah Webster Foster, American journalist and author (b. 1758)
*1843 – Samuel Morey, American engineer (b. 1762)
*1882 – George Jennings, English engineer and plumber, invented the flush toilet (b. 1810)
*1888 – E. G. Squier, American archaeologist and journalist (b. 1821)
*1892 – Alexander Mackenzie, Scottish-Canadian politician, 2nd Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1822)
1901–present
*1919 – Svetozar Ćorović, Serbian novelist (b. 1875)
*1921 – Manwel Dimech, Maltese journalist, author, and philosopher (b. 1860)
*1923 – Laurence Ginnell, Irish lawyer and politician (b. 1852)
*1930 – Alexander Golovin, Russian painter and stage designer (b. 1863)
*1933 – Kote Marjanishvili, Georgian director and playwright (b. 1872)
*1936 – Charles Ruijs de Beerenbrouck, Dutch lawyer and politician, 28th Prime Minister of the Netherlands (b. 1873)
*1942 – Jean Baptiste Perrin, French-American physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1870)
*1944 – J. T. Hearne, English cricketer and coach (b. 1867)
* 1944 – Dimitrios Psarros, Greek lieutenant, founded the National and Social Liberation (b. 1893)
*1946 – Juan Bautista Sacasa, Nicaraguan medical doctor, politician and 20th President of Nicaragua (b. 1874)
*1948 – Kantarō Suzuki, Japanese admiral and politician, 42nd Prime Minister of Japan (b. 1868)
*1954 – Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Romanian lawyer and politician, Romanian Minister of Justice (b. 1900)
*1960 – Eddie Cochran, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1938)
* 1961 – Elda Anderson, American physicist and health researcher (b. 1899)
*1967 – Red Allen, American singer and trumpet player (b. 1908)
*1975 – Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian philosopher and politician, 2nd President of India (b. 1888)
*1976 – Henrik Dam, Danish biochemist and physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1895)
*1977 – William Conway, Irish cardinal (b. 1913)
*1983 – Felix Pappalardi, American singer-songwriter, bass player, and producer (b. 1939)
*1984 – Claude Provost, Canadian-American ice hockey player (b. 1933)
*1986 – Marcel Dassault, French businessman, founded Dassault Aviation (b. 1892)
*1987 – Cecil Harmsworth King, English publisher (b. 1901)
* 1987 – Dick Shawn, American actor (b. 1923)
*1988 – Louise Nevelson, Ukrainian-American sculptor and educator (b. 1900)
*1990 – Ralph Abernathy, American minister and activist (b. 1936)
*1993 – Turgut Özal, Turkish engineer and politician, 8th president of Turkey (b. 1927)
* 1993 – Gamal Hamdan, Egyptian scholar and geographer (b. 1928)
*1994 – Roger Wolcott Sperry, American psychologist and biologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1913)
*1995 – Frank E. Resnik, American sergeant and businessman (b. 1928)
*1996 – Piet Hein, Danish poet and mathematician (b. 1905)
*1997 – Chaim Herzog, Israeli general, lawyer, and politician, 6th President of Israel (b. 1918)
*1998 – Linda McCartney, American photographer, activist, and musician (b. 1941)
*2003 – Robert Atkins, American physician and cardiologist, created the Atkins diet (b. 1930)
* 2003 – H. B. Bailey, American race car driver (b. 1936)
* 2003 – John Paul Getty, Jr., American-English philanthropist (b. 1932)
* 2003 – Earl King, American blues singer, guitarist and songwriter (b. 1934)
* 2003 – Yiannis Latsis, Greek businessman (b. 1910)
*2004 – Edmond Pidoux, Swiss author and poet (b. 1908)
*2006 – Jean Bernard, French physician and haematologist (b. 1907)
* 2006 – Scott Brazil, American director and producer (b. 1955)
* 2006 – Henderson Forsythe, American actor (b. 1917)
*2007 – Kitty Carlisle, American actress, singer, socialite and game show panelist (b. 1910)
*2008 – Aimé Césaire, Caribbean-French poet and politician (b. 1913)
* 2008 – Danny Federici, American organist and accordion player (b. 1950)
*2011 – Eric Gross, Austrian-Australian pianist and composer (b. 1926)
* 2011 – Michael Sarrazin, Canadian actor (b. 1940)
* 2011 – Robert Vickrey, American artist and author (b. 1926)
*2012 – Leila Berg, English journalist and author (b. 1917)
* 2012 – J. Quinn Brisben, American educator and politician (b. 1934)
* 2012 – Dimitris Mitropanos, Greek singer (b. 1948)
* 2012 – Nityananda Mohapatra, Indian journalist, poet, and politician (b. 1912)
* 2012 – Jonathan V. Plaut, American rabbi and author (b. 1942)
* 2012 – Stanley Rogers Resor, American soldier, lawyer, and politician, 9th United States Secretary of the Army (b. 1917)
*2013 – Carlos Graça, São Toméan politician, Prime Minister of São Tomé and Príncipe (b. 1931)
* 2013 – Bi Kidude, Tanzanian Taarab singer (b. ≈1910)
* 2013 – Yngve Moe, Norwegian bass player and songwriter (b. 1957)
* 2013 – V. S. Ramadevi, Indian politician, 13th Governor of Karnataka (b. 1934)
*2014 – Gabriel García Márquez, Colombian journalist and author, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1927)
* 2014 – Bernat Klein, Serbian-Scottish fashion designer and painter (b. 1922)
* 2014 – Wojciech Leśnikowski, Polish–American architect and academic (b. 1938)
* 2014 – Karpal Singh, Malaysian lawyer and politician (b. 1940)
*2015 – Robert P. Griffin, American soldier, lawyer, and politician (b. 1923)
* 2015 – Scotty Probasco, American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1928)
* 2015 – Jeremiah J. Rodell, American general (b. 1921)
* 2015 – A. Alfred Taubman, American businessman and philanthropist (b. 1924)
*2016 – Chyna, American wrestler (b. 1969)
* 2016 – Doris Roberts, American actress (b. 1925)
*2018 – Barbara Bush, American political matriarch and literacy advocate, First Lady of the United States (1989–1993), and Second Lady of the United States (1981–1989) (b. 1925)
* 2018 – Carl Kasell, American radio personality (b. 1934)
*2019 – Alan García, Peruvian lawyer and politician, 61st and 64th President of Peru (b. 1949)
*2022 – Radu Lupu, Romanian pianist (b. 1945)
<!--Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust "this year in history" websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence.-->
Holidays and observances
*Christian feast day:
**Donnán of Eigg
**Henry Heath<ref name="Martyrology" />
**Kateri Tekakwitha (Canada)<ref name="Martyrology" />
**Robert of Molesme<ref name="Martyrology" />
**Shemon bar Sabbae<ref name="Martyrology" />
**April 17 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
*Evacuation Day (Syria), celebrates the recognition of the independence of Syria from France in 1946.
*FAO Day (Iraq)
*Flag Day (American Samoa)
*Malbec World Day
*Women's Day (Gabon)
*World Hemophilia Day
References
External links
* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/17 BBC: On This Day]
*
* [https://www.onthisday.com/events/april/17 Historical Events on April 17]
Category:Days of April | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_17 | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.487899 |
1975 | Alan Ayckbourn | | name = Alan Ayckbourn
| image = Sir Alan Ayckbourn P4220001.JPG
| caption = Ayckbourn in 2010
| pseudonym | birth_date
| birth_place = Hampstead, London, England
| occupation = Playwright, director
| period = 1959–present
| genre | subject
| movement | website
}}
Sir Alan Ayckbourn (born 12 April 1939) is a prolific British playwright and director. As of 2025, he has written and produced 90 full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their first performance. More than 40 have subsequently been produced in the West End, at the Royal National Theatre or by the Royal Shakespeare Company since his first hit Relatively Speaking opened at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1967.
Major successes include Absurd Person Singular (1975), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Bedroom Farce (1975), Just Between Ourselves (1976), A Chorus of Disapproval (1984), Woman in Mind (1985), A Small Family Business (1987), Man of the Moment (1988), House & Garden (1999) and Private Fears in Public Places (2004). His plays have won numerous awards, including seven London Evening Standard Awards. They have been translated into over 35 languages and are performed on stage and television throughout the world. Ten of his plays have been staged on Broadway, attracting two Tony nominations, and one Tony award.
Life
Childhood
Ayckbourn was born in Hampstead, London. His mother, Irene Worley ("Lolly") (1906–1998), was a writer of short stories who published under the name "Mary James". His father, Horace Ayckbourn (1904–1965), was an orchestral violinist and was the lead violinist at the London Symphony Orchestra. His parents, who separated shortly after World War II, never married, and Ayckbourn's mother divorced her first husband to marry again in 1948. While he was at prep school as a boarder, his mother wrote to tell him she was marrying Cecil Pye, a bank manager. His new family consisted of his mother, his stepfather and Christopher, his stepfather's son by an earlier marriage. This relationship too, reportedly ran into difficulties early on.
Ayckbourn attended Haileybury and Imperial Service College, in the village of Hertford Heath and, while there, he toured Europe and America with the school's Shakespeare company.Adult lifeAfter leaving school at 17, Ayckbourn took several temporary jobs in various places before starting a temporary position at the Scarborough Library Theatre, where he was introduced to the artistic director, Stephen Joseph. It is said that Joseph became both a mentor and father figure for Ayckbourn until his untimely death in 1967, and Ayckbourn has consistently spoken highly of him.
Ayckbourn's career was briefly interrupted when he was called up for National Service. He was swiftly discharged, officially on medical grounds, but it is suggested that a doctor who noticed his reluctance to join the Armed Forces deliberately failed the medical as a favour. Although Ayckbourn continued to move wherever his career took him, he settled in Scarborough, eventually buying Longwestgate House, which had previously been owned by his mentor, Joseph.
In 1957, Ayckbourn married Christine Roland, another member of the Library Theatre company. Ayckbourn's first two plays were, in fact, written jointly with her under the pseudonym of "Roland Allen". They had two sons, Steven and Philip. However, the marriage had difficulties, which eventually led to their separation in 1971. Ayckbourn said that his relationship with Roland became easy once they agreed their marriage was over. About this time, he shared a home with Heather Stoney, an actress he had first met ten years earlier. Like his mother, neither he nor Roland sought an immediate divorce and it was not until thirty years later, in 1997, that they were formally divorced and Ayckbourn married Stoney. One side effect of the timing is that, when Ayckbourn was awarded a knighthood a few months before the divorce, both his first and second wives were entitled to take the title of Lady Ayckbourn.
In February 2006, he suffered a stroke in Scarborough, and stated: "I hope to be back on my feet, or should I say my left leg, as soon as possible, but I know it is going to take some time. In the meantime I am in excellent hands and so is the Stephen Joseph Theatre." He left hospital after eight weeks and returned to directing after six months. The following year, Ayckbourn announced he would step down as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre. He continues, however, to write and direct his own work at the theatre.Influence on playsSince the time Ayckbourn's plays became established in the West End, interviewers have raised the question of whether his work is autobiographical. There is no clear answer to this question. There has been only one biography, written by Paul Allen, which primarily covers his career in the theatre. Ayckbourn has frequently said he sees aspects of himself in all of his characters. In Bedroom Farce (1975), for example, he admitted to being, in some respects, all four of the men in the play. It has been suggested that, after Ayckbourn himself, the person who is used most often in his plays is his mother, particularly as Susan in Woman in Mind (1985).
What is less clear is the extent to which events in Ayckbourn's life have influenced his writing. It is true that the theme of marriages in difficulty was heavily present throughout his plays in the early seventies, at about the time his own marriage was coming to an end. However, by that time, he had also witnessed the failure of his parents' relationships and those of some of his friends. It is unclear whether this had any effect on the writing; Paul Allen's view is that Ayckbourn did not use his personal experiences to write his plays.
It is possible that Ayckbourn wrote plays with himself and his own situation in mind but, as Ayckbourn is portrayed as a guarded and private man, Ayckbourn joined Wolfit on tour to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe as an acting assistant stage manager (a role that involved both acting and stage management) for three weeks. His first experiences on the professional stage were various roles in The Strong are Lonely by Fritz Hochwälder. In the following year, Ayckbourn appeared in six other plays at the Connaught Theatre, Worthing and the Thorndike theatre, Leatherhead.
In 1957, Ayckbourn was employed by the director Stephen Joseph at the Library Theatre, Scarborough, the predecessor to the modern Stephen Joseph Theatre. In this play, Ayckbourn himself played the character of Jerry Watiss. where he appeared in a further eighteen plays. He left the Stoke company in 1964, officially to commit his time to the London production of Mr. Whatnot, but reportedly because was having trouble working with the artistic director, Peter Cheeseman. By now, his career as a writer was coming to fruition and his acting career was sidelined.
His final role on stage was as Jerry in Two for the Seesaw by William Gibson, at the Civic Theatre in Rotherham. The assistant stage manager on the production, Bill Kenwright, would go on to become one of the UK's most successful producers.WritingAyckbourn's first play, The Square Cat, was sufficiently popular locally to secure further commissions, although neither this nor the following three plays had much impact beyond Scarborough. After his transfer to Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, Christmas v Mastermind, flopped; this play is now universally regarded as Ayckbourn's greatest disaster.
Ayckbourn's fortunes revived in 1963 with Mr. Whatnot, which also premiered at the Victoria Theatre. This was the first play that Ayckbourn was sufficiently happy with to allow continued performances today, and the first play to receive a West End performance. However, the West End production flopped, in part due to misguided casting. After this, Ayckbourn experimented by collaborating with comedians, first writing a monologue for Tommy Cooper, and later with Ronnie Barker, who played Lord Slingsby-Craddock in the London production of Mr Whatnot in 1964, on the scripts for LWT's Hark at Barker. Ayckbourn used the pseudonym Peter Caulfield because he was under exclusive contract to the BBC at the time.
In 1965, back at the Scarborough Library Theatre, Meet my Father was produced, and later retitled Relatively Speaking. This time, the play was a massive success, both in Scarborough and in the West End, earning Ayckbourn a congratulatory telegram from Noël Coward. This was not quite the end of Ayckbourn's hit-and-miss record. His next play, The Sparrow ran for only three weeks at Scarborough but the following play, How the Other Half Loves, secured his runaway success as a playwright.
The height of Ayckbourn's commercial success came with plays such as Absurd Person Singular (1975), The Norman Conquests trilogy (1973), Bedroom Farce (1975) and Just Between Ourselves (1976). These plays focused heavily on marriage in the British middle classes. The only failure during this period was a 1975 musical with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jeeves; even this did little to dent Ayckbourn's career.
From the 1980s, Ayckbourn moved away from the recurring theme of marriage to explore other contemporary issues. One example was Woman in Mind, a play performed entirely from the perspective of a woman going through a nervous breakdown. He also experimented with unconventional ways of writing plays: Intimate Exchanges, for example, has one beginning and sixteen possible endings, and in House & Garden, two plays take place simultaneously on two separate stages. He also diversified into children's theatre, such as ''Mr A's Amazing Maze Plays and musical plays, such as By Jeeves (a more successful rewrite of the original Jeeves'').
With a résumé of over seventy plays, of which more than forty have played at the National Theatre or in the West End, Alan Ayckbourn is one of England's most successful living playwrights. Despite his success, honours and awards (which include a prestigious Laurence Olivier Award), Alan Ayckbourn remains a relatively anonymous figure, dedicated to regional theatre. Throughout his writing career, all but four of his plays premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in its three different locations. and was knighted in the 1997 New Year Honours. (but not proved) that Alan Ayckbourn is the most performed living English playwright, and the second most performed of all time, after Shakespeare.
Although Ayckbourn's plays no longer dominate the theatrical scene on the scale of his earlier works, he continues to write. Among major success has been Private Fears in Public Places, which had a hugely successful Off-Broadway run at 59E59 Theaters and, in 2006, was made into a film, Cœurs, directed by Alain Resnais. After Ayckbourn suffered a stroke, there was uncertainty as to whether he could continue to write. The play that premiered immediately after his stroke, If I Were You, had been written before his illness; the first play written afterwards, Life and Beth, premiered in the summer of 2008. Ayckbourn continues to write for the Stephen Joseph Theatre on the invitation of his successor as artistic director, Chris Monks. The first new play under this arrangement, My Wonderful Day, was performed in October 2009.
Ayckbourn continues to experiment with theatrical form. The play Roundelay opened in September 2014; before each performance, members of the audience are invited to extract five coloured ping pong balls from a bag, leaving the order in which each of the five acts is played left to chance, and allowing 120 possible permutations. In Arrivals and Departures (2013), the first half of the play is told from the point of view of one character, only for the second half to dramatise the same events from the point of view of another.
Many of Ayckbourn's plays, including Private Fears in Public Places, Intimate Exchanges, My Wonderful Day and Neighbourhood Watch, have had their New York premiere at 59E59 Theaters as part of the annual Brits Off Broadway Festival.
In 2019, Ayckbourn had published his first novel, The Divide, which had previously been showcased during a reading at the Stephen Joseph Theatre.
As a consequence of the Covid lockdown, Ayckbourn's 2020 play, Anno Domino, was recorded as a radio production, with Ayckbourn and his wife Heather playing all the roles. Similarly, Ayckbourn's Covid-period 2021 play, The Girl Next Door, was streamed online and made available behind a paywall on the Stephen Joseph Theatre's website.
In 2022, the first Ayckbourn play in around 60 years premiered in a venue other than Scarborough: All Lies at the Old Laundry in Bowness-on-Windermere.
Directing
Although Ayckbourn is best known as a writer, it is said that he only spends 10% of his time writing plays. Most of the remaining time is spent directing.
Ayckbourn began directing at the Scarborough Library Theatre in 1961, with a production of Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton. During that year and the next, he directed five other plays in Scarborough and, after transferring to the Victoria Theatre, in 1963 directed a further six plays. Between 1964 and 1967, much of his time was taken up by various productions of his early successes, Mr. Whatnot and Relatively Speaking and he directed only one play, The Sparrow, which he wrote and which was later withdrawn. In 1968, he resumed directing plays regularly, mostly at Scarborough.
After the death of Stephen Joseph in 1967, the Director of Productions was appointed on an annual basis. Ayckbourn was offered the position in 1969 and 1970, succeeding Rodney Wood, but he handed the position over to Caroline Smith in 1971, having spent most that year in the US with How the Other Half Loves. He became Director of Productions again in 1972 and, on 12 November of that year, he was made the permanent artistic director of the theatre.
In mid-1986, Ayckbourn accepted an invitation to work as a visiting director for two years at the National Theatre in London, to form his own company, and perform a play in each of the three auditoria, provided at least one was a new play of his own. He used a stock company that included performers such as Michael Gambon, Polly Adams and Simon Cadell. The three plays became four: Tons of Money by Will Evans and Valentine, with adaptations by Ayckbourn (Lyttelton); Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge (Cottesloe); his own play A Small Family Business (Olivier) and John Ford's '''Tis Pity She's a Whore (Olivier again). During this time, Ayckbourn shared his role of artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre with Robin Herford and returned in 1987 to direct the premiere of Henceforward...''. the last one being Rob Shearman's Knights in Plastic Armour in 1999; he made one exception in 2002, when he directed the world premiere of Tim Firth's The Safari Party.
In 2002, following a dispute over the Duchess Theatre's handling of Damsels in Distress, Ayckbourn sharply criticised both this and the West End's treatment of theatre in general and, in particular, their casting of celebrities. Although he did not explicitly say he would boycott the West End, he did not return to direct in there again until 2009, with a revival of Woman in Mind. He did, however, allow other West End producers to revive Absurd Person Singular in 2007 and The Norman Conquests in 2008.
Ayckbourn suffered a stroke in February 2006 and returned to work in September; the premiere of his 70th play If I Were You at the Stephen Joseph Theatre came the following month.
He announced in June 2007 that he would retire as artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre after the 2008 season. but Ayckbourn remained to direct premieres and revivals of his work at the theatre, beginning with How the Other Half Loves in June 2009.
In March 2010, he directed an in-the-round revival of his play Taking Steps at the Orange Tree Theatre, winning universal press acclaim.
In July 2014, Ayckbourn directed a musical adaptation of The Boy Who Fell into A Book, with musical adaptation and lyrics by Paul James and music by Eric Angus and Cathy Shostak. The show ran in The Stephen Joseph Theatre and received critical acclaim.
Honours and awards
* 1973: Evening Standard Award, Best Comedy, for Absurd Person Singular
* 1974: Evening Standard Award, Best Play, for The Norman Conquests
* 1977: Evening Standard Award, Best Play, for Just Between Ourselves
* 1981: Honorary Doctor of Letters degree (Litt.D.) from University of Hull
* 1985: Evening Standard Award, Best Comedy, for A Chorus of Disapproval
* 1985: Laurence Olivier Award, Best Comedy, for A Chorus of Disapproval
* 1986: Freedom of the Borough of Scarborough.
* 1987: Evening Standard Award, Best Play, for A Small Family Business
* 1987: Plays and Players Award
* 1987: Honorary Doctor of Letters degree (Litt.D.) from Keele University
* 1987: Honorary Doctor of Letters degree (Litt.D.) from University of Leeds
* 1987: Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
* 1989: Evening Standard Award, Best Comedy, for Henceforward...
* 1990: Evening Standard Award, Best Comedy, for Man of the Moment
* 1997: Knight Bachelor
* 1998: Honorary Doctor of the University degree (D.Univ.) from Open University
* 2008: Induction into the American Theater Hall of Fame
* 2009: Laurence Olivier Special Award
* 2009: The Critics' Circle annual award for Distinguished Service to the Arts
* 2011: Honorary Doctor of Letters degree (Litt.D.) from York St. John University
Ayckbourn also sits on the Council of the Society of Authors. He is also a longtime patron of Next Stage Theatre Company, an amateur theatre company based in Bath.
Works
Full-length plays
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Play number
! Title
! Series
! Scarborough premiere
! West End premiere
! New York premiere
|-
|1
|colspan"2"|The Square Cat
|30 July 1959
|
|
|-
|2
|colspan"2"|Love After All
|
|-
|5
|colspan"2"|Christmas V Mastermind
|9 July 1965
|29 March 1967
|
|-
|8
|colspan"2"|The Sparrow
| 20 August 1970
| 8 October 1974
|
|-
|11
|colspan="2"|Time And Time Again
|8 July 1971
|16 August 1972
|
|-
|12
|colspan="2"|Absurd Person Singular
|26 June 1972
|4 July 1973
|8 October 1974
|-
|13
|rowspan="3"|The Norman Conquests
|Table Manners
| 18 June 1973
| 9 May 1974
| 7 December 1975
|-
|14
|Living Together
| 26 June 1973
| 21 May 1974
| 7 December 1975
|-
|15
|Round and Round the Garden
| 2 July 1973
| 6 June 1974
| 7 December 1975
|-
|16
|colspan="2"|Absent Friends
|17 June 1974
|23 July 1975
|
|-
|17
|colspan"2"|Confusions
|30 September 1974
|19 May 1976
|
|-
|18
|colspan"2"|Jeeves
|
| 22 April 1975
|
|-
|19
|colspan="2"|Bedroom Farce
| 16 June 1975
| 16 March 1977
| 29 March 1979
|-
|20
|colspan="2"|Just Between Ourselves
| 28 January 1976
| 20 April 1977
|
|-
|21
|colspan="2"|Ten Times Table
| 18 January 1977
| 5 April 1978
|
|-
|22
|colspan="2"|Joking Apart
| 11 January 1978
| 7 March 1979
|
|-
|23
|colspan="2"|Sisterly Feelings
| 10/11 January 1979
| 3/4 June 1980
|Affairs in a Tent
|rowspan="8"| 3 June 1982
|rowspan="8"| 14 August 1984
|rowspan"8"| (31 May 2007)
|-
|Events on a Hotel Terrace
|-
|A Garden Fete
|-
|A Pageant
|-
|A Cricket Match
|-
|A Game of Golf
|-
|A One Man Protest
|-
|Love in the Mist
|-
|30
|colspan"2"|It Could Be Any One Of Us
| 5 October 1983
| 14 March 1983
|
|-
|31
|colspan="2"|
A Chorus of Disapproval
| 2 May 1984
| 1 August 1985
|
|-
|32
|colspan="2"|Woman in Mind
| 30 May 1985
| 3 September 1986
|
|-
|33
|colspan="2"|A Small Family Business
|
|20 May 1987
| 27 April 1992
|-
|34
|colspan="2"|Henceforward...
| 30 July 1987
| 21 November 1988
|
|-
|35
|colspan="2"|Man of the Moment
| 10 August 1988
| 14 February 1990
|
|-
|36
|colspan="2"|Mr A's Amazing Maze Plays
| 30 November 1988
| 4 March 1993
|
|-
|37
|colspan="2"|
The Revengers' Comedies
| 13 June 1989
| 13 March 1991
|
|-
|38
|colspan="2"|Invisible Friends
| 23 November 1989
| 13 March 1991
|
|-
|39
|colspan="2"|Body Language
| 21 May 1990
|
|-
|40
|colspan="2"|This Is Where We Came In
| 4/11 January 1990
|
|
|-
|41
|colspan"2"|Callisto 5
| 12 December 1990
|
|-
|42
|colspan="2"|Wildest Dreams
| 6 May 1991
| 14 December 1993
|
|-
|43
|colspan="2"|My Very Own Story
| 10 August 1991
|
|
|-
|44
|colspan="2"|Time of My Life
| 21 April 1992
| 3 August 1993
| 6 June 2014
|-
|45
|colspan="2"|Dreams From A Summer House
| 26 August 1992
|
|
|-
|46
|colspan="2"|Communicating Doors
| 2 February 1994
| 7 August 1995
|
|-
|47
|colspan"2"|Haunting Julia
| 20 April 1994
|
|
|-
|48
|colspan"2"|The Musical Jigsaw Play
| 2 March 1998
|
|-
|52
|colspan="2"|Comic Potential
| 4 June 1998
| 13 October 1999
|-
|53
|colspan="2"|The Boy Who Fell into a Book
| 4 December 1998
|
|
|-
|54
|rowspan"2"|House and Garden
| House
| 17 June 1999
| (9 June 2005)
* A Cut in the Rates, performed at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in 1984, and filmed for a BBC documentary.
Books
*
*
* Ayckbourn, Alan (2019) The Divide. UK: PS Publishing. ISBN 978-1-786364-47-0.
Film adaptations of Ayckbourn plays
Plays adapted as films include:
* A Chorus of Disapproval (play) filmed as A Chorus of Disapproval (1988 film), directed by Michael Winner;
* Intimate Exchanges (play) filmed as Smoking/No Smoking (1993 film), directed by Alain Resnais;
* ''The Revengers' Comedies (play) filmed as The Revengers' Comedies (also known as Sweet Revenge), directed by Malcolm Mowbray;
* Private Fears in Public Places (play) filmed as Cœurs (2006 film) directed by Alain Resnais.
* Life of Riley (play) filmed as Life of Riley'' (2014 film) directed by Alain Resnais.
Notes
References
*
External links
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* Archival material at
}}
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Category:Special Tony Award recipients | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Ayckbourn | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.553872 |
1979 | Alpha Centauri | a Centauri|HD 100673A Centauri|Centaurus A}}
}}
system, but for practical and historical reasons it is described in detail in its own article. }}
}}
), circled in red. The bright star to the right is Beta Centauri. |style=font-size: 1em; padding: 4px 0;}} <!-- Please do not change. The two bright stars are Alpha and Beta, not just A and B. -->
}}
(Rigil Kentaurus)
| ra1
| dec1 =
| appmag_v1 +0.01
| component2 = (Toliman)
| ra2
| b-v +0.71
| prop_mo_ra −3679.25
| absmag_v 4.38
| luminosity
| metal_fe
| rotation
| age_gyr = >4.8
| component2 =
| mass2
| rotation2 <!-- -->
| age_gyr2
}}
Alpha Centauri (, α Cen, or Alpha Cen) is a triple star system in the southern constellation of Centaurus. It consists of three stars: Rigil Kentaurus (), Toliman (), and Proxima Centauri (). The pair orbit around a common centre with an orbital period of 79 years. equivalent to about 430 times the radius of Neptune's orbit.
Proxima Centauri has one confirmed planet: Proxima b, an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone (though it is unlikely to be habitable), one candidate planet, Proxima d, sub-Earth which orbits very closely to the star, The common name Rigil Kentaurus is a Latinisation of the Arabic translation Rijl al-Qinṭūrus, meaning "the Foot of the Centaur". Qinṭūrus is the Arabic transliteration of the Greek (Kentaurus). The name is frequently abbreviated to Rigil Kent () or even Rigil, though the latter name is better known for Rigel ( Orionis).
An alternative name found in European sources, Toliman, is an approximation of the Arabic aẓ-Ẓalīmān (in older transcription, aṭ-Ṭhalīmān), meaning 'the (two male) Ostriches', an appellation Zakariya al-Qazwini had applied to the pair of stars Lambda and Mu Sagittarii; it was often not clear on old star maps which name was intended to go with which star (or stars), and the referents changed over time. The name Toliman originates with Jacobus Golius' 1669 edition of Al-Farghani's Compendium. Tolimân is Golius' Latinisation of the Arabic name "the ostriches", the name of an asterism of which Alpha Centauri formed the main star.
was discovered in 1915 by Robert T. A. Innes, who suggested that it be named Proxima Centaurus, . The name Proxima Centauri later became more widely used and is now listed by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) as the approved proper name; it is frequently abbreviated to Proxima.
In 2016, the Working Group on Star Names of the IAU, having decided to attribute proper names to individual component stars rather than to multiple systems, approved the name Rigil Kentaurus () as being restricted to and the name Proxima Centauri () for On 10 August 2018, the IAU approved the name Toliman () for
Other names
During the 19th century, the northern amateur popularist E.H. Burritt used the now-obscure name Bungula (). Its origin is not known, but it may have been coined from the Greek letter beta () and Latin 'hoof', originally for Beta Centauri (the other hoof).
To the Indigenous Boorong people of northwestern Victoria in Australia, Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri are Bermbermgle, two brothers noted for their courage and destructiveness, who speared and killed Tchingal "The Emu" (the Coalsack Nebula). The form in Wotjobaluk is Bram-bram-bult. Their apparent angular separation varies over about 80 years between 2 and 22 arcseconds (the naked eye has a resolution of 60 arcsec), but through much of the orbit, both are easily resolved in binoculars or small telescopes. At −0.27 apparent magnitude (combined for A and B magnitudes )}}), Alpha Centauri is a first-magnitude star and is fainter only than Sirius and Canopus. some 4.5° west, The Pointers easily distinguish the true Southern Cross from the fainter asterism known as the False Cross.
South of about 29° South latitude, is circumpolar and never sets below the horizon.) using the formulae (90°+ ). declination is −60° 50′, so the observed latitude where the star is circumpolar will be south of −29° 10′ South or 29°. Similarly, the place where Alpha Centauri never rises for northern observers is north of the latitude (90°+ ) N or +29° North.
}} North of about 29° N latitude, Alpha Centauri never rises. Alpha Centauri lies close to the southern horizon when viewed from latitude 29° N to the equator (close to Hermosillo and Chihuahua City in Mexico; Galveston, Texas; Ocala, Florida; and Lanzarote, the Canary Islands of Spain), but only for a short time around its culmination.
As seen from Earth, Proxima Centauri is 2.2° southwest from this distance is about four times the angular diameter of the Moon. Proxima Centauri appears as a deep-red star of a typical apparent magnitude of 11.1 in a sparsely populated star field, requiring moderately sized telescopes to be seen. Listed as V645 Cen in the General Catalogue of Variable Stars, version 4.2, this UV Ceti star or "flare star" can unexpectedly brighten rapidly by as much as 0.6 magnitude at visual wavelengths, then fade after only a few minutes. Some amateur and professional astronomers regularly monitor for outbursts using either optical or radio telescopes. In August 2015, the largest recorded flares of the star occurred, with the star becoming 8.3 times brighter than normal on 13 August, in the B band (blue light region).
Observational history
open to the night sky, with the Milky Way running diagonally across the sky above it and many southern stars and constellations labelled and connected by lines, including Alpha Centauri and the not visible Proxima Centauri.|alt=Image of a very large telescope dome open to the night sky, with the Milky Way running diagonally across the sky above it and many southern stars and constellations labelled and connected by lines]]
Alpha Centauri is listed in the 2nd century star catalog appended to Ptolemy's Almagest. Ptolemy gave its ecliptic coordinates, but texts differ as to whether the ecliptic latitude reads or . (Presently the ecliptic latitude is , but it has decreased by a fraction of a degree since Ptolemy's time due to proper motion.) In Ptolemy's time, Alpha Centauri was visible from Alexandria, Egypt, at <!-- Its southerly declination was about –53° S --> but, due to precession, its declination is now , and it can no longer be seen at that latitude. English explorer Robert Hues brought Alpha Centauri to the attention of European observers in his 1592 work Tractatus de Globis, along with Canopus and Achernar, noting:
The binary nature of Alpha Centauri AB was recognized in December 1689 by Jean Richaud, while observing a passing comet from his station in Puducherry. Alpha Centauri was only the third binary star to be discovered, preceded by Mizar AB and Acrux.
The large proper motion of Alpha Centauri AB was discovered by Manuel John Johnson, observing from Saint Helena, who informed Thomas Henderson at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope of it. The parallax of Alpha Centauri was subsequently determined by Henderson from many exacting positional observations of the AB system between April 1832 and May 1833. He withheld his results, however, because he suspected they were too large to be true, but eventually published them in 1839 after Bessel released his own accurately determined parallax for in 1838. For this reason, Alpha Centauri is sometimes considered as the second star to have its distance measured because Henderson's work was not fully acknowledged at first. Since the early 20th century, measures have been made with photographic plates.
By 1926, William Stephen Finsen calculated the approximate orbit elements close to those now accepted for this system. Others, like D. Pourbaix (2002), have regularly refined the precision of new published orbital elements. and its nearest known system is the binary brown dwarf system Luhman 16, at distance. Historical distance estimates :{| class"wikitable sortable mw-collapsible"
|+ Alpha Centauri AB historical distance estimates
|-
! rowspan="2" | Source
! rowspan="2" |Year
! rowspan"2" |Subject!! rowspan"2" | Parallax (mas) !! colspan"3" | Distance !! rowspan"2" | References
|-
!parsecs !! light-years !! petametres
|-
| H. Henderson || 1839 || AB || || || 2.81 ± 0.53 || ||
|-
| Maclear
|1851
|AB
|
|
|
| 32.4 ± 2.5
|
|-
| Moesta
|1868
|AB
|
|
|
|
|
|-
| Gill & Elkin
|1885
|AB
|
|
|
|
|
|-
| Roberts
|1895
|AB
|
| 1.32 ± 0.2
| 4.29 ± 0.65
|
|
|-
| Woolley et al.
|1970
|AB
|
|
|
|
|
|-
| Gliese & Jahreiß
|1991
|AB
|
|
|
|
|
|-
| van Altena et al.
| 1995
| AB
|
|
|
|
|
|-
| Perryman et al.
| 1997
| AB
|
|
|
|
|-
| Söderhjelm
| 1999
| AB
|
|
|
|
|
|-
|rowspan="2"| van Leeuwen
|rowspan="2"| 2007
| A
|
|
|
|
|
|-
| B
|
|
|
| 37.5 ± 2.5
|
|-
| RECONS TOP100
|2012
|AB
| and .
}}
|
|
|
|
|}
Kinematics
All components of display significant proper motion against the background sky. Over centuries, this causes their apparent positions to slowly change. Proper motion was unknown to ancient astronomers. Most assumed that the stars were permanently fixed on the celestial sphere, as stated in the works of the philosopher Aristotle. In 1718, Edmond Halley found that some stars had significantly moved from their ancient astrometric positions.
In the 1830s, Thomas Henderson discovered the true distance to by analysing his many astrometric mural circle observations. He then realised this system also likely had a high proper motion. by the observed differences between the two measured positions in different epochs.
Calculated proper motion of the centre of mass for is about 3620 mas/y (milliarcseconds per year) toward the west and 694 mas/y toward the north, giving an overall motion of 3686 mas/y in a direction 11° north of west. The motion of the centre of mass is about 6.1 arcmin each century, or 1.02° each millennium. The speed in the western direction is and in the northerly direction . Using spectroscopy the mean radial velocity has been determined to be around towards the Solar System.
Since is almost exactly in the plane of the Milky Way as viewed from Earth, many stars appear behind it. In early May 2028, will pass between the Earth and a distant red star, when there is a 45% probability that an Einstein ring will be observed. Other conjunctions will also occur in the coming decades, allowing accurate measurement of proper motions and possibly giving information on planets. though later calculations suggest that this will occur in 27,000 AD. At its nearest approach, α Centauri will attain a maximum apparent magnitude of −0.86, comparable to present-day magnitude of Canopus, but it will still not surpass that of Sirius, which will brighten incrementally over the next 60,000 years, and will continue to be the brightest star as seen from Earth (other than the Sun) for the next 210,000 years. Stellar system Alpha Centauri is a triple star system, with its two main stars, A and B, together comprising a binary component. The AB designation, or older A×B, denotes the mass centre of a main binary system relative to companion star(s) in a multiple star system. AB-C refers to the component of Proxima Centauri in relation to the central binary, being the distance between the centre of mass and the outlying companion. Because the distance between Proxima (C) and either of Alpha Centauri A or B is similar, the AB binary system is sometimes treated as a single gravitational object. Orbital properties The A and B components of Alpha Centauri have an orbital period of 79.762 years. Their orbit is moderately eccentric, as it has an eccentricity of almost 0.52; The observed maximum separation of these stars is about 22 arcsec, while the minimum distance is 1.7 arcsec. The widest separation occurred during February 1976, and the next will be in January 2056. Asteroseismic analyses that incorporate tight observational constraints on the stellar parameters for the Alpha Centauri stars have yielded age estimates of Gyr, Gyr, 6.4 Gyr, and Gyr. Age estimates for the stars based on chromospheric activity (Calcium H & K emission) yield whereas gyrochronology yields Gyr.
From the orbital elements, the total mass of Alpha Centauri AB is about {{efn|
<math display="block">\begin{smallmatrix} \left( \frac{\ 11.2 + 35.6\ }{ 2 }\right)^3 \frac{ 1 }{~ 79.91^2\ } \approx 2.0 \end{smallmatrix} \qquad </math> – see formula in standard gravitational parameter article.
}}
– or twice that of the Sun.|altTwo white disks side by side, each with coloured fringes and prominent diffraction spikes]]
Alpha Centauri A
Alpha Centauri A, also known as Rigil Kentaurus, is the principal member, or primary, of the binary system. It is a solar-like main-sequence star with a similar yellowish colour, whose stellar classification is spectral type G2-V; When considered among the individual brightest stars in the night sky, it is the fourth-brightest at an apparent magnitude of +0.01, Alpha Centauri B
B Centauri|HD 129116b Centauri|section=yes}}
}}
Alpha Centauri B, also known as Toliman, is the secondary star of the binary system. It is a main-sequence star of spectral type K1-V, making it more an orange colour than Alpha Centauri A; It is more magnetically active than Alpha Centauri A, showing a cycle of compared to 11 years for the Sun, and has about half the minimum-to-peak variation in coronal luminosity of the Sun. Alpha Centauri B has an apparent magnitude of +1.35, slightly dimmer than Mimosa. It is the closest star to the Sun but is too faint to be visible to the naked eye.
<div style"overflow:auto;"></div> Planetary system The Alpha Centauri system as a whole has two confirmed planets, both of them around Proxima Centauri. While other planets have been claimed to exist around all of the stars, none of the discoveries have been confirmed. Planets of Proxima Centauri
Proxima Centauri b is a terrestrial planet discovered in 2016 by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). It has an estimated minimum mass of 1.17 (Earth masses) and orbits approximately 0.049 AU from Proxima Centauri, placing it in the star's habitable zone.
The discovery of Proxima Centauri c was formally published in 2020 and could be a super-Earth or mini-Neptune. It has a mass of roughly 7 and orbits about from Proxima Centauri with a period of . In June 2020, a possible direct imaging detection of the planet hinted at the presence of a large ring system. However, a 2022 study disputed the existence of this planet.
A 2020 paper refining Proxima b's mass excludes the presence of extra companions with masses above at periods shorter than 50 days, but the authors detected a radial-velocity curve with a periodicity of 5.15 days, suggesting the presence of a planet with a mass of about . If this candidate is confirmed, the temporary name C1 will most likely be replaced with the scientific designation Alpha Centauri Ab in accordance with current naming conventions.
GO Cycle 1 observations are planned for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to search for planets around Alpha Centauri A, as well as observations of Epsilon Muscae. The coronographic observations, which occurred on July 26 and 27, 2023, were failures, though there are follow-up observations in March 2024. Pre-launch estimates predicted that JWST will be able to find planets with a radius of 5 at . Multiple observations every 3–6 months could push the limit down to 3 . Post-launch estimates based on observations of HIP 65426 b find that JWST will be able to find planets even closer to Alpha Centauri A and could find a 5 planet at . Candidate 1 has an estimated radius between }}
A search for transits of planet Bb was conducted with the Hubble Space Telescope from 2013 to 2014. This search detected one potential transit-like event, which could be associated with a different planet with a radius around . This planet would most likely orbit Alpha Centauri B with an orbital period of 20.4 days or less, with only a 5% chance of it having a longer orbit. The median of the likely orbits is 12.4 days. Its orbit would likely have an eccentricity of 0.24 or less. It could have lakes of molten lava and would be far too close to Alpha Centauri B to harbour life. If confirmed, this planet might be called . However, the name has not been used in the literature, as it is not a claimed discovery.
Hypothetical planets
Additional planets may exist in the Alpha Centauri system, either orbiting Alpha Centauri A or Alpha Centauri B individually, or in large orbits around Alpha Centauri AB. Because both stars are fairly similar to the Sun (for example, in age and metallicity), astronomers have been especially interested in making detailed searches for planets in the Alpha Centauri system. Several established planet-hunting teams have used various radial velocity or star transit methods in their searches around these two bright stars. All the observational studies have so far failed to find evidence for brown dwarfs or gas giants.
In 2009, computer simulations showed that a planet might have been able to form near the inner edge of Alpha Centauri B's habitable zone, which extends from from the star. Certain special assumptions, such as considering that the Alpha Centauri pair may have initially formed with a wider separation and later moved closer to each other (as might be possible if they formed in a dense star cluster), would permit an accretion-friendly environment farther from the star. Bodies around Alpha Centauri A would be able to orbit at slightly farther distances due to its stronger gravity. In addition, the lack of any brown dwarfs or gas giants in close orbits around Alpha Centauri make the likelihood of terrestrial planets greater than otherwise. A theoretical study indicates that a radial velocity analysis might detect a hypothetical planet of in Alpha Centauri B's habitable zone.
Radial velocity measurements of Alpha Centauri B made with the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher spectrograph were sufficiently sensitive to detect a planet within the habitable zone of the star (i.e. with an orbital period P 200 days), but no planets were detected.
Current estimates place the probability of finding an Earth-like planet around Alpha Centauri at roughly 75%. The observational thresholds for planet detection in the habitable zones by the radial velocity method are currently (2017) estimated to be about for Alpha Centauri A, for Alpha Centauri B, and for Proxima Centauri.
Early computer-generated models of planetary formation predicted the existence of terrestrial planets around both Alpha Centauri A and B, Despite these difficulties, given the similarities to the Sun in spectral types, star type, age and probable stability of the orbits, it has been suggested that this stellar system could hold one of the best possibilities for harbouring extraterrestrial life on a potential planet.
In the Solar System, it was once thought that Jupiter and Saturn were probably crucial in perturbing comets into the inner Solar System, providing the inner planets with a source of water and various other ices. However, since isotope measurements of the deuterium to hydrogen (D/H) ratio in comets Halley, Hyakutake, Hale–Bopp, 2002T7, and Tuttle yield values approximately twice that of Earth's oceanic water, more recent models and research predict that less than 10% of Earth's water was supplied from comets. In the system, Proxima Centauri may have influenced the planetary disk as the system was forming, enriching the area around Alpha Centauri with volatile materials. This would be discounted if, for example, happened to have gas giants orbiting (or vice versa), or if and B themselves were able to perturb comets into each other's inner systems, as Jupiter and Saturn presumably have done in the Solar System. For the slightly less luminous and cooler , the habitable zone is between about 0.7 and . The S.I.M. mission, however, was cancelled due to financial issues in 2010.
Circumstellar discs
Based on observations between 2007 and 2012, a study found a slight excess of emissions in the 24 μm (mid/far-infrared) band surrounding , which may be interpreted as evidence for a sparse circumstellar disc or dense interplanetary dust.
View from this system
<!-- Some of this probably doesn't need actual sources just needs explanatory calculations. some of it -->
from Alpha Centauri with Sirius near Betelgeuse, Procyon in Gemini, and the Sun in Cassiopeia generated by Celestia |alt=Simulated night-sky image centred on Orion labelled with constellation names in red and star names in yellow, including Sirius very close to Betelgeuse and the Sun near Cassiopeia.]]
connected by lines, and the Sun, labeled "Sol", as it would appear to the left of the "W"]]
The sky from would appear much as it does from the Earth, except that Centaurus's brightest star, being itself, would be absent from the constellation. The Sun would appear as a white star of apparent magnitude +0.5, roughly the same as the average brightness of Betelgeuse from Earth. It would be at the antipodal point of current right ascension and declination, at (2000), in eastern Cassiopeia, easily outshining all the rest of the stars in the constellation. With the placement of the Sun east of the magnitude 3.4 star Epsilon Cassiopeiae, nearly in front of the Heart Nebula, the "W" line of stars of Cassiopeia would have a "/W" shape.
Other nearby stars' placements may be affected somewhat drastically. Sirius, at 9.2 light years away from the system, would still be the brightest star in the night sky, with a magnitude of -1.2, but would be located in Orion less than a degree away from Betelgeuse. Procyon, which would also be at a slightly further distance than from the Sun, would move to outshine Pollux in the middle of Gemini.
A planet around either or B would see the other star as a very bright secondary. For example, an Earth-like planet at from (with a revolution period of 1.34 years) would get Sun-like illumination from its primary, and would appear 5.7–8.6 magnitudes dimmer (−21.0 to −18.2), 190–2,700 times dimmer than but still 150–2,100 times brighter than the full Moon. Conversely, an Earth-like planet at from (with a revolution period of 0.63 years) would get nearly Sun-like illumination from its primary, and would appear 4.6–7.3 magnitudes dimmer (−22.1 to −19.4), 70 to 840 times dimmer than but still 470–5,700 times brighter than the full Moon.
Proxima Centauri would appear dim as one of many stars, being magnitude 4.5 at its current distance, and magnitude 2.6 at periastron.
Future exploration
to the Sun, within 7.5 light years|alt=Series of partial circles centred on a small yellow disk labelled "Sun", each circle labelled with a distance, and several other small disks labelled with the names of stars]]
Alpha Centauri is a first target for crewed or robotic interstellar exploration. Using current spacecraft technologies, crossing the distance between the Sun and Alpha Centauri would take several millennia, though the possibility of nuclear pulse propulsion or laser light sail technology, as considered in the Breakthrough Starshot program, could make the journey to Alpha Centauri in 20 years. An objective of such a mission would be to make a fly-by of, and possibly photograph, planets that might exist in the system. The existence of Proxima Centauri b, announced by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in August 2016, would be a target for the Starshot program.
NASA released a mission concept in 2017 that would send a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in 2069, scheduled to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the first crewed lunar landing in 1969, Even at speed 10% of the speed of light (about 108 million km/h), which NASA experts say may be possible, it would take a spacecraft 44 years to reach the constellation, by the year 2113, and would take another 4 years for a signal, by the year 2117 to reach Earth. The concept received no further funding or development.In cultureAlpha Centauri has been recognized and associated throughout history, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. Polynesians have been using Alpha Centauri for their star navigation and have called it Kamailehope. In the Ngarrindjeri culture of Australia, Alpha Centauri represents with Beta Centauri two sharks chasing a stingray, the Southern Cross, and in Incan culture it with Beta Centauri form the eyes of a llama-shaped dark constellation embedded in the band of stars that the visible Milky Way forms in the sky. In ancient Egypt it was also revered and in China it is known as part of the South Gate asterism. Due to its proximity, the Alpha Centauri system has appeared in many works of fiction.
The Sagan Planet Walk in Ithaca, New York, is a walkable scale model of the solar system. An obelisk representing the scaled position of Alpha Centauri has been added at ʻImiloa Astronomy Center in Hawaii.
See also
* Project Longshot
Notes
References
External links
*
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Hypothetical planets or exploration
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Category:G-type main-sequence stars
Category:K-type main-sequence stars
Category:M-type main-sequence stars
Centauri, Alpha
Category:Maunder Minimum
Category:Triple star systems
Category:Hypothetical planetary systems<!-- Stars A & B have no confirmed planets; Proxima is categorized separately -->
Category:Centaurus
Rigil Kentaurus
Centauri, Alpha
PD-60 05483
0559
128620 and 128621
071681 and 071683
5759 and 5760
Category:Articles containing video clips
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Category:Astronomical objects known since antiquity | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri | 2025-04-05T18:25:51.978277 |
1980 | Amiga | <!-- This block is marked as red links cleanup -->
)</small>
| type = Personal computers<br/>Game console (CD32)
| generation | releasedate
| lifespan | discontinued 1996
| unitssold 4.91 million
| unitsshipped | media
| os = AmigaOS on Kickstart
| power | soc
| storage | display
| graphics | sound
| input | controllers
| camera | touchpad
| connectivity | platform
| service | dimensions
| weight | topgame
| compatibility | predecessor
| successor | website
}}
Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-bit or 16/32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphics and audio compared to previous 8-bit systems. These include the Atari ST—released earlier the same year—as well as the Macintosh and Acorn Archimedes. The Amiga differs from its contemporaries through custom hardware to accelerate graphics and sound, including sprites, a blitter, and four channels of sample-based audio. It runs a pre-emptive multitasking operating system called AmigaOS, with a desktop environment called Workbench.
The Amiga 1000, based on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor, was released in July 1985. Production problems kept it from becoming widely available until early 1986. While early advertisements cast the computer as an all-purpose business machine, When complete, the team began developing a much more sophisticated set of chips, CTIA, ANTIC and POKEY, that formed the basis of the Atari 8-bit computers.
With the 8-bit line's launch in 1979, the team once again started looking at a next generation chipset. Nolan Bushnell had sold the company to Warner Communications in 1978, and the new management was much more interested in the existing lines than development of new products that might cut into their sales. Miner wanted to start work with the new Motorola 68000, but management was only interested in another 6502 based system. Miner left the company, and, for a time, the industry.
The Amiga hardware was designed by Miner, RJ Mical, and Dale Luck. A breadboard prototype for testing and development was largely completed by late 1983, and shown at the January 1984 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
A further developed version of the system was demonstrated at the June 1984 CES and shown to many companies in hopes of garnering further funding, but found little interest in a market that was in the final stages of the video game crash of 1983. and Amiga was running out of money. A temporary arrangement in June led to a $500,000 loan from Atari to Amiga to keep the company going. The terms required the loan to be repaid at the end of the month, otherwise Amiga would forfeit the Lorraine design to Atari.
By late 1984, the prototype breadboard chipset had successfully been turned into integrated circuits, and the system hardware was being readied for production. At this time, the operating system was not ready, and led to a deal to port TRIPOS. TRIPOS was a multitasking system written in BCPL during the 1970s for the PDP-11 minicomputer. This early version was known as AmigaDOS and the GUI as Workbench. The BCPL parts were later rewritten in the C language, and the entire system became AmigaOS.
The system was enclosed in a pizza box form factor case. A late change was the introduction of vertical supports on either side of the case to provide a "garage" under the main section of the system where the keyboard could be stored.
Launch
The first model was announced in 1985 as simply "The Amiga from Commodore", later to be retroactively dubbed the Amiga 1000. They were first offered for sale in August, but by October only 50 had been built, all of which were used by Commodore. Machines only began to arrive in quantity in mid-November, meaning they missed the Christmas buying rush. By the end of the year, they had sold 35,000 machines, and severe cashflow problems made the company pull out of the January 1986 CES. Bad or entirely missing marketing, forcing the development team to move to the east coast, notorious stability problems and other blunders limited sales in early 1986 to between 10,000 and 15,000 units a month.
Later models
In late 1985, Thomas Rattigan was promoted to COO of Commodore, and then to CEO in February 1986. He immediately implemented an ambitious plan that covered almost all of the company's operations. Among these was the long-overdue cancellation of the now outdated PET and VIC-20 lines, as well as a variety of poorly selling Commodore 64 offshoots and the Commodore 900 workstation effort. These new designs were released in 1987 as the Amiga 2000 and Amiga 500, the latter of which went on to widespread success and became their best selling model.
Similar high-end/low-end models would make up the Amiga line for the rest of its history; follow-on designs included the Amiga 3000/Amiga 500 Plus/Amiga 600, and the Amiga 4000/Amiga 1200. These models incorporated a series of technical upgrades known as the ECS and AGA, which added higher resolution displays among many other improvements and simplifications.
The Amiga line sold an estimated 4,910,000 machines over its lifetime. The machines were most popular in the UK and Germany, with about 1.5 million sold in each country, and sales in the high hundreds of thousands in other European nations. The machine was less popular in North America, where an estimated 700,000 were sold. In the United States, the Amiga found a niche with enthusiasts and in vertical markets for video processing and editing. In Europe, it was more broadly popular as a home computer and often used for video games.
Commodore shut down the Amiga division on April 26, 1994, and filed for bankruptcy three days later. Commodore's assets were purchased by Escom, a German PC manufacturer, who created the subsidiary company Amiga Technologies. They re-released the A1200 and A4000T, and introduced a new 68060 version of the A4000T. Amiga Technologies researched and developed the Amiga Walker prototype. They presented the machine publicly at CeBit, but Escom went bankrupt in 1996. Some Amigas were still made afterwards for the North American market by QuikPak, a small Pennsylvania-based firm who was the manufacturer of Amigas for Escom.
After a reported sale to VisCorp fell through, Gateway was then working on a brand new Amiga platform, likely encouraged by a desire to be independent of Microsoft and Intel.
Hardware
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The Amiga has a custom chipset consisting of several coprocessors which handle audio, video, and direct memory access independently of the central processing unit (CPU). This architecture gave the Amiga a performance edge over its competitors, particularly for graphics-intensive applications and games. ReTargetable Graphics
ReTargetable Graphics is an API for device drivers mainly used by 3rd party graphics hardware to interface with AmigaOS via a set of libraries. The software libraries may include software tools to adjust resolution, screen colors, pointers and screenmodes. The standard Intuition interface is limited to display depths of 8 bits, while RTG makes it possible to handle higher depths like 24-bits.
Sound
The sound chip, named Paula, supports four PCM sound channels (two for the left speaker and two for the right) with 8-bit resolution for each channel and a 6-bit volume control per channel. The analog output is connected to a low-pass filter, which filters out high-frequency aliasing when the Amiga is using a lower sampling rate (see Nyquist frequency). The brightness of the Amiga's power LED is used to indicate the status of the Amiga's low-pass filter. The filter is active when the LED is at normal brightness, and deactivated when dimmed (or off on older A500 Amigas). On Amiga 1000 (and first Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 model), the power LED had no relation to the filter's status, and a wire needed to be manually soldered between pins on the sound chip to disable the filter. Paula can read arbitrary waveforms at arbitrary rates and amplitudes directly from the system's RAM, using direct memory access (DMA), making sound playback without CPU intervention possible.
Although the hardware is limited to four separate sound channels, software such as OctaMED uses software mixing to allow eight or more virtual channels, and it was possible for software to mix two hardware channels to achieve a single 14-bit resolution channel by playing with the volumes of the channels in such a way that one of the source channels contributes the most significant bits and the other the least.
The quality of the Amiga's sound output, and the fact that sound hardware is part of the standard chipset and easily addressed by software, were standout features of Amiga hardware unavailable on IBM PC compatibles for years. Third-party sound cards exist that provide DSP functions, multi-track direct-to-disk recording, multiple hardware sound channels and 16-bit and beyond resolutions. A retargetable sound API called AHI was developed allowing these cards to be used transparently by the OS and software. Kickstart firmware
Kickstart is the firmware upon which AmigaOS is bootstrapped. Its purpose is to initialize the Amiga hardware and core components of AmigaOS and then attempt to boot from a bootable volume, such as a floppy disk or hard disk drive. Most models (excluding the Amiga 1000) come equipped with Kickstart on an embedded ROM-chip.
There are various editions of Kickstart ROMs starting with Kickstart v1.1 for the Amiga 1000, v1.2 and v1.3 for the A500, Kickstart v2.1 on A500+, Kickstart v2.2 for A600 and dual ROMs for Kickstart v3.0 and 3.1 for A1200 and A4000. After Commodore's demise there have been new Kickstart v3.1 ROMs made available for both the A500 and A600 Computers. Amiga Software is mostly backward compatible, but v2.1 ROMs and newer differ slightly, which can cause software glitches with earlier programs. To help address this and to get earlier programs to work with later Kickstart ROMs, some tools have been produced such as RELOKIK 1.4 and MAKE IT WORK! for the A600 and A1200. They revert the system to temporarily boot in Kickstart v1.3.
Keyboard and mouse
The keyboard on Amiga computers is similar to that found on a mid-80s IBM PC: Ten function keys, a numeric keypad, and four separate directional arrow keys. Caps Lock and Control share space to the left of A. Absent are Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys: These functions are accomplished on Amigas by pressing shift and the appropriate arrow key. The Amiga keyboard adds a Help key, which a function key usually acts as on PCs (usually F1). In addition to the Control and Alt modifier keys, the Amiga has 2 "Amiga" keys, rendered as "Open Amiga" and "Closed Amiga" similar to the Open/Closed Apple logo keys on Apple II keyboards. The left is used to manipulate the operating system (moving screens and the like) and the right delivers commands to the application. The absence of Num lock frees space for more mathematical symbols around the numeric pad.
Like IBM-compatible computers, the mouse has two buttons, but in AmigaOS, pressing and holding the right button replaces the system status line at the top of the screen with a Maclike menu bar. As with Apple's Mac OS prior to Mac OS 8, menu options are selected by releasing the button over that option, not by left clicking. Menu items that have a Boolean toggle state can be left clicked whilst the menu is kept open with the right button, which allows the user – for example – to set some selected text to bold, underline and italics in one visit to the menus.
The mouse plugs into one of two Atari joystick ports used for joysticks, game paddles, and graphics tablets. Although compatible with analog joysticks, Atari-style digital joysticks became standard. Unusually, two independent mice can be connected to the joystick ports; some games, such as Lemmings, were designed to take advantage of this.
Other peripherals and expansions
The Amiga was one of the first computers for which inexpensive sound sampling and video digitization accessories were available. As a result of this and the Amiga's audio and video capabilities, the Amiga became a popular system for editing and producing both music and video.
Many expansion boards were produced for Amiga computers to improve the performance and capability of the hardware, such as memory expansions, SCSI controllers, CPU boards, and graphics boards. Other upgrades include genlocks, network cards for Ethernet, modems, sound cards and samplers, video digitizers, extra serial ports, and IDE controllers. Additions after the demise of Commodore company are USB cards. The most popular upgrades were memory, SCSI controllers and CPU accelerator cards. These were sometimes combined into one device.
Early CPU accelerator cards used the full 32-bit CPUs of the 68000 family such as the Motorola 68020 and Motorola 68030, almost always with 32-bit memory and usually with FPUs and MMUs or the facility to add them. Later designs feature the Motorola 68040 or Motorola 68060. Both CPUs feature integrated FPUs and MMUs. Many CPU accelerator cards also had integrated SCSI controllers.
Phase5 designed the PowerUP boards (Blizzard PPC and CyberStorm PPC) featuring both a 68k (a 68040 or 68060) and a PowerPC (603 or 604) CPU, which are able to run the two CPUs at the same time and share the system memory. The PowerPC CPU on PowerUP boards is usually used as a coprocessor for heavy computations; a powerful CPU is needed to run MAME for example, but even decoding JPEG pictures and MP3 audio was considered heavy computation at the time. It is also possible to ignore the 68k CPU and run Linux on the PPC via project Linux APUS, but a PowerPC-native AmigaOS promised by Amiga Technologies GmbH was not available when the PowerUP boards first appeared. Due to its NTSC-only design, it did not find a market in countries that used the PAL standard, such as in Europe. In those countries, the OpalVision card was popular, although less featured and supported than the Video Toaster. Low-cost time base correctors (TBC) specifically designed to work with the Toaster quickly came to market, most of which were designed as standard Amiga bus cards.
Various manufacturers started producing PCI busboards for the A1200, A3000 and A4000, allowing standard Amiga computers to use PCI cards such as graphics cards, Sound Blaster sound cards, 10/100 Ethernet cards, USB cards, and television tuner cards. Other manufacturers produced hybrid boards that contained an Intel x86 series chip, allowing the Amiga to emulate a PC.
PowerPC upgrades with Wide SCSI controllers, PCI busboards with Ethernet, sound and 3D graphics cards, and tower cases allowed the A1200 and A4000 to survive well into the late nineties.
Expansion boards were made by Richmond Sound Design that allow their show control and sound design software to communicate with their custom hardware frames either by ribbon cable or fiber optic cable for long distances, allowing the Amiga to control up to eight million digitally controlled external audio, lighting, automation, relay and voltage control channels spread around a large theme park, for example. See Amiga software for more information on these applications.
Other devices included the following:
* Amiga 501 with 512 KB RAM and real-time clock
* Trumpcard 500 Zorro-II SCSI interface
* GVP A530 Turbo, accelerator, RAM expansion, PC emulator
* A2091 / A590 SCSI hard disk controller + 2 MB RAM expansion The serial card used the 65CE02 CPU clocked at .
|-
| ARCNET
| style="text-align:right;"|
| A560, and Amiga OS is fundamentally incapable of enforcing any form of security model since any program had full access to the system. A co-operational memory protection feature was implemented in AmigaOS 4 and could be retrofitted to old AmigaOS systems using Enforcer or CyberGuard tools.
The problem was somewhat exacerbated by Commodore's initial decision to release documentation relating not only to the OS's underlying software routines, but also to the hardware itself, enabling intrepid programmers who had developed their skills on the Commodore 64 to POKE the hardware directly, as was done on the older platform. While the decision to release the documentation was a popular one and allowed the creation of fast, sophisticated sound and graphics routines in games and demos, it also contributed to system instabilityas some programmers lacked the expertise to program at this level. For this reason, when the new AGA chipset was released, Commodore declined to release low-level documentation in an attempt to force developers into using the approved software routines.
The latest version for the PPC Amigas is the AmigaOS 4.1 and for the 68k Amigas is the AmigaOS 3.2.2
Influence on other operating systems
AmigaOS directly or indirectly inspired the development of various operating systems. MorphOS and AROS clearly inherit heavily from the structure of AmigaOS as explained directly in articles regarding these two operating systems. AmigaOS also influenced BeOS, which featured a centralized system of Datatypes, similar to that present in AmigaOS. Likewise, DragonFly BSD was also inspired by AmigaOS as stated by Dragonfly developer Matthew Dillon who is a former Amiga developer. Unix and Unix-like systems
Commodore-Amiga produced Amiga Unix, informally known as Amix, based on AT&T SVR4. It supports the Amiga 2500 and Amiga 3000 and is included with the Amiga 3000UX. Among other unusual features of Amix is a hardware-accelerated windowing system that can scroll windows without copying data. Amix is not supported on the later Amiga systems based on 68040 or 68060 processors.
Other, still maintained, operating systems are available for the classic Amiga platform, including Linux and NetBSD. Both require a CPU with MMU such as the 68020 with 68851 or full versions of the 68030, 68040 or 68060. There is also a version of Linux for Amigas with PowerPC accelerator cards. Debian and Yellow Dog Linux can run on the AmigaOne.
There is an official, older version of OpenBSD. The last Amiga release is 3.2. MINIX 1.5.10 also runs on Amiga.Amiga Future, Trade shows The Amiga continues to be popular enough that fans to support conferences such as Amiga37 which had over 50 vendors. Uses The Amiga series of computers found a place in early computer graphic design and television presentation. Season 1 and part of season 2 of the television series Babylon 5 were rendered in LightWave 3D on Amigas.
* The "Weird Al" Yankovic film UHF contains a computer-animated music video parody of the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing", titled "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*". According to the DVD commentary track, this spoof was created on an Amiga home computer.
* Todd Rundgren's video "Change Myself" was produced with Toaster and Lightwave.
* Scottish pop artist Calvin Harris composed his 2007 debut album I Created Disco with an Amiga 1200.
* American professional skateboarder Tony Hawk used an Amiga 2000 during the late 1980s to early 1990s. NewTek sent him a Video Toaster for his Amiga in exchange for appearing in a promotional video alongside Wil Wheaton and Penn Jillette, which he later used for editing a promotional video for the TurboDuo game Lords of Thunder in 1993.
* Veteran actor Dick Van Dyke also owned an Amiga equipped with a Video Toaster, where he is credited with the creation of 3D-rendered effects used on Diagnosis: Murder and The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited. Van Dyke has displayed his computer-generated imagery work at SIGGRAPH, and continues to work with LightWave 3D.
* A number of notable producers used OctaMED for composition and live performance of Drum and Bass, Jungle, and various other sub-genres of electronic dance music on Amiga systems, occasionally in conjunction with additional synthesizers. These include: Aphrodite, DJ Zinc, Omni Trio, and Paradox, among others.
* Electronic musician Deaton Chris Anthony uses an Amiga to produce music (in addition to a modern Mac-based setup). Anthony has referred to the computer as his "inspiration creator".Special purpose applications* Amigas were used in various NASA laboratories to keep track of low orbiting satellites until 2004. Amigas were used at Kennedy Space Center to run strip-chart recorders, to format and display data, and control stations of platforms for Delta rocket launches.
* London Transport Museum developed their own interactive multi-media software for the CD32 including a virtual tour of the museum.
* The Weather Network used Amigas to display the weather on TV. See also
*Amiga Forever
*List of Amiga games
*Amiga emulation
*SAGE Computer Technology
Notes
References
Works cited
*
* External links
* [https://www.amigaos.net/ Official AmigaOS website]
* [https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/ History of the Amiga] at Ars Technica
* [https://amiga.com/ Amiga, Inc. Website]
* [https://www.amigafuture.de/app.php/asd/ Amiga Software Database]
* [http://amiga.resource.cx/ Amiga Hardware Database]
* [https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/ Big Book of Amiga Hardware]
* [http://lemonamiga.com/ Lemon Amiga: Amiga Fanbase]
*
* [https://archive.org/stream/run-magazine-21/Run_Issue_21_1985_Sep#page/n23/mode/2up RUN Magazine Issue 21], September 1985 article on the introduction of the Amiga
* [http://www.amiga.org/ Amiga.org: community forums and support]
* [http://eab.abime.net/index.php English Amiga Board: Amiga community forums and support]
* [http://hol.abime.net/ The Hall of Light: the database of Amiga games]
* [https://theamigamuseum.com/ The Amiga Museum]
Category:68k-based computers
Category:American inventions
Category:Computer-related introductions in 1985
Category:Desktop computers
Category:Home computers<!-- Leave this, or else it breaks navigation for those who don't know what a 68k is--> | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.057995 |
1985 | Absorption | Absorption may refer to:
Chemistry and biology
Absorption (biology), digestion
Absorption (small intestine)
Absorption (chemistry), diffusion of particles of gas or liquid into liquid or solid materials
Absorption (skin), a route by which substances enter the body through the skin
Absorption (pharmacology), absorption of drugs into the body
Physics and chemical engineering
Absorption (acoustics), absorption of sound waves by a material
Absorption (electromagnetic radiation), absorption of light or other electromagnetic radiation by a material
Absorption air conditioning, a type of solar air conditioning
Absorption refrigerator, a refrigerator that runs on surplus heat rather than electricity
Dielectric absorption, the inability of a charged capacitor to completely discharge when briefly discharged
Mathematics and economics
Absorption (economics), the total demand of an economy for goods and services both from within and without
Absorption (logic), one of the rules of inference
Absorption costing, or total absorption costing, a method for appraising or valuing a firm's total inventory by including all the manufacturing costs incurred to produce those goods
Absorbing element, in mathematics, an element that does not change when it is combined in a binary operation with some other element
Absorption law, in mathematics, an identity linking a pair of binary operations
See also
Adsorption, the formation of a gas or liquid film on a solid surface
CO2 scrubber, device which absorbs carbon dioxide from circulated gas
Digestion, the uptake of substances by the gastrointestinal tract
Absorption (psychology), a state of becoming absorbed by mental imagery or fantasy
Flow (psychology), a state of total mental "absorption" | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.112894 |
1988 | Abel Tasman | 17th century
| birth_date =
| birth_place = Lutjegast, Dutch Republic
| death_date
| death_place = Batavia, Dutch East Indies
| occupation =
| spouse
| children = Claesjen Tasman (daughter)
}}
Abel Janszoon Tasman (; 160310 October 1659) was a Dutch seafarer and explorer, best known for his voyages of 1642 and 1644 in the service of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). He was the first European to reach New Zealand, which he named Staten Landt. He was also the eponym of Tasmania.
Likely born in 1602 or 1603 A proclamation of his second marriage, given in December 1631 at Amsterdam, describes him as a widower and sailor.
Tasman sailed from Texel (Netherlands) to Batavia, now Jakarta, in 1633 taking the southern Brouwer Route. While based in Batavia, Tasman took part in a voyage to Seram Island (in what is now the Maluku Province in Indonesia) because the locals had sold spices to other European nationalities than the Dutch.
Tasman docked to find wood for repairs and was separated from the other ships; a fight broke out with local villagers and at least two of Tasman's men were killed.
By August 1637, Tasman had returned to Amsterdam, and in 1638 he signed on for another ten years and took his wife with him to Batavia via a six-month journey.-->
He was second-in-command of a 1639 expedition of exploration into the north Pacific under Matthijs Quast. The fleet included the ships Engel and Gracht and reached Fort Zeelandia (Dutch Formosa) and Deshima (an artificial island off Nagasaki, Japan).
First major voyage
In August 1642, the Council of the Indies, consisting of Antonie van Diemen, Cornelis van der Lijn, Joan Maetsuycker, Justus Schouten, Salomon Sweers, Cornelis Witsen, and Pieter Boreel in Batavia dispatched Tasman and Franchoijs Jacobszoon Visscher on a voyage of exploration to little-charted areas east of the Cape of Good Hope, west of Staten Land (near the Cape Horn of South America) and south of the Solomon Islands.
One of the objectives was to obtain knowledge of "all the totally unknown" Provinces of Beach. This was a purported yet phantom island said to have plentiful gold, which had appeared on European maps since the 15th century, as a result of an error in some editions of Marco Polo's works.
The expedition was to use two small ships, Heemskerck and Zeehaen.
Mauritius
In accordance with Visscher's directions, Tasman sailed from Batavia on 14 August 1642 and arrived at Mauritius on 5 September 1642, according to the captain's journal. with the intention of having the Solomon Islands as their destination.
Tasmania
]]
On 24 November 1642, Tasman reached and sighted the west coast of Tasmania, north of Macquarie Harbour. He named his discovery Van Diemen's Land, after Antonio van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies.
Proceeding south, Tasman skirted the southern end of Tasmania and turned north-east. He then tried to work his two ships into Adventure Bay on the east coast of South Bruny Island, but he was blown out to sea by a storm. This area he named Storm Bay. Two days later, on 1 December, Tasman anchored to the north of Cape Frederick Hendrick just north of the Forestier Peninsula. On 2 December, two ship's boats under the command of the Pilot, Major Visscher, rowed through the Marion Narrows into Blackman Bay, and then west to the outflow of Boomer Creek where they gathered some edible "greens". Tasman named the bay, Frederick Hendrik Bay, which included the present North Bay, Marion Bay and what is now Blackman Bay. (Tasman's original naming, Frederick Henrick Bay, was mistakenly transferred to its present location by Marion Dufresne in 1772). The next day, an attempt was made to land in North Bay. However, because the sea was too rough, a ship's carpenter swam through the surf and planted the Dutch flag. Tasman then claimed formal possession of the land on 3 December 1642.
For two more days, he continued to follow the east coast northward to see how far it went. When the land veered to the north-west at Eddystone Point, he tried to follow the coast line but his ships were suddenly hit by the Roaring Forties howling through Bass Strait. Tasman was on a mission to find the Southern Continent not more islands, so he abruptly turned away to the east and continued his continent-hunting.
New Zealand
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]]
, the main island of Tonga; drawing by Isaack Gilsemans]]
Tasman had intended to proceed in a northerly direction but as the wind was unfavourable he steered east. The expedition endured a rough voyage and in one of his diary entries Tasman claimed that his compass was the only thing that had kept him alive.
On 13 December 1642 Tasman and his crew became the first Europeans to reach New Zealand when they sighted the north-west coast of the South Island. Tasman named it Staten Landt "in honour of the States General" (Dutch parliament). He wrote, "it is possible that this land joins to the Staten Landt but it is uncertain", referring to Isla de los Estados, a landmass of the same name at the southern tip of South America, encountered by the Dutch navigator Jacob Le Maire in 1616. However, in 1643 Brouwer's expedition to Valdivia found out that Staaten Landt was separated by sea from the hypothetical Southern Land. Tasman continued: "We believe that this is the mainland coast of the unknown Southland." Tasman thought he had found the western side of the long-imagined Terra Australis that stretched across the Pacific to near the southern tip of South America. On 14 December 1642 Tasman's ships anchored 7 km offshore c. 20km south of Cape Foulwind near Greymouth. The ships were observed by Māori who named a place on this coast Tiropahi (the place were a large sailing ship was seen).
After sailing north then east for five days, the expedition anchored about from the coast off what is now Golden Bay. A group of Māori paddled out in a waka (canoe) and attacked some sailors who were rowing between the two Dutch vessels. Four sailors were clubbed to death with patu. This theory was eventually disproved when Captain Cook circumnavigated New Zealand in 1769.
<!--need citations for things that are not obviously after him and those without articles-->
]]
Multiple places have been named after Tasman, including:
*The Australian island and state of Tasmania, renamed after him, formerly Van Diemen's land. It includes features such as:
**The Tasman Peninsula.
**The Tasman Bridge.
**The Tasman Highway.
*The Tasman Sea.
*In New Zealand:
**The Tasman Glacier.
**Tasman Lake.
**The Tasman River.
**Mount Tasman.
**The Abel Tasman National Park.
**Tasman Bay.
**The Tasman District.
**Abel Tasman Monument.
<!-- Probably not reasonable to list things indirectly named after him
Animal and plant species:
*Indirectly via Tasmania
** The Tasmanian Devil
** The Tasmanian Tiger
** Tasmannia (Tasmanian pepper and relatives)
** The Tasman flaxlily
*Indirectly via the Tasman Sea
** The Tasman Booby
** Two species named Tasman Parakeets
** The Tasman Starling
** The Tasman whale-->
Also named after Tasman are:
*Tasman Pulp and Paper company, a large pulp and paper producer in Kawerau, New Zealand.
*Abel Tasman Drive, in Tākaka.
*The former passenger/vehicle ferry Abel Tasman.
*The Able Tasmans – an indie band from Auckland, New Zealand.
*Tasman, a layout engine for Internet Explorer.
* 6594 Tasman (1987 MM1), a main-belt asteroid.
* Tasman Drive in San Jose, California, and its Tasman light rail station, named after the Tasman Sea.
* Tasman Road in Claremont, Cape Town, South Africa.
<!-- More indirect naming: * Tasman Forestry Ltd. and via it the Tasman Accord
* The Tasman Rugby Union and Tasman rugby league team
* the Tasman Series, a motor racing series between Australia and New Zealand -->
* HMNZS Tasman, shore-based training establishment of the Royal New Zealand Navy.
* HMAS Tasman is a Hunter-class frigate that is expected to enter service with the Royal Australian Navy in the late 2020s.
His portrait has been on four New Zealand postage stamp issues, on a 1992 5 NZD coin, and on 1963, 1966 and 1985 Australian postage stamps.
In the Netherlands, many streets are named after him. In Lutjegast, the village where he was born, there is a museum dedicated to his life and travels.
Tasman's life was dramatised for radio in Early in the Morning (1946) a play by Ruth Park.
Portraits and depictions
A drawing titled Abel Janssen Tasman, Navigateur en Australie is held by the State Library of New South Wales as part of "a portfolio of 26 ink drawings of 16th and 17th century Dutch admirals, navigators and governor-generals of the VOC". The portfolio was acquired at an art auction in The Hague in 1862. However, it is unclear if the drawing is of Tasman and its original source is unknown, although it has been said to resemble the work of Dutch engraver Jacobus Houbraken. The drawing has been assessed as having the "most reliable provenance" of any depiction of Tasman with "no strong reason to doubt that the drawing is not genuine".
In 1948, the National Library of Australia acquired from Rex Nan Kivell a portrait purporting to depict Tasman with his wife and stepdaughter, which was attributed to Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp and dated to 1637. In 2018 the painting was exhibited by the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands which identified it as "the only known portrait of the explorer". However, the Netherlands Institute for Art History has instead attributed the painting to Dirck van Santvoort and concluded that the painting does not depict Tasman and his family.
The provenance provided from Nan Kivell for the family portrait has been unable to be verified. Nan Kivell claimed that the portrait was passed down through the Springer family – relatives of Tasman's widow – and was sold at Christie's in 1877. However, Christie's records indicate that the portrait was not owned by the Springer family or associated with Tasman, and was instead sold as "Portrait of an astronomer" by "Anthonie Palamedes" [sic]. Nan Kivell additionally claimed that the portrait was sold at Christie's a second time in 1941, however no records exist to support this. A survey of portraits of Tasman published in 2019 concluded that the provenance was "either invented by Rex Nan Kivell or by the unnamed art dealer who sold it to Rex Nan Kivell", and that the painting "should therefore not be considered a portrait of Abel Tasman's family".
Outside of the Nan Kivell painting, another purported portrait of Tasman was "discovered" in 1893 and eventually acquired by the Tasmanian government in 1976 for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG). The painting is unsigned and was attributed to Bartholomeus van der Helst at the time of its discovery, but this attribution was disputed by Dutch art historian Cornelis Hofstede de Groot and Alec Martin of Christie's. In 1985, TMAG curator Dan Gregg stated that "the painter of the life-sized portrait is unknown [...] there is some uncertainty as to whether the portrait is really of Tasman".
Tasman map
vestibule, showing a mosaic of the Tasman map inlaid in the floor]]
Held within the collection of the State Library of New South Wales is the Tasman map, thought to have been drawn by Isaac Gilsemans, or completed under the supervision of Franz Jacobszoon Visscher. The map is also known as the Bonaparte map, as it was once owned by Prince Roland Bonaparte, the great-nephew of Napoleon. The map was completed sometime after 1644 and is based on the original charts drawn during Tasman's first and second voyages. As none of the journals or logs composed during Tasman's second voyage have survived, the Bonaparte map remains an important contemporary artefact of Tasman's voyage to the northern coast of the Australian continent. The map includes the western and southern coasts of Australia, accidentally encountered by Dutch voyagers as they journeyed by way of the Cape of Good Hope to the VOC headquarters in Batavia. It is widely believed that the map was produced in Batavia; however, it has also been argued that the map was produced in Amsterdam. The work was commissioned by the Principal Librarian William Ifould, and completed by the Melocco Brothers of Annandale, who also worked on the ANZAC War Memorial in Hyde Park and the crypt at St Mary's Cathedral, Sydney.
}}
Sources
*
*Edward Duyker (ed.) The Discovery of Tasmania: Journal Extracts from the Expeditions of Abel Janszoon Tasman and Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne 1642 & 1772, St David's Park Publishing/Tasmanian Government Printing Office, Hobart, 1992, pp. 106, .
*<!-- Tasman: a forgotten navigator -->
*
*
*
*Mack, Rudiger (2024), First Encounters: The Early Pacific and European Narratives of Abel Tasman’s 1642 Voyage.[https://www.academia.edu/124617487/First_Encounters_The_Early_Pacific_and_European_Narratives_of_Abel_Tasman_s_1642_Voyage] Feilding, New Zealand: Heritage Press.
External links
*
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Category:17th-century Dutch explorers
Category:1603 births
Category:1659 deaths
Category:Dutch explorers of the Pacific
Category:Explorers of Australia
Category:Explorers of New Zealand
Category:Explorers of Tasmania
Category:Maritime history of the Dutch East India Company
Category:People from Grootegast
Category:Sailors on ships of the Dutch East India Company
Category:Early modern Netherlandish cartography | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Tasman | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.171385 |
1990 | August 5 | Events
Pre-1600
*AD 25 – Guangwu claims the throne as Emperor of China, restoring the Han dynasty after the collapse of the short-lived Xin dynasty.
*70 – Fires resulting from the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem are extinguished.
* 642 – Battle of Maserfield: Penda of Mercia defeats and kills Oswald of Northumbria.
* 910 – The last major Danish army to raid England for nearly a century is defeated at the Battle of Tettenhall by the allied forces of Mercia and Wessex, led by King Edward the Elder and Æthelred, Lord of the Mercians.
* 939 – The Battle of Alhandic is fought between Ramiro II of León and Abd-ar-Rahman III at Zamora in the context of the Spanish Reconquista. The battle resulted in a victory for the Emirate of Córdoba.
*1068 – Byzantine–Norman wars: Italo-Normans begin a nearly-three-year siege of Bari.
*1100 – Henry I is crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey.
*1278 – Spanish Reconquista: the forces of the Kingdom of Castile initiate the ultimately futile Siege of Algeciras against the Emirate of Granada.
*1305 – First Scottish War of Independence: Sir John Stewart of Menteith, the pro-English Sheriff of Dumbarton, successfully manages to capture Sir William Wallace of Scotland, leading to Wallace's subsequent execution by hanging, evisceration, drawing and quartering, and beheading 18 days later.
*1388 – The Battle of Otterburn, a border skirmish between the Scottish and the English in Northern England, is fought near Otterburn.
*1460 – The Kingdom of Scotland captures Roxburgh, one of the last English strongholds in Scotland, following a siege.
*1506 – The Grand Duchy of Lithuania defeats the Crimean Khanate in the Battle of Kletsk.
*1583 – Sir Humphrey Gilbert establishes the first English colony in North America, at what is now St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador.
*1600 – The Gowrie Conspiracy against King James VI of Scotland (later to become King James I of England) takes place at Gowrie House (Perth, Scotland).
1601–1900
*1620 – The Mayflower departs from Southampton, England, carrying would-be settlers, on its first attempt to reach North America; it is forced to dock in Dartmouth when its companion ship, the Speedwell, springs a leak.
*1689 – Beaver Wars: Fifteen hundred Iroquois attack Lachine in New France.
*1716 – Austro-Turkish War (1716–1718): One-fifth of a Turkish army and the Grand Vizier are killed in the Battle of Petrovaradin.
*1735 – Freedom of the press: New York Weekly Journal writer John Peter Zenger is acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, on the basis that what he had published was true.
*1763 – Pontiac's War: Battle of Bushy Run: British forces led by Henry Bouquet defeat Chief Pontiac's Indians at Bushy Run.
*1772 – First Partition of Poland: The representatives of Austria, Prussia, and Russia sign three bilateral conventions condemning the "anarchy" of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and imputing to the three powers "ancient and legitimate rights" to the territories of the Commonwealth. The conventions allow each of the three great powers to annex a part of the Commonwealth, which they proceed to do over the course of the following two months.
*1781 – The Battle of Dogger Bank takes place.
*1796 – The Battle of Castiglione in Napoleon's first Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars results in a French victory.
*1816 – The British Admiralty dismisses Francis Ronalds's new invention of the first working electric telegraph as "wholly unnecessary", preferring to continue using the semaphore.
*1824 – Greek War of Independence: Konstantinos Kanaris leads a Greek fleet to victory against Ottoman and Egyptian naval forces in the Battle of Samos.
*1858 – Cyrus West Field and others complete the first transatlantic telegraph cable after several unsuccessful attempts. It will operate for less than a month.
*1860 – Charles XV of Sweden–Norway is crowned king of Norway in Trondheim.
*1861 – American Civil War: In order to help pay for the war effort, the United States government levies the first income tax as part of the Revenue Act of 1861 (3% of all incomes over US$800; rescinded in 1872).
* 1861 – The United States Army abolishes flogging.
*1862 – American Civil War: Battle of Baton Rouge: Along the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Confederate troops attempt to take the city, but are driven back by fire from Union gunboats.
*1864 – American Civil War: The Battle of Mobile Bay begins at Mobile Bay near Mobile, Alabama, Admiral David Farragut leads a Union flotilla through Confederate defenses and seals one of the last major Southern ports.
*1874 – Japan launches its postal savings system, modeled after a similar system in the United Kingdom.
*1882 – Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, today known as ExxonMobil, is established officially. The company would later grow to become the holder of all Standard Oil companies and the entity at the center of the breakup of Standard Oil.
*1884 – The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty is laid on Bedloe's Island (now Liberty Island) in New York Harbor.
*1888 – Bertha Benz drives from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back in the first long distance automobile trip, commemorated as the Bertha Benz Memorial Route since 2008.
1901–present
*1901 – Peter O'Connor sets the first World Athletics recognised long jump world record of , a record that would stand for 20 years.
*1906 – Persian Constitutional Revolution: Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, King of Iran, agrees to convert the government to a constitutional monarchy.
*1914 – World War I: The German minelayer lays a minefield about off the Thames Estuary (Lowestoft). She is intercepted and sunk by the British light-cruiser .
* 1914 – World War I: The guns of Point Nepean fort at Port Phillip Heads in Victoria (Australia) fire across the bows of the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamer which is attempting to leave the Port of Melbourne in ignorance of the declaration of war and she is detained; this is said to be the first Allied shot of the War.
* 1914 – In Cleveland, Ohio, the first electric traffic light is installed.
*1916 – World War I: Battle of Romani: Allied forces, under the command of Archibald Murray, defeat an attacking Ottoman army under the command of Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein, securing the Suez Canal and beginning the Ottoman retreat from the Sinai Peninsula.
*1925 – Plaid Cymru is formed with the aim of disseminating knowledge of the Welsh language that is at the time in danger of dying out.
*1926 – Harry Houdini performs his greatest feat, spending 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping.
*1939 – The Thirteen Roses: Thirteen female members of the Unified Socialist Youth are executed by Francoist forces in Madrid, Spain.
*1940 – World War II: The Soviet Union formally annexes Latvia.
*1944 – World War II: At least 1,104 Japanese POWs in Australia attempt to escape from a camp at Cowra, New South Wales; 545 temporarily succeed but are later either killed, commit suicide, or are recaptured.
* 1944 – World War II: Polish insurgents liberate a German labor camp (Gęsiówka) in Warsaw, freeing 348 Jewish prisoners.
* 1944 – World War II: The Nazis begin a week-long massacre of between 40,000 and 50,000 civilians and prisoners of war in Wola, Poland.
*1949 – In Ecuador, an earthquake destroys 50 towns and kills more than 6,000.
* 1949 – In Montana, 12 smokejumper firefighters and 1 US Forest Service fire guard are killed in the Mann Gulch Fire.
*1957 – American Bandstand, a show dedicated to the teenage "baby-boomers" by playing the songs and showing popular dances of the time, debuts on the ABC television network.
*1960 – Burkina Faso, then known as Upper Volta, becomes independent from France.
*1962 – Apartheid: Nelson Mandela is jailed. He would not be released until 1990.
* 1962 – American actress Marilyn Monroe is found dead at her home from a drug overdose.
*1963 – Cold War: The United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union sign the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
*1964 – Vietnam War: Operation Pierce Arrow: American aircraft from carriers and bomb North Vietnam in retaliation for strikes against U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
*1965 – The Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 begins as Pakistani soldiers cross the Line of Control dressed as locals.
*1966 – A group of red guards at Experimental High in Beijing, including Deng Rong and Liu Pingping, daughters of Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi respectively, beat the deputy vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death with sticks after accusing her of counter-revolutionary revisionism, producing one of the first fatalities of the Cultural Revolution.
*1969 – The Lonesome Cowboys police raid occurs in Atlanta, Georgia, leading to the creation of the Georgia Gay Liberation Front.
*1971 – The first Pacific Islands Forum (then known as the "South Pacific Forum") is held in Wellington, New Zealand, with the aim of enhancing cooperation between the independent countries of the Pacific Ocean.
*1973 – Mars 6 is launched from the USSR.
*1974 – Watergate scandal: President Richard Nixon, under orders of the US Supreme Court, releases the "Smoking Gun" tape, recorded on June 23, 1972, clearly revealing his actions in covering up and interfering investigations into the break-in. His political support vanishes completely.
*1979 – In Afghanistan, Maoists undertake the Bala Hissar uprising against the Leninist government.
*1981 – President Ronald Reagan fires 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers who ignored his order for them to return to work.
*1984 – A Biman Bangladesh Airlines Fokker F27 Friendship crashes on approach to Zia International Airport, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing all 49 people on board.
*1995 – Yugoslav Wars: The city of Knin, Croatia, a significant Serb stronghold, is taken by Croatian forces during Operation Storm. The date is celebrated in Croatia as Victory Day.
*2003 – A car bomb explodes in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta outside the Marriott Hotel killing 12 and injuring 150.
*2008 – The New England Revolution win the 2008 North American SuperLiga final against the Houston Dynamo.
*2010 – The Copiapó mining accident occurs, trapping 33 Chilean miners approximately below the ground for 69 days.
* 2010 – Ten members of International Assistance Mission Nuristan Eye Camp team are killed by persons unknown in Kuran wa Munjan District of Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan.
*2012 – The Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting took place in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six victims; the perpetrator committed suicide after being wounded by police.
*2015 – The Environmental Protection Agency at Gold King Mine waste water spill releases three million gallons of heavy metal toxin tailings and waste water into the Animas River in Colorado.
*2019 – The revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir (state) occurred and the state was bifurcated into two union territories (Jammu and Kashmir (union territory) and Ladakh).
*2021 – Australia's second most populous state Victoria enters its sixth COVID-19 lockdown, enacting stage four restrictions statewide in reaction to six new COVID-19 cases recorded that morning.
*2024 – Following the non-cooperation movement against the government of Bangladesh, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigns and flees the country, ending her rule of 15 consecutive years and a total of almost two decades. Births<!-- Do not add yourself or persons without Wikipedia articles to this list. The names will be removed. -->Pre-1600
*79 BC – Tullia, Roman daughter of Cicero (d. 45 BC)
*1262 – Ladislaus IV of Hungary (d. 1290)
*1301 – Edmund of Woodstock, 1st Earl of Kent, English politician, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports (d. 1330)
*1397 – Guillaume Du Fay, Belgian-Italian composer and theorist (d. 1474)
*1461 – Alexander Jagiellon, Polish king (d. 1506)
*1540 – Joseph Justus Scaliger, French philologist and historian (d. 1609)
1601–1900
*1607 – Antonio Barberini, Italian cardinal (d. 1671)
*1623 – Antonio Cesti, Italian organist and composer (d. 1669)
*1626 – Richard Ottley, English politician (d. 1670)
*1662 – James Anderson, Scottish lawyer and historian (d. 1728)
*1681 – Vitus Bering, Danish-born Russian explorer (d. 1741)
*1694 – Leonardo Leo, Italian composer (d. 1744)
*1749 – Thomas Lynch Jr., American commander and politician (d. 1779)
*1797 – Friedrich August Kummer, German cellist and composer (d. 1879)
*1802 – Niels Henrik Abel, Norwegian mathematician and theorist (d. 1829)
*1811 – Ambroise Thomas, French composer (d. 1896)
*1813 – Ivar Aasen, Norwegian poet and linguist (d. 1896)
*1815 – Edward John Eyre, English explorer and politician, Governor of Jamaica (d. 1901)
*1827 – Deodoro da Fonseca, Brazilian field marshal and politician, 1st President of Brazil (d. 1892)
*1828 – Louise of the Netherlands (d. 1871)
*1833 – Carola of Vasa (d. 1907)
*1843 – James Scott Skinner, Scottish violinist and composer (d. 1927)
*1844 – Ilya Repin, Russian painter and sculptor (d. 1930)
*1850 – Guy de Maupassant, French short story writer, novelist, and poet (d. 1893)
*1860 – Louis Wain, English artist (d. 1939)
*1862 – Joseph Merrick, English man with severe deformities (d. 1890)
*1866 – Carl Harries, German chemist and academic (d. 1923)
* 1866 – Harry Trott, Australian cricketer (d. 1917)
*1868 – Oskar Merikanto, Finnish pianist and composer (d. 1924)
*1872 – Oswaldo Cruz, Brazilian physician, bacteriologist, and epidemiologist, founded the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (d. 1917)
*1874 – Wesley Clair Mitchell, American economist and academic (d. 1948)
* 1874 – Horace Rawlins, English golfer (d. 1935)
*1876 – Mary Ritter Beard, American historian and activist (d. 1958)
*1877 – Tom Thomson, Canadian painter (d. 1917)
*1880 – Gertrude Rush, American lawyer and jurist (d. 1962)
* 1880 – Ruth Sawyer, American author and educator (d. 1970)
*1882 – Anne Acheson, Irish sculptor (d. 1962)
*1887 – Reginald Owen, English-American actor and singer (d. 1972)
*1889 – Conrad Aiken, American novelist, short story writer, critic, and poet (d. 1973)
*1890 – Naum Gabo, Russian-American sculptor (d. 1977)
* 1890 – Erich Kleiber, Austrian conductor and director (d. 1956)
*1897 – Roberta Dodd Crawford, American soprano and educator (d. 1954)
* 1897 – Aksel Larsen, Danish lawyer and politician (d. 1972)
*1900 – Rudolf Schottlaender, German philosopher, classical philologist and translator (d. 1988)
1901–present
*1901 – Claude Autant-Lara, French director, screenwriter, and politician (d. 2000)
*1904 – Kenneth V. Thimann, English-American botanist and microbiologist (d. 1997)
*1905 – Wassily Leontief, German-American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1999)
*1906 – Joan Hickson, English actress (d. 1998)
* 1906 – John Huston, American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 1987)
*1908 – Harold Holt, Australian lawyer and politician, 17th Prime Minister of Australia (d. 1967)
* 1908 – Jose Garcia Villa, Filipino short story writer and poet (d. 1997)
*1910 – Bruno Coquatrix, French songwriter and manager (d. 1979)
* 1910 – Herminio Masantonio, Argentinian footballer (d. 1956)
*1911 – Robert Taylor, American actor and singer (d. 1969)
*1912 – Abbé Pierre, French priest and humanitarian (d. 2007)
*1914 – Parley Baer, American actor (d. 2002)
*1916 – Peter Viereck, American poet and academic (d. 2006)
*1918 – Tom Drake, American actor and singer (d. 1982)
* 1918 – Betty Oliphant, English-Canadian ballerina, co-founded Canada's National Ballet School (d. 2004)
*1919 – Rosalind Hicks, British literary guardian and the only child of author, Agatha Christie (d. 2004)
*1920 – George Tooker, American painter and academic (d. 2011)
*1921 – Terry Becker, American actor, director, and producer (d. 2014)
*1922 – L. Tom Perry, American businessman and religious leader (d. 2015)
* 1922 – Frank Stranahan, American golfer (d. 2013)
*1923 – Devan Nair, Malaysian-Singaporean union leader and politician, 3rd President of Singapore (d. 2005)
*1926 – Betsy Jolas, French composer
* 1926 – Jeri Southern, American jazz singer and pianist (d. 1991)
*1929 – Don Matheson, American soldier, police officer, and actor (d. 2014)
*1929 – John H. Moore II, American lawyer and judge (d. 2013)
*1930 – Neil Armstrong, American pilot, engineer, and astronaut (d. 2012)
* 1930 – Damita Jo DeBlanc, American comedian, actress, and singer (d. 1998)
* 1930 – Richie Ginther, American race car driver (d. 1989)
* 1930 – Michal Kováč, Slovak lawyer and politician, 1st President of Slovakia (d. 2016)
*1931 – Tom Hafey, Australian footballer and coach (d. 2014)
*1932 – Tera de Marez Oyens, Dutch pianist and composer (d. 1996)
* 1932 – Vladimir Fedoseyev, Russian conductor
*1934 – Karl Johan Åström, Swedish engineer and theorist
* 1934 – Wendell Berry, American novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist
* 1934 – Gay Byrne, Irish radio and television host (d. 2019)
*1935 – Michael Ballhaus, German director and cinematographer (d. 2017)
* 1935 – Peter Inge, Baron Inge, English field marshal (d. 2022)
* 1935 – Roy Benavidez, American soldier, Medal of Honor Winner (d. 1998)
*1936 – Nikolai Baturin, Estonian author and playwright (d. 2019)
* 1936 – John Saxon, American actor (d. 2020)
*1937 – Herb Brooks, American ice hockey player and coach (d. 2003)
* 1937 – Brian G. Marsden, English-American astronomer and academic (d. 2010)
*1939 – Roger Clark, English race car driver (d. 1998)
* 1939 – Carmen Salinas, Mexican actress and politician (d. 2021)
*1940 – Bobby Braddock, American country music songwriter, musician, and producer
* 1940 – Roman Gabriel, American football player, coach, and actor (d. 2024)
* 1940 – Rick Huxley, English bass player (d. 2013)
*1941 – Bob Clark, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 2007)
* 1941 – Leonid Kizim, Ukrainian general, pilot, and astronaut (d. 2010)
* 1941 – Airto Moreira, Brazilian-American drummer and composer
*1942 – Joe Boyd, American record producer, founded Hannibal Records
*1943 – Nelson Briles, American baseball player (d. 2005)
* 1943 – Sammi Smith, American country music singer-songwriter (d. 2005)
*1944 – Christopher Gunning, English composer (d. 2023)
*1945 – Loni Anderson, American actress
*1946 – Bruce Coslet, American football player and coach
* 1946 – Shirley Ann Jackson, American physicist
* 1946 – Rick van der Linden, Dutch keyboard player and songwriter (d. 2006)
* 1946 – Bob McCarthy, Australian rugby league player and coach
* 1946 – Erika Slezak, American actress
* 1946 – Xavier Trias, Spanish pediatrician and politician, 118th Mayor of Barcelona
*1947 – Angry Anderson, Australian singer and actor
* 1947 – Bernie Carbo, American baseball player
* 1947 – France A. Córdova, American astrophysicist and academic
* 1947 – Rick Derringer, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer
* 1947 – Greg Leskiw, Canadian guitarist and songwriter
*1948 – Ray Clemence, English footballer and manager (d. 2020)
* 1948 – Barbara Flynn, English actress
* 1948 – David Hungate, American bass guitarist, producer, and arranger
* 1948 – Shin Takamatsu, Japanese architect and academic
*1950 – Luiz Gushiken, Brazilian trade union leader and politician (d. 2013)
* 1950 – Mahendra Karma, Indian lawyer and politician (d. 2013)
*1951 – Samantha Sang, Australian pop singer
*1952 – Tamás Faragó, Hungarian water polo player
* 1952 – John Jarratt, Australian actor and producer
* 1952 – Louis Walsh, Irish talent manager
*1953 – Rick Mahler, American baseball player and coach (d. 2005)
*1955 – Eddie Ojeda, American guitarist and songwriter
*1956 – Christopher Chessun, English Anglican bishop
* 1956 – Jerry Ciccoritti, Canadian actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
* 1956 – Maureen McCormick, American actress
*1957 – Larry Corowa, Australian rugby league player
* 1957 – David Gill, English businessman
*1958 – Ulla Salzgeber, German equestrian
*1959 – Pete Burns, English singer-songwriter (d. 2016)
* 1959 – Pat Smear, American guitarist and songwriter
*1960 – David Baldacci, American lawyer and author
*1961 – Janet McTeer, English actress
* 1961 – Athula Samarasekera, Sri Lankan cricketer and coach
* 1961 – Tim Wilson, American comedian, singer-songwriter, and guitarist (d. 2014)
*1962 – Patrick Ewing, Jamaican-American basketball player and coach
* 1962 – Otis Thorpe, American basketball player
*1963 – Steve Lee, Swiss singer-songwriter (d. 2010)
* 1963 – Ingmar De Vos, Belgian sports administrator
* 1963 – Mark Strong, English actor
*1964 – Rory Morrison, English journalist (d. 2013)
* 1964 – Adam Yauch, American rapper and director (d. 2012)
*1965 – Jeff Coffin, American saxophonist and composer
* 1965 – Motoi Sakuraba, Japanese keyboard player and composer
*1966 – Jennifer Finch, American singer, bass player, and photographer
* 1966 – Jonathan Silverman, American actor and producer
*1967 – Matthew Caws, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
*1968 – Terri Clark, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist
* 1968 – Kendo Kashin, Japanese wrestler and mixed martial artist
* 1968 – Marine Le Pen, French lawyer and politician
* 1968 – Oleh Luzhnyi, Ukrainian footballer and manager
* 1968 – Colin McRae, Scottish race car driver (d. 2007)
* 1968 – John Olerud, American baseball player
*1969 – Jackie Doyle-Price, English politician
* 1969 – Vasbert Drakes, Barbadian cricketer
* 1969 – Venkatesh Prasad, Indian cricketer and coach
* 1969 – Rob Scott, Australian rower
*1970 – James Gunn, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
*1971 – Valdis Dombrovskis, Latvian academic and politician, 11th Prime Minister of Latvia
*1972 – Ikuto Hidaka, Japanese wrestler
* 1972 – Aaqib Javed, Pakistani cricketer and coach
* 1972 – Darren Shahlavi, English-American actor and martial artist (d. 2015)
* 1972 – Jon Sleightholme, English rugby player
* 1972 – Theodore Whitmore, Jamaican footballer and manager
* 1972 – Christian Olde Wolbers, Belgian-American guitarist, songwriter, and producer
*1973 – Paul Carige, Australian rugby league player
* 1973 – Justin Marshall, New Zealand rugby player and sportscaster
*1974 – Alvin Ceccoli, Australian footballer
* 1974 – Kajol, Indian film actress
* 1974 – Olle Kullinger, Swedish footballer
* 1974 – Antoine Sibierski, French footballer
*1975 – Dan Hipgrave, English guitarist and journalist
* 1975 – Josep Jufré, Spanish cyclist
* 1975 – Eicca Toppinen, Finnish cellist and composer
*1976 – Jeff Friesen, Canadian ice hockey player
* 1976 – Marians Pahars, Latvian footballer and manager
* 1976 – Eugen Trică, Romanian footballer and manager
*1977 – Eric Hinske, American baseball player and coach
* 1977 – Mark Mulder, American baseball player and sportscaster
* 1977 – Michael Walsh, English footballer
*1978 – Cosmin Bărcăuan, Romanian footballer and manager
* 1978 – Kim Gevaert, Belgian sprinter
* 1978 – Harel Levy, Israeli tennis player
*1979 – David Healy, Irish footballer
*1980 – Wayne Bridge, English footballer
* 1980 – Salvador Cabañas, Paraguayan footballer
* 1980 – Jason Culina, Australian footballer
* 1980 – Jesse Williams, American actor, director, producer, and political activist
*1981 – David Clarke, English ice hockey player
* 1981 – Carl Crawford, American baseball player
* 1981 – Maik Franz, German footballer
* 1981 – Erik Guay, Canadian skier
* 1981 – Travie McCoy, American rapper, singer, and songwriter
* 1981 – Anna Rawson, Australian golfer
* 1981 – Rachel Scott, American murder victim, inspired the Rachel's Challenge (d. 1999)
*1982 – Jamie Houston, English-German rugby player
* 1982 – Lolo Jones, American hurdler
* 1982 – Michele Pazienza, Italian footballer
* 1982 – Jeff Robson, Australian rugby league player
* 1982 – Pete Sell, American mixed martial artist
*1984 – Steve Matai, New Zealand rugby league player
*1985 – Laurent Ciman, Belgian footballer
* 1985 – Salomon Kalou, Ivorian footballer
* 1985 – Gil Vermouth, Israeli footballer
* 1985 – Erkan Zengin, Swedish footballer
*1986 – Paula Creamer, American golfer
* 1986 – Kathrin Zettel, Austrian skier
*1988 – Michael Jamieson, Scottish-English swimmer
* 1988 – Federica Pellegrini, Italian swimmer
*1989 – Ryan Bertrand, English footballer
* 1989 – Mathieu Manset, French footballer
*1991 – Esteban Gutiérrez, Mexican race car driver
* 1991 – Konrad Hurrell, Tongan rugby league player
* 1991 – Daniëlle van de Donk, Dutch footballer
* 1991 – Andreas Weimann, Austrian footballer
* 1994 – Natalia García, Spanish rhythmic gymnast
*1995 – Pierre-Emile Højbjerg, Danish footballer
*1996 – Takakeishō Mitsunobu, Japanese sumo wrestler
* 1996 – Cho Seung-youn, South Korean singer-songwriter and rapper
*1997 – Jack Cogger, Australian rugby league player
* 1997 – Olivia Holt, American actress and singer
* 1997 – Wang Yibo, Chinese dancer, singer and actor
* 1997 – Yungblud, English musician and actor
*1998 – Adam Doueihi, Australian-Lebanese rugby league player
*1999 – Kim Si-hyeon, South Korean singer
*2000 – Tom Gilbert, Australian rugby league player
*2001 – Anthony Edwards, American basketball player
*2003 – Toni Shaw, British Paralympic swimmer
*2004 – Gavi, Spanish footballer
<!-- Do not add yourself, fictional characters, or people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust “this year in history” websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Deaths
Pre-1600
* 553 – Xiao Ji, prince of the Liang dynasty (b. 508)
* 642 – Eowa, king of Mercia
* 642 – Oswald, king of Northumbria
* 824 – Heizei, Japanese emperor (b. 773)
* 877 – Ubayd Allah ibn Yahya ibn Khaqan, Abbasid vizier
* 882 – Louis III, Frankish king (b. 863)
* 890 – Ranulf II, duke of Aquitaine (b. 850)
* 910 – Eowils and Halfdan, joint kings of Northumbria
* 910 – Ingwær, king of Northumbria
* 917 – Euthymius I of Constantinople (b. 834)
* 940 – Li Decheng, Chinese general (b. 863)
*1063 – Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwynedd
*1364 – Kōgon, Japanese emperor (b. 1313)
*1415 – Richard of Conisburgh, 3rd Earl of Cambridge (b. 1375)
* 1415 – Henry Scrope, 3rd Baron Scrope of Masham (b. 1370)
*1447 – John Holland, 2nd Duke of Exeter (b. 1395)
*1579 – Stanislaus Hosius, Polish cardinal (b. 1504)
*1600 – John Ruthven, 3rd Earl of Gowrie, Scottish conspirator (b. 1577)1601–1900
*1610 – Alonso García de Ramón, Spanish soldier and politician, Royal Governor of Chile (b. 1552)
*1633 – George Abbot, English archbishop and academic (b. 1562)
*1678 – Juan García de Zéspedes, Mexican tenor and composer (b. 1619)
*1729 – Thomas Newcomen, English engineer, invented the eponymous Newcomen atmospheric engine (b. 1664)
*1743 – John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey, English courtier and politician, Vice-Chamberlain of the Household (b. 1696)
*1778 – Charles Clémencet, French historian and author (b. 1703)
* 1778 – Thomas Linley the younger, English composer (b. 1756)
*1792 – Frederick North, Lord North, English politician, Prime Minister of Great Britain (b. 1732)
*1799 – Richard Howe, 1st Earl Howe, English admiral and politician (b. 1726)
*1868 – Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, French archaeologist and historian (b. 1788)
*1877 – Robert Williams (known as Trebor Mai), Welsh poet (b. 1830)
*1880 – Ferdinand Ritter von Hebra, Austrian physician and dermatologist (b. 1816)
*1881 – Spotted Tail, American tribal chief (b. 1823)
*1895 – Friedrich Engels, German philosopher (b. 1820)
1901–present
*1901 – Victoria, Princess Royal of the United Kingdom and German Empress (b. 1840)
*1904 – George Dibbs, Australian politician, 10th Premier of New South Wales (b. 1834)
*1911 – Bob Caruthers, American baseball player and umpire (b. 1864)
*1916 – George Butterworth, British composer (b. 1885)
*1921 – Dimitrios Rallis, Greek lawyer and politician, 78th Prime Minister of Greece (b. 1844)
*1929 – Millicent Fawcett, English trade union leader and activist (b. 1847)
*1933 – Charles Harold Davis, American painter and academic (b. 1856)
*1935 – David Townsend, American art director and set designer (b. 1891)
*1939 – Béla Jankovich, Hungarian economist and politician, Minister of Education of Hungary (b. 1865)
*1944 – Maurice Turnbull, Welsh cricketer and rugby player (b. 1906)
*1946 – Wilhelm Marx, German lawyer and politician, 17th Chancellor of Germany (b. 1863)
*1948 – Montagu Toller, English cricketer and lawyer (b. 1871)
*1952 – Sameera Moussa, Egyptian physicist and academic (b. 1917)
*1955 – Carmen Miranda, Portuguese-Brazilian actress and singer (b. 1909)
*1957 – Heinrich Otto Wieland, German chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1877)
*1959 – Edgar Guest, English-American journalist and poet (b. 1881)
*1960 – Arthur Meighen, Canadian lawyer and politician, 9th Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1874)
*1963 – Salvador Bacarisse, Spanish composer (b. 1898)
*1964 – Moa Martinson, Swedish author (b. 1890)
* 1964 – Art Ross, Canadian-American ice hockey player and coach (b. 1886)
*1968 – Luther Perkins, American guitarist (b. 1928)
*1978 – Jesse Haines, American baseball player and coach (b. 1893)
*1980 – Harold L. Runnels, American soldier and politician (b. 1924)
*1983 – Judy Canova, American actress and comedian (b. 1913)
* 1983 – Joan Robinson, English economist and author (b. 1903)
*1984 – Richard Burton, Welsh actor (b. 1925)
*1985 – Arnold Horween, American football player and coach (b. 1898)
*1987 – Georg Gaßmann, German politician, Mayor of Marburg (b. 1910)
*1991 – Paul Brown, American football player and coach (b. 1908)
* 1991 – Soichiro Honda, Japanese engineer and businessman, founded Honda (b. 1906)
*1992 – Robert Muldoon, New Zealand politician, 31st Prime Minister of New Zealand (b. 1921)
*1994 – Menachem Avidom, Israeli composer (b. 1908)
* 1994 – Alain de Changy, Belgian race car driver (b. 1922)
*1998 – Otto Kretschmer, German commander (b. 1912)
* 1998 – Todor Zhivkov, Bulgarian commander and politician, 36th Prime Minister of Bulgaria (b. 1911)
*2000 – Otto Buchsbaum, Austrian-Brazilian journalist and activist (b. 1920)
* 2000 – Tullio Crali, Montenegrin-Italian pilot and painter (b. 1910)
* 2000 – Lala Amarnath, Indian cricketer (b. 1911)
* 2000 – Alec Guinness, English actor (b. 1914)
*2001 – Otema Allimadi, Ugandan politician, 2nd Prime Minister of Uganda (b. 1929)
* 2001 – Christopher Skase, Australian-Spanish businessman (b. 1948)
*2002 – Josh Ryan Evans, American actor (b. 1982)
* 2002 – Chick Hearn, American sportscaster (b. 1916)
* 2002 – Franco Lucentini, Italian journalist and author (b. 1920)
* 2002 – Darrell Porter, American baseball player (b. 1952)
* 2002 – Matt Robinson, American actor, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1937)
*2005 – Polina Astakhova, Russian gymnast and coach (b. 1936)
* 2005 – Jim O'Hora, American football player and coach (b. 1915)
* 2005 – Raul Roco, Filipino lawyer and politician, 31st Filipino Secretary of Education (b. 1941)
* 2005 – Eddie Jenkins, Welsh footballer (b. 1909)
*2007 – Jean-Marie Lustiger, French cardinal (b. 1926)
* 2007 – Florian Pittiș, Romanian actor, singer, director, and producer (b. 1943)
*2008 – Neil Bartlett, English-American chemist and academic (b. 1932)
* 2008 – Reg Lindsay, Australian singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1929)
*2009 – Budd Schulberg, American author, screenwriter, and producer (b. 1914)
*2011 – Andrzej Lepper, Polish farmer and politician, Deputy Prime Minister of Poland (b. 1954)
* 2011 – Aziz Shavershian, Australian bodybuilder (b. 1989)
*2012 – Erwin Axer, Polish director and screenwriter (b. 1917)
* 2012 – Michel Daerden, Belgian lawyer and politician (b. 1949)
* 2012 – Fred Matua, American football player (b. 1984)
* 2012 – Martin E. Segal, Russian-American businessman, co-founded Film Society of Lincoln Center (b. 1916)
* 2012 – Chavela Vargas, Costa Rican-Mexican singer-songwriter and actress (b. 1919)
* 2012 – Roland Charles Wagner, French author and translator (b. 1960)
*2013 – Ruth Asawa, American sculptor and educator (b. 1926)
* 2013 – Shawn Burr, Canadian-American ice hockey player (b. 1966)
* 2013 – Willie Dunn, Canadian singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1942)
* 2013 – Roy Rubin, American basketball player and coach (b. 1925)
* 2013 – May Song Vang, American activist (b. 1951)
* 2013 – Rob Wyda, American commander and judge (b. 1959)
*2014 – Harold J. Greene, American general (b. 1962)
* 2014 – Vladimir Orlov, Russian author (b. 1936)
* 2014 – Chapman Pincher, Indian-English historian, journalist, and author (b. 1914)
* 2014 – Jesse Leonard Steinfeld, American physician and academic, 11th Surgeon General of the United States (b. 1927)
*2015 – Arthur Walter James, English journalist and politician (b. 1912)
* 2015 – Tony Millington, Welsh footballer (b. 1943)
*2018 – Alan Rabinowitz, American zoologist (b. 1953)
*2019 – Toni Morrison, American author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and Nobel laureate (b. 1931).
*2020 – Hawa Abdi, Somali human rights activist and physician (b. 1947)
*2022 – Judith Durham, Australian singer-songwriter (b. 1943)
* 2022 – Cherie Gil, Filipino actress (b. 1963)
* 2022 – Ali Haydar, Syrian army officer (b. 1932)
* 2022 – Issey Miyake, Japanese fashion designer (b. 1938)
* 2022 – Dillon Quirke, Irish hurler (b. 1998)
<!-- Do not add people without Wikipedia articles to this list. Do not trust “this year in history” websites for accurate date information. Do not link multiple occurrences of the same year, just link the first occurrence. -->
Holidays and observances
* Christian feast day:
** Abel of Reims
** Addai
** Afra
** Cassian of Autun
** Dedication of the Basilica of St Mary Major (Catholic Church)
** Emygdius
** Memnius
** Oswald of Northumbria
** August 5 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
* Independence Day (Burkina Faso)
* Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day and the Day of Croatian defenders (Croatia)
References
External links
*
*
*
Category:Days of August | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_5 | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.345184 |
1994 | ASP | ASP may refer to:
Combat
ASP pistol
ASP, Inc., law enforcement weapon manufacturer
A type of extending baton
Ammunition Supply Point, military storage facility for live ammunition and explosives
Computing
Active Server Pages, a web-scripting interface by Microsoft
ASP.NET, a web-application framework by Microsoft
Advanced Simple Profile, an MPEG-4 video codec profile
Answer set programming, a declarative programming paradigm
Application service provider, to customers over a network
AppleTalk Session Protocol
Association of Software Professionals
Attached Support Processor, IBM hardware system
Auxiliary storage pool, a feature of the IBM operating system
Education
American School of Paris
Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, Kraków, Poland
Electronics
Audio Signal Processor, large-scale digital signal processor
Anti-skip protection or electronic skip protection in CD playback
Angle-sensitive pixel, a light sensor
Entertainment
ASP (band), a German gothic metal band
ASP (Japanese group), Japanese idol girl group
Adult service provider (disambiguation)
Apparent Sensory Perception, a thought recording and reproduction device in William Gibson's fiction
Medicine and biology
Aspartic acid, α-amino acid used in the biosynthesis of proteins
Acylation stimulating protein
American Society for Photobiology
Amnesic shellfish poisoning
Complement component 3, a protein in the complement system
Antimicrobial stewardship, effort to educate and persuade prescribers of antimicrobials to follow evidence-based prescribing
American Society of Primatologists
Politics
Act of the Scottish Parliament
American Solidarity Party, a Christian Democratic political party in the United States
Australian Sex Party
Afro-Shirazi Party, political party in Tanzania
Assembly for the Sovereignty of the Peoples, a political party in Bolivia
Assembly of States Parties, the legislative body of the International Criminal Court
Other uses
Airborne Surveillance Platform, Indian defence project
Albany Student Press, newspaper of the University at Albany, The State University of New York
Alice Springs Airport (IATA airport code)
Allegany State Park
Appalachia Service Project, for housing improvement
Arkansas State Police
Asociación de Scouts del Perú
Aspendale railway station, Melbourne
Aspatria railway station, UK, National Rail code
Assault system pod or A.S.P., for the G.I. Joe doll
Association of Surfing Professionals, former name of World Surf League
Assistant superintendent of police
Additional Superintendent of Police, a police rank in India
Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Authorized service provider
Avenal State Prison in California, USA
Average selling price of goods
A.S.P. Air Strike Patrol, a 1994 video game
See also
ASPS (disambiguation)
Asp (disambiguation) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.394462 |
1997 | Algebraic geometry | is an algebraic surface of degree five. The picture represents a portion of its real locus.]]
Algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics which uses abstract algebraic techniques, mainly from commutative algebra, to solve geometrical problems. Classically, it studies zeros of multivariate polynomials; the modern approach generalizes this in a few different aspects.
The fundamental objects of study in algebraic geometry are algebraic varieties, which are geometric manifestations of solutions of systems of polynomial equations. Examples of the most studied classes of algebraic varieties are lines, circles, parabolas, ellipses, hyperbolas, cubic curves like elliptic curves, and quartic curves like lemniscates and Cassini ovals. These are plane algebraic curves. A point of the plane lies on an algebraic curve if its coordinates satisfy a given polynomial equation. Basic questions involve the study of points of special interest like singular points, inflection points and points at infinity. More advanced questions involve the topology of the curve and the relationship between curves defined by different equations.
Algebraic geometry occupies a central place in modern mathematics and has multiple conceptual connections with such diverse fields as complex analysis, topology and number theory. As a study of systems of polynomial equations in several variables, the subject of algebraic geometry begins with finding specific solutions via equation solving, and then proceeds to understand the intrinsic properties of the totality of solutions of a system of equations. This understanding requires both conceptual theory and computational technique.
<!-- this paragraph is misplaced in the lead. May be in the history section?
Descartes's idea of coordinates is central to algebraic geometry, because a point of an algebraic variety is a point whose coordinates are a solution of the equations defining the variety. However it has undergone a series of remarkable transformations beginning in the early 19th century. Before then, the coordinates were assumed to be tuples of real numbers, but this changed when first complex numbers, and then elements of an arbitrary field became acceptable. Homogeneous coordinates of projective geometry offered an extension of the notion of coordinate system in a different direction, and enriched the scope of algebraic geometry. -->
In the 20th century, algebraic geometry split into several subareas.
* The mainstream of algebraic geometry is devoted to the study of the complex points of the algebraic varieties and more generally to the points with coordinates in an algebraically closed field.
* Real algebraic geometry is the study of the real algebraic varieties.
* Diophantine geometry and, more generally, arithmetic geometry is the study of algebraic varieties over fields that are not algebraically closed and, specifically, over fields of interest in algebraic number theory, such as the field of rational numbers, number fields, finite fields, function fields, and p-adic fields.
* A large part of singularity theory is devoted to the singularities of algebraic varieties.
* Computational algebraic geometry is an area that has emerged at the intersection of algebraic geometry and computer algebra, with the rise of computers. It consists mainly of algorithm design and software development for the study of properties of explicitly given algebraic varieties.
Much of the development of the mainstream of algebraic geometry in the 20th century occurred within an abstract algebraic framework, with increasing emphasis being placed on "intrinsic" properties of algebraic varieties not dependent on any particular way of embedding the variety in an ambient coordinate space; this parallels developments in topology, differential and complex geometry. One key achievement of this abstract algebraic geometry is Grothendieck's scheme theory which allows one to use sheaf theory to study algebraic varieties in a way which is very similar to its use in the study of differential and analytic manifolds. This is obtained by extending the notion of point: In classical algebraic geometry, a point of an affine variety may be identified, through Hilbert's Nullstellensatz, with a maximal ideal of the coordinate ring, while the points of the corresponding affine scheme are all prime ideals of this ring. This means that a point of such a scheme may be either a usual point or a subvariety. This approach also enables a unification of the language and the tools of classical algebraic geometry, mainly concerned with complex points, and of algebraic number theory. Wiles' proof of the longstanding conjecture called Fermat's Last Theorem is an example of the power of this approach.
Basic notions
Zeros of simultaneous polynomials
In classical algebraic geometry, the main objects of interest are the vanishing sets of collections of polynomials, meaning the set of all points that simultaneously satisfy one or more polynomial equations. For instance, the two-dimensional sphere of radius 1 in three-dimensional Euclidean space R<sup>3</sup> could be defined as the set of all points <math>(x, y, z)</math> with
:<math>x^2+y^2+z^2-1=0.\,</math>
A "slanted" circle in R<sup>3</sup> can be defined as the set of all points <math>(x, y, z)</math> which satisfy the two polynomial equations
:<math>x^2+y^2+z^2-1=0,\,</math>
:<math>x+y+z0.\,</math> Affine varieties
First we start with a field k. In classical algebraic geometry, this field was always the complex numbers C, but many of the same results are true if we assume only that k is algebraically closed. We consider the affine space of dimension n over k, denoted A<sup>n</sup>(k) (or more simply A<sup>n</sup>, when k is clear from the context). When one fixes a coordinate system, one may identify A<sup>n</sup>(k) with k<sup>n</sup>. The purpose of not working with k<sup>n</sup> is to emphasize that one "forgets" the vector space structure that k<sup>n</sup> carries.
A function f : A<sup>n</sup> → A<sup>1</sup> is said to be polynomial (or regular) if it can be written as a polynomial, that is, if there is a polynomial p in k[x<sub>1</sub>,...,x<sub>n</sub>] such that f(M) = p(t<sub>1</sub>,...,t<sub>n</sub>) for every point M with coordinates (t<sub>1</sub>,...,t<sub>n</sub>) in A<sup>n</sup>. The property of a function to be polynomial (or regular) does not depend on the choice of a coordinate system in A<sup>n</sup>.
When a coordinate system is chosen, the regular functions on the affine n-space may be identified with the ring of polynomial functions in n variables over k. Therefore, the set of the regular functions on A<sup>n</sup> is a ring, which is denoted k[A<sup>n</sup>].
We say that a polynomial vanishes at a point if evaluating it at that point gives zero. Let S be a set of polynomials in k[A<sup>n</sup>]. The vanishing set of S (or vanishing locus or zero set) is the set V(S) of all points in A<sup>n</sup> where every polynomial in S vanishes. Symbolically,
:<math>V(S) \{(t_1,\dots,t_n) \mid p(t_1,\dots,t_n) 0 \text{ for all } p \in S\}.\,</math>
A subset of A<sup>n</sup> which is V(S), for some S, is called an algebraic set. The V stands for variety (a specific type of algebraic set to be defined below).
Given a subset U of A<sup>n</sup>, can one recover the set of polynomials which generate it? If U is any subset of A<sup>n</sup>, define I(U) to be the set of all polynomials whose vanishing set contains U. The I stands for ideal: if two polynomials f and g both vanish on U, then f+g vanishes on U, and if h is any polynomial, then hf vanishes on U, so I(U) is always an ideal of the polynomial ring k[A<sup>n</sup>].
Two natural questions to ask are:
* Given a subset U of A<sup>n</sup>, when is U = V(I(U))?
* Given a set S of polynomials, when is S = I(V(S))?
The answer to the first question is provided by introducing the Zariski topology, a topology on A<sup>n</sup> whose closed sets are the algebraic sets, and which directly reflects the algebraic structure of k[A<sup>n</sup>]. Then U = V(I(U)) if and only if U is an algebraic set or equivalently a Zariski-closed set. The answer to the second question is given by Hilbert's Nullstellensatz. In one of its forms, it says that I(V(S)) is the radical of the ideal generated by S. In more abstract language, there is a Galois connection, giving rise to two closure operators; they can be identified, and naturally play a basic role in the theory; the example is elaborated at Galois connection.
For various reasons we may not always want to work with the entire ideal corresponding to an algebraic set U. Hilbert's basis theorem implies that ideals in k[A<sup>n</sup>] are always finitely generated.
An algebraic set is called irreducible if it cannot be written as the union of two smaller algebraic sets. Any algebraic set is a finite union of irreducible algebraic sets and this decomposition is unique. Thus its elements are called the irreducible components of the algebraic set. An irreducible algebraic set is also called a variety. It turns out that an algebraic set is a variety if and only if it may be defined as the vanishing set of a prime ideal of the polynomial ring.
Some authors do not make a clear distinction between algebraic sets and varieties and use irreducible variety to make the distinction when needed.
Regular functions
Just as continuous functions are the natural maps on topological spaces and smooth functions are the natural maps on differentiable manifolds, there is a natural class of functions on an algebraic set, called regular functions or polynomial functions. A regular function on an algebraic set V contained in A<sup>n</sup> is the restriction to V of a regular function on A<sup>n</sup>. For an algebraic set defined on the field of the complex numbers, the regular functions are smooth and even analytic.
It may seem unnaturally restrictive to require that a regular function always extend to the ambient space, but it is very similar to the situation in a normal topological space, where the Tietze extension theorem guarantees that a continuous function on a closed subset always extends to the ambient topological space.
Just as with the regular functions on affine space, the regular functions on V form a ring, which we denote by k[V]. This ring is called the coordinate ring of V.
Since regular functions on V come from regular functions on A<sup>n</sup>, there is a relationship between the coordinate rings. Specifically, if a regular function on V is the restriction of two functions f and g in k[A<sup>n</sup>], then f − g is a polynomial function which is null on V and thus belongs to I(V). Thus k[V] may be identified with k[A<sup>n</sup>]/I(V).
Morphism of affine varieties
Using regular functions from an affine variety to A<sup>1</sup>, we can define regular maps from one affine variety to another. First we will define a regular map from a variety into affine space: Let V be a variety contained in A<sup>n</sup>. Choose m regular functions on V, and call them f<sub>1</sub>, ..., f<sub>m</sub>. We define a regular map f from V to A<sup>m</sup> by letting . In other words, each f<sub>i</sub> determines one coordinate of the range of f.
If V′ is a variety contained in A<sup>m</sup>, we say that f is a regular map from V to V′ if the range of f is contained in V′.
The definition of the regular maps apply also to algebraic sets.
The regular maps are also called morphisms, as they make the collection of all affine algebraic sets into a category, where the objects are the affine algebraic sets and the morphisms are the regular maps. The affine varieties is a subcategory of the category of the algebraic sets.
Given a regular map g from V to V′ and a regular function f of k[V′], then . The map is a ring homomorphism from k[V′] to k[V]. Conversely, every ring homomorphism from k[V′] to k[V] defines a regular map from V to V′. This defines an equivalence of categories between the category of algebraic sets and the opposite category of the finitely generated reduced k-algebras. This equivalence is one of the starting points of scheme theory.
Rational function and birational equivalence
In contrast to the preceding sections, this section concerns only varieties and not algebraic sets. On the other hand, the definitions extend naturally to projective varieties (next section), as an affine variety and its projective completion have the same field of functions.
If V is an affine variety, its coordinate ring is an integral domain and has thus a field of fractions which is denoted k(V) and called the field of the rational functions on V or, shortly, the function field of V. Its elements are the restrictions to V of the rational functions over the affine space containing V. The domain of a rational function f is not V but the complement of the subvariety (a hypersurface) where the denominator of f vanishes.
As with regular maps, one may define a rational map from a variety V to a variety V<nowiki>'</nowiki>. As with the regular maps, the rational maps from V to V<nowiki>'</nowiki> may be identified to the field homomorphisms from k(V<nowiki>'</nowiki>) to k(V).
Two affine varieties are birationally equivalent if there are two rational functions between them which are inverse one to the other in the regions where both are defined. Equivalently, they are birationally equivalent if their function fields are isomorphic.
An affine variety is a rational variety if it is birationally equivalent to an affine space. This means that the variety admits a rational parameterization, that is a parametrization with rational functions. For example, the circle of equation <math>x^2+y^2-1=0</math> is a rational curve, as it has the parametric equation
:<math>x=\frac{2\,t}{1+t^2}</math>
:<math>y=\frac{1-t^2}{1+t^2}\,,</math>
which may also be viewed as a rational map from the line to the circle.
The problem of resolution of singularities is to know if every algebraic variety is birationally equivalent to a variety whose projective completion is nonsingular (see also smooth completion). It was solved in the affirmative in characteristic 0 by Heisuke Hironaka in 1964 and is yet unsolved in finite characteristic.
Projective variety
Just as the formulas for the roots of second, third, and fourth degree polynomials suggest extending real numbers to the more algebraically complete setting of the complex numbers, many properties of algebraic varieties suggest extending affine space to a more geometrically complete projective space. Whereas the complex numbers are obtained by adding the number i, a root of the polynomial , projective space is obtained by adding in appropriate points "at infinity", points where parallel lines may meet.
To see how this might come about, consider the variety . If we draw it, we get a parabola. As x goes to positive infinity, the slope of the line from the origin to the point (x, x<sup>2</sup>) also goes to positive infinity. As x goes to negative infinity, the slope of the same line goes to negative infinity.
Compare this to the variety V(y − x<sup>3</sup>). This is a cubic curve. As x goes to positive infinity, the slope of the line from the origin to the point (x, x<sup>3</sup>) goes to positive infinity just as before. But unlike before, as x goes to negative infinity, the slope of the same line goes to positive infinity as well; the exact opposite of the parabola. So the behavior "at infinity" of V(y − x<sup>3</sup>) is different from the behavior "at infinity" of V(y − x<sup>2</sup>).
The consideration of the projective completion of the two curves, which is their prolongation "at infinity" in the projective plane, allows us to quantify this difference: the point at infinity of the parabola is a regular point, whose tangent is the line at infinity, while the point at infinity of the cubic curve is a cusp. Also, both curves are rational, as they are parameterized by x, and the Riemann-Roch theorem implies that the cubic curve must have a singularity, which must be at infinity, as all its points in the affine space are regular.
Thus many of the properties of algebraic varieties, including birational equivalence and all the topological properties, depend on the behavior "at infinity" and so it is natural to study the varieties in projective space. Furthermore, the introduction of projective techniques made many theorems in algebraic geometry simpler and sharper: For example, Bézout's theorem on the number of intersection points between two varieties can be stated in its sharpest form only in projective space. For these reasons, projective space plays a fundamental role in algebraic geometry.
Nowadays, the projective space P<sup>n</sup> of dimension n is usually defined as the set of the lines passing through a point, considered as the origin, in the affine space of dimension , or equivalently to the set of the vector lines in a vector space of dimension . When a coordinate system has been chosen in the space of dimension , all the points of a line have the same set of coordinates, up to the multiplication by an element of k. This defines the homogeneous coordinates of a point of P<sup>n</sup> as a sequence of elements of the base field k, defined up to the multiplication by a nonzero element of k (the same for the whole sequence).
A polynomial in variables vanishes at all points of a line passing through the origin if and only if it is homogeneous. In this case, one says that the polynomial vanishes at the corresponding point of P<sup>n</sup>. This allows us to define a projective algebraic set in P<sup>n</sup> as the set , where a finite set of homogeneous polynomials {{nowrap|{f<sub>1</sub>, ..., f<sub>k</sub>} }} vanishes. Like for affine algebraic sets, there is a bijection between the projective algebraic sets and the reduced homogeneous ideals which define them. The projective varieties are the projective algebraic sets whose defining ideal is prime. In other words, a projective variety is a projective algebraic set, whose homogeneous coordinate ring is an integral domain, the projective coordinates ring being defined as the quotient of the graded ring or the polynomials in variables by the homogeneous (reduced) ideal defining the variety. Every projective algebraic set may be uniquely decomposed into a finite union of projective varieties.
The only regular functions which may be defined properly on a projective variety are the constant functions. Thus this notion is not used in projective situations. On the other hand, the field of the rational functions or function field is a useful notion, which, similarly to the affine case, is defined as the set of the quotients of two homogeneous elements of the same degree in the homogeneous coordinate ring.
Real algebraic geometry
Real algebraic geometry is the study of real algebraic varieties.
The fact that the field of the real numbers is an ordered field cannot be ignored in such a study. For example, the curve of equation <math>x^2+y^2-a0</math> is a circle if <math> a>0</math>, but has no real points if <math> a<0</math>. Real algebraic geometry also investigates, more broadly, semi-algebraic sets, which are the solutions of systems of polynomial inequalities. For example, neither branch of the hyperbola of equation <math>x y-1 0</math> is a real algebraic variety. However, the branch in the first quadrant is a semi-algebraic set defined by <math>x y-1=0</math> and <math>x>0</math>.
One open problem in real algebraic geometry is the following part of Hilbert's sixteenth problem: Decide which respective positions are possible for the ovals of a nonsingular plane curve of degree 8.
Computational algebraic geometry
One may date the origin of computational algebraic geometry to meeting EUROSAM'79 (International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation) held at Marseille, France, in June 1979. At this meeting,
* Dennis S. Arnon showed that George E. Collins's Cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD) allows the computation of the topology of semi-algebraic sets,
* Bruno Buchberger presented Gröbner bases and his algorithm to compute them,
* Daniel Lazard presented a new algorithm for solving systems of homogeneous polynomial equations with a computational complexity which is essentially polynomial in the expected number of solutions and thus simply exponential in the number of the unknowns. This algorithm is strongly related with Macaulay's multivariate resultant.
Since then, most results in this area are related to one or several of these items either by using or improving one of these algorithms, or by finding algorithms whose complexity is simply exponential in the number of the variables.
A body of mathematical theory complementary to symbolic methods called numerical algebraic geometry has been developed over the last several decades. The main computational method is homotopy continuation. This supports, for example, a model of floating point computation for solving problems of algebraic geometry.
Gröbner basis
A Gröbner basis is a system of generators of a polynomial ideal whose computation allows the deduction of many properties of the affine algebraic variety defined by the ideal.
Given an ideal I defining an algebraic set V:
* V is empty (over an algebraically closed extension of the basis field), if and only if the Gröbner basis for any monomial ordering is reduced to {1}.
* By means of the Hilbert series one may compute the dimension and the degree of V from any Gröbner basis of I for a monomial ordering refining the total degree.
* If the dimension of V is 0, one may compute the points (finite in number) of V from any Gröbner basis of I (see Systems of polynomial equations).
* A Gröbner basis computation allows one to remove from V all irreducible components which are contained in a given hypersurface.
* A Gröbner basis computation allows one to compute the Zariski closure of the image of V by the projection on the k first coordinates, and the subset of the image where the projection is not proper.
* More generally Gröbner basis computations allow one to compute the Zariski closure of the image and the critical points of a rational function of V into another affine variety.
Gröbner basis computations do not allow one to compute directly the primary decomposition of I nor the prime ideals defining the irreducible components of V, but most algorithms for this involve Gröbner basis computation. The algorithms which are not based on Gröbner bases use regular chains but may need Gröbner bases in some exceptional situations.
Gröbner bases are deemed to be difficult to compute. In fact they may contain, in the worst case, polynomials whose degree is doubly exponential in the number of variables and a number of polynomials which is also doubly exponential. However, this is only a worst case complexity, and the complexity bound of Lazard's algorithm of 1979 may frequently apply. Faugère F5 algorithm realizes this complexity, as it may be viewed as an improvement of Lazard's 1979 algorithm. It follows that the best implementations allow one to compute almost routinely with algebraic sets of degree more than 100. This means that, presently, the difficulty of computing a Gröbner basis is strongly related to the intrinsic difficulty of the problem.
Cylindrical algebraic decomposition (CAD)
CAD is an algorithm which was introduced in 1973 by G. Collins to implement with an acceptable complexity the Tarski–Seidenberg theorem on quantifier elimination over the real numbers.
This theorem concerns the formulas of the first-order logic whose atomic formulas are polynomial equalities or inequalities between polynomials with real coefficients. These formulas are thus the formulas which may be constructed from the atomic formulas by the logical operators and (∧), or (∨), not (¬), for all (∀) and exists (∃). Tarski's theorem asserts that, from such a formula, one may compute an equivalent formula without quantifier (∀, ∃).
The complexity of CAD is doubly exponential in the number of variables. This means that CAD allows, in theory, to solve every problem of real algebraic geometry which may be expressed by such a formula, that is almost every problem concerning explicitly given varieties and semi-algebraic sets.
While Gröbner basis computation has doubly exponential complexity only in rare cases, CAD has almost always this high complexity. This implies that, unless if most polynomials appearing in the input are linear, it may not solve problems with more than four variables.
Since 1973, most of the research on this subject is devoted either to improving CAD or finding alternative algorithms in special cases of general interest.
As an example of the state of art, there are efficient algorithms to find at least a point in every connected component of a semi-algebraic set, and thus to test if a semi-algebraic set is empty. On the other hand, CAD is yet, in practice, the best algorithm to count the number of connected components.
Asymptotic complexity vs. practical efficiency
The basic general algorithms of computational geometry have a double exponential worst case complexity. More precisely, if d is the maximal degree of the input polynomials and n the number of variables, their complexity is at most <math>d^{2^{c n}}</math> for some constant c, and, for some inputs, the complexity is at least <math>d^{2^{c' n}}</math> for another constant c′.
During the last 20 years of the 20th century, various algorithms have been introduced to solve specific subproblems with a better complexity. Most of these algorithms have a complexity <math>d^{O(n^2)}</math>.
Among these algorithms which solve a sub problem of the problems solved by Gröbner bases, one may cite testing if an affine variety is empty and solving nonhomogeneous polynomial systems which have a finite number of solutions. Such algorithms are rarely implemented because, on most entries Faugère's F4 and F5 algorithms have a better practical efficiency and probably a similar or better complexity (probably because the evaluation of the complexity of Gröbner basis algorithms on a particular class of entries is a difficult task which has been done only in a few special cases).
The main algorithms of real algebraic geometry which solve a problem solved by CAD are related to the topology of semi-algebraic sets. One may cite counting the number of connected components, testing if two points are in the same components or computing a Whitney stratification of a real algebraic set. They have a complexity of
<math>d^{O(n^2)}</math>, but the constant involved by O notation is so high that using them to solve any nontrivial problem effectively solved by CAD, is impossible even if one could use all the existing computing power in the world. Therefore, these algorithms have never been implemented and this is an active research area to search for algorithms with have together a good asymptotic complexity and a good practical efficiency.
Abstract modern viewpoint
The modern approaches to algebraic geometry redefine and effectively extend the range of basic objects in various levels of generality to schemes, formal schemes, ind-schemes, algebraic spaces, algebraic stacks and so on. The need for this arises already from the useful ideas within theory of varieties, e.g. the formal functions of Zariski can be accommodated by introducing nilpotent elements in structure rings; considering spaces of loops and arcs, constructing quotients by group actions and developing formal grounds for natural intersection theory and deformation theory lead to some of the further extensions.
Most remarkably, in the early 1960s, algebraic varieties were subsumed into Alexander Grothendieck's concept of a scheme. Their local objects are affine schemes or prime spectra which are locally ringed spaces which form a category which is antiequivalent to the category of commutative unital rings, extending the duality between the category of affine algebraic varieties over a field k, and the category of finitely generated reduced k-algebras. The gluing is along Zariski topology; one can glue within the category of locally ringed spaces, but also, using the Yoneda embedding, within the more abstract category of presheaves of sets over the category of affine schemes. The Zariski topology in the set theoretic sense is then replaced by a Grothendieck topology. Grothendieck introduced Grothendieck topologies having in mind more exotic but geometrically finer and more sensitive examples than the crude Zariski topology, namely the étale topology, and the two flat Grothendieck topologies: fppf and fpqc; nowadays some other examples became prominent including Nisnevich topology. Sheaves can be furthermore generalized to stacks in the sense of Grothendieck, usually with some additional representability conditions leading to Artin stacks and, even finer, Deligne–Mumford stacks, both often called algebraic stacks.
Sometimes other algebraic sites replace the category of affine schemes. For example, Nikolai Durov has introduced commutative algebraic monads as a generalization of local objects in a generalized algebraic geometry. Versions of a tropical geometry, of an absolute geometry over a field of one element and an algebraic analogue of Arakelov's geometry were realized in this setup.
Another formal generalization is possible to universal algebraic geometry in which every variety of algebras has its own algebraic geometry. The term variety of algebras should not be confused with algebraic variety.
The language of schemes, stacks and generalizations has proved to be a valuable way of dealing with geometric concepts and became cornerstones of modern algebraic geometry.
Algebraic stacks can be further generalized and for many practical questions like deformation theory and intersection theory, this is often the most natural approach. One can extend the Grothendieck site of affine schemes to a higher categorical site of derived affine schemes, by replacing the commutative rings with an infinity category of differential graded commutative algebras, or of simplicial commutative rings or a similar category with an appropriate variant of a Grothendieck topology. One can also replace presheaves of sets by presheaves of simplicial sets (or of infinity groupoids). Then, in presence of an appropriate homotopic machinery one can develop a notion of derived stack as such a presheaf on the infinity category of derived affine schemes, which is satisfying certain infinite categorical version of a sheaf axiom (and to be algebraic, inductively a sequence of representability conditions). Quillen model categories, Segal categories and quasicategories are some of the most often used tools to formalize this yielding the derived algebraic geometry, introduced by the school of Carlos Simpson, including Andre Hirschowitz, Bertrand Toën, Gabrielle Vezzosi, Michel Vaquié and others; and developed further by Jacob Lurie, Bertrand Toën, and Gabriele Vezzosi. Another (noncommutative) version of derived algebraic geometry, using A-infinity categories has been developed from the early 1990s by Maxim Kontsevich and followers.
History
Before the 16th century
Some of the roots of algebraic geometry date back to the work of the Hellenistic Greeks from the 5th century BC. The Delian problem, for instance, was to construct a length x so that the cube of side x contained the same volume as the rectangular box a<sup>2</sup>b for given sides a and b. Menaechmus () considered the problem geometrically by intersecting the pair of plane conics ay x<sup>2</sup> and xy ab. In the 3rd century BC, Archimedes and Apollonius systematically studied additional problems on conic sections using coordinates. His application of reference lines, a diameter and a tangent is essentially no different from our modern use of a coordinate frame, where the distances measured along the diameter from the point of tangency are the abscissas, and the segments parallel to the tangent and intercepted between the axis and the curve are the ordinates. He further developed relations between the abscissas and the corresponding coordinates using geometric methods like using parabolas and curves. Medieval mathematicians, including Omar Khayyam, Leonardo of Pisa, Gersonides and Nicole Oresme in the Medieval Period, solved certain cubic and quadratic equations by purely algebraic means and then interpreted the results geometrically. The Persian mathematician Omar Khayyám (born 1048 AD) believed that there was a relationship between arithmetic, algebra and geometry. This was criticized by Jeffrey Oaks, who claims that the study of curves by means of equations originated with Descartes in the seventeenth century.RenaissanceSuch techniques of applying geometrical constructions to algebraic problems were also adopted by a number of Renaissance mathematicians such as Gerolamo Cardano and Niccolò Fontana "Tartaglia" on their studies of the cubic equation. The geometrical approach to construction problems, rather than the algebraic one, was favored by most 16th and 17th century mathematicians, notably Blaise Pascal who argued against the use of algebraic and analytical methods in geometry. The French mathematicians Franciscus Vieta and later René Descartes and Pierre de Fermat revolutionized the conventional way of thinking about construction problems through the introduction of coordinate geometry. They were interested primarily in the properties of algebraic curves, such as those defined by Diophantine equations (in the case of Fermat), and the algebraic reformulation of the classical Greek works on conics and cubics (in the case of Descartes).
During the same period, Blaise Pascal and Gérard Desargues approached geometry from a different perspective, developing the synthetic notions of projective geometry. Pascal and Desargues also studied curves, but from the purely geometrical point of view: the analog of the Greek ruler and compass construction. Ultimately, the analytic geometry of Descartes and Fermat won out, for it supplied the 18th century mathematicians with concrete quantitative tools needed to study physical problems using the new calculus of Newton and Leibniz. However, by the end of the 18th century, most of the algebraic character of coordinate geometry was subsumed by the calculus of infinitesimals of Lagrange and Euler.
19th and early 20th century
It took the simultaneous 19th century developments of non-Euclidean geometry and Abelian integrals in order to bring the old algebraic ideas back into the geometrical fold. The first of these new developments was seized up by Edmond Laguerre and Arthur Cayley, who attempted to ascertain the generalized metric properties of projective space. Cayley introduced the idea of homogeneous polynomial forms, and more specifically quadratic forms, on projective space. Subsequently, Felix Klein studied projective geometry (along with other types of geometry) from the viewpoint that the geometry on a space is encoded in a certain class of transformations on the space. By the end of the 19th century, projective geometers were studying more general kinds of transformations on figures in projective space. Rather than the projective linear transformations which were normally regarded as giving the fundamental Kleinian geometry on projective space, they concerned themselves also with the higher degree birational transformations. This weaker notion of congruence would later lead members of the 20th century Italian school of algebraic geometry to classify algebraic surfaces up to birational isomorphism.
The second early 19th century development, that of Abelian integrals, would lead Bernhard Riemann to the development of Riemann surfaces.
In the same period began the algebraization of the algebraic geometry through commutative algebra. The prominent results in this direction are Hilbert's basis theorem and Hilbert's Nullstellensatz, which are the basis of the connection between algebraic geometry and commutative algebra, and Macaulay's multivariate resultant, which is the basis of elimination theory. Probably because of the size of the computation which is implied by multivariate resultants, elimination theory was forgotten during the middle of the 20th century until it was renewed by singularity theory and computational algebraic geometry.}}20th century
B. L. van der Waerden, Oscar Zariski and André Weil developed a foundation for algebraic geometry based on contemporary commutative algebra, including valuation theory and the theory of ideals. One of the goals was to give a rigorous framework for proving the results of the Italian school of algebraic geometry. In particular, this school used systematically the notion of generic point without any precise definition, which was first given by these authors during the 1930s.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Jean-Pierre Serre and Alexander Grothendieck recast the foundations making use of sheaf theory. Later, from about 1960, and largely led by Grothendieck, the idea of schemes was worked out, in conjunction with a very refined apparatus of homological techniques. After a decade of rapid development the field stabilized in the 1970s, and new applications were made, both to number theory and to more classical geometric questions on algebraic varieties, singularities, moduli, and formal moduli.
An important class of varieties, not easily understood directly from their defining equations, are the abelian varieties, which are the projective varieties whose points form an abelian group. The prototypical examples are the elliptic curves, which have a rich theory. They were instrumental in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and are also used in elliptic-curve cryptography.
In parallel with the abstract trend of the algebraic geometry, which is concerned with general statements about varieties, methods for effective computation with concretely-given varieties have also been developed, which lead to the new area of computational algebraic geometry. One of the founding methods of this area is the theory of Gröbner bases, introduced by Bruno Buchberger in 1965. Another founding method, more specially devoted to real algebraic geometry, is the cylindrical algebraic decomposition, introduced by George E. Collins in 1973.
See also: derived algebraic geometry.<!-- related to this, we really should mention more recent stuff like moduli of curves, connection to theoretical physics, etc.-->
Analytic geometry
An analytic variety over the field of real or complex numbers is defined locally as the set of common solutions of several equations involving analytic functions. It is analogous to the concept of algebraic variety in that it carries a structure sheaf of analytic functions instead of regular functions. Any complex manifold is a complex analytic variety. Since analytic varieties may have singular points, not all complex analytic varieties are manifolds. Over a non-archimedean field analytic geometry is studied via rigid analytic spaces.
Modern analytic geometry over the field of complex numbers is closely related to complex algebraic geometry, as has been shown by Jean-Pierre Serre in his paper GAGA, the name of which is French for Algebraic geometry and analytic geometry. The GAGA results over the field of complex numbers may be extended to rigid analytic spaces over non-archimedean fields.
Applications
Algebraic geometry now finds applications in statistics, control theory, robotics, error-correcting codes, phylogenetics and geometric modelling. There are also connections to string theory, game theory, graph matchings, solitons and integer programming.
See also
* Glossary of classical algebraic geometry
* Important publications in algebraic geometry
* List of algebraic surfaces
* Noncommutative algebraic geometry
Notes
References
Sources
* Further reading
;Some classic textbooks that predate schemes:
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;Modern textbooks that do not use the language of schemes:
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;Textbooks in computational algebraic geometry
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;Textbooks and references for schemes:
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* External links
* [http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/216blog/FOAGnov1817public.pdf Foundations of Algebraic Geometry by Ravi Vakil, 808 pp.]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20040415021548/http://planetmath.org/encyclopedia/AlgebraicGeometry.html Algebraic geometry] entry on [http://planetmath.org/ PlanetMath]
* [http://neo-classical-physics.info/uploads/3/0/6/5/3065888/van_der_waerden_-_algebraic_geometry.pdf English translation of the van der Waerden textbook]
*
* [http://stacks.math.columbia.edu/ The Stacks Project], an open source textbook and reference work on algebraic stacks and algebraic geometry
* [https://jessetvogel.nl/adjectives-project/ Adjectives Project], an online database for searching examples of schemes and morphisms based on their properties | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_geometry | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.464701 |
1998 | Austin, Texas | | image_flag = Flag of Austin, Texas.svg
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Austin ( ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas. It is the county seat and most populous city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 26th-largest metropolitan area in the United States, the 12th-most populous city in the United States, It has been one of the fastest growing large cities in the United States since 2010. Downtown Austin and Downtown San Antonio are approximately apart, and both fall along the I-35 corridor. This combined metropolitan region of San Antonio–Austin has approximately 5 million people. Austin is the southernmost state capital in the contiguous United States and is considered a Gamma + level global city as categorized by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network.
As of the 2020 census, Austin had a population of 961,855. The city is the cultural and economic center of the metropolitan statistical area, which had an estimated population of 2,473,275 as of July 1, 2023. Located in within the greater Texas Hill Country, it is home to numerous lakes, rivers, and waterways, including Lady Bird Lake and Lake Travis on the Colorado River, Barton Springs, McKinney Falls, and Lake Walter E. Long.
Residents of Austin are known as Austinites. which refers to the desire to protect small, unique, and local businesses from being overrun by large corporations.
Emerging from a strong economic focus on government and education, since the 1990s, Austin has become a center for technology and business. In 2021, Austin became home to the Austin FC, the first (and currently only) major professional sports team in the city.
History
Austin, Travis County and Williamson County have been the site of human habitation since at least 9200 BC. The area's earliest known inhabitants lived during the late Pleistocene (Ice Age) and are linked to the Clovis culture around 9200 BC (over 11,200 years ago), based on evidence found throughout the area and documented at the much-studied Gault Site, midway between Georgetown and Fort Cavazos.
When settlers arrived from Europe, the Tonkawa tribe inhabited the area. The Comanches and Lipan Apaches were also known to travel through the area. Spanish colonists, including the Espinosa-Olivares-Aguirre expedition, traveled through the area, though few permanent settlements were created for some time.
During the 1830s, pioneers began to settle the area in central Austin along the Colorado River. Spanish forts were established in what are now Bastrop and San Marcos. Shortly afterward, the name was changed to Austin in honor of Stephen F. Austin, the "Father of Texas" and the republic's first secretary of state.
The city grew throughout the 19th century and became a center for government and education with the construction of the Texas State Capitol and the University of Texas at Austin.
Edwin Waller was picked by Lamar to survey the village and draft a plan laying out the new capital. Settlement in the area began to expand quickly. Travis County was established in 1840, and the surrounding counties were mostly established within the next two decades. The resident African American population listed in January of this same year was 176. The fear of Austin's proximity to the Indians and Mexico, which still considered Texas a part of their land, created an immense motive for Sam Houston, the first and third President of the Republic of Texas, to relocate the capital once again in 1841. Upon threats of Mexican troops in Texas, Houston raided the Land Office to transfer all official documents to Houston for safe keeping in what was later known as the Archive War, but the people of Austin would not allow this unaccompanied decision to be executed. The documents stayed, but the capital would temporarily move from Austin to Houston to Washington-on-the-Brazos. Without the governmental body, Austin's population declined to a low of only a few hundred people throughout the early 1840s. The voting by the fourth President of the Republic, Anson Jones, and Congress, who reconvened in Austin in 1845, settled the issue to keep Austin the seat of government, as well as annex the Republic of Texas into the United States.
In 1860, 38% of Travis County residents were slaves. In 1861, with the outbreak of the American Civil War, voters in Austin and other Central Texas communities voted against secession. turned Austin into the major trading center for the region, with the ability to transport both cotton and cattle. The Missouri, Kansas & Texas (MKT) line followed close behind. Austin was also the terminus of the southernmost leg of the Chisholm Trail, and "drovers" pushed cattle north to the railroad. Cotton was one of the few crops produced locally for export, and a cotton gin engine was located downtown near the trains for "ginning" cotton of its seeds and turning the product into bales for shipment. However, as other new railroads were built through the region in the 1870s, Austin began to lose its primacy in trade to the surrounding communities.
In September 1881, Austin public schools held their first classes. The same year, Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute (now part of Huston–Tillotson University) opened its doors. The University of Texas held its first classes in 1883, although classes had been held in the original wooden state capitol for four years before.
During the 1880s, Austin gained new prominence as the state capitol building was completed in 1888 and claimed as the seventh largest building in the world.
In the late 1920s and 1930s, Austin implemented the 1928 Austin city plan through a series of civic development and beautification projects that created much of the city's infrastructure and many of its parks. In addition, the state legislature established the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) that, along with the city of Austin, created the system of dams along the Colorado River to form the Highland Lakes. These projects were enabled in large part because the Public Works Administration provided Austin with greater funding for municipal construction projects than other Texas cities. Combined with the system of segregated public services, racial segregation increased in Austin during the first half of the twentieth century, with African Americans and Mexicans experiencing high levels of discrimination and social marginalization.
In 1940, the destroyed granite dam on the Colorado River was finally replaced by a hollow concrete dam that formed Lake McDonald (now called Lake Austin) and which has withstood all floods since. In addition, the much larger Mansfield Dam was built by the LCRA upstream of Austin to form Lake Travis, a flood-control reservoir.
In the early 20th century, the Texas Oil Boom took hold, creating tremendous economic opportunities in Southeast Texas and North Texas. The growth generated by this boom largely passed by Austin at first, with the city slipping from fourth largest to tenth largest in Texas between 1880 and 1920.
The 1970s saw Austin's emergence in the national music scene, with local artists such as Willie Nelson, Asleep at the Wheel, and Stevie Ray Vaughan and iconic music venues such as the Armadillo World Headquarters. Over time, the long-running television program Austin City Limits, its namesake Austin City Limits Festival, and the South by Southwest music festival solidified the city's place in the music industry. south of Dallas and northeast of San Antonio.
Austin occupies a total area of . Approximately of this area is water. To help control this runoff and to generate hydroelectric power, the Lower Colorado River Authority operates a series of dams that form the Texas Highland Lakes. The lakes also provide venues for boating, swimming, and other forms of recreation within several parks on the lake shores.
Austin is located at the intersection of four major ecological regions, and is consequently a temperate-to-hot green oasis with a highly variable climate having some characteristics of the desert, the tropics, and a wetter climate. The area is very diverse ecologically and biologically, and is home to a variety of animals and plants.
The soils of Austin range from shallow, gravelly clay loams over limestone in the western outskirts to deep, fine sandy loams, silty clay loams, silty clays or clays in the city's eastern part. Some of the clays have pronounced shrink-swell properties and are difficult to work under most moisture conditions. Many of Austin's soils, especially the clay-rich types, are slightly to moderately alkaline and have free calcium carbonate.Cityscape
|alt=Downtown Austin, Texas from across the Colorado River, October 2022|center}}
Austin's skyline historically was modest, dominated by the Texas State Capitol and the University of Texas Main Building. However, since the 2000s, many new high-rise towers have been constructed. Austin is currently undergoing a skyscraper boom, which includes recent construction on new office, hotel and residential buildings. Downtown's buildings are somewhat spread out, partly due to a set of zoning restrictions that preserve the view of the Texas State Capitol from various locations around Austin, known as the Capitol View Corridors.
in Austin]]
At night, parts of Austin are lit by "artificial moonlight" from moonlight towers built to illuminate the central part of the city. The moonlight towers were built in the late 19th century and are now recognized as historic landmarks. Only 15 of the 31 original innovative towers remain standing in Austin, but none remain in any of the other cities where they were installed. The towers are featured in the 1993 film Dazed and Confused.
In December 2023, amid rising home prices, the Austin City Council loosened the city's zoning rules to permit by-right development of triplexes on each lot and loosened restrictions on tiny homes.DowntownThe central business district of Austin is home to the tallest condo towers in the state, with The Independent (58 stories and tall) and The Austonian (topping out at 56 floors and tall). The Independent became the tallest all-residential building in the U.S. west of Chicago when topped out in 2018. In 2005, then-Mayor Will Wynn set out a goal of having 25,000 people living downtown by 2015. Although downtown's growth did not meet this goal, downtown's residential population did surge from an estimated 5,000 in 2005 to 12,000 in 2015. The skyline has drastically changed in recent years, and the residential real estate market has remained relatively strong. , there were 31 high rise projects either under construction, approved or planned to be completed in Austin's downtown core between 2017 and 2020. Sixteen of those were set to rise above tall, including four above 600', and eight above 500'. An additional 15 towers were slated to stand between 300' and 399' tall.
Climate
Austin is located within the middle of a unique, narrow transitional zone between the dry deserts of the American Southwest and the lush, green, more humid regions of the American Southeast. Its climate, topography, and vegetation share characteristics of both. Officially, Austin has a humid subtropical climate (Cfa under the Köppen climate classification, Cfhl under the Trewartha climate classification). This climate is typified by long, very hot summers, short, mild winters, and warm to hot spring and fall seasons in-between. Austin averages of annual rainfall distributed mostly evenly throughout the year, though spring and fall are the wettest seasons. Sunshine is common during all seasons, with 2,650 hours, or 60.3% of the possible total, of bright sunshine per year.
Summers in Austin are very hot, with average July and August highs frequently reaching the high-90s (34–36 °C) or above. Highs reach on 123 days per year, of which 29 days reach ; all years in the 1991-2020 period recorded at least 1 day of the latter. An uncommon characteristic of Austin's climate is its highly variable humidity, which fluctuates frequently depending on the shifting patterns of air flow and wind direction. It is common for a lengthy series of warm, dry, low-humidity days to be occasionally interrupted by very warm and humid days, and vice versa. Humidity rises with winds from the east or southeast, when the air drifts inland from the Gulf of Mexico, but decreases significantly with winds from the west or southwest, bringing air flowing from Chihuahuan Desert areas of West Texas or Northern Mexico. When Austin received of ice on January 24, 2014, there were 278 vehicular collisions. Similarly, snowfall is rare in Austin. A snow event of on February 4, 2011, caused more than 300 car crashes. The most recent major snow event occurred February 14–15, 2021, when of snow fell at Austin's Camp Mabry, the largest two-day snowfall since records began being kept in 1948.
Typical of Central Texas, severe weather in Austin is a threat that can strike during any season. However, it is most common during the spring. According to most classifications, Austin lies within the extreme southern periphery of Tornado Alley, although many sources place Austin outside of Tornado Alley altogether. The deadliest storm to ever strike city limits was the twin tornadoes storm of May 4, 1922, while the deadliest tornado outbreak to ever strike the metro area was the Central Texas tornado outbreak of May 27, 1997.
Natural disasters
2011 drought
, part of the Colorado River.]]
From October 2010 through September 2011, both major reporting stations in Austin, Camp Mabry and Bergstrom Int'l, had the least rainfall of a water year on record, receiving less than a third of normal precipitation. The drought, coupled with exceedingly high temperatures throughout the summer of 2011, caused many wildfires throughout Texas, including notably the Bastrop County Complex Fire in neighboring Bastrop, Texas. 2018 flooding and water crisis
In the fall of 2018, Austin and surrounding areas received heavy rainfall and flash flooding following Hurricane Sergio. From October 22 to October 29, 2018, the City of Austin issued a mandatory citywide boil-water advisory after the Highland Lakes, home to the city's main water supply, became overwhelmed by unprecedented amounts of silt, dirt, and debris that had washed in from the Llano River. Austin Water, the city's water utility, has the capacity to process up to 300 million gallons of water per day; however, the elevated level of turbidity reduced output to only 105 million gallons per day. Since Austin residents consumed an average of 120 million gallons of water per day, the infrastructure was not able to keep up with demand.
This marked the longest time the area had had more than of snow, with the previous longest time being three days in January 1985.
Lack of winterization in natural gas power plants, which supply a large amount of power to the Texas grid, and increased energy demand caused ERCOT and Austin Energy to enact rolling blackouts in order to avoid total grid collapse between February 15 and February 18. Initial rolling blackouts were to last for a maximum of 40 minutes, however lack of energy production caused many blackouts to last for much longer, at the peak of the blackouts an estimated 40% of Austin Energy homes were without power.
Starting on February 15, Austin Water received reports of pipe breaks, hourly water demand increased from 150 million gallons per day on February 15 to a peak hourly demand of 260 million gallons per day on February 16. On the morning of February 17 demand increased to 330 million gallons per day, the resulting drop of water pressure caused the Austin area to enter into a boil-water advisory which would last until water pressure was restored on February 23.
2023 winter storm
Beginning January 30, 2023 the City of Austin experienced a winter freeze which left 170,000 Austin Energy customers without electricity or heat for several days. The slow pace of repairs and lack of public information from City officials frustrated many residents. A week after the freeze and when Austin City Council members were proposing to evaluate his employment, City Manager Spencer Cronk finally apologized. On Thursday February 16, 2023, Cronk was fired by the Austin City Council for the city's response to the winter storm. Former City Manager Jesus Garcia was named Interim City Manager.ParksThe Austin Parks and Recreation Department received the Excellence in Aquatics award in 1999 and the Gold Medal Awards in 2004 from the National Recreation and Park Association.
To strengthen the region's parks system, which spans more than , The Austin Parks Foundation was established in 1992 to develop and improve parks in and around Austin. APF works to fill the city's park funding gap by leveraging volunteers, philanthropists, park advocates, and strategic collaborations to develop, maintain and enhance Austin's parks, trails and green spaces.Lady Bird Lake
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is the oldest human-made pool in Texas.]]
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Lady Bird Lake (formerly Town Lake) is a river-like reservoir on the Colorado River. The lake is a popular recreational area for paddleboards, kayaks, canoes, dragon boats, and rowing shells. Austin's warm climate and the river's calm waters, nearly length and straight courses are especially popular with crew teams and clubs. Other recreational attractions along the shores of the lake include swimming in Deep Eddy Pool, the oldest swimming pool in Texas, and Red Bud Isle, a small island formed by the 1900 collapse of the McDonald Dam that serves as a recreation area with a dog park and access to the lake for canoeing and fishing. The Ann and Roy Butler Hike and Bike Trail forms a complete circuit around the lake. A local nonprofit, The Trail Foundation, is the Trail's private steward and has built amenities and infrastructure including trailheads, lakefront gathering areas, restrooms, exercise equipment, as well as doing Trailwide ecological restoration work on an ongoing basis. The Butler Trail loop was completed in 2014 with the public-private partnership 1-mile Boardwalk project.
Along the shores of Lady Bird Lake is the Zilker Park, which contains large open lawns, sports fields, cross country courses, historical markers, concession stands, and picnic areas. Zilker Park is also home to numerous attractions, including the Zilker Botanical Garden, the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, Zilker Hillside Theater, the Austin Nature & Science Center, and the Zilker Zephyr, a gauge miniature railway carries passengers on a tour around the park. Auditorium Shores, an urban park along the lake, is home to the Palmer Auditorium, the Long Center for the Performing Arts, and an off-leash dog park on the water. Both Zilker Park and Auditorium Shores have a direct view of the Downtown skyline.
Barton Creek Greenbelt
The Barton Creek Greenbelt is a public green belt managed by the City of Austin's Park and Recreation Department. The Greenbelt, which begins at Zilker Park and stretches South/Southwest to the Woods of Westlake subdivision, is characterized by large limestone cliffs, dense foliage, and shallow bodies of water. Popular activities include rock climbing, mountain biking, and hiking. Some well known naturally forming swimming holes along Austin's greenbelt include Twin Falls, Sculpture Falls, Gus Fruh Pool, and Campbell's Hole. During years of heavy rainfall, the water level of the creek rises high enough to allow swimming, cliff diving, kayaking, paddle boarding, and tubing.Swimming holesAustin is home to more than 50 public pools and swimming holes. These include Deep Eddy Pool, Texas' oldest human-made swimming pool, and Barton Springs Pool, the nation's largest natural swimming pool in an urban area. Barton Springs Pool is spring-fed while Deep Eddy is well-fed. Both range in temperature from about during the winter to about during the summer. Hippie Hollow Park, a county park situated along Lake Travis, is the only officially sanctioned clothing-optional public park in Texas. Hamilton Pool Preserve is a natural pool that was created when the dome of an underground river collapsed due to massive erosion thousands of years ago. The pool, located about west of Austin, is a popular summer swimming spot for visitors and residents. Hamilton Pool Preserve consists of of protected natural habitat featuring a jade green pool into which a waterfall flows.
Other parks
In May 2021, voters in the City of Austin reinstated a public camping ban. That includes downtown green spaces as well as trails and greenbelts such as along Barton Creek.
McKinney Falls State Park is a state park administered by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, located at the confluence of Onion Creek and Williamson Creek. The park includes several designated hiking trails and campsites with water and electric. The namesake features of the park are the scenic upper and lower falls along Onion Creek. The Emma Long Metropolitan Park is a municipal park along the shores of Lake Austin, originally constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is a botanical garden and arboretum that features more than 800 species of native Texas plants in both garden and natural settings; the Wildflower Center is located southwest of Downtown in Circle C Ranch. Roy G. Guerrero Park is located along the Colorado River in East Riverside and contains miles of wooded trails, a sandy beach along the river, and a disc golf course.
Covert Park, located on the top of Mount Bonnell, is a popular tourist destination overlooking Lake Austin and the Colorado River. The mount provides a vista for viewing the city of Austin, Lake Austin, and the surrounding hills. It was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1969, bearing Marker number 6473, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2015.
The Louis René Barrera Indiangrass Wildlife Sanctuary, located on the north shore of Lake Walter E. Long, is a park managed by the Austin Parks and Recreation Department with the goal of restoring the Blackland Prairie. While not open to the public, it is accessible through guided tours.
Demographics
}}
In 2020, there were 961,855 people, up from the 2000 United States census tabulation where there were people, households, and families residing in the city. In 2000, the population density was . There were dwelling units at an average density of . There were households, out of which 26.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 38.1% were married couples living together, 10.8% had a female householder with no husband present, and 46.7% were non-families. 32.8% of all households were made up of individuals, and 4.6% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.40 and the average family size was 3.14.
In the city the population was spread out, with 22.5% of the population under the age of 18, 16.6% from 18 to 24, 37.1% from 25 to 44, 17.1% from 45 to 64, and 6.7% were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 30 years. For every 100 females, there were 105.8 males.
The median income for a household in the city was , and the median income for a family was $. Males had a median income of $ compared to $ for females. The per capita income for the city was $. About 9.1% of families and 14.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 16.5% of those under age 18 and 8.7% of those age 65 or over. The median house price was $ in 2009, and it has increased every year since 2004. The median value of a house which the owner occupies was $318,400 in 2019—higher than the average American home value of $240,500.Race and ethnicity{| class"wikitable sortable collapsible" style="font-size: 90%;"
|-
! Racial composition
!2022!! 2020 !! 2010 !! 2000!! 1990 the racial composition of Austin was 68.3% White (48.7% non-Hispanic whites), 35.1% Hispanic or Latino (29.1% Mexican, 0.5% Puerto Rican, 0.4% Cuban, 5.1% Other), 8.1% African American, 6.3% Asian (1.9% Indian, 1.5% Chinese, 1.0% Vietnamese, 0.7% Korean, 0.3% Filipino, 0.2% Japanese, 0.8% Other), 0.9% American Indian, 0.1% Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, and 3.4% two or more races.
According to the 2020 United States census, the racial composition of Austin was 72.6% White (48.3% non-Hispanic whites), 33.9% Hispanic or Latino, 7.8% African American, 7.6% Asian, 0.7% American Indian, 0.1% Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, and 3.4% two or more races.
A 2014 University of Texas study stated that Austin was the only U.S. city with a fast growth rate between 2000 and 2010 with a net loss in African Americans. , Austin's African American and non-Hispanic white percentage shares of the total population was declining despite the actual numbers of both ethnic groups increasing, as the rapid growth of the Latino or Hispanic and Asian populations has outpaced all other ethnic groups in the city. Austin's non-Hispanic white population first dropped below 50% in 2005.
Sexual orientation and gender identity
According to a survey completed in 2014 by Gallup, it is estimated that 5.3% of residents in the Austin metropolitan area identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. The Austin metropolitan area had the third-highest rate in the nation. Religion According to Sperling's BestPlaces, 52.4% of Austin's population are religious. Other significant Christian groups in Austin include Baptists (8.7%), followed by Methodists (4.3%), Latter-day Saints (1.5%), Episcopalians or Anglicans (1.0%), Lutherans (0.8%), Presbyterians (0.6%), Pentecostals (0.3%), and other Christians such as the Disciples of Christ and Eastern Orthodox Church (7.1%). Homelessness As of 2019, there were 2,255 individuals experiencing homelessness in Travis County. Of those, 1,169 were sheltered and 1,086 were unsheltered. In September 2019, the Austin City Council approved $62.7 million for programs aimed at homelessness, which includes housing displacement prevention, crisis mitigation, and affordable housing; the city council also earmarked $500,000 for crisis services and encampment cleanups.
In June 2019, following Martin v. Boise, a federal court ruling on homelessness sleeping in public, the Austin City Council lifted a 25-year-old ban on camping, sitting, or lying down in public unless doing so causes an obstruction. The resolution also included the approval of a new housing-focused shelter in South Austin. In early October 2019, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter to Mayor Steve Adler threatening to deploy state resources to combat the camping ban repeal.
In May 2021, the camping ban was reinstated after a ballot proposition was approved by 57% of voters. The ban introduces penalties for camping, sitting, or lying down on a public sidewalk or sleeping outdoors in or near Downtown Austin or the area around the University of Texas campus. The ordinance also prohibits solicitation at certain locations.Economy
The Greater Austin metropolitan statistical area had a gross domestic product (GDP) of $222 billion in 2022. Austin is considered to be a major center for high tech. The proliferation of technology companies has led to the region's nickname, "Silicon Hills", and spurred development that greatly expanded the city.
Tesla, Inc., an electric vehicle and clean energy company has its corporate headquarters in Austin inside Gigafactory Texas, a large vehicle assembly plant which employs over 20,000 people. The company expects to eventually have a staff of 60,000 in the Austin area as production ramps up.
Austin is also emerging as a hub for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies; the city is home to about 85 of them. and in 2018, CBRE Group ranked Austin as #3 emerging life sciences cluster. Companies such as Hospira, Pharmaceutical Product Development, and ArthroCare Corporation are located there.
Whole Foods Market, an international grocery store chain specializing in fresh and packaged food products, was founded and is headquartered in Austin.
Other companies based in Austin include NXP Semiconductors, GoodPop, Temple-Inland, Sweet Leaf Tea Company, Keller Williams Realty, National Western Life, GSD&M, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Golfsmith, Forestar Group, EZCorp, Outdoor Voices, Tito's Vodka, Speak Social, and YETI.
In 2018, Austin metro-area companies saw a total of $1.33 billion invested. In 2018, Austin's venture capital investments accounted for more than 60 percent of Texas' total investments.Top employers
According to Austin's comprehensive annual financial reports, the top employers by number of employees in the county are the following. "NR" indicates the employer was not ranked among the top ten employers that year.
{|class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Employer
! Employees<br />(2022)
! Employees<br />(2013)
! Employees<br />(1998)
|-
|Government of Texas
|align=right | 39,306
|align=right | 36,948
|align=right |
|align=right |
|-
| University of Texas at Austin
|align=right | 29,597
|align=right | 24,183
|align=right | 21,000
|align=right | 20,342
|-
| H-E-B
|align=right | 20,749
|align=right | 11,277
|align=right |
|align=right |
|-
| City of Austin
|align=right | 15,548
|align=right | 12,372
|align=right | 10,617
|align=right | 10,606
|-
| Federal government of the United States
|align=right | 15,000
|align=right | 10,500
|align=right | 10,200
|align=right |
|-
| Dell Technologies
|align=right | 13,000
|align=right | 14,000
|align=right | 16,500
|align=right | 10,700
|-
| Ascension Seton
|align=right | 12,086
|align=right | 12,609
|align=right | 6,393
|align=right |
|-
| Amazon.com
|align=right | 11,000
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right |
|-
| St. David's Healthcare Partnership
|align=right | 10,854
|align=right | 7,950
|align=right | 5,000
|align=right |
|-
| Austin Independent School District
|align=right | 10,565
|align=right | 11,465
|align=right | 10,714
|align=right | 9,159
|-
|IBM
|align=right |
|align=right | 6,000
|align=right | 6,200
|align=right | 7,000
|-
| Freescale Semiconductor
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right | 6,500
|align=right |
|-
| Texas State University
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right | 5,103
|align=right |
|-
| Motorola
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right | 10,000
|-
| Internal Revenue Service
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right | 5,700
|-
| Texas Department of Health
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right | 5,634
|-
| Advanced Micro Devices
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right | 4,200
|-
| Texas Department of Public Safety
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right |
|align=right | 4,000
|}
Transportation
In 2009, 72.7% of Austin (city) commuters drove alone, with other mode shares being: 10.4% carpool, 6% were remote workers, 5% use transit, 2.3% walk, and 1% bicycle. In 2016, the American Community Survey estimated modal shares for Austin (city) commuters of 73.5% for driving alone, 9.6% for carpooling, 3.6% for riding transit, 2% for walking, and 1.5% for cycling. The city of Austin has a lower than average percentage of households without a car. In 2015, 6.9 percent of Austin households lacked a car, and decreased slightly to 6 percent in 2016. The national average was 8.7 percent in 2016. Austin averaged 1.65 cars per household in 2016, compared to a national average of 1.8.
In mid-2019, TomTom ranked Austin as having the worst traffic congestion in Texas, as well as 19th nationally and 179th globally.
Highways
is the signature element of Loop 360 in the Texas Hill Country.]]
Central Austin lies between two major north–south freeways: I-35 to the east and the Mopac Expressway (Loop 1) to the west. US 183 runs from northwest to southeast, and SH 71 crosses the southern part of the city from east to west, completing a rough "box" around central and north-central Austin. Austin is the largest city in the United States to be served by only one Interstate Highway.
US 290 enters Austin from the east and merges into I-35. Its highway designation continues south on I-35 and then becomes part of SH 71, continuing to the west. Highway 290 splits from Highway 71 in southwest Austin, in an interchange known as "The Y." SH 71 continues to Brady, Texas, and Highway 290 continues west to intersect I-10 near Junction. Interstate 35 continues south through San Antonio to Laredo on the Mexican border. I-35 is the highway link to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Northern Texas. There are two links to Houston (US 290 and SH 71/I-10). US 183 leads northwest of Austin toward Lampasas.
In the mid-1980s, construction was completed on Loop 360, a scenic highway that curves through the hill country from near the 71/Mopac interchange in the south to near the US 183/Mopac interchange in the north. The iconic Pennybacker Bridge, also known as the "360 Bridge," crosses Lake Austin to connect the northern and southern portions of Loop 360.
Tollways
and State Highway 45]]
SH 130 is a bypass route designed to relieve traffic congestion, starting from Interstate 35 just north of Georgetown and running along a parallel route to the east, where it bypasses Round Rock, Austin, San Marcos and New Braunfels before ending at I-10 east of Seguin, where drivers could drive west to return to I-35 in San Antonio. The first segment was opened in November 2006, which was located east of Austin–Bergstrom International Airport at Austin's southeast corner on SH 71. Highway 130 runs concurrently with SH 45 from Pflugerville on the north until it reaches US 183 well south of Austin, at which point SR 45 continues west. The entire route of SH 130 is now complete. The final leg opened on November 1, 2012. The highway is noted for having a maximum speed limit of for the entire route. The section of the toll road between Mustang Ridge and Seguin has a posted speed limit of , the highest posted speed limit in the United States.
SH 45 runs east–west from just south of US 183 in Cedar Park to 130 inside Pflugerville (just east of Round Rock). A tolled extension of State Highway Loop 1 was also created. A new southeast leg of SH 45 has recently been completed, running from US 183 and the south end of Segment 5 of TX-130 south of Austin due west to I-35 at the FM 1327/Creedmoor Road exit between the south end of Austin and Buda. The 183A Toll Road opened in March 2007, providing a tolled alternative to US 183 through the cities of Leander and Cedar Park. Currently under construction is a change to East US 290 from US 183 to the town of Manor. Officially, the tollway will be dubbed Tollway 290 with "Manor Expressway" as nickname.
Despite the overwhelming initial opposition to the toll road concept when it was first announced, all three toll roads have exceeded revenue projections. Grupo Senda's Turimex Internacional service operates bus service from Austin to Nuevo Laredo and on to many destinations in Mexico from their station in East Austin. BikeTexas, a state-level advocacy organization, also has its main office in Austin.
Bicycles are a popular transportation choice among students, faculty, and staff at the University of Texas. According to a survey done at the University of Texas, 57% of commuters bike to campus.
The City of Austin and CapMetro jointly own a bike-sharing service, CapMetro Bike, which is available in and around downtown. The service is a franchise of BCycle, a national bike sharing network owned by Trek Bicycle, and is operated by local nonprofit organization Bike Share of Austin. Until 2020 the service was known as Austin BCycle. In 2018, Lime began offering dockless bikes, which do not need to be docked at a designated station.
In 2018, scooter-sharing companies Lime and Bird debuted rentable electric scooters in Austin. The city briefly banned the scooters — which began operations before the city could implement a permitting system — until the city completed development of their "dockless mobility" permitting process on May 1, 2018. Dockless electric scooters and bikes are banned from Austin city parks and the Ann and Roy Butler Trail and Boardwalk. For the 2018 Austin City Limits Music Festival, the city of Austin offered a designated parking area for dockless bikes and scooters.
Parking lots
In November 2023, Austin became the largest city in the US that has abolished parking mandates. It did so to encourage walking, biking, and public transit use, as well as to lower the cost of housing and increase the amount of housing units that can be built in the city. Portland and Minneapolis also took this action.
Culture
"Keep Austin Weird" has been a local motto for years, featured on bumper stickers and T-shirts. This motto has not only been used in promoting Austin's eccentricity and diversity, but is also meant to bolster support of local independent businesses. The Rainey Street district is also home to the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center.
Austin has been part of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network under Media Arts the category.Old Austin"Old Austin" is an adage often used by nostalgic natives. The term "Old Austin" refers to a time when the city was smaller and more bohemian with a considerably lower cost of living and better known for its lack of traffic, hipsters, and urban sprawl. It is often employed by longtime residents expressing displeasure at the rapidly changing culture, or when referencing nostalgia of Austin culture.
The growth and popularity of Austin can be seen by the expansive development taking place in its downtown landscape. This growth can have a negative impact on longtime small businesses that cannot keep up with the expenses associated with gentrification and the rising cost of real estate. A former Austin musician, Dale Watson, described his move away from Austin, "I just really feel the city has sold itself. Just because you're going to get $45 million for a company to come to town – if it's not in the best interest of the town, I don't think they should do it. This city was never about money. It was about quality of life." Though much is changing rapidly in Austin, businesses such as Thundercloud Subs are thought by many to maintain classic Austin business cultural sentiments unique to the history of the city; as Diana Burgess stated, "I definitely appreciate that they haven't raised their prices a ton or made things super fancy. I think it speaks to that <u>original Old Austin vibe</u>. A lot of us that grew up here really appreciate that." Aaron Franklin, owner of Franklin Barbecue, credited the Old Austin cultural mindset and community support with the success of his barbecue restaurant and the long lines that have supported his business since starting it out of a food trailer in 2009.Annual cultural events
on a weekend night]]
The O. Henry House Museum hosts the annual O. Henry Pun-Off, a pun contest where the successful contestants exhibit wit akin to that of the author William Sydney Porter.
Other annual events include Eeyore's Birthday Party, Spamarama, Austin Pride Festival & Parade in August, the Austin Reggae Festival in April, Kite Festival, Texas Craft Brewers Festival in September, Art City Austin in April, East Austin Studio Tour in November, and Carnaval Brasileiro in February. Sixth Street features annual festivals such as the Pecan Street Festival and Halloween night. The three-day Austin City Limits Music Festival has been held in Zilker Park every year since 2002. Every year around the end of March and the beginning of April, Austin is home to "Texas Relay Weekend."
Austin's Zilker Park Tree is a Christmas display made of lights strung from the top of a Moonlight tower in Zilker Park. The Zilker Tree is lit in December along with the "Trail of Lights," an Austin Christmas tradition. The Trail of Lights was canceled four times, first starting in 2001 and 2002 due to the September 11 Attacks, and again in 2010 and 2011 due to budget shortfalls, but the trail was turned back on for the 2012 holiday season.
From 1962 to 1998, the Austin Aqua Festival, or "Aqua Fest", took place on the shores of Town Lake (now known as Lady Bird Lake). Originally conceived as a summer tourism draw, the multi-day event evolved from water-themed activities to a broader civic festival due to growth and community interest. Eventually attendance and financial solvency began to dwindle as larger music and summer festivals grew in prominence.
Cuisine and breweries
Notable Austin cuisine includes Texas barbecue and Tex-Mex; Franklin Barbecue in Austin's has sold out of brisket every day since its establishment. Breakfast tacos and queso are popular food items in the city; Austin is sometimes called the "home of the breakfast taco." Kolaches are a common pastry in Austin bakeries due to the large Czech and German immigrant population in Texas. The Oasis Restaurant is the largest outdoor restaurant in Texas, which promotes itself as the "Sunset Capital of Texas" with its terraced views looking West over Lake Travis. Birdie's, a counter-service restaurant and wine bar that opened in 2021, was Food & Wine<nowiki/>'s 2023 Restaurant of the Year.
P. Terry's, an Austin-based fast food burger chain, has a loyal following among Austinites. Some other Austin-based chain restaurants include Amy's Ice Creams, Chuy's, DoubleDave's Pizzaworks, and Schlotzky's. The Chili's at 45th and Lamar has been the subject of internet memes since 2011.
Austin is also home to a large number of food trucks, with 1,256 food trucks operating in 2016.
Austin has a large craft beer scene, with over 50 microbreweries in the metro area. Drinks publication VinePair named Austin as the "top beer destination in the world" in 2019. Notable Austin-area breweries include Jester King Brewery, Live Oak Brewing Company, and Real Ale Brewing Company.Music
with view of stages and Downtown Austin]]
As Austin's official slogan is The Live Music Capital of the World, the city has a vibrant live music scene with more music venues per capita than any other U.S. city.
The longest-running concert music program on American television, Austin City Limits, is recorded at ACL Live at The Moody Theater, located in the bottom floor of the W Hotels in Austin. Austin City Limits and C3 Presents produce the Austin City Limits Music Festival, an annual music and art festival held at Zilker Park in Austin. Other music events include the Urban Music Festival, Fun Fun Fun Fest, Wobeon Music Festival, Chaos In Tejas, Seismic Music Festival at the Concourse Project, and Old Settler's Music Festival. Austin Lyric Opera performs multiple operas each year (including the 2007 opening of Philip Glass's Waiting for the Barbarians, written by University of Texas at Austin alumnus J. M. Coetzee). In 2004 the city was first in ''MovieMaker Magazine's'' annual top ten cities to live and make movies.
Austin has been the location for a number of motion pictures, partly due to the influence of The University of Texas at Austin Department of Radio-Television-Film. Films produced in Austin include The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Songwriter (1984), Man of the House, Secondhand Lions, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Nadine, Waking Life, Spy Kids, The Faculty, Dazed and Confused, The Guards Themselves, Wild Texas Wind, Office Space, The Life of David Gale, Miss Congeniality, Doubting Thomas, Slacker, Idiocracy, Death Proof, The New Guy, Hope Floats, The Alamo, Blank Check, The Wendall Baker Story, School of Rock, A Slipping-Down Life, A Scanner Darkly, Saturday Morning Massacre, and most recently, the Coen brothers' True Grit, Grindhouse, Machete, How to Eat Fried Worms, Bandslam and Lazer Team. In order to draw future film projects to the area, the Austin Film Society has converted several airplane hangars from the former Mueller Airport into filmmaking center Austin Studios. Projects that have used facilities at Austin Studios include music videos by The Flaming Lips and feature films such as 25th Hour and Sin City.
Austin also hosted the MTV series, The Real World: Austin in 2005. Season 4 of the AMC show Fear the Walking Dead was filmed in various locations around Austin in 2018. The film review websites Spill.com and Ain't It Cool News are based in Austin. Rooster Teeth Productions, creator of popular web series such as Red vs. Blue and RWBY, was also located in Austin.
Theater
on Congress Avenue in Downtown Austin]]
Austin has a strong theater culture, with dozens of itinerant and resident companies producing a variety of work. A volunteer-run arts organization supporting creative expression and counter-culture community - Church of the Friendly Ghost (COTFG) helped many experimental programs get their start in Austin,TX. The city also has live performance theater venues such as the Zachary Scott Theatre Center, Vortex Repertory Company, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Rude Mechanicals' the Off Center, Austin Playhouse, Scottish Rite Children's Theater, Hyde Park Theatre, the Blue Theater, The Hideout Theatre, and Esther's Follies. The Victory Grill was a renowned venue on the Chitlin' Circuit. Public art and performances in the parks and on bridges are popular. Austin hosts the Fuse Box Festival each April featuring theater artists.
The Paramount Theatre, opened in downtown Austin in 1915, contributes to Austin's theater and film culture, showing classic films throughout the summer and hosting regional premieres for films such as Miss Congeniality. The Zilker Park Summer Musical is a long-running outdoor musical.
The Long Center for the Performing Arts is a 2,300-seat theater built partly with materials reused from the old Lester E. Palmer Auditorium.
Ballet Austin is among the fifteen largest ballet academies in the country. Each year Ballet Austin's 20-member professional company performs ballets from a wide variety of choreographers, including their artistic director, Stephen Mills. The city is also home to the Ballet East Dance Company, a modern dance ensemble, and the Tapestry Dance Company which performs a variety of dance genres.
The Austin improvisational theatre scene has several theaters: ColdTowne Theater, The Hideout Theater, and The Fallout Theater. Austin also hosts the Out of Bounds Comedy Festival, which draws comedic artists in all disciplines to Austin.
Libraries
The Austin Public Library is operated by the City of Austin and consists of the Central Library on César Chávez Street, the Austin History Center, 20 branches and the Recycled Reads bookstore and upcycling facility. The APL library system also has mobile libraries – bookmobile buses and a human-powered trike and trailer called "unbound: sin fronteras."
The Central Library, which is an anchor to the redevelopment of the former Seaholm Power Plant site and the Shoal Creek Walk, opened on October 28, 2017. The six-story Central Library contains a living rooftop garden, reading porches, an indoor reading room, bicycle parking station, large indoor and outdoor event spaces, a gift shop, an art gallery, café, and a "technology petting zoo" where visitors can play with next-generation gadgets like 3D printers. In 2018, Time magazine named the Austin Central Library on its list of "World's Greatest Places."Museums and other points of interest
on the University of Texas campus in Austin]]
Museums in Austin include the Texas Science and Natural History Museum, the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, Thinkery, the Blanton Museum of Art (reopened in 2006), the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum across the street (which opened in 2000), The Contemporary Austin, the Elisabet Ney Museum, the Women and Their Work gallery, and the galleries at the Harry Ransom Center. The Texas State Capitol itself is also a major tourist attraction.
The Driskill Hotel, built in 1886, once owned by George W. Littlefield, and located at 6th and Brazos streets, was finished just before the construction of the Capitol building. Sixth Street is a musical hub for the city. The Enchanted Forest, a multi-acre outdoor music, art, and performance art space in South Austin hosts events such as fire-dancing and circus-like-acts. Austin is also home to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, which houses documents and artifacts related to the Johnson administration, including LBJ's limousine and a re-creation of the Oval Office.
Locally produced art is featured at the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture. The Mexic-Arte Museum is a Mexican and Mexican-American art museum founded in 1983. Austin is also home to the O. Henry House Museum, which served as the residence of O. Henry from 1893 to 1895. Farmers' markets are popular attractions, providing a variety of locally grown and often organic foods.
Austin also has many odd statues and landmarks, such as the Stevie Ray Vaughan Memorial, the Willie Nelson statue, the Mangia dinosaur, the Loca Maria lady at Taco Xpress, the Hyde Park Gym's giant flexed arm, and Daniel Johnston's Hi, How are You? Jeremiah the Innocent frog mural.
The Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge houses the world's largest urban population of Mexican free-tailed bats. Starting in March, up to 1.5 million bats take up residence inside the bridge's expansion and contraction zones as well as in long horizontal grooves running the length of the bridge's underside, an environment ideally suited for raising their young. Every evening around sunset, the bats emerge in search of insects, an exit visible on weather radar. Watching the bat emergence is an event that is popular with locals and tourists, with more than 100,000 viewers per year. The bats migrate to Mexico each winter.
The Austin Zoo, located in unincorporated western Travis County, is a rescue zoo that provides sanctuary to displaced animals from a variety of situations, including those involving neglect.
The HOPE Outdoor Gallery was a public, three-story outdoor street art project located on Baylor Street in the Clarksville neighborhood. The gallery, which consisted of the foundations of a failed multifamily development, was a constantly-evolving canvas of graffiti and murals. Also known as "Castle Hill" or simply "Graffiti Park", the site on Baylor Street was closed to the public in early January 2019 but remained intact, behind a fence and with an armed guard, in mid-March 2019. The gallery will build a new art park at Carson Creek Ranch in Southeast Austin.Sports
{| class"wikitable" style"float:left; margin:10px;"
|+ Austin area professional sports teams
! Club
! Sport
! Founded
! League
! Venue
|-
|Austin Bats
|Basketball
| align=center | 2014
|American Basketball Association
|Travis Early College High School
|-
|Austin Crows
|Australian rules football
| align=center | 2002
|United States Australian Football League
|Onion Creek Soccer Complex
|-
|Austin FC
|Soccer
| align=center | 2018
|Major League Soccer
|Q2 Stadium
|-
|Austin Outlaws
|Quadball
| align=center | 2016
|Major League Quadball
|Round Rock Multipurpose Complex
|-
|Austin Rise FC
|Soccer
| align=center | 2022
|WPSL PRO
|House Park
|-
|Austin Sol
|Ultimate
| align=center | 2016
|Ultimate Frisbee Association
|Parmer Field
|-
|Austin Spurs
|Basketball
| align=center | 2005
|NBA G League
|H-E-B Center at Cedar Park
|-
|Austin Torch
|Ultimate
| align=center | 2019
|Premier Ultimate League
| Rudolph Gamblin Field
|-
|Round Rock Express
|Baseball
| align=center | 2000
|Pacific Coast League (AAA)
|Dell Diamond
|-
|Texas Stars
|Ice hockey
| align=center | 2009
|American Hockey League
|H-E-B Center at Cedar Park
|}
, home of Texas Longhorns football|220x220px]]
stadium located in Cedar Park, Texas]]
of Austin FC]]
Many Austinites support the athletic programs of the University of Texas at Austin known as the Texas Longhorns. During the 2005–2006 academic term, the Longhorns football team was named the NCAA Division I FBS National Football Champion, and the Longhorns baseball team won the College World Series. The football team plays its home games in the state's second-largest sports stadium, Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium, seating over 101,000 fans. Baseball games are played at UFCU Disch–Falk Field.
Austin was the most populous city in the United States without a major-league professional sports team, which changed in 2021 with Austin FC's entry to MLS. Minor-league professional sports came to Austin in 1996, when the Austin Ice Bats began playing at the Travis County Expo Center; they were later replaced by the AHL Texas Stars. Austin has hosted a number of other professional teams, including the Austin Spurs of the NBA G League, the Austin Aztex of the United Soccer League, the Austin Outlaws in WFA football, and the Austin Aces in WTT tennis.
Natural features like the bicycle-friendly Texas Hill Country and generally mild climate make Austin the home of several endurance and multi-sport races and communities. The Capitol 10,000 is the largest race in Texas, and approximately fifth largest in the United States. The Austin Marathon has been run in the city every year since 1992. Additionally, the city is home to the largest 5 mile race in Texas, named the Turkey Trot as it is run annually on Thanksgiving. Started in 1991 by Thundercloud Subs, a local sandwich chain (who still sponsors the event), the event has grown to host over 20,000 runners. All proceeds are donated to Caritas of Austin, a local charity.
The Austin-founded American Swimming Association hosts several swim races around town. Austin is also the hometown of several cycling groups and the disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong. Combining these three disciplines is a growing crop of triathlons, including the Capital of Texas Triathlon held every Memorial Day on and around Lady Bird Lake, Auditorium Shores, and Downtown Austin.
Austin is home to the Circuit of the Americas (COTA), a grade 1 Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile specification motor racing facility which hosts the Formula One United States Grand Prix. The State of Texas has pledged $25 million in public funds annually for 10 years to pay the sanctioning fees for the race. Built at an estimated cost of $250 to $300 million, the circuit opened in 2012 and is located just east of the Austin Bergstrom International Airport. The circuit also hosts the EchoPark Automotive Grand Prix NASCAR race in late March each year.
The summer of 2014 marked the inaugural season for World TeamTennis team Austin Aces, formerly Orange County Breakers of the southern California region. The Austin Aces played their matches at the Cedar Park Center northwest of Austin, and featured former professionals Andy Roddick and Marion Bartoli, as well as current WTA tour player Vera Zvonareva. The team left after the 2015 season.
In 2017, Precourt Sports Ventures announced a plan to move the Columbus Crew SC soccer franchise from Columbus, Ohio to Austin. Precourt negotiated an agreement with the City of Austin to build a $200 million privately funded stadium on public land at 10414 McKalla Place, following initial interest in Butler Shores Metropolitan Park and Roy G. Guerrero Colorado River Park. As part of an arrangement with the league, operational rights of Columbus Crew SC were sold in late 2018, and Austin FC was announced as Major League Soccer's 27th franchise on January 15, 2019, with the expansion team starting play in 2021.
The Austin Country Club is a private golf club located along the shores of the Colorado River, right next to the Pennybacker Bridge. Founded in 1899, the club moved to its third and present site in 1984, which features a challenging layout designed by noted course architect Pete Dye.
Austin is set to host the BLAST.TV Austin Major, the 22nd Counter-Strike Major esports tournament, from June 9 to 22, 2025.GovernmentCity government
Austin is administered by an 11-member city council (10 council members elected by geographic district plus a mayor elected at large). The council is accompanied by a hired city manager under the manager-council system of municipal governance. Council and mayoral elections are non-partisan, with a runoff in case there is no majority winner. A referendum approved by voters on November 6, 2012, changed the council composition from six council members plus a mayor elected at large to the current "10+1" district system. Supporters maintained that the at-large system would increase participation for all areas of the city, especially for those which had lacked representation from City Council.
November 2014 marked the first election under the new system. The Federal government had forced San Antonio and Dallas to abandon at-large systems before 1987; however, the court could not show a racist pattern in Austin and upheld the city's at-large system during a 1984 lawsuit. In five elections between 1973 and 1994 Austin voters rejected single-member districts.
Austin formerly operated its city hall at 128 West 8th Street. Antoine Predock and Cotera Kolar Negrete & Reed Architects designed a new city hall building, which was intended to reflect what The Dallas Morning News referred to as a "crazy-quilt vitality, that embraces everything from country music to environmental protests and high-tech swagger." The new city hall, built from recycled materials, has solar panels in its garage. The city hall, at 301 West Second Street, opened in November 2004. Kirk Watson is the current mayor of Austin, assuming the office for a second non-consecutive term on January 6, 2023.
In the 2012 elections, City Council elections were moved from May to November and City council members were given staggered term limits In 2022 Proposition D moved the term of the Austin Mayor to coincide with Presidential election years, so Kirk Watson would only serve two years unlike his predecessor Steve Adler
Law enforcement in Austin is provided by the Austin Police Department, except for state government buildings, which are patrolled by the Texas Department of Public Safety. The University of Texas Police operate from the University of Texas.
Fire protection within the city limits is provided by the Austin Fire Department, while the surrounding county is divided into twelve geographical areas known as emergency services districts, which are covered by separate regional fire departments. Emergency medical services are provided for the whole county by Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services.
Mayor Kirk Watson (D)
{| class="wikitable sortable"
! District !! Name !! Party (officially nonpartisan) !! References
|-
| 1 ||Natasha Harper-Madison|| Democratic ||
|-
| 2 || Vanessa Fuentes || Democratic ||
|-
| 3 ||Jose Velasquez|| Democratic ||
|-
| 4 || Jose "Chito" Vela|| Democratic ||
|-
| 5 || Ryan Alter || Democratic ||
|-
| 6 || Mackenzie Kelly || Republican ||
|-
| 7 || Leslie Pool || Democratic ||
|-
| 8 || Paige Ellis || Democratic ||
|-
| 9 || Zohaib Qadri || Democratic ||
|-
| 10 || Alison Alter || Democratic ||
|}
In 2003, the city adopted a resolution against the USA PATRIOT Act that reaffirmed constitutionally guaranteed rights.
Crime
As of 2019, Austin is one of the safest large cities in the United States. In 2019, the FBI named Austin the 11th safest city on a list of 22 American cities with a population above 400,000.
FBI statistics show that overall violent and property crimes dropped in Austin in 2015, but increased in suburban areas of the city. One such southeastern suburb, Del Valle, reported eight homicides within two months in 2016. According to 2016 APD crime statistics, the 78723 census tract had the most violent crime, with 6 murders, 25 rapes, and 81 robberies. The city had 39 homicides in 2016, the most since 1997.Notable incidentsOne of the first American mass school shooting incidents took place in Austin on August 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman shot 43 people, killing 13 from the top of the University of Texas tower.
In 1991, four teenage girls were murdered in a yogurt shop by an unknown assailant(s). A police officer responded to reports of a fire at the I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! store on Anderson Lane and discovered the girls' bodies in a back room. The murders remain unsolved.
In 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack III deliberately crashed his Piper PA-28 Cherokee into Echelon 1, a building in which the Internal Revenue Service was a lessee of, housing 190 employees. The resulting explosion killed one and injured 13 IRS employees, partially damaged the building and cost the IRS a total of $38.6 million. (see 2010 Austin suicide attack)
A series of bombings occurred in Austin in March 2018. Over the course of 20 days, five package bombs exploded, killing two people and injuring another five. The suspect, 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt of Pflugerville, Texas, blew himself up inside his vehicle after he was pulled over by police<!--DO NOT SPECIFY AN AGENCY; REFERENCES INDICATE THAT THIS WAS MULTI-AGENCY OPERATION--> on March 21, also injuring a police officer.
In 2020, Austin was the victim of a cyberattack by the Russian group Berserk Bear, possibly related to the U.S. federal government data breach earlier that year.
On April 18, 2021, a shooting occurred at the Arboretum Oaks Apartments near The Arboretum shopping center, in which a former Travis County Sheriff's Office detective killed his ex-wife, his adoptive daughter, and his daughter's boyfriend. The suspect, who was previously charged with child sexual assault, was arrested in Manor after a 20-hour manhunt.
A mass shooting took place in the early morning of June 12, 2021, on Sixth Street, which resulted in 14 people injured and one dead. The man killed was believed to be an innocent bystander who was struck as he was standing outside a bar. A 19-year-old suspect, De'ondre "Dre" White, was formally charged and arrested in Killeen nearly two weeks after the shooting.
In 2024, Zacharia Doar, a 23-year old Palestinian-American man, was attacked and stabbed in the chest on West 26th Street, West Campus, after returning from a rally in support of Palestinian human rights. The assailant, 36-year old Bert James Baker was arrested at the scene and charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
Other levels of government
Austin is the county seat of Travis County and hosts the Heman Marion Sweatt Travis County Courthouse downtown, as well as other county government offices. The Texas Department of Transportation operates the Austin District Office in Austin. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) operates the Austin I and Austin II district parole offices in Austin. The United States Postal Service operates several post offices in Austin.PoliticsFormer Governor Rick Perry had previously referred to it as a "blueberry in the tomato soup", meaning, Austin had previously been a Democratic city in a Republican state. However, Texas currently has multiple urban cities also voting Democratic and electing Democratic mayors in elections.
After the most recent redistricting, Austin is currently divided between the 10th, 35th and 37th Congressional districts.
{| class"wikitable" style"float:right;"
|+ Travis County Presidential elections results
|- style="background:lightgrey;"
! Year
! Republican
!Democratic
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|2024
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|29.4% 170,613
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|68.7% 398,253
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|2020
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|26.4% 161,337
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|71.4% 435,860
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|2016
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|27.4% 126,750
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|66.3% 306,475
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|2012
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|36.2% 140,152
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|60.1% 232,788
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|2008
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|34.3% 136,981
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|63.5% 254,017
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|2004
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|42.0% 147,885
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|56.0% 197,235
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|2000
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|46.9% 141,235
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|41.7% 125,526
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|1996
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|39.9% 98,454
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|52.3% 128,970
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|1992
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|31.9% 88,105
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|47.3% 130,546
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|1988
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|44.9% 105,915
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|54.1% 127,783
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|1984
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|56.8% 124,944
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|42.8% 94,124
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|1980
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|45.7% 73,151
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|46.9% 75,028
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|1976
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|46.7% 71,031
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|51.6% 78,585
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|1972
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|56.3% 70,561
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|43.2% 54,157
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|1968
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|41.6% 34,309
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|48.1% 39,667
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|1964
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|31.0% 19,838
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|68.9% 44,058
|-
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|1960
| style="text-align:center; background:#FFB6B6;"|44.9% 22,107
| style="text-align:center; background:#B0CEFF;"|54.9% 27,022
|}
Issues
A controversial turning point in the political history of the Austin area was the 2003 Texas redistricting. Before then, Austin had been entirely or almost entirely within the borders of a single congressional district–what was then the 10th District–for over a century. Opponents characterized the resulting district layout as excessively partisan gerrymandering, and the plan was challenged in court by Democratic and minority activists. The Supreme Court of the United States has never struck down a redistricting plan for being excessively partisan. The plan was subsequently upheld by a three-judge federal panel in late 2003, and on June 28, 2006, the matter was largely settled when the Supreme Court, in a 7–2 decision, upheld the entire congressional redistricting plan with the exception of a Hispanic-majority district in southwest Texas. This affected Austin's districting, as U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett's district (U.S. Congressional District 25) was found to be insufficiently compact to compensate for the reduced minority influence in the southwest district; it was redrawn so that it took in most of southeastern Travis County and several counties to its south and east.Environmental movementThe distinguishing political movement of Austin politics has been that of the environmental movement, which spawned the parallel neighborhood movement, then the more recent conservationist movement (as typified by the Hill Country Conservancy), and eventually the current ongoing debate about "sense of place" and preserving the Austin quality of life. Much of the environmental movement has matured into a debate on issues related to saving and creating an Austin "sense of place." In 2016, Austin became the first Gold designee of the SolSmart program, a national program from the U.S. Department of Energy that recognizes local governments for enacting solar-friendly measures at the local level.
Education
According to the 2015–2019 Census estimates, 51.7% of Austin residents aged 25 and over have earned at least a bachelor's degree, compared with the national figure of 32.1%. 19.4% hold a graduate or professional degree, compared with the national figure of 12.4%.Higher education
]]
]]
Austin is home to the University of Texas at Austin, the flagship institution of the University of Texas System with over 40,000 undergraduate students and 11,000 graduate students.
Other institutions of higher learning in Austin include St. Edward's University, Huston–Tillotson University, Austin Community College, Concordia University, the Seminary of the Southwest, Texas Health and Science University, University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences, Austin Graduate School of Theology, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Virginia College's Austin Campus, The Art Institute of Austin, Southern Careers Institute of Austin, Austin Conservatory and branch campuses of Case Western Reserve University and Park University.
The University of Texas System and Texas State University System are headquartered in downtown Austin.
Public primary and secondary education
Approximately half of the city by area is served by the Austin Independent School District. This district includes notable schools such as the magnet Liberal Arts and Science Academy High School of Austin, Texas (LASA), which, by test scores, has consistently been within the top thirty high schools in the nation, as well as The Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders. The remaining portion of Austin is served by adjoining school districts, including Round Rock ISD, Pflugerville ISD, Leander ISD, Manor ISD, Del Valle ISD, Lake Travis ISD, Hays ISD, and Eanes ISD.
Private and alternative education
The Austin metropolitan area is also served by 27 charter school districts and over 100 private schools. Another statewide publication based in Austin is The Texas Tribune, an on-line publication focused on Texas politics. The editor is Evan Smith, former editor of Texas Monthly. Smith co-founded the Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, non-partisan public media organization, with Austin venture capitalist John Thornton and veteran journalist Ross Ramsey.
Commercial radio stations include KASE-FM (country), KVET (sports), KVET-FM (country), KKMJ-FM (adult contemporary), KLBJ (talk), KLBJ-FM (classic rock), KJFK (variety hits), KFMK (contemporary Christian), KOKE-FM (progressive country) and KPEZ (rhythmic contemporary). KUT-FM is the leading public radio station in Texas and produces the majority of its content locally. KOOP (FM) is a volunteer-run radio station with more than 60 locally produced programs. KVRX is the student-run college radio station of the University of Texas at Austin with a focus on local and non-mainstream music and community programming. Other listener-supported stations include KAZI (urban contemporary), and KMFA (classical).
Network television stations (affiliations in parentheses) include KTBC (Fox O&O), KVUE (ABC), KXAN (NBC), KEYE-TV (CBS), KLRU (PBS), KNVA (The CW), KBVO (MyNetworkTV), and KAKW (Univision O&O). KLRU produces several award-winning locally produced programs such as Austin City Limits. Despite Austin's explosive growth, it is only a medium-sized market (currently 38th) because the suburban and rural areas are not much larger than the city proper. Additionally, the proximity of San Antonio truncates the potential market area.
Alex Jones, journalist, radio show host and filmmaker, produces his talk show The Alex Jones Show in Austin which broadcasts nationally on more than 60 AM and FM radio stations in the United States, WWCR Radio shortwave and XM Radio: Channel 166.Notable people
International relations
Austin has two types of relationships with other cities, sister and friendship.
Sister cities
Austin's sister cities are:
* Adelaide, South Australia, Australia (1983)
* Angers, Pays de la Loire, France (2011)
* Antalya, Antalya Province, Turkey (2009)
* Gwangmyeong, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea (2001)
* Hackney, London, England, United Kingdom (2014)
* Koblenz, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany (1991)
* Lima, Peru (1981)
* Maseru, Lesotho (1978)
* Ōita, Ōita, Japan (1990)
* Pune, Maharashtra, India (2018)
* Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico (1968)
* Taichung, Taiwan (1986)
* Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China (1997)
The cities of Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Elche, Spain were formerly sister cities, but after an Austin City Council vote in 1991, their statuses were deactivated. Orlu, South East, Nigeria became a sister city in 2000, but was downgraded to emeritus status later.Friendship citiesCovenants between two city leaders:
* Siem Reap, Cambodia (2011)
* Villefranche-sur-Mer, France (2010)
* Tehuacán, Puebla, Mexico (2019)
* San Luis Potosí, San Luis Potosí, Mexico (2024)
* Chiang Mai, Thailand (2023)
See also
* List of companies based in Austin, Texas
* List of people from Austin, Texas
* National Register of Historic Places listings in Travis County, Texas
* Music in Austin
* Neighborhoods in Austin
Notes
}}
References
Further reading
*
*
* Wright, Lawrence. "[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-astonishing-transformation-of-austin The Astonishing Transformation of Austin, Texas]". The New Yorker, February 6, 2023.
External links
* [http://austintexas.gov/ AustinTexas.gov] - official city website
* [http://austinchamber.com/ Austin Chamber of Commerce]
* [http://texashistory.unt.edu/browse/contributor/ASPL/ Historic photographs from the Austin History Center], hosted by the [http://texashistory.unt.edu/ Portal to Texas History]
*
*
* [https://www.zipdatamaps.com/en/us/zip-maps/tx/city/borders/austin-zip-code-map Austin TX ZIP Code Map]
}}
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Category:Cities in Texas
Category:Cities in Hays County, Texas
Category:Cities in Travis County, Texas
Category:Cities in Williamson County, Texas
Category:County seats in Texas
Category:Cities in Greater Austin
Category:Planned communities in the United States
Category:Populated places established in 1835
Category:1839 establishments in the Republic of Texas
Category:Academic enclaves
Category:Capitals of former nations
Category:State capitals in the United States | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin,_Texas | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.639907 |
2003 | Argument from morality | The argument from morality is an argument for the existence of God. Arguments from morality tend to be based on moral normativity or moral order. Arguments from moral normativity observe some aspect of morality and argue that God is the best or only explanation for this, concluding that God must exist. Arguments from moral order are based on the asserted need for moral order to exist in the universe. They claim that, for this moral order to exist, God must exist to support it. The argument from morality is noteworthy in that one cannot evaluate the soundness of the argument without attending to almost every important philosophical issue in meta-ethics.
German philosopher Immanuel Kant devised an argument from morality based on practical reason. Kant argued that the goal of humanity is to achieve perfect happiness and virtue (the summum bonum) and believed that an afterlife must be assumed to exist in order for this to be possible, and that God must be assumed to exist to provide this. Rather than aiming to prove the existence of God, however, Kant was simply attempting to demonstrate that all moral thought requires the assumption that God exists, and therefore that we are entitled to make such an assumption only as a regulative principle rather than a constitutive principle (meaning that such a principle can guide our actions, but it does not provide knowledge). In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argued that "conscience reveals to us a moral law whose source cannot be found in the natural world, thus pointing to a supernatural Lawgiver." Lewis argued that accepting the validity of human reason as a given must include accepting the validity of practical reason, which could not be valid without reference to a higher cosmic moral order which could not exist without a God to create and/or establish it. A related argument is from conscience; John Henry Newman argued that the conscience supports the claim that objective moral truths exist because it drives people to act morally even when it is not in their own interest. Newman argued that, because the conscience suggests the existence of objective moral truths, God must exist to give authority to these truths.
Contemporary defenders of the argument from morality are Graham Ward, Alister McGrath and William Lane Craig.
General form
All variations of the argument from morality begin with an observation about moral thought or experiences and conclude with the existence of God. Some of these arguments propose moral facts which they claim evident through human experience, arguing that God is the best explanation for these. Other versions describe some end which humans should strive to attain that is only possible if God exists.
Many arguments from morality are based on moral normativity, which suggests that objective moral truths exist and require God's existence to give them authority. Often, they consider that morality seems to be binding – obligations are seen to convey more than just a preference, but imply that the obligation will stand, regardless of other factors or interests. For morality to be binding, God must exist. In its most general form, the argument from moral normativity is:
A human experience of morality is observed.
God is the best or only explanation for this moral experience.
Therefore, God exists.
Variations
Practical reason
thumb|Portrait of Immanuel Kant, who proposed an argument for the existence of God from morality
In his Critique of Pure Reason, German philosopher Immanuel Kant stated that no successful argument for God's existence arises from reason alone. In his Critique of Practical Reason he went on to argue that, despite the failure of these arguments, morality requires that God's existence is assumed, owing to practical reason. Rather than proving the existence of God, Kant was attempting to demonstrate that all moral thought requires the assumption that God exists. Kant argued that humans are obliged to bring about the summum bonum: the two central aims of moral virtue and happiness, where happiness arises out of virtue. As ought implies can, Kant argued, it must be possible for the summum bonum to be achieved. Nicholas Everitt argues that much moral guidance is unattainable, such as the Biblical command to be Christ-like. He proposes that Kant's first two premises only entail that we must try to achieve the perfect good, not that it is actually attainable.
Argument from objective moral truths
Both theists and non-theists have accepted that the existence of objective moral truths might entail the existence of God. Atheist philosopher J. L. Mackie accepted that, if objective moral truths existed, they would warrant a supernatural explanation. Scottish philosopher W. R. Sorley presented the following argument:
If morality is objective and absolute, God must exist.
Morality is objective and absolute.
Therefore, God must exist.
Many critics have challenged the second premise of this argument, by offering a biological and sociological account of the development of human morality which suggests that it is neither objective nor absolute. This account, supported by biologist E. O. Wilson and philosopher Michael Ruse, proposes that the human experience of morality is a by-product of natural selection, a theory philosopher Mark D. Linville calls evolutionary naturalism. According to the theory, the human experience of moral obligations was the result of evolutionary pressures, which attached a sense of morality to human psychology because it was useful for moral development; this entails that moral values do not exist independently of the human mind. Morality might be better understood as an evolutionary imperative in order to propagate genes and ultimately reproduce. No human society today advocates immorality, such as theft or murder, because it would undoubtedly lead to the end of that particular society and any chance for future survival of offspring. Scottish empiricist David Hume made a similar argument, that belief in objective moral truths is unwarranted and to discuss them is meaningless.
Because evolutionary naturalism proposes an empirical account of morality, it does not require morality to exist objectively; Linville considers the view that this will lead to moral scepticism or antirealism. C. S. Lewis argued that, if evolutionary naturalism is accepted, human morality cannot be described as absolute and objective because moral statements cannot be right or wrong. Despite this, Lewis argued, those who accept evolutionary naturalism still act as if objective moral truths exist, leading Lewis to reject naturalism as incoherent. As an alternative ethical theory, Lewis offered a form of divine command theory which equated God with goodness and treated goodness as an essential part of reality, thus asserting God's existence.
J. C. A. Gaskin challenges the first premise of the argument from moral objectivity, arguing that it must be shown why absolute and objective morality entails that morality is commanded by God, rather than simply a human invention. It could be the consent of humanity that gives it moral force, for example.
Argument for conscience
thumb|Portrait of John Henry Newman, who used the conscience as evidence of the existence of God
Related to the argument from morality is the argument from conscience, associated with eighteenth-century bishop Joseph Butler and nineteenth-century cardinal John Henry Newman.
British philosopher John Locke argued that moral rules cannot be established from conscience because the differences in people's consciences would lead to contradictions. Locke also noted that the conscience is influenced by "education, company, and customs of the country", a criticism mounted by J. L. Mackie, who argued that the conscience should be seen as an "introjection" of other people into an agent's mind. Michael Martin challenges the argument from conscience with a naturalistic account of conscience, arguing that naturalism provides an adequate explanation for the conscience without the need for God's existence. He uses the example of the internalization by humans of social pressures, which leads to the fear of going against these norms. Even if a supernatural cause is required, he argues, it could be something other than God; this would mean that the phenomenon of the conscience is no more supportive of monotheism than polytheism.
C. S. Lewis argues for the existence of God in a similar way in his book Mere Christianity, but he does not directly refer to it as the argument from morality.
Notes and references
Bibliography
External links
"Kant's 'Appropriation' of Lampe's God", Harvard Theological Review 85:1 (January 1992), pp. 85–108; revised and reprinted as Chapter IV in Stephen Palmquist, Kant's Critical Religion (Ashgate, 2000).
Category:Arguments for the existence of God
Category:Christian apologetics
Category:Morality | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_morality | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.680978 |
2004 | ASL (disambiguation) | ASL is a common initialism for American Sign Language, the sign language of the United States and Canada (not be confused with Auslan, also called ASL or Asilulu language which has the ISO code ASL), and may also refer to:
Culture
Sport
American Soccer League (disambiguation)
Australia's Surfing Life, surf magazine
African Super League, a future CAF club competition
Axpo Super League, former name of the Swiss Super League
Other uses
A Static Lullaby, American post-hardcore band
Advanced Squad Leader, a tactical board wargame
age/sex/location, in early internet slang
As hell, in Generation Z slang
Average shot length, in film editing
AfreecaTV StarCraft League, a video game tournament series
Science and technology
Automobile
ASL, Japanese car manufacturer known for producing the ASL Garaiya sports car.
Aviation
Aeronautical Syndicate, British aeroplane manufacturer.
Air Serbia, ICAO airline code
ASL Airlines Australia,
ASL Airlines Ireland, cargo airline
Biology and medicine
Airway surface liquid, mucus in the respiratory tract
American Society of Lymphology, former name of the Lymphology Association of North America
Argininosuccinate lyase, an enzyme
Arterial spin labelling, a perfusion MRI technique
Computing
ACPI Source Language, for ACPI tables
Adobe Source Libraries, open-source GUI software libraries
Advanced Simulation Library, open-source hardware-accelerated multiphysics simulation software
AMPL Solver Library, an open-source automatic differentiation library
Apache Software License, an open-source license for software
Application Services Library, a process model for the maintenance of software applications
Arithmetic shift left, an operation implementing an arithmetic shift
Other uses
Above sea level, an altitude measurement
Association for Symbolic Logic, of specialists in mathematical logic and philosophical logic
Automated side loader, type of garbage collection truck
Atmospheric Sciences Laboratory, a research institution formerly under the U.S. Army Materiel Command
Society
Education
The American School in London
Appalachian School of Law, Grundy, Virginia
Art Students' League of Philadelphia
Additional Support for Learning
Hong Kong Advanced Supplementary Level Examination, a standardized examination from 1994 to 2013
Other uses
Anti-Saloon League, an organization of temperance movements that lobbied for prohibition in the United States.
Advanced stop line, a road marking at junctions
Artists' Suffrage League, UK
Ansar al-Sharia in Libya, a Salafist Islamist militia group
Animelo Summer Live, a Japanese music festival | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASL_(disambiguation) | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.701660 |
2006 | Auschwitz concentration camp | | caption Top: Gate to Auschwitz I with its sign ("work sets you free")Bottom: Auschwitz II-Birkenau gatehouse. The train track, in operation from May to October 1944, led toward the gas chambers.
| known for = The Holocaust
| location = German-occupied Poland
| coordinates
| built by = IG Farben
| operated by = Nazi Germany and the Schutzstaffel
| commandant = See list
| original use = Army barracks
| construction | in operation May 1940 – January 1945
| gas chambers | prisoner type Mainly Jews, Poles, Romani, Soviet prisoners of war
| inmates At least 1.3 million
| killed At least 1.1 million
| liberated by = Soviet Union, 27 January 1945
| notable inmates = Auschwitz prisoners: Adolf Burger, Edith Eger, Anne Frank, Viktor Frankl, Imre Kertész, Maximilian Kolbe, Primo Levi, Fritz Löhner-Beda, Irène Némirovsky, Tadeusz Pietrzykowski, Witold Pilecki, Liliana Segre, Edith Stein, Simone Veil, Rudolf Vrba, Alfréd Wetzler, Elie Wiesel, Else Ury, Eddie Jaku, Władysław Bartoszewski
| notable books =
| website =
| embedded =
}}
Auschwitz or Oświęcim, was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager'') in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish question.
After Germany initiated World War II by invading Poland in September 1939, the Schutzstaffel (SS) converted Auschwitz I, an army barracks, into a prisoner-of-war camp. The initial transport of political detainees to Auschwitz consisted almost solely of Poles (for whom the camp was initially established). For the first two years, the majority of inmates were Polish. In May 1940, German criminals brought to the camp as functionaries established the camp's reputation for sadism. Prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for the most trivial of reasons. The first gassings—of Soviet and Polish prisoners—took place in block 11 of Auschwitz I around August 1941.
Construction of Auschwitz II began the following month, and from 1942 until late 1944 freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others.
Background
The ideology of Nazism combined elements of "racial hygiene", eugenics, antisemitism, pan-Germanism, and territorial expansionism, Richard J. Evans writes. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party became obsessed by the "Jewish question". Both during and immediately after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933, acts of violence against German Jews became ubiquitous, and legislation was passed excluding them from certain professions, including the civil service and the law.}}
Harassment and economic pressure encouraged Jews to leave Germany; their businesses were denied access to markets, forbidden from advertising in newspapers, and deprived of government contracts. On 15 September 1935, the Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws. One, the Reich Citizenship Law, defined as citizens those of "German or related blood who demonstrate by their behaviour that they are willing and suitable to serve the German People and Reich faithfully", and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriage and extramarital relations between those with "German or related blood" and Jews.
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, triggering World War II, Hitler ordered that the Polish leadership and intelligentsia be destroyed. The area around Auschwitz was annexed to the German Reich, as part of first Gau Silesia and from 1941 Gau Upper Silesia. The camp at Auschwitz was established in April 1940, at first as a quarantine camp for Polish political prisoners. On 22 June 1941, in an attempt to obtain new territory, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The first gassing at Auschwitz—of a group of Soviet prisoners of war—took place around August 1941. By the end of that year, during what most historians regard as the first phase of the Holocaust, 500,000–800,000 Soviet Jews had been murdered in mass shootings by a combination of German Einsatzgruppen, ordinary German soldiers, and local collaborators. At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942, Reinhard Heydrich outlined the Final Solution to the Jewish Question to senior Nazis, and from early 1942 freight trains delivered Jews from all over occupied Europe to German extermination camps in Poland: Auschwitz, Bełżec, Chełmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Most prisoners were gassed on arrival.CampsAuschwitz IGrowth
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| image2 = Museum Auschwitz.jpg
| caption2 Auschwitz I, 2009; the prisoner reception center of Auschwitz I became the visitor reception center of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
| image3=Auschwitz I visitor reception centre, July 2014 (panoramio) cropped.jpg
| caption3=Former prisoner reception center; the building on the far left with the row of chimneys was the camp kitchen.
| image4 = AerialAuschwitz1944.jpg
| caption4 = An aerial reconnaissance photograph of the Auschwitz concentration camp showing the Auschwitz I camp, 4 April 1944
}}
A former World War I camp for transient workers and later a Polish army barracks, Auschwitz I was the main camp (Stammlager) and administrative headquarters of the camp complex. southwest of Kraków, the site was first suggested in February 1940 as a quarantine camp for Polish prisoners by Arpad Wigand, the inspector of the Sicherheitspolizei (security police) and deputy of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, the Higher SS and Police Leader for Silesia. Richard Glücks, head of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, sent Walter Eisfeld, former commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, to inspect it. Around long and wide, Auschwitz consisted at the time of 22 brick buildings, eight of them two-story. A second story was added to the others in 1943 and eight new blocks were built.
Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, approved the site in April 1940 on the recommendation of SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss of the camps inspectorate. Höss oversaw the development of the camp and served as its first commandant. The first 30 prisoners arrived on 20 May 1940 from the Sachsenhausen camp. German "career criminals" (Berufsverbrecher), the men were known as "greens" (Grünen) after the green triangles on their prison clothing. Brought to the camp as functionaries, this group did much to establish the sadism of early camp life, which was directed particularly at Polish inmates, until the political prisoners took over their roles. Bruno Brodniewicz, the first prisoner (who was given serial number 1), became Lagerälteste (camp elder). The others were given positions such as kapo and block supervisor.First mass transport
The first mass transport—of 728 Polish male political prisoners, including Catholic priests and Jews—arrived on 14 June 1940 from Tarnów, Poland. They were given serial numbers 31 to 758.}} In a letter on 12 July 1940, Höss told Glücks that the local population was "fanatically Polish, ready to undertake any sort of operation against the hated SS men". By the end of 1940, the SS had confiscated land around the camp to create a 40-square-kilometer (15 sq mi) "zone of interest" (Interessengebiet) patrolled by the SS, Gestapo and local police. By March 1941, 10,900 were imprisoned in the camp, most of them Poles.
An inmate's first encounter with Auschwitz, if they were registered and not sent straight to the gas chamber, was at the prisoner reception centre near the gate with the sign, where they were tattooed, shaved, disinfected, and given a striped prison uniform. Built between 1942 and 1944, the center contained a bathhouse, laundry, and 19 gas chambers for delousing clothing. The prisoner reception center of Auschwitz I became the visitor reception center of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.Crematorium I, first gassings
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Construction of crematorium I began at Auschwitz I at the end of June or beginning of July 1940. Initially intended not for mass murder but for prisoners who had been executed or had otherwise died in the camp, the crematorium was in operation from August 1940 until July 1943, by which time the crematoria at Auschwitz II had taken over. By May 1942 three ovens had been installed in crematorium I, which together could burn 340 bodies in 24 hours.
The first experimental gassing took place around August 1941, when Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch, at the instruction of Rudolf Höss, murdered a group of Soviet prisoners of war by throwing Zyklon B crystals into their basement cell in block 11 of Auschwitz I. A second group of 600 Soviet prisoners of war and around 250 sick Polish prisoners were gassed on 3–5 September in the old crematorium after being told they were to march naked there to receive new clothing.<!--check this--> The morgue was later converted to a gas chamber able to hold at least 700–800 people.}} Zyklon B was dropped into the room through slits in the ceiling.
First mass transport of Jews
Historians have disagreed about the date the all-Jewish transports began arriving in Auschwitz. At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on 20 January 1942, the Nazi leadership outlined, in euphemistic language, its plans for the Final Solution. According to Franciszek Piper, the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss offered inconsistent accounts after the war, suggesting the extermination began in December 1941, January 1942, or before the establishment of the women's camp in March 1942. In Kommandant in Auschwitz, he wrote: "In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews, all earmarked for extermination, arrived from Upper Silesia." On 15 February 1942, according to Danuta Czech, a transport of Jews from Beuthen, Upper Silesia (Bytom, Poland), arrived at Auschwitz I and was sent straight to the gas chamber.}} In 1998 an eyewitness said the train contained "the women of Beuthen".}} Saul Friedländer wrote that the Beuthen Jews were from the Organization Schmelt labor camps and had been deemed unfit for work. According to Christopher Browning, transports of Jews unfit for work were sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz from autumn 1941. The evidence for this and the February 1942 transport was contested in 2015 by Nikolaus Wachsmann.
Around 20 March 1942, according to Danuta Czech, a transport of Polish Jews from Silesia and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie was taken straight from the station to the Auschwitz II gas chamber, which had just come into operation. On 26 and 28 March, two transports of Slovakian Jews were registered as prisoners in the women's camp, where they were kept for slave labour; these were the first transports organized by Adolf Eichmann's department IV B4 (the Jewish office) in the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA).}} On 30 March the first RHSA transport arrived from France. "Selection", where new arrivals were chosen for work or the gas chamber, began in April 1942 and was conducted regularly from July. Piper writes that this reflected Germany's increasing need for labour. Those selected as unfit for work were gassed without being registered as prisoners.
There is also disagreement about how many were gassed in Auschwitz I. Perry Broad, an SS-Unterscharführer, wrote that "transport after transport vanished in the Auschwitz [I] crematorium." In the view of Filip Müller, one of the Auschwitz I Sonderkommando, tens of thousands of Jews were murdered there from France, Holland, Slovakia, Upper Silesia, and Yugoslavia, and from the Theresienstadt, Ciechanow, and Grodno ghettos. Against this, Jean-Claude Pressac estimated that up to 10,000 people had been murdered in Auschwitz I. The last inmates gassed there, in December 1942, were around 400 members of the Auschwitz II Sonderkommando, who had been forced to dig up and burn the remains of that camp's mass graves, thought to hold over 100,000 corpses.Auschwitz II-Birkenau<!-- This section is linked from Treblinka extermination camp -->
Construction
After visiting Auschwitz I in March 1941, it appears that Himmler ordered that the camp be expanded, although Peter Hayes notes that, on 10 January 1941, the Polish underground told the Polish government-in-exile in London: "the Auschwitz concentration camp ...can accommodate approximately 7,000 prisoners at present, and is to be rebuilt to hold approximately 30,000." Construction of Auschwitz II-Birkenau—called a Kriegsgefangenenlager (prisoner-of-war camp) on blueprints—began in October 1941 in Brzezinka, about three kilometers from Auschwitz I. The initial plan was that Auschwitz II would consist of four sectors (Bauabschnitte I–IV), each consisting of six subcamps (BIIa–BIIf) with their own gates and fences. The first two sectors were completed (sector BI was initially a quarantine camp), but the construction of BIII began in 1943 and stopped in April 1944, and the plan for BIV was abandoned.<!--describe the sectors-->
SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bischoff, an architect, was the chief of construction. Based on an initial budget of RM 8.9 million, his plans called for each barracks to hold 550 prisoners, but he later changed this to 744 per barracks, which meant the camp could hold 125,000, rather than 97,000. There were 174 barracks, each measuring , divided into 62 bays of . The bays were divided into "roosts", initially for three inmates and later for four. With personal space of to sleep and place whatever belongings they had, inmates were deprived, Robert-Jan van Pelt wrote, "of the minimum space needed to exist".
The prisoners were forced to live in the barracks as they were building them; in addition to working, they faced long roll calls at night. As a result, most prisoners in BIb (the men's camp) in the early months died of hypothermia, starvation or exhaustion within a few weeks. Some 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war arrived at Auschwitz I between 7 and 25 October 1941, but by 1 March 1942 only 945 were still registered; they were transferred to Auschwitz II, where most of them had died by May.
Crematoria II–V
The first gas chamber at Auschwitz II was operational by March 1942. On or around 20 March, a transport of Polish Jews sent by the Gestapo from Silesia and Zagłębie Dąbrowskie was taken straight from the Oświęcim freight station to the Auschwitz II gas chamber, then buried in a nearby meadow. The gas chamber was located in what prisoners called the "little red house" (known as bunker 1 by the SS), a brick cottage that had been turned into a gassing facility; the windows had been bricked up and its four rooms converted into two insulated rooms, the doors of which said "Zur Desinfektion" ("to disinfection"). A second brick cottage, the "little white house" or bunker 2, was converted and operational by June 1942. When Himmler visited the camp on 17 and 18 July 1942, he was given a demonstration of a selection of Dutch Jews, a mass-murder in a gas chamber in bunker 2, and a tour of the building site of Auschwitz III, the new IG Farben plant being constructed at Monowitz. Use of bunkers I and 2 stopped in spring 1943 when the new crematoria were built, although bunker 2 became operational again in May 1944 for the murder of the Hungarian Jews. Bunker I was demolished in 1943 and bunker 2 in November 1944.
Plans for crematoria II and III show that both had an oven room on the ground floor, and an underground dressing room and gas chamber . The dressing rooms had wooden benches along the walls and numbered pegs for clothing. Victims would be led from these rooms to a five-yard-long narrow corridor, which in turn led to a space from which the gas chamber door opened. The chambers were white inside, and nozzles were fixed to the ceiling to resemble showerheads. The daily capacity of the crematoria (how many bodies could be burned in a 24-hour period) was 340 corpses in crematorium I; 1,440 each in crematoria II and III; and 768 each in IV and V. By June 1943 all four crematoria were operational, but crematorium I was not used after July 1943. This made the total daily capacity 4,416, although by loading three to five corpses at a time, the Sonderkommando were able to burn some 8,000 bodies a day. This maximum capacity was rarely needed; the average between 1942 and 1944 was 1,000 bodies burned every day.Auschwitz III–Monowitz
, Monowitz, and nearby subcamps]]
After examining several sites for a new plant to manufacture Buna-N, a type of synthetic rubber essential to the war effort, the German chemical conglomerate IG Farben chose a site near the towns of Dwory and Monowice (Monowitz in German), about east of Auschwitz I.<!--check this: The area contained barracks, workshops and an old inn that was used as a canteen by IG Farben staff--> Tax exemptions were available to corporations prepared to develop industries in the frontier regions under the Eastern Fiscal Assistance Law, passed in December 1940. In addition to its proximity to the concentration camp, a source of cheap labour, the site had good railway connections and access to raw materials. In February 1941, Himmler ordered that the Jewish population of Oświęcim be expelled to make way for skilled laborers; that all Poles able to work remain in the town and work on building the factory; and that Auschwitz prisoners be used in the construction work.
Auschwitz inmates began working at the plant, known as Buna Werke and IG-Auschwitz, in April 1941, demolishing houses in Monowitz to make way for it. By May, because of a shortage of trucks, several hundred of them were rising at 3 am to walk there twice a day from Auschwitz I. Because a long line of exhausted inmates walking through the town of Oświęcim might harm German-Polish relations, the inmates were told to shave daily, make sure they were clean, and sing as they walked. From late July they were taken to the factory by train on freight wagons. Given the difficulty of moving them, including during the winter, IG Farben decided to build a camp at the plant. The first inmates moved there on 30 October 1942. Known as KL Auschwitz III–Aussenlager (Auschwitz III subcamp), and later as the Monowitz concentration camp, it was the first concentration camp to be financed and built by private industry.
(second left) visits the IG Farben plant in Auschwitz III, July 1942.]]
Measuring , the camp was larger than Auschwitz I. By the end of 1944, it housed 60 barracks measuring , each with a day room and a sleeping room containing 56 three-tiered wooden bunks. IG Farben paid the SS three or four Reichsmark for nine- to eleven-hour shifts from each worker. In 1943–1944, about 35,000 inmates worked at the plant; 23,000 (32 a day on average) were killed through malnutrition, disease, and the workload. Within three to four months at the camp, Peter Hayes writes, the inmates were "reduced to walking skeletons". Deaths and transfers to the gas chambers at Auschwitz II reduced the population by nearly a fifth each month. Site managers constantly threatened inmates with the gas chambers, and the smell from the crematoria at Auschwitz I and II hung heavy over the camp.<!--check: In addition to the Auschwitz inmates, who comprised a third of the work force, IG Auschwitz employed slave laborers from all over Europe.-->
Although the factory had been expected to begin production in 1943, shortages of labour and raw materials meant start-up was postponed repeatedly. The Allies bombed the plant in 1944 on 20 August, 13 September, 18 December, and 26 December. On 19 January 1945, the SS ordered that the site be evacuated, sending 9,000 inmates, most of them Jews, on a death march to another Auschwitz subcamp at Gliwice. From Gliwice, prisoners were taken by rail in open freight wagons to the Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps. The 800 inmates who had been left behind in the Monowitz hospital were liberated along with the rest of the camp on 27 January 1945 by the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army.Subcamps
Several other German industrial enterprises, such as Krupp and Siemens-Schuckert, built factories with their own subcamps. There were around 28 camps near industrial plants, each camp holding hundreds or thousands of prisoners. Designated as Aussenlager (external camp), Nebenlager (extension camp), Arbeitslager (labor camp), or Aussenkommando (external work detail), camps were built at Blechhammer, Jawiszowice, Jaworzno, Lagisze, Mysłowice, Trzebinia, and as far afield as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in Czechoslovakia. Industries with satellite camps included coal mines, foundries and other metal works, and chemical plants. Prisoners were also made to work in forestry and farming. For example, Wirtschaftshof Budy, in the Polish village of Budy near Brzeszcze, was a farming subcamp where prisoners worked 12-hour days in the fields, tending animals, and making compost by mixing human ashes from the crematoria with sod and manure. Incidents of sabotage to decrease production took place in several subcamps, including Charlottengrube, Gleiwitz II, and Rajsko. Living conditions in some of the camps were so poor that they were regarded as punishment subcamps.
Life in the camps
SS garrison
Rudolf Höss, born in Baden-Baden in 1901, was named the first commandant of Auschwitz when Heinrich Himmler ordered on 27 April 1940 that the camp be established. Living with his wife and children in a two-story stucco house near the commandant's and administration building, he served as commandant until 11 November 1943, with Josef Kramer as his deputy. Succeeded as commandant by Arthur Liebehenschel, Höss joined the SS Business and Administration Head Office in Oranienburg as director of Amt DI, a post that made him deputy of the camps inspectorate.
Richard Baer became commandant of Auschwitz I on 11 May 1944 and Fritz Hartjenstein of Auschwitz II from 22 November 1943, followed by Josef Kramer from 15 May 1944 until the camp's liquidation in January 1945. Heinrich Schwarz was commandant of Auschwitz III from the point at which it became an autonomous camp in November 1943 until its liquidation. Höss returned to Auschwitz between 8 May and 29 July 1944 as the local SS garrison commander (Standortältester) to oversee the arrival of Hungary's Jews, which made him the superior officer of all the commandants of the Auschwitz camps.
According to Aleksander Lasik, about 6,335 people (6,161 of them men) worked for the SS at Auschwitz over the course of the camp's existence; 4.2 percent were officers, 26.1 percent non-commissioned officers, and 69.7 percent rank and file. In March 1941, there were 700 SS guards; in June 1942, 2,000; and in August 1944, 3,342. At its peak in January 1945, 4,480 SS men and 71 SS women worked in Auschwitz; the higher number is probably attributable to the logistics of evacuating the camp. Female guards were known as SS supervisors (SS-Aufseherinnen).
Most of the staff were from Germany or Austria, but as the war progressed, increasing numbers of Volksdeutsche from other countries, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic states, joined the SS at Auschwitz. Not all were ethnically German. Guards were also recruited from Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Camp guards, around three quarters of the SS personnel, were members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände (death's head units). Other SS staff worked in the medical or political departments, or in the economic administration, which was responsible for clothing and other supplies, including the property of dead prisoners. The SS viewed Auschwitz as a comfortable posting; being there meant they had avoided the front and had access to the victims' property.
Functionaries and Sonderkommando
Certain prisoners, at first non-Jewish Germans but later Jews and non-Jewish Poles, were assigned positions of authority as Funktionshäftlinge (functionaries), which gave them access to better housing and food. The Lagerprominenz (camp elite) included Blockschreiber (barracks clerk), Kapo (overseer), Stubendienst (barracks orderly), and Kommandierte (trusties). Wielding tremendous power over other prisoners, the functionaries developed a reputation as sadists. Very few were prosecuted after the war, because of the difficulty of determining which atrocities had been performed by order of the SS.
Although the SS oversaw the murders at each gas chamber, the forced labor portion of the work was done by prisoners known from 1942 as the Sonderkommando (special squad). These were mostly Jews but they included groups such as Soviet POWs. In 1940–1941 when there was one gas chamber, there were 20 such prisoners, in late 1943 there were 400, and by 1944 during the Holocaust in Hungary the number had risen to 874. The Sonderkommando removed goods and corpses from the incoming trains, guided victims to the dressing rooms and gas chambers, removed their bodies afterwards, and took their jewelry, hair, dental work, and any precious metals from their teeth, all of which was sent to Germany. Once the bodies were stripped of anything valuable, the Sonderkommando burned them in the crematoria.
Because they were witnesses to the mass murder, the Sonderkommando lived separately from the other prisoners, although this rule was not applied to the non-Jews among them. Their quality of life was further improved by their access to the property of new arrivals, which they traded within the camp, including with the SS. Nevertheless, their life expectancy was short; they were regularly murdered and replaced. About 100 survived to the camp's liquidation. They were forced on a death march and by train to the camp at Mauthausen, where three days later they were asked to step forward during roll call. No one did, and because the SS did not have their records, several of them survived.
Tattoos and triangles
Uniquely at Auschwitz, prisoners were tattooed with a serial number, on their left breast for Soviet prisoners of war and on the left arm for civilians.<!--expand serial numbers--> Categories of prisoner were distinguishable by triangular pieces of cloth (German: Winkel) sewn onto on their jackets below their prisoner number. Political prisoners (Schutzhäftlinge or Sch), mostly Poles, had a red triangle, while criminals (Berufsverbrecher or BV) were mostly German and wore green. Asocial prisoners (Asoziale or Aso), which included vagrants, prostitutes and the Roma, wore black. Purple was for Jehovah's Witnesses (Internationale Bibelforscher-Vereinigung or IBV)'s and pink for gay men, who were mostly German. An estimated 5,000–15,000 gay men prosecuted under German Penal Code Section 175 (proscribing sexual acts between men) were detained in concentration camps, of whom an unknown number were sent to Auschwitz. Jews wore a yellow badge, the shape of the Star of David, overlaid by a second triangle if they also belonged to a second category. The nationality of the inmate was indicated by a letter stitched onto the cloth. A racial hierarchy existed, with German prisoners at the top. Next were non-Jewish prisoners from other countries. Jewish prisoners were at the bottom.
Transports
inside Auschwitz II-Birkenau, near the gatehouse, used to transport deportees, 2014]]
Deportees were brought to Auschwitz crammed in wretched conditions into goods or cattle wagons, arriving near a railway station or at one of several dedicated trackside ramps, including one next to Auschwitz I. The Altejudenrampe (old Jewish ramp), part of the Oświęcim freight railway station, was used from 1942 to 1944 for Jewish transports.
| image2 = Auschwitz.Birkenau.QuarantaineBarrack.jpg
| caption2 = Auschwitz II wooden barracks, 2008}}
After roll call, to the sound of "Arbeitskommandos formieren" ("form work details"), prisoners walked to their place of work, five abreast, to begin a working day that was normally 11 hours long—longer in summer and shorter in winter.<!--wearing striped camp fatigues, no underwear, and ill-fitting wooden shoes without socks.--> A prison orchestra, such as the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, was forced to play cheerful music as the workers left the camp. Kapos were responsible for the prisoners' behaviour while they worked, as was an SS escort. Much of the work took place outdoors at construction sites, gravel pits, and lumber yards. No rest periods were allowed. One prisoner was assigned to the latrines to measure the time the workers took to empty their bladders and bowels.
Lunch was three-quarters of a litre of watery soup at midday, reportedly foul-tasting, with meat in the soup four times a week and vegetables (mostly potatoes and rutabaga) three times. The evening meal was 300 grams of bread, often moldy, part of which the inmates were expected to keep for breakfast the next day, with a tablespoon of cheese or marmalade, or 25 grams of margarine or sausage. Prisoners engaged in hard labour were given extra rations.
A second roll call took place at seven in the evening, in the course of which prisoners might be hanged or flogged. If a prisoner was missing, the others had to remain standing until the absentee was found or the reason for the absence discovered, even if it took hours. On 6 July 1940, roll call lasted 19 hours because a Polish prisoner, Tadeusz Wiejowski, had escaped; following an escape in 1941, a group of prisoners was picked out from the escapee's barracks and sent to block 11 to be starved to death. After roll call, prisoners retired to their blocks for the night and received their bread rations. Then they had some free time to use the washrooms and receive their mail, unless they were Jews: Jews were not allowed to receive mail. Curfew ("nighttime quiet") was marked by a gong at nine o'clock. Inmates slept in long rows of brick or wooden bunks, or on the floor, lying in and on their clothes and shoes to prevent them from being stolen. The wooden bunks had blankets and paper mattresses filled with wood shavings; in the brick barracks, inmates lay on straw. According to Miklós Nyiszli:
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Sunday was not a workday, but prisoners had to clean the barracks and take their weekly shower, and were allowed to write (in German) to their families, although the SS censored the mail. Inmates who did not speak German would trade bread for help. Observant Jews tried to keep track of the Hebrew calendar and Jewish holidays, including Shabbat, and the weekly Torah portion. No watches, calendars, or clocks were permitted in the camp. Only two Jewish calendars made in Auschwitz survived to the end of the war. Prisoners kept track of the days in other ways, such as obtaining information from newcomers.Women's camp
About 30 percent of the registered inmates were female. The first mass transport of women, 999 non-Jewish German women from the Ravensbrück concentration camp, arrived on 26 March 1942. Classified as criminal, asocial and political, they were brought to Auschwitz as founder functionaries of the women's camp. Rudolf Höss wrote of them: "It was easy to predict that these beasts would mistreat the women over whom they exercised power ... Spiritual suffering was completely alien to them." They were given serial numbers 1–999.
Langefeld was succeeded as Lagerführerin in October 1942 by SS Oberaufseherin Maria Mandl, who developed a reputation for cruelty. Höss hired men to oversee the female supervisors, first SS Obersturmführer Paul Müller, then SS Hauptsturmführer Franz Hössler. Mandl and Hössler were executed after the war. Sterilisation experiments were carried out in barracks 30 by a German gynecologist, Carl Clauberg, and another German doctor, Horst Schumann.
Medical experiments, block 10
<!--Unsourced: and murdered in the gas chamber in August 1943.]]-->
, Auschwitz I, where medical experiments were performed on women]]
German doctors performed a variety of experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. SS doctors tested the efficacy of X-rays as a sterilization device by administering large doses to female prisoners. Carl Clauberg injected chemicals into women's uteruses in an effort to glue them shut. Prisoners were infected with spotted fever for vaccination research and exposed to toxic substances to study the effects. In one experiment, Bayer—then part of IG Farben—paid RM 150 each for 150 female inmates from Auschwitz (the camp had asked for RM 200 per woman), who were transferred to a Bayer facility to test an anesthetic. A Bayer employee wrote to Rudolf Höss: "The transport of 150 women arrived in good condition. However, we were unable to obtain conclusive results because they died during the experiments. We would kindly request that you send us another group of women to the same number and at the same price." The Bayer research was led at Auschwitz by Helmuth Vetter of Bayer/IG Farben, who was also an Auschwitz physician and SS captain, and by Auschwitz physicians Friedrich Entress and Eduard Wirths.
, Nuremberg, 1946–1947]]
The most infamous doctor at Auschwitz was Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death", who worked in Auschwitz II from 30 May 1943, at first in the gypsy family camp. Interested in performing research on identical twins, dwarfs, and those with hereditary disease, Mengele set up a kindergarten in barracks 29 and 31 for children he was experimenting on, and for all Romani children under six, where they were given better food rations. From May 1944, he would select twins and dwarfs from among the new arrivals during "selection", reportedly calling for twins with "Zwillinge heraus!" ("twins step forward!"). He and other doctors (the latter prisoners) would measure the twins' body parts, photograph them, and subject them to dental, sight and hearing tests, x-rays, blood tests, surgery, and blood transfusions between them. Then he would have them killed and dissected. Kurt Heissmeyer, another German doctor and SS officer, took 20 Polish Jewish children from Auschwitz to use in pseudoscientific experiments at the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he injected them with the tuberculosis bacilli to test a cure for tuberculosis. In April 1945, the children were murdered by hanging to conceal the project.
A Jewish skeleton collection was obtained from among a pool of 115 Jewish inmates, chosen for their perceived stereotypical racial characteristics. Rudolf Brandt and Wolfram Sievers, general manager of the Ahnenerbe (a Nazi research institute), delivered the skeletons to the collection of the Anatomy Institute at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg in Alsace-Lorraine. The collection was sanctioned by Heinrich Himmler and under the direction of August Hirt. Ultimately 87 of the inmates were shipped to Natzweiler-Struthof and murdered in August 1943.<!--replace source--> Brandt and Sievers were executed in 1948 after being convicted during the Doctors' trial, part of the Subsequent Nuremberg trials.
Punishment, block 11
and (left) the "death wall", Auschwitz I, 2000]]
Prisoners could be beaten and killed by guards and kapos for the slightest infraction of the rules. Polish historian Irena Strzelecka writes that kapos were given nicknames that reflected their sadism: "Bloody", "Iron", "The Strangler", "The Boxer". Based on the 275 extant reports of punishment in the Auschwitz archives, Strzelecka lists common infractions: returning a second time for food at mealtimes, removing one's gold teeth to buy bread, breaking into the pigsty to steal the pigs' food, putting one's hands into one's pockets.
Flogging during rollcall was common. A flogging table called "the goat" immobilised prisoners' feet in a box, while they stretched themselves across the table. Prisoners had to count out the lashes—"25 mit besten Dank habe ich erhalten" ("25 received with many thanks")— and if they got the figure wrong, the flogging resumed from the beginning. Punishment by "the post" involved tying prisoners' hands behind their backs with chains attached to hooks, then raising the chains so the prisoners were left dangling by the wrists. If their shoulders were too damaged afterwards to work, they might be sent to the gas chamber. Prisoners were subjected to the post for helping a prisoner who had been beaten, and for picking up a cigarette butt. To extract information from inmates, guards would force their heads onto the stove, and hold them there, burning their faces and eyes.
Known as block 13 until 1941, block 11 of Auschwitz I was the prison within the prison, reserved for inmates suspected of resistance activities. Cell 22 in block 11 was a windowless standing cell (Stehbunker). Split into four sections, each section measured less than and held four prisoners, who entered it through a hatch near the floor. There was a vent for air, covered by a perforated sheet. Strzelecka writes that prisoners might have to spend several nights in cell 22; Wiesław Kielar spent four weeks in it for breaking a pipe. Several rooms in block 11 were deemed the Polizei-Ersatz-Gefängnis Myslowitz in Auschwitz (Auschwitz branch of the police station at Mysłowice). There were also Sonderbehandlung cases ("special treatment") for Poles and others regarded as dangerous to Nazi Germany.Death wallThe courtyard between blocks 10 and 11, known as the "death wall", served as an execution area, including for Poles in the General Government area who had been sentenced to death by a criminal court. The first executions, by shooting inmates in the back of the head, took place at the death wall on 11 November 1941, Poland's National Independence Day. The 151 accused were led to the wall one at a time, stripped naked and with their hands tied behind their backs. Danuta Czech noted that a "clandestine Catholic mass" was said the following Sunday on the second floor of Block 4 in Auschwitz I, in a narrow space between bunks.
An estimated 4,500 Polish political prisoners were executed at the death wall, including members of the camp resistance. An additional 10,000 Poles were brought to the camp to be executed without being registered. About 1,000 Soviet prisoners of war died by execution, although this is a rough estimate. A Polish government-in-exile report stated that 11,274 prisoners and 6,314 prisoners of war had been executed. Rudolf Höss wrote that "execution orders arrived in an unbroken stream". According to SS officer Perry Broad, "[s]ome of these walking skeletons had spent months in the stinking cells, where not even animals would be kept, and they could barely manage to stand straight. And yet, at that last moment, many of them shouted 'Long live Poland', or 'Long live freedom'." The dead included Colonel Jan Karcz and Major Edward Gött-Getyński, executed on 25 January 1943 with 51 others suspected of resistance activities. Józef Noji, the Polish long-distance runner, was executed on 15 February that year. In October 1944, 200 Sonderkommando were executed for their part in the Sonderkommando revolt. <!--add section or para on block 24, the brothel-->Family campsGypsy family camp
children, Mulfingen, Germany, 1943; the children were studied by Eva Justin and later sent to Auschwitz.]]
A separate camp for the Roma, the Zigeunerfamilienlager ("Gypsy family camp"), was set up in the BIIe sector of Auschwitz II-Birkenau in February 1943. For unknown reasons, they were not subject to selection and families were allowed to stay together. The first transport of German Roma arrived on 26 February that year. There had been a small number of Romani inmates before that; two Czech Romani prisoners, Ignatz and Frank Denhel, tried to escape in December 1942, the latter successfully, and a Polish Romani woman, Stefania Ciuron, arrived on 12 February 1943 and escaped in April. Josef Mengele, the Holocaust's most infamous physician, worked in the gypsy family camp from 30 May 1943 when he began his work in Auschwitz.
}}
In early 1942, mass exterminations were moved to two provisional gas chambers (the "red house" and "white house", known as bunkers 1 and 2) in Auschwitz II, while the larger crematoria (II, III, IV, and V) were under construction. Bunker 2 was temporarily reactivated from May to November 1944, when large numbers of Hungarian Jews were gassed. In summer 1944 the combined capacity of the crematoria and outdoor incineration pits was 20,000 bodies per day. A planned sixth facility—crematorium VI—was never built.
From 1942, Jews were being transported to Auschwitz from all over German-occupied Europe by rail, arriving in daily convoys. The gas chambers worked to their fullest capacity from May to July 1944, during the Holocaust in Hungary. A rail spur leading to crematoria II and III in Auschwitz II was completed that May, and a new ramp was built between sectors BI and BII to deliver the victims closer to the gas chambers (images top right). On 29 April the first 1,800 Jews from Hungary arrived at the camp. From 14 May until early July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews, half the pre-war population, were deported to Auschwitz, at a rate of 12,000 a day for a considerable part of that period. The crematoria had to be overhauled. Crematoria II and III were given new elevators leading from the stoves to the gas chambers, new grates were fitted, and several of the dressing rooms and gas chambers were painted. Cremation pits were dug behind crematorium V. The incoming volume was so great that the Sonderkommando resorted to burning corpses in open-air pits as well as in the crematoria.SelectionAccording to Polish historian Franciszek Piper, of the 1,095,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz, around 205,000 were registered in the camp and given serial numbers; 25,000 were sent to other camps; and 865,000 were murdered soon after arrival. Adding non-Jewish victims gives a figure of 900,000 who were murdered without being registered.
During "selection" on arrival, those deemed able to work were sent to the right and admitted into the camp (registered), and the rest were sent to the left to be gassed. The group selected to die included almost all children, women with small children, the elderly, and others who appeared on brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor not to be fit for work. Practically any fault—scars, bandages, boils and emaciation—might provide reason enough to be deemed unfit. Children might be made to walk toward a stick held at a certain height; those who could walk under it were selected for the gas. Inmates unable to walk or who arrived at night were taken to the crematoria on trucks; otherwise, the new arrivals were marched there. Their belongings were seized and sorted by inmates in the "Kanada" warehouses, an area of the camp in sector BIIg that housed 30 barracks used as storage facilities for plundered goods; it derived its name from the inmates' view of Canada as a land of plenty.Inside the crematoriaThe crematoria consisted of a dressing room, gas chamber, and furnace room. In crematoria II and III, the dressing room and gas chamber were underground; in IV and V, they were on the ground floor. The dressing room had numbered hooks on the wall to hang clothes. In crematorium II, there was also a dissection room (Sezierraum). SS officers told the victims they had to take a shower and undergo delousing. The victims undressed in the dressing room and walked into the gas chamber; signs said "Bade" (bath) or "Desinfektionsraum" (disinfection room). A former prisoner testified that the language of the signs changed depending on who was being killed. Some inmates were given soap and a towel. A gas chamber could hold up to 2,000; one former prisoner said it was around 3,000.
The Zyklon B was delivered to the crematoria by a special SS bureau known as the Hygiene Institute. After the doors were shut, SS men dumped in the Zyklon B pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. The victims were usually dead within 10 minutes; Rudolf Höss testified that it took up to 20 minutes. Leib Langfus, a member of the Sonderkommando, buried his diary (written in Yiddish) near crematorium III in Auschwitz II. It was found in 1952, signed "A.Y.R.A":
}}Use of corpses
: Women on their way to the gas chamber, Auschwitz II, August 1944]]
Sonderkommando wearing gas masks dragged the bodies from the chamber. They removed glasses and artificial limbs and shaved off the women's hair; women's hair was removed before they entered the gas chamber at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, but at Auschwitz it was done after death. By 6 February 1943, the Reich Economic Ministry had received 3,000 kg of women's hair from Auschwitz and Majdanek. The hair was first cleaned in a solution of sal ammoniac, dried on the brick floor of the crematoria, combed, and placed in paper bags. The hair was shipped to various companies, including one manufacturing plant in Bremen-Bluementhal, where workers found tiny coins with Greek letters on some of the braids, possibly from some of the 50,000 Greek Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1943. When they liberated the camp in January 1945, the Red Army found 7,000 kg of human hair in bags ready to ship.
Just before cremation, jewelry was removed, along with dental work and teeth containing precious metals. Gold was removed from the teeth of dead prisoners from 23 September 1940 onwards by order of Heinrich Himmler. The work was carried out by members of the Sonderkommando who were dentists; anyone overlooking dental work might themselves be cremated alive. The gold was sent to the SS Health Service and used by dentists to treat the SS and their families; 50 kg had been collected by 8 October 1942. By early 1944, 10–12 kg of gold was being extracted monthly from victims' teeth.
The corpses were burned in the nearby incinerators, and the ashes were buried, thrown in the Vistula river, or used as fertilizer. Any bits of bone that had not burned properly were ground down in wooden mortars.Death tollAt least 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, and at least 1.1 million died. used timetables of train arrivals combined with deportation records to calculate that, of the 1.3 million sent to the camp, 1,082,000 had died there, a figure (rounded up to 1.1 million) that Piper regarded as a minimum. That figure came to be widely accepted.
Earlier estimates included Raul Hilberg's 1961 work, The Destruction of the European Jews, which estimated that up to one million Jews had died in the camp. In 1983 French scholar George Wellers was one of the first to use German data on deportations to calculate the death toll; he arrived at a figure of 1,471,595 deaths, including 1.35 million Jews and 86,675 non-Jewish Poles.}}
The Germans tried to conceal how many they had murdered. In July 1942, according to Rudolf Höss's post-war memoir, Höss received an order from Heinrich Himmler, via Adolf Eichmann's office and SS commander Paul Blobel, that "[a]ll mass graves were to be opened and the corpses burned. In addition, the ashes were to be disposed of in such a way that it would be impossible at some future time to calculate the number of corpses burned."
Earlier estimates of the death toll were higher than Piper's. Following the camp's liberation, the Soviet government issued a statement, on 8 May 1945, that four million people had been murdered on the site, a figure based on the capacity of the crematoria. Höss told prosecutors at Nuremberg that at least 2,500,000 people had been gassed there, and that another 500,000 had died of starvation and disease. He testified that the figure of over two million had come from Eichmann. In his memoirs, written in custody, Höss wrote that Eichmann had given the figure of 2.5 million to Höss's superior officer Richard Glücks, based on records that had been destroyed. Höss regarded this figure as "far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities," he wrote.
{| class"wikitable" style"font-size:98%; text-align:left; float:center; margin-left:10px;"
|-
! Nationality/ethnicity<br />(Source: Franciszek Piper) !! Registered deaths<br />(Auschwitz) !! Unregistered deaths<br />(Auschwitz) !! Total
|-
| Jews || 95,000 || 865,000 || 960,000
|-
| Ethnic Poles || 64,000 || 10,000 || 74,000 (70,000–75,000)
|-
| Roma and Sinti || 19,000 || 2,000 || 21,000
|-
| Soviet prisoners of war || 12,000 || 3,000 || 15,000
|-
| Other Europeans:<br />Soviet citizens (Byelorussians, Russians, Ukrainians),<br />Czechs, Yugoslavs, French, Germans, Austrians || 10,000–15,000 || n/a || 10,000–15,000
|-
| Total deaths in Auschwitz, 1940–1945 ||200,000–205,000 || 880,000|| 1,080,000–1,085,000
|}
Around one in six Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in Auschwitz. By nation, the greatest number of Auschwitz's Jewish victims originated from Hungary, accounting for 430,000 deaths, followed by Poland (300,000), France (69,000), Netherlands (60,000), Greece (55,000), Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (46,000), Slovakia (27,000), Belgium (25,000), Germany and Austria (23,000), Yugoslavia (10,000), Italy (7,500), Norway (690), and others (34,000). Timothy Snyder writes that fewer than one percent of the million Soviet Jews murdered in the Holocaust were murdered in Auschwitz. Of the at least 387 Jehovah's Witnesses who were imprisoned at Auschwitz, 132 died in the camp.Resistance, escapes, and liberationCamp resistance, flow of information
<gallery class"center" widths"200" heights="200">
File:Conspiratorial reportage about Auschwitz death camp 01.jpg|Camp of Death pamphlet (1942) by Natalia Zarembina
File:Krahelska Pamiętnik więźnia.jpg|Halina Krahelska report from Auschwitz Oświęcim, pamiętnik więźnia ("Auschwitz: Diary of a prisoner"), 1942
File:The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied.pdf|"The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", a paper issued by the Polish government-in-exile addressed to the United Nations, 1942
</gallery>
Information about Auschwitz became available to the Allies as a result of reports by Captain Witold Pilecki of the Polish Home Army who, as "Tomasz Serafiński" (serial number 4859), allowed himself to be arrested in Warsaw and taken to Auschwitz. He was imprisoned there from 22 September 1940 until his escape on 27 April 1943. Michael Fleming writes that Pilecki was instructed to sustain morale, organize food, clothing and resistance, prepare to take over the camp if possible, and smuggle information out to the Polish military.<!--rewrite; add Pilecki as source--> Pilecki called his resistance movement Związek Organizacji Wojskowej (ZOW, "Union of Military Organization").
]]
The resistance sent out the first oral message about Auschwitz with Aleksander Wielkopolski, a Polish engineer who was released in October 1940. The following month the Polish underground in Warsaw prepared a report on the basis of that information, The camp in Auschwitz, part of which was published in London in May 1941 in a booklet, The German Occupation of Poland, by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The report said of the Jews in the camp that "scarcely any of them came out alive". According to Fleming, the booklet was "widely circulated amongst British officials". The Polish Fortnightly Review based a story on it, writing that "three crematorium furnaces were insufficient to cope with the bodies being cremated", as did The Scotsman on 8 January 1942, the only British news organization to do so.
On 24 December 1941, the resistance groups representing the various prisoner factions met in block 45 and agreed to cooperate. Fleming writes that it has not been possible to track Pilecki's early intelligence from the camp. Pilecki compiled two reports after he escaped in April 1943; the second, Raport W, detailed his life in Auschwitz I and estimated that 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, had been murdered. On 1 July 1942, the Polish Fortnightly Review published a report describing Birkenau, writing that "prisoners call this supplementary camp 'Paradisal', presumably because there is only one road, leading to Paradise". Reporting that inmates were being killed "through excessive work, torture and medical means", it noted the gassing of the Soviet prisoners of war and Polish inmates in Auschwitz I in September 1941, the first gassing in the camp. It said: "It is estimated that the Oswiecim camp can accommodate fifteen thousand prisoners, but as they die on a mass scale there is always room for new arrivals."<!--Needs secondary sources: From 1942, members of the Bureau of Information and Propaganda of the Warsaw-area Home Army published reports based on the accounts of escapees. The first was a fictional memoir, "Oświęcim. Pamiętnik więźnia" ("Auschwitz: Diary of a prisoner") by Halina Krahelska, published in April 1942 in Warsaw. Also published in 1942 was the pamphlet Obóz śmierci (Camp of Death) by Natalia Zarembina, and W piekle (In Hell) by Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, founder of Żegota. In March 1944, the Polish Labor Group in New York published a report in English, "Oswiecim, Camp of Death (Underground Report)", with a foreword by Florence Jaffray Harriman, which described the gassing of prisoners from 1942.-->
The Polish government-in-exile in London first reported the gassing of prisoners in Auschwitz on 21 July 1942, and reported the gassing of Soviet POWs and Jews on 4 September 1942. In 1943, the Kampfgruppe Auschwitz (Combat Group Auschwitz) was organized within the camp with the aim of sending out information about what was happening. The Sonderkommando buried notes in the ground, hoping they would be found by the camp's liberators. The group also smuggled out photographs; the Sonderkommando photographs, of events around the gas chambers in Auschwitz II, were smuggled out of the camp in September 1944 in a toothpaste tube.
According to Fleming, the British press responded, in 1943 and the first half of 1944, either by not publishing reports about Auschwitz or by burying them on the inside pages. The exception was the Polish Jewish Observer, a City and East London Observer supplement edited by Joel Cang, a former Warsaw correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. The British reticence stemmed from a Foreign Office concern that the public might pressure the government to respond or provide refuge for the Jews, and that British actions on behalf of the Jews might affect its relationships in the Middle East. There was similar reticence in the United States, and indeed within the Polish government-in-exile and the Polish resistance. According to Fleming, the scholarship suggests that the Polish resistance distributed information about the Holocaust in Auschwitz without challenging the Allies' reluctance to highlight it.Escapes, Auschwitz Protocols
and Alfréd Wetzler]]
From the first escape on 6 July 1940 of Tadeusz Wiejowski, at least 802 prisoners (757 men and 45 women) tried to escape from the camp, according to Polish historian Henryk Świebocki.}} He writes that most escapes were attempted from work sites outside the camp's perimeter fence. Of the 802 escapes, 144 were successful, 327 were caught, and the fate of 331 is unknown.
Four Polish prisoners— (serial number 8502), Kazimierz Piechowski (no. 918), Stanisław Gustaw Jaster (no. 6438), and Józef Lempart (no. 3419)—escaped successfully on 20 June 1942. After breaking into a warehouse, three of them dressed as SS officers and stole rifles and an SS staff car, which they drove out of the camp with the fourth handcuffed as a prisoner. They wrote later to Rudolf Höss apologizing for the loss of the vehicle. On 21 July 1944, Polish inmate Jerzy Bielecki dressed in an SS uniform and, using a faked pass, managed to cross the camp's gate with his Jewish girlfriend, Cyla Cybulska, pretending that she was wanted for questioning. Both survived the war. For having saved her, Bielecki was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.<!--check: A common punishment for escape attempts was death by starvation; the families of successful escapees were sometimes arrested and interned in Auschwitz and prominently displayed to deter others. If someone did manage to escape, the SS picked ten people at random from the prisoner's block and starved them to death.-->
Jerzy Tabeau (no. 27273, registered as Jerzy Wesołowski) and Roman Cieliczko (no. 27089), both Polish prisoners, escaped on 19 November 1943; Tabeau made contact with the Polish underground and, between December 1943 and early 1944, wrote what became known as the ''Polish Major's report about the situation in the camp. On 27 April 1944, Rudolf Vrba (no. 44070) and Alfréd Wetzler (no. 29162) escaped to Slovakia, carrying detailed information to the Slovak Jewish Council about the gas chambers. The distribution of the Vrba-Wetzler report, and publication of parts of it in June 1944, helped to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. On 27 May 1944, Arnost Rosin (no. 29858) and Czesław Mordowicz (no. 84216) also escaped to Slovakia; the Rosin-Mordowicz report was added to the Vrba-Wetzler and Tabeau reports to become what is known as the Auschwitz Protocols. The reports were first published in their entirety in November 1944 by the United States War Refugee Board as The Extermination Camps of Auschwitz (Oświęcim) and Birkenau in Upper Silesia''.<!--work this in: Auschwitz plans originating with the Polish government were provided to the UK foreign ministry in August 1944.--><!--Not clear why these examples are here: On 24 June 1944, a Belgian-Polish Jew, Mala Zimetbaum, escaped with her Polish boyfriend, Edek Galiński, dressed in a stolen prisoner-guard uniform. They were later recaptured, tortured, and executed by the SS.-->Bombing proposal
on 23 August 1944]]
In January 1941, the Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army and prime minister-in-exile, Władysław Sikorski, arranged for a report to be forwarded to Air Marshal Richard Pierse, head of RAF Bomber Command. Written by Auschwitz prisoners in or around December 1940, the report described the camp's atrocious living conditions and asked the Polish government-in-exile to bomb it:
}}
Pierse replied that it was not technically feasible to bomb the camp without harming the prisoners. In May 1944 Slovak rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl suggested that the Allies bomb the rails leading to the camp. Historian David Wyman published an essay in Commentary in 1978 entitled "Why Auschwitz Was Never Bombed", arguing that the United States Army Air Forces could and should have attacked Auschwitz. In his book The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (1984), Wyman argued that, since the IG Farben plant at Auschwitz III had been bombed three times between August and December 1944 by the US Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, it would have been feasible for the other camps or railway lines to be bombed too. Bernard Wasserstein's Britain and the Jews of Europe (1979) and Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) raised similar questions about British inaction. Since the 1990s, other historians have argued that Allied bombing accuracy was not sufficient for Wyman's proposed attack, and that counterfactual history is an inherently problematic endeavor.
Sonderkommando revolt
member Zalmen Gradowski, pictured with his wife, Sonia, buried his notebooks near crematorium III. Sonia Gradowski was gassed on 8 December 1942.]]
The Sonderkommando who worked in the crematoria were witnesses to the mass murder and were therefore regularly murdered themselves. On 7 October 1944, following an announcement that 300 of them were to be sent to a nearby town to clear away rubble—"transfers" were a common ruse for the murder of prisoners—the group, mostly Jews from Greece and Hungary, staged an uprising. They attacked the SS with stones and hammers, killing three of them, and set crematorium IV on fire with rags soaked in oil that they had hidden. Hearing the commotion, the Sonderkommando at crematorium II believed that a camp uprising had begun and threw their Oberkapo into a furnace. After escaping through a fence using wirecutters, they managed to reach Rajsko, where they hid in the granary of an Auschwitz satellite camp, but the SS pursued and killed them by setting the granary on fire.
By the time the rebellion at crematorium IV had been suppressed, 212 members of the Sonderkommando were still alive and 451 had been killed. The dead included Zalmen Gradowski, who kept notes of his time in Auschwitz and buried them near crematorium III; after the war, another Sonderkommando member showed the prosecutors where to dig. The notes were published in several formats, including in 2017 as From the Heart of Hell''.Evacuation and death marches
The last mass transports to arrive in Auschwitz were 60,000–70,000 Jews from the Łódź Ghetto, some 2,000 from Theresienstadt, and 8,000 from Slovakia. The last selection took place on 30 October 1944. On 1 or 2 November 1944, Heinrich Himmler ordered the SS to halt the mass murder by gas. On 25 November, he ordered Auschwitz's gas chambers and crematoria be destroyed. The Sonderkommando and other prisoners began the job of dismantling the buildings and cleaning up the site. On 18 January 1945, Engelbert Marketsch, a German criminal transferred from Mauthausen, became the last prisoner to be assigned a serial number in Auschwitz, number 202499.
According to Polish historian Andrzej Strzelecki, the evacuation of the camp was one of its "most tragic chapters". Himmler ordered the evacuation of all camps in January 1945, telling camp commanders: "The Führer holds you personally responsible for ... making sure that not a single prisoner from the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy." The plundered goods from the "Kanada" barracks, together with building supplies, were transported to the German interior. Between 1 December 1944 and 15 January 1945, over one million items of clothing were packed to be shipped out of Auschwitz; 95,000 such parcels were sent to concentration camps in Germany.
Beginning on 17 January, some 58,000 Auschwitz detainees (about two-thirds Jews)—over 20,000 from Auschwitz I and II and over 30,000 from the subcamps—were evacuated under guard, at first heading west on foot, then by open-topped freight trains, to concentration camps in Germany and Austria: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenburg, Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Dora-Mittelbau, Ravensbruck, and Sachsenhausen. Fewer than 9,000 remained in the camps, deemed too sick to move. During the marches, the SS shot or otherwise dispatched anyone unable to continue; "execution details" followed the marchers, killing prisoners who lagged behind. Peter Longerich estimated that a quarter of the detainees were thus killed.<!--but didn't stick to it: In March 1945, Himmler ordered that no more Jewish prisoners should be killed; he hoped to use them as hostages in negotiations with the Allies.--> By December 1944 some 15,000 Jewish prisoners had made it from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by the British on 15 April 1945.
On 20 January, crematoria II and III were blown up, and on 23 January the "Kanada" warehouses were set on fire; they apparently burned for five days. Crematorium IV had been partly demolished after the Sonderkommando revolt in October, and the rest of it was destroyed later. On 26 January, one day ahead of the Red Army's arrival, crematorium V was blown up.
Liberation
The first in the camp complex to be liberated was Auschwitz III, the IG Farben camp at Monowitz; a soldier from the 100th Infantry Division of the Red Army entered the camp around 9 am on Saturday, 27 January 1945. The 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front (also part of the Red Army) arrived in Auschwitz I and II around 3 pm. They found 7,000 prisoners alive in the three main camps, 500 in the other subcamps, and over 600 corpses. Items found included 837,000 women's garments, 370,000 men's suits, 44,000 pairs of shoes, and 7,000 kg of human hair, estimated by the Soviet war crimes commission to have come from 140,000 people. Some of the hair was examined by the Forensic Science Institute in Kraków, where it was found to contain traces of hydrogen cyanide, the main ingredient of Zyklon B. Primo Levi described seeing the first four soldiers on horseback approach Auschwitz III, where he had been in the sick bay. They threw "strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive ...":
}}
<!--needs a different source: Because of the size of the camp, at least four divisions took part in liberating it: 100th Rifle Division (established in Vologda, Russia), 322nd Rifle Division (Gorky, Russia), 286th Rifle Division (Leningrad), and 107th Motor Rifle Division (Tambov, Russia).-->Georgii Elisavetskii, a Soviet soldier who entered one of the barracks, said in 1980 that he could hear other soldiers telling the inmates: "You are free, comrades!" But they did not respond, so he tried in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian. Then he used some Yiddish: "They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: 'Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you' ... Finally, as if the barrier collapsed ... they rushed toward us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs."
The Soviet military medical service and Polish Red Cross (PCK) set up field hospitals that looked after 4,500 prisoners suffering from the effects of starvation (mostly diarrhea) and tuberculosis. Local volunteers helped until the Red Cross team arrived from Kraków in early February. In Auschwitz II, the layers of excrement on the barracks floors had to be scraped off with shovels. Water was obtained from snow and from fire-fighting wells. Before more help arrived, 2,200 patients there were looked after by a few doctors and 12 PCK nurses. All the patients were later moved to the brick buildings in Auschwitz I, where several blocks became a hospital, with medical personnel working 18-hour shifts.
The liberation of Auschwitz received little press attention at the time; the Red Army was focusing on its advance toward Germany and liberating the camp had not been one of its key aims. Boris Polevoi reported on the liberation in Pravda on 2 February 1945 but made no mention of Jews; inmates were described collectively as "victims of Fascism". It was when the Western Allies arrived in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and Dachau in April 1945 that the liberation of the camps received extensive coverage.After the warTrials of war criminals
Only 789 Auschwitz staff, up to 15 percent, ever stood trial; most of the cases were pursued in Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany. According to Aleksander Lasik, female SS officers were treated more harshly than male; of the 17 women sentenced, four received the death penalty and the others longer prison terms than the men. He writes that this may have been because there were only 200 women overseers, and therefore they were more visible and memorable to the inmates.
Camp commandant Rudolf Höss was arrested by the British on 11 March 1946 near Flensburg, northern Germany, where he had been working as a farmer under the pseudonym Franz Lang. He was imprisoned in Heide, then transferred to Minden for interrogation, part of the British occupation zone. From there he was taken to Nuremberg to testify for the defense in the trial of SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Höss was straightforward about his own role in the mass murder and said he had followed the orders of Heinrich Himmler.}} Extradited to Poland on 25 May 1946, he wrote his memoirs in custody, first published in Polish in 1951 then in German in 1958 as Kommandant in Auschwitz. His trial before the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw opened on 11 March 1947; he was sentenced to death on 2 April and hanged in Auschwitz I on 16 April, near crematorium I.
On 25 November 1947, the Auschwitz trial began in Kraków, when Poland's Supreme National Tribunal brought to court 40 former Auschwitz staff, including commandant Arthur Liebehenschel, women's camp leader Maria Mandel, and camp leader Hans Aumeier. The trials ended on 22 December 1947, with 23 death sentences, seven life sentences, and nine prison sentences ranging from three to 15 years. Hans Münch, an SS doctor who had several former prisoners testify on his behalf, was the only person to be acquitted.<!--find sources: Arthur Liebehenschel was hanged in 1948, Richard Baer died of a heart attack in pre-trial detention in 1963, Fritz Hartjenstein died of a heart attack while awaiting execution in 1954, Josef Kramer was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint in 1945, and Heinrich Schwarz was shot by firing squad in 1947.-->
Other former staff were hanged for war crimes in the Dachau Trials and the Belsen Trial, including camp leaders Josef Kramer, Franz Hössler, and Vinzenz Schöttl; doctor Friedrich Entress; and guards Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath. Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, the owner and chief executive officer of the firm Tesch & Stabenow, one of the suppliers of Zyklon B, were arrested by the British after the war and executed for knowingly supplying the chemical for use on humans. The 180-day Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, held in West Germany from 20 December 1963 to 20 August 1965, tried 22 defendants, including two dentists, a doctor, two camp adjudants and the camp's pharmacist. The 700-page indictment, presenting the testimony of 254 witnesses, was accompanied by a 300-page report about the camp, Nationalsozialistische Konzentrationslager, written by historians from the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Germany, including Martin Broszat and Helmut Krausnick. The report became the basis of their book, Anatomy of the SS State (1968), the first comprehensive study of the camp and the SS. The court convicted 19 of the defendants, giving six of them life sentences and the others between three and ten years. East Germany also held trials against several former staff members of Auschwitz. One of the defendants they tried was Horst Fischer. Fischer, one of the highest-ranking SS physicians in the camp, had personally selected at least 75,000 men, women, and children to be gassed. He was arrested in 1965. The following year, he was convicted of crimes against humanity, sentenced to death, and executed by guillotine. Fischer was the highest-ranking SS physician from Auschwitz to ever be tried by a German court.
Legacy
In the decades since its liberation, Auschwitz has become a primary symbol of the Holocaust. Seweryna Szmaglewska's 1945 autobiography Dymy nad Birkenau (Smoke over Birkenau) has been credited with spreading knowledge about the camp to the general public. Historian Timothy D. Snyder attributes this to the camp's high death toll and "unusual combination of an industrial camp complex and a killing facility", which left behind far more witnesses than single-purpose killing facilities such as Chełmno or Treblinka. In 2005 the United Nations General Assembly designated 27 January, the date of the camp's liberation, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Helmut Schmidt visited the site in November 1977, the first West German chancellor to do so, followed by his successor, Helmut Kohl, in November 1989. In a statement on the 50th anniversary of the liberation, Kohl said that "[t]he darkest and most awful chapter in German history was written at Auschwitz." In January 2020, world leaders gathered at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to commemorate the 75th anniversary. It was the city's largest-ever political gathering, with over 45 heads of state and world leaders, including royalty. At Auschwitz itself, Reuven Rivlin and Andrzej Duda, the presidents of Israel and Poland, laid wreaths.
Notable memoirists of the camp include Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski. Levi's If This is a Man, first published in Italy in 1947 as Se questo è un uomo, became a classic of Holocaust literature, an "imperishable masterpiece".}} Wiesel wrote about his imprisonment at Auschwitz in Night (1960) and other works, and became a prominent spokesman against ethnic violence; in 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Camp survivor Simone Veil was elected President of the European Parliament, serving from 1979 to 1982. Two Auschwitz victims—Maximilian Kolbe, a priest who volunteered to die by starvation in place of a stranger, and Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism—were named saints of the Catholic Church.
In 2017, a Körber Foundation survey found that 40 percent of 14-year-olds in Germany did not know what Auschwitz was. The following year a survey organized by the Claims Conference, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and others found that 41 percent of 1,350 American adults surveyed, and 66 percent of millennials, did not know what Auschwitz was, while 22 percent said they had never heard of the Holocaust. A CNN-ComRes poll in 2018 found a similar situation in Europe.
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
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On 2 July 1947, the Polish government passed a law establishing a state memorial to remember "the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other nations in Oswiecim". The museum established its exhibits at Auschwitz I; after the war, the barracks in Auschwitz II-Birkenau had been mostly dismantled and moved to Warsaw to be used on building sites. Dwork and van Pelt write that, in addition, Auschwitz I played a more central role in the persecution of the Polish people, in opposition to the importance of Auschwitz II to the Jews, including Polish Jews. An exhibition opened in Auschwitz I in 1955, displaying prisoner mug shots; hair, suitcases, and shoes taken from murdered prisoners; canisters of Zyklon B pellets; and other objects related to the killings. UNESCO added the camp to its list of World Heritage Sites in 1979. All the museum's directors were, until 1990, former Auschwitz prisoners. Visitors to the site have increased from 492,500 in 2001, to over one million in 2009, to two million in 2016.
There have been protracted disputes over the perceived Christianization of the site. Pope John Paul II celebrated mass over the train tracks leading to Auschwitz II-Birkenau on 7 June 1979 and called the camp "the Golgotha of our age", referring to the crucifixion of Jesus. More controversy followed when Carmelite nuns founded a convent in 1984 in a former theater outside the camp's perimeter, near block 11 of Auschwitz I, after which a local priest and some survivors erected a large cross—one that had been used during the pope's mass—behind block 11 to commemorate 152 Polish inmates shot by the Germans in 1941. After a long dispute, Pope John Paul II intervened and the nuns moved the convent elsewhere in 1993. The cross remained, triggering the "War of the Crosses", as more crosses were erected to commemorate Christian victims, despite international objections. The Polish government and Catholic Church eventually agreed to remove all but the original.
On 4 September 2003, despite a protest from the museum, three Israeli Air Force F-15 Eagles performed a fly-over of Auschwitz II-Birkenau during a ceremony at the camp below. All three pilots were descendants of Holocaust survivors, including the man who led the flight, Major-General Amir Eshel. On 27 January 2015, some 300 Auschwitz survivors gathered with world leaders under a giant tent at the entrance to Auschwitz II to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation.}}
Museum curators consider visitors who pick up items from the ground to be thieves, and local police will charge them as such; the maximum penalty is a 10-year prison sentence. In 2017 two British youths from the Perse School were fined in Poland after picking up buttons and shards of decorative glass in 2015 from the "Kanada" area of Auschwitz II, where camp victims' personal effects were stored. The sign over the main camp's gate was stolen in December 2009 by a Swedish former neo-Nazi and two Polish men. The sign was later recovered.
In 2018 the Polish government passed an amendment to its Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, making it a criminal offence to violate the "good name" of Poland by accusing it of crimes committed by Germany in the Holocaust, which would include referring to Auschwitz and other camps as "Polish death camps". Staff at the museum were accused by nationalist media in Poland of focusing too much on the fate of the Jews in Auschwitz at the expense of ethnic Poles. The brother of the museum's director, Piotr Cywiński, wrote that Cywiński had experienced "50 days of incessant hatred". After discussions with Israel's prime minister, amid international concern that the new law would stifle research, the Polish government adjusted the amendment so that anyone accusing Poland of complicity would be guilty only of a civil offence.
See also
*Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation
*Censorship in Auschwitz
*List of Nazi concentration camps
*List of victims and survivors of Auschwitz
Footnotes
Citations
Works cited
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Further reading
*Borowski, Tadeusz (1992) [1976]. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Trans. from the Polish by Barbara Vedder. East Rutherford: Penguin Books.
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*Pilecki, Witold (2012). The Auschwitz Volunteer: Beyond Bravery. Trans. from the Polish by Jarek Garlinski. Los Angeles: Aquila Polonica.
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*[https://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/NT_major-war-criminals.html Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal] . Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 – 1 October 1946.
External links
*[http://auschwitz.org/en/ Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum].
*[https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/auschwitz "Auschwitz"] at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
*[http://www.auschwitz-birkenau.org/ Auschwitz-Birkenau photographs] by Bill Hunt.
Category:1940 establishments in Germany
Category:Bayer
Category:German extermination camps in Poland
Category:IG Farben
Category:Nazi concentration camps in Poland
Category:Nazi war crimes in Poland
Category:Registered museums in Poland
Category:The Holocaust
Category:Tourism in Eastern Europe
Category:World Heritage Sites in Poland
Category:World War II sites in Poland
Category:World War II sites of Nazi Germany | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.844853 |
2007 | Archery | thumb|Archery competition in June 1983 at Mönchengladbach, West Germany
thumb|A Rikbaktsa archer competes at Brazil's Indigenous Games
thumb|upright|Tibetan archer, 1938
thumb|Master Heon Kim demonstrating Gungdo, traditional Korean archery (Kuk Kung), 2009
thumb|Archers in East Timor
thumb|Japanese archers
thumb|Archery in Bhutan
thumb|Archer in Benin
Archery is the sport, practice, or skill of using a bow to shoot arrows. The word comes from the Latin arcus, meaning bow. Historically, archery has been used for hunting and combat. In modern times, it is mainly a competitive sport and recreational activity. A person who practices archery is typically called an archer, bowman, or toxophilite.
History
Origins and ancient archery
The oldest known evidence of the bow and arrow comes from South African sites such as Sibudu Cave, where the remains of bone and stone arrowheads have been found dating approximately 72,000 to 60,000 years ago.
Based on indirect evidence, the bow also seems to have appeared or reappeared later in Eurasia, near the transition from the Upper Paleolithic to the Mesolithic. The earliest definite remains of bow and arrow from Europe are possible fragments from Germany found at Mannheim-Vogelstang dated 17,500 to 18,000 years ago, and at Stellmoor dated 11,000 years ago. Azilian points found in Grotte du Bichon, Switzerland, alongside the remains of both a bear and a hunter, with flint fragments found in the bear's third vertebra, suggest the use of arrows at 13,500 years ago.
Other signs of its use in Europe come from the in the north of Hamburg, Germany and dates from the late Paleolithic, about 10,000–9000 BC. The arrows were made of pine and consisted of a main shaft and a fore shaft with a flint point. There are no definite earlier bows; previous pointed shafts are known, but may have been launched by spear-throwers rather than bows. The oldest bows known so far comes from the Holmegård swamp in Denmark. At the site of Nataruk in Turkana County, Kenya, obsidian bladelets found embedded in a skull and within the thoracic cavity of another skeleton, suggest the use of stone-tipped arrows as weapons about 10,000 years ago. Bows eventually replaced the spear-thrower as the predominant means for launching shafted projectiles, on every continent except Australasia, though spear-throwers persisted alongside the bow in parts of the Americas, including Mexico and among the Inuit.
Bows and arrows have been present in Egyptian and neighbouring Nubian culture since its respective predynastic and Pre-Kerma origins. In the Levant, artifacts that could be arrow-shaft straighteners are known from the Natufian culture, (c. 10,800–8,300 BC) onwards. The Khiamian and PPN A shouldered Khiam-points may well be arrowheads.
Classical civilizations, notably the Assyrians, Greeks, Armenians, Persians, Parthians, Romans, Indians, Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese fielded large numbers of archers in their armies. Akkadians were the first to use composite bows in war according to the victory stele of Naram-Sin of Akkad. Egyptians referred to Nubia as "Ta-Seti," or "The Land of the Bow," since the Nubians were known to be expert archers, and by the 16th Century BC Egyptians were using the composite bow in warfare. The Bronze Age Aegean Cultures were able to deploy a number of state-owned specialized bow makers for warfare and hunting purposes already from the 15th century BC. The Welsh longbow proved its worth for the first time in Continental warfare at the Battle of Crécy. In the Americas archery was widespread at European contact.
Archery was highly developed in Asia. The Sanskrit term for archery, dhanurvidya, came to refer to martial arts in general. In East Asia, Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea was well known for its regiments of exceptionally skilled archers.
Medieval archery
The medieval shortbow was technically identical with the classical era bows, having a range of approximately . It was the primary ranged weapon of the battlefield through the early medieval period. Around the tenth century the crossbow was introduced in Europe. Crossbows generally had a longer range, greater accuracy and more penetration than the shortbow, but suffered from a much slower rate of fire. Crossbows were used in the early Crusades, with models having a range of and being able to penetrate armour or kill a horse.
During the late medieval period the English army famously relied on massed archers armed with the longbow. The French army relied more on the crossbow. Like their predecessors archers were more likely to be peasants or yeomen than men-at-arms. The longbow had a range of up to . However its lack of accuracy at long ranges made it a mass weapon rather than an individual one. Significant victories attributable to the longbow, such as the Battle of Crecy and Battle of Agincourt resulted in the English longbow becoming part of military lore.
Mounted archery
thumb|upright|Hunting for flying birds from the back of a galloping horse was considered the top category of archery. The favourite hobby of Prince Maximilian, engraved by Dürer
Tribesmen of Central Asia (after the domestication of the horse) and American Plains Indians (after gaining access to horses by Europeans) became extremely adept at archery on horseback. Lightly armoured, but highly mobile archers were excellently suited to warfare in the Central Asian steppes, and they formed a large part of armies that repeatedly conquered large areas of Eurasia. Shorter bows are more suited to use on horseback, and the composite bow enabled mounted archers to use powerful weapons. Seljuk Turks used mounted archers against the European First Crusade, especially at the Battle of Dorylaeum (1097). Their tactic was to shoot at the enemy infantry, and use their superior mobility to prevent the enemy from closing with them. Empires throughout the Eurasian landmass often strongly associated their respective "barbarian" counterparts with the usage of the bow and arrow, to the point where powerful states like the Han dynasty referred to their neighbours, the Xiong-nu, as "Those Who Draw the Bow". For example, Xiong-nu mounted bowmen made them more than a match for the Han military, and their threat was at least partially responsible for Chinese expansion into the Ordos region, to create a stronger, more powerful buffer zone against them.
Decline of archery
The development of firearms rendered the bow and arrow obsolete in warfare, although efforts were sometimes made to preserve archery practice. In England and Wales, for example, the government tried to enforce practice with the longbow until the end of the 16th century. This was because it was recognized that the bow had been instrumental to military success during the Hundred Years' War. Despite the high social status, ongoing utility, and widespread pleasure of archery in Armenia, China, Egypt, England and Wales, the Americas, India, Japan, Korea, Turkey and elsewhere, almost every culture that gained access to even early firearms used them widely, to the neglect of archery. Early firearms were inferior in rate-of-fire, and were very sensitive to wet weather. However, they had longer effective range Traditional archery remains in use for sport, and for hunting in many areas.
English 18th century revival as a sport
thumb|A print of the 1822 meeting of the "Royal British Bowmen" archery club.
Early recreational archery societies in England included the Finsbury Archers and the Ancient Society of Kilwinning Archers. The latter's annual Papingo event was first recorded in 1483. (In this event, archers shoot vertically from the base of an abbey tower to dislodge a wood pigeon placed approximately above.) The Royal Company of Archers was formed in 1676 and is one of the oldest sporting bodies in the world. Archery remained a small and scattered pastime, however, until the late 18th century when it experienced a fashionable revival among the aristocracy. Sir Ashton Lever, an antiquarian and collector, formed the Toxophilite Society in London in 1781, with the patronage of George, the Prince of Wales.
thumb|upright|left|Fashionable female archers, 1799
Archery societies were set up across the country, each with its own strict entry criteria and outlandish costumes. Recreational archery soon became extravagant social and ceremonial events for the nobility, complete with flags, music and 21-gun salutes for the competitors. The clubs were "the drawing rooms of the great country houses placed outside" and thus came to play an important role in the social networks of the local upper class. As well as its emphasis on display and status, the sport was notable for its popularity with females. Young women could not only compete in the contests but retain and show off their sexuality while doing so. Thus, archery came to act as a forum for introductions, flirtation and romance. It was often consciously styled in the manner of a Medieval tournament with titles and laurel wreaths being presented as a reward to the victor. General meetings were held from 1789, in which local lodges convened together to standardise the rules and ceremonies. Archery was also co-opted as a distinctively British tradition, dating back to the lore of Robin Hood and it served as a patriotic form of entertainment at a time of political tension in Europe. The societies were also elitist, and the new middle class bourgeoisie were excluded from the clubs due to their lack of social status.
After the Napoleonic Wars, the sport became increasingly popular among all classes, and it was framed as a nostalgic reimagining of the preindustrial rural Britain. Particularly influential was Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel, Ivanhoe that depicted the heroic character Lockseley winning an archery tournament.
thumb|upright=0.6|An archery in the coat of arms of Lieksa, based on the 1669 seal of the old town of Brahea.
A modern sport
The 1840s saw the second attempts at turning the recreation into a modern sport. The first Grand National Archery Society meeting was held in York in 1844 and over the next decade the extravagant and festive practices of the past were gradually whittled away and the rules were standardized as the 'York Round' - a series of shoots at , , and . Horace A. Ford helped to improve archery standards and pioneered new archery techniques. He won the Grand National 11 times in a row and published a highly influential guide to the sport in 1856.
thumb|left|upright|Picture of Saxton Pope taken while grizzly hunting at Yellowstone
Towards the end of the 19th century, the sport experienced declining participation as alternative sports such as croquet and tennis became more popular among the middle class. By 1889, just 50 archery clubs were left in Britain, but it was still included as a sport at the 1900 Paris Olympics.
The National Archery Association of the United States was organized in 1879, in part by Maurice Thompson (the author of the seminal text “The Witchery of Archery”) and his brother Will Thompson. Maurice was president in its inaugural year and Will was president in 1882, 1903, and 1904. The 1910 President was Frank E Canfield. Today it is known as USA Archery and is recognized by United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee.
In the United States, primitive archery was revived in the early 20th century. The last of the Yahi Indian tribe, a native known as Ishi, came out of hiding in California in 1911. His doctor, Saxton Pope, learned many of Ishi's traditional archery skills, and popularized them.
thumb|right|Five women taking part in an archery contest in 1931
From the 1920s, professional engineers took an interest in archery, previously the exclusive field of traditional craft experts. They led the commercial development of new forms of bow including the modern recurve and compound bow. These modern forms are now dominant in modern Western archery; traditional bows are in a minority. Archery returned to the Olympics in 1972. In the 1980s, the skills of traditional archery were revived by American enthusiasts, and combined with the new scientific understanding. Much of this expertise is available in the Traditional Bowyer's Bibles (see Further reading). Modern game archery owes much of its success to Fred Bear, an American bow hunter and bow manufacturer.
In 2021, five people were killed and three injured by an archer in Norway in the Kongsberg attack.
Mythology
thumb|upright|Vishwamitra archery training from Ramayana
thumb|Herakles the Archer by Émile Antoine Bourdelle
Deities and heroes in several mythologies are described as archers, including the Greek Artemis and Apollo, the Roman Diana and Cupid, the Germanic Agilaz, continuing in legends like those of Wilhelm Tell, Palnetoke, or Robin Hood. Armenian Hayk and Babylonian Marduk, Indian Karna (also known as Radheya/son of Radha), Abhimanyu, Eklavya, Arjuna, Bhishma, Drona, Rama, and Shiva were known for their shooting skills. The famous archery competition of hitting the eye of a rotating fish while watching its reflection in the water bowl was one of the many archery skills depicted in the Mahabharata.
Persian Arash was a famous archer. Earlier Greek representations of Heracles normally depict him as an archer. Archery, and the bow, play an important part in the epic poem the Odyssey, when Odysseus returns home in disguise and then bests the suitors in an archery competition after hinting at his identity by stringing and drawing his great bow that only he can draw, a similar motif is present in the Turkic Iranian heroic archeheroic poem Alpamysh.
The () were worshipped on the Greek island of Delos as attendants of Artemis, presiding over aspects of archery; (), represented distancing, (), trajectory, and (), aim.
Yi the archer and his apprentice Feng Meng appear in several early Chinese myths, and the historical character of Zhou Tong features in many fictional forms. Jumong, the first Taewang of the Goguryeo kingdom of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, is claimed by legend to have been a near-godlike archer. Archery features in the story of Oguz Khagan. Similarly, archery and the bow feature heavily into historical Korean identity.
In West African Yoruba belief, Osoosi is one of several deities of the hunt who are identified with bow and arrow iconography and other insignia associated with archery.
Equipment
Types of bows
thumb|upright|A Pacific yew selfbow drawn by the split finger method. Selfbows are made from a single piece of wood.
While there is great variety in the construction details of bows (both historical and modern), all bows consist of a string attached to elastic limbs that store mechanical energy imparted by the user drawing the string. Bows may be broadly split into two categories: those drawn by pulling the string directly and those that use a mechanism to pull the string.
Directly drawn bows may be further divided based upon differences in the method of limb construction, notable examples being self bows, laminated bows and composite bows. Bows can also be classified by the bow shape of the limbs when unstrung; in contrast to traditional European straight bows, a recurve bow and some types of longbow have tips that curve away from the archer when the bow is unstrung. The cross-section of the limb also varies; the classic longbow is a tall bow with narrow limbs that are D-shaped in cross section, and the flatbow has flat wide limbs that are approximately rectangular in cross-section. Cable-backed bows use cords as the back of the bow; the draw weight of the bow can be adjusted by changing the tension of the cable. They were widespread among Inuit who lacked easy access to good bow wood. One variety of cable-backed bow is the Penobscot bow or Wabenaki bow, invented by Frank Loring (Chief Big Thunder) about 1900. It consists of a small bow attached by cables on the back of a larger main bow.
In different cultures, the arrows are released from either the left or right side of the bow, and this affects the hand grip and position of the bow. In Arab archery, Turkish archery, and Japanese archery. The arrows are released from the right hand side of the bow, and this affects construction of the bow. In western archery, the arrow is usually released from the left hand side of the bow for a right-handed archer.
thumb|upright|Modern (takedown) recurve bow
Compound bows are designed to reduce the force required to hold the string at full draw, hence allowing the archer more time to aim with less muscular stress. Most compound designs use cams or elliptical wheels on the ends of the limbs to achieve this. A typical let-off is anywhere from 65% to 80%. For example, a bow with 80% let-off only requires to hold at full draw. Up to 99% let-off is possible. The compound bow was invented by Holless Wilbur Allen in the 1960s (a US patent was filed in 1966 and granted in 1969) and it has become the most widely used type of bow for all forms of archery in North America.
Mechanically drawn bows typically have a stock or other mounting, such as the crossbow. Crossbows typically have shorter draw lengths compared to compound bows. Because of this, heavier draw weights are required to achieve the same energy transfer to the arrow. These mechanically drawn bows also have devices to hold the tension when the bow is fully drawn. They are not limited by the strength of a single archer and larger varieties have been used as siege engines.
Types of arrows and fletchings
The most common form of arrow consists of a shaft, with an arrowhead at the front end, and fletchings and a nock at the other end. Arrows across time and history have normally been carried in a container known as a quiver, which can take many different forms. Shafts of arrows are typically composed of solid wood, bamboo, fiberglass, aluminium alloy, carbon fiber, or composite materials. Wooden arrows are prone to warping. Fiberglass arrows are brittle, but can be produced to uniform specifications easily. Aluminium shafts were a very popular high-performance choice in the latter half of the 20th century, due to their straightness, lighter weight, and subsequently higher speed and flatter trajectories. Carbon fiber arrows became popular in the 1990s because they are very light, flying even faster and flatter than aluminium arrows. Today, the most popular arrows at tournaments and Olympic events are made of composite materials.
The arrowhead is the primary functional component of the arrow. Some arrows may simply use a sharpened tip of the solid shaft, but separate arrowheads are far more common, usually made from metal, stone, or other hard materials. The most commonly used forms are target points, field points, and broadheads, although there are also other types, such as bodkin, judo, and blunt heads.
thumb|Shield cut straight fletching – here the hen feathers are barred red
Fletching is traditionally made from bird feathers, but solid plastic vanes and thin sheet-like spin vanes are used. They are attached near the nock (rear) end of the arrow with thin double sided tape, glue, or, traditionally, sinew. The most common configuration in all cultures is three fletches, though as many as six have been used. Two makes the arrow unstable in flight. When the arrow is three-fletched, the fletches are equally spaced around the shaft, with one placed such that it is perpendicular to the bow when nocked on the string, though variations are seen with modern equipment, especially when using the modern spin vanes. This fletch is called the "index fletch" or "cock feather" (also known as "the odd vane out" or "the nocking vane"), and the others are sometimes called the "hen feathers". Commonly, the cock feather is of a different color. However, if archers are using fletching made of feather or similar material, they may use same color vanes, as different dyes can give varying stiffness to vanes, resulting in less precision. When an arrow is four-fletched, two opposing fletches are often cock feathers, and occasionally the fletches are not evenly spaced.
The fletching may be either parabolic cut (short feathers in a smooth parabolic curve) or shield cut (generally shaped like half of a narrow shield), and is often attached at an angle, known as helical fletching, to introduce a stabilizing spin to the arrow while in flight. Whether helical or straight fletched, when natural fletching (bird feathers) is used it is critical that all feathers come from the same side of the bird. Oversized fletchings can be used to accentuate drag and thus limit the range of the arrow significantly; these arrows are called flu-flus. Misplacement of fletchings can change the arrow's flight path dramatically.
Bowstring
Dacron and other modern materials offer high strength for their weight and are used on most modern bows. Linen and other traditional materials are still used on traditional bows. Several modern methods of making a bowstring exist, such as the 'endless loop' and 'Flemish twist'. Almost any fiber can be made into a bowstring. The author of Arab Archery suggests the hide of a young, emaciated camel. Njál's saga describes the refusal of a wife, Hallgerður, to cut her hair to make an emergency bowstring for her husband, Gunnar Hámundarson, who is then killed.
Protective equipment
thumb|A right-hand finger tab to protect the hand while the string is drawn
Most modern archers wear a bracer (also known as an arm-guard) to protect the inside of the bow arm from being hit by the string and prevent clothing from catching the bowstring. The bracer does not brace the arm; the word comes from the armoury term "brassard", meaning an armoured sleeve or badge. The Navajo people have developed highly ornamented bracers as non-functional items of adornment. Some archers (nearly all female archers) wear protection on their chests, called chestguards or plastrons. The myth of the Amazons was that they had one breast removed to solve this problem. Roger Ascham mentions one archer, presumably with an unusual shooting style, who wore a leather guard for his face.
The drawing digits are normally protected by a leather tab, glove, or thumb ring. A simple tab of leather is commonly used, as is a skeleton glove. Medieval Europeans probably used a complete leather glove.
Eurasiatic archers who used the thumb or Mongolian draw protected their thumbs, usually with leather according to the author of Arab Archery, but also with special rings of various hard materials. Many surviving Turkish and Chinese examples are works of considerable art. Some are so highly ornamented that the users could not have used them to loose an arrow. Possibly these were items of personal adornment, and hence value, remaining extant whilst leather had virtually no intrinsic value and would also deteriorate with time. In traditional Japanese archery a special glove is used that has a ridge to assist in drawing the string.
Release aids
thumb|right|Release aid
A release aid is a mechanical device designed to give a crisp and precise loose of arrows from a compound bow. In the most commonly used, the string is released by a finger-operated trigger mechanism, held in the archer's hand or attached to their wrist. In another type, known as a back-tension release, the string is automatically released when drawn to a pre-determined tension.
Stabilizers
Stabilizers are mounted at various points on the bow. Common with competitive archery equipment are special brackets that allow multiple stabilizers to be mounted at various angles to fine tune the bow's balance.
Stabilizers aid in aiming by improving the balance of the bow. Sights, quivers, rests, and design of the riser (the central, non-bending part of the bow) make one side of the bow heavier. One purpose of stabilizers are to offset these forces. A reflex riser design will cause the top limb to lean towards the shooter. In this case a heavier front stabilizer is desired to offset this action. A deflex riser design has the opposite effect and a lighter front stabilizer may be used.
Stabilizers can reduce noise and vibration. These energies are absorbed by viscoelastic polymers, gels, powders, and other materials used to build stabilizers.
Stabilizers improve the forgiveness and accuracy by increasing the moment of inertia of the bow to resist movement during the shooting process. Lightweight carbon stabilizers with weighted ends are desirable because they improve the moment of inertia while minimizing the weight added.
Shooting technique and form
thumb|left|upright|Historical reenactment of medieval archery
thumb|Chief Master Sgt. Kevin Peterson demonstrates safe archery techniques while aiming an arrow at a target on the 28th Force Support Squadron trap and skeet range at Ellsworth Air Force Base, S.D., 11 October 2012.
The standard convention on teaching archery is to hold the bow depending upon eye dominance. (One exception is in modern kyūdō where all archers are trained to hold the bow in the left hand.) Therefore, if one is right-eye dominant, they would hold the bow in the left hand and draw the string with the right hand. However, not everyone agrees with this line of thought. A smoother, and more fluid release of the string will produce the most consistently repeatable shots, and therefore may provide greater accuracy of the arrow flight. Some believe that the hand with the greatest dexterity should therefore be the hand that draws and releases the string. Either eye can be used for aiming, and the less dominant eye can be trained over time to become more effective for use. To assist with this, an eye patch can be temporarily worn over the dominant eye.
The hand that holds the bow is referred to as the bow hand and its arm the bow arm. The opposite hand is called the drawing hand or string hand. Terms such as bow shoulder or string elbow follow the same convention.
If shooting according to eye dominance, right-eye-dominant archers shooting conventionally hold the bow with their left hand. If shooting according to hand dexterity, the archer draws the string with the hand that possesses the greatest dexterity, regardless of eye dominance.
Modern form
To shoot an arrow, an archer first assumes the correct stance. The body should be at or nearly perpendicular to the target and the shooting line, with the feet placed shoulder-width apart. As an archer progresses from beginner to a more advanced level other stances such as the "open stance" or the "closed stance" may be used, although many choose to stick with a "neutral stance". Each archer has a particular preference, but mostly this term indicates that the leg furthest from the shooting line is a half to a whole foot-length from the other foot, on the ground.
To load, the bow is pointed toward the ground, tipped slightly clockwise of vertical (for a right handed shooter) and the shaft of the arrow is placed on the arrow rest or shelf. The back of the arrow is attached to the bowstring with the nock (a small locking groove located at the proximal end of the arrow). This step is called "nocking the arrow". Typical arrows with three vanes should be oriented such that a single vane, the "cock feather", is pointing away from the bow, to improve the clearance of the arrow as it passes the arrow rest.
A compound bow is fitted with a special type of arrow rest, known as a launcher, and the arrow is usually loaded with the cock feather/vane pointed either up, or down, depending upon the type of launcher being used.
The bowstring and arrow are held with three fingers, or with a mechanical arrow release. Most commonly, for finger shooters, the index finger is placed above the arrow and the next two fingers below, although several other techniques have their adherents around the world, involving three fingers below the arrow, or an arrow pinching technique. Instinctive shooting is a technique eschewing sights and is often preferred by traditional archers (shooters of longbows and recurves). In either the split finger or three finger under case, the string is usually placed in the first or second joint, or else on the pads of the fingers. When using a mechanical release aid, the release is hooked onto the D-loop.
Another type of string hold, used on traditional bows, is the type favoured by the Mongol warriors, known as the "thumb release", style. This involves using the thumb to draw the string, with the fingers curling around the thumb to add some support. To release the string, the fingers are opened out and the thumb relaxes to allow the string to slide off the thumb. When using this type of release, the arrow should rest on the same side of the bow as the drawing hand i.e. Left hand draw = arrow on left side of bow.
The archer then raises the bow and draws the string, with varying alignments for vertical versus slightly canted bow positions. This is often one fluid motion for shooters of recurves and longbows, which tend to vary from archer to archer. Compound shooters often experience a slight jerk during the drawback, at around the last , where the draw weight is at its maximum—before relaxing into a comfortable stable full draw position. The archer draws the string hand towards the face, where it should rest lightly at a fixed anchor point. This point is consistent from shot to shot, and is usually at the corner of the mouth, on the chin, to the cheek, or to the ear, depending on preferred shooting style. The archer holds the bow arm outwards, toward the target. The elbow of this arm should be rotated so that the inner elbow is perpendicular to the ground, though archers with hyper extendable elbows tend to angle the inner elbow toward the ground, as exemplified by the Korean archer Jang Yong-Ho. This keeps the forearm out of the way of the bowstring.
In modern form, the archer stands erect, forming a "T". The archer's lower trapezius muscles are used to pull the arrow to the anchor point. Some modern recurve bows are equipped with a mechanical device, called a clicker, which produces a clicking sound when the archer reaches the correct draw length. , traditional English Longbow shooters step "into the bow", exerting force with both the bow arm and the string hand arm simultaneously, especially when using bows having draw weights from to over . Heavily stacked traditional bows (recurves, long bows, and the like) are released immediately upon reaching full draw at maximum weight, whereas compound bows reach their maximum weight around the last , dropping holding weight significantly at full draw. Compound bows are often held at full draw for a short time to achieve maximum accuracy.
The arrow is typically released by relaxing the fingers of the drawing hand (see bow draw), or triggering the mechanical release aid. Usually the release aims to keep the drawing arm rigid, the bow hand relaxed, and the arrow is moved back using the back muscles, as opposed to using just arm motions. An archer should also pay attention to the recoil or follow through of his or her body, as it may indicate problems with form (technique) that affect accuracy.
Aiming methods
thumb|upright|From Hokusai Manga, 1817
There are two main forms of aiming in archery: using a mechanical or fixed sight, or barebow.
Mechanical sights can be affixed to the bow to aid in aiming. They can be as simple as a pin, or may use optics with magnification. Modern compound bows usually also have a peep sight (rear sight) built into the string, which aids in a consistent anchor point, but this is not allowed for other bow types under World Archery. Modern compound bows automatically limit the draw length to give a consistent arrow velocity, while traditional bows allow great variation in draw length. Some bows use mechanical methods to make the draw length consistent. Barebow archers often use a sight picture, which includes the target, the bow, the hand, the arrow shaft and the arrow tip, as seen at the same time by the archer. With a fixed "anchor point" (where the string is brought to, or close to, the face), and a fully extended bow arm, successive shots taken with the sight picture in the same position fall on the same point. This lets the archer adjust aim with successive shots to achieve accuracy.
Modern archery equipment usually includes sights. Instinctive aiming is used by many archers who use traditional bows. The two most common forms of a non-mechanical release are split-finger and three-under. Split-finger aiming requires the archer to place the index finger above the nocked arrow, while the middle and ring fingers are both placed below. Three-under aiming places the index, middle, and ring fingers under the nocked arrow. This technique allows the archer to better look down the arrow since the back of the arrow is closer to the dominant eye, and is commonly called "gun barreling" (referring to common aiming techniques used with firearms).
When using short bows or shooting from horseback, it is difficult to use the sight picture. The archer may look at the target, but without including the weapon in the field of accurate view. Aiming then involves hand-eye coordination—which includes proprioception and motor-muscle memory, similar to that used when throwing a ball. With sufficient practice, such archers can normally achieve good practical accuracy for hunting or for war. Aiming without a sight picture may allow more rapid shooting, not however increasing accuracy.
Intuitive shooting
Intuitive shooting is a style of shooting that includes the barebow aiming method that relies heavily upon the subconscious mind, proprioception, and motor/muscle memory to make aiming adjustments; the term used to refer to a general category of archers who did not use a mechanical or fixed sight. In other words, it is shooting "by feel."
Gap shooting
Gap shooting is an aiming method used by instinctive shooters. It involves consciously focusing on the tip of the arrow while maintaining awareness of the target. The archer must adjust the arrow's trajectory by gauging the distance between the arrow tip and the target, ensuring accurate shots.
thumb|left|Snake Indians - testing bows, circa 1837 by Alfred Jacob Miller, the Walters Art Museum
Modern arrows are made to a specified 'spine', or stiffness rating, to maintain matched flexing and hence accuracy of aim. This flexing can be a desirable feature, since, when the spine of the shaft is matched to the acceleration of the bow(string), the arrow bends or flexes around the bow and any arrow-rest, and consequently the arrow, and fletchings, have an un-impeded flight. This feature is known as the archer's paradox. It maintains accuracy, for if part of the arrow struck a glancing blow on a part of the bow during discharge, some inconsistency would be present, and the excellent accuracy of modern equipment would not be achieved.
The accurate flight of an arrow depends on its fletchings. The arrow's manufacturer (a "fletcher") can arrange fletching to cause the arrow to rotate along its axis. This improves accuracy by evening pressure buildups that would otherwise cause the arrow to "plane" on the air in a random direction after shooting. Even with a carefully made arrow, the slightest imperfection or air movement causes some unbalanced turbulence in air flow. Consequently, rotation creates an equalization of such turbulence, which, overall, maintains the intended direction of flight i.e. accuracy. This rotation is not to be confused with the rapid gyroscopic rotation of a rifle bullet. Fletching that is not arranged to induce rotation still improves accuracy by causing a restoring drag any time the arrow tilts from its intended direction of travel.
The innovative aspect of the invention of the bow and arrow was the amount of power delivered to an extremely small area by the arrow. The huge ratio of length vs. cross sectional area, coupled with velocity, made the arrow more powerful than any other hand held weapon until firearms were invented. Arrows can spread or concentrate force, depending on the application. Practice arrows, for instance, have a blunt tip that spreads the force over a wider area to reduce the risk of injury or limit penetration. Arrows designed to pierce armor in the Middle Ages used a very narrow and sharp tip ("bodkinhead") to concentrate the force. Arrows used for hunting used a narrow tip ("broadhead") that widens further, to facilitate both penetration and a large wound.
Hunting
thumb|Hadza hunter-gatherer in Tanzania
thumb|upright|A modern compound hunting bow
Using archery to take game animals is known as "bow hunting". Bow hunting differs markedly from hunting with firearms, as distance between hunter and prey must be much shorter to ensure a humane kill. The skills and practices of bow hunting therefore emphasize very close approach to the prey, whether by still hunting, stalking, or waiting in a blind or tree stand. In many countries, including much of the United States, bow hunting for large and small game is legal. Bow hunters generally enjoy longer seasons than are allowed with other forms of hunting such as black powder, shotgun, or rifle. Usually, compound bows are used for large game hunting due to the relatively short time it takes to master them as opposed to the longbow or recurve bow. These compound bows may feature fiber optic sights, stabilizers, and other accessories designed to increase accuracy at longer distances. Using a bow and arrow to take fish is known as "bow fishing".
Modern competitive archery
Competitive archery involves shooting arrows at a target for accuracy from a set distance or distances. This is the most popular form of competitive archery worldwide and is called target archery. A form particularly popular in Europe and America is field archery, shot at targets generally set at various distances in a wooded setting. Competitive archery in the United States is governed by USA Archery and National Field Archery Association (NFAA), which also certifies instructors.
Para-archery is an adaptation of archery for athletes with a disability, governed by the World Archery (WA) and is one of the sports in the Summer Paralympic Games. There are also several other lesser-known and historical forms of archery, as well as archery novelty games and flight archery, where the aim is to shoot the greatest distance.
See also
Arash
Arab archery
Archery Association of India
3D archery
Bow and arrow
Bow draw
Bowfishing
Hunting
Bowhunting
Game (hunting)
Big–game hunting
Big five game
Mukkha
Clout archery
Field archery
Gungdo
Kyūdō
Kyūjutsu
Modern competitive archery
Mounted archery
Run archery
Sagittarii
Sagittarius
Sport of Kings
Target archery
Turkish archery
List of archery terms
List of notable archers
Crossbow
List of extreme and adventure sports
References
Further reading
Enea Bianchi, “Philosophies of Archery”, , in Popular Inquiry, vol.2, 2021, 22–37.
Ford, Horace (1887) The Theory and Practice of Archery London: Longmans, Green
Elmer, Robert P. (Robert Potter) (1917) American Archery; a Vade Mecum of the Art of Shooting with the Long Bow Columbus, OH: National Archery Association of the United States
Hansard, George Agar (1841) The Book of Archery: being the complete history and practice of the art, ancient and modern ... London: H. G. Bohn
Hargrove, Ely (1792) Anecdotes of Archery; from the earliest ages to the year 1791. Including an account of the most famous archers of ancient and modern times; with some curious particulars in the life of Robert Fitz-Ooth Earl of Huntington, vulgarly called Robin Hood .... York: printed for E. Hargrove, bookseller, Knaresbro' (later editions: York, 1845 and facsimile reprint, London: Tabard Press, 1970)
Heath, E. G. & Chiara, Vilma (1977) Brazilian Indian Archery: a preliminary ethno-toxological study of the archery of the Brazilian Indians. Manchester: Simon Archery Foundation
Johnes, Martin. Archery, romance and elite culture in England and Wales, c.1780–1840, 89, 193–208.
Klopsteg, Paul (1963) A Chapter in the Evolution of Archery in America Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Lake, Fred & Wright, Hal (1974) A Bibliography of Archery: an indexed catalogue of 5,000 articles, books, films, manuscripts, periodicals and theses on the use of the bow for hunting, war, and recreation, from the earliest times to the present day. Manchester: Simon Archery Foundation
Morse, Edward (1922) Additional notes on arrow release Salem, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum
Pope, Saxton (1925) Hunting with the Bow and Arrow New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons
Pope, Saxton (1918) Yahi Archery Berkeley: University of California Press
Thompson, Maurice (1878) The Witchery of Archery: a Complete Manual of Archery New York: Scribner & Sons
FITA-Style Archery Targets Bow and Arrow Targets
The Traditional Bowyer's Bible. [Azle, TX]: Bois d'Arc Press; New York, N.Y.: Distributed by Lyons & Burford
The Traditional Bowyer's Bible; Volume 1. 1992.
The Traditional Bowyer's Bible; Volume 2. 1992.
The Traditional Bowyer's Bible; Volume 3. 1994. ;
The Traditional Bowyer's Bible; Volume 4. The Lyons Press, 2008.
External links
Sportsue at Archery Topic
Paralympic archery at IPC web site
USA Archery is the National Governing Body
Category:Competition
Category:Hunting methods
Category:Precision sports
Category:Summer Olympic sports
Category:Medieval archery | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archery | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.931218 |
2009 | Alvar Aalto | | birth_place = Kuortane, Grand Duchy of Finland
| death_date
| death_place = Helsinki, Finland
| parents | spouse
*
}}
| children = 2
| practice | significant_buildings Paimio Sanatorium<br />Säynätsalo Town Hall<br />Viipuri Library<br />Villa Mairea<br />Baker House<br />Finlandia Hall
| significant_projects = Helsinki City Centre
| significant_design = Savoy Vase<br />Paimio Chair
| awards = Prince Eugen Medal <br />RIBA Gold Medal <br />AIA Gold Medal
| alma_mater = Helsinki University of Technology
| signature = Aaltofirma.jpg
}}
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto (; 3 February 1898 – 11 May 1976) was a Finnish architect and designer. His work includes architecture, furniture, textiles and glassware, as well as sculptures and paintings. He never regarded himself as an artist, seeing painting and sculpture as "branches of the tree whose trunk is architecture." Aalto's early career ran in parallel with the rapid economic growth and industrialization of Finland during the first half of the 20th century. Many of his clients were industrialists, among them the Ahlström-Gullichsen family, who became his patrons. The span of his career, from the 1920s to the 1970s, is reflected in the styles of his work, ranging from Nordic Classicism of the early work, to a rational International Style Modernism during the 1930s to a more organic modernist style from the 1940s onwards.
His architectural work, throughout his entire career, is characterized by a concern for design as Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art in which he, together with his first wife Aino Aalto, would design not only the building but the interior surfaces, furniture, lamps, and glassware as well. His furniture designs are considered Scandinavian Modern, an aesthetic reflected in their elegant simplification and concern for materials, especially wood, but also in Aalto's technical innovations, which led him to receiving patents for various manufacturing processes, such as those used to produce bent wood. As a designer he is celebrated as a forerunner of midcentury modernism in design; his invention of bent plywood furniture had a profound impact on the aesthetics of Charles and Ray Eames and George Nelson. The Alvar Aalto Museum, designed by Aalto himself, is located in what is regarded as his home city, Jyväskylä.
The entry for him on the Museum of Modern Art website notes his "remarkable synthesis of romantic and pragmatic ideas," adding
<blockquote>His work reflects a deep desire to humanize architecture through an unorthodox handling of form and materials that was both rational and intuitive. Influenced by the so-called International Style modernism (or functionalism, as it was called in Finland) and his acquaintance with leading modernists in Europe, including Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund and many of the artists and architects associated with the Bauhaus, Aalto created designs that had a profound impact on the trajectory of modernism before and after World War II.</blockquote>BiographyLife
in the 1930s]]
University (1955)]]
(1958–62)]]
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was born in Kuortane, Finland. His father, Johan Henrik Aalto, was a Finnish-speaking land-surveyor and his mother, Selma Matilda "Selly" (née Hackstedt) was a Swedish-speaking postmistress. When Aalto was 5 years old, the family moved to Alajärvi, and from there to Jyväskylä in Central Finland.
He studied at the Jyväskylä Lyceum school, where he completed his basic education in 1916, and took drawing lessons from local artist Jonas Heiska. In 1916, he then enrolled to study architecture at the Helsinki University of Technology. His studies were interrupted by the Finnish Civil War, in which he fought. He fought on the side of the White Army and fought at the Battle of Länkipohja and the Battle of Tampere.
He built his first piece of architecture while a student; a house for his parents at Alajärvi.
In 1920, while a student, Aalto made his first trip abroad, travelling via Stockholm to Gothenburg, where he briefly found work with architect Arvid Bjerke. In 1922, he accomplished his first independent piece at the Industrial Exposition in Tampere. The latter trip together sealed an intellectual bond with the culture of the Mediterranean region that remained important to Aalto for life.
On their return they continued with several local projects, notably the Jyväskylä Worker's Club, which incorporated a number of motifs which they had studied during their trip, most notably the decorations of the Festival hall modelled on the Rucellai Sepulchre in Florence by Leon Battista Alberti. After winning the architecture competition for the Southwest Finland Agricultural Cooperative building in 1927, the Aaltos moved their office to Turku. They had made contact with the city's most progressive architect, Erik Bryggman before moving. They began collaborating with him, most notably on the Turku Fair of 1928–29. Aalto's biographer, Göran Schildt, claimed that Bryggman was the only architect with whom Aalto cooperated as an equal. With an increasing quantity of work in the Finnish capital, the Aaltos' office moved again in 1933 to Helsinki.
The Aaltos designed and built a joint house-office (1935–36) for themselves in Munkkiniemi, Helsinki, but later (1954–56) had a purpose-built office erected in the same neighbourhood – now the former is a "home museum" and the latter the premises of the Alvar Aalto Academy. In 1926, the young Aaltos designed and had built for themselves a summer cottage in Alajärvi, Villa Flora. Alvar Aalto died on 11 May 1976, in Helsinki, and is buried in the Hietaniemi cemetery in Helsinki. Elissa Aalto became the director of the practice, running the office from 1976 to 1994. In 1978, the Museum of Finnish Architecture in Helsinki arranged a major exhibition of Aalto's works.
Architecture career
Early career: classicism
Although he is sometimes regarded as among the first and most influential architects of Nordic modernism, closer examination reveals that Aalto (while a pioneer in Finland) closely followed and had personal contacts with other pioneers in Sweden, in particular Gunnar Asplund and Sven Markelius. What they and many others of that generation in the Nordic countries shared was a classical education and an approach to classical architecture that historians now call Nordic Classicism. It was a style that had been a reaction to the previous dominant style of National Romanticism before moving, in the late 1920s, towards Modernism.
Upon returning to Jyväskylä in 1923 to establish his own architect's office, Aalto designed several single-family homes designed in the style of Nordic Classicism. For example, the manor-like house for his mother's cousin Terho Manner in Töysa (1923), a summer villa for the Jyväskylä chief constable (also from 1923) and the Alatalo farmhouse in Tarvaala (1924). During this period he completed his first public buildings, the Jyväskylä Workers' Club in 1925, the Jyväskylä Defence Corps Building in 1926 and the Seinäjoki Civil Guard House building in 1924–29. He entered several architectural competitions for prestigious state public buildings, in Finland and abroad. This included two competitions for the Finnish Parliament building in 1923 and 1924, the extension to the University of Helsinki in 1931, and the building to house the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1926–27.
Aalto's first church design to be completed, Muurame church, illustrates his transition from Nordic Classicism to Functionalism.
This was the period when Aalto was most prolific in his writings, with articles for professional journals and newspapers. Among his most well-known essays from this period are "Urban culture" (1924), "Temple baths on Jyväskylä ridge" (1925), "Abbé Coignard's sermon" (1925), and "From doorstep to living room" (1926).
in Noormarkku]]
on the Charles River]]
(now Aalto University) in Otaniemi, Finland (1949–66)]]
(1958–62)]]
(1962–71)]]
opera house in Essen, Germany]]
Early career: functionalism
The shift in Aalto's design approach from classicism to modernism is epitomised by the Viipuri Library in Vyborg (1927–35), which went through a transformation from an originally classical competition entry proposal to the completed high-modernist building. His humanistic approach is in full evidence in the library: the interior displays natural materials, warm colours, and undulating lines. Due to problems related to financing, compounded by a change of site, the Viipuri Library project lasted eight years. During that time, Aalto designed the Standard Apartment Building (1928–29) in Turku, the Turun Sanomat Building (1929–30), and the Paimio Sanatorium (1929–32), which he designed in collaboration with his first wife Aino Aalto. A number of factors contributed to Aalto's shift towards modernism: his increased familiarity with international trends, facilitated by his travels throughout Europe; the opportunity to experiment with concrete prefabrication in the Standard Apartment Building; the cutting-edge Le Corbusier-inspired formal language of the Turun Sanomat Building; and Aalto's application of both in the Paimio Sanatorium and in the ongoing design for the library. Although the Turun Sanomat Building and Paimio Sanatorium are comparatively pure modernist works, they carried the seeds of his questioning of such an orthodox modernist approach and a move to a more daring, synthetic attitude. It has been pointed out that the planning principle for Paimio Sanatorium – the splayed wings – was indebted to the Zonnestraal Sanatorium (1925–31) by Jan Duiker, which Aalto visited while it was under construction. While these early Functionalist bear hallmarks of influences from Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and other key modernist figures of central Europe, Aalto nevertheless started to show his individuality in a departure from such norms with the introduction of organic references.
Through Sven Markelius, Aalto became a member of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), attending the second congress in Frankfurt in 1929 and the fourth congress in Athens in 1933, where he established a close friendship with László Moholy-Nagy, Sigfried Giedion, and Philip Morton Shand. It was during this time that he closely followed the work of the main force driving the new modernism, Le Corbusier, visiting him in his Paris office several times in the following years.
It was not until the completion of the Paimio Sanatorium (1932) and Viipuri Library (1935) that Aalto first achieved world attention in architecture. His reputation grew in the US following the invitation to hold a retrospective exhibition of his works at MOMA in New York in 1938. (This was his first visit to the States.) The exhibition, which later went on a 12-city tour of the country, was a landmark: Aalto was the second-ever architect – after Le Corbusier – to have a solo exhibition at the museum. His reputation grew in the US following the critical reception of his design for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair, described by Frank Lloyd Wright as a "work of genius". It could be said that Aalto's international reputation was sealed with his inclusion in the second edition of Sigfried Giedion's influential book on Modernist architecture, Space, Time, and Architecture: The growth of a new tradition (1949), in which Aalto received more attention than any other Modernist architect, including Le Corbusier. In his analysis of Aalto, Giedion gave primacy to qualities that depart from direct functionality, such as mood, atmosphere, intensity of life, and even national characteristics, declaring that "Finland is with Aalto wherever he goes."Mid career: experimentationDuring the 1930s Alvar spent some time experimenting with laminated wood, sculpture and abstract relief, characterized by irregular curved forms. Utilizing this knowledge, he was able to solve technical problems concerning the flexibility of wood while at the same time working out spatial issues in his designs.
His increased fame led to offers and commissions outside Finland. In 1941, he accepted an invitation as a visiting professor to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US. During the Second World War, he returned to Finland to direct the Reconstruction Office. After the war, he returned to MIT, where he designed the student dormitory Baker House, completed in 1949. The dormitory flanked the Charles River, and its undulating form provided maximum view and ventilation for each resident. This was the first building of Aalto's redbrick period. Originally used in Baker House to signify the Ivy League university tradition, Aalto went on to use it in a number of key buildings after his return to Finland, most notably in several of the buildings in the new Helsinki University of Technology campus (starting in 1950), Säynätsalo Town Hall (1952), Helsinki Pensions Institute (1954), Helsinki House of Culture (1958), as well as in his own summer house, the Experimental House in Muuratsalo (1957).
In the 1950s Aalto immersed himself in sculpting, exploring wood, bronze, marble, and mixed media. Among the notable works from this period is his 1960 memorial to the Battle of Suomussalmi. Located on the battlefield, it consists of a leaning bronze pillar on a pedestal. Aalto became the first furniture designer to use the cantilever principle in chair designs using wood. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1957. He also was a member of the Academy of Finland, and was its president from 1963 to 1968. From 1925 to 1956 he was a member of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne. In 1960 he received an honorary doctorate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Works
Aalto's career spans the changes in style from (Nordic Classicism) to purist International Style Modernism to a more personal, synthetic, and idiosyncratic Modernism. Aalto's wide field of design activity ranges from large-scale projects such as city planning and architecture to more intimate, human-scale work in interior design, furniture and glassware design, and painting. It has been estimated that during his entire career Aalto designed over 500 individual buildings, approximately 300 of which were built. The vast majority of them are in Finland. He also has a few buildings in France, Germany, Italy, and the US.
Aalto's work with wood was influenced by early Scandinavian architects. His experiments and bold departures from aesthetic norms brought attention to his ability to make wood do things not previously done. His techniques in the way he cut beech wood, for example, and his ability to use plywood as a structural element while at the same time exploiting its aesthetic properties, were at once technically innovative and artistically inspired. Other examples of his boundary-pushing sensibility include the vertical placement of rough-hewn logs at his pavilion at the Lapua expo, a design element that evoked a medieval barricade. At the orchestra platform at Turku and the Paris expo at the World Fair, he used varying sizes and shapes of planks. Also at Paris (and at Villa Mairea), he utilized birch boards in a vertical arrangement. His Vyborg Library, built in what was then Viipuri (it became Vyborg after Soviet annexation in 1944), is acclaimed for its stunning ceiling, with its undulating waves of red-hearted pine (which grows in the region ). In his roofing, he created massive spans (155-foot at the covered stadium at Otaniemi), all without tie rods. In his stairway at Villa Mairea, he evokes the feeling of a natural forest by binding beech wood with withes into columns.
Aalto claimed that his paintings were not made as individual artworks but as part of his process of architectural design, and many of his small-scale "sculptural" experiments with wood led to later larger architectural details and forms. These experiments also led to a number of patents: for example, he invented a new form of laminated bent-plywood furniture in 1932 (which was patented in 1933).
* 1924–1926: Seinäjoki Civil Guard House, Seinäjoki, Finland
* 1924–1928: Municipal hospital, Alajärvi, Finland
* 1926–1929: Defence Corps Building, Jyväskylä, Finland
* 1927–1928: South-West Finland Agricultural Cooperative building, Turku, Finland
* 1927–1935: Municipal library, Viipuri, Finland (now Vyborg, Russia)
* 1928–1929, 1930: Turun Sanomat newspaper offices, Turku, Finland
* 1928–1933: Paimio Sanatorium, Tuberculosis sanatorium and staff housing, Paimio, Finland
* 1931: Toppila paper mill in Oulu, Finland
* 1931: Central University Hospital, Zagreb, Croatia (former Yugoslavia)
* 1932: Villa Tammekann, Tartu, Estonia
* 1934: Corso theatre, restaurant interior, Zürich, Switzerland
* 1936–1939: Ahlstrom Sunila Pulp Mill, Housing, and Town Plan, Kotka, Finland
* 1937–1939: Villa Mairea, Noormarkku, Finland
* 1939: Finnish Pavilion, at the 1939 New York World's Fair
* 1945: Sawmill at Varkaus, Finland
* 1947–1948: Baker House, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
* 1953: The Experimental House, Muuratsalo, Finland
* 1953–1955: Rautatalo office building, Helsinki, Finland
* 1956–1958: Home for Louis Carré, Bazoches, France
* 1956–1958: Church of the Three Crosses, Vuoksenniska, Imatra, Finland
* 1957–1967: city center (library, theatre, City Hall, Lakeuden Risti Church and central administrative buildings), Seinäjoki, Finland
* 1958: Post and telegraph office, Baghdad, Iraq
* 1958–1972: KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Aalborg, Denmark
* 1959–1962: Community Centre, Wolfsburg, Germany
* 1959–1962: Church of the Holy Ghost (Heilig-Geist-Gemeindezentrum), Wolfsburg, Germany
* 1959–1962: Enso-Gutzeit headquarters, Helsinki, Finland
* 1961–1975: Lappia Hall performing arts and conference venue, Rovaniemi, Finland; part of the city's 'Aalto Centre'
* 1962: Aalto-Hochhaus, Bremen, Germany
* 1964–1965: Kaufmann Conference Center at the Institute of International Education, New York City, U.S.
* 1963–1968: Church of St Stephen (Stephanus Kirche), Detmerode, Wolfsburg, Germany
* 1963–1965: Building for Västmanland-Dala nation, Uppsala, Sweden
* 1967–1970: Library at the Mount Angel Abbey, St. Benedict, Salem, Oregon, U.S.
Critique of Aalto's architecture
As mentioned above, Aalto's international reputation was sealed with his inclusion in the second edition of Sigfried Giedion's influential book on Modernist architecture, Space, Time and Architecture: The growth of a new tradition (1949), in which Aalto received more attention than any other Modernist architect, including Le Corbusier. In his analysis of Aalto, Giedion gave primacy to qualities that depart from direct functionality, such as mood, atmosphere, intensity of life and even national characteristics, declaring that "Finland is with Aalto wherever he goes."
More recently, however, some architecture critics and historians have questioned Aalto's influence on the historical canon. The Italian Marxist architecture historians Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co contend that Aalto's "historical significance has perhaps been rather exaggerated; with Aalto we are outside of the great themes that have made the course of contemporary architecture so dramatic. The qualities of his works have a meaning only as masterful distractions, not subject to reproduction outside the remote reality [sic] in which they have their roots." At the heart of their critique was the perception of Aalto's work as unsuited to the urban context: "Essentially, his architecture is not appropriate to urban typologies."
At the other end of the political spectrum (though similarly concerned with the appropriateness of Aalto's formal language), the American cultural theorist and architectural historian Charles Jencks singled out his Pensions Institute as an example of what he termed the architect's "soft paternalism": "Conceived as a fragmented mass to break up the feeling of bureaucracy, it succeeds all too well in being humane and killing the pensioner with kindness. The forms are familiar – red brick and ribbon-strip windows broken by copper and bronze elements – all carried through with a literal-mindedness that borders on the soporific."
During his lifetime, Aalto faced criticisms from his fellow architects in Finland, most notably Kirmo Mikkola and Juhani Pallasmaa. By the last decade of Aalto's life, his work was seen as unfashionably individualistic at a time when the opposing tendencies of rationalism and constructivism – often championed under left-wing politics – argued for anonymous, aggressively non-aesthetic architecture. Of Aalto's late works, Mikkola wrote, "Aalto has moved to [a] baroque line..."Memorials
Aalto has been commemorated in a number of ways:
* Alvar Aalto is the eponym of the Alvar Aalto Medal, an international architecture award.
* Aalto was featured in the 50 mk note in the last series of the Finnish markka (before its replacement by the Euro in 2002).
* The centenary of Aalto's birth in 1998 was marked in Finland not only by several books and exhibitions, but also by the promotion of specially bottled red and white Aalto Wine and a specially designed cupcake.
* In 1976, the year of his death, Aalto was commemorated on a Finnish postage stamp.
* Piazza Alvar Aalto, a square named after Aalto, can be found in the Porta Nuova business district of Milan, Italy.
* Aalto University, a Finnish university formed by merging Helsinki University of Technology, Helsinki School of Economics and TaiK in 2010, is named after Alvar Aalto.
* An Alvar Aallon katu (Alvar Aalto Street) can be found in five different Finnish cities: Helsinki, Jyväskylä, Oulu, Kotka and Seinäjoki.
* In 2017, the Alvar Aalto Museum launched Alvar Aalto Cities, that is, a network of cities containing buildings by Alvar Aalto. The objective of the network is to increase awareness of Aalto's work both in Finland and abroad. It is hoped that by combining forces on communications and marketing, the visibility and accessibility of exhibitions, tourist attractions and events will be improved. To date, the network city members are: Aalborg, Alajärvi, Espoo, Eura, Hamina, Helsinki, Imatra, Jyväskylä, Järvenpää, Kotka, Kouvola, Lahti, Oulu, Paimio, Pori, Raseborg, Rovaniemi, Seinäjoki, Turku, Vantaa and Varkaus. It is estimated that in total there would be 40 cities worldwide that would qualify as an Alvar Aalto City.See also
*Architecture of Finland
*Aino Aalto
*Elissa Aalto
References
Notes
Sources
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Further reading
Göran Schildt has written and edited many books on Aalto, the most well-known being the three-volume biography, usually referred to as the definitive biography on Aalto.
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* Jormakka, Kari; Gargus, Jacqueline; Graf, Douglas The Use and Abuse of Paper. Essays on Alvar Aalto. Datutop 20: Tampere 1999.
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Aalto research
* The extensive archives of Alvar Aalto are nowadays kept at the [https://web.archive.org/web/20160118041047/http://www.alvaraalto.fi/museum/ Alvar Aalto Museum], Jyväskylä, Finland. Material is also available from the former offices of Aalto, at Tiilimäki 20, Helsinki, nowadays the headquarters of the [http://www.alvaraalto.fi/ Alvar Aalto Foundation.]
* Since 1995 the Alvar Aalto Museum and Aalto Academy has published a journal, [https://web.archive.org/web/20061003220111/http://www.alvaraalto.fi/ptah/ Ptah], which is devoted not only to Aalto scholarship but also to architecture generally as well as theory, design and art.
External links
Archives
* [http://www.alvaraalto.fi/ Alvar Aalto Foundation] Custodian of Aalto's architectural drawings and writings.
* [http://findingaids.cul.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-a/ldpd_6322394/ Institute of International Education, Kaufmann Conference Rooms architectural drawings and papers, 1961–1966].[http://library.columbia.edu/locations/avery/da.html/ Held by the Department of Drawings & Archives], [http://library.columbia.edu/locations/avery.html/ Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University].
Resources
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* [http://www.finnishdesign.com/finnish-designers/alvar-aalto Alvar Aalto biography] at FinnishDesign.com
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20090312081635/http://www.short-biographies.com/biographies/AlvarAalto.html Short Biographies: Alvar Aalto]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20061003221147/http://www.alvaraalto.fi/alvar/biblio.htm Aalto bibliography] – From the official site
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20071021021501/http://www.designdictionary.co.uk/en/aalto.htm Alvar Aalto – Design Dictionary] Illustrated article about Alvar Aalto
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20040603124907/http://www.iespana.es/legislaciones/alvar_aalto.htm Alvar Aalto] Biography in Spanish about Alvar Aalto
* [https://archive.today/20121210041920/http://www.modernfurnitureclassics.com/index.php/main_page/editorial/title/Title%2015 Modern Furniture and the history of Moulded Plywood] Role played by Alvar Alto in the use of Moulded plywood for furniture.
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* [https://www.emptycanon.org/architect/59 Alvar Aalto on Empty Canon]
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* [https://archive.today/20130904020411/http://en.wikiartmap.com/view/32050/-/-/alvar_aalto.html Map of the Alvar Aalto works – Wikiartmap, the art map of the public space]
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Catalogs
* [http://www.artek.fi Artek.fi], Aalto furniture; company founded by Aalto.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20070928112116/http://www.iittala.com/web/iittalacom.nsf/vwsearchview_en?SearchView&LANGen&SearchOrder4&Query=%28aalto%29 Alvar Aalto glassware], iittala.com
* [http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/1998/aalto/ Between Humanism and Materialism] New York Museum of Modern Art exhibit site. Contains an especially useful timeline of his life and career.
Buildings and reviews
* [http://www.checkonsite.com/browse/architect/featured-architects/alvar-aalto/ Checkonsite.com] – Alvar Aalto architecture guide.
* [http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/architecture/story/0,,2035974,00.html "Ahead of the curve"] The Guardian – Fiona MacCarthy recalls a shared lunch of smoked reindeer and schnapps in his elegant Helsinki restaurant
* [http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/aalto/aalto.html Baker House]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20080628205605/http://www.nordjyllandskunstmuseum.dk/Default.aspx?ID=656 North Jutland Museum]
* [https://archive.today/20130111165200/http://puredesign.it/mygallery/list.php?exhibition10&langeng S. Maria Assunta – Riola BO Italy]
Category:1898 births
Category:1976 deaths
Category:People from Kuortane
Category:People from Vaasa Province (Grand Duchy of Finland)
Category:People of the Finnish Civil War (White side)
Category:20th-century Finnish architects
Category:Finnish furniture designers
Category:Finnish industrial designers
Category:Modernist architects
Category:International style architects
Category:Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne members
Category:Modernist architecture in Finland
Category:Recipients of the Royal Gold Medal
Category:Aalto University alumni
Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Category:Members of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
Category:Recipients of the Prince Eugen Medal
Category:Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
Category:Burials at Hietaniemi Cemetery
Category:Recipients of the AIA Gold Medal
Category:Honorary Fellows of the American Institute of Architects | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvar_Aalto | 2025-04-05T18:25:52.995578 |
2011 | Comparison of American and British English | The English language was introduced to the Americas by the arrival of the English, beginning in the late 16th century. The language also spread to numerous other parts of the world as a result of British trade and settlement and the spread of the former British Empire, which, by 1921, included 470–570 million people, about a quarter of the world's population. In England, Wales, Ireland and especially parts of Scotland there are differing varieties of the English language, so the term 'British English' is an oversimplification. Likewise, spoken American English varies widely across the country. Written forms of British and American English as found in newspapers and textbooks vary little in their essential features, with only occasional noticeable differences.
Over the past 400 years, the forms of the language used in the Americas—especially in the United States—and that used in the United Kingdom have diverged in a few minor ways, leading to the versions now often referred to as American English and British English. Differences between the two include pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary (lexis), spelling, punctuation, idioms, and formatting of dates and numbers. However, the differences in written and most spoken grammar structure tend to be much fewer than in other aspects of the language in terms of mutual intelligibility. A few words have completely different meanings in the two versions or are even unknown or not used in one of the versions. One particular contribution towards integrating these differences came from Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary (published 1828) with the intention of unifying the disparate dialects across the United States and codifying North American vocabulary which was not present in British dictionaries.
This divergence between American English and British English has provided opportunities for humorous comment: e.g. in fiction George Bernard Shaw says that the United States and United Kingdom are "two countries divided by a common language"; and Oscar Wilde says that "We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, the language" (The Canterville Ghost, 1888). Henry Sweet incorrectly predicted in 1877 that within a century American English, Australian English and British English would be mutually unintelligible (A Handbook of Phonetics). Perhaps increased worldwide communication through radio, television, and the Internet has tended to reduce regional variation. This can lead to some variations becoming extinct (for instance the wireless being progressively superseded by the radio) or the acceptance of wide variations as "perfectly good English" everywhere.
Although spoken American and British English are generally mutually intelligible, there are occasional differences which may cause embarrassment—for example, in American English a rubber is usually interpreted as a condom rather than an eraser.
Word derivation and compounds
* Directional suffix -ward(s): British forwards, towards, rightwards, etc.; American forward, toward, rightward. In both varieties distribution varies somewhat: afterwards, towards, and backwards are not unusual in America; while in the United Kingdom upward and rightward are the more common options, as is forward, which is standard in phrasal verbs such as look forward to. The forms with -s may be used as adverbs (or preposition towards) but rarely as adjectives: in the UK, as in America, one says "an upward motion". The Oxford English Dictionary in 1897 suggested a semantic distinction for adverbs, with -wards having a more definite directional sense than -ward; subsequent authorities such as Fowler have disputed this contention.
* American English (AmE) freely adds the suffix -s to day, night, evening, weekend, Monday, etc. to form adverbs denoting repeated or customary action: I used to stay out evenings; the library is closed on Saturdays. This usage has its roots in Old English but many of these constructions are now regarded as American (for example, the OED labels nights "now chiefly N. Amer. colloq." in constructions such as to sleep nights, but to work nights is standard in British English).
* In British English (BrE), the agentive -er suffix is commonly attached to football to refer to one who plays the sport (also cricket; often netball; occasionally basketball and volleyball). AmE usually uses football player. Where the sport's name is usable as a verb, the suffixation is standard in both varieties: for example, golfer, bowler (in ten-pin bowling and in lawn bowls), and shooter. AmE appears sometimes to use the form baller as slang for a basketball player, as in the video game NBA Ballers. However, this is derived from slang use of to ball as a verb meaning to play basketball.
* English writers everywhere occasionally make new compound words from common phrases; for example, health care is now being replaced by healthcare on both sides of the Atlantic. However, AmE has made certain words in this fashion that are still treated as phrases in BrE.<!--example?-->
* In compound nouns of the form <verb><noun>, sometimes AmE prefers the bare infinitive where BrE prefers the gerund. Examples include (AmE first): jump rope/skipping rope; racecar/racing car; rowboat/rowing boat; sailboat/sailing boat; file cabinet/filing cabinet; dial tone/dialling tone; drainboard/draining board.<!-- the use of "jump rope" instead of "skipping rope" is much more complex than this rather simplistic explanation makes clear... not to mention that the actual British equivalent is "jumping" (not "skipping") rope, because "to jump" is different from "to skip" -->
* Generally AmE has a tendency to drop inflectional suffixes, thus preferring clipped forms: compare cookbook v. cookery book; Smith, age 40 v. Smith, aged 40; skim milk v. skimmed milk; dollhouse v. ''dolls' house; barber shop v. barber's shop.
* Singular attributives in one country may be plural in the other, and vice versa. For example, the UK has a drugs problem, while the United States has a drug problem (although the singular usage is also commonly heard in the UK); Americans read the sports section of a newspaper; the British are more likely to read the sport section. However, BrE maths is singular, like physics, just as AmE math is: both are abbreviations of mathematics.
* Some British English words come from French roots, while American English finds its words from other places, e.g. AmE eggplant and zucchini are aubergine and courgette'' in BrE.
* Similarly, American English has occasionally replaced more traditional English words with their Spanish counterparts. This is especially common in regions historically affected by Spanish settlement (such as the American Southwest and Florida) as well as other areas that have since experienced strong Hispanic migration (such as urban areas). Examples of these include grocery markets' preference in the U.S. for Spanish names such as cilantro and manzanilla over coriander and camomile respectively.
Pronunciation
Several pronunciation patterns contrast American and British English accents. The following lists a few common ones.
Most American accents are rhotic, preserving the historical phoneme in all contexts, while most British accents of England and Wales are non-rhotic, only preserving this sound before vowels but dropping it in all other contexts; thus, farmer rhymes with llama for Brits but not Americans. American accents tend to raise the tongue whenever the phoneme (in words like ) occurs before the consonants and . British accents distinguish the vowel sounds in , , and , while American accents merge the and vowels together, and about 50% of Americans additionally merge the vowel with the previous two, so for example odd, façade, and thawed can all rhyme. Many regional and informal accents of England, but none in North America, exhibit H-dropping. Words like bitter and bidder are pronounced the same in North America, but not England, due to a phenomenon called flapping involving and between vowels. British accents pronounce between vowels in other ways than Americans, including with a glottal stop or with an aspirated .
Vocabulary
The familiarity of speakers with words and phrases from different regions varies, and the difficulty of discerning an unfamiliar definition also depends on the context and the term. As expressions spread with telecommunications, they are often but not always understood as foreign to the speaker's dialect, and words from other dialects may carry connotations with regard to register, social status, origin, and intelligence.
Words and phrases with different meanings
Words such as bill and biscuit are used regularly in both AmE and BrE but can mean different things in each form. The word "bill" has several meanings, most of which are shared between AmE and BrE. However, in AmE "bill" often refers to a piece of paper money (as in a "dollar bill") which in BrE is more commonly referred to as a note. In AmE it can also refer to the visor of a cap, though this is by no means common. In AmE a biscuit (from the French "twice baked" as in biscotto) is a soft bready product that is known in BrE as a scone or a specifically hard, sweet biscuit. Meanwhile, a BrE biscuit incorporates both dessert biscuits and AmE cookies (from the Dutch 'little cake').
As chronicled by Winston Churchill, the opposite meanings of the verb to table created a misunderstanding during a meeting of the Allied forces; in BrE to table an item on an agenda means to open it up for discussion whereas in AmE, it means to remove it from discussion, or at times, to suspend or delay discussion; e.g. ''Let's table that topic for later. Similarly, the word moot (and moot point'') in BrE means 'remains open to debate' whereas in AmE, it means 'of no practical significance', irrelevant.
The word "football" in BrE refers to association football, also known in the US as soccer. In AmE, "football" means American football. The standard AmE term "soccer", a contraction of "association (football)", is actually of British origin, derived from the ratification of different codes of football in the 19th century, and was a fairly unremarkable usage (possibly marked for class) in BrE until later; in Britain it became perceived as an Americanism. Outside North America, particularly in sports news, American (or US branches of foreign) news agencies and media companies also use "football" to mean "soccer", especially in direct quotes.
Similarly, the word "hockey" in BrE often refers to field hockey and in AmE, "hockey" usually means ice hockey.
Words with completely different meanings are relatively few; most of the time there are either (1) words with one or more shared meanings and one or more meanings unique to one variety (for example, bathroom and toilet) or (2) words the meanings of which are actually common to both BrE and AmE but that show differences in frequency, connotation or denotation (for example, smart, clever, mad).
Some differences in usage and meaning can cause confusion or embarrassment. For example, the word fanny is a slang word for vulva in BrE but means buttocks in AmE, hence the AmE phrase fanny pack is bum bag in BrE. In AmE the word pissed means being annoyed or angry whereas in BrE it is a coarse word for being drunk (in both varieties, pissed off means irritated).
Similarly, in AmE the word pants is the common word for the BrE trousers and (in AmE) knickers refers to a variety of half-length trousers (though most AmE users would use the term "shorts" rather than knickers), while the majority of BrE speakers would understand pants to mean underpants and knickers to mean female underpants.
Sometimes the confusion is more subtle. In AmE the word quite used as a qualifier is generally a reinforcement, though it is somewhat uncommon in actual colloquial American use today and carries an air of formality: for example, "I'm quite hungry" is a very polite way to say "I'm very hungry". In BrE quite (which is much more common in conversation) may have this meaning, as in "quite right" or "quite mad", but it more commonly means "somewhat", so that in BrE "I'm quite hungry" can mean "I'm somewhat hungry". This divergence of use can lead to misunderstanding.
Different terms in different dialects
Most speakers of American English are aware of some uniquely British terms. It is generally very easy to guess what some words, such as BrE "driving licence", mean, the AmE equivalent being "driver's license". However, use of many other British words such as naff (slang but commonly used to mean "not very good") are unheard of in American English.
Speakers of BrE usually find it easy to understand most common AmE terms, such as "sidewalk (pavement or footpath)", "gas (gasoline/petrol)", "counterclockwise (anticlockwise)" or "elevator (lift)", thanks in large part to considerable exposure to American popular culture and literature. Terms heard less often, especially when rare or absent in American popular culture, such as "copacetic (very satisfactory)", are unlikely to be understood by most BrE speakers.
Other examples:
* In the UK the word whilst is commonly used as a conjunction (as an alternative to while, especially prevalent in some dialects). whilst tends to appear in non-temporal senses, as when used to point out a contrast. In AmE while is used in both contexts, with whilst being much more uncommon. Other words with the -st ending are also found even in AmE as much as in BrE, despite being old-fashioned or an affectation (e.g., unbeknownst, midst). Historically, the word against falls into this category also, and is standard in both varieties.
* In the UK generally the use of fall to mean "autumn" is obsolete. Although found often from Elizabethan literature to Victorian literature, the seasonal use of fall remains easily understandable to BrE speakers only because it is so commonly used that way in the U.S.
*In the UK the term period for a full stop is not used; in AmE the term full stop is rarely, if ever, used for the punctuation mark and commonly not understood whatsoever. For example, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said, "Terrorism is wrong, full stop", whereas in AmE, the equivalent sentence is "Terrorism is wrong, period." The use of period as an interjection meaning "and nothing else; end of discussion" is beginning to be used in colloquial British English, though sometimes without conscious reference to punctuation.
* In the US, the word line is used to refer to a line of people, vehicles, or other objects, while in the UK queue refers to that meaning. In the US, the word queue is most commonly used to refer to the computing sense of a data structure in which objects are added to one end and removed from the other. In the US, the equivalent terms to "queue up" and "wait in queue" are "line up" or "get in line" and "wait in line." The equivalent term to "jumping the queue" is "cutting in line."
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|soccer
|-
|quid (slang for one pound or multiple pounds)
|buck (slang for a dollar)
|}
Holiday greetings
It is increasingly common for Americans to say "Happy holidays", referring to all, or at least multiple, winter (in the Northern hemisphere) or summer (in the Southern hemisphere) holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, etc.) especially when one's religious observances are not known; the phrase is rarely heard in the UK. In the UK, the phrases "holiday season" and "holiday period" refer to the period in the summer when most people take time off from work, and travel; AmE does not use holiday in this sense, instead using vacation for recreational excursions.
In AmE, the prevailing Christmas greeting is "Merry Christmas", which is the traditional English Christmas greeting, as found in the English Christmas carol "We Wish You a Merry Christmas", and which appears several times in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. In BrE, "Happy Christmas" is a common alternative to "Merry Christmas".
Idiosyncratic differences
Omission of "and" and "on"
Generally in British English, numbers with a value over one hundred have the word "and" inserted before the last two digits. For example, the number 115, when written in words or spoken aloud, would be "One hundred and fifteen", in British English. In American English, numbers are typically said or written in words in the same way, however if the word "and" is omitted ("One hundred fifteen"), this is also considered acceptable (in BrE this would be considered grammatically incorrect).
Likewise, in the US, the word "on" can be left out when referring to events occurring on any particular day of the week. The US possibility "The Cowboys won the game Sunday" would have the equivalent in the UK of "Sheffield United won the match on Sunday."
Figures of speech
Both BrE and AmE use the expression "I couldn't care less", to mean that the speaker does not care at all. Some Americans use "I could care less" to mean the same thing. This variant is frequently derided as sloppy, as the literal meaning of the words is that the speaker does care to some extent.
In both areas, saying, "I don't mind" often means, "I'm not annoyed" (for example, by someone's smoking), while "I don't care" often means, "The matter is trivial or boring". However, in answering a question such as "Tea or coffee?", if either alternative is equally acceptable an American may answer, "I don't care", while a British person may answer, "I don't mind". Either can sound odd, confusing, or rude, to those accustomed to the other variant.
"To be all set in both BrE and AmE can mean "to be prepared or ready", though it appears to be more common in AmE. It can also have an additional meaning in AmE of "to be finished or done", for example, a customer at a restaurant telling a waiter "I'm all set. I'll take the check."Equivalent idioms
A number of English idioms that have essentially the same meaning show lexical differences between the British and the American version; for instance:
{|class="wikitable sortable"
|-
!British English
!American English
|-
|not touch something with a bargepole
|not touch something with a ten-foot pole
|-
|sweep under the carpet
|sweep under the rug*
|-
|touch wood
|knock on wood
|-
|''(can't) see the wood for the trees
|(can't) see the forest for the trees
|-
|put a spanner in the works
|throw a (monkey) wrench in(to) (a situation)
|-
|to put (or stick) your oar in<br/>but it won't make a ha'porth of difference<br/>to put your two penn'orth (or tuppence worth) in
|to put your two cents (or two cents' worth) in
|-
|skeleton in the cupboard
|skeleton in the closet
|-
|a home from home
|a home away from home
|-
|to blow one's own trumpet
|to blow (or toot) one's own horn
|-
|a drop in the ocean
|a drop in the bucket
|-
|flogging a dead horse
|beating a dead horse
|-
|haven't (got) a clue
|don't have a clue or have no clue (the British forms are also acceptable)
|-
|couldn't care less
|could care less or couldn't care less''
|-
|a new lease of life
|a new lease on life
|-
|lie of the land or lay of the land
|lay of the land
|-
|take it with a pinch of salt
|take it with a grain of salt
|-
|a storm in a teacup
|a tempest in a teapot (rare)
|-
|out of order
|out of line
|-
|slowcoach
|slowpoke
|}
In the US, a "carpet" typically refers to a fitted carpet, rather than a rug.
Social and cultural differences
Lexical items that reflect separate social and cultural development.
Education
Primary and secondary school
{| class"wikitable sortable" style"border-width:3px;"
|+ The naming of school years in British (except Scotland) and American English
|-
! rowspan"2" style"border-right-width:3px" | Age range
! colspan="3" | British English
! colspan"2" style"border-left-width:3px" | American English
|-
! Name
! Alternative/old name
! Syllabus
! style="border-left-width:3px" | Name
! Alternative name
|-
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:bottom;border-right-width:3px" | 1–4
! colspan="3" | Preschool (optional)
| colspan"2" style"border-left-width:3px" |
|-
| Nursery
| Playgroup
| Foundation Stage 1 || style="border-left-width:3px" | Daycare ||
|-
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:bottom;border-right-width:3px" | 3–5
! colspan="3" | Primary school
! colspan"2" style"border-left-width:3px" |
|-
| Reception
| Infants reception
| Foundation Stage 2
| style="border-left-width:3px" | Preschool
| Pre-K
|-
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:top;border-right-width:3px" | 5–6
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:top" | Year 1
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:top" | Infants year 1
| rowspan="3" | Key Stage 1
| style="border-left-width:3px" | Kindergarten
|
|-
! colspan"2" style"border-left-width:3px" | Elementary school
|-
| style="border-right-width:3px" | 6–7
| Year 2
| Infants year 2
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 1st grade
|
|-
| style="border-right-width:3px" | 7–8
| Year 3
| First year Junior
| rowspan="4" | Key Stage 2
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 2nd grade
|
|-
| style="border-right-width:3px" | 8–9
| Year 4
| Second year junior
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 3rd grade
|
|-
| style="border-right-width:3px" | 9–10
| Year 5
| Third year junior
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 4th grade
|
|-
| style="border-right-width:3px" | 10–11
| Year 6
| Fourth year junior
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 5th grade
|
|-
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:bottom;border-right-width:3px" | 11–12
! colspan="3" | Secondary school / High school
! style="border-left-width:3px" | Middle school
! Junior high school
|-
| Year 7
| First form
| rowspan="3" | Key Stage 3
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 6th grade
|
|-
| style="border-right-width:3px" | 12–13
| Year 8
| Second form
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 7th grade
|
|-
| style="border-right-width:3px" | 13–14
| Year 9
| Third form
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 8th grade
|
|-
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:bottom;border-right-width:3px" | 14–15
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:bottom" | Year 10
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:bottom" | Fourth form
| rowspan="3" | Key Stage 4, GCSE
! colspan"2" style"border-left-width:3px" | High school
|-
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 9th grade
| Freshman year
|-
| style="border-right-width:3px" | 15–16
| Year 11
| Fifth form
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 10th grade
| Sophomore year
|-
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:bottom;border-right-width:3px" | 16–17
! colspan"3" | Sixth form / FE College
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:bottom;border-left-width:3px" | 11th grade
| rowspan"2" style"vertical-align:bottom" | Junior year
|-
| Year 12
| Lower sixth (first year)
| rowspan="2" | Key Stage 5, A level
|-
| style="border-right-width:3px" | 17–18
| Year 13
| Upper sixth (second year)
| style="border-left-width:3px" | 12th grade
| Senior year
|}
The US has a more uniform nationwide system of terms than does the UK, where terminology and structure varies among constituent countries, but the division by grades varies somewhat among the states and even among local school districts. For example, elementary school often includes kindergarten and may include sixth grade, with middle school including only two grades or extending to ninth grade.
In the UK, the US equivalent of a high school is often referred to as a "secondary school" regardless of whether it is state funded or private. US Secondary education also includes middle school or junior high school, a two- or three-year transitional school between elementary school and high school. "Middle school" is sometimes used in the UK as a synonym for the younger junior school, covering the second half of the primary curriculum, current years four to six in some areas. However, in Dorset (South England), it is used to describe the second school in the three-tier system, which is normally from year 5 to year 8. In other regions, such as Evesham and the surrounding area in Worcestershire, the second tier goes from year 6 to year 8, and both starting secondary school in year nine. In Kirklees, West Yorkshire, in the villages of the Dearne Valley there is a three tier system: first schools year reception to year five, middle school (Scissett/Kirkburton Middle School) year 6 to year 8, and high school year 9 to year 13.
A public school has opposite meanings in the two countries. In American English this is a government-owned institution open to all students, supported by public funding. The British English use of the term is in the context of "private" education: to be educated privately with a tutor. In England and Wales the term strictly refers to an ill-defined group of prestigious private independent schools funded by students' fees, although it is often more loosely used to refer to any independent school. Independent schools are also known as "private schools", and the latter is the term used in Scotland and Northern Ireland for all such fee-funded schools. Strictly, the term public school is not used in Scotland and Northern Ireland in the same sense as in England, but nevertheless Gordonstoun, the Scottish private school, is sometimes referred to as a public school, as are some other Scottish private schools. Government-funded schools in Scotland and Northern Ireland are properly referred to as "state schools" but are sometimes confusingly referred to as "public schools" (with the same meaning as in the US), and in the US, where most public schools are administered by local governments, a state school typically refers to a college or university run by one of the U.S. states.
Speakers in both the United States and the United Kingdom use several additional terms for specific types of secondary school. A US prep school or preparatory school is an independent school funded by tuition fees; the same term is used in the UK for a private school for pupils under 13, designed to prepare them for fee-paying public schools. In the US, Catholic schools cover costs through tuition and have affiliations with a religious institution, most often a Catholic church or diocese. In England, where the state-funded education system grew from parish schools arranged by the local established church, the Church of England (C of E, or CE), and many schools, especially primary schools (up to age 11) retain a church connection and are known as church schools, CE schools or CE (aided) schools. There are also faith schools associated with the Roman Catholic Church and other major faiths, with a mixture of funding arrangements. In Scotland, Catholic schools are generally operated as government-funded state schools for Catholic communities, particularly in large cities such as Glasgow.
In the US, a magnet school receives government funding and has special admission requirements: in some cases pupils gain admission through superior performance on admission tests, while other magnet schools admit students through a lottery. The UK has city academies, which are independent privately sponsored schools run with public funding and which can select up to 10% of pupils by aptitude. Moreover, in the UK 36 local education authorities retain selection by ability at 11. They maintain grammar schools (state funded secondary schools), which admit pupils according to performance in an examination (known as the 11+) and comprehensive schools that take pupils of all abilities. Grammar schools select the most academically able 10% to 23% of those who sit the exam. Students who fail the exam go to a secondary modern school, sometimes called a "high school", or increasingly an "academy". In areas where there are no grammar schools the comprehensives likewise may term themselves high schools or academies. Nationally only 6% of pupils attend grammar schools, mainly in four distinct counties. Some private schools are called "grammar schools", chiefly those that were grammar schools long before the advent of state education.
University
In the UK a university student is said to "study", to "read" or, informally, simply to "do" a subject. In the recent past the expression 'to read a subject' was more common at the older universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. In the US a student studies or majors in a subject (although a student's major, concentration or, less commonly, emphasis is also used in US colleges or universities to refer to the major subject of study). To major in something refers to the student's principal course of study; to study may refer to any class being taken.
BrE:
AmE:
At university level in BrE, each module is taught or facilitated by a lecturer or tutor; professor is the job-title of a senior academic (in AmE, at some universities, the equivalent of the BrE lecturer is instructor, especially when the teacher has a lesser degree or no university degree, though the usage may become confusing according to whether the subject being taught is considered technical or not; it is also different from adjunct instructor/professor). In AmE each class is generally taught by a professor (although some US tertiary educational institutions follow the BrE usage), while the position of lecturer is occasionally given to individuals hired on a temporary basis to teach one or more classes and who may or may not have a doctoral degree.
The word course in American use typically refers to the study of a restricted topic or individual subject (for example, "a course in Early Medieval England", "a course in integral calculus") over a limited period of time (such as a semester or term) and is equivalent to a module or sometimes unit at a British university. In the UK, a course of study or simply course is likely to refer to the entire curriculum, which may extend over several years and be made up of any number of modules, hence it is also practically synonymous to a degree programme. A few university-specific exceptions exist: for example, at Cambridge the word paper is used to refer to a module, while the whole course of study is called tripos.
A dissertation in AmE refers to the final written product of a doctoral student to meet the requirement of that curriculum. In BrE, the same word refers to the final written product of a student in an undergraduate or taught master's programme. A dissertation in the AmE sense would be a thesis in BrE, though dissertation is also used.
Another source of confusion is the different usage of the word college. (See a full international discussion of the various meanings at college.) In the US, it refers to a post-high school institution that grants either associate's or bachelor's degrees, and in the UK, it refers to any post-secondary institution that is not a university (including sixth form college after the name in secondary education for years 12 and 13, the sixth form) where intermediary courses such as A levels or NVQs can be taken and GCSE courses can be retaken. College may sometimes be used in the UK or in Commonwealth countries as part of the name of a secondary or high school (for example, Dubai College). In the case of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Aberdeen, London, Lancaster, Durham, Kent and York, all members are also members of a college which is part of the university, for example, one is a member of King's College, Cambridge and hence of the university.
In both the US and UK college can refer to some division within a university that comprises related academic departments such as the "college of business and economics" though in the UK "faculty" is more often used. Institutions in the US that offer two to four years of post-high school education often have the word college as part of their name, while those offering more advanced degrees are called a university. (There are exceptions: Boston College, Dartmouth College and the College of William & Mary are examples of colleges that offer advanced degrees, while Vincennes University is an unusual example of a "university" that offers only associate degrees in the vast majority of its academic programmes). American students who pursue a ''bachelor's degree (four years of higher education) or an associate degree (two years of higher education) are college students regardless of whether they attend a college or a university and refer to their educational institutions informally as colleges.'' A student who pursues a master's degree or a doctorate degree in the arts and sciences is in AmE a graduate student; in BrE a postgraduate student although graduate student is also sometimes used. Students of advanced professional programmes are known by their field (business student, law student, medical student). Some universities also have a residential college system, the details of which may vary but generally involve common living and dining spaces as well as college-planned activities. Nonetheless, when it comes to the level of education, AmE generally uses the word college (e.g., going to college) whereas BrE generally uses the word university (e.g., going to university) regardless of the institution's official designation/status in both countries.
In the context of higher education, the word school is used slightly differently in BrE and AmE. In BrE, except for the University of London, the word school is used to refer to an academic department in a university. In AmE, the word school is used to refer to a collection of related academic departments and is headed by a dean. When it refers to a division of a university, school is practically synonymous to a college.
"Professor" has different meanings in BrE and AmE. In BrE it is the highest academic rank, followed by reader, senior lecturer and lecturer. In AmE "professor" refers to academic staff of all ranks, with (full) professor (largely equivalent to the UK meaning) followed by associate professor and assistant professor.
"Tuition" has traditionally had separate meaning in each variation. In BrE it is the educational content transferred from teacher to student at a university. In AmE it is the money (the fees) paid to receive that education (BrE: tuition fees).
General terms
In both the US and the UK, a student takes an exam, but in BrE a student can also be said to sit an exam. When preparing for an exam students revise (BrE)/review (AmE) what they have studied; the BrE idiom to revise for has the equivalent to review for in AmE.
Examinations are supervised by invigilators in the UK and proctors (or (exam) supervisors) in the US (a proctor in the UK is an official responsible for student discipline at the University of Oxford or Cambridge). In the UK a teacher first sets and then administers exam, while in the US, a teacher first writes, makes, prepares, etc. and then gives an exam. With the same basic meaning of the latter idea but with a more formal or official connotation, a teacher in the US may also administer or proctor an exam.
BrE:
AmE:
In BrE, students are awarded marks as credit for requirements (e.g., tests, projects) while in AmE, students are awarded points or "grades" for the same. Similarly, in BrE, a candidate's work is being marked, while in AmE it is said to be graded to determine what mark or grade is given.
There is additionally a difference between American and British usage in the word school. In British usage "school" by itself refers only to primary (elementary) and secondary (high) schools and to sixth forms attached to secondary schools—if one "goes to school", this type of institution is implied. By contrast an American student at a university may be "in/at school", "coming/going to school", etc. US and British law students and medical students both commonly speak in terms of going to "law school" and "med[ical] school", respectively. However, the word school is used in BrE in the context of higher education to describe a division grouping together several related subjects within a university, for example a "School of European Languages" containing departments for each language and also in the term "art school". It is also the name of some of the constituent colleges of the University of London, for example, School of Oriental and African Studies, London School of Economics.
Among high-school and college students in the United States, the words freshman (or the gender-neutral terms first year or sometimes freshie), sophomore, junior and senior refer to the first, second, third and fourth years respectively. It is important that the context of either high school or college first be established or else it must be stated directly (that is, She is a high-school freshman. He is a college junior.). Many institutes in both countries also use the term first-year as a gender-neutral replacement for freshman, although in the US this is recent usage, formerly referring only to those in the first year as a graduate student. One exception is the University of Virginia; since its founding in 1819 the terms "first-year", "second-year", "third-year", and "fourth-year" have been used to describe undergraduate university students. At the United States service academies, at least those operated by the federal government directly, a different terminology is used, namely "fourth class", "third class", "second class" and "first class" (the order of numbering being the reverse of the number of years in attendance). In the UK first-year university students are sometimes called freshers early in the academic year; however, there are no specific names for those in other years nor for school pupils; “freshers’ week” or simply “freshers” is colloquially, but increasingly commonly, used to refer to the first few weeks of the academic year, typically when students get to know the university's campus, join extra-curricular clubs and associations, and even going out for the night for drinking and to go to night clubs. Graduate and professional students in the United States are known by their year of study, such as a "second-year medical student" or a "fifth-year doctoral candidate." Law students are often referred to as "1L", "2L" or "3L" rather than “nth-year law students"; similarly, medical students are frequently referred to as "M1", "M2", "M3" or "M4".
While anyone in the US who finishes studying at any educational institution by passing relevant examinations is said to graduate and to be a graduate, in the UK only degree and above level students can graduate. Student itself has a wider meaning in AmE, meaning any person of any age studying any subject at any level (including those not doing so at an educational institution, such as a "piano student" taking private lessons in a home), whereas in BrE it tends to be used for people studying at a post-secondary educational institution and the term pupil is more widely used for a young person at primary or secondary school, though the use of "student" for secondary school pupils in the UK is increasingly used, particularly for "sixth form" (years 12 and 13).
The names of individual institutions can be confusing. There are several high schools with the word "university" in their names in the United States that are not affiliated with any post-secondary institutions and cannot grant degrees, and there is one public high school, Central High School of Philadelphia, that does grant bachelor's degrees to the top 10% of graduating seniors. British secondary schools occasionally have the word "college" in their names.
When it comes to the admissions process, applicants are usually asked to solicit letters of reference or reference forms from referees in BrE. In AmE, these are called letters of recommendation or recommendation forms. Consequently, the writers of these letters are known as referees and recommenders, respectively by country. In AmE, the word referee is nearly always understood to refer to an umpire of a sporting match.
In the context of education, for AmE, the word staff mainly refers to school personnel who are neither administrators nor have teaching loads or academic responsibilities; personnel who have academic responsibilities are referred to as members of their institution's faculty. In BrE, the word staff refers to both academic and non-academic school personnel. As mentioned previously, the term faculty in BrE refers more to a collection of related academic departments.
Government and politics
In the UK, political candidates stand for election, while in the US, they run for office. There is virtually no crossover between BrE and AmE in the use of these terms. Additionally, the document which contains a party's positions/principles is referred to as a party platform in AmE, whereas it is commonly known as a party manifesto in BrE. (In AmE, using the term manifesto may connote that the party is an extremist or radical association). The term general election is used slightly differently in British and American English. In BrE, it refers exclusively to a nationwide parliamentary election and is differentiated from local elections (mayoral and council) and by-elections; whereas in AmE, it refers to a final election for any government position in the US, where the term is differentiated from the term primary (an election that determines a party's candidate for the position in question). Additionally, a by-election in BrE is called a special election in AmE.
In AmE, the term swing state, swing county, swing district is used to denote a jurisdiction/constituency where results are expected to be close but crucial to the overall outcome of the general election. In BrE, the term marginal constituency is more often used for the same and swing is more commonly used to refer to how much one party has gained (or lost) an advantage over another compared to the previous election.
In the UK, the term government only refers to what is commonly known in America as the executive branch or the particular administration.
A local government in the UK is generically referred to as the "council," whereas in the United States, a local government will be generically referred to as the "City" (or county, village, etc., depending on what kind of entity the government serves).
Business and finance
In financial statements, what is referred to in AmE as revenue or sales is known in BrE as turnover. In AmE, having "high turnover" in a business context would generally carry negative implications, though the precise meaning would differ by industry.
A bankrupt firm goes into administration or liquidation in BrE; in AmE it goes bankrupt, or files for Chapter 7 (liquidation) or Chapter 11 (reorganisation), both of which refer to the legal authority under which bankruptcy is commenced. An insolvent individual or partnership goes bankrupt in both BrE and AmE.
If a finance company takes possession of a mortgaged property from a debtor, it is called foreclosure in AmE and repossession in BrE. In some limited scenarios, repossession may be used in AmE, but it is much less common compared to foreclosure. One common exception in AmE is for automobiles, which are always said to be repossessed. Indeed, an agent who collects these cars for the bank is colloquially known in AmE as a repo man.
Employment and recruitment
In BrE, the term curriculum vitae (commonly abbreviated to CV) is used to describe the document prepared by applicants containing their credentials required for a job. In AmE, the term résumé is more commonly used, with CV primarily used in academic or research contexts, and is usually more comprehensive than a résumé.
Insurance
AmE distinguishes between coverage as a noun and cover as a verb; an American seeks to buy enough insurance coverage in order to adequately cover a particular risk. BrE uses the word "cover" for both the noun and verb forms.
Transport
AmE speakers refer to transportation and BrE speakers to transport. (Transportation in the UK has traditionally meant the punishment of criminals by deporting them to an overseas penal colony.) In AmE, the word transport is usually used only as a verb, seldom as a noun or adjective except in reference to certain special objects, such as a tape transport or a military transport (e.g., a troop transport, a kind of vehicle, not an act of transporting).
Road transport
Differences in terminology are especially obvious in the context of roads. The British term dual carriageway, in American parlance, would be divided highway or perhaps, simply highway. The central reservation on a motorway or dual carriageway in the UK would be the median or center divide on a freeway, expressway, highway or parkway in the US. The one-way lanes that make it possible to enter and leave such roads at an intermediate point without disrupting the flow of traffic are known as slip roads in the UK but in the US, they are typically known as ramps and both further distinguish between on-ramps or on-slips (for entering onto a highway/carriageway) and off-ramps or exit-slips (for leaving a highway/carriageway). When American engineers speak of slip roads, they are referring to a street that runs alongside the main road (separated by a berm) to allow off-the-highway access to the premises that are there; however, the term frontage road is more commonly used, as this term is the equivalent of service road in the UK. However, it is not uncommon for an American to use service road as well instead of frontage road.
In the UK, the term outside lane refers to the higher-speed overtaking lane (passing lane in the US) closest to the middle of the road, while inside lane refers to the lane closer to the edge of the road. In the US, outside lane is used only in the context of a turn, in which case it depends in which direction the road is turning (i.e., if the road bends right, the left lane is the "outside lane", but if the road bends left, it is the right lane). Both also refer to slow and fast lanes (even though all actual traffic speeds may be at or around the legal speed limit).
In the UK drink driving refers to driving after having consumed alcoholic beverages, while in the US, the term is drunk driving. The legal term in the US is driving while intoxicated (DWI) or driving under the influence (of alcohol) (DUI). The equivalent legal phrase in the UK is drunk in charge of a motor vehicle (DIC) or more commonly driving with excess alcohol.
In the UK, a hire car is the US equivalent of a rental car. The term "hire car" can be especially misleading for those in the US, where the term "hire" is generally only applied to the employment of people and the term "rent" is applied to the temporary custody of goods. To an American, "hire car" would imply that the car has been brought into the employment of a company as if it were a person, which would sound nonsensical.
In the UK, a saloon is a vehicle that is equivalent to the American sedan. This is particularly confusing to Americans, because in the US the term saloon is used in only one context: describing an old bar (UK pub) in the American West (a Western saloon). Coupé is used by both to refer to a two-door car, but is usually pronounced with two syllables in the UK (coo-pay) and one syllable in the US (coop).
In the UK, van may refer to a small lorry (UK), whereas in the US, van is only understood to be a very small, boxy truck (US) (such as a moving van) or a long passenger automobile with several rows of seats (such as a minivan). A large, long vehicle used for cargo transport would nearly always be called a truck in the US, though alternate terms such as eighteen-wheeler may be occasionally heard (regardless of the actual number of tires (UK tyres) on the truck).
In the UK, a silencer is the equivalent to the US muffler. In the US, the word silencer has only one meaning: an attachment on the barrel of a gun designed to decrease the volume of the gunshot to either ear-safe levels or at least lower levels depending on the caliber; although they are popularly believed to completely hide the sound of the gunshot.
Specific auto parts and transport terms have different names in the two dialects, for example:
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
!UK
!US
|-
|accelerator
|gas pedal, accelerator
|-
|bendy bus
|articulated bus
|-
|bonnet
|hood
|-
|boot (of a car)
|trunk (of a car)
|-
|breakdown lorry
|tow truck
|-
|car journey
|road trip
|-
|car park
|parking lot
|-
|caravan
|camper
|-
|dual carriageway
|divided highway
|-
|jump lead
|jumper cable
|-
|junction
|fork (in the road), intersection, junction (see List of named highway junctions in Utah for example, usually only used for transfer-points between major highways rather than general intersections)
|-
|lorry
|truck
|-
|number plate
|license plate
|-
|overtake (a vehicle)
|pass (a vehicle), overtake and pass (a vehicle, used in law
|-
|pavement, footway
|sidewalk, pavement
|-
|pedestrian crossing
|crosswalk
|-
|petrol
|gasoline, gas
|-
|silencer
|muffler Nevertheless, both subway and metro are now more common in the US, varying by city: in Washington D.C., for example, metro is used, while in New York City subway is preferred. Another variation is the T in Boston.
Television
Traditionally, a show on British television would have referred to a light-entertainment programme (AmE program) with one or more performers and a participative audience, whereas in American television, the term is used for any type of program. British English traditionally referred to other types of programme by their type, such as drama, serial etc., but the term show has now taken on the general American meaning. In American television the episodes of a program first broadcast in a particular year constitute a season, the entire run of the program—which may span several seasons—is called a series. In British television, on the other hand, the word series may apply to the episodes of a programme in one particular year, for example, "The 1998 series of Grange Hill, as well as to the entire run. However, the entire run may occasionally be referred to as a "show".
The term telecast, meaning television broadcast and uncommon even in the US, is not used in British English. A television program(me) would be broadcast, aired or shown in both the UK and US.
Telecommunications
A long-distance call is a "trunk call" in British English, but is a "toll call" in American English, though neither term is well known among younger people. The distinction is a result of historical differences in the way local service was billed; the Bell System traditionally flat-rated local calls in all but a few markets, endowing local service by charging higher rates, or tolls, for intercity calls, allowing local calls to appear to be free. British Telecom (and the British 'Post Office Telecommunications' before it) charged for all calls, local and long distance, so labelling one class of call as "toll" would have been meaningless.
Similarly, a toll-free number in America is a freephone number in the UK. The term "freefone" is a BT trademark.
Rivers
In British English, the name of a river is usually placed after the word (River Thames) however there are a small number of exceptions such as Wick River. This matches the naming of lakes (e.g. Lake Superior, Loch Ness) and mountains (e.g. Mont Blanc, Mount St. Helens). In American English, the name is placed before the word (Hudson River).
Grammar
Subject-verb agreement
In American English (AmE), collective nouns are almost always singular in construction: the committee was unable to agree. However, when a speaker wishes to emphasize that the individuals are acting separately, a plural pronoun may be employed with a singular or plural verb: the team takes their seats, rather than the team takes its seats. Such a sentence would most likely be recast as the team members take their seats. Despite exceptions such as usage in The New York Times, the names of sports teams are usually treated as plurals even if the form of the name is singular.
In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree. The term the Government always takes a plural verb in British civil service convention, perhaps to emphasize the principle of cabinet collective responsibility. Compare also the following lines of Elvis Costello's song "Oliver's Army": ''Oliver's Army is here to stay / Oliver's Army are on their way . Some of these nouns, for example staff, actually combine with plural verbs most of the time.
The difference occurs for all nouns of multitude, both general terms such as team and company and proper nouns (for example where a place name is used to refer to a sports team). For instance,
Proper nouns that are plural in form take a plural verb in both AmE and BrE; for example, The Beatles are a well-known band; The Diamondbacks are the champions, with one major exception: in American English, the United States is almost universally used with a singular verb. Although the construction the United States are was more common early in the history of the country, as the singular federal government exercised more authority and a singular national identity developed (especially following the American Civil War), it became standard to treat the United States as a singular noun.
Style
Use of that and which in restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses
Generally, a non-restrictive relative clause (also called non-defining or supplementary) is one containing information that is supplementary, i.e. does not change the meaning of the rest of the sentence, while a restrictive relative clause (also called defining or integrated) contains information essential to the meaning of the sentence, effectively limiting the modified noun phrase to a subset that is defined by the relative clause.
An example of a restrictive clause is "The dog that bit the man was brown."
An example of a non-restrictive clause is "The dog, which bit the man, was brown."
In the former, "that bit the man" identifies which dog the statement is about.
In the latter, "which bit the man" provides supplementary information about a known dog.
A non-restrictive relative clause is typically set off by commas, whereas a restrictive relative clause is not, but this is not a rule that is universally observed.
Writers commonly use which to introduce a non-restrictive clause, and that to introduce a restrictive clause. That is rarely used to introduce a non-restrictive relative clause in prose. Which and that are both commonly used to introduce a restrictive clause; a study in 1977 reported that about 75% of occurrences of which were in restrictive clauses.
H. W. Fowler, in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage of 1926, followed others in suggesting that it would be preferable to use which as the non-restrictive (what he calls "non-defining") pronoun and that as the restrictive (what he calls defining) pronoun, but he also stated that this rule was observed neither by most writers nor by the best writers. He implied that his suggested usage was more common in American English. Fowler notes that his recommended usage presents problems, in particular that that must be the first word of the clause, which means, for instance, that which cannot be replaced by that when it immediately follows a preposition (e.g. "the basic unit from which matter is constructed") – though this would not prevent a stranded preposition (e.g. "the basic unit that matter is constructed from").
Style guides by American prescriptivists, such as Bryan Garner, typically insist, for stylistic reasons, that that be used for restrictive relative clauses and which be used for non-restrictive clauses, referring to the use of which in restrictive clauses as a "mistake".
Subjunctive
The subjunctive mood is more common in colloquial American English than in colloquial British English.
Writing
Spelling
Before the early 18th century there was no standard for English spelling. Different standards became noticeable after the publishing of influential dictionaries. For the most part current BrE spellings follow those of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), while AmE spellings follow those of Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). In the United Kingdom, the influences of those who preferred the French spellings of certain words proved decisive. In many cases AmE spelling deviated from mainstream British spelling; on the other hand it has also often retained older forms. Many of the now characteristic AmE spellings were made popular, although often not created, by Noah Webster. Webster chose already-existing alternative spellings "on such grounds as simplicity, analogy or etymology". Webster did attempt to introduce some reformed spellings, as did the Simplified Spelling Board in the early 20th century, but most were not adopted. Later spelling changes in the UK had little effect on present-day US spelling, and vice versa.
Punctuation<!-- This section is linked from List of British words not widely used in the United States -->
Full stops and periods in abbreviations
There have been some trends of transatlantic difference in use of periods in some abbreviations. These are discussed at Abbreviation § Periods (full stops) and spaces. Unit symbols such as kg and Hz are never punctuated.Parentheses/bracketsIn British English, "( )" marks are often referred to as brackets, whereas "[ ]" are called square brackets and "{ }" are called curly brackets. In formal British English and in American English "( )" marks are parentheses (singular: parenthesis), "[ ]" are called brackets or square brackets, and "{ }" can be called either curly brackets or braces. Despite the different names, these marks are used in the same way in both varieties.QuotingBritish and American English differ in the preferred quotation mark style, including the placement of commas and periods. In American English, " and ' are called quotation marks, whereas in British English, " and ' are referred to as either inverted commas or speech marks. Additionally, in American English direct speech typically uses the double quote mark ( " ), whereas in British English it is common to use the inverted comma ( ' ).
Commas in headlines
American newspapers commonly use a comma as a shorthand for "and" in headlines. For example, The Washington Post had the headline "A TRUE CONSERVATIVE: For McCain, Bush Has Both Praise, Advice."
Numerical expressions
There are many differences in the writing and speaking of English numerals, most of which are matters of style, with the notable exception of different definitions for billion.
The two countries have different conventions for floor numbering. The UK uses a mixture of the metric system and Imperial units, where in the US, United States customary units are dominant in everyday life with a few fields using the metric system.
Monetary amounts
Monetary amounts in the range of one to two major currency units are often spoken differently. In AmE one may say a dollar fifty or a pound eighty, whereas in BrE these amounts would be expressed one dollar fifty and one pound eighty. For amounts over a dollar an American will generally either drop denominations or give both dollars and cents, as in two-twenty or two dollars and twenty cents for $2.20. An American would not say two dollars twenty. On the other hand, in BrE, two-twenty or two pounds twenty would be most common.
It is more common to hear a British-English speaker say one thousand two hundred dollars than a thousand and two hundred dollars, although the latter construct is common in AmE. In British English, the "and" comes after the hundreds (one thousand, two hundred and thirty dollars). The term twelve hundred dollars, popular in AmE, is frequently used in BrE but only for exact multiples of 100 up to 1,900. Speakers of BrE very rarely hear amounts over 1,900 expressed in hundreds, for example, twenty-three hundred. In AmE it would not be unusual to refer to a high, uneven figure such as 2,307 as twenty-three hundred and seven.
In BrE, particularly in television or radio advertisements, integers can be pronounced individually in the expression of amounts. For example, on sale for £399 might be expressed on sale for three nine nine, though the full three hundred and ninety-nine pounds is at least as common. An American advertiser would almost always say on sale for three ninety-nine, with context distinguishing $399 from $3.99. In British English the latter pronunciation implies a value in pounds and pence, so three ninety-nine would be understood as £3.99.
In spoken BrE the word pound is sometimes colloquially used for the plural as well. For example, three pound forty and twenty pound a week are both heard in British English. Some other currencies do not change in the plural; yen and rand being examples. This is in addition to normal adjectival use, as in a twenty-pound-a-week pay-rise (US raise). The euro most often takes a regular plural -s in practice despite the EU dictum that it should remain invariable in formal contexts; the invariable usage is more common in Ireland, where it is the official currency.
In BrE the use of p instead of pence is common in spoken usage. Each of the following has equal legitimacy: 3 pounds 12 p; 3 pounds and 12 p; 3 pounds 12 pence; 3 pounds and 12 pence; as well as just 8 p or 8 pence. In everyday usage the amount is simply read as figures (£3.50 = three pounds fifty) as in AmE.
AmE uses words such as nickel, dime, and quarter for small coins. In BrE the usual usage is a 10-pence piece or a 10p piece or simply a 10p, for any coin below £1, pound coin and two-pound coin. BrE did have specific words for a number of coins before decimalisation. Formal coin names such as half crown (2/6) and florin (2/-), as well as slang or familiar names such as bob (1/-) and tanner (6d) for pre-decimalisation coins are still familiar to older BrE speakers but they are not used for modern coins. In older terms like two-bob bit (2/-) and thrupenny bit (3d), the word bit had common usage before decimalisation similar to that of piece today.
In order to make explicit the amount in words on a check (BrE cheque), Americans write three and (using this solidus construction or with a horizontal division line): they do not need to write the word dollars as it is usually already printed on the check. On a cheque UK residents would write three pounds and 24 pence, three pounds ‒ 24, or three pounds ‒ 24p since the currency unit is not preprinted. To make unauthorised amendment difficult, it is useful to have an expression terminator even when a whole number of dollars/pounds is in use: thus, Americans would write three and or three and on a three-dollar check (so that it cannot easily be changed to, for example, three million), and UK residents would write three pounds only.
Dates
Dates are usually written differently in the short (numerical) form. Christmas Day 2000, for example, is 25/12/00 or 25.12.00 in the UK and 12/25/00 in the US, although the formats 25/12/2000, 25.12.2000, and 12/25/2000 are now more common then they were before Y2K. Occasionally other formats are encountered, such as the ISO 8601 2000-12-25, popular among programmers, scientists and others seeking to avoid ambiguity, and to make alphanumerical order coincide with chronological order. The difference in short-form date order can lead to misunderstanding, especially when using software or equipment that uses the foreign format. For example, 06/04/05 could mean either June 4, 2005 (if read as US format), 6 April 2005 (if seen as in UK format) or even 2006 April 5 if taken to be an older ISO 8601-style format where 2-digit years were allowed.
When using the name of the month rather than the number to write a date in the UK, the recent standard style is for the day to precede the month, e. g., 21 April. Month preceding date is almost invariably the style in the US, and was common in the UK until the late twentieth century. British usage normally changes the day from an integer to an ordinal, i.e., 21st instead of 21. In speech, "of" and "the" are used in the UK, as in "the 21st of April". In written language, the words "the" and "of" may be and are usually dropped, i.e., 21 April. The US would say this as "April 21st", and this form is still common in the UK. One of the few exceptions in American English is saying "the Fourth of July" as a shorthand for the United States Independence Day. In the US military the British forms are used, but the day is read cardinally, while among some speakers of New England and Southern American English varieties and who come from those regions but live elsewhere, those forms are common, even in formal contexts.
Phrases such as the following are common in the UK but are generally unknown in the US: "A week today", "a week tomorrow", "a week (on) Tuesday" and "Tuesday week"; these all refer to a day which is more than a week into the future. ("A fortnight Friday" and "Friday fortnight" refer to a day two weeks after the coming Friday). "A week on Tuesday" and "a fortnight on Friday" could refer either to a day in the past ("it's a week on Tuesday, you need to get another one") or in the future ("see you a week on Tuesday"), depending on context. In the US the standard construction is "a week from today", "a week from tomorrow", etc. BrE speakers may also say "Thursday last" or "Thursday gone" where AmE would prefer "last Thursday". "I'll see you (on) Thursday coming" or "let's meet this coming Thursday" in BrE refer to a meeting later this week, while "not until Thursday next" would refer to next week. In BrE there is also common use of the term 'Thursday after next' or 'week after next' meaning 2 weeks in the future and 'Thursday before last' and 'week before last' meaning 2 weeks in the past, but not when referring to times more than 2 weeks been or gone or when using the terms tomorrow today or yesterday then in BrE you would say '5 weeks on Tuesday' or '2 weeks yesterday'.
Time
The 24-hour clock (18:00, 18.00 or 1800) is considered normal in the UK and Europe in many applications including air, rail and bus timetables; it is largely unused in the US outside military, police, aviation and medical applications. As a result, many Americans refer to the 24-hour clock as military time. Some British English style guides recommend the full stop (.) when telling time, compared to American English which uses colons (:) (i.e., 11:15 PM/pm/p.m. or 23:15 for AmE and 11.15 pm or 23.15 for BrE). Usually in the military (and sometimes in the police, aviation and medical) applications on both sides of the Atlantic 0800 and 1800 are read as (oh/zero) eight hundred and eighteen hundred hours respectively. Even in the UK, hundred follows twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three when reading 2000, 2100, 2200 and 2300 according to those applications.
Fifteen minutes after the hour is called quarter past in British usage and a quarter after or, less commonly, a quarter past in American usage. Fifteen minutes before the hour is usually called quarter to in British usage and a quarter of, a quarter to or ''a quarter 'til in American usage; the form a quarter to is associated with parts of the Northern United States, while a quarter 'til or till is found chiefly in the Appalachian region. Thirty minutes after the hour is commonly called half past in both BrE and AmE; half after used to be more common in the US. In informal British speech, the preposition is sometimes omitted, so that 5:30 may be referred to as half five; this construction is entirely foreign to US speakers, who would possibly interpret half five as 4:30 (halfway to 5:00) rather than 5:30. The AmE formations top of the hour and bottom of the hour are not used in BrE. Forms such as eleven forty are common in both varieties. To be simple and direct in telling time, no terms relating to fifteen or thirty minutes before/after the hour are used; rather the time is told exactly as for example nine fifteen, ten forty-five''.Sports percentagesIn sports statistics, certain percentages such as those for winning or win–loss records and saves in field or ice hockey and association football are almost always expressed as a decimal proportion to three places in AmE and are usually read aloud as if they are whole numbers, e.g. (0).500 or five hundred, hence the phrase "games/matches over five hundred", whereas in BrE they are also expressed but as true percentages instead, after multiplying the decimal by 100%, that is, 50% or "fifty per cent" and "games/matches over 50%" or "...50 per cent". However, "games/matches over 50%" or "...50 percent" is also found in AmE, albeit sporadically, e.g., hitting percentages in volleyball.
The American practice of expressing so-called percentages in sports statistics as decimals originated with baseball's batting averages, developed by English-born statistician and historian Henry Chadwick.
See also
* American and British English grammatical differences
* American and British English pronunciation differences
* American and British English spelling differences
* British and American keyboards
* List of dialects of the English language
* Lists of words having different meanings in American and British English
Explanatory notes
Citations
General and cited sources
* Algeo, John (2006). British or American English?. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
* Hargraves, Orin (2003). Mighty Fine Words and Smashing Expressions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. .
* McArthur, Tom (2002). The Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. .
* Murphy, Lynne (2018). The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between British and American English. London. Oneworld Publications. .
* Peters, Pam (2004). The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
* Trudgill, Peter and Jean Hannah (2002). International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English, 4th ed. London: Arnold. .
Further reading
* External links
* [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EnglishTranslation/WordSubstitution Word substitution list], by the [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EnglishTranslation Ubuntu English (United Kingdom) Translators team]
* [http://arquivo.pt/wayback/20090705062943/http%3A//www3.telus.net/linguisticsissues/BritishCanadianAmerican.htm Linguistics Issues] List of American, Canadian and British spelling differences
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120212114007/http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US1/REF/dial-map.html Map of US English dialects]
* [http://septicscompanion.com/ The Septic's Companion: A British Slang Dictionary]
* [https://about-the-usa.com/life/american-english.htm American English, is it really different?]
*
* [http://iteslj.org/v/e/ck-british-american.html British English-American English Vocabulary Quiz]
Category:Language comparison between countries
Category:Comparison of forms of English
Category:Internationalization and localization
Category:United Kingdom–United States relations | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_British_English | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.169043 |
2014 | Atomic semantics | Atomic semantics is a type of guarantee provided by a data register shared by several processors in a parallel machine or in a network of computers working together.
Atomic semantics are very strong. An atomic register provides strong guarantees even when there is concurrency and failures.
A read/write register R stores a value and is accessed by two basic operations: read and write(v). A read returns the value stored in R and write(v) changes the value stored in R to v.
A register is called atomic if it satisfies the two following properties:
1) Each invocation op of a read or write operation:
•Must appear as if it were executed at a single point τ(op) in time.
•τ (op) works as follow:
τb(op) ≤ τ (op) ≤ τe(op): where τb(op) and τe(op) indicate the time when the operation op begins and ends.
•If op1 ≠ op2, then τ (op1)≠τ (op2)
2) Each read operation returns the value written by the last write operation before the read, in the sequence where all operations are ordered by their τ values.
Atomic/Linearizable register:
Termination: when a node is correct, sooner or later each read and write operation will complete.
Safety Property (Linearization points for read and write and failed operations):
Read operation:It appears as if happened at all nodes at some times between the invocation and response time.
Write operation: Similar to read operation, it appears as if happened at all nodes at some times between the invocation and response time.
Failed operation(The atomic term comes from this notion):It appears as if it is completed at every single node or it never happened at any node.
Example : We know that an atomic register is one that is linearizable to a sequential safe register.
centre|atomic
The following picture shows where we should put the linearization point for each operation:
center|Atomic register
An atomic register could be defined for a variable with a single writer but multi- readers (SWMR), single-writer/single-reader (SWSR), or multi-writer/multi-reader (MWMR). Here is an example of a multi-reader multi-writer atomic register which is accessed by three processes (P1, P2, P3). Note that R. read() → v means that the corresponding read operation returns v, which is the value of the register. Therefore, the following execution of the register R could satisfies the definition of the atomic registers:
R.write(1), R.read()→1, R.write(3), R.write(2), R.read()→2, R.read()→2.
center|Atomic MWMR1
See also
Regular semantics
Safe semantics
References
Atomic semantics are defined formally in Lamport's "On Interprocess Communication" Distributed Computing 1, 2 (1986), 77–101. (Also appeared as SRC Research Report 8).
Category:Concurrency control | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_semantics | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.176255 |
2015 | Antarctic Circumpolar Current | thumb|320px|
thumb|320px| Animation of the thermohaline circulation. The later part of this animation shows the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.
Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is an ocean current that flows clockwise (as seen from the South Pole) from west to east around Antarctica. An alternative name for the ACC is the West Wind Drift. The ACC is the dominant circulation feature of the Southern Ocean and has a mean transport estimated at 100–150 Sverdrups (Sv, million m3/s), or possibly even higher, making it the largest ocean current. The current is circumpolar due to the lack of any landmass connecting with Antarctica and this keeps warm ocean waters away from Antarctica, enabling that continent to maintain its huge ice sheet.
Associated with the Circumpolar Current is the Antarctic Convergence, where the cold Antarctic waters meet the warmer waters of the subantarctic, creating a zone of upwelling nutrients. These nurture high levels of phytoplankton with associated copepods and krill, and resultant food chains supporting fish, whales, seals, penguins, albatrosses, and a wealth of other species.
The ACC has been known to sailors for centuries; it greatly speeds up any travel from west to east, but makes sailing extremely difficult from east to west, although this is mostly due to the prevailing westerly winds. Jack London's story "Make Westing" and the circumstances preceding the mutiny on the Bounty poignantly illustrate the difficulty it caused for mariners seeking to round Cape Horn westbound on the clipper ship route from New York to California. The eastbound clipper route, which is the fastest sailing route around the world, follows the ACC around three continental capes – Cape Agulhas (Africa), South East Cape (Australia), and Cape Horn (South America).
The current creates the Ross and Weddell Gyres.
Structure
thumb|The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the strongest current system in the world oceans and the only ocean current linking all major oceans: the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. Seawater density fronts after .
The ACC connects the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, and serves as a principal pathway of exchange among them. The current is strongly constrained by landform and bathymetric features. To trace it starting arbitrarily at South America, it flows through the Drake Passage between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula and then is split by the Scotia Arc to the east, with a shallow warm branch flowing to the north in the Falkland Current and a deeper branch passing through the Arc more to the east before also turning to the north. Passing through the Indian Ocean, the current first retroflects the Agulhas Current to form the Agulhas Return Current before it is split by the Kerguelen Plateau, and then moving northward again. Deflection is also seen as it passes over the mid-ocean ridge in the Southeast Pacific.
Fronts
The current is accompanied by three fronts: the Subantarctic front (SAF), the Polar front (PF), and the Southern ACC front (SACC). Furthermore, the waters of the Southern Ocean are separated from the warmer and saltier subtropical waters by the subtropical front (STF).
The northern boundary of the ACC is defined by the northern edge of the SAF, this being the most northerly water to pass through Drake Passage and therefore be circumpolar. Much of the ACC transport is carried in this front, which is defined as the latitude at which a subsurface salinity minimum or a thick layer of unstratified Subantarctic mode water first appears, allowed by temperature dominating density stratification. Still further south lies the PF, which is marked by a transition to very cold, relatively fresh, Antarctic Surface Water at the surface. Here a temperature minimum is allowed by salinity dominating density stratification, due to the lower temperatures. Farther south still is the SACC, which is determined as the southernmost extent of Circumpolar deep water (temperature of about 2 °C at 400 m). This water mass flows along the shelfbreak of the western Antarctic Peninsula and thus marks the most southerly water flowing through Drake Passage and therefore circumpolar. The bulk of the transport is carried in the middle two fronts.
The total transport of the ACC at Drake Passage is estimated to be around 135 Sv, or about 135 times the transport of all the world's rivers combined. There is a relatively small addition of flow in the Indian Ocean, with the transport south of Tasmania reaching around 147 Sv, at which point the current is probably the largest on the planet.
Dynamics
The circumpolar current is driven by the strong westerly winds in the latitudes of the Southern Ocean.
thumb|link=|The ACC (red circle near the middle of the image) in relation to the global thermohaline circulation [ (animation)]
In latitudes where there are continents, winds blowing on light surface water can simply pile up light water against these continents. But in the Southern Ocean, the momentum imparted to the surface waters cannot be offset in this way. There are different theories on how the Circumpolar Current balances the momentum imparted by the winds. The increasing eastward momentum imparted by the winds causes water parcels to drift outward from the axis of the Earth's rotation (in other words, northward) as a result of the Coriolis force. This northward Ekman transport is balanced by a southward, pressure-driven flow below the depths of the major ridge systems. Some theories connect these flows directly, implying that there is significant upwelling of dense deep waters within the Southern Ocean, transformation of these waters into light surface waters, and a transformation of waters in the opposite direction to the north. Such theories link the magnitude of the Circumpolar Current with the global thermohaline circulation, particularly the properties of the North Atlantic.
Alternatively, ocean eddies, the oceanic equivalent of atmospheric storms, or the large-scale meanders of the Circumpolar Current may directly transport momentum downward in the water column. This is because such flows can produce a net southward flow in the troughs and a net northward flow over the ridges without requiring any transformation of density. In practice both the thermohaline and the eddy/meander mechanisms are likely to be important.
The current flows at a rate of about over the Macquarie Ridge south of New Zealand. The ACC varies with time. Evidence of this is the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave, a periodic oscillation that affects the climate of much of the southern hemisphere. There is also the Antarctic oscillation, which involves changes in the location and strength of Antarctic winds. Trends in the Antarctic Oscillation have been hypothesized to account for an increase in the transport of the Circumpolar Current over the past two decades.
Formation
Published estimates of the onset of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current vary, but it is commonly considered to have started at the Eocene/Oligocene boundary. The isolation of Antarctica and formation of the ACC occurred with the openings of the Tasmanian Passage and the Drake Passage, following the fragmentation of the Antarctic land bridge. The Tasmanian Seaway separates East Antarctica and Australia, and is reported to have opened to water circulation 33.5 million years ago (Ma). The timing of the opening of the Drake Passage, between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula, is more disputed. Tectonic and sediment evidence show that it could have been open as early as pre-34 Ma; estimates of the opening of the Drake passage are between 20 and 40 Ma. The isolation of Antarctica by the current is credited by many researchers with causing the glaciation of Antarctica and global cooling in the Eocene epoch. Oceanic models have shown that the opening of these two passages limited polar heat convergence and caused a cooling of sea surface temperatures by several degrees; other models have shown that CO2 levels also played a significant role in the glaciation of Antarctica.
Phytoplankton
thumb|The Falkland Current transports nutrient-rich cold waters from the ACC north toward the Brazil–Malvinas Confluence. Phytoplankton chlorophyll concentration are shown in blue (lower concentrations) and yellow (higher concentrations).
Antarctic sea ice cycles seasonally, in February–March the amount of sea ice is lowest, and in August–September the sea ice is at its greatest extent. Ice levels have been monitored by satellite since 1973. Upwelling of deep water under the sea ice brings substantial amounts of nutrients. As the ice melts, the melt water provides stability and the critical depth is well below the mixing depth, which allows for a positive net primary production. As the sea ice recedes epontic algae dominate the first phase of the bloom, and a strong bloom dominate by diatoms follows the ice melt south. Much of the biology in the area occurs along the major fronts of the current, the Subtropical, Subantarctic, and the Antarctic Polar fronts, these are areas associated with well defined temperature changes. Size and distribution of phytoplankton are also related to fronts. Microphytoplankton (>20 μm) are found at fronts and at sea ice boundaries, while nanophytoplankton (
Category:Currents of the Southern Ocean
Category:Geography of the Southern Ocean
Category:Climate of Chile
Category:Subantarctic | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Circumpolar_Current | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.221494 |
2017 | Arbor Day | Arbor Day (or Arbour Day in some countries) is a secular day of observance in which individuals and groups are encouraged to plant trees. Today, many countries observe such a holiday. Though usually observed in the spring, the date varies, depending on climate and suitable planting season.
Origins and history
at the monument to the first Arbor Day in the world, Villanueva de la Sierra (Spain), 1805]]
First Arbor Day
The Spanish village of Mondoñedo held the first documented arbor plantation festival in the world organized by its mayor in 1594. The place remains as Alameda de los Remedios and it is still planted with lime and horse-chestnut trees. A humble granite marker and a bronze plate recall the event. Additionally, the small Spanish village of Villanueva de la Sierra held the first modern Arbor Day, an initiative launched in 1805 by the local priest with the enthusiastic support of the entire population.
First American Arbor Day
The first American Arbor Day was originated by J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska City, Nebraska, at an annual meeting of the Nebraska State board of agriculture held in Lincoln. On April 10, 1872, an estimated one million trees were planted in Nebraska.McCreight and Theodore RooseveltBeginning in 1906, Pennsylvania conservationist Major Israel McCreight of DuBois, Pennsylvania, argued that President Theodore Roosevelt's conservation speeches were limited to businessmen in the lumber industry and recommended a campaign of youth education and a national policy on conservation education. McCreight urged Roosevelt to make a public statement to school children about trees and the destruction of American forests. Conservationist Gifford Pinchot, Chief of the United States Forest Service, embraced McCreight's recommendations and asked the President to speak to the public school children of the United States about conservation. On April 15, 1907, Roosevelt issued an "Arbor Day Proclamation to the School Children of the United States" about the importance of trees and that forestry deserves to be taught in U.S. schools. Pinchot wrote McCreight, "we shall all be indebted to you for having made the suggestion."Around the world]]AustraliaArbor Day has been observed in Australia since the first event took place in Adelaide, South Australia on the 20th June 1889. National Schools Tree Day is held on the last Friday of July for schools and National Tree Day the last Sunday in July throughout Australia. Many states have Arbour Day, although Victoria has an Arbour Week, which was suggested by Premier Rupert (Dick) Hamer in the 1980s.BelgiumInternational Day of Treeplanting is celebrated in Flanders on or around 21 March as a theme-day/educational-day/observance, not as a public holiday. Tree planting is sometimes combined with awareness campaigns of the fight against cancer: Kom Op Tegen Kanker.BrazilThe Arbor Day (Dia da Árvore) is celebrated on September 21. It is not a national holiday. However, schools nationwide celebrate this day with environment-related activities, namely tree planting.British Virgin IslandsArbour Day is celebrated on November 22. It is sponsored by the National Parks Trust of the Virgin Islands. Activities include an annual national Arbour Day Poetry Competition and tree planting ceremonies throughout the territory.CambodiaCambodia celebrates Arbor Day on July 9 with a tree planting ceremony attended by the king.
Canada
The day was founded by Sir George William Ross, later the premier of Ontario, when he was minister of education in Ontario (1883–1899). According to the Ontario Teachers' Manuals "History of Education" (1915), Ross established both Arbour Day and Empire Day—"the former to give the school children an interest in making and keeping the school grounds attractive, and the latter to inspire the children with a spirit of patriotism" (p. 222). This predates the claimed founding of the day by Don Clark of Schomberg, Ontario for his wife Margret Clark in 1906. In Canada, National Forest Week is the last full week of September, and National Tree Day (Maple Leaf Day) falls on the Wednesday of that week. Ontario celebrates Arbour Week from the last Friday in April to the first Sunday in May. Prince Edward Island celebrates Arbour Day on the third Friday in May during Arbour Week. Arbour Day is the longest running civic greening project in Calgary and is celebrated on the first Thursday in May. On this day, each grade 1 student in Calgary's schools receives a tree seedling to be taken home to be planted on private property.Central African RepublicNational Tree Planting Day is on July 22.Chile"Dia del Arbol" was celebrated on June 28, 2022, as defined by Chile's Environment MinistryGreater ChinaRepublic of China (Taiwan)Arbor Day (植樹節) was founded by the forester Ling Daoyang in 1915 and has been a traditional holiday in the Republic of China since 1916. The Beiyang government's Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce first commemorated Arbor Day in 1915 at the suggestion of forester Ling Daoyang. In 1916, the government announced that all provinces of the Republic of China would celebrate the on the same day as the Qingming Festival, April 5, despite the differences in climate across China, which is on the first day of the fifth solar term of the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar. From 1929, by decree of the Nationalist government, Arbor Day was , to commemorate the death of Sun Yat-sen, who had been a major advocate of afforestation in his life. Following the retreat of the government of the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949, the celebration of Arbor Day on March 12 was retained.People's Republic of ChinaIn People's Republic of China, during the fourth session of the Fifth National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China in 1979 adopted the Resolution on the Unfolding of a Nationwide Voluntary Tree-planting Campaign. This resolution established the Arbor Day (植树节), also March 12, and stipulated that every able-bodied citizen between the ages of 11 and 60 should plant three to five trees per year or do the equivalent amount of work in seedling, cultivation, tree tending, or other services. Supporting documentation instructs all units to report population statistics to the local afforestation committees for workload allocation. Many couples choose to marry the day before the annual celebration, and they plant the tree to mark beginning of their life together and the new life of the tree.
Republic of Congo
National Tree Planting Day is on November 6.Costa Rica"Día del Árbol" is on June 15.Cuba"Dia del Árbol" (Day of the Tree) was first observed on October 10, 1904, and today is officially observed on June 21 of each year.Czech RepublicArbor Day in the Czech Republic is celebrated on October 20.EgyptArbor Day is on January 15.GermanyArbor Day ("Tag des Baumes") is on April 25. Its first celebration was in 1952.India
Van Mahotsav is an annual pan-Indian tree planting festival, occupying a week in the month of July. During this event millions of trees are planted. It was initiated in 1950 by K. M. Munshi, the then Union Minister for Agriculture and Food, to create an enthusiasm in the mind of the populace for the conservation of forests and planting of trees.
The name Van Mahotsava (the festival of trees) originated in July 1947 after a successful tree-planting drive was undertaken in Delhi, in which national leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Dr Rajendra Prasad and Abul Kalam Azad participated. Paryawaran Sachetak Samiti, a leading environmental organization conducts mass events and activities on this special day celebration each year. The week was simultaneously celebrated in a number of states in the country.
Iran
In Iran, it is known as "National Tree Planting Day". By the Solar Hijri calendar, it is on the fifteenth day of the month Esfand, which usually corresponds with March 5. This day is the first day of the "Natural Recyclable Resources Week" (March 5 to 12).
This is the time when the saplings of the all kinds in terms of different climates of different parts of Iran are shared among the people. They are also taught how to plant trees.IsraelThe Jewish holiday Tu Bishvat, the new year for trees, is on the 15th day of the month of Shvat, which usually falls in January or February. Originally based on the date used to calculate the age of fruit trees for tithing as mandated in Leviticus 19:23–25, the holiday now is most often observed by planting trees or raising money to plant trees, and by eating fruit, specifically grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates. Tu Bishvat is a semi-official holiday in Israel; schools are open but Hebrew-speaking schools often go on tree-planting excursions.
Japan
Japan celebrates a similarly themed Greenery Day, held on May 4.
Kenya
Historically, Kenya celebrated National Tree Planting Day on April 21. Often people plant palm trees and coconut trees along the Indian Ocean that borders the east coast of Kenya. They plant trees to remember Prof. Wangari Maathai, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for planting of trees and caring for them all over Kenya.
With the Kenyan government launching a campaign to plant 15 billion trees by 2032, they launched National Tree Growing Day with very aggressive targets for the number of trees to be planted. The first national public holiday was November 13, 2023. The second was May 10, 2024, with a goal to plant one billion trees in a single day.
Korea
North Korea marks "Tree Planting Day" on March 2, when people across the country plant trees. This day is considered to combine traditional Asian cultural values with the country's dominant Communist ideology.
In South Korea, April 5, Singmogil or Sikmogil (식목일), the Arbor Day, was a public holiday until 2005. Even though Singmogil is no longer an official holiday, the day is still celebrated, with the South Korean public continuing to take part in tree-planting activities.LesothoNational Tree Planting Day is usually on March 21 depending on the lunar cycle.
Luxembourg
National Tree Planting Day is on the second Saturday in November.
Malawi
National Tree Planting Day is on the 2nd Monday of December.
Mexico
plants a tree in Balleza, Chihuahua to commemorate the Día del Árbol 2013.]]
The Día del Árbol was established in Mexico in 1959 with President Adolfo López Mateos issuing a decree that it should be observed on the 2nd Thursday of July.
Mongolia
National Tree Planting Day is on the 2nd Saturday of May and October. The first National Tree Planting Day was celebrated May 8, 2010.
Namibia
Namibia's first Arbor Day was celebrated on October 8, 2004. It takes place annually on the second Friday of October.
Netherlands
Since conference and of the Food and Agriculture Organization's publication World Festival of Trees, and a resolution of the United Nations in 1954: "The Conference, recognising the need of arousing mass consciousness of the aesthetic, physical and economic value of trees, recommends a World Festival of Trees to be celebrated annually in each member country on a date suited to local conditions"; it has been adopted by the Netherlands. In 1957, the National Committee Day of Planting Trees/Foundation of National Festival of Trees (Nationale Boomplantdag/Nationale Boomfeestdag) was created.
On the third Wednesday in March each year (near the spring equinox), three quarters of Dutch schoolchildren aged 10/11 and Dutch celebrities plant trees. Stichting Nationale Boomfeestdag organizes all the activities in the Netherlands for this day. Some municipalities however plant the trees around 21 September because of the planting season.
In 2007, the 50th anniversary was celebrated with special golden jubilee activities.
New Zealand
New Zealand's first Arbor Day planting was on 3 July 1890 at Greytown, in the Wairarapa. The first official celebration was scheduled to take place in Wellington in August 1892, with the planting of pōhutukawa and Norfolk pines along Thorndon Esplanade.
Philippines
Since 1947, Arbor Day in the Philippines has been institutionalized to be observed throughout the nation by planting trees and ornamental plants and other forms of relevant activities. Its practice was instituted through Proclamation No. 30. It was subsequently revised by Proclamation No. 41, issued in the same year. In 1955, the commemoration was extended from a day to a week and moved to the last full week of July. Over two decades later, its commemoration was moved to the second week of June. In 2003, the commemorations were reduced from a week to a day and was moved to June 25 per Proclamation No. 396. The same proclamation directed "the active participation of all government agencies, including government-owned and controlled corporations, private sector, schools, civil society groups and the citizenry in tree planting activity". It was subsequently revised by Proclamation 643 in the succeeding year.
In 2012, Republic Act 10176 was passed, which revived tree planting events "as [a] yearly event for local government units" and mandated the planting of at least one tree per year for able-bodied Filipino citizens aged 12 years old and above. Since 2012, many local arbor day celebrations have been commemorated, as in the cases of Natividad and Tayug in Pangasinan and Santa Rita in Pampanga.
Poland
In Poland, Arbor Day has been celebrated since 2002. Each October 10, many Polish people plant trees as well as participate in events organized by ecological foundations. Moreover, Polish Forest Inspectorates and schools give special lectures and lead ecological awareness campaigns.
Portugal
Arbor Day is celebrated on March 21. It is not a national holiday but instead schools nationwide celebrate this day with environment-related activities, namely tree planting.
Russia
All-Russian day of forest plantation was celebrated for the first time on 14 May 2011. Now it is held in April–May (it depends on the weather in different regions).
Samoa
Arbor Day in Samoa is celebrated on the first Friday in November.
Saudi Arabia
Arbor Day in Saudi Arabia is celebrated on April 29.
Singapore
In 1971 a 'Tree Planting Day' was established which in 1990 was replaced by 'Clean and Green Week'.
South Africa
Arbor Day was celebrated from 1945 until 2000 in South Africa. After that, the national government extended it to National Arbor Week, which lasts annually from 1–7 September. Two trees, one common and one rare, are highlighted to increase public awareness of indigenous trees, while various "greening" activities are undertaken by schools, businesses and other organizations. For example, the social enterprise Greenpop, which focusses on sustainable urban greening, forest restoration and environmental awareness in Sub-Saharan Africa, leverages Arbor Day each year to call for tree planting action. During Arbor Month 2019, responding to recent studies that underscore the importance of tree restoration, they launched their new goal of planting 500,000 by 2025.
Spain
]]
In 1896 Mariano Belmás Estrada promoted the first "Festival of Trees" in Madrid.
In Spain there was an International Forest Day on 21 March, but a decree in 1915 also brought in an Arbor Day throughout Spain. Each municipality or collective decides the date for its Arbor Day, usually between February and May. In Villanueva de la Sierra (Extremadura), where the first Arbor Day in the world was held in 1805, it is celebrated, as on that occasion, on Tuesday Carnaval. It is a great day in the local festive calendar.
As an example of commitment to nature, the small town of Pescueza, with only 180 inhabitants, organizes every spring a large plantation of holm oaks, which is called the "Festivalino", promoted by city council, several foundations, and citizen participation.
Sri Lanka
National Tree Planting Day is on November 15.
Tanzania
National Tree Planting Day is on April 1.
Turkey
National Tree Planting Day is on November 11.UgandaNational Tree Planting Day is on March 24.United Kingdom
First mounted in 1975, National Tree Week is a celebration of the start of the winter tree planting season, usually at the end of November. Around a million trees are planted each year by schools, community organizations and local authorities.
On 6 February 2020, Myerscough College in Lancashire, England, supported by the Arbor Day Foundation, celebrated the UK's first Arbor Day.
]]
United States
Arbor Day was founded in 1872 by J. Sterling Morton in Nebraska City, Nebraska. By the 1920s, each state in the United States had passed public laws that stipulated a certain day to be Arbor Day or Arbor and Bird Day observance.
National Arbor Day is celebrated every year on the last Friday in April; it is a civic holiday in Nebraska. Other states have selected their own dates for Arbor Day.
The customary observance is to plant a tree. On the first Arbor Day, April 10, 1872, an estimated one million trees were planted.VenezuelaVenezuela recognizes Día del Arbol (Day of the Tree) on the last Sunday of May.See also
* Arbor Day Foundation (US)
* Earth Day
* Greenery Day (Japan)
* International Day of Forests
* National Public Lands Day (US)
* Timeline of environmental events
* Tu BiShvat (Jewish holiday)
* World Water Day
References
External links
* [https://www.arborday.org/celebrate/world-dates.cfm International Arbor Days]
* [https://archive.today/20130111070456/http://www.lessonplanet.com/ArborDayLessonPlans Arbor Day lesson plans for the classroom]
* [http://www.arborday.org National Arbor Day Foundation]
* [https://www.arborday.org/celebrate/dates.cfm State Arbor Days and state trees]
*
* [https://www.edmonton.ca/sites/default/files/public-files/assets/PDF/history_of_arbor_day.pdf History of Arbor Day]
Category:Environmental awareness days
Category:Trees in culture
Category:1872 establishments in Nebraska
Category:Recurring events established in 1872
Category:Urban forestry
Category:Reforestation
Category:Types of secular holidays
Category:Forestry events
Category:Holidays and observances by scheduling (nth weekday of the month)
Category:Forestry-related lists | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbor_Day | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.248530 |
2018 | A. J. Ayer | | image = Alfred Jules Ayer.png
| birth_name = Alfred Jules Ayer
| birth_date
| birth_place = St. John's Wood, London, England
| death_date
| death_place = London, England
| alma_mater = Christ Church, Oxford
| awards = Knight Bachelor (1970)
| era = 20th-century philosophy
| region = Western philosophy
| school_tradition =
| institutions =
| academic_advisors Gilbert Ryle 29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989) was an English philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) and The Problem of Knowledge'' (1956).
Ayer was educated at Eton College and the University of Oxford, after which he studied the philosophy of logical positivism at the University of Vienna. From 1933 to 1940 he lectured on philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford.
During the Second World War Ayer was a Special Operations Executive and MI6 agent.
Ayer was Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London from 1946 until 1959, after which he returned to Oxford to become Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1951 to 1952 and knighted in 1970. He was known for his advocacy of humanism, and was the second president of the British Humanist Association (now known as Humanists UK).
Ayer was president of the Homosexual Law Reform Society for a time; he remarked, "as a notorious heterosexual I could never be accused of feathering my own nest."
Life
Ayer was born in St John's Wood, in north west London, to Jules Louis Cyprien Ayer and Reine (née Citroen), wealthy parents from continental Europe. His mother was from the Dutch-Jewish family that founded the Citroën car company in France; his father was a Swiss Calvinist financier who worked for the Rothschild family, including for their bank and as secretary to Alfred Rothschild.
Ayer was educated at Ascham St Vincent's School, a former boarding preparatory school for boys in the seaside town of Eastbourne in Sussex, where he started boarding at the relatively early age of seven for reasons to do with the First World War, and at Eton College, where he was a King's Scholar. At Eton Ayer first became known for his characteristic bravado and precocity. Though primarily interested in his intellectual pursuits, he was very keen on sports, particularly rugby, and reputedly played the Eton Wall Game very well. In the final examinations at Eton, Ayer came second in his year, and first in classics. In his final year, as a member of Eton's senior council, he unsuccessfully campaigned for the abolition of corporal punishment at the school. He won a classics scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. He graduated with a BA with first-class honours.
After graduating from Oxford, Ayer spent a year in Vienna, returned to England and published his first book, Language, Truth and Logic, in 1936. This first exposition in English of logical positivism as newly developed by the Vienna Circle, made Ayer at age 26 the enfant terrible of British philosophy. As a newly famous intellectual, he played a prominent role in the Oxford by-election campaign of 1938. The by-election, held on 27 October 1938, was quite close, with Hogg winning narrowly.). He was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Welsh Guards from the Officer Cadet Training Unit on 21 September 1940.
After the war, Ayer briefly returned to the University of Oxford where he became a fellow and Dean of Wadham College. He then taught philosophy at University College London from 1946 until 1959, during which time he started to appear on radio and television. He was an extrovert and social mixer who liked dancing and attending clubs in London and New York. He was also obsessed with sport: he had played rugby for Eton, and was a noted cricketer and a keen supporter of Tottenham Hotspur football team, where he was for many years a season ticket holder. For an academic, Ayer was an unusually well-connected figure in his time, with close links to 'high society' and the establishment. Presiding over Oxford high-tables, he is often described as charming, but could also be intimidating.
Ayer was married four times to three women. His first marriage was from 1932 to 1941, to (Grace Isabel) Renée, with whom he had a sonallegedly the son of Ayer's friend and colleague Stuart Hampshireand a daughter. He gave a speech on why John Stuart Mill's conceptions of liberty and freedom were still valid in the 20th century. Adding to the tension was the location of the congress in West Berlin, together with the fact that the Korean War began on 25 June 1950, the fourth day of the congress, giving a feeling that the world was on the brink of war. Gully Wells, Ayer’s stepdaughter via Dee Wells, records the same event with some slight variation of detail.
Ayer was also involved in politics, including anti-Vietnam War activism, supporting the Labour Party (and later the Social Democratic Party), chairing the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in Sport, and serving as president of the Homosexual Law Reform Society. Of the experience, he first said that it "slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death ... will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be." A few weeks later, he revised this, saying, "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief".
Ayer died on 27 June 1989. From 1980 to 1989 he lived at 51 York Street, Marylebone, where a memorial plaque was unveiled on 19 November 1995.
Philosophical ideas
In Language, Truth and Logic (1936), Ayer presents the verification principle as the only valid basis for philosophy. Unless logical or empirical verification is possible, statements like "God exists" or "charity is good" are not true or untrue but meaningless, and may thus be excluded or ignored. Religious language in particular is unverifiable and as such literally nonsense. He also criticises C. A. Mace's opinion that metaphysics is a form of intellectual poetry. The stance that a belief in God denotes no verifiable hypothesis is sometimes referred to as igtheism (for example, by Paul Kurtz). In later years, Ayer reiterated that he did not believe in God and began to call himself an atheist. He followed in the footsteps of Bertrand Russell by debating religion with the Jesuit scholar Frederick Copleston.
Ayer's version of emotivism divides "the ordinary system of ethics" into four classes:
#"Propositions that express definitions of ethical terms, or judgements about the legitimacy or possibility of certain definitions"
#"Propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience, and their causes"
#"Exhortations to moral virtue"
#"Actual ethical judgements"
He focuses on propositions of the first classmoral judgementssaying that those of the second class belong to science, those of the third are mere commands, and those of the fourth (which are considered normative ethics as opposed to meta-ethics) are too concrete for ethical philosophy.
Ayer argues that moral judgements cannot be translated into non-ethical, empirical terms and thus cannot be verified; in this he agrees with ethical intuitionists. But he differs from intuitionists by discarding appeals to intuition of non-empirical moral truths as "worthless"
Ayer was closely associated with the British humanist movement. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963. In 1965, he became the first president of the Agnostics' Adoption Society and in the same year succeeded Julian Huxley as president of the British Humanist Association, a post he held until 1970. In 1968 he edited The Humanist Outlook, a collection of essays on the meaning of humanism. He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto. Works Ayer is best known for popularising the verification principle, in particular through his presentation of it in Language, Truth, and Logic. The principle was at the time at the heart of the debates of the so-called Vienna Circle, which Ayer had visited as a young guest. Others, including the circle's leading light, Moritz Schlick, were already writing papers on the issue. Ayer's formulation was that a sentence can be meaningful only if it has verifiable empirical import; otherwise, it is either "analytical" if tautologous or "metaphysical" (i.e. meaningless, or "literally senseless"). He started to work on the book at the age of 23 and it was published when he was 26. Ayer's philosophical ideas were deeply influenced by those of the Vienna Circle and David Hume. His clear, vibrant and polemical exposition of them makes Language, Truth and Logic essential reading on the tenets of logical empiricism; the book is regarded as a classic of 20th-century analytic philosophy and is widely read in philosophy courses around the world. In it, Ayer also proposes that the distinction between a conscious man and an unconscious machine resolves itself into a distinction between "different types of perceptible behaviour", an argument that anticipates the Turing test published in 1950 to test a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligence.
Ayer wrote two books on the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Russell and Moore: The Analytic Heritage (1971) and Russell (1972). He also wrote an introductory book on the philosophy of David Hume and a short biography of Voltaire.
Ayer was a strong critic of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. As a logical positivist, Ayer was in conflict with Heidegger's vast, overarching theories of existence. Ayer considered them completely unverifiable through empirical demonstration and logical analysis, and this sort of philosophy an unfortunate strain in modern thought. He considered Heidegger the worst example of such philosophy, which Ayer believed entirely useless. In Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Ayer accuses Heidegger of "surprising ignorance" or "unscrupulous distortion" and "what can fairly be described as charlatanism."
In 1972–73, Ayer gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of St Andrews, later published as The Central Questions of Philosophy. In the book's preface, he defends his selection to hold the lectureship on the basis that Lord Gifford wished to promote "natural theology, in the widest sense of that term", and that non-believers are allowed to give the lectures if they are "able reverent men, true thinkers, sincere lovers of and earnest inquirers after truth". He still believed in the viewpoint he shared with the logical positivists: that large parts of what was traditionally called philosophyincluding metaphysics, theology and aestheticswere not matters that could be judged true or false, and that it was thus meaningless to discuss them.
In The Concept of a Person and Other Essays (1963), Ayer heavily criticised Wittgenstein's private language argument.
Ayer's sense-data theory in Foundations of Empirical Knowledge was famously criticised by fellow Oxonian J. L. Austin in Sense and Sensibilia, a landmark 1950s work of ordinary language philosophy. Ayer responded in the essay "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-datum Theory?", Collections Ayer's biographer, Ben Rogers, deposited 7 boxes of research material accumulated through the writing process at University College London in 2007. The material was donated in collaboration with Ayer's family. The Aryan Path.
* 1940, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London: Macmillan.
* 1954, Philosophical Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on freedom, phenomenalism, basic propositions, utilitarianism, other minds, the past, ontology.)
* 1957, "The conception of probability as a logical relation", in S. Korner, ed., Observation and Interpretation in the Philosophy of Physics, New York: Dover Publications.
* 1956, The Problem of Knowledge, London: Macmillan.
*1957, "Logical Positivism - A Debate" (with F. C. Copleston) in: Edwards, Paul, Pap, Arthur (eds.), A Modern Introduction to Philosophy; readings from classical and contemporary sources
* 1963, The Concept of a Person and Other Essays, London: Macmillan. (Essays on truth, privacy and private languages, laws of nature, the concept of a person, probability.)
* 1967, [https://www.jstor.org/stable/20114547 "Has Austin Refuted the Sense-Datum Theory?"] Synthese vol. XVIII, pp. 117–140. (Reprinted in Ayer 1969).
* 1968, The Origins of Pragmatism, London: Macmillan.
* 1969, Metaphysics and Common Sense, London: Macmillan. (Essays on knowledge, man as a subject for science, chance, philosophy and politics, existentialism, metaphysics, and a reply to Austin on sense-data theory [Ayer 1967].)
* 1971, Russell and Moore: The Analytical Heritage, London: Macmillan.
* 1972, Probability and Evidence, London: Macmillan.
* 1972, Russell, London: Fontana Modern Masters.
* 1973, The Central Questions of Philosophy, London: Weidenfeld.
* 1977, Part of My Life, London: Collins.
* 1979, "Replies", in G. F. Macdonald, ed., Perception and Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer, With His Replies, London: Macmillan; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
* 1980, Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press
* 1982, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, London: Weidenfeld.
* 1984, Freedom and Morality and Other Essays, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* 1984, More of My Life, London: Collins.
* 1986, Ludwig Wittgenstein, London: Penguin.
* 1986, Voltaire, New York: Random House.
* 1988, Thomas Paine, London: Secker & Warburg.
* 1990, The Meaning of Life and Other Essays, Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
*1991, "A Defense of Empiricism" in: Griffiths, A. Phillips (ed.), A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements). Cambridge University Press.
* 1992, "Intellectual Autobiography" and Replies in: Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer (The Library of Living Philosophers Volume XXI), Open Court Publishing Co.
<nowiki>*</nowiki>For more complete publication details see [https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm%3A978-1-349-04862-5%2F1.pdf "The Philosophical Works of A. J. Ayer"] (1979) and "Bibliography of the writings of A.J. Ayer" (1992).
See also
* A priori knowledge
* List of British philosophers
References
Footnotes
Works cited
* Ayer, A.J. (1989). [http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/a-j-ayer-what-i-saw-when-i-was-dead/ "That undiscovered country"], New Humanist, Vol. 104 (1), May, pp. 10–13.
* Rogers, Ben (1999). [https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6782148M/A.J._Ayer A.J. Ayer: A Life]. New York: Grove Press. . ([https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/r/rogers-ayer.html Chapter one and a review by Hilary Spurling], The New York Times, 24 December 2000.)
*
Further reading
*Jim Holt, [https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/12/21/vienna-circle-positive-thinking/ "Positive Thinking"] (review of Karl Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science, Basic Books, 449 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 74–76.
* Ted Honderich, [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/AyerbyTH.html Ayer's Philosophy and its Greatness].
* Anthony Quinton, [https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/sites/default/files/94p255.pdf Alfred Jules Ayer]. Proceedings of the British Academy, 94 (1996), pp. 255–282.
* Graham Macdonald, Alfred Jules Ayer, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 7 May 2005.
*
External links
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6_Vy-Uzwzc "Logical Positivism"] (video) Men of Ideas interview with Bryan Magee (1978)
*[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOnzBSWIAzo "Frege, Russell, and Modern Logic"] (video) The Great Philosophers interview with Bryan Magee (1987)
*[http://www.sveinbjorn.org/ayer_philosophy_and_politics Ayer's Elizabeth Rathbone Lecture on Philosophy & Politics]
* [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/ Ayer entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
* [http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/callinicos/1989/09/ayer.html A.J. Ayer: Out of time] by Alex Callinicos
*
*
* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009mhc8 Appearance on Desert Island Discs – 3 August 1984]
*
* [https://archives.ucl.ac.uk/CalmView/Record.aspx?srcCalmView.Catalog&idAYER+(ROGERS) Ayer (Rogers) Papers] at University College London
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Category:English LGBTQ rights activists | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Ayer | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.285884 |
2019 | André Weil | | birth_place = Paris, France
| death_date
| death_place = Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.
| field = Mathematics
| work_institutions =
| education =
| doctoral_advisor =
| doctoral_students =
*
*
*
*
* }}
| known_for =
| prizes = ; 6 May 1906 – 6 August 1998) was a French mathematician, known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. His influence is due
both to his original contributions to a remarkably broad
spectrum of mathematical theories, and to the mark
he left on mathematical practice and style, through
some of his own works as well as through the Bourbaki group, of which he was one of the principal
founders.
Life
André Weil was born in Paris to agnostic Alsatian Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by the German Empire after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71. Simone Weil, who would later become a famous philosopher, was Weil's younger sister and only sibling. He studied in Paris, Rome and Göttingen and received his doctorate in 1928. While in Germany, Weil befriended Carl Ludwig Siegel. Starting in 1930, he spent two academic years at Aligarh Muslim University in India. Aside from mathematics, Weil held lifelong interests in classical Greek and Latin literature, Hinduism and Sanskrit literature: he had taught himself Sanskrit in 1920 at age 14. After teaching for one year at Aix-Marseille University, he taught for six years at University of Strasbourg. He married Éveline de Possel (née Éveline Gillet) in 1937.
Weil was in Finland when World War II broke out; he had been traveling in Scandinavia since April 1939. His wife Éveline returned to France without him. Weil was arrested in Finland at the outbreak of the Winter War on suspicion of spying; however, accounts of his life having been in danger were shown to be exaggerated. Weil returned to France via Sweden and the United Kingdom, and was detained at Le Havre in January 1940. He was charged with failure to report for duty, and was imprisoned in Le Havre and then Rouen. It was in the military prison in Bonne-Nouvelle, a district of Rouen, from February to May, that Weil completed the work that made his reputation. He was tried on 3 May 1940. Sentenced to five years, he requested to be attached to a military unit instead, and was given the chance to join a regiment in Cherbourg. After the fall of France in June 1940, he met up with his family in Marseille, where he arrived by sea. He then went to Clermont-Ferrand, where he managed to join his wife, Éveline, who had been living in German-occupied France.
In January 1941, Weil and his family sailed from Marseille to New York. He spent the remainder of the war in the United States, where he was supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. For two years, he taught undergraduate mathematics at Lehigh University, where he was unappreciated, overworked and poorly paid, although he did not have to worry about being drafted, unlike his American students. He quit the job at Lehigh and moved to Brazil, where he taught at the Universidade de São Paulo from 1945 to 1947, working with Oscar Zariski. Weil and his wife had two daughters, Sylvie (born in 1942) and Nicolette (born in 1946). in 1954 in Amsterdam, and in 1978 in Helsinki. Weil was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1966. Mordell's theorem had an ad hoc proof; Weil began the separation of the infinite descent argument into two types of structural approach, by means of height functions for sizing rational points, and by means of Galois cohomology, which would not be categorized as such for another two decades. Both aspects of Weil's work have steadily developed into substantial theories.
Among his major accomplishments were the 1940s proof of the Riemann hypothesis for zeta-functions of curves over finite fields, and his subsequent laying of proper foundations for algebraic geometry to support that result (from 1942 to 1946, most intensively). The so-called Weil conjectures were hugely influential from around 1950; these statements were later proved by Bernard Dwork, Alexander Grothendieck, Michael Artin, and finally by Pierre Deligne, who completed the most difficult step in 1973.
Weil introduced the adele ring in the late 1930s, following Claude Chevalley's lead with the ideles, and gave a proof of the Riemann–Roch theorem with them (a version appeared in his Basic Number Theory in 1967). His 'matrix divisor' (vector bundle avant la lettre) Riemann–Roch theorem from 1938 was a very early anticipation of later ideas such as moduli spaces of bundles. The Weil conjecture on Tamagawa numbers proved resistant for many years. Eventually the adelic approach became basic in automorphic representation theory. He picked up another credited Weil conjecture, around 1967, which later under pressure from Serge Lang (resp. of Jean-Pierre Serre) became known as the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture (resp. Taniyama–Weil conjecture) based on a roughly formulated question of Taniyama at the 1955 Nikkō conference. His attitude towards conjectures was that one should not dignify a guess as a conjecture lightly, and in the Taniyama case, the evidence was only there after extensive computational work carried out from the late 1960s.
Other significant results were on Pontryagin duality and differential geometry. He introduced the concept of a uniform space in general topology, as a by-product of his collaboration with Nicolas Bourbaki (of which he was a Founding Father). His work on sheaf theory hardly appears in his published papers, but correspondence with Henri Cartan in the late 1940s, and reprinted in his collected papers, proved most influential. He also chose the symbol ∅, derived from the letter Ø in the Norwegian alphabet (which he alone among the Bourbaki group was familiar with), to represent the empty set.
Weil also made a well-known contribution in Riemannian geometry in his very first paper in 1926, when he showed that the classical isoperimetric inequality holds on non-positively curved surfaces. This established the 2-dimensional case of what later became known as the Cartan–Hadamard conjecture.
He discovered that the so-called Weil representation, previously introduced in quantum mechanics by Irving Segal and David Shale, gave a contemporary framework for understanding the classical theory of quadratic forms. This was also a beginning of a substantial development by others, connecting representation theory and theta functions.
Weil was a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
As expositor
Weil's ideas made an important contribution to the writings and seminars of Bourbaki, before and after World War II. He also wrote several books on the history of number theory.
Beliefs
Hindu thought had great influence on Weil. He was an agnostic, and he respected religions.LegacyAsteroid 289085 Andreweil, discovered by astronomers at the Saint-Sulpice Observatory in 2004, was named in his memory.
* Sur les espaces à structure uniforme et sur la topologie générale (1937)
* ''L'intégration dans les groupes topologiques et ses applications (1940)
*
* Sur les courbes algébriques et les variétés qui s'en déduisent (1948)
* Variétés abéliennes et courbes algébriques (1948)
* Introduction à l'étude des variétés kählériennes (1958)
* Discontinuous subgroups of classical groups (1958) Chicago lecture notes
*
* Dirichlet Series and Automorphic Forms, Lezioni Fermiane (1971) Lecture Notes in Mathematics, vol. 189
* Essais historiques sur la théorie des nombres (1975)
* [https://books.google.com/books/about/Elliptic_Functions_According_to_Eisenste.html?idvoR95sDdb_MC Elliptic Functions According to Eisenstein and Kronecker] (1976)
* Number Theory for Beginners (1979) with Maxwell Rosenlicht
* Adeles and Algebraic Groups (1982)
* [https://books.google.com/books/about/Number_Theory.html?idXSV0hDFj3loC Number Theory: An Approach Through History From Hammurapi to Legendre] (1984)
Collected papers:
* Œuvres Scientifiques, Collected Works, three volumes (1979)
*
*
*
Autobiography:
* French: Souvenirs d'Apprentissage (1991) . [https://www.jstor.org/stable/3619730 Review in English] by J. E. Cremona.
* English translation: [https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Apprenticeship_of_a_Mathematician.html?id=73REHmJ9JNUC The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician] (1992), [https://www.ams.org/notices/199904/rev-varadarajan.pdf Review] by Veeravalli S. Varadarajan; [https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1993-28-01/S0273-0979-1993-00337-9/S0273-0979-1993-00337-9.pdf Review] by Saunders Mac Lane
Memoir by his daughter:
* [https://books.google.com/books/about/At_Home_with_André_and_Simone_Weil.html?idOdeDlT9-GBUC At Home with André and Simone Weil] by Sylvie Weil, translated by Benjamin Ivry; , Northwestern University Press, 2010.See also* List of things named after André WeilReferences <!-- end of reflist -->
External links
* [https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2009-46-04/S0273-0979-09-01264-6/home.html André Weil], by A. Borel, Bull. AMS 46 (2009), 661–666.
* [https://www.ams.org/notices/199904/index.html André Weil]: memorial articles in the Notices of the AMS'' by Armand Borel, Pierre Cartier, Komaravolu Chandrasekharan, Shiing-Shen Chern, and Shokichi Iyanaga
* [https://www.ams.org/images/weil-photo.gif Image of Weil]
* [https://www.ams.org/notices/200503/fea-weil.pdf A 1940 Letter of André Weil on Analogy in Mathematics]
*
*
* [http://www.ias.ac.in/currsci/aug252003/526.pdf Artless innocents and ivory-tower sophisticates: Some personalities on the Indian mathematical scene] – M. S. Raghunathan
*
* La vie et l'oeuvre d'André Weil, by J-P. Serre, L'Ens. Math. 45 (1999),5–16.
* Correspondance entre Henri Cartan et André Weil (1928–1991), par Michèle Audin, Doc. Math. 6, Soc. Math. France, 2011.
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Category:French expatriates in the United States | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Weil | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.309115 |
2020 | Achaeans (Homer) | The Achaeans or Akhaians (; , "the Achaeans" or "of Achaea") is one of the names in Homer which is used to refer to the Greeks collectively.
The term "Achaean" is believed to be related to the Hittite term Ahhiyawa and the Egyptian term Ekwesh which appear in texts from the Late Bronze Age and are believed to refer to the Mycenaean civilization or some part of it.
In the historical period, the term fell into disuse as a general term for Greek people, and was generally reserved for inhabitants of the region of Achaea, a region in the north-central part of the Peloponnese. The city-states of this region later formed a confederation known as the Achaean League, which was influential during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.
Etymology
According to Margalit Finkelberg the name Ἀχαιοί (earlier Ἀχαιϝοί) is possibly derived, via an intermediate form *Ἀχαϝyοί, from a hypothetical older Greek form reflected in the Hittite form Aḫḫiyawā; the latter is attested in the Hittite archives, e.g. in the Tawagalawa letter. However, Robert S. P. Beekes doubted its validity and suggested a Pre-Greek *Akaywa-.
Homeric versus later use
In Homer, the term Achaeans is one of the primary terms used to refer to the Greeks as a whole. It is used 598 times in the Iliad, often accompanied by the epithet "long-haired". Other common names used in Homer are Danaans (; Danaoi; used 138 times in the Iliad) and Argives (; ; used 182 times in the Iliad) while Panhellenes ( Panhellenes, "All of the Greeks") and Hellenes (; Hellenes) both appear only once; All of the aforementioned terms were used synonymously to denote a common Greek identity. In some English translations of the Iliad, the Achaeans are simply called the Greeks throughout.
Later, by the Archaic and Classical periods, the term "Achaeans" referred to inhabitants of the much smaller region of Achaea. Herodotus identified the Achaeans of the northern Peloponnese as descendants of the earlier, Homeric Achaeans. According to Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, the term "Achaean" was originally given to those Greeks inhabiting the Argolis and Laconia.
Pausanias and Herodotus both recount the legend that the Achaeans were forced from their homelands by the Dorians, during the legendary Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese. They then moved into the region later called Achaea.
A scholarly consensus has not yet been reached on the origin of the historic Achaeans relative to the Homeric Achaeans and is still hotly debated. Former emphasis on presumed race, such as John A. Scott's article about the blond locks of the Achaeans as compared to the dark locks of "Mediterranean" Poseidon, on the basis of hints in Homer, has been rejected by some. The contrasting belief that "Achaeans", as understood through Homer, is "a name without a country", an ethnos created in the Epic tradition, has modern supporters among those who conclude that "Achaeans" were redefined in the 5th century BC, as contemporary speakers of Aeolic Greek.
Karl Beloch suggested there was no Dorian invasion, but rather that the Peloponnesian Dorians were the Achaeans. Eduard Meyer, disagreeing with Beloch, instead put forth the suggestion that the real-life Achaeans were mainland pre-Dorian Greeks. His conclusion is based on his research on the similarity between the languages of the Achaeans and pre-historic Arcadians. William Prentice disagreed with both, noting archeological evidence suggests the Achaeans instead migrated from "southern Asia Minor to Greece, probably settling first in lower Thessaly" probably prior to 2000 BC.
Hittite documents
thumb|175px|left|Map showing the Hittite Empire, Ahhiyawa (Achaeans) and Wilusa (Troy) in .
Some Hittite texts mention a nation to the west called Ahhiyawa ( Aḫḫiyawa). In the earliest reference to this land, a letter outlining the treaty violations of the Hittite vassal Madduwatta, it is called Ahhiya. Another important example is the Tawagalawa Letter written by an unnamed Hittite king (most probably Hattusili III) of the empire period (14th–13th century BC) to the king of Ahhiyawa, treating him as an equal and implying Miletus (Millawanda) was under his control. It also refers to an earlier "Wilusa episode" involving hostility on the part of Ahhiyawa. Ahhiya(wa) has been identified with the Achaeans of the Trojan War and the city of Wilusa with the legendary city of Troy (note the similarity with early Greek Wilion, later Ilion, the name of the acropolis of Troy).
Emil Forrer, a Swiss Hittitologist who worked on the Boghazköy tablets in Berlin, said the Achaeans of pre-Homeric Greece were directly associated with the term "Land of Ahhiyawa" mentioned in the Hittite texts. His conclusions at the time were challenged by other Hittitologists (i.e. Johannes Friedrich in 1927 and Albrecht Götze in 1930), as well as by Ferdinand Sommer, who published his (The Ahhiyawa Documents) in 1932. More recent research based on new readings and interpretations of the Hittite texts, as well as of the material evidence for Mycenaean contacts with the Anatolian mainland, came to the conclusion that Ahhiyawa referred to the Mycenaean world, or at least to a part of it.
Scholarship up to 2011 was reviewed by Gary M. Beckman et al. In this review, the increasing acceptance of the Ahhiyawa-Mycenaeans hypothesis was noted. As to the exact location of Ahhiyawa:
In fact, the authors state that "there is now little doubt that Ahhiyawa was a reference by the Hittites to some or all of the Bronze Age Mycenaean world", and that Forrer was "largely correct after all". The earliest textual reference to the Mycenaean world is in the Annals of Thutmosis III (–1425 BC), which refers to messengers from the king of the Tanaju, , offering greeting gifts to the Egyptian king, in order to initiate diplomatic relations, when the latter campaigned in Syria.
Greek mythology
In Greek mythology, the perceived cultural divisions among the Hellenes were represented as legendary lines of descent that identified kinship groups, with each line being derived from an eponymous ancestor. Each of the Greek ethne were said to be named in honor of their respective ancestors: Achaeus of the Achaeans, Danaus of the Danaans, Cadmus of the Cadmeans (the Thebans), Hellen of the Hellenes (not to be confused with Helen of Troy), Aeolus of the Aeolians, Ion of the Ionians, and Dorus of the Dorians.
Cadmus from Phoenicia, Danaus from Egypt, and Pelops from Anatolia each gained a foothold in mainland Greece and were assimilated and Hellenized. Hellen, Graikos, Magnes, and Macedon were sons of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the only people who survived the Great Flood; the ethne were said to have originally been named Graikoi after the elder son but later renamed Hellenes after Hellen who was proved to be the strongest. Sons of Hellen and the nymph Orseis were Dorus, Xuthos, and Aeolus. Sons of Xuthos and Kreousa, daughter of Erechthea, were Ion and Achaeus.
Genealogy of the Argives
See also
Achaea (modern province)
Achaea (Roman province)
Achaean League
Aegean civilization
Denyen
Historicity of the Iliad
Homer
Mycenaean Greece
Mycenaean language
Military of Mycenaean Greece
Troy
References
Citations
Sources
External links
Category:Mycenaean Greece
Category:Ancient tribes in Greece
Category:Sea Peoples
Category:Ancient tribes in Crete
*
Category:Denyen | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaeans_(Homer) | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.352694 |
2021 | Atle Selberg | | birth_place = Langesund, Norway
| death_date
| death_place = Princeton, New Jersey, United States
| residence | nationality Norwegian
| field = Mathematics
| workplaces = {{Plainlist|
*Syracuse University
*Institute for Advanced Study This challenged the widely held view of his time that certain theorems are only obtainable with the advanced methods of complex analysis. Both results were based on his work on the asymptotic formula
:<math>\vartheta \left( x \right)\log \left( x \right) + \sum\limits_{p \le x} {\log \left( p \right)} \vartheta \left( {\frac{x}{p}} \right) = 2x\log \left( x \right) + O\left( x \right)</math>
where
:<math>\vartheta \left( x \right) = \sum\limits_{p \le x} {\log \left( p \right)}</math>
for primes <math>p</math>. He established this result by elementary means in March 1948, and by July of that year, Selberg and Paul Erdős each obtained elementary proofs of the prime number theorem, both using the asymptotic formula above as a starting point. Circumstances leading up to the proofs, as well as publication disagreements, led to a bitter dispute between the two mathematicians.
For his fundamental accomplishments during the 1940s, Selberg received the 1950 Fields Medal. Institute for Advanced Study Selberg moved to the United States and worked as an associate professor at Syracuse University and later settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in the 1950s, where he remained until his death. During the 1950s he worked on introducing spectral theory into number theory, culminating in his development of the Selberg trace formula, the most famous and influential of his results. In its simplest form, this establishes a duality between the lengths of closed geodesics on a compact Riemann surface and the eigenvalues of the Laplacian, which is analogous to the duality between the prime numbers and the zeros of the zeta function.
He generally worked alone. His only coauthor was Sarvadaman Chowla.
Selberg was awarded the 1986 Wolf Prize in Mathematics. He was also awarded an honorary Abel Prize in 2002, its founding year, before the awarding of the regular prizes began.
Selberg received many distinctions for his work, in addition to the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize and the Gunnerus Medal. He was elected to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1972, he was awarded an honorary degree, doctor philos. honoris causa, at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, later part of Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
His first wife, Hedvig, died in 1995. With her, Selberg had two children: Ingrid Selberg (married to playwright Mustapha Matura) and Lars Selberg. In 2003 Atle Selberg married Betty Frances ("Mickey") Compton (born in 1929).
He died at home in Princeton, New Jersey on 6 August 2007 of heart failure. Upon his death he was survived by his widow, daughter, son, and four grandchildren. Selected publications
*
*
*
*
*
*
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*
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Selberg's collected works were published in two volumes. The first volume contains 41 articles, and the second volume contains three additional articles, in addition to Selberg's lectures on sieves.
* [https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9783642410215 Description at M.I.T. Press Bookstore]
* [https://mitpressbookstore.mit.edu/book/9783642410222 Description at M.I.T. Press Bookstore] References Further reading
* Albers, Donald J. and Alexanderson, Gerald L. (2011), Fascinating Mathematical People: interviews and memoirs, "Atle Selberg", pp 254–73, Princeton University Press, .
* Interview with Selberg
*
* External links
*
*
* [http://publications.ias.edu/selberg Atle Selberg archive webpage]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20151122035028/https://www.ias.edu/news/press-releases/2009-30 Obituary at Institute for Advanced Study]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110524002831/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2477242.ece Obituary in The Times]
* [http://arkivportalen.no/side/arkiv/detaljer?arkivId=no-NTNU_arkiv000000008702 Atle Selbergs private archive] exists at NTNU University Library
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Category:Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atle_Selberg | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.388306 |
2023 | Aeschylus | 30 BC, based on an earlier bronze Greek herma, dating to around 340-320 BC
| native_name = }}
| native_name_lang = Greek
| birth_date = /524 BC
| birth_place = Eleusis
| death_date = (aged approximately 67)
| death_place = Gela, Sicily
| occupation = Playwright and soldier
| children =
| parents = Euphorion (father)
| relatives =
}}
Aeschylus (, ; ; /524 – /455 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy. Academic knowledge of the genre begins with his work, and understanding of earlier Greek tragedy is largely based on inferences made from reading his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in the theatre and allowed conflict among them. Formerly, characters interacted only with the chorus.
Only seven of Aeschylus's estimated 70 to 90 plays have survived in complete form. There is a long-standing debate regarding the authorship of one of them, Prometheus Bound, with some scholars arguing that it may be the work of his son Euphorion. Fragments from other plays have survived in quotations, and more continue to be discovered on Egyptian papyri. These fragments often give further insights into Aeschylus' work. He was likely the first dramatist to present plays as a trilogy. His Oresteia is the only extant ancient example. At least one of his plays was influenced by the Persians' second invasion of Greece (480–479 BC). This work, The Persians, is one of very few classical Greek tragedies concerned with contemporary events, and the only one extant. The significance of the war with Persia was so great to Aeschylus and the Greeks that his epitaph commemorates his participation in the Greek victory at Marathon while making no mention of his success as a playwright.
Life
, Aeschylus' hometown]]
Aeschylus was born around 525 BC in Eleusis, a small town about northwest of Athens, in the fertile valleys of western Attica. Some scholars argue that the date of Aeschylus's birth may be based on counting back 40 years from his first victory in the Great Dionysia. His family was wealthy and well established. His father, Euphorion, was said to be a member of the Eupatridae, the ancient nobility of Attica, but this might be a fiction invented by the ancients to account for the grandeur of Aeschylus' plays.
As a youth, Aeschylus worked at a vineyard until, according to the 2nd-century AD geographer Pausanias, the god Dionysus visited him in his sleep and commanded him to turn his attention to the nascent art of tragedy.
In 510 BC, when Aeschylus was 15 years old, Cleomenes I expelled the sons of Peisistratus from Athens, and Cleisthenes came to power. Cleisthenes' reforms included a system of registration that emphasized the importance of the deme over family tradition. In the last decade of the 6th century, Aeschylus and his family were living in the deme of Eleusis.
The Persian Wars played a large role in Aeschylus' life and career. In 490 BC, he and his brother Cynegeirus fought to defend Athens against the invading army of Darius I of Persia at the Battle of Marathon. The Athenians emerged triumphant, and the victory was celebrated across the city-states of Greece. Cynegeirus was killed while trying to prevent a Persian ship retreating from the shore, for which his countrymen extolled him as a hero. Ion of Chios was a witness for Aeschylus' war record and his contribution in Salamis.
Aeschylus was one of many Greeks who were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient cult of Demeter based in his home town of Eleusis. According to Aristotle, Aeschylus was accused of asebeia (impiety) for revealing some of the cult's secrets on stage. A nephew of Aeschylus, Philocles (his sister's son), was also a tragic poet, and won first prize in the competition against Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. Aeschylus had at least two brothers, Cynegeirus and Ameinias.
Death
]]
In 458 BC, Aeschylus returned to Sicily for the last time, visiting the city of Gela, where he died in 456 or 455 BC. Valerius Maximus wrote that he was killed outside the city by a tortoise dropped by an eagle which had mistaken his head for a rock suitable for shattering the shell, and killed him. but this story may be a legend and due to a misunderstanding of the iconography on Aeschylus' tomb. Aeschylus' work was so respected by the Athenians that after his death his tragedies were the only ones allowed to be restaged in subsequent competitions. His sons Euphorion and Euæon and his nephew Philocles also became playwrights.
The inscription on Aeschylus' gravestone makes no mention of his theatrical renown, commemorating only his military achievements:
Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian,
who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;
of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,
and the long-haired Persian knows it well.|source}}Works
in Athens, where many of Aeschylus's plays were performed]]
The seeds of Greek drama were sown in religious festivals for the gods, chiefly Dionysus, the god of wine. The first competition Aeschylus would have participated in involved three playwrights each presenting three tragedies and one satyr play. The Oresteia is the only extant example of this type of connected trilogy, but there is evidence that Aeschylus often wrote such trilogies. The satyr plays that followed his tragic trilogies also drew from myth.
The satyr play Proteus, which followed the Oresteia, treated the story of Menelaus' detour in Egypt on his way home from the Trojan War. It is assumed, based on the evidence provided by a catalogue of Aeschylean play titles, scholia, and play fragments recorded by later authors, that three other extant plays of his were components of connected trilogies: Seven Against Thebes was the final play in an Oedipus trilogy, and The Suppliants and Prometheus Bound were each the first play in a Danaid trilogy and Prometheus trilogy, respectively. Scholars have also suggested several completely lost trilogies, based on known play titles. A number of these treated myths about the Trojan War. One, collectively called the Achilleis, comprised Myrmidons, Nereids and Phrygians (alternately, The Ransoming of Hector).
Another trilogy apparently recounted the entrance of the Trojan ally Memnon into the war, and his death at the hands of Achilles (Memnon and The Weighing of Souls being two components of the trilogy). The Award of the Arms, The Phrygian Women, and The Salaminian Women suggest a trilogy about the madness and subsequent suicide of the Greek hero Ajax. Aeschylus seems to have written about Odysseus' return to Ithaca after the war (including his killing of his wife Penelope's suitors and its consequences) in a trilogy consisting of The Soul-raisers, Penelope, and The Bone-gatherers. Other suggested trilogies touched on the myth of Jason and the Argonauts (Argô, Lemnian Women, Hypsipylê), the life of Perseus (The Net-draggers, Polydektês, Phorkides), the birth and exploits of Dionysus (Semele, Bacchae, Pentheus), and the aftermath of the war portrayed in Seven Against Thebes (Eleusinians, Argives (or Argive Women), Sons of the Seven).Surviving playsThe Persians (472 BC)
.]]
The Persians (Persai) is the earliest of Aeschylus' extant plays. It was performed in 472 BC. It was based on Aeschylus' own experiences, specifically the Battle of Salamis. It is unique among surviving Greek tragedies in that it describes a recent historical event.Seven Against Thebes (467 BC)
Seven against Thebes (Hepta epi Thebas) was performed in 467 BC. It has the contrasting theme of the interference of the gods in human affairs.
The play tells the story of Eteocles and Polynices, the sons of the shamed king of Thebes, Oedipus. Eteocles and Polynices agree to share and alternate the throne of the city. After the first year, Eteocles refuses to step down. Polynices therefore undertakes war. The pair kill each other in single combat, and the original ending of the play consisted of lamentations for the dead brothers. But a new ending was added to the play some fifty years later: Antigone and Ismene mourn their dead brothers, a messenger enters announcing an edict prohibiting the burial of Polynices, and Antigone declares her intention to defy this edict.
The Suppliants (463 BC)
showing the Danaids murdering their husbands]]
Aeschylus continued his emphasis on the polis with The Suppliants (Hiketides) in 463 BC. The play gives tribute to the democratic undercurrents which were running through Athens and preceding the establishment of a democratic government in 461. The Danaids (50 daughters of Danaus, founder of Argos) flee a forced marriage to their cousins in Egypt. They turn to King Pelasgus of Argos for protection, but Pelasgus refuses until the people of Argos weigh in on the decision (a distinctly democratic move on the part of the king). The people decide that the Danaids deserve protection and are allowed within the walls of Argos despite Egyptian protests.
A Danaid trilogy had long been assumed because of The Suppliants' cliffhanger ending. This was confirmed by the 1952 publication of Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 2256 fr. 3. The constituent plays are generally agreed to be The Suppliants, The Egyptians and The Danaids. A plausible reconstruction of the trilogy's last two-thirds runs thus: In The Egyptians, the Argive-Egyptian war threatened in the first play has transpired. King Pelasgus was killed during the war, and Danaus rules Argos. Danaus negotiates a settlement with Aegyptus, a condition of which requires his 50 daughters to marry the 50 sons of Aegyptus. Danaus secretly informs his daughters of an oracle which predicts that one of his sons-in-law would kill him. He orders the Danaids to murder their husbands therefore on their wedding night. His daughters agree. The Danaids would open the day after the wedding.
It is revealed that 49 of the 50 Danaids killed their husbands. Hypermnestra did not kill her husband, Lynceus, and helped him escape. Danaus is angered by his daughter's disobedience and orders her imprisonment and possibly execution. In the trilogy's climax and dénouement, Lynceus reveals himself to Danaus and kills him, thus fulfilling the oracle. He and Hypermnestra will establish a ruling dynasty in Argos. The other 49 Danaids are absolved of their murders, and married off to unspecified Argive men. The satyr play following this trilogy was titled Amymone, after one of the Danaids.
The play consists mostly of static dialogue. The Titan Prometheus is bound to a rock throughout, which is his punishment from the Olympian Zeus for providing fire to humans. The god Hephaestus and the Titan Oceanus and the chorus of Oceanids all express sympathy for Prometheus' plight. Prometheus is met by Io, a fellow victim of Zeus' cruelty. He prophesies her future travels, revealing that one of her descendants will free Prometheus. The play closes with Zeus sending Prometheus into the abyss because Prometheus will not tell him of a potential marriage which could prove Zeus' downfall. We learn that Zeus has released the other Titans which he imprisoned at the conclusion of the Titanomachy, perhaps foreshadowing his eventual reconciliation with Prometheus.
In the trilogy's conclusion, Prometheus the Fire-Bringer, it seems that the Titan finally warns Zeus not to sleep with the sea nymph Thetis, for she is fated to beget a son greater than the father. Not wishing to be overthrown, Zeus marries Thetis off to the mortal Peleus. The product of that union is Achilles, Greek hero of the Trojan War. After reconciling with Prometheus, Zeus probably inaugurates a festival in his honor at Athens.
*Alcmene
*Amymone
*The Archer-Women
*The Argivian Women
*The Argo, also titled The Rowers
*Atalanta
*Athamas
*Attendants of the Bridal Chamber
*Award of the Arms
*The Bacchae
*The Bassarae
*The Bone-Gatherers
*The Cabeiroi
*Callisto
*The Carians, also titled Europa
*Cercyon
*Children of Hercules
*Circe
*The Cretan Women
*Cycnus
*The Danaids
*Daughters of Helios
*Daughters of Phorcys
*The Descendants
*The Edonians
*The Egyptians
*The Escorts
*Glaucus of Pontus
*Glaucus of Potniae
*Hypsipyle
*Iphigenia
*Ixion
*Laius
*The Lemnian Women
*The Lion
*Lycurgus
*Memnon
*The Men of Eleusis
*The Messengers
*The Myrmidons
*The Mysians
*Nemea
*The Net-Draggers
*The Nurses of Dionysus
*Orethyia
*Palamedes
*Penelope
*Pentheus
*Perrhaibides
*Philoctetes
*Phineus
*The Phrygian Women
*Polydectes
*The Priestesses
*Prometheus the Fire-Bearer
*Prometheus the Fire-Kindler
*Prometheus Unbound
*Proteus
*Semele, also titled The Water-Bearers
*Sisyphus the Runaway
*Sisyphus the Stone-Roller
*The Spectators, also titled Athletes of the Isthmian Games
*The Sphinx
*The Spirit-Raisers
*Telephus
*The Thracian Women
*Weighing of Souls
*Women of Aetna (two versions)
*Women of Salamis
*Xantriae
*The Youths
Influence
Influence on Greek drama and culture
, main character in Aeschylus's only surviving trilogy The Oresteia]]
The theatre was just beginning to evolve when Aeschylus started writing for it. Earlier playwrights such as Thespis had already expanded the cast to include an actor who was able to interact with the chorus. Aeschylus added a second actor, allowing for greater dramatic variety, while the chorus played a less important role. though Aristotle gives this distinction to Sophocles. Aeschylus is also said to have made the costumes more elaborate and dramatic, and made his actors wear platform boots (cothurni) to make them more visible to the audience. According to a later account of Aeschylus' life, the chorus of Furies in the first performance of the Eumenides were so frightening when they entered that children fainted, patriarchs urinated, pregnant women went into labour.
Aeschylus wrote his plays in verse. No violence is performed onstage. The plays have a remoteness from daily life in Athens, relating stories about the gods, or being set, like The Persians, far away. Aeschylus' work has a strong moral and religious emphasis.
Aeschylus' popularity is evident in the praise that the comic playwright Aristophanes gives him in The Frogs, produced some 50 years after Aeschylus' death. Aeschylus appears as a character in the play and claims, at line 1022, that his Seven against Thebes "made everyone watching it to love being warlike". He claims, at lines 1026–7, that with The Persians he "taught the Athenians to desire always to defeat their enemies."
J.T. Sheppard argues in the second half of his Aeschylus and Sophocles: Their Work and Influence that Aeschylus and Sophocles have played a major part in the formation of dramatic literature from the Renaissance to the present, specifically in French and Elizabethan drama. He also claims that their influence went beyond just drama and applies to literature in general, citing Milton and the Romantics.
Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), a trilogy of three plays set in America after the Civil War, is modeled after the Oresteia. Before writing his acclaimed trilogy, O'Neill had been developing a play about Aeschylus, and he noted that Aeschylus "so changed the system of the tragic stage that he has more claim than anyone else to be regarded as the founder (Father) of Tragedy."
During his presidential campaign in 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy quoted the Edith Hamilton translation of Aeschylus on the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy was notified of King's murder before a campaign stop in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was warned not to attend the event due to fears of rioting from the mostly African-American crowd. Kennedy insisted on attending and delivered an impromptu speech that delivered news of King's death. Acknowledging the audience's emotions, Kennedy referred to his own grief at the murder of Martin Luther King and, quoting a passage from the play Agamemnon (in translation), said: "My favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote: 'Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.' What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black ... Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."
The quotation from Aeschylus was later inscribed on a memorial at the gravesite of Robert Kennedy following his own assassination.<ref name"flickr.com"/>
Editions
*Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Aeschyli Tragoediae. Editio maior, Berlin 1914.
*Gilbert Murray, Aeschyli Septem Quae Supersunt Tragoediae. Editio Altera, Oxford 1955.
*Denys Page, Aeschyli Septem Quae Supersunt Tragoediae, Oxford 1972.
*Martin L. West, Aeschyli Tragoediae cum incerti poetae Prometheo, 2nd ed., Stuttgart/Leipzig 1998.
*The first translation of the seven plays into English was by Robert Potter in 1779, using blank verse for the iambic trimeters and rhymed verse for the choruses, a convention adopted by most translators for the next century.
*Anna Swanwick produced a verse translation in English of all seven surviving plays as The Dramas of Aeschylus in 1886 [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dramas_of_Aeschylus_(Swanwick) full text]
*Stefan Radt (ed.), Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta. Vol. III: Aeschylus (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009) (Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, 3).
*Alan H. Sommerstein (ed.), Aeschylus, Volume II, Oresteia: Agamemnon. Libation-bearers. Eumenides. 146 (Cambridge, Massachusetts/London: Loeb Classical Library, 2009); Volume III, Fragments. 505 (Cambridge, Massachusetts/London: Loeb Classical Library, 2008).
See also
* 2876 Aeschylus, an asteroid named for him
* Ancient Greek literature
* Ancient Greek mythology
* Ancient Greek religion
* Battle of Marathon
* Classical Greece
* Dionysia
* Music of ancient Greece
* Theatre of ancient Greece
* "Live by the sword, die by the sword"
Notes
<references group"nb" />CitationsReferences*
*Bierl, A. Die Orestie des Aischylos auf der modernen Bühne: Theoretische Konzeptionen und ihre szenische Realizierung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997)
*Cairns, D., V. Liapis, Dionysalexandros: Essays on Aeschylus and His Fellow Tragedians in Honour of Alexander F. Garvie (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2006)
*
*
*Deforge, B. Une vie avec Eschyle. Vérité des mythes (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2010)
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*Lefkowitz, Mary (1981). The Lives of the Greek Poets. University of North Carolina Press
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*— (2002). Greek Drama and Dramatists. London: Routledge Press.
*
*Summers, David (2007). Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting. University of North Carolina Press
*Thomson, George (1973) Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origin of Drama. London: Lawrence and Wishart (4th edition)
*
*Vellacott, Philip, (1961). Prometheus Bound and Other Plays: Prometheus Bound, Seven Against Thebes, and The Persians. New York: Penguin Classics.
*
*Zeitlin, Froma (1982). ''Under the sign of the shield: semiotics and Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes''. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2nd ed. 2009 (Greek studies: interdisciplinary approaches)
*Zetlin, Froma (1996). "The dynamics of misogyny: myth and mythmaking in Aeschylus's Oresteia<nowiki/>", in Froma Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 87–119.
*Zeitlin, Froma (1996). "The politics of Eros in the Danaid trilogy of Aeschylus", in Froma Zeitlin, Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 123–171.
External links
*
*
*
*
*
*[http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/the_classics/aeschylus/ Selected Poems of Aeschylus]
*[https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/perscoll?collection=Perseus:collection:Greco-Roman Aeschylus-related materials at the Perseus Digital Library]
*[http://alpheios.net/ Complete syntax diagrams at Alpheios]
*[http://www.bartleby.com/people/Aeschylu.html Online English Translations of Aeschylus]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20110222201257/http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/VExhibition/2161.htm Photo of a fragment of The Net-pullers]
*
*[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=27807 "Aeschylus, I: Persians" from the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press]
*[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=27808 "Aeschylus, II: The Oresteia" from the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press]
*[http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=29387 "Aeschylus, III: Fragments" from the Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press]
Category:5th-century BC Greek people
Category:5th-century BC writers
Category:520s BC births
Category:450s BC deaths
Category:Year of birth uncertain
Category:Year of death uncertain
Category:Ancient Greek dramatists and playwrights
Category:Tragic poets
Category:Ancient Greeks accused of sacrilege
Category:Greek people of the Greco-Persian Wars
Category:Battle of Marathon
Category:Accidental deaths in Italy
Category:Deaths due to animal attacks
Category:Bird attacks | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeschylus | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.437621 |
2024 | Amber Road | The Amber Road was an ancient trade route for the transfer of amber from coastal areas of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. Prehistoric trade routes between Northern and Southern Europe were defined by the amber trade.
As an important commodity, sometimes dubbed "the gold of the north", amber was transported from the North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts overland by way of the Vistula and Dnieper rivers to Italy, Greece, the Black Sea, Syria and Egypt over a period of thousands of years.
Antiquity
The oldest trade in amber started from Sicily. The Sicilian amber trade was directed to Greece, North Africa and Spain. Sicilian amber was also discovered in Mycenae by the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, and it appeared in sites in southern Spain and Portugal. Its distribution is similar to that of ivory, so it is possible that amber from Sicily reached the Iberian Peninsula through contacts with North Africa. After a decline in the consumption and trade of amber at the beginning of the Bronze Age, around 2000 BC, the influence of Baltic amber gradually took the place of Sicilian amber throughout the Iberian Peninsula from around 1000 BC. The new evidence comes from various archaeological and geological locations on the Iberian Peninsula.
From at least the 16th century BC, amber was moved from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean area. The breast ornament of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen ( BC) contains large Baltic amber beads. Schliemann found Baltic amber beads at Mycenae, as shown by spectroscopic investigation. The quantity of amber in the Royal Hypogeum of Qatna, in Syria, is unparalleled among known second millennium BC sites in the Levant and the Ancient Near East. Amber was sent from the North Sea to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi as an offering. From the Black Sea, trade could continue to Asia along the Silk Road, another ancient trade route.
In Roman times, a main route ran south from the Baltic coast (modern Lithuania), the entire north–south length of modern-day Poland (likely through the Iron Age settlement of Biskupin), through the land of the Boii (modern Czech Republic and Slovakia) to the head of the Adriatic Sea (Aquileia by the modern Gulf of Venice). Other commodities were exported to the Romans along with amber, such as animal fur and skin, honey, and wax, in exchange for Roman glass, brass, gold, and non-ferrous metals such as tin and copper imported into the early Baltic region. As this road was a lucrative trade route connecting the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, Roman military fortifications were constructed along the route to protect merchants and traders from Germanic raids.
The Old Prussian towns of Kaup and Truso on the Baltic were the starting points of the route to the south. In Scandinavia the amber road probably gave rise to the thriving Nordic Bronze Age culture, bringing influences from the Mediterranean Sea to the northernmost countries of Europe. Kaliningrad Oblast is occasionally referred to in Russian as 'the amber region' ().
Known roads by country
}}
Estonia
Old coastal Amber road route goes along E67 highway from Reiu in Häädemeeste Parish of Pärnumaa South, where it continues as 331 local road between Rannametsa and Ikla villages.
Poland
The shortest (and possibly oldest) road avoids alpine areas and led from the Baltic coastline (nowadays Lithuania and Poland), through Biskupin, Milicz, Wrocław, the Kłodzko Valley (less often through the Moravian Gate), crossed the Danube near Carnuntum in the Noricum province, headed southwest past Poetovio, Celeia, Emona, Nauportus, and reached Patavium and Aquileia at the Adriatic coast. One of the oldest directions of the last stage of the Amber Road to the south of the Danube, noted in the myth about the Argonauts, used the rivers Sava and Kupa, ending with a short continental road from Nauportus to Tarsatica in Rijeka on the coast of the Adriatic.
Germany
Several roads connected the North Sea and Baltic Sea, especially the city of Hamburg to the Brenner Pass, proceeding southwards to Brindisi (nowadays Italy) and Ambracia (nowadays Greece).
Switzerland
The Swiss region indicates a number of alpine roads, concentrating around the capital city Bern and probably originating from the banks of the Rhône and Rhine.
Netherlands
A small section, including Baarn, Barneveld, Amersfoort and Amerongen, connected the North Sea with the Lower Rhine.
Belgium
A small section led southwards from Antwerp and Bruges to the towns Braine-l'Alleud and Braine-le-Comte, both originally named "Brennia-Brenna". The route continued by following the Meuse towards Bern in Switzerland.
Southern France and Spain
Routes connected amber finding locations at Ambares (near Bordeaux), leading to Béarn and the Pyrenees. Routes connecting the amber finding locations in northern Spain and in the Pyrenees were a trading route to the Mediterranean Sea.
Mongolia
Sources of archaeological finds suggest that routes may also have connected Mongolia to eastern Europe during the Kitan/Liao Period.
Modern usage
There is a tourist route stretching along the Baltic coast from Kaliningrad to Latvia called "Amber Road".
"Amber Road" sites are:
* Mizgiris Amber Gallery-Museum in Nida;
* Amber Bay in Juodkrantė;
* Lithuania Minor History Museum;
* Amber collection place in Karklė, Lithuania;
* Palanga Amber Museum in Palanga;
* Open amber workshop in Palanga;
* Amber museum in Gdańsk; and
* Samogitian Alka in Šventoji.
* Amber deposit from Partynice - Dating from the 1st century BC amber deposit found in Wrocław. It is the world's largest archaeological find of amber, estimated at . Currently it is in the Archaeological Museum in Wrocław.
In Poland, the north–south motorway A1 is officially named Amber Highway.
EV9 The Amber Route is a long-distance cycling route between Gdańsk, Poland and Pula, Croatia which follows the course of the Amber Road.
The modern Baltic–Adriatic Corridor connects the two seas along routes that roughly follow the Amber Road.
References
External links
* [http://www.ciolek.com/OWTRAD/DATA/tmcZCEm0100.html OWTRAD-scientific description of the amber road in Poland]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20121124001256/http://www.ciolek.com/owtrad.html Old World Traditional Trade Routes (OWTRAD) Project]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060224202222/http://www.joannesrichter.homepage.t-online.de/Androgyn/Bernsteinrouten_BK.pdf Joannes Richter – "Die Bernsteinroute bei Backnang"] (pdf file)
Category:Amber
Category:History of Europe
Category:Transport in Prussia
Category:Prehistoric Lithuania
Category:Prehistoric Poland
Category:Trade routes
Category:Southern France | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Road | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.450469 |
2025 | Crandall University | | administrative_staff 39
| president = Bruce G. Fawcett
| rector | chancellor Donald Simmonds
| vice_chancellor | dean
| campus = Urban
| colors | colours Blue and Gold
| mascot = Charlie the Charger
| free_label = Sports teams
| free = Chargers
| affiliations = Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches <br /> Acadia Divinity College <br /> CCCU <br /> Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, CUSID,
| website =
| logo = Crandall University logo.png
}}
Crandall University is a Baptist Christian liberal arts university located in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. It is affiliated with the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada (Canadian Baptist Ministries).
History
Crandall University was founded in 1949 under the name United Baptist Bible Training School (UBBTS), and served as both a secondary school and a Bible school by the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada. Over two decades, the focus of the school gradually shifted toward post-secondary programs. In 1968, UBBTS became a Bible and junior Christian liberal arts college, and in 1970 the name was changed to Atlantic Baptist College (ABC). Its campus at this time was located along the Salisbury Road, west of Moncton's central business district.
The institution moved to a new campus built on the Gorge Road, north of the central business district, in 1996. The name was changed to Atlantic Baptist University (ABU), a reflection of expanded student enrolment and academic accreditation. In 2003, the ABU sports teams adopted the name The Blue Tide. The institution was the first, and thus far only, English-language university in Moncton. The Atlantic Baptist University Act was passed by the Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick in 2008.
On August 21, 2009, it was announced that the institution had changed its name to Crandall University in honour of Rev. Joseph Crandall, a pioneering Baptist minister in the maritime region. In conjunction with the university name change, Crandall Athletics took on a new identity as "The Crandall Chargers."Academics, Crandall offers 16 undergraduate programs, 3 graduate programs, and a variety of certificate programs. Through its partnership with Acadia Divinity College, students can also enrol in the Bachelor of Theology program concurrent with a Crandall degree. Crandall has a 13:1 student-to-faculty ratio. That same year, the Crandall Student Association publicly broke with the university's administration over the policy, with the student president at the time telling the CBC, "The Christian faith does say do not judge others. And the Christian faith is all about love. So I feel that this policy – to me – doesn't seem like it's following those specific guidelines." In 2013, a year after the controversy erupted, the university opted to not apply for $150,000 in public funding that it had received annually. The university president also issued an apology, stating: "We wish to apologize for anything that Crandall University might possibly have communicated in the past that may have seemed unloving or disrespectful in any way toward any individual or groups."AffiliationsCrandall is an affiliate member of the Association of the Registrars of the Universities and Colleges of Canada (ARUCC); a full member of the ARUCC regional association, the Atlantic Association of Registrars and Admissions Officers (AARAO); an active member of Christian Higher Education Canada (CHEC); and an active member of the New Brunswick Association of Private Colleges and Universities. However, Crandall faculty are not members of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT). In their report, the CAUT found that "while the university has a statement on academic freedom, it is significantly inconsistent with that of the CAUT and the majority of universities across the western world, and assurances that free enquiry is still possible within its constraints are unconvincing." They therefore recommended that Crandall University "be placed on the list of institutions 'found to have imposed a requirement of a commitment to a particular ideology or statement of faith as a condition of employment.'"
The university is affiliated with the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada (Canadian Baptist Ministries). It is a member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
Library and archives
Crandall University houses the Baptist Heritage Center whose 300 artifacts preserve the material history of Atlantic Baptists, the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches, and its predecessor organizations. The collection and archives includes objects used in worship services, furniture, musical instruments, church building architecture pictures and printed material.AthleticsCrandall University is represented in the Atlantic Collegiate Athletic Association (ACAA) by 8 varsity teams. The Chargers teams include men's and women's soccer, basketball, volleyball, and cross country. The Chargers also offer a boxing club program that competes internationally.
The Chargers have won seven ACAA championship banners:
* Women's soccer in 2003–04
* Women's cross country in 2022–23 and 2023–24
* Men's cross country in 2021–22, 2022-23, 2023-24, and 2024-25
*Ken LeBlanc – entrepreneur
*Ralph Richardson – first chancellor of the university
*Cathy Rogers – politician
See also
* List of schools in Moncton
* Higher education in New Brunswick
* List of universities and colleges in New Brunswick
References
External links
*[https://www.crandallu.ca/ Crandall University homepage]
*[http://crandallchargers.ca/landing/index Crandall Athletics homepage]
Category:Education in Moncton
Category:Universities in New Brunswick
Category:1949 establishments in New Brunswick
Category:Universities and colleges established in 1949
Category:Baptist universities and colleges
Category:Baptist Christianity in Canada
Category:Council for Christian Colleges and Universities
Category:Christian universities and colleges in Canada
Category:Private universities and colleges in New Brunswick | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crandall_University | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.472972 |
2027 | Andrew Wiles | | image = Andrew wiles1-3.jpg
| caption = Wiles in 2005
| birth_date
| birth_place = Cambridge, England
| nationality = British
| field = Mathematics
| work_institutions =
| education = King's College School, Cambridge<br/>The Leys School
| alma_mater =
| doctoral_advisor John Coates
* Vinayak Vatsal}}
| thesis_title = Reciprocity Laws and the Conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer
| thesis_year = 1979
| thesis_url http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uinuk.bl.ethos.477263
| known_for = Proving the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, thereby proving Fermat's Last Theorem<br/>Proving the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory
| prizes = .
Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem
From 1988 to 1990, Wiles was a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, and then he returned to Princeton.
From 1994 to 2009, Wiles was a Eugene Higgins Professor at Princeton.
Starting in mid-1986, based on successive progress of the previous few years of Gerhard Frey, Jean-Pierre Serre and Ken Ribet, it became clear that Fermat's Last Theorem (the statement that no three positive integers , , and satisfy the equation for any integer value of greater than ) could be proven as a corollary of a limited form of the modularity theorem (unproven at the time and then known as the "Taniyama–Shimura–Weil conjecture"). These curves can be thought of as mathematical objects resembling solutions for a torus' surface, and if Fermat's Last Theorem were false and solutions existed, "a peculiar curve would result". A proof of the theorem therefore would involve showing that such a curve would not exist. For example, Wiles's ex-supervisor John Coates stated that it seemed "impossible to actually prove",}}
In August 1993, it was discovered that the proof contained a flaw in several areas, related to properties of the Selmer group and use of a tool called an Euler system. Wiles tried and failed for over a year to repair his proof. According to Wiles, the crucial idea for circumventing—rather than closing—this area came to him on 19 September 1994, when he was on the verge of giving up. The circumvention used Galois representations to replace elliptic curves, reduced the problem to a class number formula and solved it, among other matters, all using Victor Kolyvagin's ideas as a basis for fixing Matthias Flach's approach with Iwasawa theory. Together with his former student Richard Taylor, Wiles published a second paper which contained the circumvention and thus completed the proof. Both papers were published in May 1995 in a dedicated issue of the Annals of Mathematics.
Later career
In 2011, Wiles rejoined the University of Oxford as Royal Society Research Professor. Wiles's doctoral students have also included Manjul Bhargava (2014 winner of the Fields Medal), Ehud de Shalit, Ritabrata Munshi (winner of the SSB Prize and ICTP Ramanujan Prize), Karl Rubin (son of Vera Rubin), Christopher Skinner, and Vinayak Vatsal (2007 winner of the Coxeter–James Prize).
In 2016, upon receiving the Abel Prize, Wiles said about his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, "The methods that solved it opened up a new way of attacking one of the big webs of conjectures of contemporary mathematics called the Langlands Program, which as a grand vision tries to unify different branches of mathematics. It’s given us a new way to look at that". about Fermat's Last Theorem. This was broadcast as an episode of the PBS science television series Nova with the title "The Proof". His work and life are also described in great detail in Simon Singh's popular book ''Fermat's Last Theorem''.
In 1988, Wiles was awarded the Junior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (1988). Upon completing his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in 1995, he was awarded the Schock Prize, the Royal Medal, and the Ostrowski Prize in 1996. He won the American Mathematical Society's Cole Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wolfskehl Prize in 1997, and was elected member of the American Philosophical Society that year.
In 1998, Wiles was awarded a silver plaque from the International Mathematical Union recognising his achievements, in place of the Fields Medal, which is restricted to those under the age of 40 (Wiles was 41 when he proved the theorem in 1994). That same year, he was awarded the King Faisal Prize along with the Clay Research Award in 1999,
In 2000, he was awarded Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2000) In 2004 Wiles won the Premio Pitagora. In 2005, he won the Shaw Prize.
The building at the University of Oxford housing the Mathematical Institute was named after Wiles in 2016. Later that year he won the Abel Prize. In 2017, Wiles won the Copley Medal. See also * André WeilReferencesExternal links
*[https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/people/andrew.wiles Profile from Oxford]
*[https://dof.princeton.edu/about/clerk-faculty/emeritus/andrew-john-wiles Profile from Princeton]
Category:1953 births
Category:Living people
Category:20th-century English mathematicians
Category:21st-century English mathematicians
Category:Abel Prize laureates
Category:Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge
Category:Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Category:Alumni of Merton College, Oxford
Category:Clay Research Award recipients
Category:Fellows of Merton College, Oxford
Category:Fellows of the Royal Society
Category:Fermat's Last Theorem
Category:Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
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Category:Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire
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Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society
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Category:British number theorists
Category:People educated at The Leys School
Category:People from Cambridge
Category:Princeton University faculty
Category:Recipients of the Copley Medal
Category:Regius Professors of Mathematics (University of Oxford)
Category:Rolf Schock Prize laureates
Category:Royal Medal winners
Category:Trustees of the Institute for Advanced Study
Category:Whitehead Prize winners
Category:Wolf Prize in Mathematics laureates | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wiles | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.493738 |
2028 | Ambient | Ambient or ambiance or ambience may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
Ambiancé, an unreleased experimental film
Ambient (novel), a novel by Jack Womack
Music and sound
Ambience (sound recording), also known as atmospheres or backgrounds
Ambient music, a genre of music that puts an emphasis on tone and atmosphere
Ambient (album), by Moby
Ambience (album), by the Lambrettas
Virgin Ambient series, a series of 24 albums released on the UK Virgin Records label between 1993 and 1997
Ambient 1–4, a set of four albums by Brian Eno, released by Obscure Records between 1978 and 1982
Stingray Ambiance, the channel "Ambiance" on the Singray music service
Other
Ambient (computation), a process calculus
Ambient (desktop environment), a MUI-based desktop environment for MorphOS
Mark Ambient (1860–1937), pen name of Harold Harley, English dramatist
, a cruise ship
Ambient Technologies, semiconductor company specialising in modem ICs, spun off from Cirrus Logic in 1999 and purchased by Intel in 2000
See also
Ambient lighting (disambiguation) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.520611 |
2029 | Anne Brontë | | pseudonym = Acton Bell
| birth_name | birth_date
| birth_place = Thornton, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
| death_date
| death_place = Scarborough, North Riding of Yorkshire, England
| resting_place = St. Mary's Churchyard, Scarborough
| occupation = Poet, novelist, governess
| citizenship | education
| alma_mater | period 1836–1849
| language = English
| genre = Fiction, poetry
| subject | movement Realism
| notableworks = The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
| spouse | partner
| children | parents Patrick Brontë<br />Maria Branwell
| relatives = Brontë family
| awards | signature Anne Brontë's signature.png
| website | portaldisp
}}
Anne Brontë (, <small>commonly</small> ; 17 January 1820 – 28 May 1849) was an English novelist and poet, the youngest member of the Brontë literary family.
Anne Brontë was the daughter of Maria ( Branwell) and Patrick Brontë, a poor Irish clergyman in the Church of England. Anne lived most of her life with her family at the parish of Haworth on the Yorkshire Dales. Otherwise, she attended a boarding school in Mirfield between 1836 and 1837, and between 1839 and 1845 lived elsewhere working as a governess. In 1846, she published a book of poems with her sisters and later two novels, initially under the pen name Acton Bell. Her first novel, Agnes Grey, was published in 1847 at the same time as Wuthering Heights by her sister Emily Brontë. Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was published in 1848. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is often considered one of the first feminist novels.
Anne died at 29, most likely of pulmonary tuberculosis. After her death, her sister Charlotte edited Agnes Grey to fix issues with its first edition, but prevented republication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. As a result, Anne is not as well known as her sisters. Nonetheless, both of her novels are considered classics of English literature.
Family background
]]
Anne's father was Patrick Brontë. Patrick Brontë was born in a two-room cottage in Emdale, Loughbrickland, County Down, Ireland. He was the oldest of ten children born to Hugh Brunty and Eleanor McCrory, poor Irish peasant farmers. The family surname, mac Aedh Ó Proinntigh, was Anglicised as Prunty or Brunty. He served as a curate in Essex and then in Wellington, Shropshire. In 1810, he published his first poem, Winter Evening Thoughts, in a local newspaper. In 1811, he published a collection of moral verse, Cottage Poems. Also in 1811, he became vicar of St. Peter's Church in Hartshead, Yorkshire. In 1812, he was appointed an examiner in Classics at Woodhouse Grove School, near Bradford. This was a Wesleyan academy where, at 35, he met his future wife, the headmaster's niece, Maria Branwell.
Maria Branwell, Anne's mother, was the daughter of Anne Carne, the daughter of a silversmith, and Thomas Branwell, a successful and property-owning grocer and tea merchant in Penzance. Maria was the eleventh of twelve children and enjoyed the benefits of a prosperous family in a small town. After the death of her parents, Maria went to help her aunt with housekeeping functions at the school. Maria was intelligent and well read, and her strong Methodist faith attracted Patrick Brontë, whose own leanings were similar.
Within three months, on 29 December 1812, though from considerably different backgrounds, Patrick Brontë and Maria Branwell were married. Their first child, Maria (1814–1825), was born after they moved to Hartshead. In 1815, Patrick was appointed curate of the chapel in Market Street Thornton, near Bradford. A second daughter, Elizabeth (1815–1825), was born shortly after. Four more children followed: Charlotte (1816–1855), Patrick Branwell (1817–1848), Emily (1818–1848), and Anne (1820–1849).
Early life
Anne was the youngest of the Brontë children. She was born on 17 January 1820 at the parsonage in Market Street, Thornton (now known as the Brontë Birthplace), on the outskirts of Bradford. Her father, Patrick, was curate there. Anne was baptised there on 25 March 1820. Later Patrick was appointed to the perpetual curacy in Haworth, a small town away. In April 1820 the family moved into the five-roomed Haworth Parsonage.
When Anne was barely a year old her mother, Maria, became ill, probably with uterine cancer. Maria Branwell died on 15 September 1821. Patrick tried to remarry, without success. Maria's sister, Elizabeth Branwell, had moved to the parsonage initially for Maria, but spent the rest of her life there raising Maria's children from a sense of duty. She was stern and expected respect, not love. There was little affection between her and the older children. According to tradition Anne was her favourite.
In Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte, Patrick remembered Anne as precocious. Patrick said that when Anne was four years old he had asked her what a child most wanted and that she had said: "age and experience".
In summer 1824 Patrick sent daughters Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily to Crofton Hall in Crofton, West Yorkshire, and subsequently to the Clergy Daughter's School at Cowan Bridge in Lancashire. Maria and Elizabeth Brontë died of tuberculosis on 6 May and 15 June 1825 respectively, and Charlotte and Emily were brought home. The children made little attempt to mix with others outside the parsonage and relied on each other for company. The bleak moors surrounding Haworth became their playground. Anne shared a room with her aunt, Elizabeth. They were close, and she may have influenced Anne's personality and religious beliefs.
Education
, 1834]]
Anne's studies at home included music and drawing. The Keighley church organist gave piano lessons to Anne and Emily and Branwell, and John Bradley of Keighley gave them art lessons. Each drew with some skill. Their aunt tried to teach the girls how to run a household, but they inclined more to literature. They read much from their father's well-stocked library. Their reading included the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott, articles from ''Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and Fraser's Magazine and The Edinburgh Review, and books of history and geography and biography.
Their reading fed their imaginations, and their creativity soared after their father gave Branwell a set of toy soldiers in June 1826. They gave names to the soldiers, or the "Twelves", and developed their characters. This led to the creation of an imaginary world: the African kingdom of "Angria", which was illustrated with maps and watercolour renderings. The children devised plots about the inhabitants of Angria and its capital city, "Glass Town", later called Verreopolis or Verdopolis.
Their fantastical worlds and kingdoms gradually acquired characteristics from their historical world, drawing from its sovereigns, armies, heroes, outlaws, fugitives, inns, schools, and publishers. The characters and lands created by the children were given newspapers and magazines and chronicles written in tiny books with writing so small that it was difficult to read without a magnifying glass. These creations and writings were an apprenticeship for their later literary talents.JuveniliaAround 1831, when Anne was eleven, she and Emily broke away from Charlotte and Branwell to create and develop their own fantasy world, "Gondal". Anne and Emily were particularly close, especially after Charlotte left for Roe Head School in January 1831. Charlotte's friend Ellen Nussey visited Haworth in 1833 and reported that Emily and Anne were "like twins" and "inseparable companions". She described Anne so:
Anne took lessons from Charlotte after Charlotte had returned from Roe Head. Charlotte returned to Roe Head as a teacher on 29 July 1835, accompanied by Emily as a pupil. Emily's tuition was largely financed by Charlotte's teaching. Emily was unable to adapt to life at school and was physically ill from homesickness within a few months. She was withdrawn from school by October and replaced by Anne.
Anne was 15 and it was her first time away from home. She made few friends at Roe Head. She was quiet and hardworking and determined to stay to acquire the education which she would need to support herself. She stayed for two years and returned home only during Christmas and summer holidays. She won a good-conduct medal in December 1836. Charlotte's letters almost never mention Anne while Anne was at Roe Head, which might imply that they were not close, but Charlotte was at least concerned about Anne's health. By December 1837 Anne had become seriously ill with gastritis and embroiled in religious crisis. A Moravian minister was called to see her several times during her illness, suggesting her distress was caused, in part, by conflict with the local Anglican clergy. Charlotte wrote to their father and he brought Anne home.Employment at Blake HallA year after leaving the school, and aged 19, Anne was seeking a teaching position. She was the daughter of a poor clergyman and needed to earn money. Her father had no private income and the parsonage would revert to the church on his death. Teaching or working as a governess were among few options for a poor and educated woman. In April 1839 Anne started work as a governess for the Ingham family at Blake Hall, near Mirfield.
The children in her charge were spoiled and disobedient. Anne had great difficulty controlling them and little success in educating them. She was not allowed to punish them, and when she complained about their behaviour she received no support and was criticised for being incapable. The Inghams were dissatisfied with their children's progress and dismissed Anne. She returned home in 1839 at Christmas. At home also were Charlotte and Emily, who had left their positions, and Branwell. Anne's time at Blake Hall was so traumatic that she reproduced it in almost perfect detail in her novel Agnes Grey.William WeightmanAnne returned to Haworth and met William Weightman, her father's new curate who had started work in the parish in August 1839. Weightman was 25 and had obtained a two-year licentiate in theology from the University of Durham. He was welcome at the parsonage. Anne's acquaintance with him parallels her writing a number of poems, which may suggest she fell in love with him although there is disagreement over this possibility. Little evidence exists beyond a small anecdote of Charlotte's to Ellen Nussey in January 1842.
In Agnes Grey, Agnes' interest in the curate refreshes her interest in poetry. Outside fiction, William Weightman aroused much curiosity. It seems that he was good-looking and engaging, and that his easy humour and kindness towards the sisters made an impression. It is such a character that she portrays in Edward Weston, and that her heroine Agnes Grey finds deeply appealing.
Weightman died of cholera in the same year. Anne expressed her grief for his death in her poem I will not mourn thee, lovely one, in which she called him "our darling".]]
From 1840 to 1845 Anne worked at Thorp Green Hall, a comfortable country house near York. Here she was governess to the children of the Reverend Edmund Robinson and his wife, Lydia. The house appeared as Horton Lodge in Agnes Grey. Anne had four pupils: Lydia (15), Elizabeth (13), Mary (12), and Edmund (8). She initially had problems similar to those at Blake Hall. Anne missed her home and family. In a diary paper in 1841, she wrote that she did not like her situation and wished to leave it. Her quiet and gentle disposition did not help. But Anne was determined and made a success of her position, becoming well-liked by her employers. Her charges, the Robinson girls, became lifelong friends.
Anne spent only five or six weeks a year with her family, during holidays at Christmas and in June. The rest of her time was spent with the Robinsons. She accompanied the Robinsons on annual holidays to Scarborough. Between 1840 and 1844 Anne spent around five weeks each summer at the coastal town and loved it. A number of locations in Scarborough were used for her novels. She had opportunities to collect semi-precious stones, considering an interest in geology, at least in her novels, or from personal experience, as something suitable for men and women to be considered as equals.
Anne and her sisters considered setting up a school while she was still working for the Robinsons. Various locations were considered, including the parsonage, but the project never materialised. Anne came home on the death of her aunt in early November 1842 while her sisters were in Brussels. Elizabeth Branwell left a £350 legacy (equivalent to £}} in ) for each of her nieces.
It was at the Long Plantation at Thorp Green in 1842 that Anne wrote her three-verse poem Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day, which was published in 1846 under the name Acton Bell.
In January 1843 Anne returned to Thorp Green and secured a position for Branwell. He was to tutor Edmund, who was growing too old to be in Anne's care. Branwell did not live in the house as Anne did. Anne's vaunted calm appears to have been the result of hard-fought battles, balancing deeply felt emotions with careful thought, a sense of responsibility and resolute determination. All three Brontë sisters worked as governesses or teachers, and all experienced problems controlling their charges, gaining support from their employers, and coping with homesickness, but Anne was the only one who persevered and made a success of her work.
Back at the parsonage
]]
Anne and Branwell taught at Thorp Green for the next three years. Branwell entered into a secret relationship with his employer's wife, Lydia Robinson. When Anne and Branwell returned home for the holidays in June 1845 Anne resigned. Anne gave no reason, but the reason may have been the relationship between her brother and Mrs Robinson. Branwell was dismissed when his employer found out about the relationship. Anne continued to exchange letters with Elizabeth and Mary Robinson. They came to visit Anne in December 1848.
Anne took Emily to visit some of the places which Anne had become fond of. A plan to visit Scarborough fell through, but they went to York and saw York Minster.A book of poems
The Brontës were at home with their father during the summer of 1845. None had any immediate prospect of employment. Charlotte found Emily's poems, which had been shared only with Anne. Charlotte said that they should be published. Anne showed her own poems to Charlotte, and Charlotte "thought that these verses too had a sweet sincere pathos of their own". The sisters eventually reached an agreement. They told nobody what they were doing. With the money from Elizabeth Branwell they paid for publication of a collection of poems, 21 from Anne and 21 from Emily and 19 from Charlotte. Anne's pseudonym was Acton Bell. Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell was available for sale in May 1846. The cost of publication was 31 pounds and 10 shillings, about three-quarters of Anne's salary at Thorp Green. On 7 May 1846 the first three copies were delivered to Haworth Parsonage. The book achieved three somewhat favourable reviews, but was a commercial failure, with only two copies sold in the first year. Anne nonetheless found a market for her later poetry. The Leeds Intelligencer and ''Fraser's Magazine published her poem The Narrow Way'' under her pseudonym in December 1848. Four months earlier, Fraser's Magazine had published her poem The Three Guides.
Novels
Agnes Grey
By July 1846 a package containing the manuscripts of each sister's first novel was making the rounds of London publishers. Charlotte had written The Professor, Emily had written Wuthering Heights, and Anne had written Agnes Grey.
After some rejections Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey were accepted by the publisher Thomas Cautley Newby. The Professor was rejected. It was not long before Charlotte had completed her second novel, Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre was accepted immediately by Smith, Elder & Co. It was the first published of the sisters' novels, and an immediate and resounding success. Meanwhile, Anne and Emily's novels "lingered in the press". Anne and Emily were obliged to pay fifty pounds to help meet their publishing costs. Their publisher was galvanised by the success of Jane Eyre and published Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey together in December 1847. They sold well, but Agnes Grey was outshone by Emily's more dramatic Wuthering Heights.The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, was published in the last week of June 1848.
The novel challenged contemporary social and legal structures. In 1913, May Sinclair said that the slamming of Helen Huntingdon's bedroom door against her husband reverberated throughout Victorian England.
In the book Helen has left her husband to protect their son from his influence. She supports herself and her son in hiding by painting. She has violated social conventions and English law. Until the Married Women's Property Act 1870 was passed, a married woman had no legal existence independent from her husband and could not own property nor sue for divorce nor control the custody of her children. Helen's husband had a right to reclaim her and charge her with kidnapping. By subsisting on her own income she was stealing her husband's property since this income was legally his. Anne also castigated reviewers who speculated on the sex of authors and the perceived appropriateness of their writing. She was
London visit
]]
In July 1848 Anne and Charlotte went to Charlotte's publisher George Smith in London to dispel the rumour that the "Bell brothers" were one person. Emily refused to go. Anne and Charlotte spent several days with Smith. Many years after Anne's death, he wrote in The Cornhill Magazine his impressions of her:
The increasing popularity of the Bells' works led to renewed interest in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, originally published by Aylott and Jones. The remaining print run was bought by Smith and Elder, and reissued under new covers in November 1848. It still sold poorly.
Family tragedies
Branwell's persistent drunkenness disguised the decline of his health and he died on 24 September 1848. His sudden death shocked the family. He was 31. The cause was recorded as chronic bronchitismarasmus, but was probably tuberculosis.
The family suffered from coughs and colds during the winter of 1848, and Emily became very ill. She worsened over two months and rejected medical aid until the morning of 19 December. She was very weak and said that "if you will send for a doctor, I will see him now". But Emily died at about two o'clock that afternoon, aged 30. Over Christmas Anne had influenza. Her symptoms intensified and in early January her father sent for a Leeds physician. The doctor diagnosed advanced consumption with little hope of recovery. Anne met the news with characteristic determination and self-control. However, in her letter to Ellen Nussey she expressed her frustrated ambitions:
humble and limited indeedbut still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose. But God's will be done.}}
Unlike Emily, Anne took all the recommended medicines and followed the advice she was given. She also wrote her last poem, A dreadful darkness closes in, in which she deals with being terminally ill. Her health fluctuated for months, but she grew thinner and weaker.
Death
Anne seemed somewhat better in February. She decided to visit Scarborough to see if the change of location and the fresh sea air might benefit her. Charlotte was initially against the journey, fearing that it would be too stressful, but changed her mind after the doctor's approval and Anne's assurance that it was her last hope. Anne died at about two o'clock in the afternoon on 28 May 1849, aged 29.
Charlotte decided to "lay the flower where it had fallen". Anne was buried in St Mary's churchyard, beneath the castle walls and overlooking the bay. Charlotte commissioned a stone to be placed over her grave with the inscription, When Charlotte visited the grave three years later she discovered multiple errors on the headstone and had it refaced, but it was still not free of error, for Anne was 29 when she died, not 28 as written.
In 2011 the Brontë Society installed a new plaque at Anne Brontë's grave. The original gravestone had become illegible at places and could not be restored. It was left undisturbed while the new plaque was laid horizontally, interpreting the fading words of the original and correcting its error. In April 2013 the Brontë Society held a dedication and blessing service at the gravesite to mark the installation of the new plaque.
Reputation
After Anne's death, Charlotte addressed issues with the first edition of Agnes Grey for its republication, but she prevented republication of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In 1850, Charlotte wrote that Subsequent critics paid less attention to Anne's work and some dismissed her as "a Brontë without genius".
But since the mid-20th century her life and works have been given better attention. Biographies by Winifred Gérin (1959), Elizabeth Langland (1989) and Edward Chitham (1991), as well as Juliet Barker's group biography, The Brontës (1994; revised edition 2000), and work by critics such as Inga-Stina Ewbank, Marianne Thormählen, Laura C Berry, Jan B Gordon, Mary Summers, and Juliet McMaster has led to acceptance of Anne Brontë as a major literary figure. Sally McDonald of the Brontë Society said in 2013 that in some ways Anne "is now viewed as the most radical of the sisters, writing about tough subjects such as women's need to maintain independence and how alcoholism can tear a family apart."
Works
*
*
* See also* List of feminist literature – 1840sNotesReferences
* Alexander, Christine & Smith, Margaret, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës, Oxford University Press, 2006,
* Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, St. Martin's Pr.,
* Chitham, Edward, A Life of Anne Brontë, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991,
* Fraser, Rebeca, The Brontës: Charlotte Brontë and her family, Crown Publishers, 1988,
* Gérin, Winifred, Anne Brontë, Allen Lane, 1976,
* Harrison, Ada and Stanford, Derek, Anne Brontë – Her Life and Work, Archon Books, 1970 (first published 1959).
Further reading
* Allott, Miriam, The Brontës: The Critical Heritage, 1984
* Barker, Juliet, The Brontës, 2000 (revised edition)
* Chadwick, Ellis, In the Footsteps of the Brontës, 1982
* Chitham, Edward, A Brontë Family Chronology, 2003
* Chitham, Edward, A Life of Anne Brontë, 1991
* Eagleton, Terry, Myths of Power, 1975
* Ellis, Samantha, Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life, 2016
* Gérin, Winifred, Anne Brontë: A Biography, 1959
* Langland, Elizabeth, Anne Brontë: The Other One, 1989
* Miller, Lucasta, The Brontë Myth, 2001
* Scott, P. J. M., Anne Brontë: A New Critical Assessment, 1983
* Summers, Mary, Anne Brontë Educating Parents, 2003
* Wise, T. J. and Symington, J. A. (eds.), The Brontës: Their Lives, Friendships and Correspondences, 1932
External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130511082949/http://www.annebrontesgrave.co.uk/ Anne Brontë's grave in Scarborough]
* [http://www.mick-armitage.staff.shef.ac.uk/anne/bronte.html Anne Brontë – The Scarborough Connection] , biographical materials and complete poems of Anne Brontë
* [http://www.annebronte.org/ Anne Brontë – Writer Of Genius], biographical materials on Anne and her family
* [https://sites.google.com/a/u.northwestern.edu/anne-bronte-at-northwestern-university/ Anne Bronte at Northwestern University], information about Anne and Victorian society, critical reception of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
*
* [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bronte/bronte-anne.html Anne Brontë's biography and works] at [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/ A Celebration of Women Writers]
* [http://www.bronte.org.uk/ Website of the Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth]
* [https://archives.nypl.org/brg/186118 Anne Brontë papers, circa 1840s–1895], held by the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.
Electronic editions
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120310192742/http://annebronte.com/ Anne Brontë eText Archive]
* [https://arheve.org/en/bronte-a Works by Anne Brontë in the online library ARHEVE.org] and in the free [https://library.arheve.org/ ARHEVE app]
* [http://www.reelyredd.com/0307anne_bronte.htm Music On Christmas Morning] – Audio Poem
*
*
*
*
Category:1820 births
Category:1849 deaths
Category:19th-century Christian universalists
Category:19th-century deaths from tuberculosis
Category:19th-century English novelists
Category:19th-century English women writers
Category:19th-century pseudonymous writers
Category:Anglican universalists
Category:Anglican writers
Anne
Category:Burials in North Yorkshire
Category:English Anglicans
Category:English Christian universalists
Category:English governesses
Category:English people of Cornish descent
Category:English people of Irish descent
Category:English women novelists
Category:English women poets
Category:Tuberculosis deaths in England
Category:People from Thornton and Allerton
Category:Writers from Bradford
Category:Pseudonymous women writers
Category:Victorian novelists
Category:Victorian women writers
Category:Victorian writers | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Brontë | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.546386 |
2030 | Augustine of Hippo | | image= Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne.jpg
| caption= Saint Augustin by Philippe de Champaigne,
| imagesize = 230
| venerated_in= All Christian denominations which venerate saints
| beatified_date | beatified_place
| beatified_by | canonized_date Pre-Congregation
| canonized_place | canonized_by
| major_shrine =San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, Pavia, Italy
| attributes Crozier, mitre, young child, book, small church, flaming or pierced heart
| patronage =
| module =
| school_tradition =
| notable_students Paul Orosius<br />Prosper of Aquitaine
| main_interests =
| notable_works =
| notable_ideas
|Filioque
|Original sin
|Free will
|Augustinian soteriology
|Just war theory
|Absence of good
|Concupiscence
|Sacramental character
|Augustinian hypothesis
|Augustinian theodicy
|Augustinian values|Divine command theory
|Amillennialism
|You are Christ
|Deity
|Solvitur ambulando|Heroic virtue
|Incurvatus in se
|Genesis as an allegory
|Divine illumination
|Theocentricism
|Limbo
}}
}}
}}
}}
Augustine of Hippo ( , ; ; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430), also known as Saint Augustine and in the Eastern Orthodox Church as Blessed Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings deeply influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church in the Patristic Period. His many important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and Confessions.
According to his contemporary, Jerome of Stridon, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith". Cf. [http://www.augustinus.it/latino/lettere/lettera_200_testo.htm Epistola 195]}} In his youth he was drawn to the Manichaean faith, and later to the Hellenistic philosophy of Neoplatonism. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in 386, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and perspectives. Believing the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, he helped formulate the doctrine of original sin and made significant contributions to the development of just war theory. When the Western Roman Empire began to disintegrate, Augustine imagined the Church as a spiritual City of God, distinct from the material Earthly City. The segment of the Church that adhered to the concept of the Trinity as defined by the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople closely identified with Augustine's On the Trinity.
Augustine is recognized as a saint in the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Lutheran churches, and the Anglican Communion. He is also a preeminent Catholic Doctor of the Church and the patron of the Augustinians. His memorial is celebrated on 28 August, the day of his death. Augustine is the patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians, and a number of cities and dioceses. His thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. Many Protestants, especially Calvinists and Lutherans, consider him one of the theological fathers of the Protestant Reformation due to his teachings on salvation and divine grace. Protestant Reformers generally, and Martin Luther in particular, held Augustine in preeminence among early Church Fathers. From 1505 to 1521, Luther was a member of the Order of the Augustinian Eremites.
In the East, his teachings are more disputed and were notably attacked by John Romanides, but other theologians and figures of the Eastern Orthodox Church have shown significant approbation of his writings, chiefly Georges Florovsky. The most controversial doctrine associated with him, the filioque, was rejected by the Eastern Orthodox Church. Other disputed teachings include his views on original sin, the doctrine of grace, and predestination. In the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches, his feast day is celebrated on 15 June. Life Background Augustine of Hippo, also known as Saint Augustine or Saint Austin, is known by various cognomens throughout the many denominations of the Christian world, including Blessed Augustine and the Doctor of Grace ().
Hippo Regius, where Augustine was the bishop, was in modern-day Annaba, Algeria.
Childhood and education
, 1413–15]]
Augustine was born in 354 in the municipium of Thagaste (now Souk Ahras, Algeria) in the Roman province of Numidia. His mother, Monica or Monnica,as such Monnica is the only Berber name commonly used in English."}} was a devout Christian; his father Patricius was a pagan who converted to Christianity on his deathbed. He had a brother named Navigius and a sister whose name is lost but is conventionally remembered as Perpetua.
Scholars generally agree that Augustine and his family were Berbers, an ethnic group indigenous to North Africa, but were heavily Romanized, speaking only Latin at home as a matter of pride and dignity. In his writings, Augustine mentions in passing his identity as a Roman African. For example, he refers to Apuleius as "the most notorious of us Africans," to Ponticianus as "a country man of ours, insofar as being African," and to Faustus of Mileve as "an African Gentleman".
Augustine's family name, Aurelius, suggests his father's ancestors were freedmen of the gens Aurelia given full Roman citizenship by the Edict of Caracalla in 212. Augustine's family had been Roman, from a legal standpoint, for at least a century when he was born. It is assumed that his mother, Monica, was of Berber origin, on the basis of her name, but as his family were honestiores, an upper class of citizens known as honorable men, Augustine's first language was likely Latin.
At the age of 11, Augustine was sent to school at Madaurus (now M'Daourouch), a small Numidian city about south of Thagaste. There he became familiar with Latin literature, as well as pagan beliefs and practices. His first insight into the nature of sin occurred when he and a number of friends stole pears from a neighbourhood garden. He tells this story in his autobiography, Confessions. He realises that the pears were "tempting neither for its colour nor its flavour" – he was neither hungry nor poor, and he had enough of fruit which were "much better". Over the next few chapters, Augustine agonises over this past sin of his, recognising that one does not desire evil for evil's sake. Rather, "through an inordinate preference for these goods of a lower kind, the better and higher are neglected". In other words, man is drawn to sin when grossly choosing the lesser good over a greater good. Eventually, Augustine concludes that it was the good of the "companionship" between him and his accomplices that allowed him to delight in this theft.
At the age of 17, through the generosity of his fellow citizen Romanianus, Augustine went to Carthage to continue his education in rhetoric, though it was above the financial means of his family. Despite the good warnings of his mother, as a youth Augustine lived a hedonistic lifestyle for a time, associating with young men who boasted of their sexual exploits. The need to gain their acceptance encouraged inexperienced boys like Augustine to seek or make up stories about sexual experiences.
It was while he was a student in Carthage that he read Cicero's dialogue Hortensius (now lost), which he described as leaving a lasting impression, enkindling in his heart the love of wisdom and a great thirst for truth. It started his interest in philosophy. Although raised Christian, Augustine became a Manichaean, much to his mother's chagrin.
At about the age of 17, Augustine began a relationship with a young woman in Carthage. Though his mother wanted him to marry a person of his class, the woman remained his lover. He was warned by his mother to avoid fornication (sex outside marriage), but Augustine persisted in the relationship for over fifteen years, and the woman gave birth to his son Adeodatus (372–388), which means "Gift from God", who was viewed as extremely intelligent by his contemporaries. In 385, Augustine ended his relationship with his lover in order to prepare to marry a teenage heiress. By the time he was able to marry her, however, he had already converted to Christianity and decided to become a Christian priest and the marriage did not happen. Ambrose adopted Augustine as a spiritual son after the death of Augustine's father.
Augustine's mother had followed him to Milan and arranged a respectable marriage for him. Although Augustine acquiesced, he had to dismiss his concubine and grieved for having forsaken his lover. He wrote, "My mistress being torn from my side as an impediment to my marriage, my heart, which clave to her, was racked, and wounded, and bleeding." Augustine confessed he had not been a lover of wedlock so much as a slave of lust, so he procured another concubine since he had to wait two years until his fiancée came of age. However, his emotional wound was not healed. It was during this period that he uttered his famously insincere prayer, "Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet."
There is evidence Augustine may have considered this former relationship to be equivalent to marriage. In his Confessions, he admitted the experience eventually produced a decreased sensitivity to pain. Augustine eventually broke off his engagement to his eleven-year-old fiancée but never renewed his relationship with either of his concubines. Alypius of Thagaste steered Augustine away from marriage, saying they could not live a life together in the love of wisdom if he married. Augustine looked back years later on the life at Cassiciacum, a villa outside of Milan where he gathered with his followers, and described it as Christianae vitae otium – the leisure of Christian life.
Conversion to Christianity and priesthood
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In late August of 386, places Augustine's garden conversion at the end of August, 386.}} at the age of 31, having heard of Ponticianus's and his friends' first reading of the life of Anthony of the Desert, Augustine converted to Christianity. As Augustine later told it, his conversion was prompted by hearing a child's voice say "take up and read" (). Resorting to the sortes biblicae, he opened a book of St. Paul's writings (Confessiones 8.12.29) at random and read Romans 13:13–14: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof."
He later wrote an account of his conversion in his Confessions (), which has since become a classic of Christian theology and a key text in the history of autobiography. This work is an outpouring of thanksgiving and penitence. Although it is written as an account of his life, the Confessions also talks about the nature of time, causality, free will, and other important philosophical topics. The following is taken from that work:
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Ambrose baptized Augustine and his son Adeodatus, in Milan on Easter Vigil, 24–25 April 387. A year later, in 388, Augustine completed his apology On the Holiness of the Catholic Church. That year, also, Adeodatus and Augustine returned home to Africa.
After converting to Christianity, Augustine turned against his profession as a rhetoric professor in order to devote more time to preaching. In 391 Augustine was ordained a priest in Hippo Regius (now Annaba), in Algeria. He was especially interested in discovering how his previous rhetorical training in Italian schools would help the Christian Church achieve its objective of discovering and teaching the different scriptures in the Bible. He became a famous preacher (more than 350 preserved sermons are believed to be authentic), and was noted for combating the Manichaean religion, to which he had formerly adhered. He preached around 6,000 to 10,000 sermons when he was alive; however, there are only around 500 sermons that are accessible today. When Augustine preached his sermons, they were recorded by stenographers. Augustine believed that the preachers' ultimate goal is to ensure the salvation of their audience.
In 395, he was made coadjutor Bishop of Hippo and became full Bishop shortly thereafter, hence the name "Augustine of Hippo"; and he gave his property to the church of Thagaste. He remained in that position until his death in 430. Bishops were the only individuals allowed to preach when he was alive and he scheduled time to preach after being ordained despite a busy schedule made up of preparing sermons and preaching at other churches besides his own. When serving as the Bishop of Hippo, his goal was to minister to individuals in his congregation and he would choose the passages that the church planned to read every week. As bishop, he believed that it was his job to interpret the work of the Bible. Augustine worked tirelessly to convince the people of Hippo to convert to Christianity. Though he had left his monastery, he continued to lead a monastic life in the episcopal residence.
Much of Augustine's later life was recorded by his friend Possidius, bishop of Calama (present-day Guelma, Algeria), in his Sancti Augustini Vita. During this latter part of Augustine's life, he helped lead a large community of Christians against different political and religious factors which had a major influence on his writings. Possidius admired Augustine as a man of powerful intellect and a stirring orator who took every opportunity to defend Christianity against its detractors. Possidius also described Augustine's personal traits in detail, drawing a portrait of a man who ate sparingly, worked tirelessly, despised gossip, shunned the temptations of the flesh, and exercised prudence in the financial stewardship of his see. Death and sainthood Shortly before Augustine's death, the Vandals, a Germanic tribe that had converted to Arianism, invaded Roman Africa. The Vandals besieged Hippo in the spring of 430 when Augustine entered his final illness. According to Possidius, one of the few miracles attributed to Augustine, the healing of an ill man, took place during the siege. Augustine has been cited to have excommunicated himself upon the approach of his death in an act of public penance and solidarity with sinners. Spending his final days in prayer and repentance, he requested the penitential Psalms of David be hung on his walls so he could read them and upon which led him to "[weep] freely and constantly" according to Possidius' biography. He directed the library of the church in Hippo and all the books therein should be carefully preserved. He died on 28 August 430. Shortly after his death, the Vandals lifted the siege of Hippo, but they returned soon after and burned the city. They destroyed all but Augustine's cathedral and library, which they left untouched.
Augustine was canonized by popular acclaim, and later recognized as a Doctor of the Church in 1298 by Pope Boniface VIII. His feast day is 28 August, the day on which he died. He is considered the patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians, and a number of cities and dioceses. He is invoked against sore eyes. Relics
, Annaba, Algeria]]
According to Bede's True Martyrology, Augustine's body was later translated or moved to Cagliari, Sardinia, by the Catholic bishops expelled from North Africa by Huneric. Around 720, his remains were transported again by Peter, bishop of Pavia and uncle of the Lombard king Liutprand, to the church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia, to save them from frequent coastal raids by Saracens. In January 1327, Pope John XXII issued the papal bull Veneranda Santorum Patrum, in which he appointed the Augustinians guardians of the tomb of Augustine (called Arca), which was remade in 1362 and elaborately carved with bas-reliefs of scenes from Augustine's life, created by Giovanni di Balduccio.
, Tomb of St Augustine, 1362–1365, San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, Pavia]]
In October 1695, some workmen in the Church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia discovered a marble box containing human bones (including part of a skull). A dispute arose between the Augustinian hermits (Order of Saint Augustine) and the regular canons (Canons Regular of Saint Augustine) as to whether these were the bones of Augustine. The hermits did not believe so; the canons affirmed they were. Eventually Pope Benedict XIII (1724–1730) directed the Bishop of Pavia, Monsignor Pertusati, to make a determination. The bishop declared that, in his opinion, the bones were those of Augustine.
The Augustinians were expelled from Pavia in 1785, Augustine's ark and relics were brought to Pavia Cathedral in 1799. San Pietro fell into disrepair but was finally restored in the 1870s, under the urging of Agostino Gaetano Riboldi, and reconsecrated in 1896 when the relics of Augustine and the shrine were once again reinstalled.
In 1842, a portion of Augustine's right arm (cubitus) was secured from Pavia and returned to Annaba. It now rests in the Saint Augustin Basilica within a glass tube inserted into the arm of a life-size marble statue of the saint. Views and thought
Augustine's large contribution of writings covered diverse fields including theology, philosophy and sociology. Along with John Chrysostom, Augustine was among the most prolific scholars of the early church by quantity.
Theology
Christian anthropology
Augustine was one of the first Christian ancient Latin authors with a very clear vision of theological anthropology. He saw the human being as a perfect unity of soul and body. In his late treatise On Care to Be Had for the Dead, section 5 (420) he exhorted respect for the body on the grounds it belonged to the very nature of the human person. Augustine's favourite figure to describe body-soul unity is marriage: caro tua, coniunx tua – your body is your wife.
Initially, the two elements were in perfect harmony. After the fall of humanity they are now experiencing dramatic combat with one another. They are two categorically different things. The body is a three-dimensional object composed of the four elements, whereas the soul has no spatial dimensions. Soul is a kind of substance, participating in reason, fit for ruling the body.
Augustine was not preoccupied, as Plato and Descartes were, in detailed efforts to explain the metaphysics of the soul-body union. It sufficed for him to admit they are metaphysically distinct: to be a human is to be a composite of soul and body, with the soul superior to the body. The latter statement is grounded in his hierarchical classification of things into those that merely exist, those that exist and live, and those that exist, live, and have intelligence or reason.
Like other Church Fathers such as Athenagoras, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Basil of Caesarea, Augustine "vigorously condemned the practice of induced abortion", and although he disapproved of abortion during any stage of pregnancy, he made a distinction between early and later abortions. He acknowledged the distinction between "formed" and "unformed" fetuses mentioned in the Septuagint translation of Exodus 21:22–23, which incorrectly translates the word "harm" (from the original Hebrew text) as "form" in the Koine Greek of the Septuagint. His view was based on the Aristotelian distinction "between the fetus before and after its supposed 'vivification. Therefore, he did not classify as murder the abortion of an "unformed" fetus since he thought it could not be known with certainty the fetus had received a soul.
Augustine held that "the timing of the infusion of the soul was a mystery known to God alone". However, he considered procreation as "one of the goods of marriage; abortion figured as a means, along with drugs which cause sterility, of frustrating this good. It lay along a continuum which included infanticide as an instance of 'lustful cruelty' or 'cruel lust.' Augustine called the use of means to avoid the birth of a child an 'evil work:' a reference to either abortion or contraception or both." Creation
In City of God, Augustine rejected both the contemporary ideas of ages (such as those of certain Greeks and Egyptians) that differed from the Church's sacred writings. In The Literal Interpretation of Genesis, Augustine argued that God had created everything in the universe simultaneously and not over a period of six days. He argued the six-day structure of creation presented in the Book of Genesis represents a logical framework, rather than the passage of time in a physical way – it would bear a spiritual, rather than physical, meaning, which is no less literal. One reason for this interpretation is the passage in Sirach 18:1, creavit omnia simul ("He created all things at once"), which Augustine took as proof that the days of Genesis 1 had to be taken non-literalistically. As additional support for describing the six days of creation as a heuristic device, Augustine thought the actual event of creation would be incomprehensible by humans and therefore needed to be translated.
Augustine also does not envision original sin as causing structural changes in the universe, and even suggests that the bodies of Adam and Eve were already created mortal before the Fall. Apart from his specific views, Augustine recognized that interpreting the creation story was difficult, and remarked that interpretations could change should new information come up. Ecclesiology
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Augustine developed his doctrine of the Church principally in reaction to the Donatist sect. He taught there is one Church, but within this Church there are two realities, namely, the visible aspect (the institutional hierarchy, the Catholic sacraments, and the laity) and the invisible (the souls of those in the Church, who are either dead, sinful members or elect predestined for Heaven). The former is the institutional body established by Christ on earth which proclaims salvation and administers the sacraments, while the latter is the invisible body of the elect, made up of genuine believers from all ages, who are known only to God. The Church, which is visible and societal, will be made up of "wheat" and "tares", that is, good and wicked people (as per Mat. 13:30), until the end of time. This concept countered the Donatist claim that only those in a state of grace were the "true" or "pure" church on earth, and that priests and bishops who were not in a state of grace had no authority or ability to confect the sacraments.
Augustine's ecclesiology was more fully developed in City of God. There he conceives of the church as a heavenly city or kingdom, ruled by love, which will ultimately triumph over all earthly empires which are self-indulgent and ruled by pride. Augustine followed Cyprian in teaching that bishops and priests of the Church are the successors of the Apostles, and their authority in the Church is God-given.
The concept of Church invisible was advocated by Augustine as part of his refutation of the Donatist sect, though he, as other Church Fathers before him, saw the invisible Church and visible Church as one and the same thing, unlike the later Protestant reformers who did not identify the Catholic Church as the true church. He was strongly influenced by the Platonist belief that true reality is invisible and that, if the visible reflects the invisible, it does so only partially and imperfectly (see Theory of Forms). Others question whether Augustine really held to some form of an "invisible true Church" concept. Eschatology Augustine originally believed in premillennialism, namely that Christ would establish a literal 1,000-year kingdom prior to the general resurrection, but later rejected the belief, viewing it as carnal. During the medieval period, the Catholic Church built its system of eschatology on Augustinian amillennialism, where Christ rules the earth spiritually through his triumphant church.
During the Reformation, theologians such as John Calvin accepted amillennialism. Augustine taught that the eternal fate of the soul is determined at death, and that purgatorial fires of the intermediate state purify only those who died in communion with the Church. His teaching provided fuel for later theology.
Mariology
Although Augustine did not develop an independent Mariology, his statements on Mary surpass in number and depth those of other early writers. Even before the Council of Ephesus, he defended the Ever-Virgin Mary as the Mother of God, believing her to be "full of grace" (following earlier Latin writers such as Jerome) on account of her sexual integrity and innocence. Likewise, he affirmed that the Virgin Mary "conceived as virgin, gave birth as virgin and stayed virgin forever".
Natural knowledge and biblical interpretation
Augustine took the view that, if a literal interpretation contradicts science and humans' God-given reason, the biblical text should be interpreted metaphorically. While each passage of Scripture has a literal sense, this "literal sense" does not always mean the Scriptures are mere history; at times they are rather an extended metaphor.
Original sin
Augustine taught that the sin of Adam and Eve was either an act of foolishness (insipientia) followed by pride and disobedience to God or that pride came first. The first couple disobeyed God, who had told them not to eat of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17). The tree was a symbol of the order of creation. Self-centeredness made Adam and Eve eat of it, thus failing to acknowledge and respect the world as it was created by God, with its hierarchy of beings and values.
They would not have fallen into pride and lack of wisdom if Satan had not sown into their senses "the root of evil" (radix Mali). Their nature was wounded by concupiscence or libido, which affected human intelligence and will, as well as affections and desires, including sexual desire. In terms of metaphysics, concupiscence is not a state of being but a bad quality, the privation of good or a wound.
Augustine's understanding of the consequences of original sin and the necessity of redeeming grace was developed in the struggle against Pelagius and his Pelagian disciples, Caelestius and Julian of Eclanum, who had been inspired by Rufinus of Syria, a disciple of Theodore of Mopsuestia. They refused to agree original sin wounded human will and mind, insisting human nature was given the power to act, to speak, and to think when God created it. Human nature cannot lose its moral capacity for doing good, but a person is free to act or not act in a righteous way. Pelagius gave an example of eyes: they have capacity for seeing, but a person can make either good or bad use of it.
Pelagians insisted human affections and desires were not touched by the fall either. Immorality, e.g. fornication, is exclusively a matter of will, i.e. a person does not use natural desires in a proper way. In opposition, Augustine pointed out the apparent disobedience of the flesh to the spirit, and explained it as one of the results of original sin, punishment of Adam and Eve's disobedience to God.
Augustine had served as a "Hearer" for the Manichaeans for about nine years, who taught that the original sin was carnal knowledge. But his struggle to understand the cause of evil in the world started before that, at the age of nineteen. By malum (evil) he understood most of all concupiscence, which he interpreted as a vice dominating people and causing in men and women moral disorder. Agostino Trapè insists Augustine's personal experience cannot be credited for his doctrine about concupiscence. He considers Augustine's marital experience to be quite normal, and even exemplary, aside from the absence of Christian wedding rites. As J. Brachtendorf showed, Augustine used Ciceronian Stoic concept of passions, to interpret Paul's doctrine of universal sin and redemption.
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The view that not only human soul but also senses were influenced by the fall of Adam and Eve was prevalent in Augustine's time among the Fathers of the Church. It is clear the reason for Augustine's distancing from the affairs of the flesh was different from that of Plotinus, a Neoplatonist writes: Towards Neoplatonism there was throughout his life a decidedly ambivalent attitude; one must expect both agreement and sharp dissent, derivation but also repudiation. In the matter which concerns us here, the agreement with Neoplatonism (and with the Platonic tradition in general) centres on two related notions: immutability as the primary characteristic of divinity, and likeness to divinity as the primary vocation of the soul. The disagreement chiefly concerned, as we have said, two related and central Christian dogmas: the Incarnation of the Son of God and the resurrection of the flesh. Cf. É. Schmitt's chapter 2: ''L'idéologie hellénique et la conception augustinienne de réalités charnelles'' in: in Thomas Aq. STh I q84 a5; Augustine of Hippo, [http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120108.htm City of God] (De Civitate Dei), VIII, 5; CCL 47, 221 [3–4].}} who taught that only through disdain for fleshly desire could one reach the ultimate state of mankind. Augustine taught the redemption, i.e. transformation and purification, of the body in the resurrection.
Some authors perceive Augustine's doctrine as directed against human sexuality and attribute his insistence on continence and devotion to God as coming from his need to reject his own highly sensual nature as described in the Confessions.}} Augustine taught that human sexuality has been wounded, together with the whole of human nature, and requires redemption of Christ. That healing is a process realized in conjugal acts. The virtue of continence is achieved thanks to the grace of the sacrament of Christian marriage, which becomes therefore a remedium concupiscentiae – remedy of concupiscence. The redemption of human sexuality will be, however, fully accomplished only in the resurrection of the body.
The sin of Adam is inherited by all human beings. Already in his pre-Pelagian writings, Augustine taught that Original Sin is transmitted to his descendants by concupiscence, which he regarded as the passion of both soul and body, making humanity a massa damnata (mass of perdition, condemned crowd) and much enfeebling, though not destroying, the freedom of the will. Although earlier Christian authors taught the elements of physical death, moral weakness, and a sin propensity within original sin, Augustine was the first to add the concept of inherited guilt (reatus'') from Adam whereby an infant was eternally damned at birth.
Although Augustine's anti-Pelagian defence of original sin was confirmed at numerous councils, i.e. Carthage (418), Ephesus (431), Orange (529), Trent (1546) and by popes, i.e. Pope Innocent I (401–417) and Pope Zosimus (417–418), his inherited guilt eternally damning infants was omitted by these councils and popes. Anselm of Canterbury established in his Cur Deus Homo the definition that was followed by the great 13th-century Schoolmen, namely that Original Sin is the "privation of the righteousness which every man ought to possess," thus separating it from concupiscence, with which some of Augustine's disciples had identified it, as later did Luther and Calvin. In 1567, Pope Pius V condemned the identification of Original Sin with concupiscence. Predestination Augustine taught that God orders all things while preserving human freedom. Prior to 396, he believed predestination was based on God's foreknowledge of whether individuals would believe in Christ, that God's grace was "a reward for human assent". Later, in response to Pelagius, Augustine said that the sin of pride consists in assuming "we are the ones who choose God or that God chooses us (in his foreknowledge) because of something worthy in us", and argued that God's grace causes the individual act of faith.
Scholars are divided over whether Augustine's teaching implies double predestination, or the belief God chooses some people for damnation as well as some for salvation. Catholic scholars tend to deny he held such a view while some Protestants and secular scholars have held that Augustine did believe in double predestination. About 412, Augustine became the first Christian to understand predestination as a divine unilateral pre-determination of individuals' eternal destinies independently of human choice, although his prior Manichaean sect did teach this concept. Some Protestant theologians, such as Justo L. González and Bengt Hägglund, interpret Augustine's teaching that grace is irresistible, results in conversion, and leads to perseverance.
In On Rebuke and Grace (De correptione et gratia), Augustine wrote: "And what is written, that He wills all men to be saved, while yet all men are not saved, may be understood in many ways, some of which I have mentioned in other writings of mine; but here I will say one thing: He wills all men to be saved, is so said that all the predestinated may be understood by it, because every kind of men is among them."
Sacramental theology
by Vittore Carpaccio, 1502]]
Also in reaction to the Donatists, Augustine developed a distinction between the "regularity" and "validity" of the sacraments. Regular sacraments are performed by clergy of the Catholic Church, while sacraments performed by schismatics are considered irregular. Nevertheless, the validity of the sacraments does not depend upon the holiness of the priests who perform them (ex opere operato''); therefore, irregular sacraments are still accepted as valid provided they are done in the name of Christ and in the manner prescribed by the Church. On this point, Augustine departs from the earlier teaching of Cyprian, who taught that converts from schismatic movements must be re-baptised. Augustine taught that sacraments administered outside the Catholic Church, though true sacraments, avail nothing. However, he also stated that baptism, while it does not confer any grace when done outside the Church, does confer grace as soon as one is received into the Catholic Church.
Augustine believed that in a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, saying that Christ's statement, "This is my body" referred to the bread he carried in his hands, and that Christians must have faith the bread and wine are in fact the body and blood of Christ, despite what they see with their eyes. For instance, he stated that "He [Jesus] walked here in the same flesh, and gave us the same flesh to be eaten unto salvation. But no one eats that flesh unless first he adores it; and thus it is discovered how such a footstool of the Lord's feet is adored; and not only do we not sin by adoring, we do sin by not adoring."
Presbyterian professor and author John Riggs argued that Augustine held that Christ is really present in the elements of the Eucharist, but not in a bodily manner, because his body remains in Heaven.
Augustine, in his work On Christian Doctrine, referred to the Eucharist as a "figure" and a "sign".
Against the Pelagians, Augustine strongly stressed the importance of infant baptism. About the question whether baptism is an absolute necessity for salvation, however, Augustine appears to have refined his beliefs during his lifetime, causing some confusion among later theologians about his position. He said in one of his sermons that only the baptized are saved. This belief was shared by many early Christians. However, a passage from his City of God, concerning the Apocalypse, may indicate Augustine did believe in an exception for children born to Christian parents.
Philosophy
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Astrology
Augustine's contemporaries often believed astrology to be an exact and genuine science. Its practitioners were regarded as true men of learning and called mathematici. Astrology played a prominent part in Manichaean doctrine, and Augustine himself was attracted by their books in his youth, being particularly fascinated by those who claimed to foretell the future. Later, as a bishop, he warned that one should avoid astrologers who combine science and horoscopes. (Augustine's term "mathematici", meaning "astrologers", is sometimes mistranslated as "mathematicians".) According to Augustine, they were not genuine students of Hipparchus or Eratosthenes but "common swindlers". Epistemology Epistemological concerns shaped Augustine's intellectual development. His early dialogues Contra academicos (386) and De Magistro (389), both written shortly after his conversion to Christianity, reflect his engagement with sceptical arguments and show the development of his doctrine of divine illumination. The doctrine of illumination claims God plays an active and regular part in human perception and understanding by illuminating the mind so human beings can recognize intelligible realities God presents (as opposed to God designing the human mind to be reliable consistently, as in, for example, Descartes's idea of clear and distinct perceptions). According to Augustine, illumination is obtainable to all rational minds and is different from other forms of sense perception. It is meant to be an explanation of the conditions required for the mind to have a connection with intelligible entities.
Augustine also posed the problem of other minds throughout different works, most famously perhaps in On the Trinity (VIII.6.9), and developed what has come to be a standard solution: the argument from analogy to other minds. In contrast to Plato and other earlier philosophers, Augustine recognized the centrality of testimony to human knowledge and argued that what others tell us can provide knowledge even if we do not have independent reasons to believe their testimonial reports.
Just war
Augustine asserted Christians should be pacifists as a personal, philosophical stance. However, peacefulness in the face of a grave wrong that could only be stopped by violence would be a sin. Defence of one's self or others could be a necessity, especially when authorized by a legitimate authority. While not breaking down the conditions necessary for war to be just, Augustine coined the phrase in his work The City of God. In essence, the pursuit of peace must include the option of fighting for its long-term preservation. Such a war could not be pre-emptive, but defensive, to restore peace. Thomas Aquinas, centuries later, used the authority of Augustine's arguments in an attempt to define the conditions under which a war could be just. Free will Included in Augustine's earlier theodicy is the claim God created humans and angels as rational beings possessing free will. Free will was not intended for sin, meaning it is not equally predisposed to both good and evil. A will defiled by sin is not considered as "free" as it once was because it is bound by material things, which could be lost or be difficult to part with, resulting in unhappiness. Sin impairs free will, while grace restores it. Only a will that was once free can be subjected to sin's corruption. After 412, Augustine changed his theology, teaching that humanity had no free will to believe in Christ but only a free will to sin: "I in fact strove on behalf of the free choice of the human 'will,' but God's grace conquered" (Retract. 2.1).
The early Christians opposed the deterministic views (e.g., fate) of Stoics, Gnostics, and Manichaeans prevalent in the first four centuries. Christians championed the concept of a relational God who interacts with humans rather than a Stoic or Gnostic God who unilaterally foreordained every event (yet Stoics still claimed to teach free will). Patristics scholar Ken Wilson argues that every early Christian author with extant writings who wrote on the topic prior to Augustine of Hippo (412) advanced human free choice rather than a deterministic God. According to Wilson, Augustine taught traditional free choice until 412, when he reverted to his earlier Manichaean and Stoic deterministic training when battling the Pelagians. Only a few Christians accepted Augustine's view of free will until the Protestant Reformation when both Luther and Calvin embraced Augustine's deterministic teachings wholeheartedly.
The Catholic Church considers Augustine's teaching to be consistent with free will. He often said that anyone can be saved if they wish. While God knows who will and will not be saved, with no possibility for the latter to be saved in their lives, this knowledge represents God's perfect knowledge of how humans will freely choose their destinies.
Sociology, morals and ethics
Natural law
Augustine was among the earliest to examine the legitimacy of the laws of man, and attempt to define the boundaries of what laws and rights occur naturally, instead of being arbitrarily imposed by mortals. All who have wisdom and conscience, he concludes, are able to use reason to recognize the lex naturalis, natural law. Mortal law should not attempt to force people to do what is right or avoid what is wrong, but simply to remain just. Therefore "an unjust law is no law at all". People are not obligated to obey laws that are unjust, those that their conscience and reason tell them violate natural law and rights.
Slavery
Augustine led many clergy under his authority at Hippo to free their slaves as a "pious and holy" act. He boldly wrote a letter urging the emperor to set up a new law against slave traders and was very much concerned about the sale of children. Christian emperors of his time for 25 years had permitted the sale of children, not because they approved of the practice, but as a way of preventing infanticide when parents were unable to care for a child. Augustine noted that the tenant farmers in particular were driven to hire out or to sell their children as a means of survival.
In his book, The City of God, he presents the development of slavery as a product of sin and as contrary to God's divine plan. He wrote that God "did not intend that this rational creature, who was made in his image, should have dominion over anything but the irrational creation – not man over man, but man over the beasts". Thus he wrote that righteous men in primitive times were made shepherds of cattle, not kings over men. "The condition of slavery is the result of sin", he declared. In The City of God, Augustine wrote he felt the existence of slavery was a punishment for the existence of sin, even if an individual enslaved person committed no sin meriting punishment. He wrote: "Slavery is, however, penal, and is appointed by that law which enjoins the preservation of the natural order and forbids its disturbance." Augustine believed slavery did more harm to the slave owner than the enslaved person himself: "the lowly position does as much good to the servant as the proud position does harm to the master." Augustine proposes as a solution to sin a type of cognitive reimagining of one's situation, where slaves "may themselves make their slavery in some sort free, by serving not in crafty fear, but in faithful love," until the end of the world eradicated slavery for good: "until all unrighteousness pass away, and all principality and every human power be brought to nothing, and God be all in all." He rejected homicidal attitudes, quoting part of the same prophecy, namely "Slay them not, lest they should at last forget Thy law" (Psalm 59:11). Augustine, who believed Jewish people would be converted to Christianity at "the end of time", argued God had allowed them to survive their dispersion as a warning to Christians; as such, he argued, they should be permitted to dwell in Christian lands.
The sentiment sometimes attributed to Augustine that Christians should let the Jews "survive but not thrive" (it is repeated by the author James Carroll in his book ''Constantine's Sword, for example) is apocryphal and is not found in any of his writings. Sexuality and the sexes For Augustine, the evil of sexual immorality was not in the sexual act itself, but in the emotions that typically accompany it. In On Christian Doctrine Augustine contrasts love, which is enjoyment on account of God, and lust, which is not on account of God. Augustine claims that, following the Fall, sexual lust (concupiscentia) has become necessary for copulation (as required to stimulate male erection), sexual lust is an evil result of the Fall, and therefore, evil must inevitably accompany sexual intercourse (On marriage and concupiscence [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_I/Volume_V/On_Marriage_and_Concupiscence/Book_I/Chapter_19 1.19]). Therefore, following the Fall, even marital sex carried out merely to procreate inevitably perpetuates evil (On marriage and concupiscence 1.27; A Treatise against Two Letters of the Pelagians 2.27). For Augustine, proper love exercises a denial of selfish pleasure and the subjugation of corporeal desire to God. The only way to avoid evil caused by sexual intercourse is to take the "better" way (Confessions 8.2) and abstain from marriage (On marriage and concupiscence 1.31). Sex within marriage is not, however, for Augustine a sin, although necessarily produces the evil of sexual lust. Based on the same logic, Augustine also declared the pious virgins raped during the sack of Rome to be innocent because they did not intend to sin nor enjoy the act.
Before the Fall, Augustine believed sex was a passionless affair, "just like many a laborious work accomplished by the compliant operation of our other limbs, without any lascivious heat", that the seed "might be sown without any shameful lust, the genital members simply obeying the inclination of the will". After the Fall, by contrast, the penis cannot be controlled by mere will, subject instead to both unwanted impotence and involuntary erections: "Sometimes the urge arises unwanted; sometimes, on the other hand, it forsakes the eager lover, and desire grows cold in the body while burning in the mind... It arouses the mind, but it does not follow through what it has begun and arouse the body also" (City of God 14.16).
Augustine censured those who try to prevent the creation of offspring when engaging in sexual relations, saying that though they may be nominally married they are not really, but are using that designation as a cloak for turpitude. When they allow their unwanted children to die of exposure, they unmask their sin. Sometimes they use drugs to produce sterility, or other means to try to destroy the fetus before they are born. Their marriage is not wedlock but debauchery.
Augustine believed Adam and Eve had both already chosen in their hearts to disobey God's command not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge before Eve took the fruit, ate it, and gave it to Adam. Accordingly, Augustine did not believe Adam was any less guilty of sin. "Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her."
Augustine believed that "woman has been made for man" and that "in sex she is physically subject to him in the same way as our natural impulses need to be subjected to the reasoning power of the mind, in order that the actions to which they lead may be inspired by the principles of good conduct". Women were created as a "helper" to men for Augustine.
Pedagogy
'' by Sandro Botticelli, 1494, Uffizi Gallery]]
Augustine is considered an influential figure in the history of education. A work early in Augustine's writings is De Magistro (On the Teacher), which contains insights into education. His ideas changed as he found better directions or better ways of expressing his ideas. In the last years of his life, Augustine wrote his Retractationes (Retractations), reviewing his writings and improving specific texts. Henry Chadwick believes an accurate translation of "retractationes" may be "reconsiderations". Reconsiderations can be seen as an overarching theme of the way Augustine learned. Augustine's understanding of the search for understanding, meaning, and truth as a restless journey leaves room for doubt, development, and change.
Augustine was a strong advocate of critical thinking skills. Because written works were limited during this time, spoken communication of knowledge was very important. His emphasis on the importance of community as a means of learning distinguishes his pedagogy from some others. Augustine believed dialectic is the best means for learning and that this method should serve as a model for learning encounters between teachers and students. Augustine's dialogue writings model the need for lively interactive dialogue among learners.
He recommended adapting educational practices to fit the students' educational backgrounds:
* the student who has been well-educated by knowledgeable teachers;
* the student who has had no education; and
* the student who has had a poor education, but believes himself to be well-educated.
If a student has been well educated in a wide variety of subjects, the teacher must be careful not to repeat what they have already learned, but to challenge the student with material they do not yet know thoroughly. With the student who has had no education, the teacher must be patient, willing to repeat things until the student understands, and sympathetic. Perhaps the most difficult student, however, is the one with an inferior education who believes he understands something when he does not. Augustine stressed the importance of showing this type of student the difference between "having words and having understanding" and of helping the student to remain humble with his acquisition of knowledge.
Under the influence of Bede, Alcuin, and Rabanus Maurus, De catechizandis rudibus came to exercise an important role in the education of clergy at the monastic schools, especially from the eighth century onwards.
Augustine believed students should be given an opportunity to apply learned theories to practical experience. Yet another of Augustine's major contributions to education is his study on the styles of teaching. He claimed there are two basic styles a teacher uses when speaking to the students. The mixed style includes complex and sometimes showy language to help students see the beautiful artistry of the subject they are studying. The grand style is not quite as elegant as the mixed style, but is exciting and heartfelt, with the purpose of igniting the same passion in the students' hearts. Augustine balanced his teaching philosophy with the traditional Bible-based practice of strict discipline.
Augustine knew Latin and Ancient Greek. He had a long correspondence with St Jerome regarding the textual differences existing between the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint, concluding that the original Greek manuscripts were closely similar to the other Hebrew ones, and also that even the differences in the two original versions of the Holy Scripture could enlight its spiritual meaning to have been unitarily inspired by God. Coercion Augustine of Hippo had to deal with issues of violence and coercion throughout his entire career due largely to the Donatist-Catholic conflict. He is one of the very few authors in Antiquity who ever truly theoretically examined the ideas of religious freedom and coercion. because it is seen as making him appear "to generations of religious liberals as le prince et patriarche de persecuteurs." Maureen Tilley says this was a problem by 305, that became a schism by 311, because many of the North African Christians had a long established tradition of a "physicalist approach to religion." For the next 75 years, both parties existed, often directly alongside each other, with a double line of bishops for the same cities.}} No one is exactly sure when the Circumcellions and the Donatists allied, but for decades, they fomented protests and street violence, accosted travellers and attacked random Catholics without warning, often doing serious and unprovoked bodily harm such as beating people with clubs, cutting off their hands and feet, and gouging out eyes.
Augustine became coadjutor Bishop of Hippo in 395, and since he believed that conversion must be voluntary, his appeals to the Donatists were verbal. For several years, he used popular propaganda, debate, personal appeal, General Councils, appeals to the emperor and political pressure to bring the Donatists back into union with the Catholics, but all attempts failed. He had been worried about false conversions if force was used, but "now," he says, "it seems imperial persecution is working." Many Donatists had converted.
According to Mar Marcos, Augustine made use of several biblical examples to legitimize coercion, but the primary analogy in Letter 93 and in Letter 185, is the parable of the Great Feast in Luke 14.15–24 and its statement compel them to come in. argued that, for Augustine, a degree of external pressure being brought for the purpose of reform was compatible with the exercise of free will. Frederick H. Russell describes this as "a pastoral strategy in which the church did the persecuting with the dutiful assistance of Roman authorities," He opposed severity, maiming, and the execution of heretics. While these limits were mostly ignored by Roman authorities, Michael Lamb says that in doing this, "Augustine appropriates republican principles from his Roman predecessors..." and maintains his commitment to liberty, legitimate authority, and the rule of law as a constraint on arbitrary power. He continues to advocate holding authority accountable to prevent domination but affirms the state's right to act.
Herbert A. Deane, on the other hand, says there is a fundamental inconsistency between Augustine's political thought and "his final position of approval of the use of political and legal weapons to punish religious dissidence" and others have seconded this view. Brown asserts that Augustine's thinking on coercion is more of an attitude than a doctrine since it is "not in a state of rest," but is instead marked by "a painful and protracted attempt to embrace and resolve tensions."
In philosophy
Philosopher Bertrand Russell was impressed by Augustine's meditation on the nature of time in the Confessions, comparing it favourably to Kant's version of the view that time is subjective. Catholic theologians generally subscribe to Augustine's belief that God exists outside of time in the "eternal present"; that time only exists within the created universe because only in space is time discernible through motion and change. His meditations on the nature of time are closely linked to his consideration of the human ability of memory. Frances Yates in her 1966 study The Art of Memory argues that a brief passage of the Confessions, 10.8.12, in which Augustine writes of walking up a flight of stairs and entering the vast fields of memory clearly indicates that the ancient Romans were aware of how to use explicit spatial and architectural metaphors as a mnemonic technique for organizing large amounts of information.
Augustine's philosophical method, especially demonstrated in his Confessions, had a continuing influence on Continental philosophy throughout the 20th century. His descriptive approach to intentionality, memory, and language as these phenomena are experienced within consciousness and time anticipated and inspired the insights of modern phenomenology and hermeneutics. Edmund Husserl writes: "The analysis of time-consciousness is an age-old crux of descriptive psychology and theory of knowledge. The first thinker to be deeply sensitive to the immense difficulties to be found here was Augustine, who laboured almost to despair over this problem."
Martin Heidegger refers to Augustine's descriptive philosophy at several junctures in his influential work Being and Time. Hannah Arendt began her philosophical writing with a dissertation on Augustine's concept of love, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (1929): "The young Arendt attempted to show that the philosophical basis for vita socialis in Augustine can be understood as residing in neighbourly love, grounded in his understanding of the common origin of humanity."
Jean Bethke Elshtain in Augustine and the Limits of Politics tried to associate Augustine with Arendt in their concept of evil: "Augustine did not see evil as glamorously demonic but rather as absence of good, something which paradoxically is really nothing. Arendt ... envisioned even the extreme evil which produced the Holocaust as merely banal [in Eichmann in Jerusalem]." Augustine's philosophical legacy continues to influence contemporary critical theory through the contributions and inheritors of these 20th-century figures. Seen from a historical perspective, there are three main perspectives on the political thought of Augustine: first, political Augustinianism; second, Augustinian political theology; and third, Augustinian political theory.
In theology
The historian Diarmaid MacCulloch has written: "Augustine's impact on Western Christian thought can hardly be overstated; only his beloved example, Paul of Tarsus, has been more influential, and Westerners have generally seen Paul through Augustine's eyes."
Thomas Aquinas was influenced heavily by Augustine. On the topic of original sin, Aquinas proposed a more optimistic view of man than that of Augustine in that his conception leaves to the reason, will, and passions of fallen man their natural powers even after the Fall, without "supernatural gifts". While in his pre-Pelagian writings Augustine taught that Adam's guilt as transmitted to his descendants much enfeebles, though does not destroy, the freedom of their will, Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin affirmed that Original Sin completely destroyed liberty (see total depravity).
According to Leo Ruickbie, Augustine's arguments against magic, differentiating it from a miracle, were crucial in the early Church's fight against paganism and became a central thesis in the later denunciation of witches and witchcraft. According to Professor Deepak Lal, Augustine's vision of the heavenly city has influenced the secular projects and traditions of the Enlightenment, Marxism, Freudianism and eco-fundamentalism. Post-Marxist philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt rely heavily on Augustine's thoughts, particularly The City of God, in their book of political philosophy Empire.
Augustine has influenced many modern-day theologians and authors such as John Piper. Hannah Arendt, an influential 20th-century political theorist, wrote her doctoral dissertation in philosophy on Augustine, and continued to rely on his thought throughout her career. Ludwig Wittgenstein extensively quotes Augustine in Philosophical Investigations for his approach to language, both admiringly, and as a sparring partner to develop his own ideas, including an extensive opening passage from the Confessions. Contemporary linguists have argued that Augustine has significantly influenced the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, who did not 'invent' the modern discipline of semiotics, but rather built upon Aristotelian and Neoplatonic knowledge from the Middle Ages, via an Augustinian connection: "as for the constitution of Saussurian semiotic theory, the importance of the Augustinian thought contribution (correlated to the Stoic one) has also been recognized. Saussure did not do anything but reform an ancient theory in Europe, according to the modern conceptual exigencies."
Pope Francis suggests that Augustine's reflections on the relationship between the "beloved disciple" and Jesus (John 13:23: "reclining next to him") contributed to the development of devotion to the Sacred Heart in the following centuries. In his autobiographical book Milestones, Pope Benedict XVI notes that Augustine was one of the deepest influences in his thought. Oratorio, music
Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Motet "Pour St Augustin mourant", H.419, for 2 voices and continuo (1687), and "Pour St Augustin", H.307, for 2 voices and continuo (1670s).
'' by Jaume Huguet]]
Much of Augustine's conversion is dramatized in the oratorio ''La conversione di Sant'Agostino (1750) composed by Johann Adolph Hasse. The libretto for this oratorio, written by Duchess Maria Antonia of Bavaria, draws upon the influence of Metastasio (the finished libretto having been edited by him) and is based on an earlier five-act play Idea perfectae conversionis dive Augustinus'' written by the Jesuit priest Franz Neumayr. In the libretto Augustine's mother Monica is presented as a prominent character that is worried that Augustine might not convert to Christianity. As Dr. Andrea Palent says: Throughout the oratorio Augustine shows his willingness to turn to God, but the burden of the act of conversion weighs heavily on him. This is displayed by Hasse through extended recitative passages. In popular art In his poem "Confessional", Frank Bidart compares the relationship between Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica, to the relationship between the poem's speaker and his mother.
In the 2010 TV miniseries Restless Heart: The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Augustine is played by Matteo Urzia (aged 15), Alessandro Preziosi (aged 25) and Franco Nero (aged 76).
In 1967, American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan released a song entitled "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" as part of his album John Wesley Harding. The song has been covered by several artists including Joan Baez, Vic Chesnutt, Eric Clapton, John Doe, Thea Gilmore, Adam Selzer and Dirty Projectors.
In 2016, the band The Chairman Dances released "Augustine", a response song to Bob Dylan’s "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine". In it, Augustine says he's not sure why Dylan dreams about him.
English pop/rock musician, singer and songwriter Sting wrote a song related to Saint Augustine entitled "Saint Augustine in Hell" which was part of his fourth solo studio album ''Ten Summoner's Tales released in March 1993.
See also
* Cogito, ergo sum
* Rule of Saint Augustine
* Augustinus-Lexikon''
Notes and references
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* Augustine's Political Thought in The City of God |pages 421–441 |urlhttps://www.academia.edu/16870779 |doi 10.1179/1462317X14Z.000000000113 |s2cid= 218691369 }}
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* Green, Bradley G. [http://www.jamesclarke.co/product_info.php/products_id/1675?osCsid1673ba77f80a4a6cf663eb311d2556b6 Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in the Light of Augustine] , James Clarke and Co. (2012),
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* Miles, Margaret R. (2012). ''[http://www.lutterworth.com/product_info.php/products_id/1674?osCsid1673ba77f80a4a6cf663eb311d2556b6 Augustine and the Fundamentalist's Daughter] '', Lutterworth Press, .
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External links
General
* [http://www.augustinus.it/links/inglese/opere.htm "Complete Works of Saint Augustine (in English)"] from Augustinus.it
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20180316095930/http://www.abbaye-saint-benoit.ch/saints/augustin/ "Complete Works of Saint Augustine (in French)"] from Abbey Saint Benoît de Port-Valais
* [http://www.mercaba.org/Filosofia/Medieval/agustin_de_hipona_00.htm "Complete Works of Saint Augustine (in Spanish)"] from Mercaba, Catholic leaders' website
* [http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine?show=worksBy "Works by Saint Augustine"] from CCEL.org
* [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?qAugustine&redirecttrue Works by Augustine at Perseus Digital Library]
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* [http://www.bartleby.com/210/8/281.html "St. Augustine, Bishop and Confessor, Doctor of the Church"], ''Butler's Lives of the Saints''
* [http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/augustine/ Augustine of Hippo] edited by James J. O'Donnell – texts, translations, introductions, commentaries, etc.
* Augustine's Theory of Knowledge
* [http://www.christianiconography.info/augustine.html "Saint Augustine of Hippo"] at the [http://www.christianiconography.info/ Christian Iconography] website
* [http://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/augustine.htm "The Life of St. Austin, or Augustine, Doctor"] from the Caxton translation of the Golden Legend
* [http://davidaslindsay.blogspot.com/2009/08/doctor-gratiae.html David Lindsay: Saint Augustine – Doctor Gratiae]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120409175403/http://www.its.caltech.edu/~nmcenter/women-cp/augustin.html St. Augustine – A Male Chauvinist?] [http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/MALECHAU.HTM] , Fr. Edmund Hill, OP. Talk given to the Robert Hugh Benson Graduate Society at Fisher House, Cambridge, on 22 November 1994.
* [http://www.churchhistorytimelines.com/pages/st-augustine St. Augustine Timeline – Church History Timelines]
* Giovanni Domenico Giulio: Nachtgedanken des heiligen Augustinus. Trier 1843
Bibliography
* [https://earlychurch.org.uk/augustine.php Augustine of Hippo] at EarlyChurch.org.uk – extensive bibliography and on-line articles
* [http://www.findingaugustine.org/ Bibliography on St. Augustine] – Started by T.J. van Bavel O.S.A., continued at the Augustinian historical Institute in Louvain, Belgium
Works by Augustine
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* [http://www.ccel.org/a/augustine/ St. Augustine] at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library
* [http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/augustine-against-secundinus-the-manichaean-in-english/ Augustine against Secundinus] in English.
* [http://www.intratext.com/Catalogo/Autori/AUT31.HTM Aurelius Augustinus] at "IntraText Digital Library" – texts in several languages, with concordance and frequency list
* [http://www.augustinus.it/ Augustinus.it] – Latin, Spanish and Italian texts
* [http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/20_40_0354-0430-_Augustinus,_Sanctus.html Sanctus Augustinus] at Documenta Catholica Omnia – Latin
* [http://www.doxologypress.org/theaudio/index.html City of God, Confessions, Enchiridion, Doctrine] audio books
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* [http://roderic.uv.es/uv_ms_0580 Digitized manuscript] created in France between 1275 and 1325 with extract of Augustine of Hippo works at [http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/43 SOMNI]
* [http://roderic.uv.es/uv_ms_0895 Expositio Psalmorum beati Augustini] – digitized codex created between 1150 and 1175, also known as "Enarrationes in Psalmos. 1–83", at [http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/43 SOMNI]
* [http://roderic.uv.es/uv_ms_0892 Aurelii Agustini Hipponae episcopi super loannem librum] – digitized codex created in 1481; his sermons about John's Gospel at [http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/43 SOMNI]
* [http://real-r.mtak.hu/104/ Sententiae ex omnibus operibus Divi Augustini decerptae] – digitized codex created in 1539; at [http://konyvtar.mta.hu/index_en.php Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences]
* [http://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0023/html/lewis_e_019.html Lewis E 19 In epistolam Johannis ad Parthos (Sermons on the first epistle of Saint John) at OPenn]
* [http://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0023/html/lewis_e_021.html Lewis E 21 De sermone domini in monte habito (On the sermon on the mount) and other treatises; De superbia (On pride) and other treatises; Expositio dominice orationis (Exposition on the lord's prayer) at OPenn]
* [http://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0023/html/lewis_e_022.html Lewis E 22 Enarrationes in psalmos (Expositions on the psalms); Initials (ABC); Prayer at OPenn]
* [http://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0023/html/lewis_e_023.html Lewis E 23 Sermons at OPenn]
* [http://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0023/html/lewis_e_213.html Lewis E 213 Rule of Saint Augustine; Sermon on Matthew 25:6 at OPenn]
* [http://openn.library.upenn.edu/Data/0007/html/lehigh_003.html Lehigh Codex 3 Bifolium from De civitate Dei, Book 22 at OPenn]
Biography and criticism
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20060610111127/http://augnet.org/ Order of St Augustine]
* [http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/bless_aug.aspx Blessed Augustine of Hippo: His Place in the Orthodox Church]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20100528110934/http://www.villanova.edu/mission/spirituality/about/ Augustine's World: An Introduction to His Speculative Philosophy] by Donald Burt, OSA, member of the Augustinian Order, Villanova University
* [http://roderic.uv.es/uv_ms_0049 Tabula in librum Sancti Augustini De civitate Dei] by Robert Kilwardby, digitized manuscript of 1464 at [http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/43 SOMNI]
}}
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Category:Eastern Orthodox saints | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine_of_Hippo | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.676803 |
2032 | Acting | right|thumb|French stage and early film actress Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet
thumb|Actors in samurai and rōnin costume at the Kyoto Eigamura film set
Acting is an activity in which a story is told by means of its enactment by an actor who adopts a character—in theatre, television, film, radio, or any other medium that makes use of the mimetic mode.
Acting involves a broad range of skills, including a well-developed imagination, emotional facility, physical expressivity, vocal projection, clarity of speech, and the ability to interpret drama. Acting also demands an ability to employ dialects, accents, improvisation, observation and emulation, mime, and stage combat. Many actors train at length in specialist programs or colleges to develop these skills. The vast majority of professional actors have gone through extensive training. Actors and actresses will often have many instructors and teachers for a full range of training involving singing, scene-work, audition techniques, and acting for camera.
Most early sources in the West that examine the art of acting (, hypokrisis) discuss it as part of rhetoric.
History
One of the first known actors was an ancient Greek called Thespis of Icaria in Athens. Writing two centuries after the event, Aristotle in his Poetics () suggests that Thespis stepped out of the dithyrambic chorus and addressed it as a separate character. Before Thespis, the chorus narrated (for example, "Dionysus did this, Dionysus said"). When Thespis stepped out from the chorus, he spoke as if he were the character (for example, "I am Dionysus, I did this"). To distinguish between these different modes of storytelling—enactment and narration—Aristotle uses the terms "mimesis" (via enactment) and "diegesis" (via narration). From the Greek actor Thespis' name derives the word "thespian".
Training
thumb|right|Members of the First Studio, with whom Stanislavski began to develop his 'system' of actor training, which forms the basis for most professional training in the West.
Conservatories and drama schools typically offer two- to four-year training on all aspects of acting. Universities mostly offer three- to four-year programs, in which a student is often able to choose to focus on acting, whilst continuing to learn about other aspects of theatre. Schools vary in their approach, but in North America the most popular method taught derives from the 'system' of Konstantin Stanislavski, which was developed and popularised in America as method acting by Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and others.
Other approaches may include a more physically based orientation, such as that promoted by theatre practitioners as diverse as Anne Bogart, Jacques Lecoq, Jerzy Grotowski, or Vsevolod Meyerhold. Classes may also include psychotechnique, mask work, physical theatre, improvisation, and acting for camera.
Regardless of a school's approach, students should expect intensive training in textual interpretation, voice, and movement. Applications to drama programmes and conservatories usually involve extensive auditions. Anybody over the age of 18 can usually apply. Training may also start at a very young age. Acting classes and professional schools targeted at under-18s are widespread. These classes introduce young actors to different aspects of acting and theatre, including scene study.
Increased training and exposure to public speaking allows people to maintain a calmer and more relaxed physiology. Measuring a public speaker's heart rate is perhaps one of the easiest ways to assess changes in stress, as heart rate increases with anxiety. As actors increase their performances, heart rate and other signs of stress may decrease. This is very important in training actors, as adaptive strategies gained from increased exposure to public speaking can regulate implicit and explicit anxiety. By attending an institution that specializes in acting, the increased opportunity to act will lead to a more relaxed physiology and a decrease in stress and its effects on the body. These effects can range from hormonal to cognitive health that can impact quality of life and performance.
Improvisation
thumb|right|Two masked characters from the commedia dell'arte, whose "lazzi" involved a significant degree of improvisation.
Some classical forms of acting involve a substantial element of improvised performance. Most notable is its use by the troupes of the commedia dell'arte, a form of masked comedy that originated in Italy.
Improvisation as an approach to acting formed an important part of the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski's 'system' of actor training, which he developed from the 1910s onwards. Late in 1910, the playwright Maxim Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri, where they discussed training and Stanislavski's emerging "grammar" of acting. Inspired by a popular theatre performance in Naples that utilised the techniques of the commedia dell'arte, Gorky suggested that they form a company, modelled on the medieval strolling players, in which a playwright and group of young actors would devise new plays together by means of improvisation. Stanislavski would develop this use of improvisation in his work with his First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski's use was extended further in the approaches to acting developed by his students, Michael Chekhov and Maria Knebel.
In the United Kingdom, the use of improvisation was pioneered by Joan Littlewood from the 1930s onwards and, later, by Keith Johnstone and Clive Barker. In the United States, it was promoted by Viola Spolin, after working with Neva Boyd at a Hull House in Chicago, Illinois (Spolin was Boyd's student from 1924 to 1927). Like the British practitioners, Spolin felt that playing games was a useful means of training actors and helped to improve an actor's performance. With improvisation, she argued, people may find expressive freedom, since they do not know how an improvised situation will turn out. Improvisation demands an open mind in order to maintain spontaneity, rather than pre-planning a response. A character is created by the actor, often without reference to a dramatic text, and a drama is developed out of the spontaneous interactions with other actors. This approach to creating new drama has been developed most substantially by the British filmmaker Mike Leigh, in films such as Secrets & Lies (1996), Vera Drake (2004), Another Year (2010), and Mr. Turner (2014).
Improvisation is also used to cover up if an actor or actress makes a mistake.
Physiological effects
Acting in front of an audience many times can cause "stage fright", a form of stress in which someone becomes anxious in front of an audience. This is common among actors, especially new actors, and can cause symptoms such as increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, and sweating.
In a 2017 study on American university students, actors of various experience levels all showed similarly elevated heart rates throughout their performances; this agrees with previous studies on professional and amateur actors' heart rates. While all actors experienced stress, causing elevated heart rate, the more experienced actors displayed less heart rate variability than the less experienced actors in the same play. The more experienced actors experienced less stress while performing, and therefore had a smaller degree of variability than the less experienced, more stressed actors. The more experienced an actor is, the more stable their heart rate will be while performing, but will still experience elevated heart rates.
Semiotics
thumb|right|Antonin Artaud compared the effect of an actor's performance on an audience in his "Theatre of Cruelty" with the way in which a snake charmer affects snakes.
The semiotics of acting involves a study of the ways in which aspects of a performance come to operate for its audience as signs. This process largely involves the production of meaning, whereby elements of an actor's performance acquire significance, both within the broader context of the dramatic action and in the relations each establishes with the real world.
Following the ideas proposed by the Surrealist theorist Antonin Artaud, however, it may also be possible to understand communication with an audience that occurs 'beneath' significance and meaning (which the semiotician Félix Guattari described as a process involving the transmission of "a-signifying signs"). In his The Theatre and its Double (1938), Artaud compared this interaction to the way in which a snake charmer communicates with a snake, a process which he identified as "mimesis"—the same term that Aristotle in his Poetics () used to describe the mode in which drama communicates its story, by virtue of its embodiment by the actor enacting it, as distinct from "diegesis", or the way in which a narrator may describe it. These "vibrations" passing from the actor to the audience may not necessarily precipitate into significant elements as such (that is, consciously perceived "meanings"), but rather may operate by means of the circulation of "affects".
The approach to acting adopted by other theatre practitioners involve varying degrees of concern with the semiotics of acting. Konstantin Stanislavski, for example, addresses the ways in which an actor, building on what he calls the "experiencing" of a role, should also shape and adjust a performance in order to support the overall significance of the drama—a process that he calls establishing the "perspective of the role". The semiotics of acting plays a far more central role in Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre, in which an actor is concerned to bring out clearly the socio historical significance of behaviour and action by means of specific performance choices—a process that he describes as establishing the "not/but" element in a performed physical "gestus" within context of the play's overall "Fabel". Eugenio Barba argues that actors ought not to concern themselves with the significance of their performance behaviour; this aspect is the responsibility, he claims, of the director, who weaves the signifying elements of an actor's performance into the director's dramaturgical "montage".
The theatre semiotician Patrice Pavis, alluding to the contrast between Stanislavski's 'system' and Brecht's demonstrating performer—and, beyond that, to Denis Diderot's foundational essay on the art of acting, Paradox of the Actor (–78)—argues that:
Elements of a semiotics of acting include the actor's gestures, facial expressions, intonation and other vocal qualities, rhythm, and the ways in which these aspects of an individual performance relate to the drama and the theatrical event (or film, television programme, or radio broadcast, each of which involves different semiotic systems) considered as a whole. This aspect was first explored by Johan Huizinga (in Homo Ludens, 1938) and Roger Caillois (in Man, Play and Games, 1958). Caillois, for example, distinguishes four aspects of play relevant to acting: mimesis (simulation), agon (conflict or competition), alea (chance), and ilinx (vertigo, or "vertiginous psychological situations" involving the spectator's identification or catharsis).
Resumes and auditions
Actors and actresses need to make a resume when applying for roles. The acting resume is very different from a normal resume; it is generally shorter, with lists instead of paragraphs, and it should have a head shot on the back. Sometimes, a resume also contains a short 30-second to 1-minute reel displaying the actor's abilities, so that the casting director can see previous performances, if any. An actor's resume should list projects they have acted in before, such as plays, movies, or shows, as well as special skills and their contact information.
Auditioning is the act of performing either a monologue or sides (lines for one character) as sent by the casting director. Auditioning entails showing the actor's skills to present themselves as a different person; it may be as brief as two minutes. For theater auditions it can be longer than two minutes, or they may perform more than one monologue, as each casting director can have different requirements for actors. Actors should go to auditions dressed for the part, to make it easier for the casting director to visualize them as the character. For television or film they will have to undergo more than one audition. Oftentimes actors are called into another audition at the last minute, and are sent the sides either that morning or the night before. Auditioning can be a stressful part of acting, especially if one has not been trained to audition.
Rehearsal
Rehearsal is a process in which actors prepare and practice a performance together with directors and technical staff. Some actors continue to rehearse a scene throughout the run of a show in order to keep the scene fresh in their minds and exciting for the audience.
Audience
A critical audience with evaluative spectators is known to induce stress on actors during performance. While public performances cause extremely high stress levels in actors (more so amateur ones), the stress actually improves the performance, supporting the idea of "positive stress in challenging situations."
Heart rate
Depending on what an actor is doing, their heart rate will vary. This is the body's way of responding to stress. Prior to a show, one will see an increase in heart rate due to anxiety. While performing an actor has an increased sense of exposure which will increase performance anxiety and the associated physiological arousal, such as heart rate. Heart rates increases more during shows compared to rehearsals because of the increased pressure, which is because a performance has a potentially greater impact on an actor's career. however, during the applause after the performance there is a rapid spike in heart rate. This can be seen not only in actors but also with public speaking and musicians. A 2017 study measuring actors' heart-rate during performance showed that individual heart-rates rose right before the performance began. Length of monologues, experience levels, and actions done on stage were important factors in the study. Heart-rate drops significantly at the end of a monologue, big action scene, or performance.
See also
Biomechanics
Meisner technique
Method acting
Presentational and representational acting
Stanislavski's system
Viewpoints, a movement-based pedagogical and artistic practice
Lists of actors
Flopping (basketball)
References
Sources
Boleslavsky, Richard. 1933 Acting: the First Six Lessons. New York: Theatre Arts, 1987. .
Benedetti, Jean. 1999. Stanislavski: His Life and Art. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1988. London: Methuen. .
Brustein, Robert. 2005. Letters to a Young Actor New York: Basic Books. .
Csapo, Eric, and William J. Slater. 1994. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. .
Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. New Accents Ser. London and New York: Methuen. .
Hagen, Uta and Haskel Frankel. 1973. Respect for Acting. New York: Macmillan. .
Halliwell, Stephen, ed. and trans. 1995. Aristotle Poetics. Loeb Classical Library ser. Aristotle vol. 23. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. .
Hodge, Alison, ed. 2000. Twentieth Century Actor Training. London and New York: Routledge. .
Magarshack, David. 1950. Stanislavsky: A Life. London and Boston: Faber, 1986. .
Meisner, Sanford, and Dennis Longwell. 1987. Sanford Meisner on Acting. New York: Vintage. .
Pavis, Patrice. 1998. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis. Trans. Christine Shantz. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. .
Stanislavski, Konstantin. 1938. An Actor's Work: A Student's Diary. Trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. .
Stanislavski, Konstantin. 1957. An Actor's Work on a Role. Trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. .
Wickham, Glynne. 1959. Early English Stages: 1300—1660. Vol. 1. London: Routledge.
Wickham, Glynne. 1969. Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage: Collected Studies in Mediaeval, Tudor and Shakespearean Drama. London: Routledge. .
Wickham, Glynne. 1981. Early English Stages: 1300—1660. Vol. 3. London: Routledge. .
Zarrilli, Phillip B., ed. 2002. Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide. Worlds of Performance Ser. 2nd edition. London and New York: Routledge. .
External links
Collection: "History of Acting: Gestural Acting and Realism" from the University of Michigan Museum of Art | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acting | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.715009 |
2037 | Delian League | Delyan}}
and the Persian Empire at the outset of the Peloponnesian War around 431 BC]]
The Delian League was a confederacy of Greek city-states, numbering between 150 and 330, founded in 478 BC under the leadership (hegemony) of Athens, whose purpose was to continue fighting the Persian Empire after the Greek victory in the Battle of Plataea at the end of the Second Persian invasion of Greece. The League functioned as a dual –offensive and defensive– alliance (symmachia) of autonomous states, similar to its rival association, the Peloponnesian League. The League's modern name derives from its official meeting place, the island of Delos, where congresses were held within the sanctuary of the Temple of Apollo; contemporary authors referred to the organization simply as "the Athenians and their Allies".
While Sparta excelled as Greece's greatest power on land, Athens turned to the seas becoming the dominant naval power of the Greek world. Following Sparta's withdrawal from the conflict with Persia, Athens took the lead of the Hellenic alliance accompanied by several states around the Aegean and the Anatolian coast. The Delian League was formed as an anti-Persian defensive association of equal city-states seeking protection under Athens, as the latter wished to extend its support towards the Ionian Greek colonies of Anatolia. By the mid-fifth century BC, the alliance had developed into a naval imperial power, called the Athenian Empire, where Athens established complete dominion and the allies became increasingly less autonomous. The alliance held an assembly of representatives in order to shape its policy, while the members swore an oath of loyalty to the coalition. The Delian League successfully accomplished its principal strategic goal by decisively expelling the remaining Persian forces from the Aegean. As a result, Persia would cease to pose a major threat to Greece for the following fifty years.
From its inception, Athens became the League's biggest source of military power, while more and more allies preferred to pay the dues in cash. Athens began to use the League's funds for its own purposes, like the reinforcement of its naval supremacy, which led to conflicts between the city and its less powerful allies, at times culminating in rebellions, like that of Thasos in 465 BC. The League's treasury initially stood in Delos until, in a symbolic gesture, Pericles moved it to Athens in 454 BC. While Greek states had in the past often been ruled by tyrants, this form of government was on the decline. By 500 BC, Ionia appears to have been ripe for rebellion against these Persian clients. The simmering tension finally broke into open revolt due to the actions of the tyrant of Miletus, Aristagoras. Attempting to save himself after a disastrous Persian-sponsored expedition in 499 BC, Aristagoras chose to declare Miletus a democracy. This triggered similar revolutions across Ionia, extending to Doris and Aeolis, beginning the Ionian Revolt.
, patron of Athens.]]
The Greek states of Athens and Eretria allowed themselves to be drawn into this conflict by Aristagoras, and during their only campaigning season (498 BC) they contributed to the capture and burning of the Persian regional capital of Sardis. After this, the Ionian revolt carried on (without further outside aid) for a further five years, until it was finally completely crushed by the Persians. However, in a decision of great historic significance, the Persian king Darius the Great decided that, despite having subdued the revolt, there remained the unfinished business of exacting punishment on Athens and Eretria for supporting the revolt. The Ionian revolt had severely threatened the stability of Darius's empire, and the states of mainland Greece would continue to threaten that stability unless dealt with. Darius thus began to contemplate the complete conquest of Greece, beginning with the destruction of Athens and Eretria. However, the invasion ended in 490 BC with the decisive Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon. After this invasion, Darius died, and responsibility for the war passed to his son Xerxes I.
Xerxes then personally led a second Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC, taking an enormous (although oft-exaggerated) army and navy to Greece. Those Greeks who chose to resist (the 'Allies') were defeated in the twin simultaneous battles of Thermopylae on land and Artemisium at sea. All of Greece except the Peloponnesus thus having fallen into Persian hands, the Persians then seeking to destroy the Allied navy once and for all, suffered a decisive defeat at the Battle of Salamis. The following year, 479 BC, the Allies assembled the largest Greek army yet seen and defeated the Persian invasion force at the Battle of Plataea, ending the invasion and the threat to Greece.
The Allied fleet defeated the remnants of the Persian fleet in the Battle of Mycale near the island of Samos—on the same day as Plataea, according to tradition. This action marks the end of the Persian invasion, and the beginning of the next phase in the Greco-Persian wars, the Greek counterattack. After Mycale, the Greek cities of Asia Minor again revolted, with the Persians now powerless to stop them. The Allied fleet then sailed to the Thracian Chersonese, still held by the Persians, and besieged and captured the town of Sestos. The following year, 478 BC, the Allies sent a force to capture the city of Byzantion (modern day Istanbul). The siege was successful, but the behaviour of the Spartan general Pausanias alienated many of the Allies, and resulted in Pausanias's recall.FormationAfter Byzantion, Sparta was eager to end its involvement in the war. The Spartans greatly feared the rise of the Athenians as a challenge to their power. Additionally, the Spartans were of the view that, with the liberation of mainland Greece, and the Greek cities of Asia Minor, the war's purpose had already been achieved. There was also perhaps a feeling that establishing long-term security for the Asian Greeks would prove impossible.
Xanthippus, the Athenian commander at Mycale, had furiously rejected this; the Ionian cities had been Athenian colonies, and the Athenians, if no one else, would protect the Ionians.
In reality, this goal was divided into three main efforts—to prepare for future invasion, to seek revenge against Persia, and to organize a means of dividing spoils of war. The members were given a choice of either offering armed forces or paying a tax to the joint treasury; most states chose the tax.
Members
The Delian League, also known as the Athenian Empire, was a collection of Greek city-states largely based around the Aegean Sea which operated under the hegemony of Athens. This alliance initially served the purpose of coordinating a united Greek front against a perceived looming Persian threat against the Ionian city-states which bordered it. The members of the Delian League were made to swear an oath of loyalty to the league and contributed mostly monetarily but in some instances donated ships or other forces.Composition and expansionIn the first ten years of the league's existence, Cimon/Kimon forced Karystos in Euboea to join the league, conquered the island of Skyros and sent Athenian colonists there.
Over time, especially with the suppression of rebellions, Athens exercised hegemony over the rest of the league. Thucydides describes how Athens's control over the League grew:
<blockquote> Of all the causes of defection, that connected with arrears of tribute and vessels, and with failure of service, was the chief; for the Athenians were very severe and exacting, and made themselves offensive by applying the screw of necessity to men who were not used to and in fact not disposed for any continuous labor. In some other respects the Athenians were not the old popular rulers they had been at first; and if they had more than their fair share of service, it was correspondingly easy for them to reduce any that tried to leave the confederacy. The Athenians also arranged for the other members of the league to pay its share of the expense in money instead of in ships and men, and for this the subject city-states had themselves to blame, their wish to get out of giving service making most leave their homes. Thus while Athens was increasing her navy with the funds they contributed, a revolt always found itself without enough resources or experienced leaders for war.</blockquote>RebellionNaxosThe first member of the league to attempt to secede was the island of Naxos in c. 471 BC. After being defeated, Naxos is believed (based on similar, later revolts) to have been forced to tear down its walls along with losing its fleet and vote in the League.
Thasos
In 465 BC, Athens founded the colony of Amphipolis on the Strymon river. Thasos, a member of the League, saw her interests in the mines of Mt. Pangaion threatened and defected from the League to Persia. She called to Sparta for assistance but was denied, as Sparta was facing the largest helot revolt in its history.
After more than two years of siege, Thasos surrendered to the Athenian leader Aristides and was forced back into the league. As a result, the fortification walls of Thasos were torn down, and they had to pay yearly tribute and fines. Additionally, their land, naval ships, and the mines of Thasos were confiscated by Athens. The siege of Thasos marks the transformation of the Delian league from an alliance into, in the words of Thucydides, a hegemony.
Policies of the League
In 461 BC, Cimon was ostracized and was succeeded in his influence by democrats such as Ephialtes and Pericles. This signaled a complete change in Athenian foreign policy, neglecting the alliance with the Spartans and instead allying with her enemies, Argos and Thessaly. Megara deserted the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League and allied herself with Athens, allowing construction of a double line of walls across the Isthmus of Corinth and protecting Athens from attack from that quarter. Roughly a decade earlier, due to encouragement from influential speaker Themistocles, the Athenians had also constructed the Long Walls connecting their city to the Piraeus, its port, making it effectively invulnerable to attack by land.
In 454 BC, the Athenian general Pericles moved the Delian League's treasury from Delos to Athens, allegedly to keep it safe from Persia. However, Plutarch indicates that many of Pericles's rivals viewed the transfer to Athens as usurping monetary resources to fund elaborate building projects. Athens also switched from accepting ships, men and weapons as dues from league members, to only accepting money.
The new treasury established in Athens was used for many purposes, not all relating to the defence of members of the league. It was from tribute paid to the league that Pericles set to building the Parthenon on the Acropolis, replacing an older temple, as well as many other non-defense related expenditures. The Delian League was turning from an alliance into an empire.
Wars against Persia
War with the Persians continued. In 460 BC, Egypt revolted under local leaders the Hellenes called Inaros and Amyrtaeus, who requested aid from Athens. Pericles led 250 ships, intended to attack Cyprus, to their aid because it would further damage Persia. After four years, however, the Egyptian rebellion was defeated by the Achaemenid general Megabyzus, who captured the greater part of the Athenian forces. In fact, according to Isocrates, the Athenians and their allies lost some 20,000 men in the expedition, while modern estimates place the figure at 50,000 men and 250 ships including reinforcements. The remainder escaped to Cyrene and thence returned home.
This was the Athenians' main (public) reason for moving the treasury of the League from Delos to Athens, further consolidating their control over the League. The Persians followed up their victory by sending a fleet to re-establish their control over Cyprus, and 200 ships were sent out to counter them under Cimon, who returned from ostracism in 451 BC. He died during the blockade of Citium, though the fleet won a double victory by land and sea over the Persians off Salamis, Cyprus.
This battle was the last major one fought against the Persians. Many writers report that a peace treaty, known as the Peace of Callias, was formalized in 450 BC, but some writers believe that the treaty was a myth created later to inflate the stature of Athens. However, an understanding was definitely reached, enabling the Athenians to focus their attention on events in Greece proper.
Wars in Greece
Soon, war with the Peloponnesians broke out. In 458 BC, the Athenians blockaded the island of Aegina, and simultaneously defended Megara from the Corinthians by sending out an army composed of those too young or old for regular military service. The following year, Sparta sent an army into Boeotia, reviving the power of Thebes in order to help hold the Athenians in check. Their return was blocked, and they resolved to march on Athens, where the Long Walls were not yet completed, winning a victory at the Battle of Tanagra. All this accomplished, however, was to allow them to return home via the Megarid. Two months later, the Athenians under Myronides invaded Boeotia, and winning the Battle of Oenophyta gained control of the whole country except Thebes.
Reverses followed peace with Persia in 449 BC. The Battle of Coronea, in 447 BC, led to the abandonment of Boeotia. Euboea and Megara revolted, and while the former was restored to its status as a tributary ally, the latter was a permanent loss. The Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues signed a peace treaty, which was set to endure for thirty years. It only lasted until 431 BC, when the Peloponnesian War broke out.
Those who revolted unsuccessfully during the war saw the example made of the Mytilenians, the principal people on Lesbos. After an unsuccessful revolt, the Athenians ordered the death of the entire male population. After some thought, they rescinded this order, and only put to death the leading 1000 ringleaders of the revolt, and redistributed the land of the entire island to Athenian shareholders, who were sent out to reside on Lesbos.
This type of treatment was not reserved solely for those who revolted. Thucydides documents the example of Melos, a small island, neutral in the war, though founded by Spartans. The Melians were offered a choice to join the Athenians, or be conquered. Choosing to resist, their town was besieged and conquered; the males were put to death and the women sold into slavery (see Melian dialogue).
Athenian Empire (454–404 BC)
By 454 BC, the Delian League could be fairly characterised as an Athenian Empire; a key event of 454 BC was the moving of the treasury of the Delian League from Delos to Athens. This is often seen as a key marker of the transition from alliance to empire, but while it is significant, it is important to view the period as a whole when considering the development of Athenian imperialism, and not to focus on a single event as being the main contributor to it. At the start of the Peloponnesian War, only Chios and Lesbos were left to contribute ships, and these states were by now far too weak to secede without support. Lesbos tried to revolt first, and failed completely. Chios, the most powerful of the original members of the Delian League save Athens, was the last to revolt, and in the aftermath of the Syracusan Expedition enjoyed success for several years, inspiring all of Ionia to revolt. Athens was nonetheless eventually able to suppress these revolts.
To further strengthen Athens's grip on its empire, Pericles in 450 BC began a policy of establishing kleruchiai—quasi-colonies that remained tied to Athens and which served as garrisons to maintain control of the League's vast territory. Furthermore, Pericles employed a number of offices to maintain Athens' empire: proxenoi, who fostered good relations between Athens and League members; episkopoi and archontes, who oversaw the collection of tribute; and hellenotamiai, who received the tribute on Athens' behalf.
Athens's empire was not very stable and after 27 years of war, the Spartans, aided by the Persians and Athenian internal strife, were able to defeat it. However, it did not remain defeated for long. The Second Athenian League, a maritime self-defense league, was founded in 377 BC and was led by Athens. The Athenians would never recover the full extent of their power, and their enemies were now far stronger and more varied.<ref name":0" />See also
* Second Athenian League
* Athenian democracy
* Chalcis Decree
* Hellenic civilization
* Pentecontaetia
* Zone (colony)
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Category:Military history of ancient Greece
League
Category:5th century BC in international relations
Category:5th-century BC military history
Category:Ancient military alliances
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Category:5th-century BC disestablishments
Category:Greek city-state federations
Category:Former confederations | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delian_League | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.745947 |
2038 | August Horch | | birth_place = Winningen, Rhenish Prussia
| death_date
| death_place = Münchberg, Bavaria, West Germany
| known_for = Founder of Audi and Horch
}}
August Horch (12 October 1868 – 3 February 1951) was a German engineer and automobile pioneer, the founder of the manufacturing giant that eventually became Audi.
Beginnings
automobile, 1908]]
Horch was born in Winningen, Rhenish Prussia. His initial trade was as a blacksmith, and then was educated at (Mittweida Technical College). After receiving a degree in engineering, he worked in shipbuilding. Horch worked for Karl Benz from 1896, before founding A. Horch & Co. in November 1899, in Ehrenfeld, Cologne, Germany.
Manufacturing
]]
]]
The first Horch automobile was built in 1901. The company moved to Reichenbach in 1902 and Zwickau in 1904. Horch left the company in 1909 after a dispute, and set up in competition in Zwickau. His new firm was initially called Horch Automobil-Werke GmbH, but following a legal dispute over the Horch name, he decided to make another automobile company. (The court decided that Horch was a registered trademark on behalf of August's former partners and August was not entitled to use it any more). Consequently, Horch named his new company Audi Automobilwerke GmbH in 1910, Audi being the Latinization of Horch.
Post Audi
Horch left Audi in 1920 and went to Berlin and took various jobs. He published his autobiography, I Built Cars () in 1937. He also served on the board of Auto Union, the successor to Audi Automobilwerke GmbH he had founded. Horch remained an honorary executive at Auto Union during and after its reincorporation in Ingolstadt, Bavaria in the late 1940s until his death in 1951, ultimately not living to see the later resurrection of his Audi brand a decade later under the ownership of Volkswagen.
He was an honorary citizen of Zwickau and had a street named for his Audi cars in both Zwickau and his birthplace Winningen. He was made an honorary professor at Braunschweig University of Technology.<ref name"autoweek"/> There is an August Horchstrasse (August Horch Street) at Audi's main manufacturing plant in Ingolstadt.ReferencesExternal links*
Category:1868 births
Category:1951 deaths
Category:People from Mayen-Koblenz
Category:People from the Rhine Province
Category:Audi people
Category:German automotive pioneers
Category:German industrialists
Category:Auto Union
Category:Engineers from Rhineland-Palatinate
Category:Horch
Category:German founders of automobile manufacturers | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Horch | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.756252 |
2039 | Avionics | ]]
with avionics laid out]]
Avionics (a portmanteau of aviation and electronics) are the electronic systems used on aircraft. Avionic systems include communications, navigation, the display and management of multiple systems, and the hundreds of systems that are fitted to aircraft to perform individual functions. These can be as simple as a searchlight for a police helicopter or as complicated as the tactical system for an airborne early warning platform.
History
The term "avionics" was coined in 1949 by Philip J. Klass, senior editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine as a portmanteau of "aviation electronics".
Radio communication was first used in aircraft just prior to World War I. The first airborne radios were in zeppelins, but the military sparked development of light radio sets that could be carried by heavier-than-air craft, so that aerial reconnaissance biplanes could report their observations immediately in case they were shot down. The first experimental radio transmission from an airplane was conducted by the U.S. Navy in August 1910. The first aircraft radios transmitted by radiotelegraphy. They required a two-seat aircraft with a second crewman who operated a telegraph key to spell out messages in Morse code. During World War I, AM voice two way radio sets were made possible in 1917 (see TM (triode)) by the development of the triode vacuum tube, which were simple enough that the pilot in a single seat aircraft could use it while flying.
Radar, the central technology used today in aircraft navigation and air traffic control, was developed by several nations, mainly in secret, as an air defense system in the 1930s during the runup to World War II. Many modern avionics have their origins in World War II wartime developments. For example, autopilot systems that are commonplace today began as specialized systems to help bomber planes fly steadily enough to hit precision targets from high altitudes. Modern avionics is a substantial portion of military aircraft spending. Aircraft like the F-15E and the now retired F-14 have roughly 20 percent of their budget spent on avionics. Most modern helicopters now have budget splits of 60/40 in favour of avionics.
The civilian market has also seen a growth in cost of avionics. Flight control systems (fly-by-wire) and new navigation needs brought on by tighter airspaces, have pushed up development costs. The major change has been the recent boom in consumer flying. As more people begin to use planes as their primary method of transportation, more elaborate methods of controlling aircraft safely in these high restrictive airspaces have been invented.Modern avionics
Avionics plays a heavy role in modernization initiatives like the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Next Generation Air Transportation System project in the United States and the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) initiative in Europe. The Joint Planning and Development Office put forth a roadmap for avionics in six areas:
* Published Routes and Procedures – Improved navigation and routing
* Negotiated Trajectories – Adding data communications to create preferred routes dynamically
* Delegated Separation – Enhanced situational awareness in the air and on the ground
* LowVisibility/CeilingApproach/Departure – Allowing operations with weather constraints with less ground infrastructure
* Surface Operations – To increase safety in approach and departure
* ATM Efficiencies – Improving the air traffic management (ATM) process
Market
The Aircraft Electronics Association reports $1.73 billion avionics sales for the first three quarters of 2017 in business and general aviation, a 4.1% yearly improvement: 73.5% came from North America, forward-fit represented 42.3% while 57.7% were retrofits as the U.S. deadline of January 1, 2020 for mandatory ADS-B out approach.Aircraft avionicsThe cockpit or, in larger aircraft, under the cockpit of an aircraft or in a movable nosecone, is a typical location for avionic bay equipment, including control, monitoring, communication, navigation, weather, and anti-collision systems. The majority of aircraft power their avionics using 14- or 28‑volt DC electrical systems; however, larger, more sophisticated aircraft (such as airliners or military combat aircraft) have AC systems operating at 115 volts 400 Hz, AC. There are several major vendors of flight avionics, including The Boeing Company, Panasonic Avionics Corporation, Honeywell (which now owns Bendix/King), Universal Avionics Systems Corporation, Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace), Thales Group, GE Aviation Systems, Garmin, Raytheon, Parker Hannifin, UTC Aerospace Systems (now Collins Aerospace), Selex ES (now Leonardo), Shadin Avionics, and Avidyne Corporation.
International standards for avionics equipment are prepared by the Airlines Electronic Engineering Committee (AEEC) and published by ARINC.
Avionics Installation
Avionics installation is a critical aspect of modern aviation, ensuring that aircraft are equipped with the necessary electronic systems for safe and efficient operation. These systems encompass a wide range of functions, including communication, navigation, monitoring, flight control, and weather detection. Avionics installations are performed on all types of aircraft, from small general aviation planes to large commercial jets and military aircraft.
Installation Process
The installation of avionics requires a combination of technical expertise, precision, and adherence to stringent regulatory standards. The process typically involves:
# Planning and Design: Before installation, the avionics shop works closely with the aircraft owner to determine the required systems based on the aircraft type, intended use, and regulatory requirements. Custom instrument panels are often designed to accommodate the new systems.
# Wiring and Integration: Avionics systems are integrated into the aircraft’s electrical and control systems, with wiring often requiring laser marking for durability and identification. Shops use detailed schematics to ensure correct installation.
# Testing and Calibration: After installation, each system must be thoroughly tested and calibrated to ensure proper function. This includes ground testing, flight testing, and system alignment with regulatory standards such as those set by the FAA.
# Certification: Once the systems are installed and tested, the avionics shop completes the necessary certifications. In the U.S., this often involves compliance with FAA Part 91.411 and 91.413 for IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) operations, as well as RVSM (Reduced Vertical Separation Minimum) certification.
Regulatory Standards
Avionics installation is governed by strict regulatory frameworks to ensure the safety and reliability of aircraft systems. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sets the standards for avionics installations. These include guidelines for:
* System Performance: Avionics systems must meet performance benchmarks as defined by the FAA, ensuring they function correctly in all phases of flight.
* Certification: Shops performing installations must be FAA-certified, and their technicians often hold certifications such as the General Radiotelephone Operator License (GROL).
* Inspections: Aircraft equipped with newly installed avionics systems must undergo rigorous inspections before being cleared for flight, including both ground and flight tests.
Advancements in Avionics Technology
The field of avionics has seen rapid technological advancements in recent years, leading to more integrated and automated systems. Key trends include:
* Glass Cockpits: Traditional analog gauges are being replaced by fully integrated glass cockpit displays, providing pilots with a centralized view of all flight parameters.
* NextGen Technologies: ADS-B and satellite-based navigation are part of the FAA’s NextGen initiative, aimed at modernizing air traffic control and improving the efficiency of the national airspace.
* Autonomous Systems: Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are paving the way for more autonomous aircraft systems, enhancing safety and reducing pilot workload.
Communications
Communications connect the flight deck to the ground and the flight deck to the passengers. On‑board communications are provided by public-address systems and aircraft intercoms.
The VHF aviation communication system works on the airband of 118.000 MHz to 136.975 MHz. Each channel is spaced from the adjacent ones by 8.33 kHz in Europe, 25 kHz elsewhere. VHF is also used for line of sight communication such as aircraft-to-aircraft and aircraft-to-ATC. Amplitude modulation (AM) is used, and the conversation is performed in simplex mode. Aircraft communication can also take place using HF (especially for trans-oceanic flights) or satellite communication.
Navigation
Air navigation is the determination of position and direction on or above the surface of the Earth. Avionics can use satellite navigation systems (such as GPS and WAAS), inertial navigation system (INS), ground-based radio navigation systems (such as VOR or LORAN), or any combination thereof. Some navigation systems such as GPS calculate the position automatically and display it to the flight crew on moving map displays. Older ground-based Navigation systems such as VOR or LORAN requires a pilot or navigator to plot the intersection of signals on a paper map to determine an aircraft's location; modern systems calculate the position automatically and display it to the flight crew on moving map displays.
Monitoring
glass cockpit featuring pull-out keyboards and two wide computer screens on the sides for pilots]]
The first hints of glass cockpits emerged in the 1970s when flight-worthy cathode-ray tube (CRT) screens began to replace electromechanical displays, gauges and instruments. A "glass" cockpit refers to the use of computer monitors instead of gauges and other analog displays. Aircraft were getting progressively more displays, dials and information dashboards that eventually competed for space and pilot attention. In the 1970s, the average aircraft had more than 100 cockpit instruments and controls.
Glass cockpits started to come into being with the Gulfstream G‑IV private jet in 1985. One of the key challenges in glass cockpits is to balance how much control is automated and how much the pilot should do manually. Generally they try to automate flight operations while keeping the pilot constantly informed.
The first simple commercial auto-pilots were used to control heading and altitude and had limited authority on things like thrust and flight control surfaces. In helicopters, auto-stabilization was used in a similar way. The first systems were electromechanical. The advent of fly-by-wire and electro-actuated flight surfaces (rather than the traditional hydraulic) has increased safety. As with displays and instruments, critical devices that were electro-mechanical had a finite life. With safety critical systems, the software is very strictly tested.
Fuel Systems
Fuel Quantity Indication System (FQIS) monitors the amount of fuel aboard. Using various sensors, such as capacitance tubes, temperature sensors, densitometers & level sensors, the FQIS computer calculates the mass of fuel remaining on board.
Fuel Control and Monitoring System (FCMS) reports fuel remaining on board in a similar manner, but, by controlling pumps & valves, also manages fuel transfers around various tanks.
* Refuelling control to upload to a certain total mass of fuel and distribute it automatically.
* Transfers during flight to the tanks that feed the engines. E.G. from fuselage to wing tanks
* Centre of gravity control transfers from the tail (trim) tanks forward to the wings as fuel is expended
* Maintaining fuel in the wing tips (to alleviate wing bending due to lift in flight) & transferring to the main tanks after landing
* Controlling fuel jettison during an emergency to reduce the aircraft weight.
Collision-avoidance systems
To supplement air traffic control, most large transport aircraft and many smaller ones use a traffic alert and collision avoidance system (TCAS), which can detect the location of nearby aircraft, and provide instructions for avoiding a midair collision. Smaller aircraft may use simpler traffic alerting systems such as TPAS, which are passive (they do not actively interrogate the transponders of other aircraft) and do not provide advisories for conflict resolution.
To help avoid controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), aircraft use systems such as ground-proximity warning systems (GPWS), which use radar altimeters as a key element. One of the major weaknesses of GPWS is the lack of "look-ahead" information, because it only provides altitude above terrain "look-down". In order to overcome this weakness, modern aircraft use a terrain awareness warning system (TAWS).
Flight recorders
Commercial aircraft cockpit data recorders, commonly known as "black boxes", store flight information and audio from the cockpit. They are often recovered from an aircraft after a crash to determine control settings and other parameters during the incident.
Weather systems
Weather systems such as weather radar (typically Arinc 708 on commercial aircraft) and lightning detectors are important for aircraft flying at night or in instrument meteorological conditions, where it is not possible for pilots to see the weather ahead. Heavy precipitation (as sensed by radar) or severe turbulence (as sensed by lightning activity) are both indications of strong convective activity and severe turbulence, and weather systems allow pilots to deviate around these areas.
Lightning detectors like the Stormscope or Strikefinder have become inexpensive enough that they are practical for light aircraft. In addition to radar and lightning detection, observations and extended radar pictures (such as NEXRAD) are now available through satellite data connections, allowing pilots to see weather conditions far beyond the range of their own in-flight systems. Modern displays allow weather information to be integrated with moving maps, terrain, and traffic onto a single screen, greatly simplifying navigation.
Modern weather systems also include wind shear and turbulence detection and terrain and traffic warning systems. In‑plane weather avionics are especially popular in Africa, India, and other countries where air-travel is a growing market, but ground support is not as well developed.
Aircraft management systems
There has been a progression towards centralized control of the multiple complex systems fitted to aircraft, including engine monitoring and management. Health and usage monitoring systems (HUMS) are integrated with aircraft management computers to give maintainers early warnings of parts that will need replacement.
The integrated modular avionics concept proposes an integrated architecture with application software portable across an assembly of common hardware modules. It has been used in fourth generation jet fighters and the latest generation of airliners.
Mission or tactical avionics
Military aircraft have been designed either to deliver a weapon or to be the eyes and ears of other weapon systems. The vast array of sensors available to the military is used for whatever tactical means required. As with aircraft management, the bigger sensor platforms (like the E‑3D, JSTARS, ASTOR, Nimrod MRA4, Merlin HM Mk 1) have mission-management computers.
Police and EMS aircraft also carry sophisticated tactical sensors.
Military communications
While aircraft communications provide the backbone for safe flight, the tactical systems are designed to withstand the rigors of the battle field. UHF, VHF Tactical (30–88 MHz) and SatCom systems combined with ECCM methods, and cryptography secure the communications. Data links such as Link 11, 16, 22 and BOWMAN, JTRS and even TETRA provide the means of transmitting data (such as images, targeting information etc.).
Radar
Airborne radar was one of the first tactical sensors. The benefit of altitude providing range has meant a significant focus on airborne radar technologies. Radars include airborne early warning (AEW), anti-submarine warfare (ASW), and even weather radar (Arinc 708) and ground tracking/proximity radar.
The military uses radar in fast jets to help pilots fly at low levels. While the civil market has had weather radar for a while, there are strict rules about using it to navigate the aircraft.SonarDipping sonar fitted to a range of military helicopters allows the helicopter to protect shipping assets from submarines or surface threats. Maritime support aircraft can drop active and passive sonar devices (sonobuoys) and these are also used to determine the location of enemy submarines.Electro-opticsElectro-optic systems include devices such as the head-up display (HUD), forward looking infrared (FLIR), infrared search and track and other passive infrared devices (Passive infrared sensor). These are all used to provide imagery and information to the flight crew. This imagery is used for everything from search and rescue to navigational aids and target acquisition.ESM/DASElectronic support measures and defensive aids systems are used extensively to gather information about threats or possible threats. They can be used to launch devices (in some cases automatically) to counter direct threats against the aircraft. They are also used to determine the state of a threat and identify it.Aircraft networks
The avionics systems in military, commercial and advanced models of civilian aircraft are interconnected using an avionics databus. Common avionics databus protocols, with their primary application, include:
* Aircraft Data Network (ADN): Ethernet derivative for Commercial Aircraft
* Avionics Full-Duplex Switched Ethernet (AFDX): Specific implementation of ARINC 664 (ADN) for Commercial Aircraft
* ARINC 429: Generic Medium-Speed Data Sharing for Private and Commercial Aircraft
* ARINC 664: See ADN above
* ARINC 629: Commercial Aircraft (Boeing 777)
* ARINC 708: Weather Radar for Commercial Aircraft
* ARINC 717: Flight Data Recorder for Commercial Aircraft
* ARINC 825: CAN bus for commercial aircraft (for example Boeing 787 and Airbus A350)
* Commercial Standard Digital Bus
* IEEE 1394b: Military Aircraft
* MIL-STD-1553: Military Aircraft
* MIL-STD-1760: Military Aircraft
* TTP – Time-Triggered Protocol: Boeing 787, Airbus A380, Fly-By-Wire Actuation Platforms from Parker Aerospace
See also
* Astrionics, similar, for spacecraft
*
*Acronyms and abbreviations in avionics
*
*Avionics software
*
*Emergency locator beacon
*Emergency position-indicating radiobeacon station
*
*Integrated modular avionics
Notes
Further reading
*Avionics: Development and Implementation by Cary R. Spitzer (Hardcover – December 15, 2006)
*Principles of Avionics, 4th Edition by Albert Helfrick, Len Buckwalter, and Avionics Communications Inc. (Paperback – July 1, 2007)
*Avionics Training: Systems, Installation, and Troubleshooting by Len Buckwalter (Paperback – June 30, 2005)
*Avionics Made Simple, by Mouhamed Abdulla, Ph.D.; Jaroslav V. Svoboda, Ph.D. and Luis Rodrigues, Ph.D. (Coursepack – Dec. 2005 - ).
External links
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20160510105632/http://www.harbourind.com/applications-in-commercial-aircraft Avionics in Commercial Aircraft]
*[http://www.aea.net Aircraft Electronics Association (AEA)]
*[http://www.aeapilotsguide.net ''Pilot's Guide to Avionics'']
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20081020024422/http://www.assconline.co.uk/ The Avionic Systems Standardisation Committee]
*[http://klabs.org/DEI/Processor/shuttle/sp-504/sp-504.htm Space Shuttle Avionics]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20070921205322/http://www.aviationtoday.com/av/ Aviation Today Avionics magazine]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20071230104039/http://www.raes.org.uk/cmspage.asp?cmsitemid=SG_Av_Sys_Home RAES Avionics homepage]
Category:Aircraft instruments
Category:Spacecraft components
Category:Electronic engineering | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avionics | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.785717 |
2041 | Ares | Ares (; , Árēs ) is the Greek god of war and courage. He is one of the Twelve Olympians, and the son of Zeus and Hera. The Greeks were ambivalent towards him. He embodies the physical valor necessary for success in war but can also personify sheer brutality and bloodlust, in contrast to his sister Athena, whose martial functions include military strategy and generalship. An association with Ares endows places, objects, and other deities with a savage, dangerous, or militarized quality.
Although Ares' name shows his origins as Mycenaean, his reputation for savagery was thought by some to reflect his likely origins as a Thracian deity. Some cities in Greece and several in Asia Minor held annual festivals to bind and detain him as their protector. In parts of Asia Minor, he was an oracular deity. Still further away from Greece, the Scythians were said to ritually kill one in a hundred prisoners of war as an offering to their equivalent of Ares. The later belief that ancient Spartans had offered human sacrifice to Ares may owe more to mythical prehistory, misunderstandings, and reputation than to reality.
Although there are many literary allusions to Ares' love affairs and children, he has a limited role in Greek mythology. When he does appear, he is often humiliated. In the Trojan War, Aphrodite, protector of Troy, persuades Ares to take the Trojans' side. The Trojans lose, while Ares' sister Athena helps the Greeks to victory. Most famously, when the craftsman-god Hephaestus discovers his wife Aphrodite is having an affair with Ares, he traps the lovers in a net and exposes them to the ridicule of the other gods.
Ares' nearest counterpart in Roman religion is Mars, who was given a more important and dignified place in ancient Roman religion as ancestral protector of the Roman people and state. During the Hellenization of Latin literature, the myths of Ares were reinterpreted by Roman writers under the name of Mars, and in later Western art and literature, the mythology of the two figures became virtually indistinguishable.
Names
The etymology of the name Ares is traditionally connected with the Greek word (arē), the Ionic form of the Doric (ara), "bane, ruin, curse, imprecation". Walter Burkert notes that "Ares is apparently an ancient abstract noun meaning throng of battle, war." R. S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin of the name. The earliest attested form of the name is the Mycenaean Greek }}, a-re, written in the Linear B syllabic script.
The adjectival epithet, Areios ("warlike") was frequently appended to the names of other gods when they took on a warrior aspect or became involved in warfare: Zeus Areios, Athena Areia, even Aphrodite Areia ("Aphrodite within Ares" or "feminine Ares"), who was warlike, fully armoured and armed, partnered with Athena in Sparta, and represented at Kythira's temple to Aphrodite Urania.
In the Iliad, the word ares is used as a common noun synonymous with "battle." Enyalios was sometimes identified with Ares and sometimes differentiated from him as another war god with separate cult, even in the same town; Burkert describes them as "doubles almost".Epithets
*aatos or atos polemoio, insatiate at war.
*alloprosallos,leaning first to one side, then to the other.
*andreifontēs, man slaying.
*apotimos,dishonoured by Sophocles.
*brotoloigos, plague of man.
*enyalios , warlike,
*Thēritas,at Sparta. Laconic form of Thersites,audacious .
*mainomenos,malignant.
*miaifonos, blood stained
*tykton kakon, complete evil.Cultsource for unqualified claim that the original was by Alcamenes; compare the careful description of the Ares Borghese|dateAugust 2023}}, excavated in 1925 in Rome's Largo di Torre Argentina]]
In mainland Greece and the Peloponnese, only a few places are known to have had a formal temple and cult of Ares. Pausanias (2nd century AD) notes an altar to Ares at Olympia, and the moving of a Temple of Ares to the Athenian agora during the reign of Augustus, essentially rededicating it (2 AD) as a Roman temple to the Augustan Mars Ultor.
Numismatist M. Jessop Price states that Ares "typified the traditional Spartan character", but had no important cult in Sparta; and he never occurs on Spartan coins. Pausanias gives two examples of his cult, both of them conjointly with or "within" a warlike Aphrodite, on the Spartan acropolis. Gonzalez observes, in his 2005 survey of Ares' cults in Asia Minor, that cults to Ares on the Greek mainland may have been more common than some sources assert. Wars between Greek states were endemic; war and warriors provided Ares's tribute, and fed his insatiable appetite for battle.
Ares' attributes are instruments of war: a helmet, shield, and sword or spear.Chained statuesGods were immortal but could be bound and restrained, both in mythic narrative and in cult practice. There was an archaic Spartan statue of Ares in chains in the temple of Enyalios (sometimes regarded as the son of Ares, sometimes as Ares himself), which Pausanias claimed meant that the spirit of war and victory was to be kept in the city. The Spartans are known to have ritually bound the images of other deities, including Aphrodite and Artemis (cf Ares and Aphrodite bound by Hephaestus), and in other places there were chained statues of Artemis and Dionysos.
Statues of Ares in chains are described in the instructions given by an oracle of the late Hellenistic era to various cities of Pamphylia (in Anatolia) including Syedra, Lycia and Cilicia, places almost perpetually under threat from pirates. Each was told to set up a statue of "bloody, man-slaying Ares" and provide it with an annual festival in which it was ritually bound with iron fetters ("by Dike and Hermes") as if a supplicant for justice, put on trial and offered sacrifice. The oracle promises that "thus will he become a peaceful deity for you, once he has driven the enemy horde far from your country, and he will give rise to prosperity much prayed for." This Ares karpodotes ("giver of Fruits") is well attested in Lycia and Pisidia.
Sacrifices
, ca. 447–433 BC, British Museum.]]
Like most Greek deities, Ares was given animal sacrifice; in Sparta, after battle, he was given an ox for a victory by stratagem, or a rooster for victory through onslaught. The usual recipient of sacrifice before battle was Athena. Reports of historic human sacrifice to Ares in an obscure rite known as the Hekatomphonia represent a very long-standing error, repeated through several centuries and well into the modern era. The hekatomphonia was an animal sacrifice to Zeus; it could be offered by any warrior who had personally slain one hundred of the enemy. Pausanias reports that in Sparta, each company of youths sacrificed a puppy to Enyalios before engaging in a hand-to-hand "fight without rules" at the Phoebaeum. The chthonic night-time sacrifice of a dog to Enyalios became assimilated to the cult of Ares. Porphyry claims, without detail, that Apollodorus of Athens (circa second century BC) says the Spartans made human sacrifices to Ares, but this may be a reference to mythic pre-history.Thrace and ScythiaA Thracian god identified by Herodotus ( – ) as Ares, through interpretatio Graeca, was one of three otherwise unnamed deities that Thracian commoners were said to worship. Herodotus recognises and names the other two as "Dionysus" and "Artemis", and claims that the Thracian aristocracy exclusively worshiped "Hermes". In Herodotus' Histories, the Scythians worship an indigenous form of Greek Ares, who is otherwise unnamed, but ranked beneath Tabiti (whom Herodotus claims as a form of Hestia), Api and Papaios in Scythia's divine hierarchy. His cult object was an iron sword. The "Scythian Ares" was offered blood-sacrifices (or ritual killings) of cattle, horses and "one in every hundred human war-captives", whose blood was used to douse the sword. Statues, and complex platform-altars made of heaped brushwood were devoted to him. This sword-cult, or one very similar, is said to have persisted among the Alans. Some have posited that the "Sword of Mars" in later European history alludes to the Huns having adopted Ares.Asia MinorIn some parts of Asia Minor, Ares was a prominent oracular deity, something not found in any Hellennic cult to Ares or Roman cult to Mars. Ares was linked in some regions or polities with a local god or cultic hero, and recognised as a higher, more prestigious deity than in mainland Greece. His cults in southern Asia Minor are attested from the 5th century BC and well into the later Roman Imperial era, at 29 different sites, and on over 70 local coin issues. He is sometimes represented on coinage of the region by the "Helmet of Ares" or carrying a spear and a shield, or as a fully armed warrior, sometimes accompanied by a female deity. In what is now western Turkey, the Hellenistic city of Metropolis built a monumental temple to Ares as the city's protector, not before the 3rd century BC. It is now lost, but the names of some of its priests and priestesses survive, along with the temple's likely depictions on coins of the province.CreteA sanctuary of Aphrodite was established at Sta Lenika, on Crete, between the cities of Lato and Olus, possibly during the Geometric period. It was rebuilt in the late 2nd century BC as a double-sanctuary to Ares and Aphrodite. Inscriptions record disputes over the ownership of the sanctuary. The names of Ares and Aphrodite appear as witness to sworn oaths, and there is a Victory thanks-offering to Aphrodite, whom Millington believes had capacity as a "warrior-protector acting in the realm of Ares". There were cultic links between the Sta Lenika sanctuary, Knossos and other Cretan states, and perhaps with Argos on the mainland. While the Greek literary and artistic record from both the Archaic and Classical eras connects Ares and Aphrodite as complementary companions and ideal though adulterous lovers, their cult pairing and Aphrodite as warrior-protector is localised to Crete.AksumIn Africa, Maḥrem, the principal god of the kings of Aksum prior to the 4th century AD, was invoked as Ares in Greek inscriptions. The anonymous king who commissioned the Monumentum Adulitanum in the late 2nd or early 3rd century refers to "my greatest god, Ares, who also begat me, through whom I brought under my sway [various peoples]". The monumental throne celebrating the king's conquests was itself dedicated to Ares. In the early 4th century, the last pagan king of Aksum, Ezana, referred to "the one who brought me forth, the invincible Ares".Characterisation
]]
Ares was one of the Twelve Olympians in the archaic tradition represented by the Iliad and Odyssey. In Greek literature, Ares often represents the physical or violent and untamed aspect of war and is the personification of sheer brutality and bloodlust ("overwhelming, insatiable in battle, destructive, and man-slaughtering", as Burkert puts it), in contrast to his sister, the armored Athena, whose functions as a goddess of intelligence include military strategy and generalship. An association with Ares endows places and objects with a savage, dangerous, or militarized quality; but when Ares does appear in myths, he typically faces humiliation.
In the Iliad, Zeus expresses a recurring Greek revulsion toward the god when Ares returns wounded and complaining from the battlefield at Troy:
This ambivalence is expressed also in the Greeks' association of Ares with the Thracians, whom they regarded as a barbarous and warlike people. Thrace was considered to be Ares's birthplace and his refuge after the affair with Aphrodite was exposed to the general mockery of the other gods.
A late-6th-century BC funerary inscription from Attica emphasizes the consequences of coming under Ares's sway:
Mythology
, Roman version of a Greek original c. 320 BC, with 17th-century restorations by Bernini]]
Birth
He is one of the Twelve Olympians, and the son of Zeus and Hera.ArgonauticaIn the Argonautica, the Golden Fleece hangs in a grove sacred to Ares, until its theft by Jason. The Birds of Ares (Ornithes Areioi) drop feather darts in defense of the Amazons' shrine to Ares, as father of their queen, on a coastal island in the Black Sea.Founding of ThebesAres plays a central role in the founding myth of Thebes, as the progenitor of the water-dragon slain by Cadmus. The dragon's teeth were sown into the ground as if a crop and sprang up as the fully armored autochthonic Spartoi. Cadmus placed himself in the god's service for eight years to atone for killing the dragon. To further propitiate Ares, Cadmus married Harmonia, a daughter of Ares's union with Aphrodite. In this way, Cadmus harmonized all strife and founded the city of Thebes. According to Plutarch, the plain was anciently described as "The dancing-floor of Ares".
Aphrodite
In Homer's Odyssey, in the tale sung by the bard in the hall of Alcinous, the Sun-god Helios once spied Ares and Aphrodite having sex secretly in the hall of Hephaestus, her husband. Helios reported the incident to Hephaestus. Contriving to catch the illicit couple in the act, Hephaestus fashioned a finely-knitted and nearly invisible net with which to snare them. At the appropriate time, this net was sprung, and trapped Ares and Aphrodite locked in very private embrace.
But Hephaestus was not satisfied with his revenge, so he invited the Olympian gods and goddesses to view the unfortunate pair. For the sake of modesty, the goddesses demurred, but the male gods went to witness the sight. Some commented on the beauty of Aphrodite, others remarked that they would eagerly trade places with Ares, but all who were present mocked the two. Once the couple was released, the embarrassed Ares returned to his homeland, Thrace, and Aphrodite went to Paphos. Helios discovered the two and alerted Hephaestus. The furious Ares turned the sleepy Alectryon into a rooster which now always announces the arrival of the sun in the morning, as a way of apologizing to Ares.
The Chorus of Aeschylus' Suppliants (written 463 BC) refers to Ares as Aphrodite's "mortal-destroying bedfellow". In the Illiad, Ares helps the Trojans because of his affection for their divine protector, Aphrodite; she thus redirects his innate destructive savagery to her own purposes. In this, [Burkert] suspects "a festival of licence which is unleashed in the thirteenth month." Ares was held screaming and howling in the urn until Hermes rescued him, and Artemis tricked the Aloadae into slaying each other. In Nonnus's Dionysiaca, in the war between Cronus and Zeus, Ares killed an unnamed giant son of Echidna who was allied with Cronus, and described as spitting "horrible poison" and having "snaky" feet. <!--is this in Dionysiaca?:Zeus helped him heal afterwards.-->
In the 2nd century AD Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis, when the monstrous Typhon attacked Olympus the gods transformed into animals and fled to Egypt; Ares changed into a fish, the Lepidotus (sacred to the Egyptian war-god Anhur). Liberalis's koine Greek text is a "completely inartistic" epitome of Nicander's now lost Heteroeumena (2nd century BC).IliadIn Homer's Iliad, Ares has no fixed allegiance. He promises Athena and Hera that he will fight for the Achaeans but Aphrodite persuades him to side with the Trojans. During the war, Diomedes fights Hector and sees Ares fighting on the Trojans' side. Diomedes calls for his soldiers to withdraw. Zeus grants Athena permission to drive Ares from the battlefield. Encouraged by Hera and Athena, Diomedes thrusts with his spear at Ares. Athena drives the spear home, and all sides tremble at Ares's cries. Ares flees to Mount Olympus, forcing the Trojans to fall back. Ares overhears that his son Ascalaphus has been killed and wants to change sides again, rejoining the Achaeans for vengeance, disregarding Zeus's order that no Olympian should join the battle. Athena stops him. Later, when Zeus allows the gods to fight in the war again, Ares attacks Athena to avenge his previous injury. Athena overpowers him by striking him with a boulder.AttendantsDeimos ("Terror" or "Dread") and Phobos ("Fear") are Ares' companions in war, and according to Hesiod, are also his children by Aphrodite. Eris, the goddess of discord, or Enyo, the goddess of war, bloodshed, and violence, was considered the sister and companion of the violent Ares. In at least one tradition, Enyalius, rather than another name for Ares, was his son by Enyo.
Ares may also be accompanied by Kydoimos, the daemon of the din of battle; the Makhai ("Battles"); the "Hysminai" ("Acts of manslaughter"); Polemos, a minor spirit of war, or only an epithet of Ares, since it has no specific dominion; and Polemos's daughter, Alala, the goddess or personification of the Greek war-cry, whose name Ares uses as his own war-cry. Ares's sister Hebe ("Youth") also draws baths for him.
According to Pausanias, local inhabitants of Therapne, Sparta, recognized Thero, "feral, savage," as a nurse of Ares.
Offspring and affairs
as viewed from the Acropolis.]]
Though Ares plays a relatively limited role in Greek mythology as represented in literary narratives, his numerous love affairs and abundant offspring are often alluded to.
The union of Ares and Aphrodite created the gods Eros, Anteros, Phobos, Deimos, and Harmonia. Other versions include Alcippe as one of his daughters.
Cycnus (Κύκνος) of Macedonia was a son of Ares who tried to build a temple to his father with the skulls and bones of guests and travellers. Heracles fought him and, in one account, killed him. In another account, Ares fought his son's killer but Zeus parted the combatants with a thunderbolt.
Ares had a romantic liaison with Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Aphrodite discovered them, and in anger she cursed Eos with insatiable lust for men.
By a woman named Teirene he had a daughter named Thrassa, who in turn had a daughter named Polyphonte. Polyphonte was cursed by Aphrodite to love and mate with a bear, producing two sons, Agrius and Oreius, who were hubristic toward the gods and had a habit of eating their guests. Zeus sent Hermes to punish them, and he chose to chop off their hands and feet. Since Polyphonte was descended from him, Ares stopped Hermes, and the two brothers came into an agreement to turn Polyphonte's family into birds instead. Oreius became an eagle owl, Agrius a vulture, and Polyphonte a strix, possibly a small owl, certainly a portent of war; Polyphonte's servant prayed not to become a bird of evil omen and Ares and Hermes fulfilled her wish by choosing the woodpecker for her, a good omen for hunters.List of offspring and their mothers
Sometimes poets and dramatists recounted ancient traditions, which varied, and sometimes they invented new details; later scholiasts might draw on either or simply guess. Thus while Phobos and Deimos were regularly described as offspring of Ares, others listed here such as Meleager, Sinope and Solymus were sometimes said to be children of Ares and sometimes given other fathers.
The following is a list of Ares' offspring, by various mothers. Beside each offspring, the earliest source to record the parentage is given, along with the century to which the source dates.
<div style=display:inline-table>
{| class="wikitable sortable mw-collapsible mw-collapsed"
! scope"col" style"width: 100pt;" | Offspring
! scope"col" style"width: 90pt;" | Mother
! scope"col" style"width: 70pt;" | Source
! scope"col" style"width: 70pt;" | Date
! class"unsortable" scope"col" style="width: 10pt;" |
|-
| Phobos
| rowspan="5" | Aphrodite
| Hes. Theog.
| data-sort-value=1 | 8th cent. BC
|
|-
| Deimos
| Hes. Theog.
| data-sort-value=1 | 8th cent. BC
|
|-
| Eros
| Simonides
|
|
|-
| Anteros
| Cic. DND
| data-sort-value=15 | 1st cent. BC
|
|-
| Odomantus
| rowspan="3" | Calliope
|
|
|
|-
| Mygdon
|
|
|
|-
| Edonus
|
|
|
|-
| rowspan="2" | Biston
| Terpsichore
| Etym. Mag.
| data-sort-value=39 | 12th cent. AD
|
|-
| Callirrhoe
| Steph. Byz.
| data-sort-value=27 | 6th cent. AD
|
|-
| Enyalius
| Enyo
|
|
|
|-
| Dragon of Thebes
| Erinys of Telphusa
|
|
|
|-
| Nike
| No mother mentioned
| HH 8
|
|
|-
| Sinope (possibly)
| Aegina
| Schol. Ap. Rhod.
|
|
|-
| Edonus
| rowspan="2" | Callirrhoe
| Steph. Byz.
| data-sort-value=27 | 6th cent. AD
|
|-
| Pelopia
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Pyrene
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Diomedes of Thrace
| rowspan=2 | Cyrene
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Crestone
| Tzetzes
| data-sort-value=39 | 12th cent. AD
|
|-
| The Amazons
| Harmonia
|
|
|
|-
| rowspan="3" | Oenomaus
| Sterope
| Hyg. Fab.
| data-sort-value=17 | 1st cent. AD
|
|-
| Harpina
| Diod. Sic.
| data-sort-value=15 | 1st cent. BC
|
|-
| Eurythoe the Danaid
| Tzetzes
| data-sort-value=39 | 12th cent. AD
|
|-
| rowspan="2" | Evenus
| Sterope
| Ps.-Plutarch
|
|
|-
| Demonice
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Thrassa
| Tereine
| Ant. Lib.
| data-sort-value=20 | 2nd/3rd cent. AD
|
|-
| Aeropus
| Aerope
| Paus.
| data-sort-value=19 | 2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Alcippe
| Aglauros
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Meleager
| Althaea
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Calydon
| Astynome
|
|
|
|-
| Ascalaphus
| rowspan=2 | Astyoche
| Paus.
| data-sort-value=19 | 2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Ialmenus
| Paus.
| data-sort-value=19 | 2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Parthenopaeus
| Atalanta
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Solymus
| Caldene
| Etym. Mag.
| data-sort-value=39 | 12th cent. AD
|
|-
| rowspan="2" | Phlegyas
| Chryse
| Paus.
| data-sort-value=19 | 2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Dotis
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Pangaeus
| Critobule
| Ps.-Plutarch
|
|
|-
| Molus, Pylus
| Demonice
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| rowspan="2" |Thestius
| Pisidice
| Ps.-Plutarch
|
|
|-
| Demonice
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Stymphelus
| Dormothea
| Ps.-Plutarch
|
|
|-
| Antiope
| rowspan="4" | Otrera
| Hyg. Fab.
| data-sort-value=17 | 1st cent. AD
|
|-
| Hippolyta
| Hyg. Fab.
| data-sort-value=17 | 1st cent. AD
|
|-
| Melanippe
|
|
|
|-
| Penthesilea
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Sinope
| Parnassa
| Eumelus
|
|
|-
| Lycaon
| Pyrene
|
|
|
|-
| Lycastus
| rowspan="2" | Phylonome
| Ps.-Plutarch
|
|
|-
| Parrhasius
| Ps.-Plutarch
|
|
|-
| Bithys
| Sete
|
|
|
|-
| Tmolus
| Theogone
| Ps.-Plutarch
|
|
|-
| Ismarus
| Thracia
|
|
|
|-
| Chalyps
|
|
|
|-
| Cheimarrhoos
| Schol. Hes., WD
|
|
|-
| Dryas
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|-
| Hyperbius
|
|
|
|-
| Lycus of Libya
|
|
|
|-
| Nisos
| Hyg. Fab.
| data-sort-value=17 | 1st cent. AD
|
|-
| Oeagrus
| Nonnus
| data-sort-value=25 | 5th cent. AD
|
|-
| Paeon
| Etym. Mag.''
| data-sort-value=39 | 12th cent. AD
|
|-
| Tereus
| Apollod.
| data-sort-value=18 | 1st/2nd cent. AD
|
|}
</div>
Mars
, c. 20 BC – 50s AD, showing Mars and Venus. The Roman god of war is depicted as youthful and beardless, reflecting the influence of the Greek Ares.]]
The nearest counterpart of Ares among the Roman gods is Mars, a son of Jupiter and Juno, pre-eminent among the Roman army's military gods but originally an agricultural deity. As a father of Romulus, Rome's legendary founder, Mars was given an important and dignified place in ancient Roman religion, as a guardian deity of the entire Roman state and its people. Under the influence of Greek culture, Mars was identified with Ares, but the character and dignity of the two deities differed fundamentally. Mars was represented as a means to secure peace, and he was a father (pater) of the Roman people. In one tradition, he fathered Romulus and Remus through his rape of Rhea Silvia. In another, his lover, the goddess Venus, gave birth to Aeneas, the Trojan prince and refugee who "founded" Rome several generations before Romulus.
In the Hellenization of Latin literature, the myths of Ares were reinterpreted by Roman writers under the name of Mars. Greek writers under Roman rule also recorded cult practices and beliefs pertaining to Mars under the name of Ares. Thus in the classical tradition of later Western art and literature, the mythology of the two figures later became virtually indistinguishable.
Renaissance and later depictions
In Renaissance and Neoclassical works of art, Ares's symbols are a spear and helmet, his animal is a dog, and his bird is the vulture. In literary works<!--examples would be more enlightening than this generality--> of these eras, Ares is replaced by the Roman Mars, a romantic emblem of manly valor rather than the cruel and blood-thirsty god of Greek mythology.
In popular culture
<!--items that belong at that article should not be added here, as they may be deleted without comment-->
Genealogy
See also
* Family tree of the Greek gods
Footnotes
NotesReferences
* Antoninus Liberalis, The Metamorphoses of Antoninus Liberalis: A Translation with a Commentary, edited and translated by Francis Celoria, Routledge, 1992. . [https://topostext.org/work/216 Online version at ToposText].
* Apollodorus, Apollodorus: The Library, with an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S. in 2 Volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1921. . [http://data.perseus.org/texts/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0548.tlg001.perseus-eng1 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion, Harvard University Press, 1985. . [https://archive.org/details/greekreligion0000burk/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater Internet Archive].
* Etymologicum Magnum, Friderici Sylburgii (ed.), Leipzig: J.A.G. Weigel, 1816. [https://archive.org/details/etymologikontome00etymuoft/page/2/mode/2up?view=theater Internet Archive].
* Gantz, Timothy, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, Two volumes: (Vol. 1), (Vol. 2).
* Grimal, Pierre, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Wiley-Blackwell, 1996. . [https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofclas0000grim/page/n3/mode/2up?view=theater Internet Archive].
* Hansen, William, Handbook of Classical Mythology, ABC-CLIO, 2004. . [https://archive.org/details/handbookofclassi0000hans/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater Internet Archive].
* Hard, Robin, ''The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology: Based on H.J. Rose's "Handbook of Greek Mythology", Psychology Press, 2004. . [https://books.google.com/books?id=r1Y3xZWVlnIC Google Books].
* Hesiod, Theogony, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0020.tlg001.perseus-eng1:1-28 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library]. [https://archive.org/details/hesiodhomerichym00hesiuoft/page/78/mode/2up?view=theater Internet Archive].
* Homer, The Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-eng1:1.1-1.32 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Homer, The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919. [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg002.perseus-eng1:1.1-1.43 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Homeric Hymn 8 to Ares, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1914. [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0013.tlg008.perseus-eng1:8 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Hyginus, Gaius Julius, De Astronomica, in The Myths of Hyginus, edited and translated by Mary A. Grant, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960. [https://topostext.org/work/207 Online version at ToposText].
* Hyginus, Gaius Julius, Fabulae, in The Myths of Hyginus, edited and translated by Mary A. Grant, Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1960. [https://topostext.org/work/206 Online version at ToposText].
*
* Nonnus, Dionysiaca, Volume II: Books 16–35, translated by W. H. D. Rouse, Loeb Classical Library No. 345, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1940. [https://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL354/1940/volume.xml Online version at Harvard University Press]. . [https://archive.org/stream/dionysiaca02nonnuoft#page/n5/mode/2up Internet Archive (1940)].
* Oxford Classical Dictionary, revised third edition, Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (editors), Oxford University Press, 2003. . [https://archive.org/details/oxfordclassicald0000unse_w0u7/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater Internet Archive].
* Pausanias, Pausanias Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918. [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Paus.+1.1.1 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Peck, Harry Thurston, Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, New York, Harper and Brothers, 1898. [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.04.0062 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Pseudo-Plutarch, De fluviis, in Plutarch's morals, Volume V, edited and translated by William Watson Goodwin, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1874. [http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0094.tlg001.perseus-eng1:1 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Smith, William, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). [https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.04.0104 Online version at the Perseus Digital Library].
* Stephanus of Byzantium, Stephani Byzantii Ethnica: Volumen I Alpha - Gamma, edited by Margarethe Billerbeck, in collaboration with Jan Felix Gaertner, Beatrice Wyss and Christian Zubler, De Gruyter, 2006. . [https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110202816 Online version at De Gruyter]. [https://books.google.com/books?id=e2WGsl7oeEUC Google Books].
* Tripp, Edward, Crowell's Handbook of Classical Mythology'', Thomas Y. Crowell Co; First edition (June 1970). . [https://archive.org/details/crowellshandbook00trip/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater Internet Archive].
Category:Characters in the Odyssey
Category:Children of Hera
Category:Children of Zeus
Category:Consorts of Aphrodite
Category:Consorts of Eos
Category:Deeds of Poseidon
Category:Deities in the Iliad
Category:Dog gods
Category:Greek mythology of Thrace
Category:Greek war deities
Category:Martian deities
Category:Planetary gods
Category:Metamorphoses characters
Category:Twelve Olympians
Category:War gods | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.868335 |
2042 | Alexander Grothendieck | | birth_place = Berlin, Prussia, Germany
| death_date }}
| death_place = Saint-Lizier, Ariège, France
| nationality |Stateless (post 1945 until 1971)}}
| workplaces |University of São Paulo}}
| alma_mater
| thesis_title = Produits tensoriels topologiques et espaces nucléaires
| thesis_url = https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~leila.schneps/grothendieckcircle/PTT.pdf
| thesis_year = 1953
| doctoral_advisors
| doctoral_students |Luc Illusie |William Messing |Michel Raynaud|Michèle Raynaud |Hoàng Xuân Sính |Jean-Louis Verdier}}
| fields = Functional analysis<br />Algebraic geometry<br />Homological algebra
| awards Fields Medal | Émile Picard Medal | Crafoord Prize
}}
| known_for = Renewing algebraic geometry and synthesis between it and number theory and topology<br />List of things named after Alexander Grothendieck
}}
Alexander Grothendieck, later Alexandre Grothendieck in French (; ; ; 28 March 1928 – 13 November 2014), was a German-born French mathematician who became the leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry. His research extended the scope of the field and added elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory to its foundations, while his so-called "relative" perspective led to revolutionary advances in many areas of pure mathematics. He is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. He later became professor at the University of Montpellier<!--(see "Politics and retreat from scientific community" section below, ¶1)--> and, while still producing relevant mathematical work, he withdrew from the mathematical community and devoted himself to political and religious pursuits (first Buddhism and later, a more Catholic Christian vision). In 1991, he moved to the French village of Lasserre in the Pyrenees, where he lived in seclusion, still working on mathematics and his philosophical and religious thoughts until his death in 2014. Life Family and childhood Grothendieck was born in Berlin to anarchist parents. His father, Alexander "Sascha" Schapiro (also known as Alexander Tanaroff), had Hasidic Jewish roots and had been imprisoned in Russia before moving to Germany in 1922, while his mother, Johanna "Hanka" Grothendieck, came from a Protestant German family in Hamburg and worked as a journalist.}} As teenagers, both of his parents had broken away from their early backgrounds. At the time of his birth, Grothendieck's mother was married to the journalist Johannes Raddatz and initially, his birth name was recorded as "Alexander Raddatz." That marriage was dissolved in 1929 and Schapiro acknowledged his paternity, but never married Hanka Grothendieck. According to Winfried Scharlau, during this time, his parents took part in the Spanish Civil War as non-combatant auxiliaries. However, others state that Schapiro fought in the anarchist militia.
World War II
In May 1939, Grothendieck was put on a train in Hamburg for France. Shortly afterward his father was interned in Le Vernet. The first camp was the Rieucros Camp, where his mother contracted the tuberculosis that would eventually cause her death in 1957. While there, Grothendieck managed to attend the local school, at Mende. Once, he managed to escape from the camp, intending to assassinate Hitler. Grothendieck was permitted to live separated from his mother.
In the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, he was sheltered and hidden in local boarding houses or pensions, although he occasionally had to seek refuge in the woods during Nazi raids, surviving at times without food or water for several days. Working on his own, he rediscovered the Lebesgue measure. After three years of increasingly independent studies there, he went to continue his studies in Paris in 1948.
Initially, Grothendieck attended Henri Cartan's Seminar at , but he lacked the necessary background to follow the high-powered seminar. On the advice of Cartan and André Weil, he moved to the University of Nancy where two leading experts were working on Grothendieck's area of interest, topological vector spaces: Jean Dieudonné and Laurent Schwartz. The latter had recently won a Fields Medal. Dieudonné and Schwartz showed the new student their latest paper La dualité dans les espaces () et (); it ended with a list of 14 open questions, relevant for locally convex spaces. Grothendieck introduced new mathematical methods that enabled him to solve all of these problems within a few months.
In Nancy, he wrote his dissertation under those two professors on functional analysis, from 1950 to 1953. At this time he was a leading expert in the theory of topological vector spaces. In 1953 he moved to the University of São Paulo in Brazil, where he immigrated by means of a Nansen passport, given that he had refused to take French nationality (as that would have entailed military service against his convictions). He stayed in São Paulo (apart from a lengthy visit in France from October 1953 to March 1954) until the end of 1954. His published work from the time spent in Brazil is still in the theory of topological vector spaces; it is there that he completed his last major work on that topic (on "metric" theory of Banach spaces).
Grothendieck moved to Lawrence, Kansas at the beginning of 1955, and there he set his old subject aside in order to work in algebraic topology and homological algebra, and increasingly in algebraic geometry. It was in Lawrence that Grothendieck developed his theory of abelian categories and the reformulation of sheaf cohomology based on them, leading to the very influential "Tôhoku paper".
In 1957 he was invited to visit Harvard University by Oscar Zariski, but the offer fell through when he refused to sign a pledge promising not to work to overthrow the United States government—a refusal which, he was warned, threatened to land him in prison. The prospect of prison did not worry him, so long as he could have access to books.
Comparing Grothendieck during his Nancy years to the -trained students at that time (Pierre Samuel, Roger Godement, René Thom, Jacques Dixmier, Jean Cerf, Yvonne Bruhat, Jean-Pierre Serre, and Bernard Malgrange), Leila Schneps said:
His first works on topological vector spaces in 1953 have been successfully applied to physics and computer science, culminating in a relation between Grothendieck inequality and the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox in quantum physics.
IHÉS years
In 1958, Grothendieck was installed at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS), a new privately funded research institute that, in effect, had been created for Jean Dieudonné and Grothendieck. Grothendieck attracted attention by an intense and highly productive activity of seminars there (de facto working groups drafting into foundational work some of the ablest French and other mathematicians of the younger generation). Grothendieck practically ceased publication of papers through the conventional, learned journal route. However, he was able to play a dominant role in mathematics for approximately a decade, gathering a strong school.
Officially during this time, he had as students Michel Demazure (who worked on SGA3, on group schemes), (relative schemes and classifying topos), Luc Illusie (cotangent complex), Michel Raynaud, Michèle Raynaud, Jean-Louis Verdier (co-founder of the derived category theory), and Pierre Deligne. Collaborators on the SGA projects also included Michael Artin (étale cohomology), Nick Katz (monodromy theory, and Lefschetz pencils). Jean Giraud worked out torsor theory extensions of nonabelian cohomology there as well. Many others such as David Mumford, Robin Hartshorne, Barry Mazur and C.P. Ramanujam were also involved.
"Golden Age"
Alexander Grothendieck's work during what is described as the "Golden Age" period at the IHÉS established several unifying themes in algebraic geometry, number theory, topology, category theory, and complex analysis. His first (pre-IHÉS) discovery in algebraic geometry was the Grothendieck–Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem, a generalisation of the Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem proved algebraically; in this context he also introduced K-theory. Then, following the programme he outlined in his talk at the 1958 International Congress of Mathematicians, he introduced the theory of schemes, developing it in detail in his Éléments de géométrie algébrique (EGA) and providing the new more flexible and general foundations for algebraic geometry that has been adopted in the field since that time. He went on to introduce the étale cohomology theory of schemes, providing the key tools for proving the Weil conjectures, as well as crystalline cohomology and algebraic de Rham cohomology to complement it. Closely linked to these cohomology theories, he originated topos theory as a generalisation of topology (relevant also in categorical logic). He also provided, by means of a categorical Galois theory, an algebraic definition of fundamental groups of schemes giving birth to the now famous étale fundamental group and he then conjectured the existence of a further generalization of it, which is now known as the fundamental group scheme. As a framework for his coherent duality theory, he also introduced derived categories, which were further developed by Verdier.
The results of his work on these and other topics were published in the EGA and in less polished form in the notes of the Séminaire de géométrie algébrique (SGA) that he directed at the IHÉS.
Political activism
Grothendieck's political views were radical and pacifistic. He strongly opposed both United States intervention in Vietnam and Soviet military expansionism. To protest against the Vietnam War, he gave lectures on category theory in the forests surrounding Hanoi while the city was being bombed. In 1966, he had declined to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Moscow, where he was to receive the Fields Medal. He retired from scientific life around 1970 after he had found out that IHÉS was partly funded by the military. He returned to academia a few years later as a professor at the University of Montpellier.
While the issue of military funding was perhaps the most obvious explanation for Grothendieck's departure from the IHÉS, those who knew him say that the causes of the rupture ran more deeply. Pierre Cartier, a visiteur de longue durée ("long-term guest") at the IHÉS, wrote a piece about Grothendieck for a special volume published on the occasion of the IHÉS's fortieth anniversary. In that publication, Cartier notes that as the son of an antimilitary anarchist and one who grew up among the disenfranchised, Grothendieck always had a deep compassion for the poor and the downtrodden. As Cartier puts it, Grothendieck came to find Bures-sur-Yvette as "une cage dorée" ("a gilded cage"). While Grothendieck was at the IHÉS, opposition to the Vietnam War was heating up, and Cartier suggests that this also reinforced Grothendieck's distaste at having become a mandarin of the scientific world. In addition, after several years at the IHÉS, Grothendieck seemed to cast about for new intellectual interests. By the late 1960s, he had started to become interested in scientific areas outside mathematics. David Ruelle, a physicist who joined the IHÉS faculty in 1964, said that Grothendieck came to talk to him a few times about physics. Biology interested Grothendieck much more than physics, and he organized some seminars on biological topics. It also includes a study of Teichmüller theory.
In 1983, stimulated by correspondence with Ronald Brown and Tim Porter at Bangor University, Grothendieck wrote a 600-page manuscript entitled Pursuing Stacks. It began with a letter addressed to Daniel Quillen. This letter and successive parts were distributed from Bangor (see External links below). Within these, in an informal, diary-like manner, Grothendieck explained and developed his ideas on the relationship between algebraic homotopy theory and algebraic geometry and prospects for a noncommutative theory of stacks. The manuscript, which is being edited for publication by G. Maltsiniotis, later led to another of his monumental works, Les Dérivateurs. Written in 1991, this latter opus of approximately 2000 pages, further developed the homotopical ideas begun in Pursuing Stacks. Much of this work anticipated the subsequent development during the mid-1990s of the motivic homotopy theory of Fabien Morel and Vladimir Voevodsky.
In 1984, Grothendieck wrote the proposal ''Esquisse d'un Programme'' ("Sketch of a Programme") An English translation by Leila Schneps will be published by MIT Press in 2025. A partial English translation can be found on the Internet. A Japanese translation of the whole book in four volumes was completed by Tsuji Yuichi (1938–2002), a friend of Grothendieck from the Survivre period. The first three volumes (corresponding to Parts 0 to III of the book) were published between 1989 and 1993, while the fourth volume (Part IV) was completed and, although unpublished, copies of it as a typed manuscript are circulated. Grothendieck helped with the translation and wrote a preface for it, in which he called Tsuji his "first true collaborator". Parts of Récoltes et Semailles have been translated into Spanish, as well as into a Russian translation that was published in Moscow.
In 1988, Grothendieck declined the Crafoord Prize with an open letter to the media. He wrote that he and other established mathematicians had no need for additional financial support and criticized what he saw as the declining ethics of the scientific community that was characterized by outright scientific theft that he believed had become commonplace and tolerated. The letter also expressed his belief that totally unforeseen events before the end of the century would lead to an unprecedented collapse of civilization. Grothendieck added however that his views were "in no way meant as a criticism of the Royal Academy's aims in the administration of its funds" and he added, "I regret the inconvenience that my refusal to accept the Crafoord prize may have caused you and the Royal Academy."
La Clef des Songes, a 315-page manuscript written in 1987, is Grothendieck's account of how his consideration of the source of dreams led him to conclude that a deity exists. As part of the notes to this manuscript, Grothendieck described the life and the work of 18 "mutants", people whom he admired as visionaries far ahead of their time and heralding a new age. The only mathematician on his list was Bernhard Riemann. Influenced by the Catholic mystic Marthe Robin who was claimed to have survived on the Holy Eucharist alone, Grothendieck almost starved himself to death in 1988. His growing preoccupation with spiritual matters was also evident in a letter entitled Lettre de la Bonne Nouvelle sent to 250 friends in January 1990. In it, he described his encounters with a deity and announced that a "New Age" would commence on 14 October 1996.
The Grothendieck Festschrift, published in 1990, was a three-volume collection of research papers to mark his sixtieth birthday in 1988.
More than 20,000 pages of Grothendieck's mathematical and other writings are held at the University of Montpellier and remain unpublished. They have been digitized for preservation and are freely available in open access through the Institut Montpelliérain Alexander Grothendieck portal. Retirement into reclusion and death In 1991, Grothendieck moved to a new address that he did not share with his previous contacts in the mathematical community. Very few people visited him afterward. Local villagers helped sustain him with a more varied diet after he tried to live on a staple of dandelion soup. At some point, Leila Schneps and located him, then carried on a brief correspondence. Thus they became among "the last members of the mathematical establishment to come into contact with him". After his death, it was revealed that he lived alone in a house in Lasserre, Ariège, a small village at the foot of the Pyrenees.
In January 2010, Grothendieck wrote the letter entitled "Déclaration d'intention de non-publication" to Luc Illusie, claiming that all materials published in his absence had been published without his permission. He asked that none of his work be reproduced in whole or in part and that copies of this work be removed from libraries. He characterized a website devoted to his work as "an abomination". His dictate may have been reversed in 2010.
In September 2014, almost totally deaf and blind, he asked a neighbour to buy him a revolver so he could kill himself. On 13 November 2014, aged 86, Grothendieck died in the hospital of Saint-Lizier
Citizenship
Grothendieck was born in Weimar Germany. In 1938, aged ten, he moved to France as a refugee. Records of his nationality were destroyed in the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945 and he did not apply for French citizenship after the war. Thus, he became a stateless person for at least the majority of his working life and he traveled on a Nansen passport.<!--Note: Douroux 2012's 1971 date is incorrect; given Cartier's other statements, 1981 (i.e. during the 1980s) is more credible (see Cartier 2001, p. 393: "...an absurd trial in 1977 due to a 1945 regulation that made it a misdemeanor to meet with a foreigner," indicating that Grothendieck did not have French nationality in 1977.--> Part of his reluctance to hold French nationality is attributed to not wishing to serve in the French military, particularly due to the Algerian War (1954–62). He eventually applied for French citizenship in the early 1980s, after he was well past the age that would have required him to do military service. Family
Grothendieck was very close to his mother, to whom he dedicated his dissertation. She died in 1957 from tuberculosis that she contracted in camps for displaced persons.
He had five children: a son with his landlady during his time in Nancy; three children, Johanna (1959), Alexander (1961), and Mathieu (1965) with his wife Mireille Dufour; and one child with Justine Skalba, with whom he lived in a commune in the early 1970s. Mathematical work
Grothendieck's early mathematical work was in functional analysis. Between 1949 and 1953 he worked on his doctoral thesis in this subject at Nancy, supervised by Jean Dieudonné and Laurent Schwartz. His key contributions include topological tensor products of topological vector spaces, the theory of nuclear spaces as foundational for Schwartz distributions, and the application of L<sup>p</sup> spaces in studying linear maps between topological vector spaces. In a few years, he had become a leading authority on this area of functional analysis—to the extent that Dieudonné compares his impact in this field to that of Banach.
It is, however, in algebraic geometry and related fields where Grothendieck did his most important and influential work. From approximately 1955 he started to work on sheaf theory and homological algebra, producing the influential "Tôhoku paper" (''Sur quelques points d'algèbre homologique, published in the Tohoku Mathematical Journal in 1957) where he introduced abelian categories and applied their theory to show that sheaf cohomology may be defined as certain derived functors in this context.
Homological methods and sheaf theory had already been introduced in algebraic geometry by Jean-Pierre Serre and others, after sheaves had been defined by Jean Leray. Grothendieck took them to a higher level of abstraction and turned them into a key organising principle of his theory. He shifted attention from the study of individual varieties to his relative point of view'' (pairs of varieties related by a morphism), allowing a broad generalization of many classical theorems. The first major application was the relative version of Serre's theorem showing that the cohomology of a coherent sheaf on a complete variety is finite-dimensional; Grothendieck's theorem shows that the higher direct images of coherent sheaves under a proper map are coherent; this reduces to Serre's theorem over a one-point space.
In 1956, he applied the same thinking to the Riemann–Roch theorem, which recently had been generalized to any dimension by Hirzebruch. The Grothendieck–Riemann–Roch theorem was announced by Grothendieck at the initial Mathematische Arbeitstagung in Bonn, in 1957. It appeared in print in a paper written by Armand Borel with Serre. This result was his first work in algebraic geometry. Grothendieck went on to plan and execute a programme for rebuilding the foundations of algebraic geometry, which at the time were in a state of flux and under discussion in Claude Chevalley's seminar. He outlined his programme in his talk at the 1958 International Congress of Mathematicians.
His foundational work on algebraic geometry is at a higher level of abstraction than all prior versions. He adapted the use of non-closed generic points, which led to the theory of schemes. Grothendieck also pioneered the systematic use of nilpotents. As 'functions' these can take only the value 0, but they carry infinitesimal information, in purely algebraic settings. His theory of schemes has become established as the best universal foundation for this field, because of its expressiveness as well as its technical depth. In that setting one can use birational geometry, techniques from number theory, Galois theory, commutative algebra, and close analogues of the methods of algebraic topology, all in an integrated way.
Grothendieck is noted for his mastery of abstract approaches to mathematics and his perfectionism in matters of formulation and presentation.EGA, SGA, FGA
The bulk of Grothendieck's published work is collected in the monumental, yet incomplete, Éléments de géométrie algébrique (EGA) and Séminaire de géométrie algébrique (SGA). The collection Fondements de la Géometrie Algébrique (FGA), which gathers together talks given in the Séminaire Bourbaki, also contains important material.
Grothendieck's work includes the invention of the étale and l-adic cohomology theories, which explain an observation made by André Weil that argued for a connection between the topological characteristics of a variety and its diophantine (number theoretic) properties. For example, the number of solutions of an equation over a finite field reflects the topological nature of its solutions over the complex numbers. Weil had realized that to prove such a connection, one needed a new cohomology theory, but neither he nor any other expert saw how to accomplish this until such a theory was expressed by Grothendieck.
This program culminated in the proofs of the Weil conjectures, the last of which was settled by Grothendieck's student Pierre Deligne in the early 1970s after Grothendieck had largely withdrawn from mathematics.
Major mathematical contributions
In Grothendieck's retrospective Récoltes et Semailles, he identified twelve of his contributions that he believed qualified as "great ideas". In chronological order, they are:
# Topological tensor products and nuclear spaces
# "Continuous" and "discrete" duality (derived categories, "six operations")
# Yoga of the Grothendieck–Riemann–Roch theorem K-theory relation with intersection theory
# Schemes
# Topoi
# Étale cohomology and l-adic cohomology
# Motives and the motivic Galois group (Grothendieck ⊗-categories)
# Crystals and crystalline cohomology, yoga of "de Rham coefficients", "Hodge coefficients"...
# "Topological algebra": ∞-stacks, derivators; cohomological formalism of topoi as inspiration for a new homotopical algebra
# Tame topology
# Yoga of anabelian algebraic geometry, Galois–Teichmüller theory
# "Schematic" or "arithmetic" point of view for regular polyhedra and regular configurations of all kinds
Here the term yoga denotes a kind of "meta-theory" that may be used heuristically; Michel Raynaud writes the other terms "Ariadne's thread" and "philosophy" as effective equivalents.
Grothendieck wrote that, of these themes, the largest in scope was topoi, as they synthesized algebraic geometry, topology, and arithmetic. The theme that had been most extensively developed was schemes, which were the framework "par excellence" for eight of the other themes (all but 1, 5, and 12). Grothendieck wrote that the first and last themes, topological tensor products and regular configurations, were of more modest size than the others. Topological tensor products had played the role of a tool rather than of a source of inspiration for further developments; but he expected that regular configurations could not be exhausted within the lifetime of a mathematician who devoted oneself to it. He believed that the deepest themes were motives, anabelian geometry, and Galois–Teichmüller theory. Influence Grothendieck is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.</blockquote>
By the 1970s, Grothendieck's work was seen as influential, not only in algebraic geometry and the allied fields of sheaf theory and homological algebra, but influenced logic, in the field of categorical logic.
According to mathematician Ravi Vakil, "Whole fields of mathematics speak the language that he set up. We live in this big structure that he built. We take it for granted—the architect is gone". In the same article, Colin McLarty said, "Lots of people today live in Grothendieck's house, unaware that it's Grothendieck's house."
His generalization of the classical Riemann–Roch theorem related topological properties of complex algebraic curves to their algebraic structure and now bears his name, being called "the Grothendieck–Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem". The tools he developed to prove this theorem started the study of algebraic and topological K-theory, which explores the topological properties of objects by associating them with rings. After direct contact with Grothendieck's ideas at the Bonn Arbeitstagung, topological K-theory was founded by Michael Atiyah and Friedrich Hirzebruch. Cohomology theories Grothendieck's construction of new cohomology theories, which use algebraic techniques to study topological objects, has influenced the development of algebraic number theory, algebraic topology, and representation theory. As part of this project, his creation of topos theory, a category-theoretic generalization of point-set topology, has influenced the fields of set theory and mathematical logic. The ℓ-adic cohomology then became a fundamental tool for number theorists, with applications to the Langlands program.
Grothendieck's conjectural theory of motives was intended to be the "ℓ-adic" theory but without the choice of "ℓ", a prime number. It did not provide the intended route to the Weil conjectures, but has been behind modern developments in algebraic K-theory, motivic homotopy theory, and motivic integration. This theory, Daniel Quillen's work, and Grothendieck's theory of Chern classes, are considered the background to the theory of algebraic cobordism, another algebraic analogue of topological ideas.
Category theory
Grothendieck's emphasis on the role of universal properties across varied mathematical structures brought category theory into the mainstream as an organizing principle for mathematics in general. Among its uses, category theory creates a common language for describing similar structures and techniques seen in many different mathematical systems. His notion of abelian category is now the basic object of study in homological algebra. The emergence of a separate mathematical discipline of category theory has been attributed to Grothendieck's influence, although unintentional.
In popular culture
Colonel Lágrimas (Colonel Tears in English), a novel by Puerto Rican–Costa Rican writer Carlos Fonseca is about Grothendieck.
The Benjamín Labatut book When We Cease to Understand the World dedicates one chapter to the work and life of Grothendieck, introducing his story by reference to the Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki. The book is a lightly fictionalized account of the world of scientific inquiry and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
In Cormac McCarthy's The Passenger and its sequel Stella Maris, a main character is a student of Grothendieck's.
The Istituto Grothendieck has been created in his honor. Publications * <!-- -->
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* ∞-groupoid
* λ-ring
* AB5 category
* Abelian category
* Accessible category
* Algebraic geometry
* Algebraic stack
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* Barsotti–Tate group
* Chern class
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* Descent (mathematics)
* Dévissage
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* Dunford–Pettis property
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* Excellent ring
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* Formally smooth map
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* Fundamental group scheme
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* K-theory
* Hilbert scheme
* Homotopy hypothesis
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* List of things named after Alexander Grothendieck
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* Nakai conjecture
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* Nuclear operator
* Nuclear space
* Parafactorial local ring
* Projective tensor product
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* Quasi-finite morphism
* Quot scheme
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* Scheme (mathematics)
* Section conjecture
* Semistable abelian variety
* Sheaf cohomology
* Stack (mathematics)
* Standard conjectures on algebraic cycles
* Sketch of a program
* Tannakian formalism
* Theorem of absolute purity
* Theorem on formal functions
* Ultrabornological space
* Weil conjectures
* Vector bundles on algebraic curves
* Zariski's main theorem
Notes
References
Sources and further reading
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* First part of planned four-volume biography.
** English version.
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** A review of the German edition
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* Third part of planned four-volume biography; crowd-financed translation into English.
* First 4 chapters from the incomplete second part of planned four-volume biography.
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External links
* [https://csg.igrothendieck.org/ Centre for Grothendieckian Studies (CSG)] is a research centre of the Grothendieck Institute, with a dedicated mission to honour the memory of Alexander Grothendieck.
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* [http://users.unimi.it/barbieri/SG.html Séminaire Grothendieck] is a peripatetic seminar on Grothendieck view not just on mathematics
* [https://www.grothendieckcircle.org Grothendieck Circle], collection of mathematical and biographical information, photos, links to his writings
* [https://archive.today/20120722054515/http://www.bangor.ac.uk/r.brown/pstacks.htm The origins of 'Pursuing Stacks']: This is an account of how 'Pursuing Stacks' was written in response to a correspondence in English with Ronnie Brown and [https://web.archive.org/web/20100503001504/http://www.bangor.ac.uk/~mas013/ Tim Porter] at Bangor, which continued until 1991. See also [http://education.lms.ac.uk/2014/12/alexander-grothendieck-some-recollections/ Alexander Grothendieck: some recollections].
* [http://acm.math.spbu.ru/RS/ Récoltes et Semailles]
* [http://matematicas.unex.es/~navarro/res/llavecarmona.pdf "Récoltes et Semailles"], Spanish translation
* [http://matematicas.unex.es/~navarro/res/ "La Clef des Songes"], French originals and Spanish translations
* [http://www.landsburg.com/grothendieck/clef.pdf English summary of "La Clef des Songes"]
* [http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8juek_colloque-grothendieck-winfried-scha_tech Video of a lecture] with photos from Grothendieck's life, given by Winfried Scharlau at IHES in 2009
* [http://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2014/Grothendieck.html Can one explain schemes to biologists] —biographical sketch of Grothendieck by David Mumford & John Tate
* [https://grothendieck.umontpellier.fr/archives-grothendieck/ Archives Grothendieck]
* "[https://www.ams.org/notices/200808/tx080800930p.pdf Who Is Alexander Grothendieck?], Winfried Scharlau, Notices of the AMS 55(8), 2008.
* "[https://www.ams.org/notices/201504/rnoti-p373.pdf Alexander Grothendieck: A Country Known Only by Name], Pierre Cartier, Notices of the AMS 62(4), 2015.
* [http://matematicas.unex.es/~navarro/res/notices201603.pdf Alexandre Grothendieck 1928–2014, Part 1], Notices of the AMS 63(3), 2016.
* [https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2019/05/06/les-archives-insaisissables-d-alexandre-grothendieck_5459049_1650684.html Les-archives-insaisissables-d-alexandre-grothendieck]
* Kutateladze S.S. [http://www.math.nsc.ru/LBRT/g2/english/ssk/rebellious_genius_e.html Rebellious Genius: In Memory of Alexander Grothendieck]
* [https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2019/05/06/alexandre-grothendieck-une-mathematique-en-cathedrale-gothique_5459035_1650684.html Alexandre-Grothendieck-une-mathematique-en-cathedrale-gothique]
* [https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2019/05/06/les-archives-insaisissables-d-alexandre-grothendieck_5459049_1650684.html Les-archives-insaisissables-d-alexandre-grothendieck]
Category:1928 births
Category:2014 deaths
Category:20th-century French mathematicians<!-- See references and discussion of nationality on talk page: French citizen since 1980s. -->
Category:Algebraic geometers
Category:Algebraists
Category:Emigrants from Nazi Germany to France
Category:Fields Medalists
Category:French pacifists
Category:Functional analysts
Category:German people of Russian-Jewish descent
Category:Nancy-Université alumni
Category:Nicolas Bourbaki
Category:Operator theorists
Category:Scientists from Berlin
Category:Stateless people<!-- No longer stateless, but was for much of working life, hence useful category --> | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck | 2025-04-05T18:25:53.930276 |
2047 | Alcoholics Anonymous | | founders = Bill Wilson<br />Dr. Bob Smith
| founding_location = Akron, Ohio
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| type = Mutual aid addiction recovery twelve-step program
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}}
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is a global, peer-led mutual-aid fellowship focused on an abstinence-based recovery model from alcoholism through its spiritually inclined twelve-step program. AA's Twelve Traditions, besides emphasizing anonymity, stress lack of hierarchy, staying non-promotional, and non-professional, while also unaffiliated, non-denominational, apolitical and free to all. AA estimated it is active in 180 countries with an estimated membership of nearly two million—73% in the United States and Canada.
AA traces its origins to a 1935 meeting between Bill Wilson (commonly referred to as Bill W.) and Dr. Bob Smith (Dr. Bob), two individuals seeking to address their shared struggles with alcoholism. Their collaboration, influenced by the Christian revivalist Oxford Group, evolved into a mutual support group that eventually became AA. In 1939, the fellowship published Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism, colloquially known as the "Big Book". This publication introduced the twelve-step program and provided the basis for the organization's name. Later editions of the book expanded its subtitle to reflect the inclusion of "Thousands of Men and Women".
The Twelve Steps outline a suggested program of ongoing drug rehabilitation and self-improvement. A key component involves seeking alignment or divining with a personally defined concept of "God as we understood Him". The steps begin with an acknowledgment of powerlessness over alcohol and the unmanageability of life due to alcoholism. Subsequent steps emphasize rigorous honesty, including the completion of a "searching and fearless moral inventory," acknowledgment of "character defects," sharing the inventory with a trusted person, making amends to individuals harmed, and engaging in regular prayer or meditation to seek "conscious contact with God" and guidance in following divine will. The final step, the 12th, focuses on maintaining the principles of recovery, sharing the message with other alcoholics, and participating in "12th Step work," such as peer sponsorship, organizing meetings, and outreach to institutions like hospitals and prisons.
AA meetings differ in format, with variations including personal storytelling, readings from the Big Book, and open discussions. While certain meetings may cater to specific demographic groups, attendance is generally open to anyone with a desire to stop drinking alcohol. The organization is self-supporting through member donations and literature sales. Its operations follow an "inverted pyramid" structure, allowing local groups significant autonomy. AA does not accept external funding or contributions.
Empirical evidence supports AA's efficacy. A 2020 Cochrane review found that manualized AA and Twelve-Step Facilitation (TSF) therapy demonstrated higher rates of continuous abstinence compared to alternative treatments, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, with added healthcare cost savings over time. In 1926, Hazard went to Zurich, Switzerland, to seek treatment for alcoholism with psychiatrist Carl Jung. When Hazard ended treatment with Jung after about a year, and came back to the US, he soon resumed drinking, and returned to Jung in Zurich for further treatment. Jung told Hazard that his case was nearly hopeless (as with other alcoholics) and that his only hope might be a "spiritual conversion" with a "religious group".
Back in America, Hazard went to the Oxford Group, whose teachings were eventually the source of such AA concepts as "meetings" and "sharing" (public confession), making "restitution", "rigorous honesty" and "surrendering one's will and life to God's care". He became converted to a lifetime of sobriety while on a train ride from New York to Detroit after reading For Sinners Only, by Oxford Group member AJ Russell. Hazard underwent a spiritual conversion" with the help of the Group and began to experience the liberation from drink that he was seeking. Members of the group introduced Hazard to Ebby Thacher, whom Hazard brought to the Calvary Rescue Mission, directed by Oxford Group leader Sam Shoemaker. Bill Wilson & his spiritual awakening In keeping with the Oxford Group teaching that a new convert must win other converts to preserve his own conversion experience, Thacher contacted his old friend Bill Wilson, whom he knew had a drinking problem. Thacher approached Wilson, saying that he had "got religion", was sober, and that Wilson could do the same if he set aside objections and instead formed a personal idea of God, "another power" or "higher power". or "chip", given for specified lengths of sobriety. On the back is the Serenity Prayer. Here green is for six months of sobriety; purple is for nine months.]]Feeling a "kinship of common suffering", Wilson attended his first group gathering, although he was drunk. Within days, Wilson admitted himself to the Charles B. Towns Hospital after drinking four beers on the way—the last alcohol he ever drank. Under the care of Dr. William Duncan Silkworth, an early benefactor of AA, Wilson's detox included the deliriant belladonna. At the hospital, a despairing Wilson experienced a bright flash of light, which he felt to be God revealing himself. Founding of AA Wilson's early efforts and influence of the Oxford Group Following his hospital discharge, Wilson joined the Oxford Group and tried to recruit other alcoholics to the group. These early efforts to help others kept him sober, but were ineffective in getting anyone else to join the group. Dr. Silkworth suggested that Wilson place less stress on religion (as required by The Oxford Group) and more on the science of treating alcoholism. Bill W. would later write: "The early AA got its ideas of self-examination, acknowledgment of character defects, restitution for harm done, and working with others straight from the Oxford Group and directly from Sam Shoemaker, their former leader in America, and from nowhere else". According to Mercadante, however, the AA concept of powerlessness over alcohol departs significantly from Oxford Group belief. According to AA, alcoholism cannot be cured, whereas the Oxford Group stressed the possibility of complete victory over sin. Beginnings of AA In 1935, AA began in Akron, Ohio, as the outcome of a meeting between Wilson—who became known as "Bill W." in AA circles—and Dr. Robert Smith, an Akron surgeon, who would become Wilson's first recruitment success. On a business trip by Bill W. to Akron, he was introduced to the surgeon, who despite connections with the Oxford Group, was unable to stay sober. One patient, who soon achieved sobriety, joined them and together, the three men formed the foundation of what would later become known as Alcoholics Anonymous. This publication marked a significant milestone in AA's development.
The first female member, Florence Rankin, joined AA in March 1937, and the first non-Protestant member, a Roman Catholic, joined in 1939. The first Black AA group commenced in 1945 in Washington, D.C., founded by Jim S., an African-American physician from Virginia. The Alcoholic Foundation In 1938, Dr. Bob and Bill created The Alcoholic Foundation in New York, bringing in friends of John D. Rockefeller Jr. as board members. Although they sought to raise significant funds, Rockefeller advised that large contributions might jeopardize the Fellowship. The foundation opened a small office in New York, funded primarily by AA members, to handle inquiries and distribute the Alcoholics Anonymous book. The next year, Rockefeller organized a dinner to promote AA, which further increased the number of inquiries. The office became effective. Each request received a personal reply and a pamphlet, enhancing interest in the book. Consequently, many new AA groups were established, and by the end of 1940, membership had grown to 2,000. The Cleveland group, although small, successfully assisted many alcoholics, quickly growing from 20 to around 500 members. In 1941, The Saturday Evening Post published an article about AA, sparking a surge in inquires, and AA membership tripled over the next year. AA-related interviews on American radio and favorable articles in US magazines led to increased book sales and membership.
As the growing fellowship faced disputes over structure, purpose, authority, and publicity, Bill W. began promoting the Twelve Traditions. He first introduced his ideas on these in an April 1946 article for The Grapevine, titled "Twelve Suggested Points for AA Tradition", This successful gathering established direct oversight of AA's trusteeship by the fellowship itself, ensuring the organization's future governance. At the 1955 conference in St. Louis, Missouri, Bill W. relinquished stewardship of AA to the General Service Conference, as AA had grown to millions of members internationally.
Today, AA is present in approximately 180 nations worldwide. By 2018, AA had 2,087,840 members and 120,300 AA groups worldwide.
In July 2024, AA launched its first UK-wide advertising campaign with a unique approach—no logos, phone numbers, or links—focusing on subtle messaging like "You Are Not Alone" and "Alcohol Isn't the Answer". The campaign, created by [https://www.theraisedeyebrowsociety.com The Raised Eyebrow Society], aims to attract people struggling with alcohol without violating AA's principles of anonymity and non-promotion.
AA will celebrate its 100th anniversary meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 2035. The international convention is anticipated to attract tens of thousands of attendees to the Indiana Convention Center and Lucas Oil Stadium.AA literature
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Alcoholics Anonymous publishes several books, reports, pamphlets, and other media, including a periodical known as the AA Grapevine. Two books are used primarily: Alcoholics Anonymous (the "Big Book") and, expounding on the big book in regard to its subject, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. As with all AA literature, the texts are freely available on AA.org. The Big Book In 1939, Bill W. and other members wrote the book initially titled Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism, from which AA drew its name, informally known as the "Big Book". The second edition of the Big Book was released in 1955, the third in 1976, and the fourth in 2001. The first part of the book, which details the program, has remained largely intact since the 1939 edition, with minor statistical updates and edits. The second part contains personal stories that are updated with every edition to reflect current AA membership, resulting in earlier stories being removed—these were published separately in 2003 in the book Experience, Strength, and Hope.
The Big Book suggests a twelve-step program in which members admit that they are powerless over alcohol and need help from a "higher power". It offers guidance and strength through prayer and meditation from God or a higher power of their own understanding; take a moral inventory with care to include resentments; list and become ready to remove character defects; list and make amends to those harmed; continue to take a moral inventory, pray, meditate, and try to help other alcoholics recover. The second half of the book, "Personal Stories" (subject to additions, removal, and retitling in subsequent editions), is made of AA members' redemptive autobiographical sketches.
Illness and allergy terminology
AA's Big Book calls alcoholism "an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer". Ernest Kurtz says this is "The closest the book Alcoholics Anonymous comes to a definition of alcoholism". Somewhat divergently in his introduction to The Big Book, non-member and early benefactor William Silkworth said those unable to moderate their drinking suffer from an allergy. In presenting the doctor's postulate, AA said "The doctor's theory that we have an allergy to alcohol interests us. As laymen, our opinion as to its soundness may, of course, mean little. But as ex-problem drinkers, we can say that his explanation makes good sense. It explains many things for which we cannot otherwise account". AA later acknowledged that "alcoholism is not a true allergy, the experts now inform us".
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions
The "Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions" is a book published in 1953 that serves as a key text for AA. Written by AA co-founder Bill W., it provides detailed explanations of the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. The book is commonly used in AA meetings and individual study, offering a framework for understanding the organization's approach to recovery and community. The story of Eddie Rickenbacker "and his courageous company" appears in the book. It pertains to when his plane crashed in the Pacific and is used in the closing remarks of Tradition One: "Our common welfare should come first; personal recovery depends upon AA unity".
Grapevine
The Grapevine, established in June 1944 by six AA members in New York, became AA's national journal by 1945 and later its international journal. Supported by Bill W., the magazine featured first-person stories, AA news, and discussions on key topics like women in AA and veterans returning from war. In 1986, it was reaffirmed as AA's international journal by the General Service Conference. Its goal is to effect enough change in the alcoholic's thinking "to bring about recovery from alcoholism" through "an entire psychic change," or spiritual awakening. A spiritual awakening is meant to be achieved by taking the Twelve Steps, and sobriety is furthered by volunteering for AA and regular AA meeting attendance or contact with AA members.
Sponsorship
Members are encouraged to find an experienced fellow alcoholic, called a sponsor, to help them understand and follow the AA program. The sponsor should preferably have experienced all twelve of the steps, be the same sex as the sponsored person, and refrain from imposing personal views on the sponsored person.
Twelve Traditions
The Twelve Traditions provide essential guidelines—not rules—that help AA groups navigate their relationships both internally and with the outside world. These traditions ensure that membership is open to anyone seeking to stop drinking, with no dues or fees required. These Traditions foster an altruistic, unaffiliated, non-coercive, and non-hierarchical organization, limiting AA's mission to helping alcoholics at a non-professional level while avoiding publicity. To prioritize recovery, the traditions discourage hierarchies, dogma, public controversies, property acquisition, and outside contributions. Members are advised against using AA for personal gain or public prestige, and anonymity is emphasized, particularly in media, with no prescribed consequences for breaches. Meetings Overview AA meetings serve as a space where individuals discuss recovery from alcoholism, with flexibility in how meetings are conducted. While AA offers pamphlets suggesting formats, groups have the autonomy to organize their meetings according to their preferences, as long as their decisions do not impact other groups or AA as a whole.
Big Book meetings focus on reading and discussing passages from AA's foundational text, while sharing meetings provide an open platform for members to speak freely and share their experiences, with or without a predetermined topic. AA meetings are gatherings where recovery from alcoholism is discussed. One perspective sees them as "quasi-ritualized therapeutic sessions run by and for, alcoholics".
In recent years, online meetings have become popular, allowing members to connect virtually through platforms like Zoom and What's App. Offline or in-person meetings, often referred to as "brick and mortar" meetings, take place in physical locations, and some groups even host hybrid meetings, enabling participants to attend either in person or virtually.
Inclusivity & language accessibility
Inclusivity is a core principle of AA meetings, which welcome all alcoholics, though some are tailored to specific demographics such as gender, age, profession, or cultural background. Since the mid-1970s, several 'agnostic' or 'no-prayer' AA groups have begun across the US, Canada, and other parts of the world, which hold meetings that adhere to a tradition allowing alcoholics to freely express their doubts or disbelief that spirituality will help their recovery, and these meetings forgo the use of opening or closing prayers.
Meetings in the United States are held in a variety of languages including Armenian, English, Farsi, Finnish, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish., Uruguay]] Donations and contributions At some point during the meeting a basket is passed around for voluntary contributions. AA's 7th tradition requires that groups be "self-supporting, declining outside contributions". Often recited at meetings, it emphasizes the concepts of acceptance, courage, and wisdom, which align with the principles of the AA program. The prayer encourages individuals to accept things they cannot change, to find the courage to make changes where possible, and to seek the wisdom to distinguish between the two.
Sobriety anniversaries and coins
Sobriety coins, also known as sobriety chips, are tokens given to members of AA to signify the duration of their sobriety. While the chip system is common, it is not universally adopted across all AA groups. The tradition began with Sister Ignatia in Akron, Ohio who distributed medallions to newly released patients as reminders to avoid drinking. The actual sobriety chip as known today is believed to have originated in 1942 in Indianapolis, gaining popularity as various AA groups adopted the practice. Typically, different colored chips represent milestones of sobriety within the first year, with tokens awarded for 24 hours, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and beyond, culminating in a bronze chip for one year of sobriety.
AA members celebrate Founders Day on the weekend closest to 10 June, marking the anniversary of the organization with thousands of attendees engaging in tours of historical sites, sharing recovery stories, and participating in related activities in Akron, Ohio. Organization and finances Structure and governance AA describes itself as "not organized in the formal or political sense" and has been referred to as a "benign anarchy," borrowing a phrase from anarchy theorist Peter Kropotkin. The Twelve Traditions guide the functioning of individual AA groups, while the Twelve Concepts for World Service outline how the organization operates on a global scale. Each AA group is self-governing, with AA World Services acting only in an advisory capacity. This "inverted pyramid" style of governance has been key to the organization's resilience and adaptability. In Ireland, Shane Butler noted that AA's lack of top-level leadership might make it seem unsustainable, but its structure has proven extremely robust since its establishment there in 1946.
AA's 21-member Board of Trustees includes seven "nonalcoholic friends of the fellowship," though the organization is primarily served and run by alcoholics. Members who accept service positions, termed "trusted servants," hold these roles for limited terms, typically ranging from three months to two years, depending on the position and group vote. This approach ensures regular rotation and participation from a broad spectrum of members, maintaining AA's commitment to shared responsibility and leadership. In addition to these contributions, more than 50% of AA's income comes from the sale of AA literature, such as books and pamphlets. This practice aligns with AA's Seventh Tradition, which emphasizes financial independence by not accepting donations from outside individuals or organizations. The Central Office is also fully self-supporting through the sale of literature and member contributions.
Employment and service roles
The Eighth Tradition permits AA to employ "special workers" for roles that require specific expertise or full-time responsibilities, such as administrative tasks.
Organizational operations
The AA Central Office coordinates activities such as printing literature, responding to public inquiries, and organizing conferences. It operates independently but ensures alignment with the core principles of the organization. Other International General Service Offices—such as those in Australia, Costa Rica, and Russia—function independently of AA World Services in New York, reflecting AA's decentralized and autonomous structure. Hospitals & institutions Many AA meetings take place in treatment facilities. Carrying the message of AA into hospitals was how the co-founders of AA first remained sober. They discovered great value in working with alcoholics who are still suffering, and that even if the alcoholic they were working with did not stay sober, they did. Bill W. wrote, "Practical experience shows that nothing will so much insure immunity from drinking as intensive work with other alcoholics". Bill Wilson visited Towns Hospital in New York City in an attempt to help the alcoholics who were patients there in 1934. At St. Thomas Hospital in Akron, Ohio, Smith worked with still more alcoholics. In 1939, a New York mental institution, Rockland State Hospital, was one of the first institutions to allow AA hospital groups. Service to corrections and treatment facilities used to be combined until the General Service Conference, in 1977, voted to dissolve its Institutions Committee and form two separate committees, one for treatment facilities, and one for correctional facilities.
In the United States and Canada, AA meetings are held in hundreds of correctional facilities. The AA General Service Office has published a workbook with detailed recommendations for methods of approaching correctional-facility officials with the intent of developing an in-prison AA program. In addition, AA publishes a variety of pamphlets specifically for the incarcerated alcoholic. Additionally, the AA General Service Office provides a pamphlet with guidelines for members working with incarcerated alcoholics.Demographics, Mexico]] 2014 membership survey AA's New York General Service Office survey of over 6,000 members in Canada and the United States concluded that, in North America, AA members who responded to the survey were 62% male and 38% female. The survey found that 89% of AA members were white. Average member sobriety is slightly under 10 years with 36% sober more than ten years, 13% sober from five to ten years, 24% sober from one to five years, and 27% sober less than one year.Effectiveness Measuring Several metrics are used to evaluate the success of AA including abstinence, reduced drinking intensity, reduced alcohol-related consequences, addiction severity, and healthcare costs. Because of the anonymous and voluntary nature of AA meetings, it has been difficult to perform random trials with them. However, environmental and quasi-experiment studies suggest that AA can help alcoholics make positive changes. Until recently, ethical and operational issues had prevented robust randomized controlled trials from being conducted comparing 12-step programs directly to other approaches.
Reviews and studies
Long-term recovery effectiveness
There have been numerous studies on the effectiveness of AA. A 2006 study by Rudolf H. Moos and Bernice S. Moos saw a 67% success rate 16 years later for the 24.9% of alcoholics who ended up, on their own, undergoing a lot of AA treatment. However, this may be influenced by self-selection bias. Project MATCH, a 1990s multi-site study, found AA to be more effective than no treatment. Other studies link increased AA attendance with higher spirituality and reduced alcohol consumption.
A 2020 Cochrane review concluded that AA is more effective than other treatments, such as MET and CBT, in terms of abstinence rates. It also noted similar success in reducing drinking and alcohol-related problems, though this conclusion was based on moderate-certainty evidence. The review found that AA participation via AA twelve step facilitation (AA/TSF) had sustained remission rates 20-60% above other well-established treatments. Additionally, 4 of the 5 economic studies in the review found that AA/TSF lowered healthcare costs considerably. Nick Heather, an addiction researcher, critiqued the review, arguing it may have a sample bias and that it failed to measure outcomes like quality of life or alcohol dependence, which are important for evaluating recovery. The authors responded, stating their review showed AA is at least as effective as other treatments and more cost-effective. The authors also noted the lack of quality-of-life measures was due to the limitations of the reviewed studies. A longitudinal study suggests that LifeRing and SMART Recovery fared worse than AA across several outcomes, however, the effects are insignificant when controlling for the baseline alcohol goal of total abstinence. More recent studies employing randomized and blinded trials have shown 12-step programs provide similar benefit compared to motivational enhancement therapy (MET) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and were more effective in producing continuous abstinence and remission compared to these approaches. Patterns of engagement and disengagement The 2001–2002 National Epidemiological Survey on Alcoholism and Related Conditions (NESARC) found that 3.4% of respondents had attended a 12-step meeting. Of those, 988 had ceased attending, 348 continued attending, and 105 were newcomers. These figures help to understand engagement and disengagement patterns within AA. Mechanisms of recovery Although AA claims that spirituality is the primary mechanism for achieving change and recovery, there is growing evidence that suggests this is only true for a minority of AA attendees with a high addiction severity. Instead, AA's beneficial effects are carried predominantly by social, cognitive and affective mechanisms. However, atheist and agnostic people are less likely to initiate and sustain AA attendance in comparison to spiritual and religious people. Lance Dodes, in The Sober Truth, claims only five to eight percent of the people who go to one or more AA meetings achieve sobriety. Dodes opposes the idea that a social network is needed to overcome substance abuse. Dodes' assertion that AA is ineffective has been criticized. Some other experts claim that the book's conclusion that "[12-step] approaches are almost completely ineffective and even harmful in treating substance use disorders" is wrong. In a 2015 article for The Atlantic, Gabrielle Glaser criticized the dominance of AA in the treatment of addiction in the United States, citing Dodes's figures and a 2006 Cochrane report, to claim AA had a low success rate. In the past, others have criticized 12-step programs as pseudoscientific Her figures and assertions, however were criticized by other experts. Philosophical and sociological dimensions AA shares the view that acceptance of one's inherent limitations is critical to finding one's proper place among other humans and God. Such ideas are described as "Counter-Enlightenment" because they are contrary to the Enlightenment's ideal that humans have the capacity to make their lives and societies a heaven on Earth using their own power and reason.Criticism and controversy Zoombombing Zoombombing emerged as a significant challenge for AA meetings during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many groups moved online. Disruptive individuals often infiltrated these virtual meetings, harassing participants and sharing inappropriate content. This intrusion undermined the safe, supportive environment essential for recovery, raising concerns about privacy and security. In response, AA groups and Zoom implemented stricter access controls and guidelines to protect participants and maintain a welcoming atmosphere for those seeking help. Disease model Though AA usually avoids the term disease, 1973 conference-approved literature said "we had the disease of alcoholism", while Living Sober, published in 1975, contains several references to alcoholism as a disease, including a chapter urging the reader to "Remember that alcoholism is an incurable, progressive, fatal disease".
Bill Wilson explained in 1960 why AA had refrained from using the term disease:
13th-step and sexual advances
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"Thirteenth-stepping" is a term used to describe a predatory behavior in AA where some individuals exploit vulnerable members for sexual relationships. This can involve unwanted advances and harassment, often targeting newer members who may be more susceptible due to their recovery status.
In 2003, a study in the Journal of Addiction Nursing sampled 55 women in AA and found that 35% of these women had experienced a "pass" and 29% had felt seduced at least once in AA settings. This has also happened with new male members who received guidance from older female AA members pursuing sexual company. The authors suggest that both men and women must be prepared for this behavior or find male or female-only groups. Response As of 2010, women-only meetings are a very prevalent part of AA culture, and AA has become more welcoming for women. AA's pamphlet on sponsorship suggests that men be sponsored by men and women be sponsored by women. AA also has a safety flier which states that "Unwanted sexual advances and predatory behaviors are in conflict with carrying the AA message of recovery".
Criticism of culture
Stanton Peele argued that some AA groups apply the disease model to all problem drinkers, whether or not they are "full-blown" alcoholics. Along with Nancy Shute, Peele has advocated that besides AA, other options should be readily available to those problem drinkers who can manage their drinking with the right treatment. The Big Book says "moderate drinkers" and "a certain type of hard drinker" can stop or moderate their drinking. The Big Book suggests no program for these drinkers, but instead seeks to help drinkers without "power of choice in drink".
In 1983, a review stated that the AA program's focus on admission of having a problem increases deviant stigma and strips members of their previous cultural identity, replacing it with the deviant identity. A 1985 study based on observations of AA meetings warned of detrimental iatrogenic effects of the twelve-step philosophy and concluded that AA uses many methods that are also used by cults. A later review disagreed, stating that AA's program bore little resemblance to religious cult practices. In 2014, George Eman Vaillant published a paper making the case that Alcoholics Anonymous is not a cult. Spirituality Some have criticized 12-step programs as "a cult that relies on God as the mechanism of action" and as "overly theistic and outdated". Gabrielle Glaser criticized 12-step programs for being "faith-based",
Secular meetings in Toronto controversy
Reception to secular 12 step meetings from within AA has been mixed. In 2011, secular meetings in Toronto, where the 12 steps were altered to remove references to God and prayer, were delisted from the Toronto AA online and print directories, effectively removing them from the network of meetings. They appealed this decision, but were rejected, leading to a complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. The Toronto co-ordinating body, the Greater Toronto Area Intergroup of Alcoholics Anonymous, argued both that as a special interest group they have the right to restrict its membership, and that a belief in God is a requirement for groups in Toronto. Mediation between the two groups resulted in the delisted groups being listed again, however the secular groups would be required to not alter the 12 steps.
Lawsuits and court rulings
Privileged communication
In the Fifth Step, AA members typically reveal their own past misconduct to their sponsors. US courts have not extended the status of privileged communication, such as physician-patient privilege or clergy–penitent privilege, to communications between an AA member and their sponsor.
Court rulings on mandatory attendance
United States courts have ruled that inmates, parolees, and probationers cannot be ordered to attend AA. Though AA itself was not deemed a religion, it was ruled that it contained enough religious components (variously described in Griffin v. Coughlin below as, inter alia, "religion", "religious activity", "religious exercise") to make coerced attendance at AA meetings a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the constitution. In 2007, the Ninth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals stated that a parolee who was ordered to attend AA had standing to sue his parole office.
Family lawsuit
The family of Karla Mendez, who was murdered in 2011 by a man she met at an AA meeting, filed a civil lawsuit in 2012 against AA asserting AA had a "reckless disregard for, and deliberate indifference...to the safety and security of victims attending AA meetings who are repeatedly preyed upon at those meetings by financial, violent, and sexual predators...". The lawsuit against AA was dismissed in 2016.
Big Book manuscript case
In May 2017, Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Inc. filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court of the State of New York seeking the return of the original manuscript of the Big Book from its then-owner. AAWS claimed that the manuscript had been given to them as a gift in 1979. This action was criticized by many members of Alcoholics Anonymous since they didn't want their parent organization engaged in lawsuits. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Inc. asked the court to voluntarily discontinue the action in November 2017. Notable people who have attended AA
While AA emphasizes personal anonymity, many notable individuals have publicly acknowledged their participation in the program for various lengths of time.
Roger Ebert stated he was a member of AA according to a 2009 blog entry he wrote. Eminem has posted pictures of AA Sobriety coins. Anthony Hopkins has credited AA with saving him and marked 48 years of sobriety in 2023. Others who have spoken publicly about their AA attendance include James K. Baxter, Art Carney, Bonnie Raitt, Mychal Judge, Moby, Hank Azaria, Matthew Perry, Jim Irsay, Demi Lovato, Elton John, Tom Waits, Capers Williamson, among others. Some have received pushback, including Brad Pitt recently and criticism from some people in AA regarding its anonymity guidelines.
AA in media and arts
Film
* My Name Is Bill W. – dramatized biography of co-founder Bill Wilson.
* When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story – a 2010 film about the wife of founder Bill Wilson, and the beginnings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon.
* Bill W. – a 2011 biographical documentary film that tells the story of Bill Wilson using interviews, recreations, and rare archival material.
* A Walk Among the Tombstones (2015), a mystery/suspense film based on Lawrence Block's books featuring Matthew Scudder, a recovering alcoholic detective whose AA membership is a central element of the plot.
* When a Man Loves a Woman – a school counselor attends AA meetings in a residential treatment facility.
* Clean and Sober – an addict (alcohol, cocaine) visits an AA meeting to get a sponsor.
* Days of Wine and Roses – a 1962 film about a married couple struggling with alcoholism. Jack Lemmon's character attends an AA meeting in the film.
* Drunks – a 1995 film starring Richard Lewis as an alcoholic who leaves an AA meeting and relapses. The film cuts back and forth between his eventual relapse and the other meeting attendees.
* Come Back, Little Sheba – A 1952 film based on a play of the same title about a loveless marriage where the husband played by Burt Lancaster is an alcoholic who gets help from two members of the local AA chapter. A 1977 TV drama was also based on the play.
* ''I'll Cry Tomorrow'' – A 1955 film about singer Lillian Roth played by Susan Hayward who goes to AA to help her stop drinking. The film was based on Roth's autobiography of the same name detailing her alcoholism and sobriety through AA.
* You Kill Me – a 2007 crime-comedy film starring Ben Kingsley as a mob hit man with a drinking problem who is forced to accept a job at a mortuary and go to AA meetings.
* Smashed – a 2012 drama film starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead. An elementary school teacher's drinking begins to interfere with her job, so she attempts to get sober in AA.
* ''Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot'' – a 2018 biography/comedy/drama by Gus Van Sant, based on the life of cartoonist John Callahan.
* Doctor Sleep – Released in 2019, Doctor Sleep is a sequel to The Shining, directed by Mike Flanagan and based on Stephen King's work. Ewan McGregor stars as a man who, after overcoming his own demons through AA, helps others do the same. Television * In "Days of Wine and D'oh'ses" (The Simpsons) after watching a video of his drunken antics at his birthday party, Barney resolves to get sober. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, cleans up his appearance, and attends helicopter-flying lessons. He remains sober by the episode's end, though his alcoholism is replaced by an unhealthy dependence on coffee.
* Bloody Mary - A 2005 episode of the animated TV series South Park where Randy Marsh must attend AA meetings after getting a DUI.
* In CBS' Elementary, Jonny Lee Miller plays an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes who is a recovering drug addict. Several episodes are centered around AA meetings and the process of recovery.
Music
* Faithful (Macklemore song) released in October 2022
* AA (song) by American country music singer Walker Hayes
* In 2024, Jelly Roll revealed that an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting served as the inspiration for his new album track, "Winning Streak".
Theater
* Bill W. and Dr. Bob is a play by Stephen Bergman and Janet Surrey that chronicles the lives of AA founders Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith, and their wives, and has been produced Off-Broadway and in multiple countries since its debut in 2007.
See also
* Adult Children of Alcoholics
* Al-Anon/Alateen
* Calix Society
* Community reinforcement approach and family training (CRAFT)
* Drug addiction recovery groups
* Drug rehabilitation
* Group psychotherapy
* List of twelve-step groups
* Long-term effects of alcohol
* Recovery approach
* Short-term effects of alcohol consumption
* Stepping Stones (house), home of Bill W.
* Washingtonian movement
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Notes
References
Bibliography
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External links
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* [http://aaagnostica.org/a-history-of-agnostic-groups-in-aa/ A History of Agnostic Groups in AA]
* [https://anonpress.org/manu/ Reproduction of the 1938 Original Manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous]
Category:Addiction and substance abuse organizations
Category:Non-profit organizations based in New York City
Category:Organizations established in 1935
Category:Therapeutic community
Category:Twelve-step programs | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholics_Anonymous | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.044907 |
2049 | Alpha compositing | image with an alpha channel that falls off to zero at its base, where it is blended with the background color.]]
In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate passes or layers and then combine the resulting 2D images into a single, final image called the composite. Compositing is used extensively in film when combining computer-rendered image elements with live footage. Alpha blending is also used in 2D computer graphics to put rasterized foreground elements over a background.
In order to combine the picture elements of the images correctly, it is necessary to keep an associated matte for each element in addition to its color. This matte layer contains the coverage information—the shape of the geometry being drawn—making it possible to distinguish between parts of the image where something was drawn and parts that are empty.
Although the most basic operation of combining two images is to put one over the other, there are many operations, or blend modes, that are used.
History
The concept of an alpha channel was introduced by Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull in the late 1970s at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab. Bruce A. Wallace derived the same straight over operator based on a physical reflectance/transmittance model in 1981. A 1984 paper by Thomas Porter and Tom Duff introduced premultiplied alpha using a geometrical approach.
The use of the term alpha is explained by Smith as follows: "We called it that because of the classic linear interpolation formula <math>\alpha A + (1-\alpha)B</math> that uses the Greek letter <math>\alpha</math> (alpha) to control the amount of interpolation between, in this case, two images A and B". That is, when compositing image A atop image B, the value of <math>\alpha</math> in the formula is taken directly from A's alpha channel.
Description
In a 2D image a color combination is stored for each picture element (pixel), often a combination of red, green and blue (RGB). When alpha compositing is in use, each pixel has an additional numeric value stored in its alpha channel, with a value ranging from 0 to 1. A value of 0 means that the pixel is fully transparent and the color in the pixel beneath will show through. A value of 1 means that the pixel is fully opaque.
With the existence of an alpha channel, it is possible to express compositing image operations using a compositing algebra. For example, given two images A and B, the most common compositing operation is to combine the images so that A appears in the foreground and B appears in the background. This can be expressed as A over B. In addition to over, Porter and Duff
Premultiplied alpha may also be used to allow regions of regular alpha blending (e.g. smoke) and regions with additive blending mode (e.g. flame and glitter effects) to be encoded within the same image. This is represented by an RGBA triplet that express emission with no occlusion, such as (0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.0).
Another advantage of premultiplied alpha is performance; in certain situations, it can reduce the number of multiplication operations (e.g. if the image is used many times during later compositing). The Porter–Duff operations have a simple form only in premultiplied alpha.
One disadvantage of premultiplied alpha is that it can reduce the available relative precision in the RGB values when using integer or fixed-point representation for the color components. This may cause a noticeable loss of quality if the color information is later brightened or if the alpha channel is removed. In practice, this is not usually noticeable because during typical composition operations, such as OVER, the influence of the low-precision color information in low-alpha areas on the final output image (after composition) is correspondingly reduced. This loss of precision also makes premultiplied images easier to compress using certain compression schemes, as they do not record the color variations hidden inside transparent regions, and can allocate fewer bits to encode low-alpha areas. The same “limitations” of lower quantisation bit depths such as 8 bit per channel are also present in imagery without alpha, and this argument is problematic as a result.
Examples
Assuming that the pixel color is expressed using straight (non-premultiplied) RGBA tuples, a pixel value of (0, 0.7, 0, 0.5) implies a pixel that has 70% of the maximum green intensity and 50% opacity. If the color were fully green, its RGBA would be (0, 1, 0, 0.5). However, if this pixel uses premultiplied alpha, all of the RGB values (0, 0.7, 0) are multiplied, or scaled for occlusion, by the alpha value 0.5, which is appended to yield (0, 0.35, 0, 0.5). In this case, the 0.35 value for the G channel actually indicates 70% green emission intensity (with 50% occlusion). A pure green emission would be encoded as (0, 0.5, 0, 0.5). Knowing whether a file uses straight or premultiplied alpha is essential to correctly process or composite it, as a different calculation is required.
Emission with no occlusion cannot be represented in straight alpha. No conversion is available in this case.
Image formats supporting alpha channels
The most popular image formats that support the alpha channel are PNG and TIFF. GIF supports alpha channels, but is considered to be inefficient when it comes to file size. Support for alpha channels is present in some video codecs, such as Animation and Apple ProRes 4444 of the QuickTime format, or in the Techsmith multi-format codec.
The file format BMP generally does not support this channel; however, in different formats such as 32-bit (888–8) or 16-bit (444–4) it is possible to save the alpha channel, although not all systems or programs are able to read it: it is exploited mainly in some video games or particular applications; specific programs have also been created for the creation of these BMPs.
{| class="wikitable sortable"
! File/Codec format !! Maximum Depth
!Type!! Browser support !! Media type !! Notes
|-
| Apple ProRes 4444 || 16-bit
| || None || Video (.mov) || ProRes is the successor of the Apple Intermediate Codec
|-
|HEVC / h.265 ||10-bit
| || Limited to Safari ||Video (.hevc) || Intended successor to H.264
|-
|WebM (codec video VP8, VP9, or AV1) || 12-bit
| || All modern browsers ||Video (.webm) || While VP8/VP9 is widely supported with modern browsers, AV1 still has limited support. Only Chromium-based browsers will display alpha layers.
|-
|OpenEXR || 32-bit
| || None || Image (.exr) || Has largest HDR spread.
|-
| PNG|| 16-bit
|straight|| All modern browsers || Image (.png) ||
|-
| APNG|| 24-bit
|straight|| Moderate support || Image (.apng) || Supports animation.
|-
| TIFF|| 32-bit
|both|| None || Image (.tiff) ||
|-
|GIF|| 8-bit
| || All modern browsers || Image (.gif) || Browsers generally do not support GIF alpha layers.
|-
|SVG || 32-bit
|straight|| All modern browsers || Image (.svg) || Based on CSS color.
|-
|JPEG XL
|32-bit
|both
|Moderate support
|Image (.jxl)
|Allows lossy and HDR.
|}
Gamma correction
The RGB values of typical digital images do not directly correspond to the physical light intensities, but are rather compressed by a gamma correction function:
: <math>C_\text{encoded} = C_\text{linear}^{1/\gamma}</math>
This transformation better utilizes the limited number of bits in the encoded image by choosing <math>\gamma</math> that better matches the non-linear human perception of luminance.
Accordingly, computer programs that deal with such images must decode the RGB values into a linear space (by undoing the gamma-compression), blend the linear light intensities, and re-apply the gamma compression to the result:
:<math id"C_o \left(\frac{ C_a^\gamma \alpha_a + C_b^\gamma \alpha_b (1 - \alpha_a) }{\alpha_o}\right)^{1/…" qid"Q281055">C_o \left(\frac{ C_a^\gamma \alpha_a + C_b^\gamma \alpha_b (1 - \alpha_a) }{\alpha_o}\right)^{1/\gamma}</math>
When combined with premultiplied alpha, pre-multiplication is done in linear space, prior to gamma compression. This results in the following formula:
:<math>C_o = \left( C_a^\gamma + C_b^\gamma (1 - \alpha_a) \right)^{1/\gamma}</math>
Note that the alpha channel may or may not undergo gamma-correction, even when the color channels do.
Other transparency methods
Although used for similar purposes, transparent colors and image masks do not permit the smooth blending of the superimposed image pixels with those of the background (only whole image pixels or whole background pixels allowed).
A similar effect can be achieved with a 1-bit alpha channel, as found in the 16-bit RGBA high color mode of the Truevision TGA image file format and related TARGA and AT-Vista/NU-Vista display adapters' high color graphic mode. This mode devotes 5 bits for every primary RGB color (15-bit RGB) plus a remaining bit as the "alpha channel".
Dithering can be used to simulate partial occlusion where only 1-bit alpha is available.
For some applications, a single alpha channel is not sufficient: a stained-glass window, for instance, requires a separate transparency channel for each RGB channel to model the red, green and blue transparency separately. More alpha channels can be added for accurate spectral color filtration applications.
Some order-independent transparency methods replace the over operator with a commutative approximation.See also <!-- end "content" -->ReferencesExternal links
* [http://keithp.com/~keithp/porterduff/p253-porter.pdf Compositing Digital Images - Thomas Porter and Tom Duff (Original Paper)]
* [http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall00/cs426/papers/smith95a.pdf Image Compositing Fundamentals]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20180726161540/http://www.svgopen.org/2005/papers/abstractsvgopen/ Understand Compositing and Color extensions in SVG 1.2 in 30 minutes!]
* [http://dvd-hq.info/alpha_matting.php Alpha Matting and Premultiplication]
Category:Computer graphics algorithms | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_compositing | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.065887 |
2052 | Array (data structure) | In computer science, an array is a data structure consisting of a collection of elements (values or variables), of same memory size, each identified by at least one array index or key, a collection of which may be a tuple, known as an index tuple. An array is stored such that the position (memory address) of each element can be computed from its index tuple by a mathematical formula. The simplest type of data structure is a linear array, also called a one-dimensional array.
For example, an array of ten 32-bit (4-byte) integer variables, with indices 0 through 9, may be stored as ten words at memory addresses 2000, 2004, 2008, ..., 2036, (in hexadecimal: 0x7D0, 0x7D4, 0x7D8, ..., 0x7F4) so that the element with index i has the address 2000 + (i × 4).
The memory address of the first element of an array is called first address, foundation address, or base address.
Because the mathematical concept of a matrix can be represented as a two-dimensional grid, two-dimensional arrays are also sometimes called "matrices". In some cases the term "vector" is used in computing to refer to an array, although tuples rather than vectors are the more mathematically correct equivalent. Tables are often implemented in the form of arrays, especially lookup tables; the word "table" is sometimes used as a synonym of array.
Arrays are among the oldest and most important data structures, and are used by almost every program. They are also used to implement many other data structures, such as lists and strings. They effectively exploit the addressing logic of computers. In most modern computers and many external storage devices, the memory is a one-dimensional array of words, whose indices are their addresses. Processors, especially vector processors, are often optimized for array operations.
Arrays are useful mostly because the element indices can be computed at run time. Among other things, this feature allows a single iterative statement to process arbitrarily many elements of an array. For that reason, the elements of an array data structure are required to have the same size and should use the same data representation. The set of valid index tuples and the addresses of the elements (and hence the element addressing formula) are usually, but not always, Array indexing was originally done by self-modifying code, and later using index registers and indirect addressing. Some mainframes designed in the 1960s, such as the Burroughs B5000 and its successors, used memory segmentation to perform index-bounds checking in hardware.
Assembly languages generally have no special support for arrays, other than what the machine itself provides. The earliest high-level programming languages, including FORTRAN (1957), Lisp (1958), COBOL (1960), and ALGOL 60 (1960), had support for multi-dimensional arrays, and so has C (1972). In C++ (1983), class templates exist for multi-dimensional arrays whose dimension is fixed at runtime
1 (one-based indexing) The first element of the array is indexed by subscript of 1.
n (n-based indexing) The base index of an array can be freely chosen. Usually programming languages allowing n-based indexing also allow negative index values and other scalar data types like enumerations, or characters may be used as an array index.
Using zero based indexing is the design choice of many influential programming languages, including C, Java and Lisp. This leads to simpler implementation where the subscript refers to an offset from the starting position of an array, so the first element has an offset of zero.
Arrays can have multiple dimensions, thus it is not uncommon to access an array using multiple indices. For example, a two-dimensional array A with three rows and four columns might provide access to the element at the 2nd row and 4th column by the expression A[1][3] in the case of a zero-based indexing system. Thus two indices are used for a two-dimensional array, three for a three-dimensional array, and n for an n-dimensional array.
The number of indices needed to specify an element is called the dimension, dimensionality, or rank of the array.
In standard arrays, each index is restricted to a certain range of consecutive integers (or consecutive values of some enumerated type), and the address of an element is computed by a "linear" formula on the indices.
One-dimensional arrays
thumb|Diagram of a typical 1D array
A one-dimensional array (or single dimension array) is a type of linear array. Accessing its elements involves a single subscript which can either represent a row or column index.
As an example consider the C declaration int anArrayName[10]; which declares a one-dimensional array of ten integers. Here, the array can store ten elements of type int . This array has indices starting from zero through nine. For example, the expressions anArrayName[0] and anArrayName[9] are the first and last elements respectively.
For a vector with linear addressing, the element with index i is located at the address , where B is a fixed base address and c a fixed constant, sometimes called the address increment or stride.
If the valid element indices begin at 0, the constant B is simply the address of the first element of the array. For this reason, the C programming language specifies that array indices always begin at 0; and many programmers will call that element "zeroth" rather than "first".
However, one can choose the index of the first element by an appropriate choice of the base address B. For example, if the array has five elements, indexed 1 through 5, and the base address B is replaced by , then the indices of those same elements will be 31 to 35. If the numbering does not start at 0, the constant B may not be the address of any element.
thumb|Diagram of a typical 2D array
Multidimensional arrays
thumb|Diagram of a typical 3D array
For a multidimensional array, the element with indices i,j would have address B + c · i + d · j, where the coefficients c and d are the row and column address increments, respectively.
More generally, in a k-dimensional array, the address of an element with indices i1, i2, ..., ik is
B + c1 · i1 + c2 · i2 + … + ck · ik.
For example: int a[2][3];
This means that array a has 2 rows and 3 columns, and the array is of integer type. Here we can store 6 elements they will be stored linearly but starting from first row linear then continuing with second row. The above array will be stored as a11, a12, a13, a21, a22, a23.
This formula requires only k multiplications and k additions, for any array that can fit in memory. Moreover, if any coefficient is a fixed power of 2, the multiplication can be replaced by bit shifting.
The coefficients ck must be chosen so that every valid index tuple maps to the address of a distinct element.
If the minimum legal value for every index is 0, then B is the address of the element whose indices are all zero. As in the one-dimensional case, the element indices may be changed by changing the base address B. Thus, if a two-dimensional array has rows and columns indexed from 1 to 10 and 1 to 20, respectively, then replacing B by will cause them to be renumbered from 0 through 9 and 4 through 23, respectively. Taking advantage of this feature, some languages (like FORTRAN 77) specify that array indices begin at 1, as in mathematical tradition while other languages (like Fortran 90, Pascal and Algol) let the user choose the minimum value for each index.
Dope vectors
The addressing formula is completely defined by the dimension d, the base address B, and the increments c1, c2, ..., ck. It is often useful to pack these parameters into a record called the array's descriptor, stride vector, or dope vector. whereas growable arrays require linear (Θ(n)) time to insert or delete elements at an arbitrary position.
Linked lists allow constant time removal and insertion in the middle but take linear time for indexed access. Their memory use is typically worse than arrays, but is still linear.
120px|left|A two-dimensional array stored as a one-dimensional array of one-dimensional arrays (rows).
An Iliffe vector is an alternative to a multidimensional array structure. It uses a one-dimensional array of references to arrays of one dimension less. For two dimensions, in particular, this alternative structure would be a vector of pointers to vectors, one for each row(pointer on c or c++). Thus an element in row i and column j of an array A would be accessed by double indexing (A[i][j] in typical notation). This alternative structure allows jagged arrays, where each row may have a different size—or, in general, where the valid range of each index depends on the values of all preceding indices. It also saves one multiplication (by the column address increment) replacing it by a bit shift (to index the vector of row pointers) and one extra memory access (fetching the row address), which may be worthwhile in some architectures.
Dimension
The dimension of an array is the number of indices needed to select an element. Thus, if the array is seen as a function on a set of possible index combinations, it is the dimension of the space of which its domain is a discrete subset. Thus a one-dimensional array is a list of data, a two-dimensional array is a rectangle of data, a three-dimensional array a block of data, etc.
This should not be confused with the dimension of the set of all matrices with a given domain, that is, the number of elements in the array. For example, an array with 5 rows and 4 columns is two-dimensional, but such matrices form a 20-dimensional space. Similarly, a three-dimensional vector can be represented by a one-dimensional array of size three.
See also
Dynamic array
Parallel array
Variable-length array
Bit array
Array slicing
Offset (computer science)
Row- and column-major order
Stride of an array
References
External links
* | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Array_(data_structure) | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.099424 |
2053 | Advance Australia Fair | April 1984)
| composer = Peter Dodds McCormick
| music_date = November 1878
| adopted = (as the national anthem)
* (as one of three "national songs")
* (readopted as the national anthem)
}}
| predecessor =
| sound = Advance_Australia_Fair.ogg
| sound_title = Royal Australian Navy Band instrumental version (one verse)
}}
"Advance Australia Fair" is the national anthem of Australia. Written by Scottish-born Australian composer Peter Dodds McCormick, the song was first performed as a patriotic song in Australia in 1878. It replaced "God Save the Queen" as the official national anthem by the Whitlam government in 1974, following an indicative opinion survey. The subsequent Fraser government reinstated "God Save the Queen" as the national anthem in January 1976 alongside three other "national songs": "Advance Australia Fair", "Waltzing Matilda" and "Song of Australia". Later in 1977 a plebiscite to choose the "national song" preferred "Advance Australia Fair". This was subsequently proclaimed the national anthem in 1984 by the Hawke government. "God Save the Queen" became the royal anthem (later "God Save the King" on the accession of King Charles III), and is used at public engagements attended by the King or members of the royal family.
The lyrics of the 1984 version of "Advance Australia Fair" were significantly modified from McCormick's original, only retaining a now gender neutral version of the first verse and using a second verse first sung in 1901 at Federation. In January 2021, the official lyrics were changed once again, in recognition of the long habitation of Indigenous Australians.
History
Origin
"Advance Australia Fair" was published in early December 1878 by Scottish-born Australian composer Peter Dodds McCormick (1833–1916) under the pen-name "Amicus" (which means in Latin). It was first sung by Andrew Fairfax, accompanied by a concert band conducted by McCormick, at a function of the Highland Society of New South Wales in Sydney on 30 November 1878 (Saint Andrew's Day). The song gained in popularity and an amended version was sung by a choir of around 10,000 at the inauguration of the Commonwealth of Australia on 1 January 1901. In 1907, the Australian Government awarded McCormick £100 for his composition.
In a letter to R.B. Fuller dated 1 August 1913, McCormick described the circumstances that inspired him to write "Advance Australia Fair" to be sung by a large choir with band accompaniment. McCormick had attended a concert at Sydney's Exhibition Building where various national anthems were played.
The earliest known sound recording of "Advance Australia Fair" appears in The Landing of the Australian Troops in Egypt (), a short commercial recording dramatizing the arrival of Australian troops in Egypt en route to Gallipoli.
Before its adoption as Australia's national anthem, "Advance Australia Fair" had considerable use elsewhere. For example, Australia's national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, used it to announce its radio news bulletins from 1942 to 1952. It was also frequently played at the start or end of official functions. Towards the end of World War II it was one of three songs played in certain picture theatres, along with "God Save the King" and the US national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner".Adoption by the Whitlam government
Following the collapse of British power and influence after World War II, Australia was forced to abandon its previous conception of itself as a loyal member of a wider global British community. The impetus for the creation of a new identity was described by Donald Horne as "new nationalism" in 1968. A Gallup poll indicated in 1972 that 72% of Australians now supported a new nationally distinct anthem, up from 38% in 1968. The newly elected Whitlam government of 1972 made central the elevation of distinctively Australian symbols. In this vein, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam announced in his 1973 Australia Day address that
... My government does not believe that our present national anthem is adequate for these purposes.}}
Whitlam also announced that a competition for a new anthem would be held by the Australian Council for the Arts with entrants accepted for both music and lyrics. However, despite around the 2500 entries received for lyrics and 1300 for music, the Council for the Arts could only produce a shortlist of 6 lyrics and no music, reduced from the 12 originally requested. The lyrics selected were "We'll Keep the Faith", "Advance, Australia", "Song of Australia" and three untitled verses. These were widely denounced by artists and the media, with A D Hope calling them "hopeless", James McAuley calling them "hopelessly bad" and The Australian describing the choices as "between the unbearable and the unforgivable". One of the judges David Williamson responded to the criticism stating "if you think these are bad, you should have seen the rest of the 2500 or so we rejected".
Many artists commentated on the difficulty of creating a national anthem in the 1970s, with Richard Meale stating that "we had missed the boat" and writer Bob Ellis stating that "You've got to leave out all the gum trees and wallabies, and you can't talk about defending the country against yellow hordes, so there's not much to talk about except an independent stance and belated pride in ourselves. Anything else would embarrass the audience." Ultimately, the government did not include any of the new entries in the final vote, with the poll only including "Advance Australia Fair", "Waltzing Matilda" and "The Song of Australia". This "indicative plebiscite" polled 60,000 people (0.05% of Australians at the time) nationally. and the Anglican Dean of Sydney commenting "This second-rate secular song is completely inappropriate for use in churches." Officials in four states said that Advance Australia Fair would not be played at official functions and that "God Save the Queen" would not be replaced, with Sir Harry Budd of New South Wales saying that the lyrics "are foolish and banal and their sentiments ridiculous".
During the 1975 election campaign following the dismissal of Whitlam by Sir John Kerr, David Combe proposed that the song be played at the start of the Labor Party's official campaign launch on 24 November 1975 at Festival Hall, Melbourne. Whitlam's speechwriter Graham Freudenberg rejected this idea because, among other reasons, the status of the anthem at that point was still tentative.
Reversion by the Fraser government
On 22 January 1976 the Fraser government reinstated "God Save the Queen" as the national anthem for use at royal and vice-regal events, but otherwise provided a choice between "God Save the Queen", "Advance Australia Fair", "Song of Australia" or "Waltzing Matilda" for civilian functions. His government made plans to conduct a national poll to find a song for use on ceremonial occasions when it was desired to mark a separate Australian identity, whilst maintaining "God Save The Queen" as the national anthem. This was conducted as a plebiscite to choose the National Song, held as an optional additional question in the 1977 referendum on various issues. Despite both Fraser and Whitlam advocating a vote for "Waltzing Matilda", "Advance Australia Fair" was the winner with 43.29% of the vote, defeating the three alternatives, "Waltzing Matilda" (28.28%), "The Song of Australia" (9.65%) and the existing national anthem, "God Save the Queen" (18.78%).
Re-adoption by the Hawke government
"Advance Australia Fair", with modified lyrics and reduced to two verses (see development of lyrics), was adopted as the Australian national anthem by the Labor government of Bob Hawke, At the same time, "God Save the King/Queen" became known as the royal anthem, and continues to be played alongside the Australian national anthem at public engagements in Australia that are attended by the King or any other members of the Royal Family.
Even though any personal copyright of Peter Dodds McCormick's original lyrics has expired, as he died in 1916, the Commonwealth of Australia claims copyright on the official lyrics and particular arrangements of music. Non-commercial use of the anthem is permitted without case-by-case permission, but the Commonwealth government requires permission for commercial use.
The orchestral arrangement of "Advance Australia Fair" that is now regularly played for Australian victories at international sporting medal ceremonies, and at the openings of major domestic sporting, cultural and community events, is by Tommy Tycho, an immigrant from Hungary. It was commissioned by ABC Music in 1984 and then televised by Channel 10 in 1986 in their Australia Day broadcast, featuring Julie Anthony as the soloist.
Lyrics
The lyrics of "Advance Australia Fair", as modified by the National Australia Day Council, were officially adopted in April 1984. The lyrics were updated on 1 January 2021 in an attempt to recognise the legacy of Indigenous Australians, with the word "one" in the second line replacing the previous "young". The lyrics are now as follows:
The lyrics published in the second edition (1879) were as follows:
<poem style="float:left; margin-left: 1em;">I
Australia's sons let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We've golden soil and wealth for toil,
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in nature's gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history's page, let every stage
Advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains let us sing,
Advance, Australia fair.</poem>
<poem style="float:left; margin-left: 1em;>II
When gallant Cook from Albion sail'd,
To trace wide oceans o'er,
True British courage bore him on,
Til he landed on our shore.
Then here he raised Old England's flag,
The standard of the brave;
"With all her faults we love her still"
"Britannia rules the wave."
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance, Australia fair.</poem>
<poem style="float:left; margin-left: 1em;">III
While other nations of the globe
Behold us from afar,
We'll rise to high renown and shine
Like our glorious southern star;
From England soil and Fatherland,
Scotia and Erin fair,
Let all combine with heart and hand
To advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance, Australia fair.</poem>
<poem style="float:left; margin-left: 1em;>IV
Should foreign foe e'er sight our coast,
Or dare a foot to land,
We'll rouse to arms like sires of yore,
To guard our native strand;
Britannia then shall surely know,
Though oceans roll between,
Her sons in fair Australia's land
Still keep their courage green.
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia fair.</poem>
The 1901 Federation version of the third verse was originally sung as:
<poem style="float:left; margin-left: 1em;>III
Beneath our radiant Southern Cross,
We'll toil with hearts and hands;
To make our youthful Commonwealth,
Renowned of all the lands;
For loyal sons beyond the seas
We've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia fair!</poem>
The lyrics of "Advance Australia Fair", as modified by the National Australia Day Council and officially adopted on 19 April 1984, were as follows:
<poem style="float:left; margin-left: 1em;>I
Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We've golden soil and wealth for toil;
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in nature's gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history's page, let every stage
Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.</poem>
<poem style="float:left; margin-left: 1em;>II
Beneath our radiant Southern Cross
We'll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.</poem>
These lyrics were updated on 1 January 2021 to the current version, in which "young" in the second line is replaced with "one" to reflect the pre-colonial presence of Indigenous Australians, who have lived in Australia much longer than Europeans.
Criticism
General criticism
In May 1976, after reinstating "God Save the Queen", Fraser advised the Australian Olympic Federation to use "Waltzing Matilda" as the national anthem for the forthcoming Montreal Olympic Games.
In December 2020, another setting, in Dharug, followed by the anthem in English, was sung before a Rugby Union international between Australia and Argentina:
Other unofficial variants
In 2011, about fifty different Christian schools from different denominations came under criticism for singing an unofficial version of the song written by the Sri Lankan immigrant Ruth Ponniah in 1988. The song replaced the official second verse of "Advance Australia Fair" with lyrics that were Christian in nature.
Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth Peter Garrett and chief executive of the National Australia Day Council Warren Pearson admonished the schools for modifying the lyrics of the anthem, and the Australian Parents Council and the Federation of Parents and Citizens' Association of NSW called for a ban on the modified song. Stephen O'Doherty, chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, defended the use of the lyrics in response.ReferencesNotesExternal links
* [https://www.australia.gov.au/our-country Lyrics] on official government website
* [http://nationalanthems.me/australia-advance-australia-fair/ Streaming audio of Advance Australia Fair with links and information] ([https://web.archive.org/web/20180520150238/http://nationalanthems.me/australia-advance-australia-fair/ archive link])
* Australian Government websites:
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20071109134834/http://www.itsanhonour.gov.au/symbols/anthem.cfm#download Official published lyrics, music with band parts and sound recordings]
** [https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/files/pmc/Honours/AusNatAnthem_FULLSCORE.pdf Four-part musical score & lyrics PDF 169 KB]
** [https://www.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/files/pmc/Honours/anthem_vocal_solo.mp3 Australian National Anthem Audio for download (MP3 2.04 MB)]
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20141027034911/http://www.dfat.gov.au/facts/nat_anthem.html Department of Foreign Affair and Trade's webpage on Advance Australia Fair]
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20070927161820/http://www.musicaustralia.org/apps/MA?functionsearchResults&searchInitiatedtrue&scopescope&simpleTermadvance+australia+fair&searchbutton.x36&searchbutton.y14 Online scores held by Australian government libraries (The MusicAustralia collaboration)]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20050716020728/http://www.diggerhistory.info/sound/advance-orig01.mp3 Advance Australia Fair (Original Lyrics) – Australian singer Peter Dawson (c. 1930)]
Category:Oceanian anthems
Category:National symbols of Australia
Category:Australian patriotic songs
Category:1878 songs
Category:National anthems | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Australia_Fair | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.122305 |
2061 | Automatic number announcement circuit | An automatic number announcement circuit (ANAC) is a component of a central office of a telephone company that provides a service to installation and service technicians to determine the telephone number of a telephone line. The facility has a telephone number that may be called to listen to an automatic announcement that includes the caller's telephone number. The ANAC facility is useful primarily during the installation of landline telephones to quickly identify one of multiple wire pairs in a bundle or at a termination point.
Operation
By connecting a test telephone set, a technician calls the local telephone number of the automatic number announcement service. This call is connected to equipment at the central office that uses automatic equipment to announce the telephone number of the line calling in. The main purpose of this system is to allow telephone company technicians to identify the telephone line they are connected to.
Automatic number announcement systems are based on automatic number identification. They are intended for use by phone company technicians, the ANAC system bypasses customer features, such as unlisted numbers, caller ID blocking, and outgoing call blocking. Installers of multi-line business services where outgoing calls from all lines display the company's main number on call display can use ANAC to identify a specific line in the system, even if CID displays every line as "line one".
Most ANAC systems are provider-specific in each wire center, while others are regional or state-/province- or area-code-wide. No official lists of ANAC numbers are published, as telephone companies guard against abuse that would interfere with availability for installers.
Exchange prefixes for testing
The North American Numbering Plan reserves the exchange (central office) prefixes 958 and 959 for plant testing purposes. Code 959 with three or four additional digits is dedicated for access to office test lines in local exchange carrier and interoffice carrier central offices. The specifications define several test features for line conditions, such as quiet line and busy line, and test tones transmitted to callers. Telephone numbers are assigned for ring back to test the ringer when installing telephone sets, milliwatt tone (a number simply answers with a continuous test tone) and a loop around (which connects a call to another inbound call to the same or another test number).
ANAC services are typically installed in the 958 range, which is intended for communications between central offices. In some area codes, multiple additional prefixes may be reserved for test purposes. Many area codes reserved 999; 320 was also formerly reserved in Bell Canada territory.
Other carrier-specific North American test numbers include 555-XXXX numbers (such as 555–0311 on Rogers Communications in Canada) or vertical service codes, such as *99 on Cablevision/Optimum Voice in the United States. MCI Inc. (United States) provides ANI information by dialing 800-444-4444.
Telephone numbers
Plant testing telephone numbers are carrier-specific, there is no comprehensive list of telephone numbers for ANAC services. In some communities, test numbers change relatively often. In others, a major incumbent carrier might assign a single number which provides test functions on its network across an entire numbering plan area, throughout an entire province or state, or system-wide.
Some telecommunication carriers maintain toll-free numbers for ANAC facilities. Some national toll-free numbers provide automatic number identification by speaking the telephone number of the caller, but these are not intended for use in identifying the customer's own phone number. They are used for the agent in a call center to confirm the telephone a customer is calling from, so that the customer's account information can be displayed as a "screen pop" for the next available customer service representative.
See also
Plant test number
Ringback number
References
Category:Telephone numbers
Category:Telephony signals | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_announcement_circuit | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.129837 |
2062 | Amerigo Vespucci | ) at the British Museum in London, attributed to Crispijn van de Passe the Elder
| birth_date = 9 March 1454
| birth_place = Florence, Republic of Florence
| death_date
| death_place = Seville, Crown of Castile
| other_names =
| known_for Demonstrating to Europeans that the New World was not Asia but a previously unknown fourth continent,}} after whom the Americas are named.
| occupation = Merchant, explorer, cartographer
| relatives =
| signature = AmerigoVespucci Signature.png
}}
Amerigo Vespucci ( , ; 9 March 1454 – 22 February 1512) was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Florence for whom "America" is named.
Vespucci participated in at least two voyages of the Age of Discovery between 1497 and 1504, first on behalf of Spain (14991500) and then for Portugal (15011502). In 1503 and 1505, two booklets were published under his name containing colourful descriptions of these explorations and other voyages. Both publications were extremely popular and widely read throughout much of Europe. Historians still dispute the authorship and veracity of these accounts, but they were instrumental in raising awareness of the discoveries and enhancing the reputation of Vespucci as an explorer and navigator.
Vespucci claimed to have understood in 1501 that Brazil was part of a fourth continent unknown to Europeans, which he called the "New World". The claim inspired cartographer Martin Waldseemüller to recognize Vespucci's accomplishments in 1507 by applying the Latinized form "America" to a map showing the New World. Other cartographers followed suit, securing the tradition of marking the name "America" on maps of the newly discovered continents.
It is unknown whether Vespucci was ever aware of these honours. In 1505, he was made a subject of Castile by royal decree, and he was appointed to the position of piloto mayor (master navigator) for Spain's Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) in Seville in 1508, a post which he held until his death in 1512.
Biography
, a frazione of the comune of Greve in Chianti, Italy. Montefioralle was the home of the Vespucci family.]]
, Florence, Italy]]
Vespucci was born on 9 March 1454 in Florence, a wealthy Italian city-state and a center of Renaissance art and learning, in the suburb of Peretola. The family resided in the District of Santa Lucia d'Ognissanti along with other families of the Vespucci clan. Earlier generations of Vespucci had funded a family chapel in the Ognissanti church, and the nearby Hospital of San Giovanni di Dio was founded by Simone di Piero Vespucci in 1380. Vespucci's immediate family was not especially prosperous but they were politically well-connected. Amerigo's grandfather, also named Amerigo Vespucci, served a total of 36 years as the chancellor of the Florentine government, known as the Signoria; and Nastagio also served in the Signoria and in other guild offices. More importantly, the Vespuccis had good relations with Lorenzo de' Medici, the powerful de facto ruler of Florence.
Amerigo's two older brothers, Antonio and Girolamo, were sent to the University of Pisa for their education; Antonio followed his father to become a notary, while Girolamo entered the Church and joined the Knights Hospitaller in Rhodes. Amerigo's career path seemed less certain; instead of following his brothers to the university, he remained in Florence and was tutored by his uncle, Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, a Dominican friar in the monastery of San Marco. Fortunately for Amerigo, his uncle was one of the most celebrated humanist scholars in Florence at the time and provided him with a broad education in literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and Latin. He was also introduced to geography and astronomy, subjects that played an essential part in his career. Amerigo's later writings demonstrated a familiarity with the work of the classic Greek cosmographers, Ptolemy and Strabo, and the more recent work of Florentine astronomer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli.
Early career
In 1478, Guido Antonio Vespucci, Amerigo's other uncle, led a Florentine diplomatic mission to Paris and invited his younger cousin, Amerigo Vespucci, to join him. Amerigo's role is not clear, but it was likely as an attache or private secretary. Along the way they had business in Bologna, Milan, and Lyon. Their objective in Paris was to obtain French support for Florence's war with Naples. Louis XI was noncommittal and the diplomatic mission returned to Florence in 1481 with little to show for their efforts.
After his return from Paris, Amerigo worked for a time with his father and continued his studies in science. In 1482, when his father died, Amerigo went to work for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, head of a junior branch of the Medici family. Although Amerigo was twelve years older, they had been schoolmates under the tutelage of Giorgio Antonio Vespucci. Amerigo served first as a household manager and then gradually took on increasing responsibilities, handling various business dealings for the family both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, he continued to show an interest in geography, at one point buying an expensive map made by the master cartographer Gabriel de Vallseca.SevilleIn 1488, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco became dissatisfied with his Seville business agent, Tomasso Capponi. He dispatched Vespucci to investigate the situation and provide an assessment of a suggested replacement, Florentine merchant Gianotto Berardi. Vespucci's findings have been lost but Capponi returned to Florence around this time and Berardi took over the Medici business in Seville. In addition to managing Medici's trade in Seville, Berardi had his own business in African slavery and ship chandlery.
By 1492, Vespucci had settled permanently in Seville. His motivations for leaving Florence are unclear; he continued to transact some business on behalf of his Medici patrons but more and more he became involved with Berardi's other activities, most notably his support of Christopher Columbus's voyages. Berardi invested half a million maravedis in Columbus's first voyage, and he won a potentially lucrative contract to provision Columbus's large second fleet. However, profits proved to be elusive. In 1495, Berardi signed a contract with the crown to send 12 resupply ships to Hispaniola but then died unexpectedly in December without completing the terms of the contract.
Vespucci was the executor of Berardi's will, collecting debts and paying outstanding obligations for the firm. Afterwards he was left owing 140,000 maravedis. He continued to provision ships bound for the West Indies, but his opportunities were diminishing; Columbus's expeditions were not providing the hoped-for profits, and his patron, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco Medici, was using other Florentine agents for his business in Seville.
Sometime after he settled in Seville, Vespucci married a Spanish woman, Maria Cerezo. Very little is known about her; Vespucci's will refers to her as the daughter of celebrated military leader Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. Historian Fernández-Armesto speculates that she may have been Gonzalo's illegitimate offspring and a connection that would have been very useful to Vespucci. She was an active participant in his business and held power of attorney for Vespucci when he was away.Voyages and alleged voyages
, alleged to have occurred in 1497 (De Bry engraving, )]]
The evidence for Vespucci's voyages of exploration consists almost entirely of a handful of letters written by him or attributed to him. Historians have differed sharply on the authorship, accuracy and veracity of these documents. Consequently, opinions also vary widely regarding the number of voyages undertaken, their routes, and Vespucci's roles and accomplishments. Starting in the late 1490s Vespucci participated in two voyages to the New World that are relatively well-documented in the historical record. Two others have been alleged but the evidence is more problematic. Traditionally, Vespucci's voyages are referred to as the "first" through "fourth", even by historians who dismiss one or more of the trips.
Alleged voyage of 14971498
A letter, addressed to Florentine official Piero Soderini, dated 1504 and published the following year, purports to be an account by Vespucci of a voyage to the New World, departing from Spain on 10 May 1497, and returning on 15 October 1498. This is perhaps the most controversial of Vespucci's voyages, as this letter is the only known record of its occurrence, and many historians doubt that it took place as described. Some question the authorship and accuracy of the letter and consider it to be a forgery. Others point to the inconsistencies in the narrative of the voyage, particularly the alleged course, starting near Honduras and proceeding northwest for 870 leagues (about )—a course that would have taken them across Mexico to the Pacific Ocean.
Certain earlier historians, including contemporary Bartolomé de las Casas, suspected that Vespucci incorporated observations from a later voyage into a fictitious account of this supposed first one, so as to gain primacy over Columbus and position himself as the first European explorer to encounter the mainland. Others, including scholar Alberto Magnaghi, have suggested that the Soderini letter was not written by Vespucci at all, but rather by an unknown author who had access to the navigator's private letters to Lorenzo de' Medici about his 1499 and 1501 expeditions to the Americas,Voyage of 14991500
, published by Pietro Pacini in Florence ]]
In 1499, Vespucci joined an expedition licensed by Spain and led by Alonso de Ojeda as fleet commander and Juan de la Cosa as chief navigator. Their intention was to explore the coast of a new landmass found by Columbus on his third voyage and in particular investigate a rich source of pearls that Columbus had reported. Vespucci and his backers financed two of the four ships in the small fleet. His role on the voyage is not clear. Writing later about his experience, Vespucci gave the impression that he had a leadership role, but that is unlikely, due to his inexperience. Instead, he may have served as a commercial representative on behalf of the fleet's investors. Years later, Ojeda recalled that "Morigo Vespuche" was one of his pilots on the expedition.
The vessels left Spain on 18 May 1499 and stopped first in the Canary Islands before reaching South America somewhere near present-day Suriname or French Guiana. From there the fleet split up: Ojeda proceeded northwest toward modern Venezuela with two ships, while the other pair headed south with Vespucci aboard. The only record of the southbound journey comes from Vespucci himself. He assumed they were on the coast of Asia and hoped by heading south they would, according to the Greek geographer Ptolemy, round the unidentified "Cape of Cattigara" and reach the Indian Ocean. They passed two huge rivers (the Amazon and the Para) which poured freshwater out to sea. They continued south for another 40 leagues (about ) before encountering a very strong adverse current which they could not overcome. Forced to turn around, the ships headed north, retracing their course to the original landfall. From there Vespucci continued up the South American coast to the Gulf of Paria and along the shore of what is now Venezuela. At some point they may have rejoined Ojeda but the evidence is unclear. In the late summer, they decided to head north for the Spanish colony at Hispaniola in the West Indies to resupply and repair their ships before heading home. After Hispaniola they made a brief slave raid in the Bahamas, capturing 232 Lucayans, and then returned to Spain.
Voyage of 15011502
In 1501, Manuel I of Portugal commissioned an expedition to investigate a landmass far to the west in the Atlantic Ocean encountered unexpectedly by a wayward Pedro Álvares Cabral on his voyage around Africa to India. That land would eventually become present-day Brazil. The king wanted to know the extent of this new discovery and determine where it lay in relation to the line established by the Treaty of Tordesillas. Any land that lay to the east of the line could be claimed by Portugal. Vespucci's reputation as an explorer and presumed navigator had already reached Portugal, and he was hired by the king to serve as pilot under the command of Gonçalo Coelho.
Coelho's fleet of three ships left Lisbon in May 1501. Before crossing the Atlantic they resupplied at Cape Verde, where they encountered Cabral on his way home from his voyage to India. This was the same expedition that had found Brazil on its outward-bound journey the previous year. Coelho left Cape Verde in June, and from this point Vespucci's account is the only surviving record of their explorations. On 17 August 1501 the expedition reached Brazil at a latitude of about 6° south. Upon landing it encountered a hostile band of natives who killed and ate one of its crewmen. Sailing south along the coast they found friendlier natives and were able to engage in some minor trading. At 23° S they found a bay which they named Rio de Janeiro because it was 1 January 1502. On 13 February 1502, they left the coast to return home. Vespucci estimated their latitude at 32° S but experts now estimate they were closer to 25° S. Their homeward journey is unclear since Vespucci left a confusing record of astronomical observations and distances travelled.Alleged voyage of 15031504In 1503, Vespucci may have participated in a second expedition for the Portuguese crown, again exploring the east coast of Brazil. There is evidence that a voyage was led by Coelho at about this time but no independent confirmation that Vespucci took part. The only source for this last voyage is the Soderini letter; but several modern scholars dispute Vespucci's authorship of that letter and it is uncertain whether Vespucci undertook this trip. There are also difficulties with the reported dates and details in the account of this voyage.
Return to Seville
]]
By early 1505, Vespucci was back in Seville. His reputation as an explorer and navigator continued to grow and his recent service in Portugal did not seem to damage his standing with King Ferdinand. On the contrary, the king was likely interested in learning about the possibility of a western passage to India. In February, he was summoned by the king to consult on matters of navigation. During the next few months he received payments from the crown for his services and in April he was declared by royal proclamation a citizen of Castile and León.
From 1505 until his death in 1512, Vespucci remained in service to the Spanish crown. He continued his work as a chandler, supplying ships bound for the Indies. He was also hired to captain a ship as part of a fleet bound for the "spice islands" but the planned voyage never took place. In March 1508, he was named chief pilot for the Casa de Contratación or House of Commerce which served as a central trading house for Spain's overseas possessions. He was paid an annual salary of 50,000 maravedis with an extra 25,000 for expenses. In his new role, Vespucci was responsible for ensuring that ships' pilots were adequately trained and licensed before sailing to the New World. He was also charged with compiling a "model map", the Padrón Real, based on input from pilots who were obligated to share what they learned after each voyage.
Vespucci wrote his will in April 1511. He left most of his modest estate, including five household slaves, to his wife. His clothes, books, and navigational equipment were left to his nephew Giovanni Vespucci. He requested to be buried in a Franciscan habit in his wife's family tomb. Vespucci died on 22 February 1512.
Upon his death, Vespucci's wife was awarded an annual pension of 10,000 maravedis to be deducted from the salary of the successor chief pilot. His nephew Giovanni was hired into the Casa de Contratación where he spent his subsequent years spying on behalf of the Florentine state.
Naming of America
we dropped our anchor off the shores of that new land, thanking God with solemn prayers and the celebration of the Mass. Once there, we determined that the new land was not an island but a continent...|Amerigo Vespucci, Mundus Novus, Letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici (1502/1503)}}
, depicting Vespucci that awakens the sleeping America]]
Vespucci's voyages became widely known in Europe after two accounts attributed to him were published between 1503 and 1505. The Soderini letter (1505) came to the attention of a group of humanist scholars studying geography in Saint-Dié, a small French town in the Duchy of Lorraine. Led by Walter Lud, the academy included Matthias Ringmann and Martin Waldseemüller. In 1506, they obtained a French translation of the Soderini letter as well as a Portuguese maritime map that detailed the coast of lands recently discovered in the western Atlantic. They surmised that this was the "new world" or the "antipodes" hypothesized by classical writers. The Soderini letter gave Vespucci credit for discovery of this new continent and implied that the Portuguese map was based on his explorations.
In April 1507, Ringmann and Waldseemüller published their Introduction to Cosmography with an accompanying world map. The Introduction was written in Latin and included a Latin translation of the Soderini letter. In a preface to the Letter, Ringmann wrote
}}
A thousand copies of the world map were printed with the title Universal Geography According to the Tradition of Ptolemy and the Contributions of Amerigo Vespucci and Others. It was decorated with prominent portraits of Ptolemy and Vespucci and, for the first time, the name America was applied to a map of the New World.
The Introduction and map were a great success and four editions were printed in the first year alone. The map was widely used in universities and was influential among cartographers who admired the craftsmanship that went into its creation. In the following years, other maps were printed that often incorporated the name America. In 1538, Gerardus Mercator used America to name both the North and South continents on his influential map. By this point the tradition of marking the name "America" on maps of the New World was secure.
In 1513 Waldseemüller published a new map with the New World labelled "Terra Incognita" instead of "America", and the accompanying text names Columbus as discoverer. Many supporters of Columbus felt that Vespucci had stolen an honour that rightfully belonged to Columbus. Most historians now believe that Vespucci was unaware of Waldseemüller's map before his death in 1512 and many assert that he was not even the author of the Soderini letter.
Vespucci letters
]]
constellation with an astrolabe during his 1499 voyage, event described in his Letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. Print includes Vespucci's own allusion to a relevant passage in Dante's Purgatorio.]]
Knowledge of Vespucci's voyages relies almost entirely on a handful of letters written by him or attributed to him. Two of these letters were published during his lifetime and received widespread attention throughout Europe. Several scholars now believe that Vespucci did not write the two published letters in the form in which they circulated during his lifetime. They suggest that they were fabrications based in part on genuine Vespucci letters.
:Mundus Novus (1503) was a letter written to Vespucci's former schoolmate and one-time patron, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. Originally published in Latin, the letter described his voyage to Brazil in 15011502 serving under the Portuguese flag. The document proved to be extremely popular throughout Europe. Within a year of publication, twelve editions were printed including translations into Italian, French, German, Dutch and other languages. By 1550, at least 50 editions had been issued.
:Letter to Soderini (1505) was a letter ostensibly intended for Piero di Tommaso Soderini, the leader of the Florentine Republic. It was written in Italian and published in Florence around 1505. It is more sensational in tone than the other letters and the only one to assert that Vespucci made four voyages of exploration. The authorship and the veracity of the letter have been widely questioned by modern historians. Nevertheless, this document was the original inspiration for naming the American continent in honour of Amerigo Vespucci.
The remaining documents were unpublished manuscripts; handwritten letters uncovered by researchers more than 250 years after Vespucci's death. After years of controversy, the authenticity of the three complete letters was convincingly demonstrated by Alberto Magnaghi in 1924. Most historians now accept them as the work of Vespucci but aspects of the accounts are still disputed.
:Letter from Seville (1500) describes a voyage made in 14991500 while in the service of Spain. It was first published in 1745 by Angelo Maria Bandini.
:Letter from Cape Verde (1501) was written in Cape Verde at the outset of a voyage undertaken for Portugal in 15011502. It was first published by Count Baldelli Boni in 1807. It describes the first leg of the journey from Lisbon to Cape Verde and provides details about Pedro Cabral's voyage to India which were obtained when the two fleets met by chance while anchored in the harbour at Cape Verde.
:Letter from Lisbon (1502) is essentially a continuation of the letter started in Cape Verde. It describes the remainder of a voyage made on behalf of Portugal in 15011502. The letter was first published by Francesco Bartolozzi in 1789.
:Ridolfi Fragment (1502) is part of a letter attributed to Vespucci but some of its assertions remain controversial. It was first published in 1937 by Roberto Ridolfi. The letter appears to be an argumentative response to questions or objections raised by the unknown recipient. A reference is made to three voyages made by Vespucci, two on behalf of Spain and one for Portugal.
Historiography
, which titles him "discoverer and conqueror of Brazilian land"]]
Vespucci has been called "the most enigmatic and controversial figure in early American history". The debate has become known among historians as the "Vespucci question". How many voyages did he make? What was his role on the voyages and what did he learn? The evidence relies almost entirely on a handful of letters attributed to him. Many historians have analysed these documents and have arrived at contradictory conclusions.
In 1515, Sebastian Cabot became one of the first to question Vespucci's accomplishments and express doubts about his 1497 voyage. Later, Bartolomé de las Casas argued that Vespucci was a liar and stole the credit that was due Columbus. By 1600, most regarded Vespucci as an impostor and not worthy of his honours and fame. In 1839, Alexander von Humboldt after careful consideration asserted the 1497 voyage was impossible but accepted the two Portuguese-sponsored voyages. Humboldt also called into question the assertion that Vespucci recognized that he had encountered a new continent. According to Humboldt, Vespucci (and Columbus) died in the belief that they had reached the eastern edge of Asia. Vespucci's reputation was perhaps at its lowest in 1856 when Ralph Waldo Emerson called Vespucci a "thief" and "pickle dealer" from Seville who managed to get "half the world baptized with his dishonest name".
in Florence, Italy]]
Opinions began to shift somewhat after 1857 when Brazilian historian Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen wrote that everything in the Soderini letter was true. Other historians followed in support of Vespucci including John Fiske and Henry Harrisse.
In 1924, Alberto Magnaghi published the results of his exhaustive review of Vespucci's writings and relevant cartography. He denied Vespucci's authorship of the 1503 Mundus Novus and the 1505 Letter to Soderini, the only two texts published during his lifetime. He suggested that the Soderini letter was not written by Vespucci, but was cobbled together by unscrupulous Florentine publishers who combined several accounts – some from Vespucci, others from elsewhere. Magnaghi determined that the manuscript letters were authentic and based on them he was the first to propose that only the second and third voyages were true, and the first and fourth voyages (only found in the Soderini letter) were fabrications. While Magnaghi has been one of the chief proponents of a two-voyage narrative, Roberto Levellier was an influential Argentinian historian who endorsed the authenticity of all Vespucci's letters and proposed the most extensive itinerary for his four voyages.
Other modern historians and popular writers have taken varying positions on Vespucci's letters and voyages, espousing two, three, or four voyages and supporting or denying the authenticity of his two printed letters. Most authors believe that the three manuscript letters are authentic while the first voyage as described in the Soderini letter draws the most criticism and disbelief.
A two-voyage thesis was accepted and popularized by Frederick J. Pohl (1944), and rejected by Germán Arciniegas (1955), who posited that all four voyages were truthful. Luciano Formisiano (1992) also rejects the Magnaghi thesis (acknowledging that publishers probably tampered with Vespucci's writings) and declares all four voyages genuine, but differs from Arciniegas in details (particularly the first voyage). Samuel Morison (1974) flatly rejected the first voyage but was noncommittal about the two published letters. Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2007) calls the authenticity question "inconclusive" and hypothesizes that the first voyage was probably another version of the second; the third is unassailable, and the fourth is probably true.Legacy
, Colombia]]
Vespucci's historical importance may rest more with his letters (whether or not he wrote them all) than his discoveries. Burckhardt cites the naming of America after him as an example of the immense role of the Italian literature of the time in determining historical memory. Within a few years of the publication of his two letters, the European public became aware of the newly discovered continents of the Americas. According to Vespucci:
}}
Notes
References
Bibliography
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* 1580 |date1977 |publisherUniversity of Minnesota Press |pages456–462}}
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* 1616 |urlhttps://archive.org/details/europeandiscover00mori_2 |url-accessregistration |date1974 |publisherOxford University Press |locationNew York |pages=[https://archive.org/details/europeandiscover00mori_2/page/276 276]–312}}
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External links
* Canaday, James A. "[https://web.archive.org/web/20100328011335/http://www.millersville.edu/~columbus/papers/canaday.html The Life of Amerigo Vespucci]"
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* Vespucci, Amerigo. [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1497vespucci%2Damerica.html "Account of His First Voyage 1497 (Letter to Pier Soderini, Gonfalonier of the Republic of Florence)"]. [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook.html Internet Modern History Sourcebook-Fordham University (U.S.)]
* Mason, Wyatt, [https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/magazine/02wwln-lede-t.html 'I am America. (And So?)'] The New York Times, 12 December 2007.
* Martin Waldseemüller, Franz Wieser (Ritter von), Edward Burke (trans), [https://archive.org/details/cosmographiintr00waldgoog The Cosmographiæ Introductio of Martin Waldseemüller in facsimile: followed by the Four voyages of Amerigo Vespucci], The United States Catholic Historical Society, 1908.
* [https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/waldexh.html 1507 Waldseemüller Map] from the US Library of Congress
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110318030557/http://www.loc.gov/preserv/tops/france-easton.html TOPS Lecture at Library of Congress, Drs. France and Easton]
* World Digital Library presentation of [http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.wdl/wdl.369 the 1507 Waldseemüller Map in the Library of Congress]. This is the only known surviving copy of the wall map edition of which it is believed 1,000 copies were printed. Four originals of the 1507 globe gore map are in existence in Germany, UK and US.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120324053652/http://hos.ou.edu/galleries//01Ancient/HeroOfAlexandria/1575//15thCentury/Vespucci/ Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries] High resolution images of works by and/or portraits of Amerigo Vespucci in .jpg and .tiff format.
* Soderini Letters in [https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_iZ5TZHXOnYcC <!-- quote=Ramusio "Primo Volume delle Nauigationi et Viaggi, ". --> Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Primo Volume delle Nauigationi et Viaggi] , Venetia, 1550, fol.138–140.
Category:1454 births
Category:1512 deaths
Category:15th-century Italian businesspeople
Category:15th-century people from the Republic of Florence
Category:16th-century Italian explorers
Category:16th-century Italian businesspeople
Category:16th-century Italian cartographers
Category:Businesspeople from Florence
Category:Cartographers of North America
Category:Italian explorers of South America
Category:Italian navigators
Category:Italian Roman Catholics
Category:Italian slave owners | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.152070 |
2063 | Aristide Maillol | | birth_place = Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon, France
| death_date =
| death_place = Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon, France
| nationality | field Sculpture, painting
| training = École des Beaux-Arts
| movement | works
| patrons | influenced by
| influenced | awards
}}
Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol (; December 8, 1861 – September 27, 1944) was a French sculptor, painter, and printmaker.
He began his career as a painter and developed an early interest in the decorative arts. He became primarily interested in sculpture from his early 40s. Maillol was one of the most famous sculptors of his time. His work inspired artists such as Picasso, Henri Matisse and Henry Moore.
Biography
, New York, Chicago, Boston. Catalogue image (no. 110)]]
Maillol was born in Banyuls-sur-Mer, Roussillon. He decided at an early age to become a painter, and moved to Paris in 1881 to study art. His early paintings show the influence of his contemporaries Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Paul Gauguin.
Gauguin encouraged his growing interest in decorative art, an interest that led Maillol to take up tapestry design. In 1893 Maillol opened a tapestry workshop in Banyuls, producing works whose high technical and aesthetic quality gained him recognition for renewing this art form in France. He began making small terracotta sculptures in 1895, and within a few years his concentration on sculpture led to the abandonment of his work in tapestry.
'', bronze, 1938–1943, at the Tuileries Garden in Paris]]
In July 1896, Maillol married Clotilde Narcis, one of his employees at his tapestry workshop. Their only son, Lucian, was born that October.
Maillol's first major sculpture, A Seated Woman, was modeled after his wife. The first version (in the Museum of Modern Art, New York) was completed in 1902, and renamed La Méditerranée.
'' cast 1938, Kröller-Müller Museum ]]
The subject of nearly all of Maillol's mature work is the female body, treated with a classical emphasis on stable forms. The figurative style of his large bronzes is perceived as an important precursor to the greater simplifications of Henry Moore, and his serene classicism set a standard for European (and American) figure sculpture until the end of World War II.
Josep Pla said of Maillol, "These archaic ideas, Greek, were the great novelty Maillol brought into the tendency of modern sculpture. What you need to love from the ancients is not the antiquity, it is the sense of permanent, renewed novelty, that is due to the nature and reason."
His important public commissions include a 1912 commission for a monument to Cézanne, as well as numerous war memorials commissioned after World War I.
Maillol served as a juror with Florence Meyer Blumenthal in awarding the Prix Blumenthal (1919–1954) a grant awarded to painters, sculptors, decorators, engravers, writers, and musicians.
He made a series of woodcut illustrations for an edition of Vergil's Eclogues published by Harry Graf Kessler in 1926–27. He also illustrated Daphnis and Chloe by Longus (1937) and Chansons pour elle by Paul Verlaine (1939).
He died in Banyuls at the age of eighty-two, in an automobile accident. While driving home during a thunderstorm, the car in which he was a passenger skidded off the road and rolled over. A large collection of Maillol's work is maintained at the Musée Maillol in Paris, which was established by Dina Vierny, Maillol's model and platonic companion during the last 10 years of his life. His home a few kilometers outside Banyuls, also the site of his final resting place, has been turned into a museum, the Musée Maillol Banyuls-sur-Mer, where a number of his works and sketches are displayed.
Three of his bronzes grace the grand staircase of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City: Summer (1910–11), Venus Without Arms (1920), and Kneeling Woman: Monument to Debussy (1950–55). The third, the artist's only reference to music, is a copy of an original created for the French city of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Claude Debussy's birthplace.
Nazi-looted art
During the German occupation of France, dozens of artworks by Maillol were seized by the Nazi looting organization known as the E.R.R. or Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce. The Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume lists thirty artworks by Maillol. The German Lost Art Foundation database lists 33 entries for Maillol. The German Historical Museum's database for artworks recovered by the Allies at the Munich Central Collecting Point has 13 items related to Maillol. Maillol's sculpture "Head of Flora" was found in the stash of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of Hitler's art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt together with lithographs, drawings and paintings.
A photograph from May 24, 1946, shows "Six men, members of the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives section of the military, prepare Aristide Maillol's sculpture Baigneuse à la draperie, looted during World War II for transport to France. Sculpture is labeled with sign: Wiesbaden, no. 31."
Jewish art collectors whose artworks by Maillol were looted by Nazis include Hugo Simon, Alfred Flechtheim and many others.
]]
Works
* Mme Henry Clemens van de Velde (c. 1899)
* The Mediterranean (1902–05)
* Action in Chains (1905)
* Flora, Nude (1910)
* ''L'Été sans bras (1911)
*Bathing Woman with Raised Arms (1921)
* Nymph (1930)
* The Mountain (1937)
* L'Air (1938)
* The River (1938–43)
* Harmonie (1944)
* Femme à l’Echarpe'' (circa 1919-20, cast in bronze in edition of 6; certificate of authenticity from model Dina Vierny dated 29.10.1970)
Legacy and Contemporary Influence
Aristide Maillol's work has had a profound and enduring impact on both modern and contemporary art, particularly within the realms of sculpture, the representation of the human body, and the revival of classical forms in the 20th century. His restrained, monumental approach to the female figure influenced numerous artists, sparking discussions about form, abstraction, and the essence of sculpture itself.
One of Maillol's most significant contributions was his rejection of the exaggerated dynamism that characterized much of late 19th-century sculpture, notably the work of his contemporary, Auguste Rodin. Maillol's figures, with their serene and stable forms, marked a return to classical simplicity and purity. This approach resonated with artists like Henry Moore, who cited Maillol as an early influence on his own move toward abstraction and monumentality. Moore admired the way Maillol's work avoided excessive detail, allowing the essential form of the human body to take precedence. In his 1941 writings, Moore stated, "Maillol's influence was important to me because of the calm and permanence that his figures suggest, as well as his return to classical balance and volume."</nowiki>
Additionally, Hans Arp, a Dadaist and Surrealist artist, found inspiration in Maillol's organic forms, which he believed offered a "timeless universality." Arp's abstracted, rounded sculptures share a kinship with Maillol's pursuit of essential, elemental forms, though Arp pushed these ideas further into abstraction.
Art historians such as Hilton Kramer and Albert Elsen have extensively discussed Maillol's unique place in modern sculpture. Kramer remarked that Maillol's works possess an "elemental calm" and reflect an anti-Romantic sentiment, contrasting sharply with the emotional intensity of Rodin. Elsen, in his study of Maillol's work, argued that his influence can be seen in the development of modernist sculpture, particularly through his focus on the essential harmony of form and space, a concept that paved the way for mid-century minimalism.
In more recent decades, Maillol's sculptures have continued to inspire contemporary artists exploring themes of memory, identity, and the body. The French-Lebanese contemporary artist Oliver Aoun incorporated Maillol's sculptures into his project Lisa Rediviva (2012), which juxtaposes classical representations of the female form with fragmented images of the Mona Lisa. Aoun's work engaged with the legacy of Western iconography, questioning the colonial and patriarchal structures embedded within these revered forms. In reinterpreting Maillol's figures, Oliver Aoun critiqued the traditional Western gaze and proposed a more inclusive dialogue around the representation of women in art.
Furthermore, exhibitions such as the 2011 show at the Musée Maillol in Paris, which focused on the dialogue between Maillol and contemporary sculptors, underscore the relevance of his oeuvre in ongoing conversations about the body, space, and abstraction. Artists such as Jean-Michel Othoniel and Louise Bourgeois have also been said to engage with the themes of solidity and fluidity in ways that echo Maillol's approach to form.
Maillol's influence persists not only in sculpture but also in broader conversations about the role of classical ideals in contemporary art, inviting ongoing re-evaluation and reinterpretation.
References
Sources
* Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "Aristide Maillol, 1861–1944", New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975.
* Frèches-Thory, Claire, & Perucchi-Petry, Ursula, ed.: Die Nabis: Propheten der Moderne, Kunsthaus Zürich & Grand Palais, Paris & Prestel, Munich 1993 (German), (French)
Further reading
* Lorquin, Bertrand (1995). Maillol. Skira. .
* Rewald, John (1951). The Woodcuts of Aristide Maillol. New York: Pantheon Books.
External links
*
* [http://www.ilovefiguresculpture.com/masters/maillol/maillol.html Masters of 20th Century Figure Sculpture]
* [http://www.museemaillol.com Maillol Museum]
*
*[https://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/card_search.php?Query=Maillol Aristide Maillol in Cultural Plunder by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg]: Database of Art Objects at the Jeu de Paume
Category:1861 births
Category:1944 deaths
Category:People from Pyrénées-Orientales
Category:French modern sculptors
Category:French male painters
Category:French male sculptors
Category:Nabis (art)
Category:Artists from Occitania (administrative region)
Category:Painters from Catalonia
Category:Sculptors from Catalonia
Category:19th-century French painters
Category:20th-century French painters
Category:20th-century French male artists
Category:19th-century French sculptors
Category:20th-century French sculptors
Category:19th-century French male artists
Category:École des Beaux-Arts alumni
Category:Prix Blumenthal
Category:Road incident deaths in France | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristide_Maillol | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.163429 |
2064 | Antonio Canova | | death_place = Venice, Lombardy–Venetia
| nationality = Republic of Venice (1757–1798)<br />Austria (territory ceded to Austria) (1798–1805)<br />Kingdom of Italy (1805–1814) <br /> Austrian Empire (1814–1822)
| field = Sculpture
| training | movement Neoclassicism
| works =
| patrons | influenced
| awards | elected
| website =
}}
Antonio Canova (; 1 November 1757 – 13 October 1822) was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor, famous for his marble sculptures. Often regarded as the greatest of the Neoclassical artists, his sculpture was inspired by the Baroque and the classical revival, and has been characterised as having avoided the melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter.
Life
Possagno
, The Child Canova Modeling a Lion Out of Butter, c. 1885]]
In 1757, Antonio Canova was born in the Venetian Republic city of Possagno to Pietro Canova, a stonecutter, and Angela Zardo Fantolin. In 1761, his father died. A year later, his mother remarried. As such, in 1762, he was put into the care of his paternal grandfather Pasino Canova, who was a stonemason, owner of a quarry, Indeed, at the age of nine, he executed two small shrines of Carrara marble, which are still extant. After these works, he appears to have been constantly employed under his grandfather. The statues were begun in 1775, and both were completed by 1777. The pieces exemplify the late Rococo style. On the year of their completion, both works were exhibited for the Feast of the Ascension in Piazza San Marco. Canova was paid 100 gold zecchini for the completed work. With such an intention, there is suggestion that Daedalus is a portrait of Canova's grandfather Pasino. Zulian played a fundamental role in Canova's rise to fame, turning some rooms of his palace into a studio for the artist and placing his trust in him despite Canova's early critics in Rome. The highly regarded work is now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London.
In 1790, he began to work on a funerary monument for Titian, which was eventually abandoned by 1795.
In 1797, he went to Vienna, He became so successful that he had acquired patrons from across Europe including France, England, Russia, Austria and Holland, as well as several members from different royal lineages, and prominent individuals. It was completed in 1806. In 1811, the statue arrived in Paris, but not installed; neither was its bronze copy in the Foro Napoleonico in Milan. The work was not intended for public viewing. In 1808 Canova became an associated member of the Royal Institute of Sciences, Literature and Fine Arts of the Kingdom of Holland.
In 1814, he began his The Three Graces.
Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker'' had its inception after Canova was hired to make a bust of Napoleon in 1802. The statue was begun in 1802, with Napoleon requesting to be shown in a French General's uniform, Canova rejected this, insisting on an allusion to Mars, the Roman god of War. It depicts the Greek hero Perseus after his victory over the Gorgon Medusa.
The statue was based freely on the Apollo Belvedere and the Medusa Rondanini.
Napoleon, after his 1796 Italian Campaign, took the Apollo Belvedere to Paris. In the statue's absence, Pope Pius VII acquired Canova's Perseus Triumphant and placed the work upon the Apollo's pedestal. The statue was so successful that when the Apollo was returned, Perseus remained as a companion piece.
One replica of the statue was commissioned from Canova by the Polish countess Waleria Tarnowska; it's now displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Karl Ludwig Fernow said of the statue that "every eye must rest with pleasure on the beautiful surface, even when the mind finds its hopes of high and pure enjoyment disappointed." He had previously visited Canova in his studio in Rome in 1814 and had been immensely impressed by a carving of the Graces the sculptor had made for the Empress Joséphine. When the Empress died in May of the same year he immediately offered to purchase the completed piece, but was unsuccessful as Josephine's son Eugène de Beauharnais claimed it (his son Maximilian, Duke of Leuchtenberg brought it to St. Petersburg, where it can now be found in the Hermitage Museum). Undeterred, the Duke commissioned another version for himself.
The sculpting process began in 1814 and was completed in 1817. Finally in 1819 it was installed at the Duke's residence in Woburn Abbey. Canova even made the trip over to England to supervise its installation, choosing for it to be displayed on a pedestal adapted from a marble plinth with a rotating top. This version is now owned jointly by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland, and is alternately displayed at each.
Artistic process
Canova had a distinct, signature style in which he combined Greek and Roman art practices with early stirrings of romanticism to delve into a new path of Neoclassicism. Canova's sculptures fall into three categories: Heroic compositions, compositions of grace, and sepulchral monuments. These workers would leave a thin veil over the entire statue so Canova's could focus on the surface of the statue.
He was introduced into various orders of chivalry.Literary inspirations
Two of Canova's works appear as engravings in ''Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1834, with poetical illustrations by Letitia Elizabeth Landon. These are of The Dancing Girl and Hebe.
Commemorations
*Canova, South Dakota
*Via Antonio Canova, in Treviso
*Aeroporto di Treviso A. Canova
* The Museo Canova in Possagno
*Tempio Canoviano, in Possagno
Gallery
<gallery>
Antonio Canova from the studio if Canova c.1813.jpg|Antonio Canova from the studio of Canova, c. 1813
Amor-Psyche-Canova-JBU02.JPG|Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, 1787–1793, Louvre
Amor-Psyche-Canova-JBU04.JPG|Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, 1787–1793, Louvre (detail)
Venus Italica by Canova.jpg|Antonio Canova, Detail of Venus Italica, 1804–1812, Galleria Palatina, Florence
Antonio Canova Teseo defeats the centaur.jpg|Theseus Fighting the Centaur (1804–1819), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Antonio canova, danzatrice, ermitage, 01.JPG|Dancer, 1811–1812, The State Hermitage Museum
Canova-Three Graces 0 degree view.jpg|The Three Graces, 1814–1817, Hermitage
Venus Italica MET DP108444.jpg|Venus Italica, c. 1822–23, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Terpsichore by Antonio Canova.jpg|Terpsichore Lyran (Muse of Lyric Poetry)
Perseus Canova Pio-Clementino Inv969.jpg|Perseus Triumphant, Vatican
Canova, maddalena penitente, 02.JPG|The Penitent Magdalene, Palazzo Doria-Tursi, Genoa
Napoleon-Canova-London JBU01.jpg|Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker, Apsley House, London
Paolina Borghese (Canova).jpg|Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix'', now at the Galleria Borghese
Florence, Santa Croce, Antonio Canova, tomb of Vittorio Alfieri, 1810.jpg|Monumental tomb of Vittorio Alfieri, Santa Croce, Florence, 1810
Tomb Monument of Pius VI Gregorovius.jpg|Monument to Pius VI
Tomb of Pope Clement XIII Gregorovius.jpg|Tomb of Clement XIII
Tomb of Pope Clement XIV Gregorovius.jpg|Tomb of Pope Clement XIV
Frith, Francis (1822-1898) - n. 2340 - Tomb of Marie Christine by Canova - Vienna.jpg|Cenotaph to Maria Christina of Austria in the Augustinerkirche
Antonio Canova Cenotaph of Archduchess Maria Christina Augustinerkirche (Wien) panoramic sculpture Austria 2014 photo Paolo Villa August FOTO8412 - FOTO8425auto.jpg|Panorama of Cenotaph to Maria Christina of Austria
Basilica di Santa Maria dei Frari interno - Monumento di Canova.jpg|Monument to Canova in the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, designed by Canova as a mausoleum for the painter Titian
Italy, Antonio Canova Medal by Putinati.jpg|Antonio Canova medal by Putinati
(Venice) Maschera funebre di Antonio Canova - Gesso - Museo Correr.jpg |Antonio Canova's funeral mask, Museo Correr
</gallery>
Notes
References
Sources
*
*
* .
* .
External links
*
* [https://archiviocanova.medialibrary.it/ Antonio Canova Digital Archive], digitisation of the "Fondo Antonio Canova" of the Bassano del Grappa Public Library.
* [https://www.flickr.com/photos/65986072@N00/458745957/ Canova's Three Graces (second version)] in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2000). One of three Flickr photos by ketrin 1407.
* [https://www.flickr.com/photos/65986072@N00/3963111586/ Canova's Perseus and Medusa] in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009). Part of Flickr set by ketrin1407.
*[http://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p15324coll10/id/59328/rec/1 Europe in the age of enlightenment and revolution], a catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art Libraries (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Canova (see index)
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20050723014633/http://www.scultura-italiana.com/Galleria/Canova%20Antonio/index.html Antonio Canova: Photo Gallery]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20080530115839/http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/C0770/ex49.jpg Canova's death mask at Princeton]
*[http://www.museocanova.it/menu.php?namehom&languk Canova museum and plaster cast gallery]
*[http://www.alessandroronchi.net/2008/canova-exhibition-at-forli-san-domenico-museum/ Canova 2009 Exhibition in Forlì, Italy]
Category:1757 births
Category:1822 deaths
Category:People from the Province of Treviso
Category:Republic of Venice sculptors
Category:18th-century Italian sculptors
Category:Italian male sculptors
Category:19th-century Italian sculptors
Category:Neoclassical sculptors
Category:Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Category:Artists of the Boston Public Library
Category:19th-century Italian male artists
Category:Burials at Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari
Category:Elgin Marbles | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Canova | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.204347 |
2065 | Auguste Rodin | Rodin (film)}}
| birth_place = Paris, Kingdom of France
| death_date
| death_place = Meudon, French Third Republic
| field = Sculpture and drawing
| training | influenced
| awards =
| works = ), 1877
|The Walking Man (), 1877–78
|The Burghers of Calais (), 1889
|The Kiss (), 1889
|The Thinker (), 1902}}
| spouse
| module
}}
François Auguste René Rodin (; ; 12 November 184017 November 1917) was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, and deeply pocketed surface in clay. He is known for such sculptures as The Thinker, Monument to Balzac, The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell''.
Many of Rodin's most notable sculptures were criticized, as they clashed with predominant figurative sculpture traditions in which works were decorative, formulaic, or highly thematic. Rodin's most original work departed from traditional themes of mythology and allegory. He modeled the human body with naturalism, and his sculptures celebrate individual character and physicality. Although Rodin was sensitive to the controversy surrounding his work, he refused to change his style, and his continued output brought increasing favor from the government and the artistic community.
From the unexpected naturalism of Rodin's first major figure – inspired by his 1875 trip to Italy – to the unconventional memorials whose commissions he later sought, his reputation grew, and Rodin became the preeminent French sculptor of his time. By 1900, he was a world-renowned artist. Wealthy private clients sought Rodin's work after his World's Fair exhibit, and he kept company with a variety of high-profile intellectuals and artists. His student, Camille Claudel, became his associate, lover, and creative rival. Rodin's other students included Antoine Bourdelle, Constantin Brâncuși, and Charles Despiau. He married his lifelong companion, Rose Beuret, in the last year of both their lives. His sculptures suffered a decline in popularity after his death in 1917, but within a few decades his legacy solidified. Rodin remains one of the few sculptors widely known outside the visual arts community.
Biography
Formative years
Rodin was born in 1840 into a working-class family in Paris, the second child of Marie Cheffer and Jean-Baptiste Rodin, who was a police department clerk. He was largely self-educated, and began to draw at age 10. Between ages 14 and 17, he attended the Petite École, a school specializing in art and mathematics where he studied drawing and painting<!--with Belloc-->. His drawing teacher Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran believed in first developing the personality of his students so that they observed with their own eyes and drew from their recollections, and Rodin expressed appreciation for his teacher much later in life. It was at Petite École that he met Jules Dalou and Alphonse Legros.
In 1857, Rodin submitted a clay model of a companion to the École des Beaux-Arts in an attempt to win entrance; he did not succeed, and two further applications were also denied. so the rejections were considerable setbacks. Rodin's inability to gain entrance may have been due to the judges' Neoclassical tastes, while Rodin had been schooled in light, 18th-century sculpture. He left the Petite École in 1857 and earned a living as a craftsman and ornamenter for most of the next two decades, producing decorative objects and architectural embellishments.
Rodin's sister Maria, two years his senior, died of peritonitis in a convent in 1862, and Rodin was anguished with guilt because he had introduced her to an unfaithful suitor. He turned away from art and joined the Catholic order of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament as a laybrother. Saint Peter Julian Eymard, founder and head of the congregation, recognized Rodin's talent and sensed his lack of suitability for the order, so he encouraged Rodin to continue with his sculpture. Rodin returned to work as a decorator while taking classes with animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. The teacher's attention to detail and his finely rendered musculature of animals in motion significantly influenced Rodin.
In 1864, Rodin began to live with a young seamstress named Rose Beuret (born in June 1844), with whom he stayed for the rest of his life, with varying commitment. The couple had a son named Auguste-Eugène Beuret (1866–1934). That year, Rodin offered his first sculpture for exhibition and entered the studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, a successful mass producer of ''objets d'art''. Rodin worked as Carrier-Belleuse' chief assistant until 1870, designing roof decorations and staircase and doorway embellishments. With the arrival of the Franco-Prussian War, Rodin was called to serve in the French National Guard, but his service was brief due to his near-sightedness. Decorators' work had dwindled because of the war, yet Rodin needed to support his family, as poverty was a continual difficulty for him until about the age of 30. Carrier-Belleuse soon asked him to join him in Belgium, where they worked on ornamentation for the Brussels Stock Exchange.
Rodin planned to stay in Belgium a few months, but he spent the next six years outside of France. It was a pivotal time in his life. Rodin said, "It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture." Returning to Belgium, he began work on The Age of Bronze, a life-size male figure whose naturalism brought Rodin attention but led to accusations of sculptural cheatingits naturalism and scale was such that critics alleged he had cast the work from a living model. Much of Rodin's later work was explicitly larger or smaller than life, in part to demonstrate the folly of such accusations.
Artistic independence
, 1884]]
Rose Beuret and Rodin returned to Paris in 1877, moving into a small flat on the Left Bank. Misfortune surrounded Rodin: his mother, who had wanted to see her son marry, was dead, and his father was blind and senile, cared for by Rodin's sister-in-law, Aunt Thérèse. Rodin's eleven-year-old son Auguste, possibly developmentally delayed, was also in the ever-helpful Thérèse's care. Rodin had essentially abandoned his son for six years, and would have a very limited relationship with him throughout his life. Father and son joined the couple in their flat, with Rose as caretaker. Charges of fakery surrounding The Age of Bronze continued. Rodin increasingly sought soothing female companionship in Paris, and Rose stayed in the background.
Rodin earned his living collaborating with more established sculptors on public commissions, primarily memorials and neo-baroque architectural pieces in the style of Carpeaux. In competitions for commissions he submitted models of Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Lazare Carnot, all to no avail. On his own time, he worked on studies leading to the creation of his next important work, St. John the Baptist Preaching.
In 1880, Carrier-Belleuse – then art director of the Sèvres national porcelain factory – offered Rodin a part-time position as a designer. The offer was in part a gesture of reconciliation, and Rodin accepted. That part of Rodin which appreciated 18th-century tastes was aroused, and he immersed himself in designs for vases and table ornaments that brought the factory renown across Europe.
The artistic community appreciated his work in this vein, and Rodin was invited to Paris Salons by such friends as writer Léon Cladel. During his early appearances at these social events, Rodin seemed shy; in his later years, as his fame grew, he displayed the loquaciousness and temperament for which he is better known. French statesman Leon Gambetta expressed a desire to meet Rodin, and the sculptor impressed him when they met at a salon. Gambetta spoke of Rodin in turn to several government ministers, likely including , the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Fine Arts, whom Rodin eventually met. his income came from private commissions.
In 1883, Rodin agreed to supervise a course for sculptor Alfred Boucher in his absence, where he met the 18-year-old Camille Claudel. The two formed a passionate but stormy relationship and influenced each other artistically. Claudel inspired Rodin as a model for many of his figures, and she was a talented sculptor, assisting him on commissions as well as creating her own works. Her Bust of Rodin was displayed to critical acclaim at the 1892 Salon.
(1888–89) by Camille Claudel]]
Although busy with The Gates of Hell'', Rodin won other commissions. He pursued an opportunity to create a historical monument for the town of Calais. For a monument to French author Honoré de Balzac, Rodin was chosen in 1891. His execution of both sculptures clashed with traditional tastes and met with varying degrees of disapproval from the organizations that sponsored the commissions. Still, Rodin was gaining support from diverse sources that propelled him toward fame.
In 1889, the Paris Salon invited Rodin to be a judge on its artistic jury. Though Rodin's career was on the rise, Claudel and Beuret were becoming increasingly impatient with Rodin's "double life". Claudel and Rodin shared an atelier at a small old castle (the Château de l'Islette in the Loire), but Rodin refused to relinquish his ties to Beuret, his loyal companion during the lean years, and mother of his son. During one absence, Rodin wrote to Beuret, "I think of how much you must have loved me to put up with my caprices...I remain, in all tenderness, your Rodin."
]]
Claudel and Rodin parted in 1898. Claudel suffered an alleged nervous breakdown several years later and was confined to an institution for 30 years by her family, until her death in 1943, despite numerous attempts by doctors to explain to her mother and brother that she was sane.
In 1904, Rodin was introduced to the Welsh artist, Gwen John, who modelled for him and became his lover after being introduced by Hilda Flodin. John had a fervent attachment to Rodin and would write to him thousands of times over the next ten years. As their relationship came to a close, despite his genuine feeling for her, Rodin eventually resorted to the use of concièrges and secretaries to keep her at a distance. The Salon rejected the piece.Early figures: the inspiration of ItalyIn Brussels, Rodin created his first full-scale work, The Age of Bronze, having returned from Italy. Modeled after a Belgian soldier, the figure drew inspiration from Michelangelo's Dying Slave, which Rodin had observed at the Louvre. Attempting to combine Michelangelo's mastery of the human form with his own sense of human nature, Rodin studied his model from all angles, at rest and in motion; he mounted a ladder for additional perspective, and made clay models, which he studied by candlelight. The result was a life-size, well-proportioned nude figure, posed unconventionally with his right hand atop his head, and his left arm held out at his side, forearm parallel to the body.
In 1877, the work debuted in Brussels and then was shown at the Paris Salon. The statue's apparent lack of a theme was troubling to critics – commemorating neither mythology nor a noble historical event – and it is not clear whether Rodin intended a theme. He first titled the work The Vanquished, in which form the left hand held a spear, but he removed the spear because it obstructed the torso from certain angles. After two more intermediary titles, Rodin settled on The Age of Bronze, suggesting the Bronze Age, and in Rodin's words, "man arising from nature". Later, however, Rodin said that he had had in mind "just a simple piece of sculpture without reference to subject". Rodin chose this contradictory position to, in his words, "display simultaneously...views of an object which in fact can be seen only successively".
Despite the title, St. John the Baptist Preaching did not have an obviously religious theme. The model, an Italian peasant who presented himself at Rodin's studio, possessed an idiosyncratic sense of movement that Rodin felt compelled to capture. Rodin thought of John the Baptist and carried that association into the title of the work.
He conceived The Gates with the surmoulage controversy still in mind: "...I had made the St. John to refute [the charges of casting from a model], but it only partially succeeded. To prove completely that I could model from life as well as other sculptors, I determined...to make the sculpture on the door of figures smaller than life."
The Gates of Hell comprised 186 figures in its final form.
The Burghers of Calais
'' (1884–ca. 1889) in Victoria Tower Gardens, London, England]]
The town of Calais had contemplated a historical monument for decades when Rodin learned of the project. He pursued the commission, interested in the medieval motif and patriotic theme. The mayor of Calais was tempted to hire Rodin on the spot upon visiting his studio, and soon the memorial was approved, with Rodin as its architect. It would commemorate the six townspeople of Calais who offered their lives to save their fellow citizens.
During the Hundred Years' War, the army of King Edward III besieged Calais, and Edward ordered that the town's population be killed en masse. He agreed to spare them if six of the principal citizens would come to him prepared to die, bareheaded and barefooted and with ropes around their necks. When they came, he ordered that they be executed, but pardoned them when his queen, Philippa of Hainault, begged him to spare their lives. The Burghers of Calais depicts the men as they are leaving for the king's camp, carrying keys to the town's gates and citadel.
Rodin began the project in 1884, inspired by the chronicles of the siege by Jean Froissart. Though the town envisioned an allegorical, heroic piece centered on Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the eldest of the six men, Rodin conceived the sculpture as a study in the varied and complex emotions under which all six men were laboring. One year into the commission, the Calais committee was not impressed with Rodin's progress. Rodin indicated his willingness to end the project rather than change his design to meet the committee's conservative expectations, but Calais said to continue. rather, each is isolated from his brothers, individually deliberating and struggling with his expected fate. Rodin soon proposed that the monument's high pedestal be eliminated, wanting to move the sculpture to ground level so that viewers could "penetrate to the heart of the subject". At ground level, the figures' positions lead the viewer around the work, and subtly suggest their common movement forward.
The committee was incensed by the untraditional proposal, but Rodin would not yield. In 1895, Calais succeeded in having Burghers displayed in their preferred form: the work was placed in front of a public garden on a high platform, surrounded by a cast-iron railing. Rodin had wanted it located near the town hall, where it would engage the public. Only after damage during the First World War, subsequent storage, and Rodin's death was the sculpture displayed as he had intended. It is one of Rodin's best-known and most acclaimed works. The 1897 plaster model was not cast in bronze until 1964.
The Société des Gens des Lettres, a Parisian organization of writers, planned a monument to French novelist Honoré de Balzac immediately after his death in 1850. The society commissioned Rodin to create the memorial in 1891, and Rodin spent years developing the concept for his sculpture. Challenged in finding an appropriate representation of Balzac given the author's rotund physique, Rodin produced many studies: portraits, full-length figures in the nude, wearing a frock coat, or in a robe – a replica of which Rodin had requested. The realized sculpture displays Balzac cloaked in the drapery, looking forcefully into the distance with deeply gouged features. Rodin's intent had been to show Balzac at the moment of conceiving a work – to express courage, labor, and struggle.
at the studio of his assistant Henri Lebossé in 1896]]
When Monument to Balzac was exhibited in 1898, the negative reaction was not surprising. The Société rejected the work, and the press ran parodies. Criticizing the work, Morey (1918) reflected, "there may come a time, and doubtless will come a time, when it will not seem outre to represent a great novelist as a huge comic mask crowning a bathrobe, but even at the present day this statue impresses one as slang."
The monument had its supporters in Rodin's day; a manifesto defending him was signed by Monet, Debussy, and future Premier Georges Clemenceau, among many others. In the BBC series Civilisation, art historian Kenneth Clark praised the monument as "the greatest piece of sculpture of the 19th Century, perhaps, indeed, the greatest since Michelangelo." Rather than try to convince skeptics of the merit of the monument, Rodin repaid the Société his commission and moved the figure to his garden. After this experience, Rodin did not complete another public commission. Only in 1939 was Monument to Balzac cast in bronze and placed on the Boulevard du Montparnasse at the intersection with Boulevard Raspail.Other works
]]
The popularity of Rodin's most famous sculptures tends to obscure his total creative output. A prolific artist, he created thousands of busts, figures, and sculptural fragments over more than five decades. He painted in oils (especially in his thirties) and in watercolors. The Musée Rodin holds 7,000 of his drawings and prints, in chalk and charcoal, and thirteen vigorous drypoints. He also produced a single lithograph.
Portraiture was an important component of Rodin's oeuvre, helping him to win acceptance and financial independence. His first sculpture was a bust of his father in 1860, and he produced at least 56 portraits between 1877 and his death in 1917. Early subjects included fellow sculptor Jules Dalou (1883) and companion Camille Claudel (1884).
Later, with his reputation established, Rodin made busts of prominent contemporaries such as English politician George Wyndham (1905), Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1906), socialist (and former mistress of the Prince of Wales who became King Edward VII) Countess of Warwick (1908), Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1909), former Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and French statesman Georges Clemenceau (1911).
His undated drawing Study of a Woman Nude, Standing, Arms Raised, Hands Crossed Above Head is one of the works seized in 2012 from the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt.Aesthetic
'' (1877–78)]]
Rodin was a naturalist, less concerned with monumental expression than with character and emotion. Departing with centuries of tradition, he turned away from the idealism of the Greeks, and the decorative beauty of the Baroque and neo-Baroque movements. His sculpture emphasized the individual and the concreteness of flesh, and suggested emotion through detailed, textured surfaces, and the interplay of light and shadow. To a greater degree than his contemporaries, Rodin believed that an individual's character was revealed by his physical features.
Rodin's talent for surface modeling allowed him to let every part of the body speak for the whole. The male's passion in The Thinker is suggested by the grip of his toes on the rock, the rigidness of his back, and the differentiation of his hands.
Sculptural fragments to Rodin were autonomous works, and he considered them the essence of his artistic statement. His fragments – perhaps lacking arms, legs, or a head – took sculpture further from its traditional role of portraying likenesses, and into a realm where forms existed for their own sake. Notable examples are The Walking Man, Meditation without Arms, and Iris, Messenger of the Gods.
Rodin saw suffering and conflict as hallmarks of modern art. "Nothing, really, is more moving than the maddened beast, dying from unfulfilled desire and asking in vain for grace to quell its passion."
George Bernard Shaw sat for a portrait and gave an idea of Rodin's technique: "While he worked, he achieved a number of miracles. At the end of the first fifteen minutes, after having given a simple idea of the human form to the block of clay, he produced by the action of his thumb a bust so living that I would have taken it away with me to relieve the sculptor of any further work."
Since clay deteriorates rapidly if not kept wet or fired into a terra-cotta, sculptors used plaster casts as a means of securing the composition they would make from the fugitive material that is clay. This was common practice amongst Rodin's contemporaries, and sculptors would exhibit plaster casts with the hopes that they would be commissioned to have the works made in a more permanent material. Rodin, however, would have multiple plasters made and treat them as the raw material of sculpture, recombining their parts and figures into new compositions, and new names. which was exhibited at his major one-person show in 1900. This is composed of two sculptures from the 1870s that Rodin found in his studio – a broken and damaged torso that had fallen into neglect and the lower extremities of a statuette version of his 1878 St. John the Baptist Preaching he was having re-sculpted at a reduced scale.
Without finessing the join between upper and lower, between torso and legs, Rodin created a work that many sculptors at the time and subsequently have seen as one of his strongest and most singular works. This is despite the fact that the object conveys two different styles, exhibits two different attitudes toward finish, and lacks any attempt to hide the arbitrary fusion of these two components. It was the freedom and creativity with which Rodin used these practices – along with his activation surfaces of sculptures through traces of his own touch and with his more open attitude toward bodily pose, sensual subject matter, and non-naturalistic surface – that marked Rodin's re-making of traditional 19th century sculptural techniques into the prototype for modern sculpture.
<gallery widths"200px" heights"200px">
File:Rodin The Shade.jpg|The Shade (1880–81), High Museum of Art, Atlanta
File:Age of bronze plaster.jpg|A plaster of The Age of Bronze
</gallery>
Later years (1900–1917)
]]
By 1900, Rodin's artistic reputation was established. Gaining exposure from a pavilion of his artwork set up near the 1900 World's Fair (Exposition Universelle) in Paris, he received requests to make busts of prominent people internationally, As Rodin's fame grew, he attracted many followers, including the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and authors Octave Mirbeau, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde. Rodin moved to the city in 1908, renting the main floor of the Hôtel Biron, an 18th-century townhouse. He left Beuret in Meudon and began an affair with the American-born Duchesse de Choiseul. From 1910, he mentored the Russian sculptor, Moissey Kogan.
United States
, 1881 – c. 1899 bronze, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris]]
While Rodin was beginning to be accepted in France by the time of The Burghers of Calais'', he had not yet conquered the American market. Because of his technique and the frankness of some of his work, he did not have an easy time selling his work to American industrialists. However, he came to know Sarah Tyson Hallowell (1846–1924), a curator from Chicago who visited Paris to arrange exhibitions at the large Interstate Expositions of the 1870s and 1880s. Hallowell was not only a curator but an adviser and a facilitator who was trusted by a number of prominent American collectors to suggest works for their collections, the most prominent of these being the Chicago hotelier Potter Palmer and his wife, Bertha Palmer (1849–1918).
The next opportunity for Rodin in America was the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Hallowell wanted to help promote Rodin's work and he suggested a solo exhibition, which she wrote him was ''beaucoup moins beau que l'original but impossible, outside the rules. Instead, she suggested he send a number of works for her loan exhibition of French art from American collections and she told him she would list them as being part of an American collection. Rodin sent Hallowell three works, Cupid and Psyche, Sphinx and Andromeda. All nudes, these works provoked great controversy and were ultimately hidden behind a drape with special permission given for viewers to see them.
Bust of Dalou and Burgher of Calais were on display in the official French pavilion at the fair and so between the works that were on display and those that were not, he was noticed. However, the works he gave Hallowell to sell found no takers, but she soon brought the controversial Quaker-born financier Charles Yerkes (1837–1905) into the fold and he purchased two large marbles for his Chicago manse;
Other collectors soon followed including the tastemaking Potter Palmers of Chicago and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) of Boston, all arranged by Sarah Hallowell. In appreciation for her efforts at unlocking the American market, Rodin eventually presented Hallowell with a bronze, a marble and a terra cotta. When Hallowell moved to Paris in 1893, she and Rodin continued their warm friendship and correspondence, which lasted to the end of the sculptor's life. After Hallowell's death, her niece, the painter Harriet Hallowell, inherited the Rodins <!-- _?___ --> and after her death, the American heirs could not manage to match their value in order to export them, so they became the property of the French state.
Great Britain
After the start of the 20th century, Rodin was a regular visitor to Great Britain, where he developed a loyal following by the beginning of the First World War. He first visited England in 1881, where his friend, the artist Alphonse Legros, had introduced him to the poet William Ernest Henley. With his personal connections and enthusiasm for Rodin's art, Henley was most responsible for Rodin's reception in Britain. (Rodin later returned the favor by sculpting a bust of Henley that was used as the frontispiece to Henley's collected works and, after his death, on his monument in London.)
Through Henley, Rodin met Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Browning, in whom he found further support. Encouraged by the enthusiasm of British artists, students, and high society for his art, Rodin donated a selection of his works to the nation in 1914.
After the revitalization of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1890, Rodin served as the body's vice-president. In 1903, Rodin was elected president of the International Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers. He replaced its former president, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, upon Whistler's death. His election to the prestigious position was largely due to the efforts of Albert Ludovici, father of English philosopher Anthony Ludovici, who was private secretary to Rodin for several months in 1906, but the two men parted company after Christmas, "to their mutual relief."
During his later creative years, Rodin's work turned increasingly toward the female form, and themes of more overt masculinity and femininity. and the next year sketched studies of her and her students. In July 1906, Rodin was also enchanted by dancers from the Royal Ballet of Cambodia and produced some of his most famous drawings from the experience.
Fifty-three years into their relationship, Rodin married Rose Beuret. They married on 29 January 1917, and Beuret died two weeks later, on 16 February. Rodin was ill that year; in January, he suffered weakness from influenza, and on 16 November his physician announced that "congestion of the lungs has caused great weakness. The patient's condition is grave." in Meudon, Île-de-France, on the outskirts of Paris.
A cast of The Thinker was placed next to his tomb in Meudon; it was Rodin's wish that the figure served as his headstone and epitaph. In 1923, Marcell Tirel, Rodin's secretary, published a book alleging that Rodin's death was largely due to cold, and the fact that he had no heat at Meudon. Rodin requested permission to stay in the Hotel Biron, a museum of his works, but the director of the museum refused to let him stay there.
<gallery widths"200px" heights"200px">
File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-R38535, Auguste Rodin.jpg|Rodin in 1914
File:Musée Rodin de Meudon 04.jpg|Rodin's gravesite at the Musée Rodin de Meudon
</gallery>
Legacy
Rodin willed to the French state his studio and the right to make casts from his plasters. Because he encouraged the edition of his sculpted work, Rodin's sculptures are represented in many public and private collections. The Musée Rodin was founded in 1916 and opened in 1919 at the Hôtel Biron, where Rodin had lived, and it holds the largest Rodin collection, with more than 6,000 sculptures and 7,000 works on paper. The French order made him a Commander, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.
During his lifetime, Rodin was compared to Michelangelo, and was widely recognized as the greatest artist of the era. In the three decades following his death, his popularity waned with changing aesthetic values. he is recognized as the most important sculptor of the modern era, and has been the subject of much scholarly work. The sense of incompletion offered by some of his sculpture, such as The Walking Man, influenced the increasingly abstract sculptural forms of the 20th century.
Rodin restored an ancient role of sculpture – to capture the physical and intellectual force of the human subject To honor Rodin's artistic legacy, the Google search engine homepage displayed a Google Doodle featuring The Thinker to celebrate his 172nd birthday on 12 November 2012.
Rodin had enormous artistic influence. A whole generation of sculptors studied in his workshop. These include Gutzon Borglum, Antoine Bourdelle, Constantin Brâncuși, Camille Claudel, Charles Despiau, Malvina Hoffman, Carl Milles, François Pompon, Rodo, Gustav Vigeland, Clara Westhoff and Margaret Winser, even though Brancusi later rejected his legacy. Rodin also promoted the work of other sculptors, including Aristide Maillol and Ivan Meštrović whom Rodin once called "the greatest phenomenon amongst sculptors." Other sculptors whose work has been described as owing to Rodin include Joseph Csaky, Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Bernard, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Georg Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Jacques Lipchitz, Pablo Picasso, Adolfo Wildt, and Ossip Zadkine. Henry Moore acknowledged Rodin's seminal influence on his work.
Several films have been made featuring Rodin as a prominent character or presence. These include Camille Claudel, a 1988 film in which Gérard Depardieu portrays Rodin, Camille Claudel 1915 from 2013, and Rodin, a 2017 film starring Vincent Lindon as Rodin. Furthermore, the Rodin Studios artists' cooperative housing in New York City, completed in 1917 to designs by Cass Gilbert, was named after Rodin.
<gallery widths"200px" heights"200px">
File:Kiss Rodin.jpg|The Kiss, 1889
File:Auguste Rodin signature.jpg|alt=Artist's signature is raised above the surface of a sculpture.|Rodin's signature on The Thinker
File:Musee Rodin.jpg|The grounds of Musée Rodin
File:Philly042107-009-RodinMuseum.jpg|Rodin Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
</gallery>
Forgeries
The relative ease of making reproductions has also encouraged many forgeries: a survey of expert opinion placed Rodin in the top ten most-faked artists. Rodin fought against forgeries of his works as early as 1901, and since his death, many cases of organized, large-scale forgeries have been revealed. A massive forgery was discovered by French authorities in the early 1990s and led to the conviction of art dealer Guy Hain.
To deal with the complexity of bronze reproduction, France has promulgated several laws since 1956 which limit reproduction to twelve casts – the maximum number that can be made from an artist's plasters and still be considered his work. As a result of this limit, The Burghers of Calais, for example, is found in fourteen cities. and Rodin's bronze Ève, grand modele – version sans rocher sold for $18.9 million at a 2008 Christie's auction in New York. Art critics concerned about authenticity have argued that taking a cast does not equal reproducing a Rodin sculpture – especially given the importance of surface treatment in Rodin's work.
A number of drawings previously attributed to Rodin are now known to have been forged by Ernest Durig.
See also
* List of sculptures by Auguste Rodin
* [https://focusonbelgium.be/en/facts/auguste-rodin-left-many-sculptural-traces-brussels Auguste Rodin left many sculptural traces in Brussels | Focus on Belgium]
* [https://frenchsculpture.org/ FRENCH SCULPTURE CENSUS - French sculpture 1500-1960 in North American public collections]
Citations
Sources
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Further reading
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* Corbett, Rachel (2016). You Must Change Your Life: the Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, New York: W. W. Norton and Company. .
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* Sanyal, Narayan (1984). Rodin, Dey's Publishing Company, Kolkata. .
* Vincent, Clare. [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rodn/hd_rodn.htm "Auguste Rodin (1840–1917)"]. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004)
* Tobias G. Natter, Max Hollein (Eds.): Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter. DelMonico Books – Prestel Publishing, Munich e. a. 2017, ISBN 978-3-7913-5708-9.
External links
* [http://www.musee-rodin.fr/ Musée Rodin, Paris]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20190714185645/https://www.amisderodin.fr/en/ Friends of Rodin], association organizing for its members events around Auguste Rodin
* [http://www.rodinmuseum.org/ Rodin Museum, Philadelphia]
* [https://spmoa.shizuoka.shizuoka.jp/pdf/en/guide/RodinWingGuidebook.pdf Rodin Wing - Guide] at the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka City, Japan
* [http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/artist-info.2251.html#works Auguste Rodin at the National Gallery of Art]
* [http://museum.stanford.edu/view/rodin.html Rodin Collection, Stanford University]
* [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rodn/hd_rodn.htm Auguste Rodin: Timeline of Art History] Metropolitan Museum of Art
* [https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions/2755/Rodin%3A_The_Cantor_Gift_to_The_Brooklyn_Museum?referring-q=Rodin/ Rodin Exhibition] at the Brooklyn Museum Nov 1987 – Jan 1988
* [http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/r/rodin-at-the-v-and-a/ Rodin] at the Victoria and Albert Museum
* [http://www.ils.salford.ac.uk/library/resources/special/butterworth.xml#Butterworth%20Family%20Papers Correspondence with Walter Butterworth] held at the University of Salford
* [http://www.publicartfund.org/view/exhibitions/5856_rodin_at_rockefeller_center Public Art Fund: Rodin at Rockefeller Center]
* [http://www.canal-educatif.fr/en/videos/art/2/rodin/gates-of-hell.html Video documentary about Rodin's work]
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* [https://www.simonowcollection.com/search?q=rodin Works by Rodin in the Simonow Collection] - Abbaye de Flaran, France
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* (by Ranier Maria Rilke, trans. by Jessie Lemont & Hans Trausil)
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* [https://exchange.umma.umich.edu/resources/19776 Portrait of Auguste Rodin by Alphonse Legros] at University of Michigan Museum of Art
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* Exhibition catalogue, [http://www.jillnewhouse.com/catalogues/auguste-rodin-intimate-works Auguste Rodin: Intimate Works], Jill Newhouse Gallery, March 2011
Category:1840 births
Category:1917 deaths
Category:19th-century French sculptors
Category:20th-century French sculptors
Category:Sculptors from Paris
Category:French male sculptors
Category:French printmakers
Category:Grand Officers of the Legion of Honour
Category:French modern sculptors
Category:People of the French Third Republic
Category:People of the July Monarchy
Category:Camille Claudel | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Rodin | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.247491 |
2067 | Ann Arbor, Michigan | | image_flag | image_seal Seal of Ann Arbor, Michigan.svg
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Ann Arbor is a city in Washtenaw County, Michigan, United States, and its county seat. The 2020 census recorded its population to be 123,851, making it the fifth-most populous city in Michigan. Located on the Huron River, Ann Arbor is the principal city of its metropolitan area, which encompasses all of Washtenaw County and had 372,258 residents in 2020. Ann Arbor is included in the Detroit–Warren–Ann Arbor combined statistical area and the Great Lakes megalopolis.
Ann Arbor was founded in 1824 by John Allen and Elisha Rumsey. It was named after the wives of the village's founders, both named Ann, and the stands of bur oak trees they found at the site of the town. The University of Michigan was established in Ann Arbor in 1837, and the city's population grew at a rapid rate in the early to mid-20th century.
A college town, Ann Arbor is currently home to the University of Michigan, which significantly shapes the city's economy, employing about 30,000 workers which includes about 12,000 in its medical center. The city's economy is also centered on high technology, with several companies drawn to the area by the university's research and development infrastructure. The city has been a center for progressive politics as well as several social and religious movements.History Before founding as Ann Arbor The region was once inhabited by several Native American tribes, the most prominent being the Anishinaabe people of the Three Fires: the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi. The Potawatomi founded two villages in the area of what is now Ann Arbor in about 1774. Other tribes that inhabited the area included the Fox, Wyandots, and Sauk. These peoples established several trails that converged on present-day Ann Arbor. The land that included Washtenaw County was ceded to the U.S. by the Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Wyandot in the Treaty of Detroit of 1807.
19th century
Ann Arbor was founded in 1824 by land speculators John Allen and Elisha Walker Rumsey. On May 25, 1824, the town plat was registered with Wayne County as the Village of Annarbour, the earliest known use of the town's name. Allen and Rumsey decided to name it for their wives, both named Ann, and for the stands of bur oak in the of land they purchased for $800 () from the federal government at $1.25 per acre. The local Ojibwa named the settlement , after the sound of Allen's sawmill.
Ann Arbor became the seat of Washtenaw County in 1827 and was incorporated as a village in 1833. The Ann Arbor Land Company, a group of speculators, set aside of undeveloped land and offered it to the state of Michigan as the site of the state capitol, but lost the bid to Lansing. In 1837, the property was accepted instead as the site of the University of Michigan.
at the Ann Arbor station in 1892, with a crowd that included Mayor William Doty and University President James B. Angell|alt=A black-and-white photograph of a crowd of men are standing in a semi-circle around Grover Cleveland. A train car is visible in the top-left corner of the photograph.]]
Since the university's establishment in the city in 1837, the histories of the University of Michigan and Ann Arbor have been closely linked. The town became a regional transportation hub in 1839 with the arrival of the Michigan Central Railroad, and a north–south railway connecting Ann Arbor to Toledo and other markets to the south was established in 1878. Throughout the 1840s and the 1850s settlers continued to come to Ann Arbor. While the earlier settlers were primarily of British ancestry, the newer settlers also consisted of Germans, Irish, and Black people. In 1851, Ann Arbor was chartered as a city, though the city showed a drop in population during the Depression of 1873. with new immigrants from Greece, Italy, Russia, and Poland.
20th century
Ann Arbor saw increased growth in manufacturing, particularly in milling.
Following a 1956 vote, the city of East Ann Arbor merged with Ann Arbor to encompass the eastern sections of the city.
In 1960, Ann Arbor voters approved a $2.3 million bond issue (equivalent to $ million in ) to build the current city hall, which was designed by architect Alden B. Dow. The City Hall opened in 1963. In 1995, the building was renamed the Guy C. Larcom Jr. Municipal Building in honor of the longtime city administrator who championed the building's construction.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the city gained a reputation as an important center for liberal politics. Ann Arbor also became a locus for left-wing activism and anti-Vietnam War movement, as well as the student movement. The first major meetings of the national left-wing campus group Students for a Democratic Society took place in Ann Arbor in 1960; in 1965, the city was home to the first U.S. teach-in against the Vietnam War. During the ensuing 15 years, many countercultural and New Left enterprises sprang up and developed large constituencies within the city. These influences washed into municipal politics during the early and mid-1970s when three members of the Human Rights Party (HRP) won city council seats on the strength of the student vote. During their time on the council, HRP representatives fought for measures including pioneering antidiscrimination ordinances, measures decriminalizing marijuana possession, and a rent-control ordinance.
in 1975|alt=A photograph of a train and several tracks of railroad in front of the Ann Arbor station.]]
Two religious-conservative institutions were created in Ann Arbor; the Word of God (established in 1967), a charismatic inter-denominational movement; Since 1998, Ann Arbor is also the home office of the Anthroposophical Society in the United States, an organization dedicated to supporting the community of those interested in the inner path of schooling known as anthroposophy, developed by Rudolf Steiner. 21st century In the past several decades, Ann Arbor has grappled with the effects of sharply rising land values, gentrification, and urban sprawl stretching into outlying countryside. On November 4, 2003, voters approved a greenbelt plan under which the city government bought development rights on agricultural parcels of land adjacent to Ann Arbor to preserve them from sprawling development. Since then, a vociferous local debate has hinged on how and whether to accommodate and guide development within city limits. Ann Arbor consistently ranks in the "top places to live" lists published by various mainstream media outlets every year.
's headquarters on Eisenhower Parkway in Ann Arbor|alt=See caption]]
In 2016, the city changed mayoral terms from two years to four. Until 2017, City Council held annual elections in which half of the seats (one from each ward) were elected to 2-year terms. These elections were staggered, with each ward having one of its seats up for election in odd years and its other seat up for election in even years. Beginning in 2018 the city council has had staggered elections to 4-year terms in even years. This means that half of the members (one from each ward) are elected in presidential election years, while the other half are elected in mid-term election years. To facilitate this change in scheduling, the 2017 election elected members to terms that lasted 3-years.
In 2020, partly as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the city government opened several downtown streets to pedestrians, limiting their use by motor vehicles to emergency vehicles during summertime weekends. In addition to providing a large pedestrian mall, these changes allow restaurants to use more of the sidewalks and part of the street for outdoor seating. These changes were popular enough that in 2021 the city council extended the dates from March to November, continuing the schedule of cordoning off cars from Thursday evening until Monday morning.
Geography
Ann Arbor is located along the Huron River, which flows southeast through the city on its way to Lake Erie. It is the central core of the Ann Arbor, MI Metropolitan Statistical Area, which consists of the whole of Washtenaw County, but is also a part of the Metro Detroit Combined Statistical Area designated by the U.S. Census Bureau. While it borders only Townships, the built-up nature of the sections of Pittsfield and Ypsilanti townships between Ann Arbor and the city of Ypsilanti make the two effectively a single urban area.Landscape|altA photograph of Huron River, with trees lining the banks of the river.]]
The landscape of Ann Arbor consists of hills and valleys, with the terrain becoming steeper near the Huron River. The elevation ranges from about along the Huron River to on the city's west side, near the intersection of Maple Road and Pauline Blvd. Ann Arbor Municipal Airport, which is south of the city at , has an elevation of . Ann Arbor is nicknamed "Tree Town", both due to its name and to the dense forestation of its parks and residential areas. The city contains more than 50,000 trees along its streets and an equal number in parks. Into the early 2000s, the emerald ash borer has destroyed many of the city's approximately 10,500 ash trees.
The city contains over 160 municipal parks ranging from small neighborhood green spots to large recreation areas such as Buhr Park. Several large city parks and a university park border sections of the Huron River. Fuller Recreation Area, near the University Hospital complex, contains sports fields, pedestrian and bike paths, and swimming pools. Opened in the summer of 2014, the city-funded Ann Arbor Skatepark is a skatepark located within Veterans Memorial Park. The city is also home to the Washtenaw County-owned County Farm Park. The Nichols Arboretum, owned by the University of Michigan, is a arboretum that contains hundreds of plant and tree species. It is on the city's east side, near the university's Central Campus. Located across the Huron River just beyond the university's North Campus is the university's Matthaei Botanical Gardens, which contains 300 acres of gardens and a large tropical conservatory. Several other green spaces around Ann Arbor are privately owned or owned by government agencies such as Ann Arbor Public Schools.
Cityscape
The cityscape of Ann Arbor is heavily influenced by the University of Michigan, with 22% of downtown and 9.4% of the total land owned by the university. The downtown Central Campus contains some of the oldest extant structures in the city—including the President's House, built in 1840—and separates the South University District from the other three downtown commercial districts. These other three districts, Kerrytown, State Street, and Main Street are contiguous near the northwestern corner of the university.
Major landmarks in downtown Ann Arbor include the Michigan Theater, The Diag, and Tower Plaza, a 26-story condominium building that is the city's tallest building. Downtown is also home to several Fairy Doors and other public art installations.
Three commercial areas south of downtown include the areas near I-94 and Ann Arbor-Saline Road, Briarwood Mall, and the South Industrial area. Other commercial areas include the Arborland/Washtenaw Avenue and Packard Road merchants on the east side, the Plymouth Road area in the northeast, and the Westgate/West Stadium areas on the west side. Downtown contains a mix of 19th- and early-20th-century structures and modern-style buildings, as well as a farmers' market in the Kerrytown district. The city's commercial districts are composed mostly of two- to four-story structures, although downtown and the area near Briarwood Mall contain a small number of high-rise buildings.
Ann Arbor's residential neighborhoods contain architectural styles ranging from classic 19th- and early 20th-century designs to ranch-style houses. Among these homes are a number of kit houses built in the early 20th century. Contemporary-style houses are farther from the downtown district.
Climate
Ann Arbor has a typically Midwestern humid continental climate (Köppen Dfa), which is influenced by the Great Lakes. There are four distinct seasons: winters are cold and snowy, with average highs around . Summers are warm to hot and humid, with average highs around and with slightly more precipitation. Spring and autumn are transitional between the two. The area experiences lake effect weather, primarily in the form of increased cloudiness during late fall and early winter. The monthly daily average temperature in July is , while the same figure for January is . Temperatures reach or exceed on 10 days, and drop to or below on 4.6 nights. Precipitation tends to be the heaviest during the summer months, but most frequent during winter. Snowfall, which normally occurs from November to April but occasionally starts in October, averages per season. The lowest recorded temperature was on February 11, 1885, and the highest recorded temperature was on July 24, 1934.
Demographics
thumb|left|Map of racial distribution in Ann Arbor, 2020 U.S. census. Each dot is one person:
Ann Arbor has seen consistent growth in population between all decennial censuses since 1860 with the exception of the 2010 census which reported almost no growth from the previous census. As of the 2020 U.S. census, there were 123,851 people and 49,337 households residing in the city, with a population density of . Ann Arbor has a small population of Arab Americans, including students as well as local Lebanese and Palestinians, and a large community of Japanese nationals.
According to the 2022 American Community Survey estimates, out of 49,337 households, 33.8% were married-couple households, 9.8% were cohabiting couple households, 26.1% had a male householder with no spouse present, and 30.4% had a female householder with no spouse present. 18.4% of the households had individuals under the age of 18 living in them, and 20.1% had individuals over age 65 living in them. The average household size was 2.22 people and the average family size was 2.78 people. The median age was 25.9; 12.2% of the population was under age 18, and 12.3% was age 65 or older. The percentage of city residents age 25 years or older with at least a high school degree was 97.8% while 77.5% had a bachelor's degree or higher, which is higher than the U.S. national percentage of 89.1% for persons age 25 years or older with at least a high school degree and 34.3% with a bachelor's degree or higher. The per capita income for the city was $52,276, which is higher than the U.S. national per capita income of $41,261.
{|class"wikitable sortable collapsible left" style"font-size: 90%,"
|-
! Historical racial composition
! 2020
! 2010
! 1990
! 1970
Economy
interior|alt=See caption]]
The University of Michigan shapes Ann Arbor's economy significantly. It employs about 30,000 workers which includes about 12,000 in the medical center. Other employers are drawn to the area by the university's research and development money, and by its graduates. High tech, health services and biotechnology are other major components of the city's economy; numerous medical offices, laboratories, and associated companies are located in the city. Automobile manufacturers, such as General Motors and Visteon, also employ residents.
High tech companies have located in the area since the 1930s, when International Radio Corporation introduced the first mass-produced AC/DC radio (the Kadette, in 1931) as well as the first pocket radio (the Kadette Jr., in 1933). Current firms include Arbor Networks (provider of Internet traffic engineering and security systems), Arbortext (provider of XML-based publishing software), JSTOR (the digital scholarly journal archive), Truven Health Analytics, and ProQuest, which includes UMI. Duo Security, a cloud-based access security provider of two-factor authentication, is headquartered in Ann Arbor. It was formerly a unicorn and continues to be headquartered in Ann Arbor after its acquisition by Cisco Systems. In November 2021, semiconductor test equipment company KLA Corporation opened a new North American headquarters in Ann Arbor.
Ann Arbor is the home to Internet2 and the Merit Network, a not-for-profit research and education computer network. Both are located in the South State Commons 2 building on South State Street. The city is also home to a secondary office of Google's AdWords program—the company's primary revenue stream. Ann Arbor is home to more than twenty video game and XR studios of varying sizes. The city plays host to a regional chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) which hosts monthly meetups, presentations, and educational events.
The city is the home of many research and engineering centers, including the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory that is operated by NOAA and the Michigan Tech Research Institute. Other research centers sited in the city are the United States Environmental Protection Agency's National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory and the Toyota Technical Center. The city is also home to National Sanitation Foundation International (NSF International), the nonprofit non-governmental organization that develops generally accepted standards for a variety of public health related industries and subject areas.
Non-high tech companies in Ann Arbor include Domino's Pizza, headquartered on Domino's Farms, a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired complex just northeast of the city. Another Ann Arbor-based company is Zingerman's Delicatessen, which serves sandwiches and has developed businesses under a variety of brand names. Avfuel, a global supplier of aviation fuels and services, is headquartered in Ann Arbor as is Pinkerton, a detective and private security firm. Many cooperative enterprises were founded in the city; among those that remain are the People's Food Co-op and the Inter-Cooperative Council at the University of Michigan, a student housing cooperative founded in 1937. There are also three cohousing communities—Sunward, Great Oak, and Touchstone—located immediately to the west of the city limits.
Culture
Several performing arts groups and facilities are on the University of Michigan's campus, as are museums dedicated to art, archaeology, and natural history and sciences. Founded in 1879, the University Musical Society is an independent performing arts organization that presents over 60 events each year, bringing international artists in music, dance, and theater. Since 2001 Shakespeare in the Arb has presented one play by Shakespeare each June, in a large park near downtown. Regional and local performing arts groups not associated with the university include the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre, the Arbor Opera Theater, the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra, The Ark, and Performance Network Theatre. State Theatre and the adjacent Michigan Theater are a movie palace and a performing arts center, respectively.
is listed on the NRHP|alt=A photograph of the front and side facade of the Weinmann Block]]
The Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum, an interactive science center, is located in a renovated and expanded historic downtown fire station. The Ann Arbor Art Center is a nonprofit that organizes art activities and exhibitions. Aside from the Ann Arbor District Library, which maintains four branch outlets in addition to its main downtown building, and being the home to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor ranks first among U.S. cities in the number of booksellers and books sold per capita.
Several annual events—many of them centered on performing and visual arts—draw visitors to Ann Arbor. One such event is the Ann Arbor Art Fairs, a set of four concurrent juried fairs held on downtown streets. Scheduled on Thursday through Sunday of the third week of July, the fairs draw upward of half a million visitors. Another is the Ann Arbor Film Festival, held during the third week of March, which receives more than 2,500 submissions annually from more than 40 countries and serves as one of a handful of Academy Award–qualifying festivals in the United States.
Ann Arbor has a long history of openness to marijuana, given Ann Arbor's decriminalization of cannabis, the large number of medical marijuana dispensaries in the city (one dispensary, called People's Co-op, was directly across the street from Michigan Stadium until zoning forced it to move one mile to the west), the large number of pro-marijuana residents, and the annual Hash Bash: an event that is held on the first Saturday of April. Until (at least) the successful passage of Michigan's medical marijuana law, the event had arguably strayed from its initial intent, although for years, a number of attendees have received serious legal responses due to marijuana use on University of Michigan property, which does not fall under the city's progressive and compassionate ticketing program.
A person from Ann Arbor is called an "Ann Arborite", and many long-time residents call themselves "townies". The city itself is often called "A²" ("A-squared") or "A2" ("A two") or "AA", "The Deuce" (mainly by Chicagoans), and "Tree Town". With tongue-in-cheek reference to the city's liberal political leanings, some occasionally refer to Ann Arbor as "The People's Republic of Ann Arbor" or "25 square miles surrounded by reality." In A Prairie Home Companion broadcast from Ann Arbor, Garrison Keillor described Ann Arbor as "a city where people discuss socialism, but only in the fanciest restaurants." Ann Arbor sometimes appears on citation indexes as an author, instead of a location, often with the academic degree MI, a misunderstanding of the abbreviation for Michigan.SportsAnn Arbor is a major center for college sports, most notably at the University of Michigan. Several well-known college sports facilities exist in the city, including Michigan Stadium, the largest American football stadium and the third-largest stadium of any kind in the world with a capacity of 107,601. The stadium is colloquially known as "The Big House" due to its status as the largest American football stadium. Crisler Center and Yost Ice Arena play host to the school's basketball (both men's and women's) and ice hockey teams, respectively. Concordia University, a member of the NAIA, also fields sports teams.
In semi-professional sports Ann Arbor is represented in the NPSL by AFC Ann Arbor, a soccer club founded in 2014 who call themselves The Mighty Oak.Government
As the county seat of Washtenaw County, the Washtenaw County Trial Court (22nd Circuit Court) is located in Ann Arbor at the Washtenaw County Courthouse on Main Street. Seven judges serve on the court. The 15th Michigan district court, which serves only the city itself, is located within the Ann Arbor Justice Center, immediately next to city hall. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan and Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit are also located in downtown Ann Arbor, at the federal building on Liberty Street.
In the Michigan Legislature, the city is split between Districts 23, 33, 47, and 48 in the Michigan House of Representatives. In the Michigan Senate, Ann Arbor is covered by Districts 14 and 15. Ann Arbor is within the 6th congressional district, currently represented by Debbie Dingell.
|alt=A photograph of the front facade of the Washtenaw County Administration Building]]
Ann Arbor has a council–manager form of government, with 11 voting members: the mayor and 10 city council members. Each of the city's five wards are represented by two council members, with the mayor elected at-large during midterm years. Half of the council members are elected in midterm years, with the other in general election years. The mayor is the presiding officer of the city council and has the power to appoint all council committee members as well as board and commission members, with the approval of the city council. The current mayor of Ann Arbor is Christopher Taylor, a Democrat who was elected as mayor in 2014. Day-to-day city operations are managed by a city administrator chosen by the city council. While Democrats, hold the mayorship and all ten council seats, Ann Arbor has two major political factions. A major source of this local divide is differences in views on the city's growth.
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders"
|+Current Ann Arbor City Council Members
! scope="col" | Ward
! scope="col" | Council member
! scope="col" | Party
! scope="col" | Term
|-
|1
! scope="row" |Lisa Disch
|Democrat
|2024–2028
|-
|1
! scope="row" |Cynthia Harrison
|Democrat
|2022–2026
|-
|2
! scope="row" |Jon Mallek
|Democrat
|2024–2028
|-
|2
! scope="row" |Chris Watson
|Democrat
|2022–2026
|-
|3
! scope="row" |Travis Radina
|Democrat
|2024–2028
|-
|3
! scope="row" |Ayesha Ghazi Edwin
|Democrat
|2022–2026
|-
|4
! scope="row" |Jen Eyer
|Democrat
|2024–2028
|-
|4
! scope="row" |Dharma Akmon
|Democrat
|2022–2026
|-
|5
! scope="row" |Erica Briggs
|Democrat
|2024–2028
|-
|5
! scope="row" |Jenn Cornell
|Democrat
|2022–2026
|}
Education
Primary and secondary education
Public schools are part of the Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS) district. AAPS has one of the country's leading music programs. For the 2021–2022 school year, 17,070 students were enrolled in the Ann Arbor Public Schools. Notable schools include Pioneer, Huron, Skyline, Community high schools, Pathways to Success Academic Campus, and Ann Arbor Open School. The district has a preschool center with both free and tuition-based programs for preschoolers in the district. The University High School, a "demonstration school" with teachers drawn from the University of Michigan's education program, was part of the school system from 1924 to 1968.
Ann Arbor is home to several private schools, including Clonlara School, Michigan Islamic Academy, and Greenhills School, a prep school. The city is also home to several charter schools such as Central Academy (Michigan) (PreK–12) of the Global Educational Excellence (GEE) charter school company.Higher educationThe University of Michigan dominates the city of Ann Arbor, providing the city with its distinctive college-town character. University buildings are located in the center of the city and the campus is directly adjacent to the State Street and South University downtown areas.
Other local colleges and universities include Concordia University Ann Arbor, a Lutheran liberal-arts institution. Washtenaw Community College is located in neighboring Ann Arbor Township. In 2000, the Ave Maria School of Law, a Roman Catholic law school established by Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, opened in northeastern Ann Arbor, but the school moved to Ave Maria, Florida in 2009, and the Thomas M. Cooley Law School acquired the former Ave Maria buildings for use as a branch campus.
Media
The Ann Arbor News, owned by the Michigan-based Booth Newspapers chain, was the major newspaper serving Ann Arbor and the rest of Washtenaw County. The newspaper ended its 174-year daily print run in 2009 due to economic difficulties, and began producing two printed editions a week under the name AnnArbor.com. Ann Arbor has been said to be the first significant city to lose its only daily paper. The publication resumed using its former name in 2013, and also produces a daily digital edition named MLive.com. Another Ann Arbor-based publication that has ceased production was the Ann Arbor Paper, a free monthly. The Ann Arbor Chronicle, an online newspaper, covered local news, including meetings of the library board, county commission, and DDA until September 3, 2014.
Current publications in the city include the Ann Arbor Journal (A2 Journal), a weekly community newspaper; the Ann Arbor Observer, a free monthly local magazine; and Current, a free entertainment-focused alt-weekly. The Ann Arbor Business Review covers local business in the area. Car and Driver magazine and Automobile Magazine are also based in Ann Arbor. The University of Michigan is served by many student publications, including the independent Michigan Daily student newspaper, which reports on local, state, and regional issues in addition to campus news.
Four major AM radio stations based in or near Ann Arbor are WAAM 1600, a conservative news and talk station; WLBY 1290, a business news and talk station; WDEO 990, Catholic radio; and WTKA 1050, which is primarily a sports station. The city's FM stations include NPR affiliate WUOM 91.7; country station WWWW 102.9; and adult-alternative station WQKL 107.1. Freeform station WCBN-FM 88.3 is a local community radio/college radio station operated by the students of the University of Michigan featuring noncommercial, eclectic music and public-affairs programming. The city is also served by public and commercial radio broadcasters in Ypsilanti, the Lansing/Jackson area, Detroit, Windsor, and Toledo.
Ann Arbor is part of the Detroit television market. WPXD channel 31, the owned-and-operated Detroit outlet of the ION Television network, is licensed to the city. Until its sign-off on August 31, 2017, WHTV channel 18, a MyNetworkTV-affiliated station for the Lansing market, was broadcast from a transmitter in Lyndon Township, west of Ann Arbor. Community Television Network (CTN) is a city-provided cable television channel with production facilities open to city residents and nonprofit organizations. Detroit and Toledo-area radio and television stations also serve Ann Arbor, and stations from Lansing and Windsor, Ontario, can be seen in parts of the area. and Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital in nearby Superior Township.
Utilities
The city provides sewage disposal and water supply services, with water coming from the Huron River and groundwater sources. There are two water-treatment plants, one main and three outlying reservoirs, four pump stations, and two water towers. These facilities serve the city, which is divided into five water districts. The city's water department also operates four dams along the Huron River—Argo, Barton, Geddes, and Superior—of which Barton and Superior provide hydroelectric power.
The city also offers waste management services, with Recycle Ann Arbor handling recycling service. Other utilities are provided by private entities. Electrical power and gas are provided by DTE Energy. AT&T Inc. is the primary wired telephone service provider for the area. Cable TV service is primarily provided by Comcast.
A plume of the industrial solvent dioxane is migrating under the city from the contaminated Gelman Sciences, Inc. property on the westside of Ann Arbor. the average measured concentration was found to be 201.19 ppb, with the maximum being 6.000 ppm. While the United States Environmental Protection Agency does not impose a federal limit on the level of the contaminant allowed in drinking water, the World Health Organization suggests a limit of 35 ppb. The Gelman plume is a potential threat to one of the City of Ann Arbor's drinking water sources, the Huron River, which flows through downtown Ann Arbor.Transportation
|alt=See caption]]
The streets in downtown Ann Arbor conform to a grid pattern, though this pattern is less common in the surrounding areas. Major roads branch out from the downtown district to the highways surrounding the city. The city is belted by three freeways: Interstate 94 (I-94), which runs along the southern and western portion of the city; U.S. Highway 23 (US 23), which primarily runs along the eastern edge of Ann Arbor; and M-14, which runs along the northern edge of the city. Other nearby highways include US 12 (Michigan Avenue), M-17 (Washtenaw Avenue), and M-153 (Ford Road). Several of the major surface arteries lead to the I-94/M-14 interchange in the west, US 23 in the east, and the city's southern areas. The Washtenaw County Border-to-Border Trail connects Ann Arbor to Ypsilanti, mostly along the Huron River, for pedestrians, bicycles and other non-motorized transportation.
The Ann Arbor Area Transportation Authority (AAATA), which brands itself as "TheRide", operates public bus services throughout the city and nearby Ypsilanti. The AAATA operates the Blake Transit Center on Fourth Ave. in downtown Ann Arbor, and the Ypsilanti Transit Center. A separate zero-fare bus service operates within and between the University of Michigan campuses. In 2019, 36% of trips in Ann Arbor were taken by walking, biking or transit.
Since April 2012, the "AirRide" connects to Detroit Metro Airport a dozen times a day. The Michigan Flyer, a service operated by Indian Trails, cooperates with AAATA for their AirRide and additionally offers bus service to East Lansing. Greyhound Lines provides intercity bus service. Megabus has direct service to Chicago, Illinois, while a bus service is provided by Amtrak Thruway for rail passengers making connections to services in East Lansing and Toledo, Ohio.
Amtrak, which provides service to the city at the Ann Arbor Train Station, operates the Wolverine train between Chicago and Pontiac via Detroit. The present-day train station neighbors the city's old Michigan Central Depot, which was renovated as a restaurant in 1970. Ann Arbor Municipal Airport is a small, city-run general aviation airport located south of I-94.Sister citiesAnn Arbor has eight sister cities:
* Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany (since 1965) The schools in Ann Arbor and Tübingen have regular exchanges.
*Belize City, Belize (since 1967)
* Hikone, Shiga, Japan (since 1969) The schools in Ann Arbor and Hikone have regular exchanges.
* Peterborough, Ontario, Canada (since 1983)
* Juigalpa, Chontales, Nicaragua (since 1986)
* Dakar, Senegal (since 1997)
* Remedios, Cuba (since 2003)
* Lubny, Ukraine (since 2024)
See also
* Ann Arbor staging
* Ardis Publishing
* List of people from Ann Arbor
Notes
ReferencesWorks cited*
*
*
*
*
*
*
* External links
* [http://www.a2gov.org/ City's official website]
* [http://www.annarbor.org/ Ann Arbor Area Convention and Visitor's Bureau]
*[https://exchange.umma.umich.edu/resources/23607 Collection: "Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan"] from the University of Michigan Museum of Art
*[https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?alistis&c1874608773 Materials on Ann Arbor's history] from HathiTrust
Category:Populated places established in 1824
Category:Academic enclaves
Category:County seats in Michigan
Category:Cities in Washtenaw County, Michigan
Category:Metro Detroit
Category:1824 establishments in Michigan Territory
Category:Geographical articles missing image alternative text | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Arbor,_Michigan | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.311471 |
2070 | Act of Settlement 1701 | | type = Act
| parliament = Parliament of England
| long_title = An Act for the further Limitation of the Crown and better securing the Rights and Liberties of the Subject.
| year = 1701
| citation = 12 & 13 Will. 3. c. 2
| introduced_commons | introduced_lords
| territorial_extent
* (1701–1707)
* (1701–1800; extended by the Parliament of England to the Kingdom of Ireland)
* (1707–1800)
* (1801–1922)
* United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1922–present)
* Canada (1867–1931; became a separate law of Canada as a consequence of Order in Council P.C. 3144 and the Succession to the Throne Act 1937)
* Commonwealth of Australia (1901–42; became a separate law of Australia as a consequence of the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act)
* (1907–47; became a separate law of New Zealand as a consequence of the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act)
* Newfoundland (1907–49; Dominion became a province of Canada)
* (1910–31; became a separate law of the Union of South Africa as a consequence of the Statute of Westminster)
* (1922–31; became a separate law of the Irish Free State as a consequence of the Statute of Westminster)
| royal_assent 12 June 1701
| commencement = 6 February 1701
| expiry_date | repeal_date
| amends | replaces
| amendments
* Royal Succession Act 2013 (New Zealand)
* Succession to the Crown Act 2013 (United Kingdom)
* Succession to the Crown Act 2015 (Australia)
* Succession to the Throne Act 2015 (Barbados)
* Succession to the Throne Act, 2013 (Canada)
* British Nationality Act 1981
* Statute Law Revision Act 1950
* British Nationality Act 1948
* Regency Act 1937
* HM Declaration of Abdication Act 1936
* British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914
* Accession Declaration Act 1910
* Statute Law Revision and Civil Procedure Act 1881
* Short Titles Act 1896
* Aliens Act 1844
* South Africa Act 1962
* Army and Air Force Act 1961
* Electoral Administration Act 2006
* Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010
* Army Act 1955
* Air Force Act 1955
* Aliens' Employment Act 1955
* Armed Forces Act 1966
* Solicitors Act 1974
* Northern Ireland (Elections) Act 1998
* Government of Wales Act 1998
* Scotland Act 1998
* Northern Ireland Act 1998
* Courts Act 2003
* Armed Forces Act 2006
* The European Communities (Employment in the Civil Service) Order 1991
* Regency Act 1705, s. 27 [https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Will3/12-13/2#commentary-c950581]
* Act 1 Geo. 1. St. 2. Sovereign's Power to go Abroad (Restriction Repeated) Act 1715 c. 51 (1715) [https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Will3/12-13/2#commentary-c950581]
* and others
| repealing_legislation | related_legislation Bill of Rights 1689
| status = amended
| legislation_history | theyworkforyou
| millbankhansard | original_text https://www.british-history.ac.uk/statutes-realm/vol7/pp636-638
| revised_text = http://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Will3/12-13/2/contents
| use_new_UK-LEG | UK-LEG_title Act of Settlement (1700)
| collapsed =
}}
The Act of Settlement (12 & 13 Will. 3. c. 2) is an act of the Parliament of England that settled the succession to the English and Irish crowns to only Protestants, which passed in 1701. More specifically, anyone who became a Roman Catholic, or who married one, became disqualified to inherit the throne. This had the effect of deposing the remaining descendants of Charles I, other than his Protestant granddaughter Anne, as the next Protestant in line to the throne was Sophia of Hanover. Born into the House of Wittelsbach, she was a granddaughter of James VI and I from his most junior surviving line, with the crowns descending only to her non-Catholic heirs. Sophia died less than two months before Queen Anne, and Sophia's son succeeded to the throne as King George I, starting the Hanoverian dynasty in Britain.
The Act of Supremacy 1558 had confirmed the independence of the Church of England from Roman Catholicism under the English monarch. One of the principal factors which contributed to the Glorious Revolution was the perceived assaults made on the Church of England by King James II, a Roman Catholic, who was deposed in favour of his Protestant daughter Mary II and her husband William III. The need for this Act of Settlement was prompted by the inability of William and Mary, as well as of Mary's Protestant sister (the future Queen Anne), to produce any surviving children, and by the perceived threat posed by the pretensions to the throne by remaining Roman Catholic members of the House of Stuart.
]]
The act played a key role in the formation of the Kingdom of Great Britain as, though England and Scotland had shared a monarch since 1603, they had remained separately governed countries, with the Act catalysing the Union of England and Scotland. However, the Parliament of Scotland was more reluctant to abandon the House of Stuart, members of which had been Scottish monarchs long before they became English. Moreover, the Act also placed limits on both the role of foreigners in the British government and the power of the monarch with respect to the Parliament of England, though some of those provisions have been altered by subsequent legislation.
Along with the Bill of Rights 1689, the Act of Settlement remains today one of the main constitutional laws governing the succession not only to the throne of the United Kingdom, but to those of the other Commonwealth realms, whether by assumption or by patriation. The Act of Settlement cannot be altered in any realm except by that realm's own parliament and, by convention, only with the consent of all the other realms, as it touches on the succession to the shared crown. On 26 March 2015, following the Perth Agreement, legislation amending the Act came into effect across the Commonwealth realms that removed the disqualification arising from marriage to a Roman Catholic and instituted absolute primogeniture.Backgroundwith Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, whose death in 1700 was the predicate for the Act|altAnne and her son embrace against a Baroque garden background]]
Following the Glorious Revolution, the line of succession to the English throne was governed by the Bill of Rights 1689, which declared that the flight of James II from England to France during the revolution amounted to an abdication of the throne and that James's daughter Mary II and her husband/cousin, William III (William of Orange, who was also James's nephew), were James's successors. The Bill of Rights also provided that the line of succession would go through Mary's Protestant descendants by William and any possible future husband should she outlive him, then through Mary's sister Anne and her Protestant descendants, and then to the Protestant descendants of William III by a possible later marriage should he outlive Mary. During the debate, the House of Lords had attempted to append Sophia and her descendants to the line of succession, but the amendment failed in the Commons.
Mary II died childless in 1694, after which William III did not remarry. In 1700, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, who was Anne's only child to survive infancy, died of what may have been smallpox at the age of 11. Thus, Anne was left as the only person in line to the throne. The Bill of Rights excluded Catholics from the throne, which ruled out James II and his children (as well as their descendants) sired after he converted to Catholicism in 1668. However, it did not provide for the further succession after Anne. Parliament thus saw the need to settle the succession on Sophia and her descendants, and thereby guarantee the continuity of the Crown in the Protestant line.
With religion and lineage initially decided, the ascendancy of William of Orange in 1689 would also bring his partiality to his Dutch favourites that followed. By 1701, anti-Dutch sentiment was widespread in England and action was considered necessary.
Firstly, the monarch "shall join in communion with the Church of England". This was intended to ensure the exclusion of a Roman Catholic monarch. Along with James II's perceived despotism, his religion was the main cause of the Glorious Revolution, and of the previous linked religious and succession problems which had been resolved by the joint monarchy of William III and Mary II.
Second, if a person not native to England comes to the throne, England will not wage war for "any dominions or territories which do not belong to the Crown of England, without the consent of Parliament". This would become relevant when a member of the House of Hanover ascended the British throne, as he would retain the territories of the Electorate of Hanover in what is now Lower Saxony (Germany), then part of the Holy Roman Empire. This provision has been dormant since Queen Victoria ascended the throne, because she did not inherit Hanover under the Salic Laws of the German-speaking states.
Third, no monarch may leave "the dominions of England, Scotland, or Ireland", without the consent of Parliament. This provision was repealed in 1716, at the request of George I who was also the Elector of Hanover and Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg within the Holy Roman Empire; because of this, and also for personal reasons, he wished to visit Hanover from time to time.
Fourth, all government matters within the jurisdiction of the Privy Council were to be transacted there, and all council resolutions were to be signed by those who advised and consented to them. This was because Parliament wanted to know who was deciding policies, as sometimes councillors' signatures normally attached to resolutions were absent. This provision was repealed early in Queen Anne's reign, as many councillors ceased to offer advice and some stopped attending meetings altogether.
Fifth, no foreigner ("no Person born out of the Kingdoms of England Scotland or Ireland or the Dominions thereunto belonging"), even if naturalised or made a denizen (unless born of English parents), can be a Privy Councillor or a member of either House of Parliament, or hold "any Office or Place of Trust, either Civill or Military, or to have any Grant of Lands, Tenements or Hereditaments from the Crown, to himself or to any other or others in Trust for him". Subsequent nationality laws (today primarily the British Nationality Act 1981) made naturalised citizens the equal of those native born, and excluded Commonwealth citizens from the definition of foreigners, and citizens of the Irish Republic from the definition of aliens, but otherwise this provision still applies. It has however been disapplied in particular cases by a number of other statutes.
Sixth, no person who has an office under the monarch, or receives a pension from the Crown, was to be a Member of Parliament. This provision was inserted to avoid unwelcome royal influence over the House of Commons. It remains in force, but with several exceptions; ministers of the Crown were exempted early on before Anne's death in order to continue some degree of royal patronage, but had to stand for a by-election to re-enter the House upon such appointment until 1926. As a side effect, this provision means that members of the Commons seeking to resign from parliament can get around the prohibition on resignation by obtaining a sinecure in the control of the Crown; while several offices have historically been used for this purpose, two are currently in use: appointments generally alternate between the stewardships of the Chiltern Hundreds and of the Manor of Northstead.
Seventh, judges' commissions are valid quamdiu se bene gesserint (during good behaviour) and if they do not behave themselves, they can be removed only by both Houses of Parliament (or in other Commonwealth realms the one House of Parliament, depending on the legislature's structure). This provision was the result of various monarchs influencing judges' decisions, and its purpose was to assure judicial independence. This patent was used prior to 1701 but did not prevent Charles I from removing Sir John Walter as Chief Baron of the Exchequer.
Eighth, that "no Pardon under the Great Seal of England be pleadable to an Impeachment by the Commons in Parliament". This meant in effect that no pardon by the monarch was to save someone from being impeached by the House of Commons.
Family tree
Opposition
The Tory administration that replaced the Whig Junto in 1699 took responsibility for steering the Act through Parliament. As a result, it passed with little opposition, although five peers voted against it in the House of Lords, including the Earl of Huntingdon, his brother-in-law the Earl of Scarsdale and three others. While many shared their opposition to a "foreign" king, the general feeling was summed up as "better a German prince than a French one".Legacy
For different reasons, various constitutionalists have praised the Act of Settlement: Henry Hallam called the Act "the seal of our constitutional laws" and David Lindsay Keir placed its importance above the Bill of Rights of 1689. Naamani Tarkow wrote: "If one is to make sweeping statements, one may say that, save Magna Carta (more truly, its implications), the Act of Settlement is probably the most significant statute in English history".
Union of Scotland with England and Wales
The Act of Settlement was, in many ways, the major cause of the union of Scotland with England and Wales to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Parliament of Scotland had not been consulted about the Act of Settlement, and, in response, passed the Act of Security 1704, through which Scotland reserved the right to choose its own successor to Queen Anne. Stemming from this, the Parliament of England decided that, to ensure the stability and future prosperity of Great Britain, full union of the two parliaments and nations was essential before Anne's death.
It used a combination of exclusionary legislation (the Alien Act 1705), politics, and bribery to achieve this within three years under the Act of Union 1707. This success was in marked contrast to the four attempts at political union between 1606 and 1689, which all failed owing to a lack of political will in both kingdoms. By virtue of Article II of the Treaty of Union, which defined the succession to the throne of Great Britain, the Act of Settlement became part of Scots law as well.
Succession to the Crown
In addition to excluding James II, who died a few months after the Act received royal assent, and his Roman Catholic children, Prince James (The Old Pretender) and the Princess Royal, the Act also excluded the descendants of Princess Henrietta, the youngest sister of James II. Henrietta's daughter was Anne, Queen of Sardinia, a Roman Catholic, from whom descend all Jacobite pretenders after 1807.
With the legitimate descendants of Charles I either childless (in the case of his two grand-daughters the late Queen Mary II and her successor Queen Anne) or Roman Catholic, Parliament's choice was limited to Sophia of Hanover, the Protestant daughter of the late Elizabeth of Bohemia, the only other child of King James I to have survived childhood. Elizabeth had borne nine children who reached adulthood, of whom Sophia was the youngest daughter. However in 1701 Sophia was the senior Protestant one, therefore with a legitimate claim to the English throne; Parliament passed over her Roman Catholic siblings, namely her sister Louise Hollandine of the Palatinate, and their descendants, who included Elizabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Orléans; Louis Otto, Prince of Salm, and his aunts; Anne Henriette, Princess of Condé, and Benedicta Henrietta, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg.
Removal from the succession due to Catholicism
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Since the act's passing the most senior living member of the royal family to have married a Roman Catholic, and thereby to have been removed from the line of succession, is Prince Michael of Kent, who married Baroness Marie-Christine von Reibnitz in 1978; he was fifteenth in the line of succession at the time. He was restored to the line of succession in 2015 when the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 came into force, and became 34th in line.
The next most senior living descendant of the Electress Sophia who had been ineligible to succeed on this ground is George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews, the elder son of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who married the Roman Catholic Sylvana Palma Tomaselli in 1988. His son, Lord Downpatrick, converted to Roman Catholicism in 2003 and is the most senior descendant of Sophia to be barred as a result of his religion. In 2008 his daughter, Lady Marina Windsor, also converted to Catholicism and was removed from the line of succession. More recently, Peter Phillips, the son of Anne, Princess Royal, and eleventh in line to the throne, married Autumn Kelly; Kelly had been brought up as a Roman Catholic, but she converted to Anglicanism prior to the wedding. Had she not done so, Phillips would have forfeited his place in the succession upon their marriage, only to have it restored in 2015.
Excluding those princesses who have married into Roman Catholic royal families, such as Marie of Edinburgh, Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg and Princess Beatrice of Edinburgh, one member of the Royal Family (that is, with the style of Royal Highness) has converted to Roman Catholicism since the passage of the Act: the Duchess of Kent, wife of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, who converted on 14 January 1994, but her husband did not lose his place in the succession because she was an Anglican at the time of their marriage.
Present status
As well as being part of the law of the United Kingdom, the Act of Settlement was received into the laws of all the countries and territories over which the British monarch reigned. It remains part of the laws of the 15 Commonwealth realms and the relevant jurisdictions within those realms. In accordance with established convention, the Statute of Westminster 1931 and later laws, the Act of Settlement (along with the other laws governing the succession of the Commonwealth realms) may only be changed with the agreement of all the realms (and, in some federal realms, the constituent members of those federations). The Succession to the Crown Act 2013 changed many provisions of this Act.
Amendment proposals
Challenges have been made against the Act of Settlement, especially its provisions regarding Roman Catholics and preference for males. However, changing the act is a complex process, since the act governs the shared succession of all the Commonwealth realms. The Statute of Westminster 1931 acknowledges by established convention that any changes to the rules of succession may be made only with the agreement of all of the states involved, with concurrent amendments to be made by each state's parliament or parliaments. Further, as the current monarch's eldest child and, in turn, his eldest child, are Anglican males, any change to the succession laws would have no immediate implications. Consequently, there was little public concern with the issues and debate had been confined largely to academic circles until the November 2010 announcement that Prince William was to marry. This raised the question of what would happen if he were to produce first a daughter and then a son.
The Times reported on 6 November 1995 that Prince Charles had said on that day to Tony Blair and Paddy Ashdown that "Catholics should be able to ascend to the British throne". Ashdown claimed the Prince said: "I really can't think why we can't have Catholics on the throne". In 1998, during debate on a Succession to the Crown Bill, Junior Home Office Minister Lord Williams of Mostyn informed the House of Lords that the Queen had "no objection to the Government's view that in determining the line of succession to the throne, daughters and sons should be treated in the same way."
Australia
In October 2011 the Australian federal government was reported to have reached an agreement with all of the states on potential changes to their laws in the wake of amendments to the Act of Settlement. The practice of the Australian states—for example, New South Wales and Victoria—has been, when legislating to repeal some imperial statutes so far as they still applied in Australia, to provide that imperial statutes concerning the royal succession remain in force.
The legal process required at the federal level remains, theoretically, unclear. The Australian constitution, as was noted during the crisis of 1936, contains no power for the federal parliament to legislate with respect to the monarchy. Everything thus turns upon the status and meaning of clause 2 in the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, which provides: "The provisions of this Act referring to the Queen shall extend to Her Majesty's heirs and successors in the sovereignty of the United Kingdom."
Anne Twomey reviews three possible interpretations of the clause. Canadian scholar Richard Toporoski theorised in 1998 that "if, let us say, an alteration were to be made in the United Kingdom to the Act of Settlement 1701, providing for the succession of the Crown... [i]t is my opinion that the domestic constitutional law of Australia or Papua New Guinea, for example, would provide for the succession in those countries of the same person who became Sovereign of the United Kingdom." In 2002, O'Donohue launched a court action that argued the Act of Settlement violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but, the case was dismissed by the court. It found that, as the Act of Settlement is part of the Canadian constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as another part of the same constitution, does not have supremacy over it. Also, the court noted that, while Canada has the power to amend the line of succession to the Canadian throne, the Statute of Westminster stipulates that the agreement of the governments of the fifteen other Commonwealth realms that share the Crown would first have to be sought if Canada wished to continue its relationship with these countries. An appeal of the decision was dismissed on 16 March 2005. Some commentators state that, as a result of this, any single provincial legislature could hinder any attempts to change this Act, and by extension, to the line of succession for the shared crown of all 16 Commonwealth realms. Others contend that that is not the case, and changes to the succession instituted by an Act of the Parliament of Canada "[in accord] with the convention of symmetry that preserves the personal unity of the British and Dominion Crowns".
With the announcement in 2007 of the engagement of Peter Phillips to Autumn Kelly, a Roman Catholic and a Canadian, discussion about the Act of Settlement was revived. Norman Spector called in The Globe and Mail for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to address the issue of the Act's bar on Catholics, saying Phillips' marriage to Kelly would be the first time the provisions of the Act would bear directly on Canada—Phillips would be barred from acceding to the Canadian throne because he married a Roman Catholic Canadian. Opponents of repeal, such as Enoch Powell and Adrian Hilton, believe that it would lead to the disestablishment of the Church of England as the state religion if a Roman Catholic were to come to the throne. They also note that the monarch must swear to defend the faith and be a member of the Anglican Communion, but that a Roman Catholic monarch would, like all Roman Catholics, owe allegiance to the Pope. This would, according to opponents of repeal, amount to a loss of sovereignty for the Anglican Church.
When in December 1978 there was media speculation that Prince Charles might marry a Roman Catholic, Powell defended the provision that excludes Roman Catholics from ascending the throne, stating his objection was not rooted in religious bigotry but in political considerations. He said a Roman Catholic monarch would mean the acceptance of a source of authority external to the realm and "in the literal sense, foreign to the Crown-in-Parliament ... Between Roman Catholicism and royal supremacy there is, as Saint Thomas More concluded, no reconciliation." Powell concluded that a Roman Catholic crown would be the destruction of the Church of England because "it would contradict the essential character of that church."
He continued:
<blockquote>When Thomas Hobbes wrote that "the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof", he was promulgating an enormously important truth. Authority in the Roman Church is the exertion of that imperium from which England in the 16th century finally and decisively declared its national independence as the alter imperium, the "other empire", of which Henry VIII declared "This realm of England is an empire" ... It would signal the beginning of the end of the British monarchy. It would portend the eventual surrender of everything that has made us, and keeps us still, a nation.</blockquote>
The Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a motion in 1999 calling for the complete removal of any discrimination linked to the monarchy and the repeal of the Act of Settlement. The following year, The Guardian challenged the succession law in court, claiming that it violated the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides,
<blockquote>The enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in this Convention shall be secured without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth, or other status.</blockquote>
As the Convention nowhere lists the right to succeed to the Crown as a human right, the challenge was rejected.
Adrian Hilton, writing in The Spectator in 2003, defended the Act of Settlement as not "irrational prejudice or blind bigotry", but claimed that it was passed because "the nation had learnt that when a Roman Catholic monarch is upon the throne, religious and civil liberty is lost." He points to the Pope's claiming universal jurisdiction, and Hilton argues that "it would be intolerable to have, as the sovereign of a Protestant and free country, one who owes any allegiance to the head of any other state" and contends that, if such situation came about, "we will have undone centuries of common law." He said that because the Roman Catholic Church does not recognise the Church of England as an apostolic church, a Roman Catholic monarch who abided by their faith's doctrine would be obliged to view Anglican and Church of Scotland archbishops, bishops, and clergy as part of the laity and therefore "lacking the ordained authority to preach and celebrate the sacraments." (Hilton noted that the Church of Scotland's Presbyterian polity does not include bishops or archbishops.) Hilton said a Roman Catholic monarch would be unable to be crowned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and notes that other European states have similar religious provisions for their monarchs: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, whose constitutions compel their monarchs to be Lutherans; the Netherlands, which has a constitution requiring its monarchs be members of the Protestant House of Orange; and Belgium, which has a constitution that provides for the succession to be through Roman Catholic houses.
In December 2004, a private member's bill—the Succession to the Crown Bill—was introduced in the House of Lords. The government, headed by Tony Blair, blocked all attempts to revise the succession laws, claiming it would raise too many constitutional issues and it was unnecessary at the time. In the British general election the following year, Michael Howard promised to work towards having the prohibition removed if the Conservative Party gained a majority of seats in the House of Commons, but the election was won by Blair's Labour Party. Four years later, plans drawn up by Chris Bryant were revealed that would end the exclusion of Catholics from the throne and end the doctrine of male-preference primogeniture in favour of absolute primogeniture, which governs succession solely on birth order and not on sex. The issue was raised again in January 2009, when a private member's bill to amend the Act of Succession was introduced in parliament.
Across the realms
In early 2011 Keith Vaz, a Labour Member of Parliament, introduced to the House of Commons at Westminster a private member's bill which proposed that the Act of Settlement be amended to remove the provisions relating to Roman Catholicism and change the primogeniture governing the line of succession to the British throne from male-preference to absolute cognatic. Vaz sought support for his project from the Canadian Cabinet and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, but the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada responded that the issue was "not a priority for the government or for Canadians without further elaboration on the merits or drawbacks of the proposed reforms". Stephenson King, Prime Minister of Saint Lucia, said he supported the idea and it was reported that the government of New Zealand did, as well. The Monarchist League of Canada said at the time to the media that it "supports amending the Act of Settlement in order to modernize the succession rules."
Later the same year, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Nick Clegg, announced that the government was considering a change in the law. At approximately the same time, it was reported that British Prime Minister David Cameron had written to each of the prime ministers of the other fifteen Commonwealth realms, asking for their support in changing the succession to absolute primogeniture and notifying them he would raise his proposals at that year's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth, Australia. Cameron reportedly also proposed removing the restriction on successors being or marrying Roman Catholics; however, potential Roman Catholic successors would be required to convert to Anglicanism prior to acceding<!-- OED (to date, online) has "accede" and "succeed", which is an accurate record of indeed illogical usage --> to the throne. In reaction to the letter and media coverage, Harper stated that, this time, he was "supportive" of what he saw as "reasonable modernizations".
At the 2011 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on 28 October 2011, the prime ministers of the other Commonwealth realms agreed to support Cameron's proposed changes to the Act. The bill put before the Parliament of the United Kingdom would act as a model for the legislation required to be passed in at least some of the other realms, and any changes would only first take effect if the Duke of Cambridge were to have a daughter before a son.
The British group Republic asserted that succession reform would not make the monarchy any less discriminatory. as did Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland, who pointed out that "It is deeply disappointing that the reform [of the Act of Settlement of 1701] has stopped short of removing the unjustifiable barrier on a Catholic becoming monarch."
See also
* Jacobitism
* List of British monarchs
* List of Canadian monarchs
* List of New Zealand monarchs
* List of Australian monarchs
* Royal Succession Bills and Acts
* Succession to the British throne
* Alternative successions of the English and British crown
References
Citations
Notes
Bibliography
*
*
*
* External links
*
*[https://archive.org/stream/statutesatlarge31britgoog#page/n403 Text of the Act of Settlement as originally passed], The Statutes at Large: vol X: 1696/7–1703 (1764), pp. 357–60.
*[http://www.legislation.act.gov.au/a/db_1788/default.asp Official text of the "Act of Settlement 1700" as currently in force in the Australian Capital Territory]
*[https://www.royal.uk/act-settlement-0 British Monarchy web page on the Act of Settlement]
*
*[https://archives.parliament.uk/collections/getrecord/GB61_HL_PO_PU_1_1700_13W3n2 Image of original act from the Parliamentary Archives website]
*
Category:Australian constitutional law
Category:Constitution of Canada
Category:Constitutional laws of England
Category:Constitution of the United Kingdom
Category:Acts of the Parliament of England 1701
Category:Acts of the Parliament of England still in force
Category:1701 in law
Category:1701 in England
Category:Monarchy of Canada
Category:Monarchy of Australia
Category:Monarchy of New Zealand
Category:Succession acts
Category:Succession to the British crown
Category:Succession to the Canadian Crown
Category:Law about religion in the United Kingdom
Category:History of Christianity in Canada
Category:History of Catholicism in England
Category:Anti-Catholicism in England
Category:Sophia of Hanover | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Settlement_1701 | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.356473 |
2075 | Aircraft hijacking | exploding after United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into it during the September 11 attacks. One of the most infamous aircraft hijackings.]]
being held hostage by an armed hijacker in Beirut, Lebanon in 1985]]
Aircraft hijacking (also known as airplane hijacking, skyjacking, plane hijacking, plane jacking, air robbery, air piracy, or aircraft piracy, with the last term used within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States) is the unlawful seizure of an aircraft by an individual or a group. Dating from the earliest of hijackings, most cases involve the pilot being forced to fly according to the hijacker's demands. There have also been incidents where the hijackers have overpowered the flight crew, made unauthorized entry into the cockpit and flown them into buildings—most notably in the September 11 attacks—and in some cases, planes have been hijacked by the official pilot or co-pilot, such as with Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702.
Unlike carjacking or sea piracy, an aircraft hijacking is not usually committed for robbery or theft. Individuals driven by personal gain often divert planes to destinations where they are not planning to go themselves. Some hijackers intend to use passengers or crew as hostages, either for monetary ransom or for some political or administrative concession by authorities. Various motives have driven such occurrences, such as demanding the release of certain high-profile individuals or for the right of political asylum (notably Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961), but sometimes a hijacking may have been affected by a failed private life or financial distress, as in the case of Aarno Lamminparras in Finnair Flight 405. Hijackings involving hostages have produced violent confrontations between hijackers and the authorities, during negotiation and settlement. In several casesmost famously Air France Flight 139, Lufthansa Flight 181, and Air France Flight 8969the hijackers were not satisfied and showed no inclination to surrender, resulting in the deployment of counterterrorist police tactical units or special forces to rescue the passengers.
In most jurisdictions of the world, aircraft hijacking is punishable by life imprisonment or a long prison sentence. In most jurisdictions where the death penalty is a legal punishment, aircraft hijacking is a capital crime, including in China, India, Liberia, and the U.S. states of Georgia and Mississippi.
History
Airplane hijackings have occurred since the early days of flight. These can be classified in the following eras: 1929–1957, 1958–1979, 1980–2000 and 2001–present. Early incidents involved light planes, but this later involved passenger aircraft as commercial aviation became widespread.
1929–1957
Between 1929 and 1957, there were fewer than 20 incidents of reported hijackings worldwide; several occurred in Eastern Europe.
One of the first unconfirmed hijackings occurred in December 1929. J. Howard "Doc" DeCelles was flying a postal route for a Mexican firm, Transportes Aeras Transcontinentales, ferrying mail from San Luis Potosí to Torreon and then on to Guadalajara. Saturnino Cedillo, the governor of the state of San Luis Potosí, ordered him to divert. Several other men were also involved, and through an interpreter, DeCelles had no choice but to comply. He was allegedly held captive for several hours under armed guard before being released.
The first recorded aircraft hijack took place on February 21, 1931, in Arequipa, Peru. Byron Richards, flying a Ford Tri-Motor, was approached on the ground by armed revolutionaries. He refused to fly them anywhere during a 10-day standoff. Richards was informed that the revolution was successful and he could be freed in return for flying one of the men to Lima.
The following year, in September 1932, a Sikorsky S-38 with registration P-BDAD, registered to Nyrba do Brasil, was seized in the company's hangar by three men, who took a hostage. Despite having no flying experience, they managed to take off. However, the aircraft crashed in São João de Meriti, killing the four men. Apparently, the hijack was related to the events of the Constitutionalist Revolution in São Paulo; it is considered to be the first hijack that took place in Brazil.
On October 28, 1939, the first murder on a plane took place in Brookfield, Missouri, US. The victim was Carl Bivens, a flight instructor, who was teaching a man named Earnest P. "Larry" Pletch. While airborne in a Taylor Cub monoplane, Pletch shot Bivens twice in the back of the head. Pletch later told prosecutors, "Carl was telling me I had a natural ability and I should follow that line", adding, "I had a revolver in my pocket and without saying a word to him, I took it out of my overalls and I fired a bullet into the back of his head. He never knew what struck him." The Chicago Daily Tribune stated it was one of the most spectacular crimes of the 20th century. Pletch pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. However, he was released on March 1, 1957, after serving 17 years, and lived until June 2001.
In 1942 near Malta, two New Zealanders, a South African, and an Englishman achieved the first confirmed in-air hijack when they overpowered their captors aboard an Italian seaplane that was flying them to a prisoner-of-war camp. As they approached an Allied base, they were strafed by Supermarine Spitfires unaware of the aircraft's true operators and forced to land on the water. However, all on board survived to be picked up by a British boat.
In the years following World War II, Philip Baum, an aviation security expert, suggested that the development of a rebellious youth "piggybacking on to any cause which challenged the status quo or acted in support of those deemed oppressed" may have been a contributor to attacks against the aviation field. After this incident and others in the 1950s, airlines recommended that flight crews comply with the hijackers' demands rather than risk a violent confrontation.
On 23 July 1956, in the Hungarian People's Republic, seven passengers hijacked a domestic flight of Malév Hungarian Airlines, a Lisunov Li-2 (registration HA-LIG), to escape from behind the Iron Curtain, and flew it to West Germany. The aircraft landed safely at Ingolstadt Air Base without injuries.
An aircraft belonging to the airline Lloyd Aereo Boliviano was hijacked in Bolivia on September 26, 1956. The DC-4 was carrying 47 prisoners who were being transported from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, to El Alto, in La Paz. A political group was waiting to take them to a concentration camp located in Carahuara de Carangas, Oruro. The 47 prisoners overpowered the crew and gained control of the aircraft while airborne and diverted the plane to Tartagal, Argentina. Prisoners took control of the aircraft and received instructions to again fly to Salta, Argentina, as the airfield in Tartagal was not big enough. Upon landing, they told the government of the injustice they were subjected to, and received political asylum.
On October 22, 1956, French forces hijacked a Moroccan airplane carrying leaders of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) during the ongoing Algerian War. The plane, which was carrying Ahmed Ben Bella, Hocine Aït Ahmed, and Mohamed Boudiaf, was destined to leave from Palma de Mallorca for Tunis where the FLN leaders were to conference with Prime Minister Habib Bourguiba, but French forces redirected the flight to occupied Algiers, where the FLN leaders were arrested.
Australia was relatively untouched by the threat of hijackings until July 19, 1960. On that evening, a 22-year-old Russian man attempted to divert Trans Australia Airlines Flight 408 to Darwin or Singapore. The incidents were frequent and often just an inconvenience, which resulted in television shows creating parodies. Time magazine even ran a lighthearted comedy piece called "What to Do When the Hijacker Comes". Most incidents occurred in the United States. There were two distinct types: hijackings for transportation elsewhere and hijackings for extortion with the threat of harm.
The Eastern Air Lines Shuttle Flight 1320 on May 17, 1970, witnessed the first fatality in the course of a U.S. hijacking.
Incidents also became problematic outside of the U.S. For instance, in 1968, El Al Flight 426 was seized by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) militants on 23 July, an incident which lasted 40 days, making it one of the longest. This record was later beaten in 1999.
As a result of the evolving threat, President Nixon issued a directive in 1970 to promote security at airports, electronic surveillance and multilateral agreements for tackling the problem. Incidents also became notoriousin 1971, a man known as D. B. Cooper hijacked a plane and extorted US$200,000 in ransom before parachuting over Oregon. He was never identified.
On August 20, 1971, a Pakistan Air Force T-33 military plane was hijacked prior the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 in Karachi. Lieutenant Matiur Rahman attacked Officer Rashid Minhas and attempted to land in India. Minhas deliberately crashed the plane into the ground near Thatta to prevent the diversion.
Countries around the world continued their efforts to tackle crimes committed on-board planes. The Tokyo Convention, drafted in 1958, established an agreement between signatories that the "state in which the aircraft is registered is competent to exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed on board that aircraft while it is in flight". The Convention came into force in December 1969.
A year later, in December 1970, the Hague Convention was drafted which punishes hijackers, enabling each state to prosecute a hijacker if that state does not extradite them, and to deprive them from asylum from prosecution. Airports slowly implemented walk-through metal detectors, hand-searches and X-ray machines, to prohibit weapons and explosive devices. Between 1968 and 1977, there were approximately 41 hijackings per year. 1980–2000 By 1980, airport screening and greater cooperation from the international community led to fewer successful hijackings; the number of events had significantly dropped below the 1968 level. Between 1978 and 1988, there were roughly 26 incidents of hijackings a year.
During the 1990s, there was relative peace in the United States airspace as the threat of domestic hijacking was seen as a distant memory. Globally, however, hijackings still persisted. Between 1993 and 2003, the highest number of hijackings occurred in 1993 (see table below). This number can be attributed to events in China where hijackers were trying to gain political asylum in Taiwan. On 12 April 1999, six ELN members hijacked a Fokker 50 of Avianca Flight 9463, flying from Bucaramanga to Bogotá. Many hostages were held for more than a year, and the last hostage was finally freed 19 months after the hijacking.
{| class"wikitable" style"margin:1em auto;"
|+Annual hijack incidents, 1993–2003 Until the September 11 attacks, there had never been an incident whereby a passenger aircraft was used as a weapon of mass destruction. The 9/11 Commission report stated that it was always assumed that a "hijacking would take the traditional form"; therefore, airline crews never had a contingency plan for a suicide-hijacking. As Patrick Smith, an airline pilot, summarizes:
a set of presumptions based on decades-long track record of hijackings. In years past, a hijacking meant a diversion, with hostage negotiations and standoffs. The only weapon that mattered was the intangible one: the element of surprise.}}
Throughout the mid-2000s, hijackings still occurred but there were much fewer incidents and casualties. The number of incidents had been declining, even before the September 11 attacks. One notable incident in 2006 was the hijacking of Turkish Airlines Flight 1476, flying from Tirana to Istanbul, which was seized by a man named Hakan Ekinci. The aircraft, with 107 passengers and 6 crew, made distress calls to air traffic control and the plane was escorted by military aircraft before landing safely at Brindisi, Italy. In 2007, several incidents occurred in the Middle East and Northern Africa; hijackers in one of these incidents claimed to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Towards the end of the decade, AeroMexico experienced its first terror incident when Flight 576 was hijacked by a man demanding to speak with President Calderón. In 2007, a man failed to hijack a 737-200 with 103 people on board over Chad.
Between 2010 and 2019, the Aviation Safety Network estimates there have been 15 hijackings worldwide with three fatalities. This is a considerably lower figure than in previous decades which can be attributed to greater security enhancements and awareness of September 11–style attacks. On June 29, 2012, an attempt was made to hijack Tianjin Airlines Flight GS7554 from Hotan to Ürümqi in China. More recently was the 2016 hijacking of EgyptAir Flight MS181, involving an Egyptian man who claimed to have a bomb and ordered the plane to land in Cyprus. He surrendered several hours later, after freeing the passengers and crew. Until September 2001, the FAA set and enforced a "layered" system of defense: hijacking intelligence, passenger pre-screening, checkpoint screening and on-board security. The idea was that if one layer were later to fail, another would be able stop a hijacker from boarding a plane. However, the 9/11 Commission found that this layered approach was flawed and unsuitable to prevent the September 11 attacks. The U.S. Transportation Security Administration has since strengthened this approach, with a greater emphasis on intelligence sharing. On-board security In the history of hijackings, most incidents involved planes being forced to land at a certain destination with demands. As a result, commercial airliners adopted a "total compliance" rule which taught pilots and cabin crew to comply with the hijackers' demands. Although total compliance is still relevant, the events of September 11 changed this paradigm as this technique cannot prevent a murder-suicide hijacking.
After the September 11 attacks, it became evident that each hijacking situation needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Cabin crew, now aware of the severe consequences, have a greater responsibility for maintaining control of their aircraft. Most airlines also give crew members training in self-defense tactics. Ever since the 1970s, crew are taught to be vigilant for suspicious behaviour. For example, passengers who have no carry-on luggage, or are standing next to the cockpit door with fidgety movements. There have been various incidents when crew and passengers intervened to prevent attacks: on December 22, 2001, Richard Reid attempted to ignite explosives on American Airlines Flight 63. In 2009, on Northwest Flight 253, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate explosives sewn into his underwear. In 2012, the attempted hijacking of Tianjin Airlines Flight 7554 was stopped when cabin crew placed a trolley in-front of the cockpit door and asked passengers for help. Cockpit security As early as 1964, the FAA required cockpit doors on commercial aircraft be kept locked during flight. Also in 2002, aircraft manufacturers such as Airbus introduced a reinforced cockpit door which is resistant to gunfire and forced entry. Shortly afterwards, the FAA required operators of more than 6,000 aircraft to install tougher cockpit doors by April 9, 2003. In 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525 was seized by the co-pilot and deliberately crashed, while the captain was out. The captain was unable to re-enter the cockpit, because the airline had already reinforced the cockpit door. The European Aviation Safety Agency issued a recommendation for airlines to ensure that at least two people, one pilot and a member of cabin crew, occupy the cockpit during flight. The FAA in the United States enforce a similar rule.
Air marshal service
Some countries operate a marshal service, which puts members of law enforcement on high-risk flights based on intelligence. According to the Congressional Research Service, the budget for the U.S. Federal Air Marshal Service was US$719 million in 2007.
Air traffic control
There is no generic or set of rules for handling a hijacking situation. Air traffic controllers are expected to exercise their best judgement and expertise when dealing with the apparent consequences of an unlawful interference or hijack. Depending on the jurisdiction, the controller will inform authorities, such as the military, who will escort the hijacked plane. Controllers are expected to keep communications to a minimum and clear the runway for a possible landing. The Court also ruled that the Minister of Defense is constitutionally not entitled to act in terrorism matters, as this is the duty of the state and federal police forces. President of Germany Horst Köhler urged judicial review of the constitutionality of the Luftsicherheitsgesetz after he signed it into law in 2005.
India
India published its anti-hijacking policy in August 2005. The policy came into force after approval from the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS). The main points of the policy are:
* Any attempt to hijack will be considered an act of aggression against the country and will prompt a response fit for an aggressor.
* Hijackers, if captured alive, will be put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to death.
* Hijackers will be engaged in negotiations only to bring the incident to an end, to comfort passengers and to prevent loss of lives.
* The hijacked plane will be shot down if it is deemed to become a missile heading for strategic targets.
* The hijacked plane will be escorted by armed fighter aircraft and will be forced to land.
* A hijacked grounded plane will not be allowed to take off under any circumstance.
United States
Prior to the September 11 attacks, countermeasures were focused on "traditional" hijackings. As such, there were no specific rules for handling suicide hijackings, where aircraft would be used as a weapon. In 2003, the military stated that fighter pilots exercise this scenario several times a week.
Other countries
Poland and Russia are among other countries that have had laws or directives for shooting down hijacked planes. However, in September 2008 the Polish Constitutional Court ruled that the Polish rules were unconstitutional, and voided them.International lawTokyo Convention
The Convention on Offences and Certain Other Acts Committed on Board Aircraft, known as the Tokyo Convention, is an international treaty which entered force on December 4, 1969. , it has been ratified by 186 parties. Article 11 of the Tokyo Convention states the following:
The signatories agree that if there is unlawful takeover of an aircraft, or a threat of it on their territory, then they will take all necessary measures to regain or keep control over an aircraft. The captain can also disembark a suspected person on the territory of any country, where the aircraft lands, and that country must agree to it, as stated in Articles 8 and 12 of the convention.
Hague Convention
The Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft (known as the Hague Convention) went into effect on October 14, 1971. , the convention has 185 signatories.
Montreal Convention
The Montreal Convention is a multilateral treaty adopted by a diplomatic meeting of ICAO member states in 1999. It amended important provisions of the Warsaw Convention's regime concerning compensation for the victims of air disasters.
In popular culture
*The 1942 Superman film Japoteurs depicts Superman saving Metropolis from a bombardier hijacked by Japanese spies during World War II.
*The 1997 Hollywood film Air Force One is based on the fictional hijacking of Air Force One.
* Hijacking is a central theme in the Turbulence movie trilogy.
*In Mission: Impossible 2, one of the film's antagonists hijacks a plane at the start of the movie.
*The 2006 film United 93 is based on the real events onboard United Airlines Flight 93 one of the four airlines hijacked during the September 11 attacks.
*The 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises features an opening sequence of hijacking and crashing an aircraft for the purpose of kidnapping a man and faking his death.
*The film Con Air features a U.S. Marshals aircraft being hijacked by the maximum-security prisoners on board.
*The Taking of Flight 847: The Uli Derickson Story was a made-for-TV film based on the actual hijacking of TWA Flight 847, as seen through the eyes of the chief flight attendant Uli Derickson.
*Passenger 57 depicts an airline security expert trapped on a passenger jet when terrorists seize control.
*Executive Decision depicts a Boeing 747 carrying 400 passengers being hijacked by Algerian terrorists, and U.S. marine and Army special forces use a reconnaissance aircraft to re-take the plane.
*Skyjacked is a 1972 film about a crazed Vietnam War veteran hijacking an airliner, demanding to be taken to the Soviet Union.
*The 1986 film The Delta Force depicted a Special Forces squad tasked with retaking a plane hijacked by Lebanese terrorists, loosely based on the hijacking of TWA Flight 847.
*The 2004 film The Assassination of Richard Nixon, based on a true incident, depicts a disillusioned tire salesman who attempts to hijack a plane in 1974 and crash it into the White House. His attempt failed and he was mortally wounded by an airport policeman. He killed himself before police stormed the plane.
*The 2006 film Snakes On a Plane is a fictional story about aircraft piracy through the in-flight release of venomous snakes.
*In Harold and Kumar 2, two U.S. Air Marshals subdue Harold and Kumar on board a plane after mistaking them for terrorists.
*The 2011 film Payanam is a movie entirely based on the negotiations and rescue operations done by the Indian security forces in response to a flight hijacking incident.
*In the 2013 video game Grand Theft Auto V the player is tasked with hijacking a cargo plane carrying a large shipment of weapons by crashing a crop duster into the cargo bay mid-flight and fighting to seize control of the aircraft. The cargo plane is later shot down by the US Air Force, requiring the player to bail out.
*The 2014 film Non-Stop depicts an aircraft hijacking.
*The Indian film Neerja is based on the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 in Karachi.
*In 2016, German television broadcast the film , in which a Bundeswehr military pilot shoots down a hijacked passenger plane with 164 people on board that was heading towards a stadium filled with 70,000 people. Following the broadcast, a public vote was called for in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and 86.9% of viewers voted that the pilot was not guilty of murder.
*The 2019 film 7500 depicts the struggle of a pilot to land an aircraft and maintain control of its cockpit during a hijacking.
*The 2023 Apple TV+ original series Hijack stars Idris Elba as Sam, a talented business negotiator, who embarks on a mission to broker a peaceful end to a hijacking of his 7-hour flight from Dubai to London.
*The 2024 Indian Netflix web-series IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack reconstructs the real events onboard Indian Airlines Flight 814
See also
* Air pirate
* Airport security
* Canadian Air Transport Security Authority
* Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair
* El Al
* Federal Air Marshal Service
* Federal Bureau of Investigation
* Federal crime in the United States
* List of aircraft hijackings
* List of Cuba–United States aircraft hijackings
* Palestinian political violence
* Terrorism
* Transportation Security Administration (TSA)
* United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
References
External links
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20120119012735/http://www.fortnightjournal.com/dolan-morgan/258-the-first-hijacking-myth.html "The First Hijacking Myth" at Fortnight Journal]
* [https://mikedashhistory.com/2014/12/30/americas-first-highjacking/ "America's first highjacking" at A Blast From the Past]
Category:Aviation risks
Category:Aviation security
Category:Terrorism tactics | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_hijacking | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.410558 |
2076 | Acropolis of Athens | |ID = 404
|Area = 3.04 ha
|Buffer_zone = 116.71 ha
|locmapin = Greece
|map_caption = Location in Greece
|Year=1987}}
The Acropolis of Athens (; ) is an ancient citadel located on a rocky outcrop above the city of Athens, Greece, and contains the remains of several ancient buildings of great architectural and historical significance, the most famous being the Parthenon. The word Acropolis is . The term acropolis is generic and there are many other acropoleis in Greece. During ancient times the Acropolis of Athens was also more properly known as Cecropia, after the legendary serpent-man Cecrops, the supposed first Athenian king.
While there is evidence that the hill was inhabited as early as the 4th millennium BC, it was Pericles (–429 BC) in the fifth century BC who coordinated the construction of the buildings whose present remains are the site's most important ones, including the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Erechtheion and the Temple of Athena Nike. The Parthenon and the other buildings were seriously damaged during the 1687 siege by the Venetians during the Morean War when gunpowder being stored by the then Turkish rulers in the Parthenon was hit by a Venetian bombardment and exploded.
History
<br /><small> The wooded Hill of the Nymphs is half-visible on its right, and Philopappos Hill on the left, immediately behind. The Philopappos Monument is seen here where, in the distant background, the coast of Peloponnese meets the waters of the Saronic Gulf.</small>]]<!-- Please note, the Parthenon is not an acropolis, but rather sits upon one -->
Early settlement
The Acropolis is located on a flattish-topped rock that rises above sea level in the city of Athens, with a surface area of about . While the earliest artifacts date to the Middle Neolithic era, there have been documented habitations in Attica from the Early Neolithic period (6th millennium BC).
There can be little doubt that a Mycenaean megaron palace stood upon the hill during the late Bronze Age. Nothing of this structure survives except, probably, a single limestone column base and pieces of several sandstone steps. Soon after the palace was constructed, a Cyclopean massive circuit wall was built, 760 meters long, up to 10 meters high, and ranging from 3.5 to 6 meters thick. From the end of the Helladic IIIB (1300–1200 BC) on, this wall would serve as the main defense for the acropolis until the 5th century. The wall consisted of two parapets built with large stone blocks and cemented with an earth mortar called emplekton (Greek: ἔμπλεκτον). The wall uses typical Mycenaean conventions in that it followed the natural contour of the terrain and its gate, which was towards the south, was arranged obliquely, with a parapet and tower overhanging the incomers' right-hand side, thus facilitating defense. There were two lesser approaches up the hill on its north side, consisting of steep, narrow flights of steps cut in the rock. Homer is assumed to refer to this fortification when he mentions the "strong-built house of Erechtheus" (Odyssey 7.81). At some time before the 13th century BC, an earthquake caused a fissure near the northeastern edge of the Acropolis. This fissure extended some 35 meters to a bed of soft marl in which a well was dug. An elaborate set of stairs was built and the well served as an invaluable, protected source of drinking water during times of siege for some portion of the Mycenaean period.
Archaic Acropolis
. Fragments of the sculptures in its pediments are in the Acropolis Museum.]]
Not much is known about the architectural appearance of the Acropolis until the Archaic era. During the 7th and the 6th centuries BC, the site was controlled by Kylon during the failed Kylonian revolt, and twice by Peisistratos; each of these was attempts directed at seizing political power by ''coups d'état. Apart from the Hekatompedon mentioned later, Peisistratos also built an entry gate or propylaea. Nevertheless, it seems that a nine-gate wall, the Enneapylon, had been built around the acropolis hill and incorporated the biggest water spring, the Clepsydra, at the northwestern foot.
A temple to Athena Polias, the tutelary deity of the city, was erected between 570 and 550 BC. This Doric limestone building, from which many relics survive, is referred to as the Hekatompedon (Greek for "hundred–footed"), Ur-Parthenon (German for "original Parthenon" or "primitive Parthenon"), H–Architecture or Bluebeard temple, after the pedimental three-bodied man-serpent sculpture, whose beards were painted dark blue. Whether this temple replaced an older one or just a sacred precinct or altar is not known. Probably, the Hekatompedon was built where the Parthenon now stands.
by the armies of Xerxes I, during the Second Persian invasion of Greece, 480–479 BC]]
Between 529 and 520 BC yet another temple was built by the Pisistratids, the Old Temple of Athena, usually referred to as the Arkhaios Neōs (ἀρχαῖος νεώς, "ancient temple"). This temple of Athena Polias was built upon the Dörpfeld foundations, between the Erechtheion and the still-standing Parthenon. The Arkhaios Neōs was destroyed as part of the Achaemenid destruction of Athens during the Second Persian invasion of Greece during 480–479 BC; however, the temple was probably reconstructed during 454 BC, since the treasury of the Delian League was transferred in its opisthodomos. The temple may have been burnt down during 406/405 BC as Xenophon mentions that the old temple of Athena was set afire. Pausanias does not mention it in his 2nd century AD Description of Greece.
Around 500 BC the Hekatompedon was dismantled to make place for a new grander building, the Older Parthenon (often referred to as the Pre-Parthenon or Early Parthenon). For this reason, Athenians decided to stop the construction of the Olympieion temple which was connoted with the tyrant Peisistratos and his sons, and, instead, used the Piraeus limestone destined for the Olympieion to build the Older Parthenon. To accommodate the new temple, the south part of the summit was cleared, made level by adding some 8,000 two-ton blocks of limestone, a foundation deep at some points, and the rest was filled with soil kept in place by the retaining wall. However, after the victorious Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, the plan was revised and marble was used instead. The limestone phase of the building is referred to as Pre-Parthenon I and the marble phase as Pre-Parthenon II. In 485 BC, construction stalled to save resources as Xerxes became king of Persia, and war seemed imminent.
The Older Parthenon was still under construction when the Persians invaded and sacked the city in 480 BC. The building was burned and looted, along with the Ancient Temple and practically everything else on the rock. After the Persian crisis had subsided, the Athenians incorporated many architectural parts of the unfinished temple (unfluted column drums, triglyphs, metopes, etc.) into the newly built northern curtain wall of the Acropolis, where they served as a prominent "war memorial" and can still be seen today. The devastated site was cleared of debris. Statuary, cult objects, religious offerings, and unsalvageable architectural members were buried ceremoniously in several deeply dug pits on the hill, serving conveniently as a fill for the artificial plateau created around the Classical Parthenon. This "Persian debris" was the richest archaeological deposit excavated on the Acropolis by 1890.
The Periclean building program
, as seen from the north-west in 1978]]
After winning at Eurymedon during 468 BC, Cimon and Themistocles ordered the reconstruction of the southern and northern walls of the Acropolis. Most of the major temples, including the Parthenon, were rebuilt by order of Pericles during the so-called Golden Age of Athens (460–430 BC). Phidias, an Athenian sculptor, and Ictinus and Callicrates, two famous architects, were responsible for the reconstruction.
During 437 BC, Mnesicles started building the Propylaea, a monumental gate at the western end of the Acropolis with Doric columns of Pentelic marble, built partly upon the old Propylaea of Peisistratos. These colonnades were almost finished during 432 BC and had two wings, the northern one decorated with paintings by Polygnotus. About the same time, south of the Propylaea, building started on the small Ionic Temple of Athena Nike in Pentelic marble with tetrastyle porches, preserving the essentials of Greek temple design. After an interruption caused by the Peloponnesian War, the temple was finished during the time of Nicias' peace, between 421 BC and 409 BC.
, viewed from the south-west, looking across the remains of the Old Temple in 2015]]
Construction of the elegant temple of Erechtheion in Pentelic marble (421–406 BC) was by a complex plan which took account of the extremely uneven ground and the need to circumvent several shrines in the area. The entrance, facing east, is lined with six Ionic columns. Unusually, the temple has two porches, one on the northwest corner borne by Ionic columns, the other, to the southwest, supported by huge female figures or caryatids. The eastern part of the temple was dedicated to Athena Polias, while the western part, serving the cult of the archaic king Poseidon-Erechtheus, housed the altars of Hephaestus and Voutos, brother of Erechtheus. Little is known about the original plan of the interior, which was destroyed by fire during the first century BC and has been rebuilt several times.
During the same period, a combination of sacred precincts including the temples of Athena Polias, Poseidon, Erechtheus, Cecrops, Herse, Pandrosos and Aglauros, with its Kore Porch (Porch of the Maidens) or Caryatids' Balcony was begun. Between the temple of Athena Nike and the Parthenon, there was the Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia (or the Brauroneion), the goddess represented as a bear and worshipped in the deme of Brauron. According to Pausanias, a wooden statue or xoanon of the goddess and a statue of Artemis made by Praxiteles during the 4th century BC were both in the sanctuary.
in 2005]]
Behind the Propylaea, Phidias' gigantic bronze statue of Athena Promachos ("Athena who fights in the front line"), built between 450 BC and 448 BC, dominated. The base was high, while the total height of the statue was . The goddess held a lance, the gilt tip of which could be seen as a reflection by crews on ships rounding Cape Sounion, and a giant shield on the left side, decorated by Mys with images of the fight between the Centaurs and the Lapiths. Other monuments that have left almost nothing visible to the present day are the Chalkotheke, the Pandroseion, Pandion's sanctuary, Athena's altar, Zeus Polieus's sanctuary and, from Roman times, the circular Temple of Roma and Augustus.Hellenistic and Roman PeriodDuring the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many of the existing buildings in the area of the Acropolis were repaired to remedy damage from age and occasionally war. Monuments to foreign kings were erected, notably those of the Attalid kings of Pergamon Attalos II (in front of the NW corner of the Parthenon), and Eumenes II, in front of the Propylaea. These were rededicated during the early Roman Empire to Augustus or Claudius (uncertain) and Agrippa, respectively. Eumenes was also responsible for constructing a stoa on the south slope, similar to that of Attalos in the agora below.
During the Julio-Claudian period, the Temple of Roma and Augustus, a small, round edifice about 23 meters from the Parthenon, was to be the last significant ancient construction on the summit of the rock. Around the same time, on the north slope, in a cave next to the one dedicated to Pan since the Classical period, a sanctuary was founded where the archons dedicated to Apollo on assuming office. During 161 AD, on the south slope, the Roman Herodes Atticus built his grand amphitheater or odeon. It was destroyed by the invading Herulians a century later but was reconstructed during the 1950s.
During the 3rd century, under threat from a Herulian invasion, repairs were made to the Acropolis walls, and the Beulé Gate was constructed to restrict entrance in front of the Propylaea, thus returning the Acropolis to use as a fortress. During the Latin Duchy of Athens, the Acropolis functioned as the city's administrative center, with the Parthenon as its cathedral, and the Propylaea as part of the ducal palace. A large tower was added, the Frankopyrgos (Frankish Tower), demolished during the 19th century.
After the Ottoman conquest of Greece, the Propylaea were used as the garrison headquarters of the Turkish army, the Parthenon was converted into a mosque and the Erechtheum was turned into the governor's private harem. The buildings of the Acropolis suffered significant damage during the 1687 siege by the Venetians in the Morean War. The Parthenon, which was being used as a gunpowder magazine, was hit by artillery and damaged severely.
by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (the earliest known photography of the site)]]
in Athens, Leo von Klenze, 1846.]]
During subsequent years, the Acropolis was a site of bustling human activity with many Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman structures. The dominant feature during the Ottoman period was a mosque inside the Parthenon, complete with a minaret.
The Acropolis was besieged thrice during the Greek War of Independence—two sieges from the Greeks in 1821–1822 and one from the Ottomans in 1826–1827. A new bulwark named after Odysseas Androutsos was built by the Greeks between 1822 and 1825 to protect the recently rediscovered Klepsydra spring, which became the sole fresh water supply of the fortress.
Independent Greece
]]
After independence, most features that dated from the Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman periods were cleared from the site in an attempt to restore the monument to its original form, "cleansed" of all later additions. The Parthenon mosque was demolished in 1843, and the Frankish Tower in 1875. German Neoclassicist architect Leo von Klenze was responsible for the restoration of the Acropolis in the 19th century, according to German historian Wolf Seidl, as described in his book Bavarians in Greece.
Some antiquities from the Acropolis were exhibited in the old Acropolis Museum, which was built in the second half of the 19th century.
At the beginning of the Axis occupation of Greece in 1941, German soldiers raised the Nazi German War Flag over the Acropolis. It would be taken down by Manolis Glezos and Apostolos Santas in one of the first acts of resistance. In 1944 Greek Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou arrived on the Acropolis to celebrate liberation from the Nazis.
Archaeological remains
as of 2007. View from the west.]]
The entrance to the Acropolis was a monumental gateway termed the Propylaea. To the south of the entrance is the tiny Temple of Athena Nike. At the centre of the Acropolis is the Parthenon or Temple of Athena Parthenos (Athena the Virgin). East of the entrance and north of the Parthenon is the temple known as the Erechtheum. South of the platform that forms the top of the Acropolis there are also the remains of the ancient, though often remodelled, Theatre of Dionysus. A few hundred metres away, there is the now partially reconstructed Odeon of Herodes Atticus.
All the valuable ancient artifacts are situated in the Acropolis Museum, which resides on the southern slope of the same rock, 280 metres from the Parthenon.
Site plan
Site plan of the Acropolis at Athens showing the major archaeological remains.
<imagemap>
File:AcropolisatathensSitePlan.png|right|600px|alt=Site plan of the Acropolis at Athens
poly 332 198 447 158 468 217 352 254 Parthenon
poly 305 130 374 115 385 146 314 167 Old Temple of Athena
poly 346 116 389 108 375 71 334 82 Erechtheum
poly 248 137 266 160 252 168 243 151 Statue of Athena Promachos
poly 104 164 193 115 225 200 158 224 Propylaea (Acropolis of Athens)
poly 132 223 152 226 150 257 136 255 Temple of Athena Nike
poly 168 256 193 261 188 278 166 277 Eleusinion
poly 191 213 258 199 245 259 185 246 Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia or Brauroneion
poly 248 260 315 276 321 245 255 231 Chalkotheke
poly 322 78 337 97 343 111 310 122 304 108 Pandroseion
poly 258 81 281 73 288 96 266 102 Arrephorion
poly 402 102 428 100 435 120 408 127 Altar of Athena Polias
poly 462 120 500 96 540 96 533 136 506 146 464 149 Sanctuary of Zeus Polieus
poly 574 155 641 184 628 212 564 183 Sanctuary of Pandion
poly 26 384 56 336 88 314 129 313 160 337 174 370 175 399 139 416 72 417 25 402 Odeon of Herodes Atticus
poly 182 381 462 384 460 419 179 415 Stoa of Eumenes
poly 395 325 469 309 478 356 406 372 Sanctuary of Asclepius or Asclepieion
poly 484 397 492 356 516 323 555 297 596 293 642 300 670 311 650 345 683 389 540 457 Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus
poly 655 343 738 276 807 356 722 425 Odeon of Pericles
poly 564 460 678 414 684 442 627 505 586 515 Temenos of Dionysus Eleuthereus
poly 300 32 332 42 323 67 296 64 Aglaureion
</imagemap>
#Parthenon
#Old Temple of Athena
#Erechtheum
#Statue of Athena Promachos
#Propylaea
#Temple of Athena Nike
#Eleusinion
#Sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia or Brauroneion
#Chalkotheke
#Pandroseion
#Arrephorion
#Altar of Athena
#Sanctuary of Zeus Polieus
#Sanctuary of Pandion
#Odeon of Herodes Atticus
#Stoa of Eumenes
#Sanctuary of Asclepius or Asclepieion
#Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus
#Odeon of Pericles
#Temenos of Dionysus Eleuthereus
#Mycenaean fountain
The Acropolis Restoration Project
The Acropolis Restoration Project began in 1975 to reverse the decay of centuries of attrition, pollution, destruction from military actions, and misguided past restorations. The project included the collection and identification of all stone fragments, even small ones, from the Acropolis and its slopes, and the attempt was made to restore as much as possible using reassembled original material (anastylosis), with new marble from Mount Pentelicus used sparingly. All restoration was made using titanium dowels and is designed to be completely reversible, in case future experts decide to change things. A combination of cutting-edge modern technology and extensive research and reinvention of ancient techniques were used.
The Parthenon colonnades, largely destroyed by Venetian bombardment during the 17th century, were restored, with many wrongly assembled columns now properly placed. The roof and floor of the Propylaea were partly restored, with sections of the roof made of new marble and decorated with blue and gold inserts, as in the original.
A total of 2,675 tons of architectural members were restored, with 686 stones reassembled from fragments of the originals, 905 patched with new marble, and 186 parts made entirely of new marble. A total of 530 cubic meters of new Pentelic marble were used.
In 2021, the addition of new reinforced concrete paths to the site to improve accessibility caused controversy among archaeologists.
Cultural significance
Every four years, the Athenians had a festival called the Great Panathenaea that rivaled the Olympic Games in popularity. During the festival, a procession (believed to be depicted on the Parthenon frieze) traveled through the city via the Panathenaic Way and culminated on the Acropolis. There, a new robe of woven wool (peplos) was placed on either the statue of Athena Polias in the Erechtheum (during the annual Lesser Panathenaea) or the statue of Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon (during the Great Panathenaea, held every four years).
Within the later tradition of Western civilization and Classical revival, the Acropolis, from at least the mid-18th century on, has often been invoked as a critical symbol of the Greek legacy and of the glories of Classical Greece.
Most of the artifacts from the temple are housed today in the Acropolis Museum at the foot of the ancient rock.
Geology
The Acropolis is a klippe consisting of two lithostratigraphic units: the Athens schist and the overlying Acropolis limestone. The Athens schist is a soft reddish rock dating from the late Cretaceous period. The original sediments were deposited in a river delta approximately 72 million years ago. The Acropolis limestone dates from the late Jurassic period, predating the underlying Athens schist by about 30 million years. The Acropolis limestone was thrust over the Athens schist by compressional tectonic forces, forming a nappe or overthrust sheet. Erosion of the limestone nappe led to the eventual detachment of the Acropolis, forming the present-day feature. Where the Athens schist and the limestone meet there are springs and karstic caves.
Many of the hills in the Athens region were formed by the erosion of the same nappe as the Acropolis. These include the hills of Lykabettos, Areopagus, and Mouseion.
The marble used for the buildings of the Acropolis was sourced from the quarries of Mount Pentelicus, a mountain to the northeast of the city.
Geological instability
The limestone that the Acropolis is built upon is unstable because of the erosion and tectonic shifts that the region is prone to. This instability may cause rock slides that cause damage to the historic site. Various measures have been implemented to protect the site, including retaining walls, drainage systems, and rock bolts. These measures work to counter the natural processes that threaten the historic site.
Gallery
<gallery heights'240' widths'210' mode=packed>
File:Marble seats from the theatre of Dioynsus.jpg|Marble seats at the Theatre of Dionysus inscribed with names.
File:Pergamene column.jpg|Pergamene column at the Stoa of Eumenes.
File:Thrasyllos.jpg|Choragic Monument of Thrasyllos.
File:Temple of Asclepios.jpg|Temple of Asclepius.
File:North Portico of the Erectheion.jpg|North Portico of the Erechtheion, where a coffer is missing, signifying the supposed place where Zeus struck his lightning bolt, killing Erechtheus. Another belief is that this was the location where Poseidon struck his trident into the Acropolis.
</gallery>
See also
*Landscaping of the Acropolis of Athens
References
Notes
Bibliography
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*Cohen, Beth. (2010). "Deconstructing the Acropolis: The Acropolis Museum, Athens, opened 20 June 2009 by Bernard Tschumi Architects." American Journal of Archaeology 114: 745–753.
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*Goette, Hans Rupprecht. (2001). Athens, Attica, and the Megarid: An Archaeological Guide. London and New York: Routledge.
*Harris, Diane. (1995). The Treasures of the Parthenon and Erechtheion. New York: Oxford University Press.
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*Neils, Jenifer, ed. (1996). Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
*Pollitt, Jerome J. (1990). The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Category:Ancient Greek sanctuaries in Greece
Category:Art of ancient Attica
Category:Buildings and structures completed in the 5th century BC
Category:Culture of ancient Greece
Category:Culture of Greece
Category:Former populated places in Greece
Category:Landmarks in Athens
Category:Tourist attractions in Athens
Category:World Heritage Sites in Greece | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropolis_of_Athens | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.434602 |
2077 | Adam Weishaupt | |birth_place = Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Holy Roman Empire
|death_date
|death_place = Gotha, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, German Confederation
|school_tradition = Empiricism
|known_for = Founder of the Illuminati
|main_interests = Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics
|notable_ideas =
}}
Johann Adam Weishaupt (; 6 February 1748 – 18 November 1830) was a German philosopher, professor of civil law and later canon law, and founder of the Illuminati.Early lifeAdam Weishaupt was born on 6 February 1748 in Ingolstadt who, like his father, was a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Ickstatt was a proponent of the philosophy of Christian Wolff and of the Enlightenment, and he influenced the young Weishaupt with his rationalism. Weishaupt began his formal education at age seven The following year he married Afra Sausenhofer of Eichstätt.
After Pope Clement XIV's suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773, Weishaupt became a professor of canon law, a position that was held exclusively by the Jesuits until that time. In 1775 Weishaupt was introduced to the empirical philosophy of Johann Georg Heinrich Feder of the University of Göttingen. Both Feder and Weishaupt would later become opponents of Kantian idealism.Foundation of the Illuminati
On 1 May 1776 Johann Adam Weishaupt founded the "Illuminati" in the Electorate of Bavaria. Initially, Illumination was designated for a group of outstanding and enlightened individuals in society. Indeed, the word was adapted from a Latin root, Iluminatus, which directly translates to "enlightened." He also adopted the name of "Brother Spartacus" within the order. Even encyclopedia references vary on the goal of the order, such as Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) saying the Order was not egalitarian or democratic internally, but sought to promote the doctrines of equality and freedom throughout society; while others such as ''Collier's'' have said the aim was to combat religion and foster rationalism in its place. The Illuminati was formed with the vision of liberating humans from religious bondage and undermining corrupted governments.
The actual character of the society was an elaborate network of spies and counter-spies. Each isolated cell of initiates reported to a superior, whom they did not know: a party structure that was effectively adopted by some later groups. Riedel writes:
::' The independence of thought and judgment required by Kant ... was specifically prevented by the Order of the Illuminati's rules and regulations. Enlightenment takes place here, if it takes place at all, precisely under the direction of another, namely under that of the "Superiors" [of the Order].
Weishaupt's radical rationalism and vocabulary were not likely to succeed. Writings that were intercepted in 1784 were interpreted as seditious, and the Society was banned by the government of Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, in 1784. Weishaupt lost his position at the University of Ingolstadt and fled Bavaria.
Assessment of character and intentions
of Adam Weishaupt]]
Weishaupt's character and intentions have been variously assessed. Some took a negative view, such as Augustin Barruel, who despite writing that Weishaupt's goals were that "Equality and Liberty, together with the most absolute independence, are to be the substitutes for all rights and all property" saw this as more dangerous than beneficial, and John Robison, who regarded Weishaupt as a 'human devil' and saw his mission as one of malevolent destructiveness. Others took a more positive view, including Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in a letter to James Madison that "Barruel’s own parts of the book are perfectly the ravings of a Bedlamite and considered Weishaupt to be an "enthusiastic Philanthropist" who believed in the indefinite perfectibility of man, and believed that the intention of Jesus Christ was simply to "reinstate natural religion, and by diffusing the light of his morality, to teach us to govern ourselves".
In his defence, Weishaupt wrote a Kurze Rechtfertigung meiner Absichten (A Brief Justification of my Intentions) in 1787. Author Tony Page comments:
::"Weishaupt’s plan was to educate Illuminati followers in the highest levels of humanity and morality (basing his teachings on the supremacy of Reason, allied with the spirit of the Golden Rule of not doing to others what one would not wish done to oneself), so that if Illuminati alumni subsequently attained positions of significance and power (such as in the fields of education and politics), they could exert a benevolent and uplifting influence upon society at large. His project was utopian and naively optimistic, and he himself was certainly not without flaws of character – but neither he nor his plan was evil or violent in and of themselves. It is one of the deplorable and tragic ironies of history that a man who tried to inculcate virtue, philanthropy, social justice and morality has become one of the great hate-figures of 21st-century 'conspiracy' thinking."
Works
Philosophical works
* (1775) De Lapsu Academiarum Commentatio Politica.
* (1786) Über die Schrecken des Todes – eine philosophische Rede.
** Discours Philosophique sur les Frayeurs de la Mort (1788). [http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k107838n Gallica]
* (1786) Über Materialismus und Idealismus. [https://web.archive.org/web/20080529080940/http://hal9000.cisi.unito.it/wf/BIBLIOTECH/Umanistica/Biblioteca2/Libri-anti1/Miscellane/imagemar2297.pdf Torino]
* (1788) Geschichte der Vervollkommnung des menschlichen Geschlechts.
* (1788) Über die Gründe und Gewißheit der Menschlichen Erkenntniß.
* (1788) Über die Kantischen Anschauungen und Erscheinungen.
* (1788) Zweifel über die Kantischen Begriffe von Zeit und Raum.
* (1793) Über Wahrheit und sittliche Vollkommenheit.
* (1794) Über die Lehre von den Gründen und Ursachen aller Dinge.
* (1794) Über die Selbsterkenntnis, ihre Hindernisse und Vorteile.
* (1797) Über die Zwecke oder Finalursachen.
* (1802) Über die Hindernisse der baierischen Industrie und Bevölkerung.
* (1804) Die Leuchte des Diogenes.
* (1817) Über die Staats-Ausgaben und Auflagen. [https://books.google.com/books?id=lnxRAAAAMAAJ Google Books]
* (1818) Über das Besteuerungs-System.
Works relating to the Illuminati
*(1786) Apologie der Illuminaten, .
*(1786) Vollständige Geschichte der Verfolgung der Illuminaten in Bayern.
*(1786) Schilderung der Illuminaten.
*(1787) Einleitung zu meiner Apologie.
*(1787) Einige Originalschriften des Illuminatenordens...
*(1787) Nachtrage von weitern Originalschriften...
*(1787) Kurze Rechtfertigung meiner Absichten.
*(1787) Nachtrag zur Rechtfertigung meiner Absichten.
*(1787) Apologie des Mißvergnügens und des Übels.
*(1787) Das Verbesserte System der Illuminaten.
*(1788) Der ächte Illuminat, oder die wahren, unverbesserten Rituale der Illuminaten.
*(1795) Pythagoras, oder Betrachtungen über die geheime Welt- und Regierungs-Kunst.
SourceWorks by Adam Weishaupt in English translation
*(2008) ''Diogenes' Lamp, or an Examination of Our Present Day Morality and Enlightenment, translated by Amelia Gill, The Masonic Book Club. [https://archive.org/details/WeishauptADiogenesLampOrAnExaminationOfOurPresentDayMoralityAndEnlightenmentOCR Internet Archive]
*(2015) The Secret School of Wisdom: The Authentic Rituals and Doctrines of the Illuminati, translated by Jeva Singh-Anand, edited by Josef Wäges and Reinhard Markner, London: Lewis Masonic, 447 pp.,
*(2014) A Brief Justification of My Intentions: Casting Light on the Latest Original Writings, translated by Dr. Tony Page, Justice Publications, Amazon Kindle.
*(2014) Supplement to the Justification of My Intentions'', translated by Dr. Tony Page, Justice Publications, Amazon Kindle.
Notes
Further reading
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Category:1748 births
Category:1830 deaths
Category:People from Ingolstadt
Category:People from the Electorate of Bavaria
Category:Enlightenment philosophers
Category:19th-century German philosophers
Category:18th-century German philosophers
Category:University of Ingolstadt alumni
Category:Academic staff of the University of Ingolstadt
Category:German Freemasons
Category:18th-century German male writers
Category:Empiricists | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Weishaupt | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.445886 |
2078 | Acorn Electron | | Discontinued | Processor Synertek SY6502A @<br>2 MHz when accessing ROM<br>1 MHz when accessing RAM
| Memory = 32 KB RAM, 32 KB ROM
| Media = Cassette tape, floppy disk (optional), ROM cartridge (optional)
| Graphics = Ferranti Semiconductor Custom ULA
| Display = RF modulator, composite video, RGB monitor output, 160×256 (4 or 16 colours), 320×256 (2 or 4 colours), 640×256 (2 colours), 320×200 (2 colours – spaced display with two blank horizontal lines following every 8 pixel lines), 640×200 (2 colours – spaced display)
| Input = Keyboard
| Connectivity | OS Acorn MOS v1.0
| baseprice £199 (circa £ today)
| sound = Tone and noise generation
}}
The Acorn Electron (nicknamed the Elk inside Acorn) was introduced as a lower-cost alternative to the BBC Micro educational/home computer, also developed by Acorn Computers, to provide many of the features of that more expensive machine at a price more competitive with that of the ZX Spectrum. with an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 machines sold over its entire commercial lifespan. With production effectively discontinued by Acorn as early as 1985, Acorn co-founder Chris Curry also emphasised the Electron's role as being "designed to compete with the Spectrum... to get the starting price very low, but not preclude expansion in the long term."DevelopmentIn order to reduce component costs, and to prevent cloning, the company reduced the number of chips in the Electron from the 102 on the BBC Micro's motherboard to "something like 12 to 14 chips" with most functionality on a single 2,400-gate Uncommitted Logic Array (ULA).
Additionally, the last bytes of both the BASIC ROM and the Plus 3 interface's ADFS v1.0 ROM include the word "Roger", thought to be a reference to Roger Wilson. The case was designed by industrial designer Allen Boothroyd of Cambridge Product Design.
Release
Reports during the second half of 1982 indicated a potential December release, with Curry providing qualified confirmation of such plans, together with an accurate depiction of the machine's form and capabilities, noting that the "massive ULA" would be the "dominant factor" in any pre-Christmas release. As the end of the year approached, the machine itself was pictured in press reports. With the ULA not ready for "main production", however, the launch of the Electron was to be delayed until the spring.
By June 1983, with the planned March release having passed, the launch of the Electron had been rescheduled for the Acorn User Exhibition in August 1983, and the machine was indeed launched at the event. The company expected to ship the Electron before Christmas, and sell 100,000 by February 1984. The price at launch£199remained unchanged from that stated in an announcement earlier in the year, with the machine's nickname within Acornthe "Elk"also being reported publicly for perhaps the first time.
Reviews were generally favourable, starting with positive impressions based on the physical design of the computer, with one reviewer noting, "The Electron is beautifully designed and builtquite a shock compared to the BBC. Its designer case will look great on the coffee table." Praise was also forthcoming for the Electron's keyboard which was regarded as being better than most of its low-cost peers, with only the VIC-20 being comparable. one reviewer considered the absence of a "software simulation of a teletext screen" to be a "lazy omission" even if it would have to be "awfully slow and take up piles of memory".
While its speed was acceptable compared to its immediate competition, the Electron was, however, rather slower than the BBC Micro with one review noting that games designed for the BBC Micro ran "at less than half the speed, with very significant effects on their appeal". The reduced performance can be attributed to the use of a 4-bit wide memory system instead of the 8-bit wide memory system of the BBC Micro to reduce cost. Due to needing two accesses to the memory instead of one to fetch each byte, along with contention with the video hardware also needing access, reading or writing RAM was much slower than on the BBC Micro. Reviewers were also disappointed by the single-channel sound, noting that "BBC-style music" and its "imitations of various musical instruments" would not be possible, the latter due to the inability of the sound system to vary the amplitude of sounds.
Despite some uncertainty about Acorn's target demographic for the Electron, some noted the potential for the machine in education given its robustness, helped by the Electron's software compatibility with the BBC Micro and the already established reputation of its predecessor. with Chris Curry having indicated "a very heavy push overseas" involving both the BBC Micro and Electron. but this model was never produced. West Germany, and New Zealand.
Production and volume delivery
Production difficulties at Astec in Malaysia delayed the machine's introduction, forcing Acorn to look to other manufacturers such as AB Electronics in Wales and Wongs in Hong Kong (an original equipment manufacturer making over 30 million circuit boards a year, along with power supplies and plastic housings, for companies such as IBM, Xerox, Atari, and Apple, including units made for Acorn for the BBC Micro). By October 1983, Acorn had received orders for more than 150,000 units, but had production targets of only 25,000 a month before Christmas, meaning that the existing backlog would take more than six months to fulfil. Demand for the Electron was high but only two of WH Smith's London branches had inventory. Ultimately, manufacturing in Malaysia ceased with the anticipated but unspecified number of units having been produced, this having been originally reported as 100,000 units. Acorn's marketing manager, Tom Hohenberg, admitted in early 1984 that "a lot of the trouble stemmed from the ULA" in getting production to the desired levels, but that such difficulties had been resolved, although Acorn faced an order backlog of almost a quarter of a million units.
As the company increased production during 1984, however, the British home computer market greatly weakened. Hohenberg later noted that after the 1983 Christmas season, Electron deliveries had increased to meet a demand that was no longer there, with the market having "completely dried up". Acorn's Christmas 1984 sales were greatly below expectations and by March 1985 the company had reduced the Electron's price to £129. With the company's unsuccessful expansion into the United States abandoned, Acorn's financial situation had deteriorated sufficiently to prompt Olivetti to rescue the company by taking a 49.30% ownership stake. Renewed efforts were made to sell the machine, bundling it with Acorn's own expansions and software, such as one package adding the Plus 1 expansion, joysticks and a ROM cartridge game to the base machine for a total price of £219. Acorn committed to supporting the machine "until the end of 1986", continuing to supply it (as the Merlin M2105) to British Telecom as part of the Healthnet communications system, with small-scale manufacturing continuing while existing stocks were being run down.
By autumn, retailers appeared eager to discount the computer, with prices in stores as low as £100, reportedly less than the distributor prices of the summer months. As the Christmas season approached, Dixons Retail acquired the remaining Electron inventory to sell, bundled with a cassette recorder and software, at a retail price of £99.95. This deal, from the perspective of a year later, apparently played a significant part in helping to reduce Acorn's unsold inventory from a value of £18 million to around £7.9 million, and in combination with "streamlining corporate activities and reducing overheads", had helped to reduce Acorn's losses from over £20 million to less than £3 million.
The deal effectively brought to an end Acorn's interest in the Electron and the lower-cost end of the home computing market, but empowered third-party suppliers whose "inventiveness and initiative" was noted as being in contrast with Acorn's lack of interest in the product and the "false promises" made to its users. However, Acorn subsequently released the Master Compact a model in the Master series of microcomputers with fewer BBC Micro-style ports and a similar expansion connector to that used by the Electron with the home audience specifically in mind. Indeed, prior to its release, the Master Compact had been perceived as the successor to the Electron. Superficial similarities between the Compact and Acorn Communicator, together with technical similarities between the Electron (particularly when expanded in the form of the Merlin M2105) and the Communicator, may also have driven rumours of an updated Electron model.
Hardware
Much of the core functionality of the BBC Micro the video and memory controller, cassette input/output, timers and sound generation was replicated using a single customised ULA chip designed by Acorn in conjunction with Ferranti, albeit with only one sound channel instead of three (and one noise channel), and without the character-based Teletext Mode 7.
The edge connector on the rear of the Electron exposes all address and data bus lines from the CPU, including the upper eight bits of the address bus, in contrast to the limited selection available via the BBC Micro's expansion ports, with the One Megahertz Bus as the principal mechanism for general purpose expansion on the BBC Micro only providing the lower eight bits of the address bus. In addition, various control signals provided by the CPU and ULA are exposed via the Electron's expansion connector.
The ULA mediates access to 32 KB of addressable RAM using four 4164 DRAMs (64 K×1 bit), sharing the RAM between the CPU and the video signal generation (or screen refresh) performed by the ULA itself. Two accesses have to be made to the RAM to get each byte (albeit with a single RAS), delivering a maximum transfer rate to or from RAM of one byte per 2 MHz cycle. In generating the video signal, the ULA is able to take advantage of this 2 MHz bandwidth when producing the picture for the high-bandwidth screen modes. Issue 5 and 6 boards utilized a different ULA type, this being known as the Aberdeen ULA (as opposed to the earlier Ferranti ULA) which was mounted on a board that was directly soldered to the main board, with the chip being covered by epoxy resin "insulating material". This arrangement dispensed with the 68-pin socket, and this new type of ULA was expected to be "less prone to failure". This type of ULA was also used on the German release of the Electron mainboard which is designated by the marking "GERMAN ELECTRON Issue 1" on the mainboard rather than just "ELECTRON" as for the UK model.Technical specificationsThe hardware specification according to official documentation, combined with more technical documentation and analysis is as follows:
* CPU: Synertek SY6502A
* Clock rate: variable. CPU runs at 2 MHz when accessing ROM and 1 MHz when accessing RAM. The CPU is also periodically halted.
* Glue logic: Ferranti Semiconductor Custom ULA
* RAM: 32 KB
* ROM: 32 KB
* Graphics modes: 160×256 pixels (20×32 characters) in 4 or 16 colours, 320×256 (40×32 characters) in 2 or 4 colours, 640×256 (80×32 characters) in 2 colours
* Text modes: 40×25 characters in 2 colours, 80×25 characters in 2 colours
* Colours: 8 colours (TTL combinations of RGB primaries) + 8 flashing versions of the same colours
* Sound: 1 channel of sound, 7 octaves; built-in speaker. Software emulation of noise channel supported
* Keyboard: 56 key "full travel QWERTY keyboard"Merlin M2105An unusual variant of the Electron was sold by British Telecom Business Systems as the BT Merlin M2105 Communications Terminal, being previewed by British Telecom at the Communications '84 show. This consisted of a rebadged Electron plus a large expansion unit containing 32 KB of battery-backed RAM (making up 64 KB of RAM in total), up to 64 KB of ROM resident in four sockets (making up to 96 KB of ROM in total), a Centronics printer port, an RS423 serial port, a modem, and the speech generator previously offered for the BBC Micro. The ROM firmware provided dial-up communications facilities, text editing and text messaging functions. The complete product included a monitor and dot-matrix printer. these were used by the Interflora florists network in the UK for over a decade. Used mostly for sending messages, despite providing support for other applications, limited availability of the product led Interflora to look for alternatives after five years, although users appeared to be happy with the product as it was.
This generic product combination of the Electron and accompanying expansion was apparently known as the Chain during development, with British Telecom having intended the M2105 to be a product supporting access to an online service known as Healthnet. This service aimed to improve and speed up communications within hospitals so that patients could be treated and discharged more quickly, and to facilitate transfers of information to doctors and health workers outside hospitals, with communications taking place over conventional telephone lines. The service was to be introduced in the Hammersmith and Fulham district health authority, with installation starting at Charing Cross Hospital. The Electron was said to be particularly suitable for deployment in this application in that it had a "large expansion bus", ostensibly making the machine amenable to the necessary adaptations required for the role, together with its "price, and the fact it has a real keyboard". As a Healthnet terminal, the M2105 was intended to support the exchange of forms, letters and memos.
The adoption of an Acorn product in this role was perhaps also unusual in that much of BT's Merlin range of this era had been supplied by ICL, notably the M2226 small business computer and M3300 "communicating word processor". Nevertheless, the M2105 offered interoperability with other BT products such as the QWERTYphone which was able to receive messages from the M2105 and the Merlin Tonto.
The hardware specifications of the M2105, observed from manufactured units, include the 6502 CPU (SY6502 or R6502), ULA and 32 KB of dynamic RAM fitted in the Electron main unit, plus 32 KB of static RAM, two 6522 VIA devices for interfacing, AM2910PC modem, SCN2681A UART, and TMS5220 plus TMS6100 for speech synthesis. The components chosen and the capabilities provided (excluding speech synthesis) are broadly similar to those featured by the Acorn Communicator which was another product of Acorn's custom systems division.
The product documentation indicates a specification with 48 KB of RAM plus 16 KB of "non volatile CMOS RAM" and 96 KB of ROM, However, the earlier Chain variant of the board does appear to provide only 16 KB of static RAM using two HM6264LP-15 chips, also providing an extra 16 KB of dynamic RAM using eight MK4516-15 chips, suggesting that the product evolved during development. (Windows, Linux, Mac)
#Elkulator (Windows, Linux)
#ElkJS is a browser-based emulator
#Multi-system emulators MESS and Clock Signal support the Electron.
Electron software is predominantly archived in the UEF file format.
There are also two publicly documented FPGA based recreations of the Acorn Electron hardware: ElectronFPGA for the Papilio Duo hardware and the Acorn-Electron core for the FPGA Arcade "Replay" board. In addition, an implementation of the ULA for the Lattice ICE40 series has been made available.SoftwareA range of titles were made available on cassette at the launch of the Electron through the Acornsoft publishing arm of Acorn, including a number of games, the Forth and Lisp languages, and a handful of other educational and productivity titles. which remained BBC-only releases. Games such as Chess and Snooker, plus a number of other titles were also established as being compatible prior to launch.
Languages
A significant selling point for the Electron was its built-in BBC BASIC interpreter, providing a degree of familiarity from the BBC Micro along with a level of compatibility with the earlier machine. However, as had been the case with the BBC Micro, support for other languages was quickly forthcoming, facilitated by the common heritage of the two systems. on cassette and followed up with an ISO Pascal implementation on ROM cartridge, the latter providing two 16 KB ROMs containing a program editor and a Pascal compiler producing intermediate code that required Pascal run-time routines to be loaded. As a more minimal implementation, S-Pascal made use of the machine's built-in BASIC program editing facilities and provided a compiler generating assembly language that would then be assembled, generating machine code for direct execution. notably a compiler that could produce a stand-alone "relocatable 6502 machine-code file". Acornsoft later released the ISO Pascal Stand Alone Generator product for the BBC Micro and Master series, permitting the generation of executable programs embedding "sections of the interpreter" required by each program, with such executables being subject to various licensing restrictions.
Acornsoft Forth, aiming for compliance with the Forth-79 standard, was regarded as "an excellent implementation of the language". It saw competition from Skywave Software's Multi-Forth 83 which was delivered on a ROM chip, supported the Forth-83 standard, and provided a multitasking environment. Future availability of Multi-Forth 83 on ROM cartridge was advertised.
With the launch of the Plus 1, Acornsoft Lisp was also made available on cartridge.
Acornsoft provided two products offering different degrees of support for the Logo programming language. Turtle Graphics was a cassette-based product, available alongside Forth, Lisp and S-Pascal amongst the first titles released for the Electron, Acornsoft Logo was provided on ROM cartridge and offered a vocabulary of over 200 commands as part of a more comprehensive implementation of the language, exposing its list processing foundations. Turtle Graphics was substantially cheaper than Logo: by 1987, the former had been reportedly discounted to under £3 whereas the latter cost "less than £30". Unlike other Acornsoft language products, however, Logo was supplied with "two thick manuals". By running directly from ROM, these applications were able to dedicate all of the machine's available RAM to their documents, and using general filing system mechanisms, documents could be loaded from and saved to cassette or disc, although disc users could also use commands that took advantage of that faster, random-access medium. Cassette-based operation was still regarded as "perfectly feasible" since the software itself did not need to be loaded, with loading and saving operations in View achieving about 800 words per minute and in ViewSheet achieving around 200 cells per minute. However, Acornsoft did release a product, Database, on 3.5-inch diskette for use with the Electron upgraded with the Plus 3 expansion. The product provided a suite of programs for the creation, maintenance and analysis of structured data files, visualising records using a card index user interface metaphor, and supporting sorting and searching operations on the stored data.
Slogger, an established provider of expansions, also produced productivity applications such as Starword, a word processor, and Starstore, a database. Starword provided separate command and editing modes familiar from Acornsoft's View, also supporting 132-column documents and horizontal scrolling for the editing of such wider documents. Along with other operations familiar from View, such as search and replace functions, block-based editing, and control over text justification, it had built-in support for customising documents for output using a mail merge function. Available on ROM for fitting to a ROM expansion such as Slogger's Rombox or inside a separately purchased ROM cartridge, and reportedly developed specifically for the Electron, Starword was considered "comprehensive and powerful".
Starstore, also available on ROM, provided a database management suite primarily aimed at users of cassette storage, with databases being entirely resident in RAM. It supported database definition, data editing, searching, sorting and printing activities. Various features complemented Starword, such as mail merge integration. Starstore II followed on as an alternative to, as opposed to a direct successor of, the earlier Starstore product by requiring a disc-based system and permitting databases to be as large as the amount of free space on any given disc. Its user interface was improved over the earlier product, offering pop-up menus and cursor-based navigation.
Computer Concepts' Wordwise Plus, developed from the company's earlier Wordwise product for the BBC Micro and launched in early 1985, was made available for use with the Electron expanded with the E2P-6502 second processor cartridge. The original Wordwise product was incompatible with the Electron due to its use of Mode 7 (the BBC Micro's 40-column Teletext display mode), and being supplied on a ROM chip, it could also not be readily added to the Electron without appropriate expansions. Available from Permanent Memory Systems, producers of the E2P-6502 cartridge, the Electron version of the software was the Hi-Wordwise Plus variant, supplied on disc instead of ROM, and designed to run on the second processor and to use the expanded memory provided in that environment. The program used the Electron's 40-column Mode 6 display. Slogger produced a version of the desktop publishing package Stop Press for the Electron, requiring a DFS-compatible disc system, two spare ROM sockets, a mouse, and a suitable user port expansion, with Slogger producing its own user port expansion cartridge.Games
Of the twelve software titles announced by Acornsoft for the Electron at the machine's launch, six were games titles: Snapper, Monsters (a clone of Space Panic), Meteors (a clone of Asteroids), Starship Command, Chess, and the combined title Draughts and Reversi. When the Plus 1 expansion was launched in 1984, three of these titlesHopper, Snapper and Starship Commandwere among the six ROM cartridge titles available at launch, together with the adventure Countdown to Doom. and Elite.
Micro Power, already an established BBC Micro games publisher, also entered the Electron market at a relatively early stage, offering ten initial titles either converted from the BBC Micro, in the case of Escape from Moonbase Alpha and Killer Gorilla, or "completely re-written", in the case of Moonraider (due to differences in the screen handling between the machines). Superior Software, also a significant publisher for the BBC Micro, routinely released games for both machines, notably a licensed version of Atari's Tempest in 1985, but also successful original titles such as the Repton series of games, Citadel, Thrust and Galaforce. Superior's role in games publishing for the Acorn machines expanded in 1986 when the company acquired the right to use the Acornsoft brand, leading to the co-branding of games and compilations released by the company and the re-release of existing Acornsoft titles with this branding, Elite among them. The company would subsequently release another "masterpiece" with bundled novellathe 1988 game Exileas well as numerous conversions and compilations. Although the Electron imposed additional technical constraints on authors accustomed to the BBC Micro, some authors were able to use this to their creative advantage. For instance, of Frak! it was noted that the "Electron version is more popular, and considered better than the BBC version because it has a screen designer included".
is an example of an arcade game officially ported to the Electron by US Gold.]]
Although not as well supported by the biggest software publishers as rivals like the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, a good range of games were available for the Electron including popular multi-format games such as Chuckie Egg. There were also many popular games officially converted to the Electron from arcade machines (including Crystal Castles, Tempest, Commando, Paperboy, and Yie Ar Kung-Fu) and other home computer systems (including Impossible Mission, Jet Set Willy, The Way of the Exploding Fist, Tetris, The Last Ninja, Barbarian, Ballistix, Predator, Hostages and SimCity).
Despite Acorn themselves effectively shelving the Electron in 1985, games continued to be developed and released by professional software houses until the early 1990s.
Other games would simply load non-graphical data into the display and leave it visible as regions of apparently randomly coloured pixels. One notable example is Superior Software's Citadel.
Although page flipping is a hardware possibility, the limited memory forced most applications to do all their drawing directly to the visible screen, often resulting in graphical flicker or visible redraw. A notable exception is Players' Joe Blade series.
A number of unusual techniques were employed by some developers to work around apparent limitations of the hardware.
Firetrack: smooth vertical scrolling
Although programs can alter the position of the screen in memory, the non-linear format of the display means that vertical scrolling can only be done in blocks of 8 pixels without further work.
Firetrack, released on a compilation by Superior Software, exploits a division in the way the Electron handles its display of the seven available graphics modes, two are configured so that the final two of every ten scanlines are blank and are not based on the contents of RAM. If 16 scanlines of continuous graphical data are written to a character-block-aligned portion of the screen then they will appear as a continuous block in most modes but in the two non-continuous modes they will be displayed as two blocks of eight scanlines, separated in the middle by two blank scanlines.
In order to keep track of its position within the display, the Electron maintains an internal display address counter. The same counter is used in both the continuous and non-continuous graphics modes and switching modes mid-frame does not cause any adjustment to the counter.
Firetrack switches from a non-continuous to a continuous graphics mode part way down the display. By using the palette to mask the top area of the display and taking care about when it changes mode it can shift the continuous graphics at the bottom of the display down in two pixel increments because the internal display counter is not incremented on blank scanlines during non-continuous graphics modes.
Exile: sampled speech
Exile turns the Electron's one channel output into a digital speaker for PCM output.
The speaker can be programmatically switched on or off at any time but is permanently attached to a hardware counter so is normally only able to output a square wave. But if set to a frequency outside the human audible range then the ear can't perceive the square wave, only the difference between the speaker being switched on and off. This gives the effect of a simple toggle speaker similar to that seen in the 48 KB Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Exile uses this to output 1-bit audio samples.
Frak! and Zalaga: polyphonic music
As part of their copy protection, illegal copies of Aardvark Software's Frak! and Zalaga would cause a pseudo-polyphonic rendition of Trumpet Hornpipe, the Captain Pugwash theme tune, to play endlessly rather than loading the game properly (Pugwash being a pirate). On the Electron version of Frak!, the tune was the main theme from "Benny Hill" (Boots Randolph's "Yakety Sax"). The polyphony was achieved via fast note-switching to achieve the necessary chords.
Hardware expansions
Since the Electron provides only a selection of video output ports, a cassette port and the expansion connector, a range of additional expansions were produced to offer ports and connections to various peripherals. The first expansions were largely joystick and printer interfaces or sideways ROM boards. For instance, First Byte Computers developed an interface and software which allowed a "switched" joystick to be used with the majority of software titles. This interface became very popular and was sold by W.H. Smiths, Boots, Comet and hundreds of independent computer dealers, selling as many as 23,000 units over a two-year period, helped by a bundling agreement with Dixons.
Acorn's own expansion strategy was led by the Plus 1 which offered a combination of ports and cartridge connectors, followed by the Plus 3 disc drive unit, but by early 1986 the more general range of expansions had broadened to include floppy drive and RS423 interfaces, Teletext adapters, and other fundamental enhancements to the base machine.
Multi-function expansions
Since the Electron's expansion connector was the basis of practically all external hardware expansions for the machine, unless an expansion propagated this connector to others, as was done by the Acorn Plus 3, the capabilities of any given expansion would limit the capabilities of the expanded machine. Thus, expansions offering a single function, such as joystick ports or a printer port, would need to be disconnected if other capabilities were needed, and then reconnected later. Consequently, multi-function expansions offering a combination of different capabilities offered a significant degree of convenience as well as avoiding wear on the expansion connector.
Alongside announcements of Acorn's then-unreleased Plus 1, Solidisk previewed a General Purpose Interface for the Electron in early 1984 offering a Centronics printer port, switched joystick port, user port, sideways ROM sockets, and mini-cartridge sockets supported by the 6522 versatile interface adapter (VIA) chip. The Plus 1 itself was released in mid-1984, introducing the influential cartridge format for expansions ultimately used by several other companies.Acorn Plus 1The Acorn Plus 1 added two ROM cartridge slots, an analogue interface (supporting four channels) and a Centronics parallel port, priced at £59.90. and graphics tablet devices were available, and the parallel interface was typically used to connect a printer. Game ROM cartridges would boot automatically. Languages in paged ROM cartridges would take precedence over BASIC. (The slot at the front of the interface took priority if both were populated.)
Access to ROM occurs at 2 MHz until RAM access is required, so theoretically programs released on ROM can run up to twice as fast as those released on tape or disc. Despite this, all of the games released on ROM were packaged as ROM filing system cartridges, from which the micro would load programs into main memory in exactly the same way as if it were loading from tape. This meant that programs did not need to be modified for their new memory location and could be written in BASIC but gave no execution speed benefits. Six ROM cartridge titles were announced for the launch of the Plus 1: three arcade games, one adventure game, one educational title, and the Lisp language implementation, the latter being a genuine language ROM that "takes the place of the BASIC ROM" and is instantly available when switching on. Acorn described the hardware extension possibilities in promotional literature, giving an RS423 cartridge as an example of this capability of the Plus 1.
Additional peripheral cartridges were produced by companies such as Advanced Computer Products (and subsequently PRES) whose Advanced ROM Adaptor (ARA) and Advanced Sideways RAM (ASR) products provided sideways ROM and RAM capabilities, allowing ROM- or EPROM-based software to be accessed to provide languages, utilities and applications. ROM or EPROM devices containing the software could be physically inserted into empty ZIF sockets, or the software would be loaded from ROM image files (typically provided on disk) into RAM devices fitted in such sockets. Such RAM could potentially be powered by a battery and thus be able to retain its contents when the computer itself was powered off. Both such arrangements exposed the software in the same sideways memory region.
Such cartridge support enabled the Electron to provide the same functionality as that offered by the expansion ROM slots under the keyboard and on the bottom-left of the BBC Micro B keyboard. However, the need to use cartridge sockets for other peripherals encouraged PRES to develop the Advanced Plus 6 (AP6): an internal RAM and ROM board for the Plus 1 providing six sockets that could be freely used for ROM, EPROM and RAM devices. Installation of the AP6 unit required some modifications to the Plus 1, undertaken either by the user or by PRES, and the product could also be enhanced with the Advanced Plus 7 offering battery-backed RAM support for two 16 KB banks.
The addition of the Plus 1 added a number of new *FX or OSBYTE calls that allowed the OS to read values from the analogue interface and write to the parallel interface.
The Plus 1 needed memory page &D for its workspace, and the unit added some processing overhead when enabled, both of these things causing issues with the loading and running of software, particularly cassette-based games. To disable the Plus 1, after pressing BREAK, the following commands could be issued:
*FX163,128,1
?&212=&D6
?&213=&F1
?&2AC=0
An official application note described a similar set of commands to "remove the Plus One completely from the address map disabling the Centronics and A/D ports (additionally disabling the RS423 cartridge if fitted)".Further developmentsAfter Acorn's change of focus away from the Electron, and with a shortage of Plus 1 units available to purchase, Advanced Computer Products secured the rights to manufacture the unit under licence from Acorn, The Advanced Plus 2 (AP2) ROM was later sold by PRES as a replacement ROM for the Plus 1, of whose 8 KB utility ROM only 3 KB had been used, thus providing an opportunity for a more comprehensive ROM to be developed. The AP2 added ROM management commands familiar from the BBC Master series, support for various sideways RAM products from PRES, disc formatting and verification utilities for different ADFS versions, a command to disable the Plus 1 entirely, and improvements that made tape loading more reliable in "high memory" screen modes.
Slogger Rombox Plus
Following on from Slogger's earlier Rombox product an expansion similar in profile to the Plus 1 but offering eight ROM sockets and propagating the expansion connector to other units the Rombox Plus was positioned more directly as a competitor to the Plus 1 in that it offered two cartridge slots and a Centronics print port alongside four ROM sockets. Priced at £49.95, the unit was mostly compatible with cartridges designed for the Plus 1 although one reviewer reported physical issues with some expansion cartridges, suggesting some manufacturing inconsistencies given other users' more positive experiences, but indicated that it was still "worth considering as an alternative to the Plus 1". One review reported that the Cumana Electron Filing System cartridge had an edge connector that would not physically fit inside the slot in the Rombox Plus unit; this along with a perceived lack of robustness of the case being their only major reservations about the product. The product's support for utilising 8 KB RAM devices as a printer buffer, with buffer management provided by the built-in EPROM, was noted as a particular advantage over the Plus 1.Slogger Remote Expansion and Plus 2In early 1989, Slogger announced its "remote expansion" (RX) system for the Electron, providing a separate case with power supply to house expansions and disc drives, able to support the weight of a monitor or television. Intended for the RX system, the Plus 2 offered two ROM cartridge slots compatible with the Plus 1, three ROM sockets, and RS423 and user port capabilities.
Software Bargains Plus 1
In mid-1989, Software Bargains announced an expansion providing different levels of Plus 1 functionality, offered as a bare printed circuit board without casing and in three different variants: the basic model offered one cartridge port and was bundled with View and Viewsheet cartridges for £29.95; an extended model offered one cartridge port and a printer port with the two bundled cartridges for £36.95; the full model offered two cartridge ports, printer port and the bundled cartridges for £39.95. Various board upgrade options were also offered between the variants, with the product being described mainly as a vehicle to expose the bundled software packages to as many as 150,000 owners of the estimated 200,000 Electrons in the UK who "have not yet been able to acquire or use View or Viewsheet". The lack of casing was considered the most significant disadvantage, with the absence of the analogue port deemed less critical due to a general lack of support for joysticks in many games.
Communications and networking
To support connectivity, Acorn announced a Plus 2 network interface with availability scheduled for early 1985, together with a RS423 cartridge for the Plus 1. This interface did not make it to market. However, an Econet interface was produced by Barson Computers in Australia and possibly other individuals and businesses.
Andyk RS423 cartridge
Andyk announced an RS423 cartridge for the Plus 1 providing a serial port, alongside other products, in late 1985. It was priced at £34.99. but launched in early 1986, Pace offered a communications product consisting of a RS423 cartridge, bundled with a Nightingale modem and Tellstar communications software, retailing at around £161 but discounted to £145. The substantially reduced price of the Electron itself created an opportunity that Pace was "exploiting nicely" with its telecommunications bundle, described by one commentator as "a marvellous opportunity to get a cheap Prestel set in addition to your normal computer".Jafa Systems RS423 cartridgeJafa Systems announced an RS423 cartridge in late 1989 to "fill a two year gap in the market", offering a serial connector compatible with the BBC Micro together with an on-board socket for 8 KB or 16 KB EPROM devices or for 32 KB RAM, the latter being configured to present two sideways RAM banks to the system. Write protect functionality was supported to prevent certain ROM software from attempting to overwrite itself if stored in RAM. The cartridge board itself was priced at around £30, with a case costing £5 extra, and an optional 32 KB RAM adding another £20. Support for the E00 ADFS offered by PRES for that company's AP3 disc system was indicated as an application for the sideways RAM.
Slogger Plus 2 RS423 interface
Slogger provided an RS423 interface as an option for its own Plus 2 expansion, announced in early 1989.Disc interfacesThe first disc interface to be announced for the Electron was Pace's Le Box in 1984, offering a single-sided 100 KB floppy drive controlled by the 8271 controller and accessed using the Amcom Disc Filing System, with pricing at £299 plus VAT including the drive or around £199 without. The unit also provided eight sideways ROM sockets and was intended to sit under the Electron itself. The unit was connected via cabling to the expansion edge connector and included its own power supply, and other drives including switchable 40/80 track drives offering up to 400 KB capacity were dealer-supplied options. Although the product was meant to be on sale at the Acorn User Show in August 1984, it was "discontinued" in early 1985 before getting to market, with a Pace representative indicating that prohibitive pricing of the 8271 chips (each at "over £80 at times") had left the company considering a re-launch of the product should the pricing situation become more favourable.
Following on from Acorn's Plus 3 interface, Cumana, Solidisk, Advanced Computer Products and Slogger all offered disc interfaces for the Electron. Unlike disc systems on the BBC Micro and the Acorn Plus 3, many of the systems released for the Electron did not claim RAM workspace (and raise the PAGE variable affecting applications above the default of &E00), making it easier to use cassette-based software transferred to disc and to run larger programs from disc.
Low-cost alternatives to disc systems, briefly made fashionable by press coverage of the Sinclair Microdrive, were reportedly under development by expansion suppliers such as Solidisk, Reliability issues were described with the Phloopy, and the product was apparently short-lived.Acorn Plus 3Launched in late 1984 for a price of £229, the Acorn Plus 3 was a hardware module that connected independently of the Plus 1 and provided a "self contained disc interface and 3.5 inch single sided disc drive" offering over 300 KB of storage per disc using the newly introduced Advanced Disc Filing System (ADFS). The Plus 3 was also reportedly produced with a double-sided drive fitted.
An expansion connector for a second 3.5- or 5.25-inch drive was also provided by the unit, with such drives needing to provide a Shugart-compatible connector and their own power supply. The original Electron edge connector was repeated on the back of the Plus 3, allowing the Plus 1 or other compatible expansion to be connected in conjunction with the Plus 3.) Because the WD1770 is capable of single-density mode and uses the same IBM360-derived floppy disc format as the Intel 8271 found in the BBC Micro, it was also possible to use the Disc Filing System with an alternate ROM, such as the ACP 1770 DFS.
The Plus 3 reset PAGE to &1D00, reducing the amount of free RAM available to the user. This replaced the original cream-coloured "wall wart" style power supply, designed to and manufactured in Hong Kong.
* Original Part no: 0201,113; input 220/240 V AC/50 Hz; output 19 V AC/0.737 A/14 W: Usage: Electron, Electron+Plus1
* Uprated Part no: 0865,010; input 240 V AC/50 Hz 50 W; output 21 V AC/1.75 A/36.75 W: Usage: Electron+Plus3, Electron+Plus3+Plus1
Repair note: If the internal power-supply connector, used to power the existing internal 3.5-inch drive is damaged, and requires replacement, then the original AMP 800-930 4-pin connector, which was already in short supply during the original production run, may be replaced with a Molex 5264 50-37-5043 "Mini-SPOX" connector as an alternative.Advanced Plus 3Designed and produced by Baildon Electronics and sold by PRES, the Advanced Plus 3 (AP3) was a Plus 1 cartridge interface using the WD1770 controller, supplied with Acorn's ADFS and a single-sided 3½-inch disc drive for £99 plus VAT, offering equivalent functionality to the Acorn Plus 3. Announced in late 1987, the product was made possible by an agreement between ACP and Acorn to license the ADFS software. As with many disc interfaces for the Electron, since the interface provided a connector for the drive, this made it possible to connect a 5¼" floppy disc drive (more common amongst BBC Micro owners) or the more typical 3½-inch drive.
PRES later released a version of ADFS with support for PAGE at &E00, this being achieved by using RAM provided by the Advanced Battery Backed RAM (ABR) cartridge. This version also fixed two notable bugs in Acorn's ADFS, eliminating unreliability when accessing the first tracks on a disc which had previously necessitated the writing of a file (ZYSYSHELP) as a workaround, and switching off the text cursor during disc compaction which had previously caused disc corruption (since the disc data would be processed using screen memory during this operation, and the cursor would modify that data when blinking). The ROM image was supplied on disc for £17.19, whereas a bundle of the ROM and ABR cartridge was £50.95.
In 1989, the Advanced Plus 3 Mark 2 was launched, offering a double-sided drive in place of the single-sided drive previously offered. This meant that the storage capacity of each disc was increased from the 320 KB of the original Plus 3 to 640 KB (this being supported by ADFS on the Master Compact).Cumana Floppy Disc SystemEarly in 1985, Cumana released a cartridge-based interface providing support for double-density storage, a real-time clock and calendar for timestamping of files, and a spare ROM socket for user-fitted sideways ROMs. The filing system used was Cumana's own QFS, supporting 89 files per disc, PAGE at &E00, The interface itself cost £149.95 when originally announced, Later pricing put the interface at £74.95 including VAT.Solidisk EFSIn mid-1985, Solidisk released a cartridge-based interface with support for single and double density storage and providing Acorn DFS and ADFS compatibility, 16 KB of on-board sideways RAM, and a connector for a Winchester hard drive. The cartridge itself cost £59, with a bundle including a double-sided, double-density, 3½-inch drive costing £200. A 20 MB hard drive was offered at a price of £805.Advanced Plus 4Announced in early 1986, the Advanced Plus 4 (AP4) from Advanced Computer Products was a cartridge-based interface employing the WD1770 controller and featuring ACP's 1770 DFS product, providing compatibility with Acorn's DFS from the BBC Micro and thereby supporting seven-character filenames and up to 31 files per disc. However, 8 KB of on-board static RAM was used as workspace for the filing system, keeping PAGE at &E00. An extra ROM socket was provided for a user-fitted sideways ROM, and being a 1770-based interface, it was reported that Acorn's ADFS could be used instead, although since it was not aware of the additional RAM, PAGE would be raised to &1D00 as it would be when using Acorn's Plus 3. The interface was priced at £69.55 plus VAT.Slogger Electron Disc System and Pegasus 400Slogger, an established producer of expansions and a reseller of other disc systems, introduced the Electron Disc System in early 1987, priced at £74.95, featuring the Cumana Floppy Disc System interface, which was combined with an Acorn-compatible DFS, SEDFS, having the capability of reading 40-track discs on 80-track drives plus support for Slogger's tape-to-disc conversion products, and reported as offering "virtual 100 per cent 8271 emulation" for compatibility with traditional DFS software. The SEDFS ROM was also available separately for existing Cumana interface owners, priced at £24.95. The precise DFS variant used by the Pegasus 400 system kept PAGE at &E00 and introduced "typeahead" support, permitting keystroke buffering during disc activity on systems with the Turbo-Driver or Master RAM Board fitted and enabled.
Slogger/Elektuur Turbo boards
Announced in early 1986, the Slogger Turbo-Driver was a professionally fitted upgrade priced at £42. The board itself plugged into the CPU and BASIC ROM sockets on the main circuit board of the Electron, which merely involved removing socketed components on very early Electron models, but required desoldering work and therefore benefited from a fitting service for later units. The performance benefit of fitting the board was to make some programs, particularly those running in the high bandwidth modes (0 to 3), run up to three times faster.
The direct origins of the Slogger product appear to be a board designed by Andyk Limited, announced as the Fast Electron Board in late 1985 with a price of £29.99, whereas the Elektuur modification was described in an article in Dutch Electronics magazine Elektuur and intended for users to perform at home.
The Slogger and Elektuur Turbo boards were born out of a hack initially devised at Acorn. By shadowing the lowest 8 KB of RAM with a static RAM chip outside of reach of the ULA, the CPU could always access it at 2 MHz. The tradeoff was that the screen could not be located in that 8 KB. In practice the operating system ROMs always put the screen into the top 20 KB and as a result this probably only broke compatibility with around 2% of software. Speeding up the low portion of memory is particularly useful on 6502 derived machines because that processor has a faster addressing for the first 256 bytes and so it is common for software to put any variables involved in time-critical sections of program into that region.
The cost of the 64 Kbit SRAM chip would have been more than that of doubling the four 64 Kbit DRAM chips to give 8-bit RAM access, fixing both the modest memory and poor performance issues of the Electron.
Slogger Master RAM Board
Introduced at around the start of 1987 and priced at £64.95 fitted or £54.95 as a kit, the Master RAM Board offered the familiar turbo mode from the Slogger Turbo-Driver alongside a shadow mode providing 32 KB of static shadow RAM in addition to the existing 32 KB, thus giving 64 KB in total. So-called "legally written software", this being software using the operating system calls and not writing directly to the screen, could function without significant modification, making substantially more memory available for BASIC, View, Viewsheet, language ROMs and many other applications. By providing extra storage this modification also allowed some games and applications intended for the BBC Micro to function on the Electron despite the lack of a native Mode 7.
Applications could not directly address video memory in shadow mode without modification, so it was incompatible with most games, although there is no inherent reason why a game could not be written to function in shadow mode. A switch mounted through the case switched between normal, turbo and shadow modes.
Towards the end of the Electron's commercial lifetime, the Turbo-Driver and Master RAM Boards were offered already fitted to new Electrons in an attempt to increase sales. For a time, Jafa Systems manufactured their own equivalent of the Master RAM Board in order to support their own product range.
Such display capabilities, desirable in their own right on low-memory computers, were also desirable for delivering content through low-bandwidth communications channels such as that from Teletext and Viewdata services. However, access to such services can be considered to be a separate capability, and the BBC Micro needed to be upgraded to complement its display capability with the Teletext or Prestel adapters to receive such over-the-air or online content. Unfortunately, Sir Computers ceased trading before the product was brought to market.
Jafa Systems
Released in 1987 at a price of £89, the Mode 7 Mark 1 Display Unit was a separate unit "about the size, shape and colour of the Plus One or a Slogger ROMbox" that connected to the Electron's expansion connector and featured a Motorola 6845 display controller and Mullard SAA5050 character generator to replicate the main elements of the BBC Micro's Teletext display solution. This only used 1 KB of memory for the display, with the expansion listening to display memory write accesses and buffering the data in its own memory. A ROM was included to extend the operating system to allow activation of Mode 7 as a genuine screen mode and to provide extra commands and to support keyboard shortcuts used on the BBC Micro to emit Teletext control sequences. To support the output of both the Mode 7 display and the existing video output, a lead connected the Electron's RGB output to the expansion, with the expansion providing only RF (television) output.
Conscious of the relatively high price of the Mark 1 unit,
A conceptually similar predecessor to the software-based simulator was published by Electron User in early 1987, offering a monochrome Mode 4 simulation of the Teletext display, using the lower 25 character lines of the screen to show the Teletext output, reserving several lines at the top of the screen for a representation of Mode 7 used to prepare the eventual visual output. However, the program did not support direct access to Mode 7 memory locations. The author noted that a Mode 2 version would have been possible but would have required a redesigned character set and "too much memory".
A further refinement of the hardware solution was introduced in 1989 with the Mode 7 Mark 2 Display Unit, which retained the SAA5050 character generator but omitted the 6845 display controller, and was fitted internally in the Electron itself instead of being housed in an external unit, although some kind of ROM expansion unit was needed to hold the driver/utilities ROM. It used software to ensure that the SAA5050 was fed with the correct character data. A software ROM would put the machine into a two-colour, 40-column graphics mode (thus providing one byte per character), and as the ULA read display data from memory in the usual fashion, the SAA5050 would listen to the data it was reading and produce a Mode 7 interpretation of the same information, this being achieved by fitting a board on top of the ULA connecting to its pins.
The Jafa interfaces did not provide a Teletext or Viewdata reception capability, but the Mark 2 was explicitly stated to work in conjunction with the Morley Electronics Teletext Adapter. although this was never brought to market directly by Acorn.Advanced Plus 5Despite Acorn's withdrawal from the Electron peripheral market, Baildon Electronics developed the Advanced Plus 5 (AP5) expansion, featuring Tube, 1 MHz bus and user port interfaces, which plugged into a Plus 1 cartridge socket. This provided a sufficient level of compatibility that both the 6502 and Z80 second processor products from Acorn were shown to work, providing a Tube implementation that was "as faithful as you can get", with it also being noted that the Electron being available for as little as £50 at that point in its commercial lifespan was a "very cheap way of getting a CP/M machine". Some differences in the memory map of the Electron meant that BBC Micro software would need modifications to work on the Electron with AP5. The price of the unit in late 1986 was £66.70.
The additional facilities of the AP5 alongside the Tube interface permitted various expansions for the BBC Micro to be made available for the Electron. These included the Hybrid Music 5000
PMS Electron Second Processor
In 1986, Permanent Memory Systems (PMS) announced a second processor product for the Electron, the PMS-E2P, as a self-contained cartridge for use with the Plus 1 containing a second 2 MHz 6502A processor plus 64 KB of RAM, priced at £89. This was based on a product originally developed by John Wike of Jafa Systems. PMS supplied Acorn's Hi-BASIC with the E2P, permitting the use of as much as 44 KB of the second processor's RAM with BASIC programs. The company also made a version of Computer Concepts' Wordwise Plus available for the E2P, priced at £39.95.
Sound system expansions
Despite the Electron having only limited sound generation capabilities, few expansions were offered to overcome the machine's limitations.
Millsgrade Voxbox
Advertised in late 1985, the Voxbox by Millsgrade Limited was an expansion connecting to the Electron's expansion connector that provided allophone-based speech synthesis, with driver software provided on cassette. The supplied software supported the definition of spoken words built up from the allophones these allophones or sounds being stored in the expansion's own ROM and for catalogues of words to be created and saved. A program was supplied that extended BASIC to allow the use of the synthesiser in user programs. The expansion used the General Instrument SP0256A-AL2 speech synthesis chip.Sound Expansion cartridgeOriginally announced in 1987 by Project Expansions to be priced at around £40, the Sound Expansion cartridge could be fitted in a Plus 1 (or compatible) slot and provide sound output equivalent to that of the BBC Micro, with Superior Software's Speech bundled as a "limited offer". A product of the same name and with similar functionality was subsequently sold by Complex Software for around £55, employing its own adjustable speaker in the cartridge unit. Superior Software had announced a version of Speech for the unexpanded Acorn Electron in 1986, but this was never released.Hybrid Music 5000Hybrid Technology's Music 5000 was adapted and released by PRES for use with the 1 MHz bus of the Advanced Plus 5 expansion, with the Music 5000 itself priced at £113.85. The only functional differences between the Electron adaptation and the original BBC Micro unit involved the use of Mode 6 for the display and the reduced performance of the Electron imposing some limitations on processing in programs written for the system, although this was not thought to prevent most programs for the system from working on the Electron version.LegacyAlthough the Electron presented challenges to developers in terms of the amount of memory available to programs and, particularly for those writing or porting games to the machine, a reduction in hardware features useful for controlling or presenting content on the screen, developers often discovered creative workarounds to deliver commercially successful products, making the business of writing conversions a viable one for some developers.
Several features that would later be associated with the BBC Master and Archimedes first appeared as features of Electron expansion units, including ROM cartridge slots and the Advanced Disc Filing System, a hierarchical improvement to the BBC's original Disc Filing System. Having been envisaged as the basis of a portable computer with "a very strong emphasis on communications" during its development, supporting both modem and Econet interfaces, While it may not have been as popular as the Spectrum, Commodore 64 or Amstrad CPC, it did sell in sufficient numbers to ensure that new software titles from established producers were being produced right up until the early 1990s, with mainstream publications dedicated to the machine having effectively supported it for five years beyond the point at which Acorn's own support had ceased. One reviewer concluded that even at this point in 1990, "Electron owners wishing to upgrade their machine will find themselves better served now than at any time in the machine’s history."
See also
* Electron User, the most popular Acorn Electron focused magazine
Notes
References External links
* [http://www.stairwaytohell.com Stairway To Hell]
* [https://www.8bitkick.cc/playuef.html Acorn Electron tape archiveplayUEF@8bitkick]
* [http://www.acornelectron.co.uk Acorn Electron World]
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20190809232748/http://www.bygonebytes.co.uk/Mode7.html Electron MODE 7 Photos]
Electron
Category:6502-based home computers
Category:Home computers
Category:Computer-related introductions in 1983
Category:Computers designed in the United Kingdom | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Electron | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.537595 |
2080 | A Fire Upon the Deep | A Fire Upon the Deep is a 1992 science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge. It is a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and a communication medium resembling Usenet. A Fire Upon the Deep won the Hugo Award in 1993, sharing it with Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.
Besides the normal print book editions, the novel was also included on a CD-ROM sold by ClariNet Communications along with the other nominees for the 1993 Hugo awards. The CD-ROM edition included numerous annotations by Vinge on his thoughts and intentions about different parts of the book, and was later released as a standalone e-book. It has a loose prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, from 1999, and a direct sequel, The Children of the Sky, from 2012.
Setting
The novel is set in various locations in the Milky Way. The galaxy is divided into four concentric volumes called the "Zones of Thought"; it is not clear to the novel's characters whether this is a natural phenomenon or an artificially produced one, but it seems to roughly correspond with galactic-scale stellar density and a Beyond region is mentioned in the Sculptor Galaxy as well. civilizations which are linked by a faster-than-light communication network, "the Net", sometimes cynically called the "Net of a Million Lies". The Net does connect with the Transcend, on the off-chance that one of the "Powers" that live there deigns to communicate, but has no connections with the Slow Zone, as FTL communication is impossible into or out of that Zone. In the novel, the Net is depicted as working much like the Usenet network in the early 1990s, with transcripts of messages containing header and footer information as one would find in such forums.
The outermost layer, containing the galactic halo, is the Transcend, within which incomprehensible, superintelligent beings dwell. When a "Beyonder" civilization reaches the point of technological singularity, it is said to "Transcend", becoming a "Power". Such Powers always seem to relocate to the Transcend, seemingly necessarily, where they become engaged in affairs which remain entirely mysterious to those that remain in the Beyond.
One of the characters in the book, Ravna, uses this analogy to explain the relation between the zones:
Plot
An expedition from Straumli Realm, a young human civilization in the high Beyond, investigates a newly discovered five-billion-year-old data archive in the low Transcend that offers the possibility of unimaginable riches. The expedition's facility, High Lab, is gradually and secretly compromised by an initially dormant superintelligence within the archive later known as the Blight. However, shortly before the Blight's final "flowering", two self-aware entities created similarly to the Blight plot to aid the humans before the Blight can gain its full powers.
Finally recognizing the danger, the researchers at High Lab attempt to flee in two ships, one carrying the adults and the second carrying the children in "coldsleep boxes". The Blight discovers that the first ship lists a data storage device in its cargo manifest; assuming it contains information that could harm it, the Blight destroys the ship. The second ship escapes.
The ship lands on a distant planet with a medieval-level civilization of dog-like creatures, dubbed "Tines", who live in packs as group minds. Upon landing, however, the two surviving adults, husband and wife, are ambushed and killed by Tine fanatics known as Flenserists, in whose realm they have landed. The Flenserists capture a young boy named Jefri Olsndot and his wounded sister, Johanna. Johanna is rescued by a Tine named Pilgrim who witnessed the ambush and taken to a neighboring kingdom ruled by a brilliant Tine named Woodcarver. Steel, the Flenserists' leader, tells Jefri that Johanna and their parents were killed by Woodcarver and exploits him in order to develop advanced technology (such as cannon and radio communication), while Johanna and the knowledge stored in her "dataset" device help Woodcarver rapidly develop as well. A highly placed Flenserist spy keeps Steel informed of Woodcarver's progress.
A distress signal from the sleeper ship eventually reaches "Relay", a major information/service provider for the galactic communications network. A benign transcendent being named "the Old One" contacts Relay, seeking information about the Blight and the humans who released it, and reconstitutes a human man named Pham Nuwen from the wreckage of a spaceship to act as its agent, using his doubt of his own memory's veracity to keep him under its control. Ravna Bergsndot, the only human Relay employee, traces the sleeper ship's signal to the Tines' world and persuades her employer to investigate what it took from High Lab, contracting the merchant vessel Out of Band II, owned by two sentient plant "Skroderiders", Blueshell and Greenstalk, to transport her and Pham there.
Before the mission is launched, the Blight launches a surprise attack on Relay and kills Old One. As Old One dies, it downloads what information it can into Pham to defeat the Blight, and Pham, Ravna and the Skroderiders barely escape Relay's destruction in the Out of Band II.
The Blight expands, taking over races and "rewriting" their people to become its agents, murdering several other Powers, and seizing other archives in the Beyond, looking for what was taken. It finally realizes where the danger truly lies and sends a hastily assembled fleet in pursuit.
The humans arrive at the Tines' homeworld first and ally with Woodcarver to defeat the Flenserists and rescue Jefri. Pham initiates Countermeasure, which extends the Slow Zone outward by thousands of light years, enveloping and killing the Blight at the cost of wrecking thousands of civilizations and causing trillions of deaths. The humans are stranded on the Tines world, now in the depths of the Slow Zone. Activating Countermeasure is fatal to Pham, but before he dies, the ghost of Old One within his mind reveals to him that, although his body is a reconstruction, his memories are real. (Vinge expands on Pham's backstory in A Deepness in the Sky.)
Intelligent species
Aprahanti
A race of humanoids with colorful butterfly-like wings who attempt to use the chaos wrought by the Blight to reestablish their waning hegemony. Despite their attractive, delicate appearance, the Aprahanti are an extremely fearsome and vicious species.
Blight
An ancient, malevolent super-intelligent entity which strives to constantly expand and can easily manipulate electronics and organic beings.
Dirokimes
An older race which originally inhabited Sjandra Kei before the arrival of humanity. They work with the humans.
Humans
All humans in the novel (except Pham) are descended from Nyjoran stock. Their ancestors were "Tuvo-Norsk" asteroid miners from Old Earth's solar system, which is noted as being on the other side of the galaxy in the Slow Zone. (Nyjora sounds similar to New Norwegian "New Earth".) One of the major human habitations is Sjandra Kei, three systems comprising roughly 28 billion individuals. Their main language is Samnorsk, the Norwegian term for a hypothetical unification of the Bokmål and Nynorsk forms of the language. (Vinge indicates in the book's dedication that several key ideas in it came to him while at a conference in Tromsø, Norway.)
Skroders/Riders/Skroderiders
A race of plantlike beings with fronds that serve as arms. The Riders have little native capacity for short-term memory. They are one of the longest-existing species; five billion years ago, someone gave them six-wheeled mechanical constructs ("skrodes") to move around and to provide short-term memory that made it easier for them to retain information well enough to become long-term memory in the vegetable "rider". It is later revealed that their "benefactor" is the Blight, and it is able to easily corrupt and remotely operate the Riders via their skrodes.
Tines
A race of group minds: each person is a "pack" of 4–8 doglike members, which communicate within the pack using very short-range ultrasonic waves from drumlike organs called "tympana".
Each "soul" can survive and evolve by adding members to replace those who die, potentially for hundreds of years, as Woodcarver does.
Related works
Vinge first used the concepts of "Zones of Thought" in a 1988 novella The Blabber, which occurs after Fire. Vinge's novel A Deepness in the Sky (1999) is a prequel to A Fire Upon the Deep set 20,000 years earlier and featuring Pham Nuwen. Vinge's The Children of the Sky, "a near-term sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep, set ten years later, was released in October 2011.
Vinge's former wife, Joan D. Vinge, has also written stories in the Zones of Thought universe, based on his notes. These include "The Outcasts of Heaven Belt", "Legacy", and (as of 2008) a planned novel featuring Pham Nuwen.
Title
Vinge's original title for the novel was "Among the Tines"; its final title was suggested by his editors.
Awards and nominations
A Fire Upon the Deep shared the 1993 Hugo Award for Best Novel with Doomsday Book. the 1993 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel,
References
External links
A Fire Upon the Deep at Worlds Without End
The book with Vinge's commentaries
Category:1992 American novels
Category:Hugo Award for Best Novel–winning works
Category:Transhumanist books
Category:Usenet
Category:Novels by Vernor Vinge
Category:1992 science fiction novels
Category:Tor Books books
Category:Fiction about artificial intelligence
Category:Fiction about malware
Category:Fiction about nanotechnology
Category:Fiction about consciousness transfer
Category:Apocalyptic fiction
Category:Novels about technological singularity | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.561483 |
2082 | Aeronautics | thumb|Space Shuttle Atlantis on a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft
Aeronautics is the science or art involved with the study, design, and manufacturing of air flight-capable machines, and the techniques of operating aircraft and rockets within the atmosphere.
While the term originally referred solely to operating the aircraft, it has since been expanded to include technology, business, and other aspects related to aircraft.
The term "aviation" is sometimes used interchangeably with aeronautics, although "aeronautics" includes lighter-than-air craft such as airships, and includes ballistic vehicles while "aviation" technically does not. The founders of modern aeronautics, Leonardo da Vinci in the Renaissance and Cayley in 1799, both began their investigations with studies of bird flight.
Man-carrying kites are believed to have been used extensively in ancient China. In 1282 the Italian explorer Marco Polo described the Chinese techniques then current. The Chinese also constructed small hot air balloons, or lanterns, and rotary-wing toys.
An early European to provide any scientific discussion of flight was Roger Bacon, who described principles of operation for the lighter-than-air balloon and the flapping-wing ornithopter, which he envisaged would be constructed in the future. The lifting medium for his balloon would be an "aether" whose composition he did not know.
In the late fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci followed up his study of birds with designs for some of the earliest flying machines, including the flapping-wing ornithopter and the rotating-wing helicopter. Although his designs were rational, they were not based on particularly good science. Many of his designs, such as a four-person screw-type helicopter, have severe flaws. He did at least understand that "An object offers as much resistance to the air as the air does to the object." (Newton would not publish the Third law of motion until 1687.) His analysis led to the realisation that manpower alone was not sufficient for sustained flight, and his later designs included a mechanical power source such as a spring. Da Vinci's work was lost after his death and did not reappear until it had been overtaken by the work of George Cayley.
Balloon flight
thumb|right|upright|Francesco Lana de Terzi's flying boat concept c. 1670
The modern era of lighter-than-air flight began early in the 17th century with Galileo's experiments in which he showed that air has weight. Around 1650 Cyrano de Bergerac wrote some fantasy novels in which he described the principle of ascent using a substance (dew) he supposed to be lighter than air, and descending by releasing a controlled amount of the substance. Francesco Lana de Terzi measured the pressure of air at sea level and in 1670 proposed the first scientifically credible lifting medium in the form of hollow metal spheres from which all the air had been pumped out. These would be lighter than the displaced air and able to lift an airship. His proposed methods of controlling height are still in use today; by carrying ballast which may be dropped overboard to gain height, and by venting the lifting containers to lose height. In practice de Terzi's spheres would have collapsed under air pressure, and further developments had to wait for more practicable lifting gases.
thumb|Montgolfier brothers flight, 1784
From the mid-18th century the Montgolfier brothers in France began experimenting with balloons. Their balloons were made of paper, and early experiments using steam as the lifting gas were short-lived due to its effect on the paper as it condensed. Mistaking smoke for a kind of steam, they began filling their balloons with hot smoky air which they called "electric smoke" and, despite not fully understanding the principles at work, made some successful launches and in 1783 were invited to give a demonstration to the French Académie des Sciences.
Meanwhile, the discovery of hydrogen led Joseph Black in to propose its use as a lifting gas, though practical demonstration awaited a gas-tight balloon material. On hearing of the Montgolfier Brothers' invitation, the French Academy member Jacques Charles offered a similar demonstration of a hydrogen balloon. Charles and two craftsmen, the Robert brothers, developed a gas-tight material of rubberised silk for the envelope. The hydrogen gas was to be generated by chemical reaction during the filling process.
The Montgolfier designs had several shortcomings, not least the need for dry weather and a tendency for sparks from the fire to set light to the paper balloon. The manned design had a gallery around the base of the balloon rather than the hanging basket of the first, unmanned design, which brought the paper closer to the fire. On their free flight, De Rozier and d'Arlandes took buckets of water and sponges to douse these fires as they arose. On the other hand, the manned design of Charles was essentially modern. As a result of these exploits, the hot air balloon became known as the Montgolfière type and the gas balloon the Charlière.
Charles and the Robert brothers' next balloon, La Caroline, was a Charlière that followed Jean Baptiste Meusnier's proposals for an elongated dirigible balloon, and was notable for having an outer envelope with the gas contained in a second, inner ballonet. On 19 September 1784, it completed the first flight of over 100 km, between Paris and Beuvry, despite the man-powered propulsive devices proving useless.
In an attempt the next year to provide both endurance and controllability, de Rozier developed a balloon having both hot air and hydrogen gas bags, a design which was soon named after him as the Rozière. The principle was to use the hydrogen section for constant lift and to navigate vertically by heating and allowing to cool the hot air section, in order to catch the most favourable wind at whatever altitude it was blowing. The balloon envelope was made of goldbeater's skin. The first flight ended in disaster and the approach has seldom been used since.
Cayley and the foundation of modern aeronautics
Sir George Cayley (1773–1857) is widely acknowledged as the founder of modern aeronautics. He was first called the "father of the aeroplane" in 1846 and Henson called him the "father of aerial navigation." He was the first true scientific aerial investigator to publish his work, which included for the first time the underlying principles and forces of flight.
In 1809 he began the publication of a landmark three-part treatise titled "On Aerial Navigation" (1809–1810). In it he wrote the first scientific statement of the problem, "The whole problem is confined within these limits, viz. to make a surface support a given weight by the application of power to the resistance of air." He identified the four vector forces that influence an aircraft: thrust, lift, drag and weight and distinguished stability and control in his designs.
He developed the modern conventional form of the fixed-wing aeroplane having a stabilising tail with both horizontal and vertical surfaces, flying gliders both unmanned and manned.
He introduced the use of the whirling arm test rig to investigate the aerodynamics of flight, using it to discover the benefits of the curved or cambered aerofoil over the flat wing he had used for his first glider. He also identified and described the importance of dihedral, diagonal bracing and drag reduction, and contributed to the understanding and design of ornithopters and parachutes.
Another significant invention was the tension-spoked wheel, which he devised in order to create a light, strong wheel for aircraft undercarriage.
The 19th century: Otto Lilienthal and the first human flights
thumb|Lilienthal in mid-flight, Berlin c. 1895
During the 19th century Cayley's ideas were refined, proved and expanded on, culminating in the works of Otto Lilienthal.
Lilienthal was a German engineer and businessman who became known as the "flying man". He was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful flights with gliders, therefore making the idea of "heavier than air" a reality. Newspapers and magazines published photographs of Lilienthal gliding, favourably influencing public and scientific opinion about the possibility of flying machines becoming practical.
His work lead to him developing the concept of the modern wing. His flight attempts in Berlin in the year 1891 are seen as the beginning of human flight and the "Lilienthal Normalsegelapparat" is considered to be the first air plane in series production, making the Maschinenfabrik Otto Lilienthal in Berlin the first air plane production company in the world.
Otto Lilienthal is often referred to as either the "father of aviation" or "father of flight".
Other important investigators included Horatio Phillips.
Branches
thumb|The Eurofighter Typhoon
thumb|Antonov An-225 Mriya, the largest aeroplane ever built
Aeronautics may be divided into three main branches, Aviation, Aeronautical science and Aeronautical engineering.
Aviation
Aviation is the art or practice of aeronautics. Historically aviation meant only heavier-than-air flight, but nowadays it includes flying in balloons and airships.
Aeronautical engineering
Aeronautical engineering covers the design and construction of aircraft, including how they are powered, how they are used and how they are controlled for safe operation.
A major part of aeronautical engineering is aerodynamics, the science of passing through the air.
With the increasing activity in space flight, nowadays aeronautics and astronautics are often combined as aerospace engineering.
Aerodynamics
The science of aerodynamics deals with the motion of air and the way that it interacts with objects in motion, such as an aircraft.
The study of aerodynamics falls broadly into three areas:
Incompressible flow occurs where the air simply moves to avoid objects, typically at subsonic speeds below that of sound (Mach 1).
Compressible flow occurs where shock waves appear at points where the air becomes compressed, typically at speeds above Mach 1.
Transonic flow occurs in the intermediate speed range around Mach 1, where the airflow over an object may be locally subsonic at one point and locally supersonic at another.
Rocketry
thumb|right|Launch of Apollo 15 Saturn V rocket: T – 30 s through T + 40 s.
A rocket or rocket vehicle is a missile, spacecraft, aircraft or other vehicle which obtains thrust from a rocket engine. In all rockets, the exhaust is formed entirely from propellants carried within the rocket before use. Rocket engines work by action and reaction. Rocket engines push rockets forwards simply by throwing their exhaust backwards extremely fast.
Rockets for military and recreational uses date back to at least 13th-century China. Significant scientific, interplanetary and industrial use did not occur until the 20th century, when rocketry was the enabling technology of the Space Age, including setting foot on the Moon.
Rockets are used for fireworks, weaponry, ejection seats, launch vehicles for artificial satellites, human spaceflight and exploration of other planets. While comparatively inefficient for low speed use, they are very lightweight and powerful, capable of generating large accelerations and of attaining extremely high speeds with reasonable efficiency.
Chemical rockets are the most common type of rocket and they typically create their exhaust by the combustion of rocket propellant. Chemical rockets store a large amount of energy in an easily released form, and can be very dangerous. However, careful design, testing, construction and use minimizes risks.
See also
References
Citations
Sources
Wilson, E. B. (1920) Aeronautics: A Class Text, via Internet Archive
External links
Aeronautics
Aviation Terminology
Jeppesen The AVIATION DICTIONARY for pilots and aviation technicians
DTIC ADA032206: Chinese-English Aviation and Space Dictionary
Courses
Research
>
Category:Articles containing video clips | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautics | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.585710 |
2083 | Auguste and Louis Lumière | | alma_mater = La Martiniere Lyon
| awards = Elliott Cresson Medal (1909)
| resting_place = New Guillotière Cemetery
| module
| birth_place = Besançon, France
| death_date
| death_place = Lyon, France
}}
| header2 = Louis Lumière
| birth_place = Besançon, France
| death_date
| death_place = Bandol, France
}}}}
}}
The Lumière brothers (, ; ), Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière (19 October 1862 – 10 April 1954) and Louis Jean Lumière (5 October 1864 – 6 June 1948), were French manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905, which places them among the earliest filmmakers.
Their screening of a single film on 22 March 1895, for around 200 members of the Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale (Society for the Development of the National Industry) in Paris was probably the first presentation of projected film. Their first commercial public screening on 28 December 1895, for around 40 paying visitors and invited relations has traditionally been regarded as the birth of cinema. Either the techniques or the business models of earlier filmmakers proved to be less viable than the breakthrough presentations of the Lumières.
History
The Lumière brothers were born in Besançon, France, to Charles-Antoine Lumière (1840–1911) and Jeanne Joséphine Costille Lumière, who were married in 1861 and moved to Besançon, setting up a small photographic portrait studio. Here were born Auguste, Louis and their daughter Jeanne. They moved to Lyon in 1870, where their two other daughters were born: Mélina and Francine. Auguste and Louis both attended La Martiniere, the largest technical school in Lyon.
They patented several significant processes leading up to their film camera, most notably film perforations (originally implemented by Émile Reynaud) as a means of advancing the film through the camera and projector. The original had been patented by Léon Guillaume Bouly on 12 February 1892. The — a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures — was further developed by the Lumières. The brothers patented their own version on 13 February 1895.
The date of the recording of their first film is in dispute. In an interview with Georges Sadoul given in 1948, Louis claimed that he shot the film in August 1894 – before the arrival of the kinetoscope in France. This is questioned by historians, who consider that a functional Lumière camera did not exist before the beginning of 1895.
The Lumière brothers saw film as a novelty and had withdrawn from the film business by 1905. They went on to develop the first practical photographic colour process, the Lumière Autochrome.
Louis died on 6 June 1948, and Auguste on 10 April 1954. They are buried in a family tomb in the New Guillotière Cemetery in Lyon.
First film screenings
On 22 March 1895, in Paris, at the Society for the Development of the National Industry, in front of a small audience, one of whom was said to be Léon Gaumont, then director of the company , the Lumières privately screened a single film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. The main focus of the conference by Louis concerned the recent developments in the photographic industry, mainly the research on polychromy (colour photography). It was much to Lumière's surprise that the moving black-and-white images retained more attention than the coloured stills.
The Lumières gave their first paid public screening on 28 December 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. This presentation consisted of the following 10 short films:
#'' (literally, "the exit from the Lumière factory in Lyon", or, under its more common English title, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), 46 seconds
# (Horse Trick Riders), 46 seconds
# ("fishing for goldfish"), 42 seconds
# (The Photographical Congress Arrives in Lyon), 48 seconds
# (The Blacksmiths), 49 seconds
# () (The Gardener, or The Sprinkler Sprinkled), 49 seconds
# (Baby's Breakfast'' (lit. "baby's meal")), 41 seconds
# ("Jumping Onto the Blanket"), 41 seconds
# (''Cordeliers' Square in Lyon), 44 seconds
# (The Sea''), 38 seconds
Each film was up to long, which, when hand cranked through a projector, runs approximately 50 seconds.
The Lumières went on tour with the in 1896, visiting places like Brussels, Bombay, London, Montreal, New York City, Palestine, and Buenos Aires.
In 1896, only a few months after the initial screenings in Europe, films by the Lumiere Brothers were shown in Egypt, first in the Tousson stock exchange in Alexandria on 5 November 1896, and then in the Hamam Schneider (Schneider Bath) in Cairo.Early colour photography
of North-African soldiers, Pas-de-Calais, France, 1915.]]
The brothers stated that "the cinema is an invention without any future" and declined to sell their camera to other filmmakers such as Georges Méliès. This made many film makers upset. Consequently, their role in the history of film was exceedingly brief. In parallel with their cinema work they experimented with colour photography. They worked on colour photographic processes in the 1890s including the Lippmann process (interference heliochromy) and their own 'bichromated glue' process, a subtractive colour process, examples of which were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. This last process was commercialised by the Lumieres but commercial success had to wait for their next colour process. In 1903 they patented a colour photographic process, the Autochrome Lumière, which was launched on the market in 1907. Throughout much of the 20th century, the Lumière company was a major producer of photographic products in Europe, but the brand name, Lumière, disappeared from the marketplace following merger with Ilford. Film systems that preceded the Cinématographe Lumière <!-- Is this necessary when all statements seem to be uncontested summaries of info on bluelinked pages? -->
Earlier moving images, for instance those of the phantasmagoria shows, the phénakisticope, the zoetrope and Émile Reynaud's Théâtre Optique consisted of hand-drawn images. A system that could record photographic reality in motion, in a fashion much like it is seen by the eyes, had a greater impact on people.
Eadweard Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope projected moving painted silhouettes based on his chronophotographic work. The only Zoopraxiscope disc with actual photographs was made as an early form of stop motion.
Less-known predecessors, such as Jules Duboscq's Bioscope (patented in 1852) were not developed to project the moving images.
A Polish inventor Kazimierz Prószyński built his camera and projecting device, called Pleograph, in 1894, before those made by the Lumière brothers.
Le Prince went missing in 1890, before he got around to give public demonstrations of the patented cameras and projectors he had been developing during the previous years. His short film known as Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) has later come to be regarded as the oldest film.
William Friese-Greene patented a "machine camera" in 1889, which embodied many aspects of later film cameras. He displayed the results at photographic societies in 1890 and developed further cameras but did not publicly project the results.
Ottomar Anschütz's Electrotachyscope projected very short loops of high photographic quality.
Thomas Edison believed projection of films wasn't as viable a business model as offering the films in the "peepshow" kinetoscope device. Watching the images on the screen turned out to be much preferred by audiences. Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope (developed by William Kennedy Dickson), premiered publicly in 1894.
Lauste and Latham's Eidoloscope was demonstrated for members of the press on 21 April 1895, and opened to the paying public on Broadway on 20 May. They shot films up to twenty minutes long at speeds over thirty frames per second and showed them in many US cities.<ref name":0" /> The Eidoloscope Company was dissolved in 1896 after various internal disputes.
Max and Emil Skladanowsky, inventors of the Bioscop, had offered projected moving images to a paying public in Berlin from 1 November 1895, until the end of the month. Their machinery was relatively cumbersome and their films much shorter than those of the Lumière brothers. The Skladnowskys' booked screenings in Paris were cancelled after the news of the Lumière show. Nonetheless, they toured their films to other countries.<ref name":0" /> See also
houses the Institut Lumière museum.]]
*Auguste Lumière
*Louis Lumière
* Institut Lumière
*1895 in film
*1896 in film
*19th century in film
*History of film
*L'Idéal Cinéma Jacques Tati in Aniche the oldest still-active cinéma in the world, though not continuously, since 23 November 1905.
*List of works by Louis Botinelly
*Place Ambroise-Courtois
References
Notes
Works cited
*
*
Further reading
* Chardère, B. Les images des Lumière (in French). Paris: Gallimard, 1995. .
* Cook, David. A History of Narrative Film (4th ed.). New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. .
*
* Mast, Gerald and Bruce F. Kawin. A Short History of the Movies (9th ed.). New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. .
* Rittaud-Hutinet, Jacques. Le cinéma des origines (in French). Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 1985. .
External links
*
*
*
*
* [http://www.institut-lumiere.org/ Le musée Lumière] – Lumière Museum
Category:Businesspeople from Lyon
Category:Color scientists
Category:Sibling filmmakers
Category:Brother duos
Category:Filmmaking duos
Category:French film directors
Category:French silent film directors
Category:Pioneers of photography
Category:History of film
Category:Defunct film and television production companies
Category:La Martinière Lyon alumni
Category:Members of the French Academy of Sciences
Category:Order of the Francisque recipients
Category:Recipients of the Order of St. Sava
Category:French cinema pioneers
Category:Articles containing video clips | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumière | 2025-04-05T18:25:54.599091 |
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